2010 Gen Con Report Part 1

Gen Con was the best four days I've had in a long time. Maybe ever. Lots of reasons for that, some more blog-worthy than others. Since I got back I've been sorting through exactly how to handle it on the blog. Should I write a blow-by-blow account of what I did at the con? Write a few separate posts hitting some of the highlights? Attempt to capture the "Gen Con experience" in a narrative essay? Then I decided all of that would be too much dang work, so you get random bullet points. This is just the first batch, and mostly from Wednesday and Thursday.

• The whole freaking city was full of gamers. Obvious, out, clearly-there-for-the-con geeks of all stripes noticeably outnumbered normal Indianapolis folk and other travelers until sometime Sunday afternoon. Go to a restaurant? Full of gamers. Walk down the street? Full of gamers. Get into an elevator? Full of gamers. It was very much as if Gen Con was its own small town within the larger city. Or as if my online, roleplaying-focused life had moved offline.
• Being in charge of a trip, on my own, without parents, was wicked cool. This was the first time I've been responsible for anything this big and crazy, and that aspect was one of the best parts of the trip. I didn't always enjoy being the default decision maker, especially towards the end of the afternoon when I'd started to crash a bit, but the other members of my posse were able to mostly pick up the slack when necessary. I did love being able to build a trip around what I wanted to do from start to finish, and even more than that really enjoyed deciding to do something crazy and then making it happen. I'm used to being responsible for myself at college, but a lot of times that descends into the lowest energy state of the daily grind. Planning and executing Gen Con was active, not reactive, and that was very rewarding.
• Hanging out with Trollsmyth was deeply weird, but also a lot of fun. I hadn't met any online friends in person before this, so simultaneously getting "I've known you for over a year" and "total stranger" signals was a new and exciting flavor of cognitive dissonance. Luckily, we had Gen Con, so it didn't take long for my social processing to catch up with -- Oh yeah! Trollsmyth is the guy I geek out about gaming stuff with.
• The dealer hall is like the coolest game store in the world. Seeing a lot of RPG stuff I'd only read about online before was neat, and meeting the people responsible for some of it was extra-neat. There's also a lot of stuff besides RPGs at the dealer hall -- costume pieces, dice, game tables, and other things where the actual physical experience is the whole point of the thing.
• Trollsmyth and I were both more or less mystified by the map/program. It took like an hour to really figure out how all the sub-maps fit together, and even then there was a lot of stuff on there that we simply didn't discover until our second day at the con. We'd be terrible adventurers. But the con is also very big, and very complicated, especially once you start trying to figure out where events are in the connected hotels.
• Seminars are really cool. We ended up only making Girls Just Wanna Get Their Game On and GMs Jam 2010 this year, which were both great. Next year I'd like to do more, and I'll probably spend a little more time finding interesting looking ones before the con; I didn't have that many picked out this year to begin with, and we skipped a couple I had picked on account of hungry, or just other things I wanted to get done.
• The Embassy Suites has its reputation as gamer central for a reason: tons of table space.
• Dogs in the Vineyard is fun. Not going to replace old school D&D as my staple game any time soon, but getting a chance to play with Tim and some of his friends in person was great. Unfortunately Thursday was the day with my highest energy high (boy, was I wired that morning in Panera) and my corresponding lowest low later that evening, which hit right around the middle of that session, and it'd been entirely too long since I'd had a bit of actual table play, so I was much quieter than I could or should have been. Still, a good time.
• Pict-o-phone is also fun. Tim had to take off after the Dogs game, but a couple of his friends stuck around and taught us this excellent thing. Basically it's a cross between the telephone game and Pictionary. Everyone has a stack of cards, writes a sentence on the first one, and hands the stack off to the next person. They have to draw that sentence on the next card, and then hand the stack off again, and the person who gets that stack has to write a new sentence based on the picture, without referencing the original sentence. A couple of rounds of this is a recipe for endless hilarity. Especially when someone thinks it's funny to write things like "For whom the bell tolls" and "A mighty fortress is our God" on his starting cards.

