When an afternoon starts with checking out complex board games and nifty costumes, and ends with playtesting retro roleplaying games with legends of the industry, it’s been a good day.
This weekend’s HawaiiCon 2018 takes place on the grounds of the Mauna Lani Bay Resort. Most fan conventions need the space offered by convention centers and resorts — for game rooms, swag merchants, discussion panels, art galleries, and places for cosplayers to put the finishing touches on their “Avatar: The Last Airbender” or “Deadpool” costumes. HawaiiCon had all of that, but as with the best conventions, it’s not the nice location that makes it special, but the great people attending.
I had the opportunity to meet a couple of industry greats in the area of tabletop roleplaying — particularly Dungeons &Dragons, you know, the much-maligned “Devil’s game” of the ’70s — and see some of their work in the playtest stages, as well as get to know them as people, not just as names on the pages of a game’s rulebook.
I don’t know what I was expecting when I bumped into Heidi Gygax, the daughter of Dungeons &Dragons creator Gary Gygax, especially given the convention’s billing of her as a “gaming goddess.” But Heidi was down-to-earth and friendly, and spent a good chunk of the convention looking after her two little granddaughters. She even spared time to sign my copy of the 5th Edition Player’s Handbook, which I am now never going to let out of my sight.
Jeff R. Leason, who worked with with the TSR gaming company in its early stages and rubbed elbows with the legendary Gary Gygax himself 40 years or so ago, was running a playtest on Thursday of a new adventure path for the decades-old Advanced Dungeons &Dragons. In a cordoned-off area of the game room (actually, it was a tent), he demonstrated that despite his long hiatus from the industry, he still has what it takes to keep a table full of gaming fans focused on the story and attentive to its dangers.
He also gets stage fright, he said, but even with a group of a dozen people focused on him in his role as the Dungeon Master, he doesn’t lose his cool when roleplaying. He could never do theater, or perform in a band, but the cooperative storytelling of a tabletop roleplaying game is an ideal creative outlet for him. And he shares that passion with others as his career.
Others find it helps them, too. A player at the table, Max, had in-character thoroughly convinced one of our clerics that his glowing rock was truly special and important. That eloquence doesn’t come naturally to Max, who stutters in normal conversations. But slipping into another’s shoes and life and scenes of life-threatening monsters helps him a lot. “It’s weird,” he said, but his stutter “just goes away” in the flights of fantasy these games offer.
Francesca and Deb are from Brisbane, Australia, and you couldn’t ask for better companions for a lighthearted evening. They came specifically for HawaiiCon. Francesca’s parents used to take her to the roleplaying society events in her hometown. Being teachers, they saw the value in the game’s puzzle-solving challenges and opportunities to build social skills. Deb wanted to visit Hawaii and the U.S. as a birthday trip and wanted to try out tabletop gaming.
They can also talk your ears off about their favorite episodes of every iteration of “Star Trek,” quote “Babylon 5” like pros, and throw out lines from “The Princess Bride” in unison with a whole table full of like-minded nerds. It was a pleasure spending the later hours of the evening swapping jokes and going around the table, checking out photos of our new friends in various fandom costumes.
Then there’s me. Thanks to some misinformation in some of the publications my mom read regularly, and a particularly bossy member of my church, I was forbidden from playing Dungeons &Dragons as a kid. So when I went off to college, where newly fledged adults typically sow their wild oats, I chose the most rebellious of behavior and learned the ins and outs of that forbidden fruit.
Less than a decade later, I taught Mom and Dad how to play it themselves. Because as much as the various flavors of geek culture argue “Star Trek” versus “Star Wars,” or whether or not Severus Snape was really a good guy, we are all united by the love we share for our passions and hobbies. That which makes us strange is also what cements us together. That, more than anything else, is what makes a convention great.
The last day of HawaiiCon 2018 is today, and I recommend attending if you can. Find information online at HawaiiCon.com.
Mitchell Bonds is a copy editor and designer for West Hawaii Today — and in his spare time, a giant nerd who writes fantasy books and runs tabletop games about space mercenaries. He can be reached at mbonds@westhawaiitoday.com.