Worldcon day 4, Gen Con day 2

I had nothing much to do Friday morning, so I caught up on anime and blogging.

Pie of the day: Lemon chicken, not as good as the classic chicken. Soda: Orange cream, not nearly as good as the vanilla cream.

"Improving Puzzles for RPGs" was a panel presentation about adding puzzles to your homemade RPG adventures. There were a lot of standard tips, like being aware that the puzzle will be much harder than you think it is, and making sure that the game doesn't become unplayable if the puzzle can't be solved. One non-obvious one was to make sure that harder puzzles fall earlier in a session.

"Designing Better Character Sheets" was a talk by a UX designer showing some horrid examples and her redisgns of them. The full-color version of the Pathfinder 2e character sheet was called out as a bad example for how the vivid contrasting colors distract from the important parts, oops. A lot of basic UI advice applies to sheets as well: stay away from fancy fonts, put the important stuff near the top, remove what you don't need, etc.

"Time Wizardry and Mind Games for GMs" was a big disappointment. The talk turned out to really be about constructing a profile of each of your players, their gaming style and what motivates them, which I guess was useful to GMs running long campaigns for the same group of players every week. Not the tips and tricks on psychology at any gaming table that I was hoping for.

Over to Worldcon, then, where "Constructed Language: From Elvish to Esperanto to Dothraki to Belter" must have been much like every other conlang panel I've been to because nothing about it particularly sticks in my mind.

I took a break during the Hugo ceremony (I'm not in the habit of going, since it's usually so late at night, and there was no category I was especially exercised about this year) and came back fresh for the last panel I was appearing on, "The Decade in Anime".

Mostly this one was the panel enthusing about our favorite shows of the last ten years. In the Discord chat afterward, it was agreed that there were way more good shows we hadn't gotten around to mentioning. I tried to get into some discussion of trends in the industry and fandom, but that didn't go very far and we went back to recommending shows.

Worldcon day 5, Gen Con day 3

This was the big gaming day. First up was a game of DungeonQuest, a boardgame from 1985. When I was paging through the event listings for Gen Con, the fact that it was from 1985 caught my eye. I pointed it out the SO, who immediately looked it up on BoardGameGeek, found a bunch of reviews talking about how this game usually ends in death for all characters, and started doing dramatic readings of the especially entertaining ones. Which convinced me that I absolutely needed to experience this game for myself.

DungeonQuest is a ton of fun if your sense of fun is sufficiently warped, because yes, your character is almost certainly going to die, and the suspense is more about how interesting their death will be. There are a lot of options for surprise permadeath in this game, including: monsters that only some characters are equipped to handle, traps, dead ends, monsters that no characters are really equipped to handle, and the Doomshadow, which is what got me. It follows you around, forcing you to roll a d12 every turn, and if you ever roll a 1, that's it.

The GM remarked that he has run this game several times for cons now, and I was the first player to make it as far as the big treasure chamber at the center of the board. Alas, I did not make it back out again. The person who did win got stuck near the outer wall with a jammed door, then decided to stay near the wall, frantically searching for any treasure at all, finally finding some on the next-to-last turn and then teleporting out just in time.

The GM ran the entire thing with a camera pointed at a physical copy of the board and players telling him what moves we wanted to make, and rolling dice on Discord. This worked out much better than I thought it would.

Then it was time for the Pathfinder Society multi-table special kicking off season 2. I'll leave my thoughts about the scenario itself for the next adventure log, but I will note here that it ended an hour early, which I saw a couple Gen Con veterans attributing to the fact that everyone could actually hear each other. One big advantage for online play there over packing everyone into a ballroom or two.

Pie of the day: a second roast lamb one. Soda of the day: Root beer, the last different flavor to try. A rather disappointing one, too much sweetness and not enough rooty taste.

The early end of the PFS game freed me up to see "The History of the Book", which is my new favorite talk from Worldcon. If anyone reading this still has access to the option to rewatch panels, definitely catch this one. Lots of information that was new to me, the most shocking part being that when you see a parchment-era book being destroyed in a TV show, it's too expensive to make replica ones, so that is an actual historical artifact being destroyed.

I later tuned in to "In Space No One Can See You Hide the Evidence: Crimes in Space", but also needed to make dinner during that hour, so I was only able to listen with half an ear and didn't pick up much from it.

The last panel of Worldcon for me was, appropriately, "Virtual Conventions and Conferences", which revealed a disaster that nearly halted Worldcon before it started. No, not the virus, an error on Zoom's part. Worldcon got a package deal that was supposed to be in effect for a two-week period that included the convention dates. It was set up on July 12, and someone at Zoom entered the 12th as the first day, causing all the webinar rooms to vanish the day before the start of the con. It took nine hours to get it straightened out because Zoom's tech support only operates on Pacific time.

A lot of information was shared and compared about the specific platforms that various cons have used over the last few months. I would have liked to see some discussion about how easy it is now for people to run coattail events, but it wound up focusing on mostly technology.

That was not quite it for Worldcon, though...

Worldcon loose ends, Gen Con day 4

I usually don't sign up for games starting before 8am my time, but I made an exception for Zohn Ahl, a traditional Kiowa game. This was another one played with the GM pointing a camera at a physical board, but it did not work so well in this case because it cut players off from the one interesting aspect of the game, which is how you roll to move.

Movement is determined with four counting sticks, flat on one side and round on the other. You find yourself a large, interesting rock and then drop the sticks on it, moving one space for every flat side that points upward (unless all four land on the same side). The "board" only allows linear movement in one direction for each team, so there wasn't really any playing of the game, just watching the GM play both teams.

This worked better for the next game, Patolli, a board game which was popular in the Aztec Empire. This has some striking similarities with Sorry!, but one big difference is that victory is determined by a betting mechanism. Each player starts with some beans (or whatever you want to bet) and landing on certain squares forces you to pay a bean to the player to your left.

Rolling would normally consist of tossing five beans which have been painted on one side, with each painted side displayed counting as one space of movement. The GM substituted d6s, which made things easier for playing on video but messed with the odds a bit, making it harder to get counters on the board.

Once you get multiple counters on the board you do get to exercise some strategy. I can see how this was crazy popular in Aztec times.

After finishing my games for the day, I went back to Worldcon to watch the closing ceremonies. I also found on its Discord that before it was locked down, someone had posted an invite to an unofficial server on all the social channels for fans to continue hanging out on.

So now it's all over, and there's no rush to pack and get home, just the return of reality and work tomorrow.

93 days to go

We're down into double digits! OTOH, this is the week that the hamstringing of the Postal Service began.

Downtown, the feds have negotiated a strategic withdrawal and things are largely calm again. The city may have found it couldn't do much to put limits on them, but it can still fine them for sticking their fence in a bike lane.

Openings are being reversed in eastern Oregon as virus cases climb. Originally it was thought that if everyone could hang on for just a couple months then deaths could be limited to a couple hundred; now we're at 326.

Temperatures have hit nearly 100F around here some of the last few days. Summer is happening and it's hard to notice aside from the air conditioning running all the time.