Listen to Trollsmyth and Oddysey Chat About Gen Con

Trollsmyth and I have been talking about fiddling with podcasting for a while now, and at Gen Con had a couple of conversations we thought would make an interesting starting point for such a thing. We ended up being too busy with con things to get all the technical details worked out while we were there, but Skype makes such things fairly easy at long distance. If you want our take on Pathfinder, D&D Essentials, the Paizo and WotC booths, the general con vibe, catgirls, and more, you can download the podcast at Mediafire. It's about half an hour long.

Links to stuff we mentioned:

Zak’s RPG Blog II

Roger’s awesome character sheets at Roles, Rules, and Rolls (Not “Rolls, Rules, and Rulings.” Sorry, Roger.)

The Hook Mountain Massacre by Nicolas Logue

Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set

Dr. Rotwang plays with his daughter

Raggi sells his box at Ropecon

Eric Mona buys Swords & Wizardry

Fear the Boot interviews Ryan Dancey

EDIT: Official Gen Con 2010 attendance numbers.

Unjustified Player Grinching

JB's had an interesting post up recently about how every campaign has a "Robilar." One player who's a lot more into the game, plays more, makes every session, even goes off on solo adventures if the DM is up for it. Apparently this has been a feature of long-running campaigns since the earliest days of gaming, and came up back in his own early gaming as well.

It's certainly been the case in Doom & Tea Parties, though explicitly by design. The game that became the solo game came first, and when we added more players to the campaign we decided to split that off into its own game. The party in the group game picked up a rumor that turned out to be about something that happened in the solo game, but otherwise there hasn't been any contact between them. Which is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned. Does an end run around the messy issues of diva-ism that JB talks about in his post.

Still, the Robilar comparison isn't perfect. One of the things that tends to happen, it seems, in a game that where one character gets a lot more running time than they others, is that character gains a lot more power and wealth just through the extra attention.

But that solo game? The one that's been running for over ninety sessions now? More than twice the number that the group game's had? Guess what level that character is. Just GUESS.

I asked Trollsmyth this question a couple of days ago. He got it wrong!

The Coolest Thing That Happened at GenCon

So it turns out that I'm an idiot. I was completely and utterly wrong about there being no old school vendor presence at GenCon. Over on RPG Blog 2 there are some pictures of Raggi's stuff at the IPR booth, and there was a whole mess of Swords & Wizardry and OSRIC material available at the Expeditious Retreat Press booth. It was awesome.

But being an idiot worked out pretty well for me, because it meant that we dropped by on the last day of the con, once I'd figured out how terribly wrong I was. (Thanks to everyone who commented on that post last week!) We met Jon Hershberger, co-founder of Black Blade Publishing, who was very impressed with how well-worn my copy of Swords & Wizardry was. We were flipping through OSRIC modules and A Magical Society: Silk Road when another gamer showed up and started asking Hershberger about Swords & Wizardry, and what old school modules he'd recommend running with it. A certain, oddly familiar gamer...

I was there when Erik Mona bought a copy of Swords & Wizardry! Which was extra-cool because Trollsmyth and I had spent a lot of our first day in the dealer hall chatting about how neat Paizo's booth was, what makes their business model so interesting, and how awesome it was that they were clearly there to sell product and support people gaming. Not only did their booth contain huge stacks of their rulebooks and an entire wall of adventures, they'd gotten some third party gaming accessories lined up as well. Everything you need to run a kick-ass game of Pathfinder right there.

Gamers gaming, man. Actual people playing the games they want to play. As geek-out worthy as that picture is, that's what's really worth getting exciting about.

Stack Overflow RPG Q&A

I'll have the first bit of my GenCon report up later tonight, once I've gotten a chance to load up and go through my pictures. I have a number of points that I want to hit, so it may take most of the next week or so to get through it all. In the meantime, though, I'd like to point out that Role-playing Games is currently the second-hottest proposal on the StackExchange, an online Q&A system. Jeff Rients, Zach Houghton, Scott, and Rob Conley are all already there, so even if we can't beat out Linux & Unix to make it the hottest topic on the system I figure we can still thorough infest the thing with old schoolers. It won't move into the beta stage until we get enough people to commit to answering ten questions over three months, so if you haven't heard about it already I encourage you to check it out.

