10/03/04: 5:00 PM  

Spring Revel: Conclusion

At the end of the interactive, everyone gathered together for a brief Eberron Q&A session, followed by the distribution of prizes. Wes presented each of the foreign travellers with an Australian First Aid Kit:

6 cans of beer

1 package of Tim-Tams

1 jar of Vegemite

The beer was red bitter. Wes later noted that Foster’s wasn’t Australian for “beer”, it was Australian for “crap”.

Next came the prize distribution for the Eberron Open. As it turned out, only four teams had participated, so everyone received something. The final standings were:

First Place – The Cobra Kais

Second Place – The Iron Talons

Third Place – The Ones for Fun

 Fourth Place – Team Axis 

Afterwards, there were prize drawings. Showing my usual knack for winning contests, my name was drawn three times, though two was the maximum allowed. I chose a box of Harbinger miniatures and a set of nice red-and-gold dice. Sadly, though I received three sets of Harbinger minis, all three had duplicates of creatures I already had. James gave me a Blackguard, however, and I received a dire wolf in one of my other DM rewards, which was a mini I’d been looking for!

That evening, many of us gathered at a pizzeria. When Australians put meat on a pizza, they don’t mess around: my meaty pizza must have had a pound or more of meat on it! After dining with Bruce Paris and his family, we returned to the hotel for some sleep. Spring Revel was finally over.

Looking back, I must thank Wes, Dale, and everyone at WotC who made the trip possible. It was a wonderful experience, and I enjoyed meeting so many new people and getting to run so many games. The Interactive will certainly stick in my mind as I develop games for my local group, and I hope that the people I ran games for will stay in touch.

One thing I will note about the weekend: when it comes down to it, I’m a soft touch as a DM. I don’t like to kill PCs just because of the roll of the dice: I always look at things like a novel or story, and feel that if a main character wouldn’t die in the novel, he shouldn’t die in the game. However, here I was running for the RPGA. All dice rolls are supposed to be made in open view, so there’s no fudging. In the open, your players are competing against other players – if you fudge rolls, you are screwing up the entire process and giving your group an unfair advantage. As a result, I played everything as straight-up and brutal as I could, and ended up killing 8 PCs over the course of the weekend. I don’t know that I’ve killed 8 PCs in the last 8 years! In a way, it was a very liberating experience, especially because the people were very good sports about dying (especially Stephen of the Iron Talons, who died in every session of the Open) and carried on with good spirit. So now that I have a taste for blood, my home team had best watch out!

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