Natterings From Nepantla

After two consecutive years of being cancelled, GameStorm is back and I am absolutely going even if I have to wear a full environment suit.

Actually, late March looks like good timing for the next pandemic lull, which makes it baffling to me that they cut off registration at February 1 and aren't allowing at-con registration. A lot of people are going to be making late decisions that they do want to go, and then being frustrated because GameStorm really did not make the announcement very prominently.

Next up is hopefully Enfilade! in late May. Its official site is still talking about 2021, but there's a Tabletop.Events listing at an easily guessable URL, so my hope is that things are in motion behind the scenes.

PaizoCon is still irritatingly scheduled the same week as Enfilade!, but it's one day longer, and Paizo has promised that it will have an online component in perpetuity, so I can just sign up for some online gaming on that one day.

It did occur to me that I could just try to go from Olympia to SeaTac at the end of Enfilade! and try to have one day of in-person PFS, but the logistical overhead is probably not worth it.

Origins is back to its usual dates in June, and just sent me an e-mail that I have an outstanding balance with them. It took me a minute to remember that I'd registered in 2020 before Origins Online fell apart. With no apparent online gaming component this year, I guess I won't have any use for that.

In July it's Westercon, which I'd better be at what with running the gaming track and all.

Gen Con is back to its usual weekend as well, at the start of August, and is keeping both Gen Con Online and Pop-Up Gen Con. I think it's worth taking a couple vacation days for the first and I may try to go to the second again, if any gaming store on this side of town is participating.

And then Worldcon is back in its usual zone on Labor Day weekend, and I'm hoping to go in person this year.

I'm sure one or more of these plans will fall apart, but my attitude these days is that the more plans I make, the harder the universe must work to frustrate them all, and the less it hurts when I have to cross one off.

A consensus is emerging that it will probably not be safe to have large in-person gatherings before the summer. Balticon, which is held Memorial Day weekend (the last full weekend in May, for international readers), has recently announced that it will be virtual for a second year in a row.

Futhermore, the consensus says that it will probably be safe by fall. So, for instance, Rustycon, which is normally held in January in the Seattle area, is moving to September this year, with an announcement that it expects to be one of the first in-person events in the state of Washington. Origins, one of the big commercial gaming events, which first tried to go virtual and then cancelled last year, has moved itself to October on a similar assumption that it will be safe.

Caught in between are all the big summer cons. Worldcon, as I mentioned recently, has the extra wrinkle of its main hotel being unavailable for negotiation due to bankruptcy proceedings.

Gen Con, usually early August, has simply not opened up pre-registration yet. Gen Con had easily the smoothest transition to being online, due to so much of the infrastructure for online gaming having existed for years, so it should be able to wait a while before it has to jump one way or another.

Then there's Otakon, one of the biggest anime cons in the US. ANN reports that Otakon is looking for donations to stave off a possible collapse. Rumors have immediately sprung up about the state of its finances, but my guess is that it's looking at being trapped between the enormous fees for being held in a convention center and much lower attendance. Even if it was able to cancel for a second year in a row, it also has fixed costs, plus there's whatever it sank into last year's free online event.

The situation is better here in Portland. 2020 was the year the Portland Retro Gaming Expo was supposed to have moved from October to August. It was presumably going to try for similar dates this year, but there's been no update to the Web site in ages. It doesn't have to worry about being forced to honor a facility contract with the last stages of a pandemic going on, though, because the Oregon Convention Center is currently serving as an emergency homeless shelter and mass vaccination site.

Web forms I have filled out recently:

1. Gen Con's post-convention survey.

2. reCONvene's post-convention survey.

3. A bonus post-post-convention survey from Gen Con, asking what they might be able to do to turn their Web and Discord presence into a continuous year-round community. Actual Play videos? Game reviews? Maybe a monthly book club?

4. DisCon III's volunteer form. I went over to the site meaning to check whether I'd remembered to get attending memberships already (yes), wandered over to the volunteer openings page saw the "Brainstorming Staff" listing, and was all YES I CAN DO THAT PICK ME. Plus I'd be volunteering for something or other at-con anyway.

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...

Gen Con kicked off with the launch of the Pathfinder 2nd edition Advanced Player's Guide, bringing a whole new bunch of ancestries and heritages to 2e. I really wanted to try out the witch class and something from the new ancestries and heritages, so I rolled a few dice in public view on the main PFS Discord server, and now I have a half-angel goblin ready to bring in when Yara graduates from the 1-4 tier.

