It was a long vacation, but I’m back at it! More posts coming soon.
This past weekend was yet another convention: Diversicon. It’s a very small con, hovering around 100 people (so it’s smaller than Convergence by near two orders of magnitude). But it can be a lot of fun, with some very interesting panels, a usually-hilarious auction, gaming and other niftiness. This year’s iteration was no exception, with good gaming (I played two games of Zar, though unfortunately other games didn’t end up happening, with insufficient players), a great panel about the works of Iain (M.) Banks, lots of hanging out with good friends and general enjoyment.
A particular highlight for me was getting to do the “Crowd-Source a World” panel, and getting to facilitate it. I modeled this heavily on the way Ben Rosenbaum has done a similar panel at WisCon in the past. (Here are notes from 2008 and 2012.) We got a late start, so we didn’t have enough time, but by the end, everyone in the room had the sense that this was a weird, wonderful place that we somehow knew.
I don’t have time to write up what we created, but here are photos of the sheets we used:
It was an amazing world, with moons connected by rods, giant mats of garbage like the one in the Pacific gyre, nomads determined to destroy the anchor of the supercontinent and more. Can you figure out what order we did the sheets in? (We completed one entire category before moving onto the next.)
Finally, a note: Blogs posts will be sparse here for a few days as I am going on vacation. But I’ll be back at it next week!
If you’ve seen Pacific Rim or its advertising, you’ve seen the work of Wayne Barlowe. He’s done concept design work for lots of other movies, shows and games, and it’s very distinctive. If you know his work, you might even have guessed it was his before knowing it was; he likes bioluminescence a lot, and unusual projections on creatures, so the art for the movie has a very Barlowe touch.
It’s interesting to look at his work for direct inspiration for games and worlds, of course. I’d love to run an SF game where the PCs encounter a group of daggerwrists, for example. The blade-birds of B&C may even have a little daggerwrist blood in their veins.
But deeper than that, his work carries some inspiring themes, and lessons, for worldbuilders. One of the biggest is that he always manages to make creatures that look as if they’re part of a functioning ecology, even if it’s the ecology of hell. And his creatures almost always look highly alien, often missing something that we tend to think of as fundamental for animal life. None of the creatures in Expedition, for example, have what we’d consider eyes, and many are tripedal.
An important lesson for worldbuilders here is to create ecologies (and creatures) that are distinct from those of Earth, yet have their own consistency. Choose some fundamental ways in which your creatures will vary from Terran ones, and then keep to that principle. This might be an old idea, but it’s one worth mentioning again because it’s so productive.
Imagine, for example, a world where no creature has bones. Or one where a majority use jet propulsion and near-perfect lubricants to get around. Or where all animals are composite entities. Or where gametes are always fertilized externally.
There are hundreds of variations, and they can lead to a myriad possibilities for creatures to encounter in a constructed world.
Then take those variations to their logical extremes, and think of what variations would naturally occur.
If creatures all slide around via jet power, predators might have more powerful jets; there might be vast plains scoured into smooth surfaces by wandering herd animals; there might be creatures that eject chaff to clog the jets of predators.
Implications are many, and it can be fascinating, and very creative, to think through them all.
In a fantasy game, this kind of thinking can help us think of creatures that are exotic, yet sensical — creatures that feel bizarre yet logical. Useful when players have tired of dragons and giant spiders, or even when they haven’t. (I find that a fantasy game where the players know the stats of all creatures immediately upon seeing them — “Scaly beast with fire breath and no wings? Obviously a wyrm, which means it has STR 5 and a weakness to cold…” — is a formulaic game, one that has lost its sense of wonder. Outlandish yet self-consistent creatures can be a great way to break that cycle.) In an SF game, this can help different planets from feeling like “Earth biome writ unrealistically large”. It can help make a post-apocalyptic setting feel like effects have consequences — an important message in a post-apocalyptic setting — rather than being a cartoonish mess.
So when I read the works of Wayne Barlowe, part of my mind is appreciating the work itself and the effort he put into it. Another part is pondering how to use creatures like these in my RPGs. But the largest part is swirling with my own ideas for fantastic, yet naturalistic, creatures.
