Big Bad Con

Recently I got to attend Big Bad Con, a new San Francisco bay area game convention that takes place at the Hilton Oakland Airport. This is where Kublacon used to be before they moved to Burlingame (to an arguably much better location). Kublacon has earned its place as my favorite bay area game convention with its great mix of smoothly ran events, open gaming, dealer's room, and the people who run it are always working hard to make sure the convention is fun for everyone. Still, I have fond memories of gaming at the Hilton (in particular an epic run through of the AD&D module: Pharaoh) - so it was fun to be able to attend a new game convention there.
Big Bad Con focusses solely on role playing games, though it does have a small open gaming area for board and card gaming.
At most game conventions I either go as a guest or as a dealer with a table. This time I went just to play games. Sometimes you can forget how fun game conventions are! I got to participate in 4 epic roleplaying sessions: Mutant's & Masterminds 3rd edition, Dungeoneers & Dragonslayers (a playtest of  a new yet to be published RPG by Luke Crane), Stars Without Number, and MouseGuard. I will post my experiences with the 4 sessions over the next few days:

Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition

The adventure was just average.

The differences from 2nd edition to 3rd edition were subtle in many places, but also really important. Such as Hero points. 3rd edition focusses on positive reinforcement instead of penalties. It is a further distillation of d20 into an original system, in many ways almost unrecognizable from the original.

The adventure in a nutshell:

You are part of a super powered group of investigators and law enforcers. You have a headquarters complete with a super computer and a super van to travel around in (from San Francisco to Portland Oregon in under 2 hours!).

The Leader of the super group is missing, investigate what happened.

Criminal activity was depressed when leader first disappeared, but now is sharply on the rise again.

We hunted down the last known super villain he contacted. After busting a narcotic ring, inadvertently, we found some minions and found their super villain lair.

Once in the lair we beat up the thugs, got to the headquarters and confronted the super villain - who was annoyed we had "broken the agreement". We endeavored to find out what the "agreement" was.

We then discovered our leader and the super villain (along with other super villains) had made a deal because the leader wanted to retire.

We hunted dear leader down, found him drunk in a bar and proceeded to berate him for his nefarious dealings and deception, and told him if he wanted to retire he was welcome to, even though his power gave him certain obligations, and we left his sorry drunk butt where we found it.