Day One

There is always the moment of worry about getting our badges when it comes to Dragon Con. Over the 30 years since my very first one, I have spent hours in the line, once having the line take so long that I missed the whole reason I’d come down to Dragon Con in the first place (it was for a Magic the Gathering Grand Prix). Since we don’t go down until Friday morning, all we have to go on for the line ride times is the horror stories from the people who go down on Thursday. I saw everything from 30 minutes to 2 hours of wait time.

I even saw someone who said it was the worst line experience they’d ever had, and they’d been coming to Dragon Con for over 30 years themselves (in fairness, someone immediately said that 2025 wasn’t even the worst year in the past 5, so the original poster might have been exaggerating somewhat).

Still, the line was what it has been for the past few years coming in around 10:30 in the morning – it took us less than 15 minutes to get our badges counting from the time we entered the hotel to the time we left (and it honestly was closer to 10 minutes, I just didn’t track it).

On Friday’s agenda we had planned on going to lunch with some friends, the Arrowverse panel, and the Vendors’ Hall. Lunch went great, got to hear some of what was going on from Rebecca who stays downtown and had been there since Thursday… and then it was onto the Arrowverse Panel.

Arrowverse Panel

After all these years, it is kind of surprising to find out that someone from one of these genre shows had never been to Dragon Con before, especially with so many things being filmed in Georgia nowadays. So it was great that we could sit in on Emily Bett Rickards (Felicity Smoak) first Dragon Con. Joining her was Colin Donnell (Tommy Merlyn), David Ramsey (John Diggle), and Brandon Routh (Ray Palmer). I must admit that I didn’t immediately recognize Colin with his full beard, but luckily someone asked a question about Tommy and it all clicked into place.

A couple of interesting little stories from the panel:

Everyone clearly were not the biggest fan of the first Arrowverse crossover due to the logistical problems it brought with scheduling.

When David Ramsey goes to direct an episode of something, he normally talks to the producers about the tone of the show. With Arrow, it is a darker show… with the Flash it is lighter and comedic… with Batwoman, it’s darker… but with Legends of Tomorrow the producer just kind of shrugged and said “Just make it look cool”. As a BIG fan of Legends of Tomorrow for exactly that reason, I felt that in my soul.

David Ramsey mentioned that upon initially meeting Stephen Amell, Stephen “thought David was a serious ‘Actor'”. During one of the scenes, Diggle is supposed to lean in and whisper something in Oliver Queen’s ear “Your car is here sir.” So when they were doing a shot for coverage, David leaned in and instead whispered “I have the biggest balls for you.”

Stephen could not keep a straight face in light of that reveal.

Vendors’ Hall

The OTHER line ride at Dragon Con is always the Vendors’ Hall. This year the line was wrapped 3 quarters of the way around the building. All told it took about 1 hour to get in, so not the worst ever, but it makes me wonder if there was any better way to do it while still obeying building capacity ordinances and the like. It is one of the big attractions, but I also hear people talk about skipping it due to the time associated with even getting in.

The things I noticed this year:

An increase in the number of Food related booths. Lots of chocolate, fudge, snack, etc. booths.

An increase in author booths. They were spread around so it is hard to really have a headcount, but it seemed like there were a few more.

An decrease in comic book related booths. There were still the one booth which had $5 trades, and a couple of others which had $1 and $3 boxes, but most had much smaller selections.

Felt like there were a few additional artists on the 4th floor which is the Pop Art (Comic) floor. Though there apparently were a couple of A.I. artists (I must have glanced past them) that at least one was asked to leave the convention early (good for Dragon Con). It’s hard enough to scrap together a couple of bucks at conventions without having to deal with the A.I.

After dinner at Ted’s Montana Grill where a group of 6 recapped their own days, we briefly debated staying for the Comedy show, but Courtney had officially “hit the wall” (trademark pending), so we called it a successful first day and headed home.

Day Two

After years and years of either fighting through crowds on Saturday or sometimes skipping it entirely (due to family commitments mostly), last year I threw out the suggestion to just roleplay all day. It seemed like all upside as we wouldn’t have to deal with crowds and lines since all the gaming is in one of the America’s Mart buildings, and we’d have the opportunity to do a little bit more of what we do at Gen Con – play games we don’t normally get to play.

Alien RPG

Free League’s D6 system just works for us. Whether it is Tales from the Loop or the Alien RPG, everything seems to click right into place. Of course, every time we play it makes me want to play a longer campaign of something using that system. On top of that, the Alien setting works exceptionally alongside it with the Stress rolls and potential for Panic building with each encounter.

Eric, our GM, set up this game as a little more powerful than the other time I played, but it made sense as we were mercenaries hired to go through an especially dangerous jungle to retrieve whatever it was the local forces had uncovered. There was lots of opportunities for strategy and planning to try and obtain our goals throughout, with a little bit of roleplaying on the front end.

Marvel Superheroes (TSR)

It has been 30ish years since I’ve played the old TSR Marvel Superheroes game. What I remember at the time was the multicolored chart and the time it took to figuring out whether an action succeeded or failed. While it wasn’t a difficult task, it was a little bit unwieldy (and compared to current RPG designs with plus modifiers, it seems like the chart could be updated and streamlined.

All that said, our GM, Daimen, was a Flash programmer and had a monitor along with a touch screen on his side, so we could immediately see what we rolled versus what we needed to get to achieve. We noted in our discussions afterward that he might have been the most prepared GM we’ve ever played with, as that screen was not only super easy to see, but his adventure also eased us into the adventure perfectly.

We were playing the New Warriors, a 90s super team that were kind of the junior Avengers. I’m a huge fan of that comic book, and would probably put the first 25 issues up against anything in the fun to read category. Now normally, when it comes to picking pregenerated characters in games, I’m mostly content with just going with whatever is left over. Not with the New Warriors, though. I had my eye on Nova, so when there was a slight pause, I jumped at the chance to grab him. With Egg playing Speedball and inventing the catchphrase “You just got Speedballed!”… we were off.

The GM ran us through a training exercise (which fit the feel perfectly, since all the comics were doing that back in the day) before then getting involved in an intergalactic incident with pirates, Dire Wraiths, and the most helpful PA operator in the galaxy. A ton of fun was had, and it not only made me want to play the game again, but I now want to go upstairs and dig out my long box with all my New Warriors comics!

That’s it for this week. Next week we’ll talk a little bit about the greatest horror movie never made and a handful of panels that made me laugh to the point my cheeks hurt