First game of the day was Cosmic Colonies on Tabletopia. The game itself uses cards and polyominos as you attempt to make asteroids suitable for habitation. One neat feature for evening things out is that you get a random hand to start the game with, but any cards you play are then passed to the player on your left at the end of the round. Pretty good, would play again.

Being the first session of the con, a lot of time was spent at the beginning ironing out technical difficulties. Tabletopia turns out not to play well with Chrome, for instance. I was using Firefox, but ran into a problem where I couldn't dismiss a popup which was too big for my screen insisting that I sign up for a free trial.

One thing that struck me about both boardgaming platforms from yesterday was that where Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds are constructed with an eye to being an aid to players by implementing some of the rules in code, Tabletopia and such are conceived more as a simulation. You get a 3D representation of your gaming table and the ability to move your point of view around. You also get some work to mimic real-world physics, which can work both for and against you. For instance, when you're trying to return a resource counter to its stack, it would be neat if it just snapped back into the stack, whereas it was possible to not put it back precisely on top and have it fall to the table.

"Dice Questions Answered" presented the results of some experiments on dice rolling and fairness. The main question it answered was "Are your dice cursed?". The answer was, your d20s probably are cursed. The majority of d20s tested were biased, and more were biased toward low numbers than high numbers.

What biases them seems to be imprecise tolerances, a problem that gets worse as you move to dice with smaller and smaller faces. While the float test is useless, a good pair of calipers turns out to be the quickest and easiest way to tell if your die is going to be fair or not. Also, sharp corners work better than round ones.

The second game of the day was Planet Unknown on Sovranti, another space-themed game which turned out to also involve polyominos, but with wholly different mechanisms for allocation and scoring. I liked this one a lot, probably because I'm attracted to crunchier gaming systems and this one was significantly crunchier than Cosmic Colonies. It was the sort of game where none of us really fully grasped everything that was going on until a few turns in, yet managed to have fun anyway.

Sovranti, which turns out be pronounced like "sovereignty", is a downloadable app rather than a browser-based platform, and currently in beta. It adds avatars to stand around the virtual table (not customizable, though with a long list of varying ethnicities to choose from), but it falls closer to the "aid" end of the spectrum than Tabletopia. Rules were implemented in code, with a robust undo mechanism. One feature missing in comparison was the ability to select a board and zoom in on it, but our GM, who was one of the developers, assured us that that was on their shortlist of features still to be implemented.

Pacific Pie of the day: classic chicken. Very classic. I'd forgotten how good their chicken pie was. Wild Bill's soda of the day: vanilla cream. Possibly the best vanilla cream soda I've ever had, in that it tastes like actual vanilla and cream rather than just sugar.

Worldcon's Masquerade happened, all by pre-recorded video. A fairly small number of entries, which would be normal for a Worldcon outside North America, but all good. My favorite would probably be "The Pirates of New Zealand", all adorned with native NZ birds rather than pirates.

This was also the day that the site selection result was announced. To the surprise of practically no one, Chicago romped home with over 90% of the vote. The Jeddah committee will be trying again for 2026. In the traditional SMOFfish manner, they are now being recruited to help out with the next couple Worldcons.

Props to the nine people whose first-choice vote was a write-in for "Free Hong Kong", both for the sentiment and for setting up the additional write-in of "Moderately Expensive Hong Kong".

A lot of people stopped by the bid channel afterward to offer their condolences to the Jeddah chair and wish him Eid Mubarak. While it is well understood that the bid was a nonstarter (and that the odds for 2026 are not great right now either), few people want to crush the spirits of such an enthusiastic and committed bunch of young fans.

"Great Worlds in SF" was mostly about the mechanics of worldbuilding and how it is communicated to the reader-- the map in the front of the book and so forth. Fewer recommendations for specific great worlds than I was hoping for.

"My Favourite Anime" was the last thing I made it to for the day. Always good to see a bunch of people getting to enthuse about anime at an sf con, and many recommendations were made. It suffered from one problem that tends to occur on any open-ended anime-related panel, though, which is that very little of what was talked about was less than about 15 years old.

This panel also set a record for the number of feline interruptions. One panelist was plagued early with recurring appearances of a tail in frame with her, while another had a cat hanging out in his background grooming itself for a while, which eventually decided to come up and demand lap time and scritches.

At 12pm Eastern on the dot, just when the countdown reached zero, I clicked the "Submit Wishlist" button and



...number 1189, yikes. At that moment I didn't think I had any hope of getting into the PFS special.

It took 16 minutes for me to reach the front of the queue, and as it worked out, only half the tables in the tier I was aiming for had filled. So I did get a seat. In fact, I got into everything I was hoping for.