No Old School at GenCon?

I'll have a longer report (complete with rants!) when I get back, but one point so far at GenCon stands out enough that it's worth taking a break from pestering Trollsmyth to mention it -- there is a serious lack of old school presence at GenCon. As far as I can tell the only publisher connected with the retro-clone scene here is Troll Lord Games, though Rogue Games also has James Maliszewski's The Cursed Chateau. And it seems that the only old school or quasi old school bloggers here are Zack Houghton, me, Roger GS, and Trollsmyth. (Please let me know if I'm wrong. And e-mail me so we can hook up!)

Mostly it's an object lesson in just how "niche of a niche" we really are. And I know there are AD&D games running so there obviously are old school people here who aren't associated with the online scene. Still -- can't help feeling that there ought to be a bit more of a concerted presence next year.

GenCon 2010 Side Quests

Wednesday night will find me in Indianapolis for the four days during which it is the greatest city in the world -- or so I am told, since this'll be my first ever GenCon. And in fact my first gaming con, ever. I've been thinking about doing "the GenCon thing" for a couple of years now, but this time I'm finally making it happen. I suspect I'm going to spend most of my time wandering around and hanging out, but as befits any good campaign, I have acquired a number of side quests.

Buy a set of GameScience dice.

It's been a while since I picked up a new set of dice, and I still don't have a set to go with Doom & Tea Parties (not surprising, since we don't use dice in that game, but still). GameScience seems the obvious choice, being the premier dice of the old school. Unfortunately, word on the street says I'm not going to get an opportunity to witness the famed Lou Zocchi pitch.

Attend some seminars.

Right now I'm signed up for "Girls Just Wanna Get Their Game On!" on Thursday at noon, "Game Design: Seven Steps to Writing Great Rules" on Thursday at one, and "Game Magic: Why It's Not" on Saturday at noon, but I'm sure I'll wander into some others as well. I'm deeply annoyed that I'll be missing the TARGA seminar -- a game of the Dune boardgame was running at the same time, and, well, Dune.

Poison Meet Trollsmyth

Why would I ever want to harm my beloved Dungeon Master?

Meet other blog folks.

Readers of this blog as well as writers of others. I'll have chocolate chip bacon cookies. Though maybe only on the first day of the con. (Don't worry. I'll tell you which ones not to eat.) I'm bringing my Swords & Wizardry book as a sort of "con yearbook" for people to sign, too.

Get Monte Cook to sign my 3e Dungeon Master's Guide.

I may have sworn the system itself off, but I'm still very fond of the book that taught spazzy thirteen-year-old Oddysey how to DM. And didn't do too bad a job of it, if I may say so.

Try a new game or two.

Perhaps weirdly, this isn't my absolute top priority, but Tim Jensen has been talking about running some dirty hippy indie games and that sounds like a fun time, given his games' historically high incidence of magic giraffes. I'm also assuming I'm going to end up in at least a couple unplanned games or demos or somesuch.

Pick up some art.

I've been informed that I need to actually decorate my room at college this year. The inexplicable diagram that somehow compares teaching styles to the "land of ogres" and the "land of elves" is no longer cutting it, it seems. Enter: fantasy art.

Some Stuff You Should Know About

Good stuff happening on the blog-o-sphere lately. But you knew that.

• If I was willing to deal with fiddly, 3.5-style character abilities again, I'd probably follow Zak S's lead and tie them to specific areas of the campaign world. Cool of an idea as it is, I can't see myself doing that any time soon. Though I do I know I've enjoyed the handful of odd powers that my nixie has, so maybe.
• JB's got some really interesting observations on poison in Moldvay/Cook. I've got only this to say: Poison should be guaranteed, will-definitely-kill-you death, and shouldn't do it immediately. Got a great moment in the solo game out of something like that.
• Alexis's ideas on running the "end game" are basically how I'd always assumed that something like that would go down. Or how I hope my DM will run things if I ever get to that point with a campaign. But I'm all about the politics, backstabbing, and deal-making.
• So it turns out I'm not actually the only old-school-ish college-age gamer blogging right now. Ian of Swashbuckler's Hideout got into roleplaying with AD&D, and Nick Crayon of Lawful Indifferent started out with BECMI, got into 3e for a while, and these days is all about Labyrinth Lord.
• Roger the GS is working on a color system for D&D magic. It's nifty.
• Jacquaying the dungeon
• Help out James Raggi's long-suffering wife! Get a LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Box Set out of his living room!

