Earlier this month I traveled to Atlanta to visit family and to attend Dragoncon for the first time. I’ve been to other geek conventions before, like New York Comic Con, Connecticon, Anime Expo, and Strategicon, but this one was by a good margin the best experience I’ve had at a con to date.

The first thing that set this one apart—other than getting to attend in costume with my cousin Lizzie as Superman and Supergirl—was that I almost never didn’t have a presentation I wanted to go see. I got into every panel I lined up for, and asked at least one question at most of them. (Asking questions is even more fun when the moderator calls on you with, “Let’s hear Superman’s question.”) There are a lot of genres, or “tracks,” covered in Dragoncon, so you can really tailor it to your own interests, and my selection of presentations was heavily skewed toward the tabletop gaming track.

I attended multiple panels featuring Monte James Cook, Jason Bulmahn, and Robert J Schwalb, some of the minds behind D&D 3E, Pathfinder, and D&D 5E, respectively. Their work has defined much of my gaming life, and provided me with untold hours of entertainment and opportunities for creative expression through collaborative storytelling. Hearing them talk about their concepts for their games, the ways both that they design and play them, validated many of my own beliefs and opened my eyes to new ways to view these games.

Some people asked Schwalb to sign their Dungeon Master’s Guide or Player’s Handbook, but since I didn’t have any of my rulebooks with me, I had all three of these gentlemen instead sign my gaming notebook. I also took pictures with them in my Hipster Robin/Bro Robin/Wes Anderson Robin costume.

The highlights of these panels were the two I attended on using horror in games and on “growing up” games to make them more “mature.” The ideas discussed and stories shared in these panels have begun to reshape the way that I approach adventure designs. In particular, I find myself much more drawn to a harsher realism with regard to the consequences of the adventuring life. It’s a dangerous world out there, and as adventurers, the PCs are heading directly into its most dangerous parts.

Schwalb seems to enjoy the horrible happening regularly in his games. (I would not want to spend an evening in his nightmares.) He extolled “sudden and violent deaths” as having strong emotional impacts on players, as well as getting under players’ skin by making them choose between two terrible options, like saving the town at the cost of the innocent orphan children’s lives. Oh man!

Maybe my favorite moment: Someone asked a panel Schwalb was on what their deepest fears are. Schwalb’s response, only slightly paraphrased: “That one morning I will wake up, bleary-eyed and hungover, and go to the bathroom for my first piss of the morning, and when I look down, instead of pee coming out, it’s centipedes. I have nightmares about this.” So “dick centipedes” is a thing now.

Since the con I’ve been thinking more about ways to make my players face harsh realities to make the stakes heavier in my games. I had already been experimenting with designing difficult decisions like harmful side effects for powerful magic items, and put a couple of cursed items in a room for my delighted players to find. Sudden and violent deaths can be very disheartening to many players—as I discovered last night when I killed a PC, followed the player’s protests about bad design—but should provide a challenge for my design chops to make those events meaningful, and not just discouraging.

I want to find good ways for more Bad Shit™ to happen in my games.

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I have, since attending Dragoncon, bought Shadow of the Demon Lord, Robert J Schwalb’s new tabletop RPG, and I’m itching to try it out. I also got to play one session of D&D with my oldest cousin Lizzie (a.k.a. Kara Zor-El), her boyfriend Sam, and their friend Kyle. Two of Lizzie’s younger siblings also want to try D&D too now, so at some point we’ll set up an online session that Lizzie will run, and I can try Roll20, which I hear good things about.