Convergence is still the con where I talk about gaming the most. Why not at other conventions, like Con of the North (where there’s tons of gaming) or WisCon (where discussions are such a major focus, and so deep and meaningful)? For one thing, Convergence has a huge contingent of gamers, so there are enough people around to support discussions about gaming. For another, the focus is largely on panels about gaming, rather than gaming itself. (Convergence probably has fewer than two dozen RPG sessions in a typical weekend, compared to probably a hundred or more at Con of the North. And unlike CotN, it’s not really possible to sign up for games ahead of time, and there’s a lot going on, so it seems frequent that scheduled games don’t happen for lack of players.) And for whatever reason, it just has critical mass to support discussions about gaming. Which is fine by me, because they’re usually quite interesting.
I hope that, in the future, Convergence will start to split different kinds of gaming into different panels. It may result in smaller audiences, but having to address all console games, tabletop RPGs, boardgames and everything else in a single panel gets very frustrating after a while.
Folks said hi to me a few times in the halls and wanted to talk about panels I’d been on. That’s kind of a nice feeling.
In spite of its hugeness, Convergence actually felt no bigger than last year, or perhaps even smaller. And that’s with breaking out into an additional hotel. Thursday afternoon, the majority of the con actually was less crowded — because so many people were stuck in the registration line. But the rest of the time, it also seemed like traffic was manageable, or at least as manageable as it had been in 2012. Maybe traffic patterns were better? Or maybe spreading into the additional hotel helped? Or maybe the shock of being so crowded has started to wear off?
I remember when I went to one of the huge Minicons — 26 or 27, I want to say — feeling annoyed that gaming was stuck across the street in the additional hotel. But I think that may be preferable to having it on the 22nd floor, with the waits for the elevator as bad as they are.
Convergence continues to be a major highlight of the year for me. It’s going through some growing pains, but it seems like the concomm is working to continually improve the con. I know I’ll be back next year.
Like a lot of general-purpose SF conventions, I didn’t do much actual gaming at Convergence. There’s a lot of gaming on the 22nd floor, but a) getting there, with the long lines for the elevators, is a major hassle and b) the games are either not scheduled or not especially appealing to me. So I mostly make do with games I or my friends have, or which are in the library near the consuite.
At some point, I played a game of Zar that managed to be fun while convincing me that there is one person I never, ever want to play anything with again. Later in the con, there was another game where everyone was an expert player, meaning the game was quite fast. I and a friend were moded for the win. Neat!
A friend and I taught ourselves Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League, which is a two-person trading boardgame with an SF flavor. It was pretty fun, with mechanics that actually made it feel like a trading game, some interesting special action cards, and a pretty tight design that kept the game close until the end.
The last game of Sunday night was a few rounds of an old playing card game: I Doubt It (AKA other things). It was pretty fun, but I can see how the game would lose its appeal if people don’t actually call each other on things. And it can get pretty repetitive. (Though so do some of the other games my group plays!)
Arranging games is becoming tough at Convergence. The con is just so huge (nearly 7000 people this year), with so much going on, that it took many minutes of furious messaging back and forth to get together many of the games I played. Good thing I had my phone and unlimited texts!
Edit: Forgot to mention that Friday afternoon I got the chance to play Artemis Bridge Simulator again. This time, I was the engineer. It wasn’t quite as fun as playing the communications officer, because it basically consisted of constantly monitoring levels of heat and coolant and adjusting accordingly. Not a lot of variety. But the game was still a lot of fun. It was interesting to play with a different setup: the main viewscreen was a hotel TV, and the captain preferred a tactical map rather than a 3D view, so it gave a very different feel. I totally don’t remember what we did — I think we may have gotten ourselves blown up in a minefield. But it was the same intense experience, with everyone falling into their assigned roles. Good stuff!
My last panel of Convergence. This one also went pretty well.
We started by discussing how different types of gaming are socially sanctioned. Are social games more acceptable somehow? What about games that are easier to interrupt with other activities? Which games seem to get the most respect, and why? Interesting questions.
The we discussed a lot of ways to organize our gaming time & space better, allowing us to get down to gaming faster:
- Computer tools like Obsidian Portal or MediaWiki can allow us to keep detailed notes and make sure everyone is up to speed, even between sessions.
- Special furniture can allow games to stay set up during time off.
- Organizer trays to organize chits, minis, etc.
- Various online gaming solutions such as Vassal, Google hangouts, Skype + MapTool, IRC, OpenRPG, play-by-email, etc.
- Shifting our focus to games that just take less time to play, such as games that can easily be played in a single session.
- Boardgames that are available as apps, such as Settlers or Agricola.