What's Up With That Wedding Anyhow?

For those times when you go "You *finally* arrive in Small Town #3. After a bit of asking around, you find out that there's a sale on cheese, the sewers are infested with giant hungry weasels, and the locals are planning a wedding" and the players go "Sweet! We crash it!"

1. An important alliance between two nobles.

2. A secret marriage between two nobles, who's parents will be some degree of unhappy when they find out.

3. A secret marriage between a noble and a commoner. The noble's parents will be extremely displeased when they find out; the noble was supposed to marry someone important to end some war or another.

4. The bride is a werewolf!

5. The groom is a vampire!

6. Part of an important rite for a weird local fertility cult. The human sacrifice is purely metaphorical.

7. Part of an important rite for a weird local fertility cult. The human sacrifice is very much not metaphorical, and the bride and/or groom is it.

8. Part of an important rite for a weird local fertility cult. They still need a human sacrifice -- preferably one from outside the community.

9. The bride and/or groom is under the effect of a charm effect. It will wear off at the worst possible moment.

10. The bridge/groom has been, or is about to be, kidnapped by nixies/satyrs.

11. The bride/groom gets cold feet.

12. The bride/groom gets cold feet. S/he makes it look like s/he's been kidnapped by nixies/satyrs.

13. The bride/groom gets cold feet. S/he gets the other one kidnapped by nixies/satyrs.

14. The couple is already bickering constantly. It's starting to get on everyone's nerves.

15. The couple is madly in love, utterly normal, and deeply obnoxious.

16. The bride/groom is a doppelganger.

17. The bride *and* the groom are doppelgangers. Neither is aware that the other one is one.

18. The bridge/groom is a secretly a hideous monster! The wedding is all just a convenient pretext to get a large number of people in one room for convenient mid-rampage snacking.

19. The bride/groom is not whom s/he appears to be. S/he's actually an obsessive stalker, and has kidnapped the real bride/groom to take his/her place for the ceremony.

20. The couple has made a poor choice of flower arranger. Odds are good that the ceremony is attacked by angry sentient plants.

Quoted for Truth

Role-playing is a social hobby, and a being able to be identified as a growing thing is the best way to get more people playing. Absolutely nothing gets people willing to try to play games more than the belief that it will be easy to find people to play with.

That sense of mass and momentum is the greatest tool we have to get more people.

If we disconnect, if everyone takes down their blogrolls, stops talking about each other's work, stops caring about the world beyond their table and just plays the game and says fuck everything else, then this doesn't grow, and it dies with us.

I've been on about this long before I had any sort of financial stake in it, and there's a hell of a lot more people than me that benefits from this. Not just publishers, either. Every single person who thinks they'd like to play but suffers from the old gamer curse, "can't find a group" benefits.

-- James Edward Raggi IV

I owe the OSR my current game group. Technically speaking, I owe it to some combination of Jeff Rients (who linked me to Trollsmyth's blog, and piqued my interest in this old school thing originally), James Maliszewski (who got me really interested in old school mechanics and the principles behind sandbox play and dungeon delving, and convinced Trollsmyth that maybe demi-human level limits weren't such a horrible thing after all), Melan (again, the idea that there really was something to dungeons), Daniel Proctor, for publishing Labyrinth Lord, the Knights & Knaves Alehouse and Dragonsfoot (for kicking off the retro-clones with OSRIC) whoever it was who linked Trollsmyth to me, and, frankly, pretty much anyone who wrote something interesting about old school roleplaying between, oh, the summer of 2007 and the winter of 2009. You guys just made this dungeon and Red Box stuff just sound so dang fun.

