Thank You Origins 2014

Had a great time again this year, just wanted to drop a quick thanks to all of the PCI staff and volunteers who made it happen. The BI was tough, but enjoyable. It was really nice to get to spend time with so many people from the Arcanis community!

Let me add my own thanks for a fun Origins. Thanks to Bill, Ryan, Tony and Ken for running. Thanks to Henry, James, Matt, Eric and the others that wrote the mods and BI. All the tables were fun and really pushed us. The events will certainly shape continued character development. Hard to ask for more than that.

It was great catching up with old friends and finally meeting some folks in person.

Thanks for a fun Origins, and I hope to see many of you before or at Origins next year.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

An eight encounter BI should work well. Four encounters say from 2-6PM, then a one hour dinner break then four encounters from 7-11PM, a wrap up and we are done by 11:30. If they want to have a players meeting we could do that from 11:30 to 12AM. And we still get out at a reasonable hour.

Speaking as someone who was not there, I think an 8-scene BI is the best way to go as well. That said, I’m all for experimentation (especially, when it doesn’t work, I’m not the guinea pig ).

Though, I know that BI’s are supposed to be Con-exclusive events (and I understand WHY they are and should remain so), I’d love to see “abridged” versions released for homeplay. For example, if you have an 8 Combat BI for XP/sweet rewards, have a 4 Combat “abridged” version for half combat/less cool rewards. While wanting to play these is one reason for this, I mostly suggest this for continuity’s sake as many of the HP’s lead into the BI and there is a risk of no pay-off for the Home Players with that storyline. Don’t do anything as awesome as at an actual BI, but focus on the bare-bones plot-lines (make it back to the city, defend the walls, clear the city, final push). Kind of similar to the 3.x adventure (The Serpentine Path?).

If the adventures do not lead to a cliffhanger (like, for example, HP 2), than that takes up my one BIG issue with not releasing them.

As stated, however, I understand why they aren’t being released and for the most part agree.

The large number of minions in a number of the rounds also slowed the combats significantly. We had a couple combats where it took almost twenty minutes to go through twelve ticks of actions, which is problematic when you only have ~30 minutes to complete your objective.

Suffice it to say, we failed a lot of missions at the BI. Had a good time though.

We also “failed” a number of missions. We didn’t realize what the objective was in the first mission so never made it off the map or release prisoners (but we did save all of them). I also remember failing the bridges, temple steps, giants, and final scene (we just couldn’t do enough damage fast enough). I’m pretty sure we also failed one or two earlier missions but I don’t remember which. The one mission we rocked without question was the harpy cliffs (two casters with skyward made that pretty trivial).