- Boardgames that can scratch the RPG itch (though in my experience, if they do a good job, they take as long or longer to set up than an actual RPG does).
We spent some time (perhaps too much time) discussing how to find players, then we dived into a major part of the problem with gaming today: namely, that we’re under immense pressure from other areas of our lives, and that we’re under a great deal of pressure to only do things that can be construed as Productive. We finished with an interesting point: that it’d be good if society allowed more leisure time, and made less requirement that we be Productive every moment of our lives. “Tune in next year,” one of my fellow panelists said, “for ‘I’m getting too broke to find time to game’.”
As with other Convergence panels, this one suffered from having to cover all of gaming: consoles, MMORPGs, tabletop RPGs, boardgames, everything. I hope that Convergence starts breaking down gaming-related programming at some point, because while it makes the audience huge, it also means we’re only serving a small portion of that audience’s interests at a time. And as I mentioned above, I think this panel probably spent too much time discussing how to find gamers, which is an important issue, but not totally related.
Other than that, it was good: highly practical, with a nice bit of theory on the side.
Helló magyar barátaim! Lefordítottam ezt a Google Translate. Elnézést!
I’ve gotten a few hits from this article. Sorry if this kind of post is annoying, but I’m tickled to see people sharing the love of RPGs around the world!
This panel was much more practical and much less political, and also much more narrowly focused on gaming. (Though perhaps not narrow enough; the panel was written to address all gaming, from electronic to board, card and book. We had to start off with a disclaimer that we could only talk about publishing on wood pulp.) Previous years’ incarnations of similar topics have looked primarily at big companies’ publishing processes, so I hoped that this one could look at all scales, from tiny one-person enterprises (ahem) to larger companies.
We organized the panel in a chronological way, starting with “where do you get ideas” and ending with “how to fulfill Kickstarter promises”. I also created a handout with a bunch of resources on it, so we wouldn’t need to repeat a bunch of URLs for people. Things I mentioned on the handout:
- CreateSpace: Print-On-Demand (POD), linked with Amazon bookstore.
- Lulu: Another POD company. The one I decided to go with for the printed edition of Blade & Crown.
- Lightning Source: Another POD company.
- DriveThruRPG/RPGNow: PDF and POD retailers, both part of OneBookShelf. I sell the electronic edition of B&C here.
- Game Crafter: Printing of cards, counters, etc.
- MorgueFile: Public domain photography.
- OpenClipArt: Public domain vector art.
- DeviantArt: Copyright art, so don’t use it without permission, but a great way to find artists!
- Freeware publishing programs: Serif PagePlus, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, InkScape, GIMP, etc.
- Kickstarter: Fundraising for indie projects.
Other things that came up during the conversation:
- Ron Edwards’ important article about fantasy heartbreakers.
- Meeplesource, a company that sells various kinds of boardgame counters and bits.
- The game designers’ resource thread on RPGnet.
- Eureqa, a program that can discover hidden trends in data.
We made a lot of good, specific points, too: if your idea for a game boils down to “like D&D, but better”, you should probably rethink your idea; don’t be afraid to cobble together ideas, mechanics, etc.; having a good bullet list of what you’re trying for can make good advertising later (it certainly did for me — the back cover of Blade & Crown is essentially my bullet list of design goals for the game). We talked about how early prototypes probably should not look beautiful; how it’s important to look at all permutations of chance in your game, even unlikely ones, because they will happen sometimes and the game needs to be fun even then; and how to balance creativity, skill and player choice. We discussed the importance of blind playtesting, and mused that it’s now possible to ask players to record a session as audio or video, so you can truly see how they interact from scratch with the game, even if you don’t have a game room with a one-way mirror (like some large publishers do).
We addressed a lot of good things, and I think the audience came out of it pretty well-informed about how to create and sell a game. And right after the panel, an audience member bought a copy of B&C from me! So I consider it very successful all around.
The third panel I was on; not RPG-specific, but important enough to discuss here.
This one got into a lot of topics that are really important to me. We discussed our experiences with the Geek Hierarchy, and how it really shouldn’t exist; reasons fans disagree so passionately and often; and a lot of other really deep and important issues in fandom.
This panel gave me a chance to bring up my theory of disagreements on the Net. Combine the following elements…
- There are a million ways to disagree (“you got this fact wrong”, “your interpretation is wrong”, “your tastes are different from mine”, etc.), but far fewer ways to agree.
- There is, in the US at least, a cultural imperative to always be original.