And it is. And I could not have gotten to it on my own. Without the OSR? Without old school bloggers and linking to each other and the retro-clones? I might be running Pathfinder, giving a curious glance at OD&D every now-and-again but convinced that it was too arcane, too inaccessible, fundamentally in some way not for college punks with more enthusiasm than sense. Or who knows? I might have picked up a copy of Moldvay/Cook in a used bookstore and figured it out on my own. Maybe. But the OSR sure got me here a lot faster.

Take that for what you will.

And here's your Obligatory Argument Content:

Antoine's Ring of Lizard Power
This white jade ring is etched with crude scribbles that, based on appearance alone, might be large lizards or small dinosaurs. Or birds. Can't rule out birds. Anyone who puts the ring will eventually discern that they were probably intended to be lizards: the wearer gains the ability to understand the speech of lizards, but birds remain unintelligible. Furthermore, there is a 50% chance to understand the speech of any given snake or turtle, a 25% chance to understand any given amphibian, and a 25% chance to understand any given dinosaur.

Once per day, the wearer can cast charm monster on any creature whom the ring allows him to communicate with.

The wearer also experiences one of the following effects while wearing the ring. The effect should be chosen at random, but an individual will always experience the same effect when wearing the ring. If the wearer removes the ring, the effect lasts for another 24 hours.

1. Ectothermic -- irresistibly drawn to sunlight and sources of warmth. Becomes lethargic in surroundings significantly cooler than comfortable room temperature.
2. Forked tongue
3. Yellow, slitted eyes
4. A patch of scales on the back of each hand
5. Clawed toes
6. Nothing visible

Why Don't More Girls Play D&D?

Zak S asks why none of the guest stars on I Hit It With My Axe could get any boys to let them play when they were teenagers. (NSFW)

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the answer's in the gap between:

"When I was a teenager, I knew guys who were playing and I always wanted to try it, but they wouldn't let me play."

and

"Heh, that never happened with us. Sure, we were nerds but we weren't stupid...and we had hormones just like anyone else. If a young woman would have asked to play D&D or whatever we were playing we would have each been falling over one another to day "yes". We were not at all shy, and every one knew that we played...but no girls asked." (Mr. R, from the comments on that post)

One of my major social functions is to make it okay for the women around me I hang out with to be geeky, because there's always at least decent odds I'm the geekiest one in the room, male or female. Comic books, video games, and, yes, D&D, are all often seen as "boys stuff." Women are often interested, but aren't sure how to directly ask. And male nerds tend to be even more clueless than guys in general.

2010 ENnies

I just wanted to take a moment to echo LotFP and RPG Blog II in encouraging everyone to vote in the ENnies, especially since a number of old school outfits are up for Best Publisher. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is my top choice there, for the inside look we've been getting on the creation his amazing boxed set, but Goblinoid Games, Mythmere Games, Bat in the Attic Games, and Pied Piper Publishing all absolutely deserve a shout-out.

And LotFP's The Grinding Gear is up against Paizo, Fantasy Flight, Green Ronin and Pelgrane Press in the Best Adventure Category. Worth a shot, though, eh?

Player/GM collaboration?

How much do you talk with the GM about the kind of game you want? Or to your players about the kind of game they want you to run? Do you prefer a "this is my game, take it or leave" approach from the GM, or do you build the whole premise collaboratively from the ground up? Or somewhere in between?

Does the way you handle this issue vary depending on whether you're playing or game-mastering? That is to say, do you prefer a collaborative approach when you're a player even if you're pretty much "take it or leave it" when you GM yourself? Or do you encourage player participation in the premise when you GM, even if you're happy to leave that work to your GM when you play?

Does it matter if you're putting together a brand new group or running for a group you've had for ages? When you're starting a new group, do you decide on the premise and then recruit players for that, or recruit players and then work on a premise together? When you're coming up with a new game for an old group, is it usually built on conversations you've with them over the course of the last game, or are you more likely to pitch them an idea of your own more-or-less cold?

Does system matter?

Does system matter?

