A huge thanks to everyone who spent time organizing, mustering and running the event. I had a lot of fun, and this was easily, all things considered, my favourite Gen Con yet.
Negative Feedback
We had issues - but they were primarily with individual GMs.
Our GM for the Thursday night special greeted us at the table by asking us to "choose the form of the destructor" and pick his dice, then responded with "Oh, those haven't tasted blood yet." No one laughed. Moments later, he flashed his GM stars - all four of them.
It was a strange and pointedly hostile start, but we rolled with it. He had an overall solid knowledge of rules, which was good. About two hours into the slot he said aloud, to the entire table, "I just want this to be over." He said he was tired and had started hallucinating.
Things basically got worse from there. We all wanted to play the slot, but playing the slot was also a lot more painful than it should have been. We powered through and left politely at the end of the session, but it was a real grind that could have been entirely mitigated by the GM adopting a more positive attitude.
If you can't even bring yourself to pretend to want to be there, then you probably shouldn't be there. And this was on Thursday: the first day of the con. If this had been a new player's introduction to PFS, they would never have come back.
For the Saturday evening special: I just felt that, given when the GMs got the scenarios, it would have been difficult to prep the middle section of the module with the amount of time it really needed. That section dragged heavily and made it so that the GM had to rush through the end of the scenario (the actual interesting part) with little to no description. I have no doubt that this scenario would be gold with the right amount of prep time, but given that the GMs received the scenarios the Friday prior (from what I heard), I'm not certain this one really got the love it deserved.
I'm wondering if four specials is almost too many. I loved all of them, but the late-night slots are pretty rough for those of us who love PFS and are unwilling to skip them ;)
Positive Feedback
The GMs for the other two specials were great. A huge shoutout to Keith from Minnesota who was our GM for Friday evening - he did a great job of challenging our party and providing interesting encounters for our party composition. He was everything you'd expect from an excellent GM: great roleplay, rules knowledge and pacing.
Our Sunday GM was also good, and the scenario itself was a ton of fun.
The setup for Phantom Phenomena was great. Please, please, for the future of this game, do this every year. The first year we discovered PFS, it was because we managed to get into a We Be Goblins! game with generics. This year's setup lets new players get a taste for the game without too much commitment. I managed to make time for four of the six quests, playing the new Occult pregens, and it was a ton of fun.
The overall quality of the scenarios was high. I'm hoping to see more stuff like Serpent's Rise in the future.
