Dreamation '97 was my third Double Exposure convention; I attended
Dreamation '96 as well as DexCon '96. Dreamation is the smaller
of the two conventions, with several hundred attendees and a
fairly intimate atmosphere.

This year's Dreamation was considerably larger than the previous 
year's; Dreamation '96 was marked by unexpectedly low attendance
due to an extremely violent snowstorm that weekend. It was held
at the same hotel, in Elizabeth, New Jersey; the Holiday Inn was,
as in the previous year, comfortable and fairly reasonably priced.
The hotel restaurant is moderately pricey, but the hotel is close
to a number of fast-food places, and a 24-hour diner.

Dreamation is a friendly, relaxed weekend of gaming; it's not too
crowded, while still offering a good selection of activities, and
although there wasn't much in the way of room parties, there were
plenty of people just hanging out and chatting. One of the nice
Dreamation amenities is a con suite with free snacks and constant
video showings. Judges get free food throughout the weekend (indeed,
if you're judging, con staff bring you sandwiches and drinks while
you're trapped at your table -- a very great service indeed).

Most of the convention attendees were adults, college-age and older;
the hallways were kept quiet (the hotel had decent soundproofing)
and there weren't any obvious examples of obnoxious attendees
making life difficult for others.

The balance of events was good, offering roleplaying (both RPGA and
other stuff), war games, board games, and collectible card games, plus
a StoryTeller/Cthulhu crossover LARP (an excellent game run by "Fangs
and Tentacles"). The organization of events was smooth, with a
sign-up board used to indicate which games you wanted to play, and
with each event assigned to a table. Similarly, the dealer's room was
small but neatly laid out, with a few RPG dealers, one major purveyor
of cards, and some novelties (T-shirts, anime, swords, jewelry, and so
forth).

TSR's usual major winter convention, Winter Fantasy, was cancelled
this year; as a result, the big RPGA meeting ended up being held at
Dreamation (a particularly important meeting, given the recent changes
in RPGA staffing and the financial difficulties that TSR is evidently
experiencing). Winter Fantasy is not likely to return anytime soon,
and therefore, I would expect that winter regional conventions with a
strong RPGA presence, such as Dreamation, are likely to become more
important in the future. The RPGA presence was strong, with a good
selection of events (yes, lots of Living City, though I was glad to
see that Dreamation had also requested a lot of other stuff, including
two Call of Cthulhu games); I _highly_ recommend playing "The Killer
Whale Club" Call of Cthulhu module if you ever get a chance.

Like DexCon, Dreamation also features the "Nexus", an interactive
round-the-clock LARP-style game. Essentially, you create an Avatar,
and that Avatar is incarnated into the characters that you play in
whatever games you play over the weekend (the Avatar's "Journeys");
your Avatar accrues experience with each Journey, thus becoming
more powerful. In the Nexus, the Avatars interact with each other,
usually in the form of heavy politicking; the Avatars are organized
into Houses which vie with one another for power. On Journeys, Avatars
are also supposed to get bonuses to their character in that game.

The Nexus is probably the most interesting and most controversial
thing about a Double Exposure convention. This is the third convention
that I've witnessed some fairly nasty out-of-character confrontations
involving events in the Nexus; I suspect that with the set-up of the
Nexus, it's somewhat difficult to cleanly distinguish in-character
politicking from out-of-character disputes at times.

Furthermore, this year, it was supposedly mandatory for everyone to
create a Nexus character before being able to play any game; while I
didn't find a GameMaster all weekend who actually enforced this (to
quote one of the RPGA GMs, when he was asked about needing a Nexus
character, and bonuses to RPGA characters based on the Nexus
characters: "That's the Nexus. This is the RPGA. We don't care
what they say we should do."), I heard quite a few people voice
their annoyance at having the Nexus mandatorily imposed on them.

While I like the idea in principle, and it can provide a superb
roleplaying experience outside of the normal convention game, I hate
being told I have to do anything, particularly when I spent an hour
standing in line to get a Nexus character, thus missing a game that I
was actually interested in playing. Stupid paperwork annoys me, and
since I had absolutely no intention of actually participating in Nexus
events, stupid paperwork was all it really amounted to.

There's a good reason for it, of course; the more experienced the
Avatars in a given game, the better the prizes for winning it.  I
suppose the convention wants to reward people who go to more Double
Exposure conventions, or play a lot of events at Double Exposure
conventions; the experience points given for Journeys ("Nexus Points")
are a pretty constant, "play a game of X length and get Y points, with
bonuses if it's a genre appropriate to your Nexus House".

Still, the Nexus didn't really interfere with my gaming throughout the
weekend, since the GameMasters generally seemed to feel that the Nexus
was the Nexus and their game was their game. I also fortunately did
not see a repeat of something I saw a few times at DexCon -- people
who were basically just sitting in games to get the Nexus Points.

I had a very relaxing, entertaining time at Dreamation; the games
I played were uniformly enjoyable (some of them were superb), the
people were friendly, and the convention atmosphere pleasant and
unharried. It's reasonably priced ($45 if you register at the door,
and all events are free), at a fairly convenient location (next to
Newark Airport), and well-run... definitely a win.