Is there one roleplaying system that you prefer to play above all others? Are there systems that you absolutely won't play? Do social considerations override those preferences? Would you rather play with the right people, or the right system? Or are the right people the ones playing the right system?

Would you rather play something familiar, or try something new? Are you still playing the first system you started gaming with? When you try a new system, would you rather that it be similar to one you know, or something crazy and different? Or are there certain features that you know and love, and others you don't mind if the system experiments with?

Would you rather play the perfect system, or one that's not quite perfect but you know inside and out? Are there systems that you originally hated, but fell in love with when you mastered them? What about the other way around? Any system that you used to love, but now don't remember well enough to use properly?

The Inner Lives of Player Characters

Trollsmyth has a really excellent piece up today about personality inventories, or "stress-testing the character concept." This is something that I've seen a lot of in his games; the solo game in particular almost entirely revolves around exploring these kinds of changes and personal re-evaluations now, and they're becoming ever more important in the group sessions. I haven't seen so much of it outside of those campaigns, though. I had one player in high school who really got into this kind of thing, but for the most part our campaigns were too short for it to ever come up.

Thus, this kind of character change is intimately connected with another thing that sets Trollsmyth's campaigns apart from the ones I've played in before: I spend a lot of time outside the game thinking about my character. The exact amount varies from week to week and month to month, depending on what's going on in the game and what else is going on in my life, but it's a lot more than any game I've played in before. I'm used to having my mind a lot on the game I'm running, but as a player, that kind of outside-the-session involvement is a new experience.

It can take a lot of time to work through the problems that these kinds of transformations and pressures present to my characters. Particularly since I'm building the cultures that they come from at the same time, and often in response to what's going on in-game, so that her actions and experiences create interesting conflicts with her backstories. And while a lot of times these personality conflicts come up naturally in-game, often in ways that (delightfully!) I don't expect in my between-session musings, I also try -- sometimes without success -- to come up with ways to express the ideas while I've had away from the table (or the keyboard, as the case may be) while I'm at it.

I'm being vague here because this process of character examination and consideration is one of the big reasons I haven't been writing much here lately. When I'm thinking about a game as a DM, I'm thinking a lot about technique. Not only is a lot of it much easier to abstract away from the particulars of the game into the realm of process, it's -- well, it's a lot less personal. I get deeply involved with some of my NPCs on occasion, but even when I do, there's always more going on to a game than just the inner lives of the characters. And I can write about that.

When most of my mental game-time goes into one or two individuals over a long period of time, there's a lot less I can talk about. And a lot less that I want to talk about, particularly on the internet. There are a lot of reasons for that. Some of it, in fact, is actively secret--the character in the group game in particular is a bit of a schemer, and the rest of the group still doesn't know what she's up to, relationship and otherwise. I don't want to tip her hand to the other players early, before I've had the opportunity to set up the reveals. This isn't as big of an issue in the solo game, but there are at least a few things about that character that I don't plan to discuss with Trollsmyth outside of game until they come up within it.

Still. Blog posts or no, the way my characters have changed and the time that I spend considering and shaping that change is one of my favorite things about these games, and one major reason why I'm even more interested now than when the first one started a year and a half ago. Situations that encourage character change, and allow the opportunity to explore it, is now the bar for what I expect from a campaign. And it's one of the major things I'm going to have my eye on the next time I run my own game.

My Return to d20 Modern, and Why I Shouldn't Have

The old high school gang is kinda-sorta getting back together this summer for some gaming. I say "kinda-sorta" because right now the posse consists of me, one of the four members of my original crew, her husband(!), and one of the members of the group I played with my last year of high school. There's some possibility that my brother and another member of that senior-year group will join next week, though I'm not sure how much of one. This is mostly cool, since I haven't seen most of these people much lately and I could use the excuse to get out of the house. But it also means saying "hello" to another old friend I haven't seen in a while: d20 Modern.

