Little Chris stayed up all night doing his homework, so he was still sleeping when I left the room. I went down with Dave and we went through the dealer rooms. Brisk business today as there were lots of people crowding into the both rooms. In contrast, the Buyers Bazaar (what used to be the Swap Meet) was practically empty. They changed it last year so there are like 6 spaces and you can get a space for two hours. No more rush of people cramming into a small room. No more last minute deals before the swap meet ends. It is quite tragic.

Anyway, I bought three Champions books that I don't have and that were on sale. Module 14, The Trail of the Gold Spike, which I didn't have, and two supplements published in 1993. Later on I attended the Hero Games seminar, "What's Up With Hero Games!" Bruce Harlick, Steve Peterson, and Steve Long were present (and one other guy whose name I didn't get). I haven't been paying attention to Hero Games the last few years. I knew they had a very low profile and were publishing e-books to save money.

Hero was bought by CyberGames a while ago, so now they have a full-time staff instead of the part-time staff they were snailing along on. They're back to publishing supplements, with the first one having been recently done. 5th Edition Champions wil be published March 23rd and they have a healthy amount of upcoming products. (For some reason, the mention of CyberGames and Hero brought out a round of derision from Ken and Eric later that night. Not being all that "in-the-know" I wonder what's wrong with CyberGames).

Some talk about licensing. Hero has the Witchblade license and will produce one book for it. Top Cow's president grew up on Champions so the relationship has been a good one. And with the tv show starting this Fall it will bring more attention to the game and then maybe some spillover to the other Hero products. For the most part though, licensing is a bad deal for almost all RPG companies. The RPG market is small, licensing fees are high because the license owners don't realize that sales are low, lots of restrictions with the material that is put out. The only company that obtains a lot of licenses is Steve Jackson Games, and they lose money on just about every license. But they do it because Steve loves those worlds and loves to hobnob with the authors and it's his company, and I personally love him for it.

Also a few opinions about the death of ICE. Once they had their Middle Earth license pulled they didn't have anything popular to sell. For years they were able to keep that license, even though they were often (sometimes years) late in payments, because that was Tolkein Enterprises only revenue license. Then Christopher Tolkein finally got fed up and personally gave New Line Cinema majority control of licensing. New Line said "drop ICE, they don't make their payments" and after a year or two of legal battles ICE lost. Consequently though, Tolkein Enterprises does get ownership of all the MERP supplements published, not that they'll do anything with it. There is a new MERP licensee, and maybe they'll have something to say tomorrow.

Finally, Steve Peterson talked a bit about his dream. He wants Hero to be a major intellectual property. To whit, he wants to have novels, online games, computer games and play aids, movies, television, whatever. "We're not selling books, we're selling an experience." Bruce Harlick, in charge of the RPG line, quipped "that may be what Steve wants, but *I* want to sell books." The Hero Creator program that they have is one part. Basically it's a file translater, using Fuzion as the base language. Templates (scripts, from the sound of it) are used to convert from a particular system to Fuzion and back. That way you can convert AD&D characters to a DC Heroes campaign, or whatever.

My last comment is that the players there were what I would call condescending towards all other RPG systems. You can do anything in Hero; it's not just a list of things, but a meta-list creator; seamlessly convert from campaign to campaign without changing your character; etc. I do plan on one day running a Champions campaign, but unless 5th edition is radically different, you'll still have the problems that (1) it's too easy to min/max a character, which means that everybody does it and it becomes too rules-lawyerish and (2) if you're not careful, you lose all color to the campaign (everything starts boling down to it's stats: I have a 6d6 Energy Blast, this gun has a 2d6 Ranged Killing Attack). The first one I'll solve by writing all the characters so that players can't min/max. They can describe the character and I'll make it for them. Second one is harder to fix and I'll have to be careful not to let the campaign fall into that trap.

I went back to our room, where my brother and Dave Sweet were lounging. Dave Woo arrived for his one day at the convention. We all went to the video game room -- finally they have some real variety and not just a half dozen Street Fighter-type games and a couple of other games. There was a Ms PacMan/Galaga sitdown console, a pinball game, California Speed (race game), Gauntlet 3d, Maximum Force (a gun shooter), Raiden Fighters 2, Striker 1945 Plus (sequel to 1942, 1943, and 1944), Puzzle Fighter, Metal Slug X, some sort of Street Fighter game, and a couple of other games. Chris and I played 1945 and beat it (only took about $8 to finish the three levels).

It was still early so we decided to go out to dinner. We drove over to Crow Canyon Road and wandered around. There was a Max's Cafe that was very full so we went to a nice Chinese restaurant called Uncle Yu's. Definitely felt like I was not dressed properly. The food was great and even Chinese food, even if it is a nice restaurant, is relatively cheap. The best was the Prawns with Honey Glazed Walnuts, this one served with the walnuts separated from the prawns rather than mixed in as I've seen with some dishes. I think I ordered Crispy Fried Chicken which was different than what I thought it would be. Sort of fried chicken nuggets covered with a light sauce. There were a couple of other dishes which I avoided. The only problem was that they give each person a very small bowl of rice and I hate asking for more, but Sweet did get us more rice.

We got back to the room and it was only like 20:00. Still a couple of hours before the drinking event. We watched Motocrossed on tv (Disney), a movie which I sort of wanted to see. For some reason I like the girl-poses-as-a-guy- and-shows-the-other-guys-that-she's-just-as-good type of movie. So then it was 22:00 and Woo, Sweet and I went to the bar to stake out a place. Eric and Ken were there already and we got some chairs. We waited a bit for Pickering to show up but he couldn't make it, as we found out.

Just as well, we wouldn't have to drink The Resistor. Seven drinks: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet (the last three are hard since they're pretty much the same color). No white and black, no resistor, just the seven drinks, which was enough. We got six drinks (one for each of us present and one for Big Chris or Pickering when they showed up) and I never seem to remember the name. I remember Yellow being bad, Blue being awful (new bartender and she didn't have a good concept of colors and such), and the last couple of drinks were more red than blue, though both good. Little Chris showed up to watch us and do homework. Big Chris showed up after his game and caught up by drinking four drinks in 5 minutes. A couple of other people dropped by to talk. We decided that Woo could pick up about 21 of 35 women that walked into the bar (a really good ratio considering previous years, meaning that either Woo is getting stronger or gamer chicks are getting lighter).

Then after the drinks were done we just kept on talking. Well, really it was Eric and Ken and Nicole and Big Chris and another Chris and some other guy. Woo and I mostly listened. Sweet got bored with the industry talk and left with Little Chris. This was probably my favorite night of drinking, mostly because I found the conversations interesting to listen to. Making fun of various people in the gaming industry and talking about the state of the industry and how various companies are doing and so forth. Not that I really remember any of it, but it was great. We finished at 03:00 and by then Woo was sober enough to drive home. The rest of us went back to our rooms to sleep.