DunDraCon

This is one of the oldest conventions in role-playing history, at least when it comes to the Bay Area. It is also one of the most loved, and for good reason! It is a wonderful time, and everyone this year, much like the last, had an absolute blast. The games and role players in attendance were absolute fun, and there was more going on than anyone could ever anticipate. Unlike the rest of the area, this convention hotel was actually very inexpensive, which made it very easy for everyone to fly out to be in attendance. This made for a very packed affair, having 114 RPG games, 22 boardgames, seven live action role players, six games for kids to play, five card games going, and the miniature games in total numbered at nine. This made for a very large amount of variety for the games you can play, and everyone took to them quite readily. I myself even played many I never would’ve anticipated, and had an absolute blast! One thing that makes conventions like these hard to manage to play in is space, namely the high number of players required to do any of the games on offer, and the large lengths of time required to play any one of them. It took a minimum of four hours to reserve time to play any one of these games, which makes things somewhat hard to manage compared to other conventions of this kind. There are also many administrative things going on that have everybody governed by rules, which makes it all feel a little bit less free. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for games that are about rules themselves, but it did make it all feel somewhat constricted. They also had a strange priority system to determine who would be able to play and at which time, which made things hard to plan around. We still think this is a good convention, but things like that make it less fun the more popular it becomes.

Summing Up How This Year’s Con Went

If you are a big fan of live action role playing, and tabletop RPG’s, then you’ll have a good time here, provided that you can put up with the fact that the entire event is somewhat governed by rules similar to what you will find of those games! It’s also getting more and more crowded.