I've all but sworn off 3rd Edition and anything related to it, and this game, I suspect, is going to be a series of all-too-immediate lessons on why I really should continue that policy. I don't mean to harsh on anyone's buzz here; I know lots of people have all kinds of fun playing d20 and its derivatives. I've been one of them, and someday I might be again. But man, do I ever doubt that right now.

d20 Modern encourages me to focus on aspects of gaming I don't enjoy focusing on. Case in point: I'm putting together a Tough hero who specializing in surviving helicopter crashes. (Because she causes them.) I consider the Concentration skill. This seems like something my character should have. Flying helicopters is tricky; she's probably going to do it while being shot at and taking damage. And yet, in the back of my mind, I know -- we never used Concentration checks back in the day. So do I take the thing that the system says I should have, or should I bet that the GM isn't going to call me on it if I don't take it, and spend those points on something I can almost guarantee will come up? Intimidation, for instance -- I know I'll be able to create that situation. Likewise, I picked up the feat Aircraft Operation, and I probably shouldn't have, because all it does is eliminate a penalty to flying helicopters (anything besides ordinary planes, basically) that I'm pretty sure won't come up anyway. If I don't mention it, the GM's definitely not going to remember that exception.

This kind of thing pulls me away from in-game contemplation of "What can my character do?" to the meta-game judgement of "How is my GM going to handle this one particular rule?" Not to mention all the time I spend just manipulating the rules themselves. Point-buy is a major culprit here; I'm sitting there calculating the relative values of the various ability scores, thinking about the cost of odd-numbered scores versus even-numbered ones and trying to remember which of my character's abilities reference which scores, rather than, y'know, the character, or what I want to be able to do in the game.

Maybe this is a character flaw. Maybe I'm just easily distractable. But it seems to me that a large point of the joy, such as it is, in a system like this is the meta-game. And at this point in my gaming life, I don't care about the meta-game. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time manipulating the rules. I want the GM to roll some dice and tell me what happens and then get on with the actual game.

So what about game mastering experience?

This is something that kinda came up in the comments to Wednesday's post, but I thought was interesting enough to go after on it's own: Would you rather have a new game master/dungeon master/referee, or someone who's been playing for ages? Are there any advantages to having a new-ish game master, or does experience and expertise always equal better play?

Does it matter to you how long your game master has been running their current system of choice, or is overall refereeing experience really what counts, and pretty much transfer over between games? Is someone who has experience with a lot of different styles better or worse than someone who's pretty much one run one system, or a handful of closely related systems, for their entire gaming career?

And it occurs to me that some of the difference, if there is any, could have as much to do with age as with actual experience. Are there any relatively new game masters out there who aren't in their teens? How do they stack up?

How much experience has your current game master had? How much had the best game master (assuming you keep score that way) had?

How much have you? How much better of a game master do you think you are now than when you first started? Are there any areas where your first game(s) were better than the ones you're running now?

Who Would You Rather Play With? Response & Recap

I got some great responses to Wednesday's question about whether you'd rather play with brand new or experienced gamers. My own preference fits pretty well with what several of you said, in particular: I like to get new players, so they can pick on my obnoxious habits without anyone else's to get in the way. I also like to get a mix of old and new, when possible; knowledge plus fresh enthusiasm brings out the best of both types, I think. I've had some . . . not bad experiences, exactly, but less than optimal ones with people who came into my games with a lot of pre-conceptions about how gaming "should" work, has made me kind of prejudiced towards new players. On the other hand, the most fun I've had has been in a game with people who had a lot more experience than I did, which means I need to try to keep an open mind.

Will and Mr. Gone each brought up a different side of an extremely important angle on this that I hadn't considered. With new people, there's the opportunity to teach, which is one of those things that's just fun. Likewise, learning can be a lot of fun on it's own. And when you're playing with gamers who have more experience than you, or simply a lot of different experience, you can get the opportunity to see people who know what they're doing and what kind of gaming they really enjoy to perform, in a way that you maybe aren't up to on your own, or didn't realize before could be done.

Of course, my favorite comment came from Yoo-Hoo Tom:

I'm actually running the Encounters season at a book store, even though there is a game store across the street. All of the players (minus an occasional ringer) are complete newbs. I find their enthusiasm very refreshing. I tell people that I am recruiting my next gaming group. To be honest, I was quite tired of some of the gamers I was playing with. Some of which were only playing so they could "break" the newest edition.

