You, Mii and D&D

Sunday, April 1, 2007 6:30 a.m. In the years following my retirement from professional bass fishing, I’ve accomplished a great deal: I’ve survived Catholic grade school, gotten laid, graduated from college and even managed to watch all seven Police Academy movies in one sitting. Until recently, however, I had never once gotten up at the butt-crack of dawn in order to wait in a Toys ‘R’ Us parking lot. Joined by my long-suffering girlfriend, I’m among a dozen other foolhardy souls braving the morning freeze in hopes of scoring the impossibly hard-to-find Nintendo Wii. Though this video game-fueled madness certainly represents a troubling descent into pasty-faced, fan-boy territory, it’s merely the topper to a weekend already filled with role-playing games, minor sci-fi celebrities and a puzzling lecture on ghost hunting. Get out your 20-sided dice, grandma, ‘cause this column’s rolling with a +8 Dexterity… 15 Hours Earlier… It’s a perfectly lovely Saturday afternoon and I’m spending it listening to a handful of 19-year-olds discuss their favorite Super Nintendo games: “Did you know that Breath of Fire III was the first SNES game to utilize an Active Time Battle system?” …I actually did know that. After following a sizzling hot tip, I’ve found myself – again, with my patient-to-a-fault girlfriend – at the 2007 Concinnity Sci-Fi and Gaming Convention held at the MSOE Campus Center. Like the once-Milwaukee-based Gen Con (the largest sci-fi/gaming/still-living-with-your-parents convention in the country), Concinnity offers up RPG demos, video game tournaments and bored-looking vendors hawking used fantasy books and black light dragon posters. Of course, everything here is on a much smaller scale, a fact that bears out in the lineup of special guests: instead of Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax and a Billy Dee Williams meet-and-greet, Concinnity has, um…an anime voice actress and some guy who used to write Tomb Raider novels. It’s this micro-sized quality that gives the “con” it’s wonky charm, however, along with the small and endearingly awkward group of attendees that populate it. Fittingly, the place feels like a rec room sent from heaven (or hell, if you’re averse to these sorts of things): a few clutches of seasoned gamers roll dice in a faraway corner, a group of younger Evil Dead aficionados mull over arcane rule books in the back and, near the entrance, a pleasant-enough fellow recruits for a zombie LARP game (Live Action Role Playing). My girlfriend and I stroll through the room cautiously; though we’re enjoying ourselves, most of the attendees seem to steer clear of us (the requisite “guy-dressed-up-as-a-Jedi” seems especially aloof). It’s a strange feeling I can only equate to my experiences with gay bars: no matter how hard you try to blend in, no matter how kinda-sorta gay you may be, the pros will always sniff you out. Following the aforementioned Super Nintendo discussion (dubbed “AwesomSNES” on the schedule), as well as a look at an Alien-themed board game, we grab our seats for the highly anticipated lecture on ghost hunting. The star of […]