Your experience with RPGA events..good or not so good?

[Radiating Gnome]

I've only taken part in 3 RPGA events, but they were uniformly bad experiences.

Living Force was the worst of them...an idiotic railroaded adventure, where we got such thrilling adventure as...

DM (reading right from the book): "OK...you meet the guy, and he says that...oh wait! Someone has to roll diplomacy...(we roll) Ok, he says that you should go to a warehouse"

Us: "Uh, what for?"

DM(still reading): "Um, he says that that's what you are supposed to do. That's all it says".

...coupled witht he fact that there was basically no ability to loot anything (Despite the fact that we were engaged in gunplay with multiple guys, it turns out that between them they only had one blaster.

Not that I really want to put myself in a position to try to defend RPGA, esp. Living Greyhawk mods, but this is an example of very bad judging, not a bad mod. And this is where the differences in the people inolved make a big difference.

I don't exactly have encyclopedic experience with LG events, but like anything else in life, it depends a LOT on the people who are doing it. If you have a judge who doesn't prepare the mod before running it, it's going to probably suck.

It's also true, as someone else noted, that you can do many of the mods in your home games that you do at a convention (maybe not regional stuff, but that's not such a big deal). The bigger, convention-specific events will usually be a special event crafted for the con by the people judging it, and will therefore be far better prepared and run that many of the mods you'll do, where some judges may have only had a short amount of time to prepare.

The mods themselves have many challenges to overcome -- they have to be very short, which defeats any effort to create decent plot archs. As an answer to this, many are written in series, so that a plot begins in one and ins continued through several, but usually you play those so far apart it doesn't mean that the player experience of teh story is any better. And, because none of the folks writing the mods are getting paid for it -- much less the people editing and revising them -- the mods often have errors that you would hope wouldn't be there if they were being prepared by people for whom it was a full time job.

But given all that, the RPGA-LG stuff I play is usually a good diversion, and often a great deal of fun, depending upon judges and players. But for me, the main reason I play is to meet other gamers in my area (and beyond), to find people who I think would fit well in home games that I run or play in, etc. And, since I am almost always the DM in my home game, it gives me a chance to play once in a while. And for all that it works admirably.

-rg

 

[Creamsteak]

DM (reading right from the book): "OK...you meet the guy, and he says that...oh wait! Someone has to roll diplomacy...(we roll) Ok, he says that you should go to a warehouse"

Us: "Uh, what for?"

DM(still reading): "Um, he says that that's what you are supposed to do. That's all it says".

...coupled witht he fact that there was basically no ability to loot anything (Despite the fact that we were engaged in gunplay with multiple guys, it turns out that between them they only had one blaster.

*Snip*
whiners, muchkins and crybabies
*Snip*

My Living Greyhawk experience was not much different. We had a guy who used dice so tiny that "nobody could read them but him" who I had to tolerate cheating his way through the entire session, and the rest of the table just angered me for one reason or another. The GM was just following the rules given to him, but the whole thing simply wasn't what I thought a living setting was going to be... theres nothing alive about it, alive to LG means that you can play your character in other states...

It was sorta like trying to play an MMORPG in pen and paper mode, "kill a demon wearing dragonshide, find a suit of chainmail for an elf... not sure why..."

Other RPGA stuff could be completely different.

 

[pogre]

Man, my experiences with RPGA have been completely positive. I ran four games for them at GenCon last year and it was a blast. Great groups and lots of fun.