Dead of Winter 2010
How was Dead of Winter this year, you ask? It was pretty damn awesome, is what it was!
Although there was a lot of “You shoulda been there last year!” going around. Seriously, its first year and there was torrential rain, a power outage, and no heat in a half-flooded, half burnt-down haunted death-trap hotel. This year it was mild weather and warm evening fires in a oddly well-visited, still half burnt-down haunted death-trap hotel.
But the real draw is the 2 6-hour games Saturday and Sunday, a total of 24 hours of gaming in one weekend.
I talked a lot to others about this post-con, and I’ve certainly expressed this opinion before, but I think it’s even more true for horror games, especially horror one-offs: the goal isn’t to win. In fact, the goal of a good horror game, in my opinion, is to fail and fail gloriously, in the most gut-wrenching, heart-breaking way that will leave your character emotionally crippled by the end of the session.
For example, take a Cthulhu game. If your character isn’t dead or insane by the end of it, you did something wrong. You played too cautiously and probably did a lot of hiding and NOT solving the giant mystery that will no doubt melt your feeble brain when you do finally discover why those bodies are going missing, or what’s in that book your crazy uncle bequeathed you.
So I went to this 2-day horror con with the express purpose of losing my shit and having some meaningful death scenes. But once or twice I found myself butting heads with the class of gamer that plays to win.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with solving the mystery and saving the day and killing all the Nazis. But not every game is made for that, and I think that many of the ones featured at DoW were designed to pit players against players in messy emotional dramas rather than have everyone work together to complete a quest.
It’s important to know when you’re playing a story-game that drives characters’ relationships, and an objective-game that hinges on characters’ skills, and also players’ tactical and analytical abilities.
I don’t have any of those skills, so I just go for the drama.