The next order of business after paying for the games that had an event charge was finding where to view my schedule chronologically. This is the one part where the design of the site falls down; someone on Discord eventually spread the word that you get to it by going to your name in the top menu bar, ignoring the dropdown menu, and just clicking on the name. Not obvious at all.

Everything else about the site bears the hallmarks of having been repeatedly refined over the years. Note, in the screenshot above, that the opening time includes date, time, timezone, and a counter for people who don't want to try the timezone arithmetic, leaving no ambiguity. The events list was nice and searchable and filterable, and adding things to the wishlist was easy.

I'm signed up for 10 things other than the PFS special, including an infamous 1985 boardgame, a couple sessions of traditional Native American games, and some panels on various aspects of science and gaming. Everything ends before the start of the Worldcon day, except for the special, which overlaps it by one hour.

Now, here is the full list of platforms that these events are spread across: Tabletopia, Zoom, Sovranti, Twitch, Discord, Roll20, Jitsi, Tabletop Simulator. That's eight different ones, only three of which I have accounts on (Discord, Zoom, Roll20), and two of which I'd never heard of a couple weeks ago (Jitsi, Sovranti). Obviously the attempt to encourage people onto a smaller collection of platforms did not work.

One big advantage Gen Con has over nearly every convention which has abruptly moved online is that it already had its own software for managing an online schedule and signups. Warhorn is okay for your gaming conventions of a few hundred people, but it isn't built to handle the traffic rush from mega-cons. (When PaizoCon signups smacked it with 10 times its previous traffic record, the resulting slowdown led someone to comment, "How much XP do we get for killing Warhorn?". And PaizoCon is well over an order of magnitude smaller than Gen Con.)

Gen Con's software allows you to gather everything you especially want to attend onto a wishlist. Then, when signups open, you can press one button to try to sign up for everything on your list, instead of having a tab open for every event.

Chatter on Discord revealed another very useful feature: You can put conflicting events on your list, and the software will resolve it by signing you up for your highest priority that it can actually grab. So if you sign up for A, B, and C in the same timeslot, your process will first try to get a seat at A, and if not, go for B, and so forth. If it does manage to get you a seat in A, then it skips B and C and moves on to something at another time.

So if you really, really want to play the PFS multi-table special in English in the level 3-6 tier, and there are 25 tables that meet that description, by golly you can add all 25 of them to your wishlist and not worry about getting duplicate signups.

It occurred to me after doing that that if I absolutely wanted to make sure I had a chance to play the special, the thing to do would be to add all the English-language level 1-4 tables too, and be prepared to show up with a new character if I wound up in something that far down the list. In the process of doing that, I discovered that the wishlist tops out at 50 items. I do want to play some other things, so I took the level 1-4 tables back out of my list and will just hope that I'm one of the first 150 people in the queue who wants to bring a level 3-6 character.

1. Paizo's latest blog post gives a little more detail on the Gen Con signup fees. A portion of each fee will be donated to charity.

2. Also from that post, the Paizo crew is ready to tackle online multi-table specials. Again, this is something the online gaming community has been doing for years, just not any of the Paizo people.

Multi-table PFS scenarios have players divided up into tables of level 1-2, 3-4, etc. Multiple tables can be run in each tier. Each table has its own GM, and the scenario as a whole has an coordinator who keeps track of time, announces when certain conditions that affect everyone begin or end, and so forth. They are a huge amount of fun, more than worth all the extra effort.

3. Gen Con's latest newsletter mentions yet another conferencing platform I hadn't heard of before: Jitsi.

4. I left out one of my favorite characters that I encountered last weekend. Someone built a character around doing shield attacks. She was Shieldmaiden America, fighting for truth, justice, and the Andoran way (Andoran being the notable democracy in the Pathfinder setting).

Gen Con is moving online for this year too. It's where the new Pathfinder Society season gets kicked off every year, so these days I have actual reasons for wanting to attend.

The fact that even the online version is up against Worldcon is a problem, though... OR IS IT?

Gen Con will be running on Central Daylight Time. Worldcon will be on New Zealand time. I'm in the Pacific Time Zone. The bulk of Worldcon programming with start at 3pm my time and run late into the night. I know that sounds absolutely perfect to some of you, but I'm a morning person. In the middle of Northern Hemisphere summer, I'll be waking up before 6am without the aid of an alarm clock.

Gaming all morning and then panels and virtual con suite in the afternoon/evening sounds doable. It wouldn't be the first or even the second time I've been to two conventions simultaneously.