(03-25-2011, 04:40 PM)paway Wrote: Not exactly a general PBM convention, but a convention of PBM gamers nonetheless!
The PBM-con within a game con that I remember best was the 1987 Origins. The year before my friend Draper Kaufmann had won best PBM game in Los Angeles for Illuminati-PBM, beating out Rimworlds. The year before, in Baltimore, Rimworlds won the best new PBM game, beating out Illuminati. I'd been a beta-tester from Dray, and have the honor of having been the world's first PBM Swiss Gnomes. He had returned the favor and was responsible for a couple of major changes in the logic of the game.
Nicky Palmer was there with a booth hawking Flagship; I think he stands about 6'7" and must weigh 130 lbs. He's an extremely friendly guy with a hawk-like nose as I remember, an engaging grin and a British accent you could cut with a knife. Nicky left Flagship to run for Parliament and hung on to his seat until the last election when he lost by a few dozen votes.
One thing I remember very clearly was GEnie being there giving away Frisbees and recruiting people for their brand new service, touting the chance to play games on line. They were charging $6.00 @ hour to connect during evening hours - and $36.00 to connect during the day! (double those prices to see what the equivalent would be today.)
Had a nice chat with Rick Loomis - short, pudgy, blonde (he had hair back then) - a consummate nerd who wore his mantle of being the founder of modern PBM quite lightly. He was dead-set, I remember against hand-moderated, or even cyborg-moderated games. He said the temptation would always be there for the GM to put his finger on the scale.
The most fun I had there that weekend was playing a game of Dark Conspiracy where I ended up role-playing a character with a strength of 19 and an IQ of 1 on scale of 1 - 20.
I was quite young back then