All I can say to that is -- rock on! This is absolutely the kind of thing I was hoping to hear come out of D&D Encounters.

(Of course, this was not the smoothest comment. That distinction, as always, goes to Doc Rotwang. But c'mon! New players!)

So yeah, pretty happy with how this turned out. I'm probably going to do something like that again; I've gotten to the point with this blogging business where I've got some really fantastic commentors, and I want to take advantage of that.

Who Would You Rather Play With?

So, I'm curious. If you had the option, would you rather play with people who you introduced to gaming, or would you rather play with folks who had been around the dungeon a time or two before you met them? Or a mix of both? Does it matter what kind of experience they've had?

When you think back to the people you've most enjoyed playing with, where they people who had already played a bit before you met them, or were they newbies before you met them? If they were brand new, were they your first group, or part of your first group? (That is, when you were new too?)

This is a less important question, but what about the people you've least enjoyed playing with?

(A somewhat tangential additional question: If you'd rather play with new folks than old hands, do you like playing with new people just for that new kid enthusiasm? Or do you like new people, but like them even better after they've played with you for a while?)

The Next Game

So it's coming up on a year since I last ran a campaign, even a short one. And I'm pretty happy with that, honestly. Playing 2-3 times a week continues to be pretty rad. Being a player is just fun, and it's given me a lot to think about in terms of how I'm going to run the next game. I'm also enjoying the opportunity to get some time to really think about what I'm going to run next, and for whom.

I still really, really want to run my own chat game. The format really clicks with me, as a player, and I'm not going to master it until I run my own game. I've got the player base. And I've got some ideas and inclinations that wouldn't really work except in chat. I know that if I were to run a tabletop game, I'd spend at least some of my time thinking, "Man, if this were chat, then we could..."

And yet, I've got this gentle, persistent nudging that my next game should not be the intimate, 1-3 player online chat that I'm really digging right now, but open, anyone-who-shows-up tabletop. Some kind of crazed LL/S&W/LotfP WFRPG/"you want to play a centaur? sure!" megadungeon sandboxy thing, just to get that all out of my system. The game itself wouldn't be quite as good, not quite what I'm grooving on at the moment, but the game isn't everything.

In short: My social life revolves around gaming. A lot of this is just because people I have other things in common with tend to be gaming-curious; partly it's because I make a conscious effort to be "out" about my gaming, and to bring my non-gaming friends into the fold. The overall effect is that, since seventh grade, about 90% of the people I voluntarily interact with on a regular basis (as opposed to classmates and such) have been people who I'm actively gaming with, or people who I'd gamed with in the past but for various reasons wasn't at the moment. Which means that, at the moment, a great deal of my social life is online.

I should probably be more worried about that than I am, but I'm actually pretty happy with that right now. Skype is an awesome thing, I'm weird enough that "mostly online" means "fits my strange niche interests," and a lot of it is that I'm using the 'net to keep in touch with the people I hang out with at college, now that we're scattered across the state.

However, what mostly gaming online does mean is that I don't have a whole lot of influence on my local social scene, and that's going to be even more true once I get back to college. I'd like for there to be a little more communication between the different groups of gamers I'm in touch with at school. I'd like for there to be a reliable group of people around for me to hang out with, who understand how to socialize without getting as drunk as they possibly can, as quickly as they can. I worry about some of my friends who, when I'm busy with my online gaming, often end up hanging out with people who drink more than said friends are really comfortable with. Running a game isn't necessarily going to have the effect that I want, and it's obviously not the only way to create that kind of environment, but it's a tool that I'm comfortable with, and fairly good at using.

So there's that. Plus, like I mentioned before, the kind of "anyone can show up!" old school exploration game I've been curious about running for a while is going to be a lot easier to wrangle while I'm still at college, and have a handful of people bugging me about running some variety of old school D&D already, than it will be once I graduate and have to start over cold in a social environment. I'm not quite convinced that's the kind of game I want to run, but it's enough that I've started (once again) scribbling down notes and maps for something of the kind.