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.

I've been doing mostly play-by-post for my online Pathfinder Society fix the past year or so, but when we all got sent home for a while and I had nowhere to go on weekends I figured I had enough time to go back to real-time virtual tabletop gaming. All I needed to do was finish up the play-by-post game my main PFS 2e character was in, which looked like it only had about a week to go. This was, of course, the moment when the play-by-post game slowed down massively. Eventually the GM disappeared altogether and we had to find a replacement. (This happens from time to time in online play, there are procedures for it, and I hope our original GM is okay out there somewhere.)

So I wasn't free of that game until early May, but that was still in time for PaizoCon! Which is usually Memorial Day weekend in Seattle, but moved online and took the entire week and weekend following Memorial Day instead. The way the schedule worked out, I was only able to make it to weekend games.

One of the great things about PaizoCon was it introduced a whole lot of people to VTT games who'd never played them before (including quite a few of the Paizo staff). This was also the downside. Of the three games I played, two started an hour late. One of these was the high-level game on Fantasy Grounds. The GM had been encouraging people to get their characters set up as soon as signups opened, and even helped me finish importing mine two weeks before the game. And yet, when game time arrived, two of the people who'd signed up showed up to say, "I've only downloaded the app, what do I do next?"

This game was also a milestone for me in that it was the first time I've ever had a character killed. This isn't that big a deal in a sufficiently high-level game; characters at this point can use the reputation points they've accumulated to pay for being raised. The in-game explanation is that their Society factions will go and retrieve and resurrect prominent members if they get killed.

The two games on Roll20 were both PFS Quests, a quick adventure format where you get one-quarter the experience of a normal scenario but spend one-half the time doing it. The quests are already being phased out at the end of this PFS season, to be replaced by a different quick adventure format. The two I played were nice in that we got to visit lesser-used areas of the Pathfinder world, but both had almost exactly the same structure and this could get old very quickly.

Since then I've been trying to get in a game per weekend, when I don't have an online con to go to. I'm currently signed up for games into early July.

Now that the conrunning world has had time to regroup, online cons are popping up everywhere. My schedule for the summer so far:

May 30-31: PaizoCon Online, for all things Pathfinder. Actually starts the 26th, but the way the schedule is organized the only sessions I can make it to are on the weekend.

June 12-14: AmazingCon, where I'll be on a couple of panels (schedule currently being finalized and should be available soon).

June 19-21: Origins Online, another gaming con, one I never had plans to attend in person, but they're trying some interesting things so what the heck.

July 29-August 2: Worldcon! Which I am taking days off for, and have volunteered to be a panelist at.