Role Players Prepare for Convention

Anyone for Dungeons and Dragons?

This Saturday, light-up dance pads, role-playing paraphernalia and creative conjuring will sweep into Baldy Hall when SARPA, UB's Strategist and Role Players Association, plans to show off its gaming and role-playing goods to anyone with an open imagination at its annual fall convention.

The convention, for which the $3 admission proceeds go to Roswell Park Cancer Institute, will showcase puzzle, card, and role-playing game demos from various companies like Looney Labs and Steve Jackson Games on the first floor of Baldy Hall starting at 1 p.m.

According to organizers, other games will also be shuffled into the mix. Players will be able to try out a new Paranoia XP Game and World of Darkness 2.0, as well as test their footwork in calorie-killing Dance Dance Revolution competitions.

As always, strategic role-playing is a staple of the event, and Convention Director James Jennings explained the premise of live-action and tabletop role-playing games.

"Tabletop role-playing is a system where a company, depending on the game, creates a system that requires a pen and paper, dice, or other things of that nature that let you create a character to play in some crazy world," said Jennings, a senior math major.

Live action role-playing, on the other hand, can get a lot more physical.

"Live action is more of a player interaction where people can come and go when they please," Jennings said. "Some live action has real-time combat, but none happens on campus."

This semester, the club has an active mailing list of over 350 people, about 150 of whom are undergraduates, and convention organizers said they expect about 75-100 people to show up this Saturday.

November's big event, however, is merely a precursor to the convention that will be held in April, to which club members expect to draw 200 to 300 people. The long-running convention has proven so successful in the past that Robin Williams paid a surprise visit to the event in 1996.

SARPA, does a lot of prep work for their biannual events, according to Jennings. This coming weekend's event took about one month to organize, while the larger spring event takes nine months to put together.

"This weekend is a fundraiser for charity," said Jennings, a two-year SARPA veteran. "Last year we raised $350 for Roswell Park."