- There is also a mandate to be ‘cool’, which seems to necessarily include a large element of disdain or disapproval.
- So many of us geeks get our self-esteem from being the biggest experts on a given subject, the biggest fish in a pond; but the Net is a very big ocean, and there’s always a bigger fish.
- Many people find themselves unable to get responses on the Net, so they try for the next ‘best’ thing, which is getting reactions.
- Listicles and other forms of easy journalism feed on the above factors, so they exist in great numbers.
- As with so many groups, we geeks often feel the need to elevate ourselves by deprecating others.
…and you get a perfect recipe for raging geeky arguments and flamewars all over the Net. But what to do about it?
One remedy we discussed in the panel is working hard to find ways to agree. It takes work, especially because it sometimes requires a) digging deep to find what all involved are really saying, b) possibly suspending the cultural need to appear original, and c) suspending the sense of self-esteem we get from appearing more knowledgeable, cooler or in whatever other way superior to our fellow geeks. But it can be really worthwhile, as we said in the panel, because we end up learning a lot more about the world, and because we can then revel in the enjoyment that others get from their geeky hobbies (even when that enjoyment itself isn’t something we’re into).
Another remedy is just asking questions. Rather than saying why someone is wrong, or even trying to find ways to agree, we can try to find out more about why they like something, what it means to them, how they got into liking that thing, and generally opening ourselves up to aspects of an interest that we might not even know we don’t know. As the panel brought up, we as geeks are very likely fans of fractally deep levels of detail and interest, so why not open ourselves up to these vistas of new understanding? When we don’t know something and we get a chance to learn about it, we’re one of the Lucky Ten Thousand.
One thing I was lucky enough to learn from one of my fellow panelists (Lynne M. Thomas, who among other things is the inventor of the phrase “don’t harsh the squee”) is the concept of compersion. It’s basically the opposite of schadenfreude; in other words, it’s taking joy in other people’s joy. I like this word! I’ll have to use it more.
We also discussed the importance of distinguishing between geeky disagreements, and places where it’s actually quite important to disagree. If someone is doing racist things, for example, or harassing people, that’s not a situation where civility is called for. Combine these situations with Minnesota Nice, the geek social fallacies or the missing stair problem, and we sometimes end up with situations where there’s entirely too much civility.
It would be nice if we could’ve discussed more how to know if a given situation is ‘just’ a geeky disagreement, or is one of those situations where we need to call something out. I think another reason for fannish disagreement is that we, as geeks, often attribute large meanings to small disagreements: “You like story games better than traditional RPGs? That means you endorse genocide!” or whatever. This is, I think, because we see large meaning in our very narrow areas of interest and expertise. And this can interact in difficult ways with the problem of what legitimately needs to be called out: if someone has a preference for roll-high systems, does that mean they’re buying into American cultural imperialism (“bigger is always better”), or does that just mean they like roll-high systems? Or something in between?
Still, this was a really good panel. My only real regret for is that there were only a handful of people in the audience. But our panel seems to be part of a greater movement, I think, where fandom is starting to swing away from snark and over to squee. That’s a very good thing in my book! We ended with calls to stop dissing other fans’ fannishness, and to not reinforce the geek hierarchy, and generally to be more compersive.
I wasn’t on this panel, just in the audience. It was quite a good panel. But then, with Beth Kinderman and Sherry Merriam on it, how could it not be?
It dealt pretty well with its subject matter — namely, why, when and how to push your comfort zone in RPGs. Why? To learn about things and lives you’ve never experienced; to become a temporary expert in 17th century piracy or rocket science; to get a sense of what it’s like to be someone very different from you.
They also addressed, very adeptly, that it’s not necessary to push your limits. It’s okay to always play the same kinds of characters, if that’s fun for you and your group. As they said, “roleplaying outside your comfort zone is not obligatory”.
And it’s equally important to get things right when you do play someone very different from yourself. Avoid essentializing. If you’re cross-playing, or playing someone of a different ethnicity, or whatever else, make sure you do your research and make the character well-rounded, not a stereotype. Make sure that their gender, ethnicity, etc. are part of a well-woven tapestry.
One interesting concept that Sherry mentioned was “you play what we say”. In it, everyone else in the group decides each person’s character. If the other players charge you with playing a character very different from your usual type, it could be quite an eye-opening roleplaying experience. This seems like it would only work well with a group where there’s a lot of trust, however.