Gaming update
Nov. 9th, 2021 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellIt is frequently said these days that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. Case in point: the consequences of my post about Westercon and gaming are that people encouraged me to at least try volunteering to run the gaming track, so I did, and I am in fact going to be running gaming at Westercon.
I made it to Kumoricon last weekend, and enjoyed seeing a few people I haven't seen in a couple years, giving a talk about history of conventions, going to a talk about 150 years of trains in Japan, doing a bit of smoffing, learning mahjong, and so forth. The attempt to run a game did not go so well, though.
The RPG schedule was delayed by some mysterious logistical problem, so that when the con schedule was posted it was with a note that RPGs would be added later. By Friday morning, the first day of the con, I was frantically asking on the con Discord if any program staff member could let me know if my game had a time that just wasn't published yet. I was told to go ask on the staff server if I could, which seemed very odd to me at the time.
I wound up hauling my gaming stuff to the con and back that day in case it would turn out to be scheduled for that day. I did eventually speak to the head of gaming in person who told me the game was being scheduled for Sunday and signup sheets for all the RPGs would be out soon.
By midday Saturday, the game had finally become visible on the schedule, but there were no official signup sheets. The D&D people had started improvising theirs, so I got out the one I'd printed ahead of time (since I didn't know if the con was going to provide them), filled in the day and time, and put it out next to the D&D signups.
Next I checked back, the D&D stuff had been moved to a newly arrived table, but my signup sheet had vanished. Asking around, no one knew what had become of it. I was told by one D&D GM who also had a staff badge that some other group had been trying to use "our" space but had given up and left.
I'd previously put a message in the con Discord's gaming channel about the game, so now I followed it up with one to say it was real, it was visible on the online schedule, and to please not believe anyone who said otherwise. When I got home Saturday night, there was a reply from one of the Discord moderators asking me to please report what happened to the program office.
That I did Sunday morning, emphasizing that I understood everyone had been through two very stressful years since the last in-person con and it's wasn't a huge surprise if things had become discombobulated in some small way somewhere. The staff member assured me that people would be spoken to and told to get their acts together next year (actually in stronger language than that).
The game almost surprised me by happening after all that, as one person who had seen it on the schedule had not been deterred by the lack of a signup sheet, and he convinced a friend to join in, but we couldn't get the third player we needed for a legal table. So we wound up just chatting about Pathfinder a bit and I said I'd try again next year.
When I reported back to the local PFS Discord about how the experiment had turned out, I was told I should definitely suspect deliberate sabotage. The real reason the local PFS branch decided not to go this year, it turns out, is that the person in charge of RPGs for Kumoricon for the past few years had been blatantly favoring the D&D Adventurers' League over other groups and had actively pushed out at least one other group a couple years before the PFS people gave up. No complaint was ever made to the higher-ups in Programming because no one thought they'd second-guess their own staff.
The accused staff member seems not to be on staff this year, and I wasn't around for the past incidents, so I've decided not to add more context to my report. But, having stumbled into the middle of this and already come to the attention of Programming, I figure to be assertive next year about asking ahead of time if the logistical issues have been ironed out and making noise if any of this repeats itself.
The one thing I can do directly is take care to ensure that nothing like this happens in my gaming room.
I made it to Kumoricon last weekend, and enjoyed seeing a few people I haven't seen in a couple years, giving a talk about history of conventions, going to a talk about 150 years of trains in Japan, doing a bit of smoffing, learning mahjong, and so forth. The attempt to run a game did not go so well, though.
The RPG schedule was delayed by some mysterious logistical problem, so that when the con schedule was posted it was with a note that RPGs would be added later. By Friday morning, the first day of the con, I was frantically asking on the con Discord if any program staff member could let me know if my game had a time that just wasn't published yet. I was told to go ask on the staff server if I could, which seemed very odd to me at the time.
I wound up hauling my gaming stuff to the con and back that day in case it would turn out to be scheduled for that day. I did eventually speak to the head of gaming in person who told me the game was being scheduled for Sunday and signup sheets for all the RPGs would be out soon.
By midday Saturday, the game had finally become visible on the schedule, but there were no official signup sheets. The D&D people had started improvising theirs, so I got out the one I'd printed ahead of time (since I didn't know if the con was going to provide them), filled in the day and time, and put it out next to the D&D signups.
Next I checked back, the D&D stuff had been moved to a newly arrived table, but my signup sheet had vanished. Asking around, no one knew what had become of it. I was told by one D&D GM who also had a staff badge that some other group had been trying to use "our" space but had given up and left.
I'd previously put a message in the con Discord's gaming channel about the game, so now I followed it up with one to say it was real, it was visible on the online schedule, and to please not believe anyone who said otherwise. When I got home Saturday night, there was a reply from one of the Discord moderators asking me to please report what happened to the program office.
That I did Sunday morning, emphasizing that I understood everyone had been through two very stressful years since the last in-person con and it's wasn't a huge surprise if things had become discombobulated in some small way somewhere. The staff member assured me that people would be spoken to and told to get their acts together next year (actually in stronger language than that).
The game almost surprised me by happening after all that, as one person who had seen it on the schedule had not been deterred by the lack of a signup sheet, and he convinced a friend to join in, but we couldn't get the third player we needed for a legal table. So we wound up just chatting about Pathfinder a bit and I said I'd try again next year.
When I reported back to the local PFS Discord about how the experiment had turned out, I was told I should definitely suspect deliberate sabotage. The real reason the local PFS branch decided not to go this year, it turns out, is that the person in charge of RPGs for Kumoricon for the past few years had been blatantly favoring the D&D Adventurers' League over other groups and had actively pushed out at least one other group a couple years before the PFS people gave up. No complaint was ever made to the higher-ups in Programming because no one thought they'd second-guess their own staff.
The accused staff member seems not to be on staff this year, and I wasn't around for the past incidents, so I've decided not to add more context to my report. But, having stumbled into the middle of this and already come to the attention of Programming, I figure to be assertive next year about asking ahead of time if the logistical issues have been ironed out and making noise if any of this repeats itself.
The one thing I can do directly is take care to ensure that nothing like this happens in my gaming room.
