Worldcon day 4, Gen Con day 2
Aug. 2nd, 2020 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellI 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.
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.
