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Jul. 6th, 2004 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckScott took a week of vacation in June. We spent the first couple of days up north with my grandmother. She hadn't seen Delia in nearly a year and was utterly thrilled to have us visit. My aunts and uncles on that side of the family all live in the area and had never met Delia, so they were very nearly as thrilled.
There was a little craft fair going on in downtown East Tawas while we were there. I ended up buying a new sunhat. My old one didn't survive the trip to Florida very well, but this one can be folded and bent without falling apart. It was expensive, but I think it'll last for quite a while. Scott bought some shoes on sale. Delia just enjoyed the crowds.
We took her to the beach one morning. It was too chilly and windy even to think about going in the water. Not that we had intended to do that anyway. We just wanted to introduce her to sand and see if we could get her to explore it a bit. She didn't actually step off the blanket, but she did touch the sand and lift a couple of handfuls.
Delia also learned to climb up stairs while we were at Grandma's. She heard Scott talking up there and wanted to get to him, so she started up. I followed behind her. She managed to go up several times, but going down remained beyond her skills. We need to find a place where she can practice safely.
We went home on Monday so that we'd have all of Tuesday to get ready for our second trip-- Wednesday about noon, we headed south for Origins, a big gaming convention. I'm still not sure how to rate the experience. There were parts of it that were good and parts that were dreadful. I'm not sure how those pieces balance out.
Delia had a blast. There was a lot for her to see, places she could run around, other kids near her own age, adults willing to play with her, everything a toddler might want. For me and Scott... Well, we took turns watching Delia. That was more challenging for me in some ways than for him because he could carry her around while I was confined to the hotel room when I was watching her. (Basically, I can't walk all that far or long without increasing pain, especially when carrying things, so I rent a motorized scooter/chair for these conventions. But I can't carry Delia safely *and* operate the scooter safely, at least not if I run into any challenges like tight corners or crowds or doors. That meant that when I was watching her we had to stay in one place and that that place needed to be somewhere that had food, beverages, easy bathroom access and a way of keeping Delia confined when I needed to use the facilities-- Holding a squirming toddler while trying to use the toilet comes strongly under the heading of Not Fun.)
The Origins space was only moderately accessible for someone using a scooter. There were several places (including the connector to and from our hotel) that I couldn't go without someone to assist me, and the bathrooms were dreadful. Doors that spring back are fairly easy to handle when a person's walking, but it's hard to push through on a scooter (or I would imagine, in a chair). Tight corners are also very nasty, particularly where there's more than one right on top of each other (one of the bathrooms had a push door followed by two very tight turns). Finally, some stalls that are supposedly accessible simply aren't big enough for both scooter and toilet (there was one that I could get the scooter into only if I either didn't shut the door or was willing to have the basket on the front protrude over the toilet and, um... limit my access). At least, I'm lucky enough to have the option of leaving the scooter outside the stall. I don't like to leave it outside the bathroom itself unless I've got someone to watch it for me because the dratted things are expensive and we'd have to pay for it if it got stolen.
I also face another challenge at conventions like this-- I can't play most board or card games, especially ones I don't already know really, really well, with any pleasure. It's kind of a phobia and kind of, well... A near analogy would be test anxiety or stage fright. I get so knotted up over the process of playing that the experience is utterly miserable. So far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with fear of losing; I don't care all that much one way or another about it. I just can't relax at all-- I shake. I get headaches. I can't talk. Utterly not worthwhile.
I'm okay with sitting and watching other people play, commenting on the game, asking how it works or talking about other things. I just can't play myself. This has been very difficult to explain to most people because it's so alien to their experience and because many of them think it would be good for me to work at overcoming it. I know how to overcome phobias. It's a long and painful process both for the person with the phobia and for the people around her. I don't really feel that the payoff would be sufficient. My quality of life is not decreased by an inability to play dominoes or bridge or the Cheapass game of the month.
Except at gaming conventions. At conventions, it's much easier to find people willing to play an impromptu round of a card or board game than of a role playing game. RPGs require planning and someone with skill to GM. Board and card games just require space, sufficient players and another copy of the game. Usually, I plan out my schedule and buy tickets for role playing events well in advance so that I've got lots to do, but this year, we were improvising because we weren't sure how things with Delia would work out.
Scott tends to fill in time by wandering the dealers' room, looking at new games, new supplements, etc. I generally sweep through there twice, once early in the convention to see if anything really strongly catches my eye and once just before we leave to buy things if I notice them again and am still interested. Using the scooter complicates things because I can't get in very close to most booths and because I'm giving about 75% of my attention to navigation so that I don't plow into people or displays. I suspect that some of it is also that I'm not interested in the card games, board games or computer games-- That kind of wipes out a large percentage of the displays as things worth my attention.
Ah, well... I *did* actually do some things that I enjoyed. I played in two games, and we roomed with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dagoski and his wife, Michelle. We last saw them in November, at a wedding, so it was really good to see them. They didn't even complain when Delia woke them early in the mornings; Michelle just noted that it was later than their cats would have let them sleep. They also gave Delia a lovely quilt that Michelle had made (I can't describe it since it's in Delia's room at the moment, and I'd rather not wake her by going in to get it).
I wrote up some detailed suggestions on the Origins feedback form. Two of them would be pretty simple to implement. The first was to put the day of the week at the top of each page of the schedule in the convention book. When you've got thirty plus pages of events in each category (categories such as "Seminars," "RPGs," and "CCGs") and they're in order by date and time but only labeled by time, the day of the week *matters*. The second easy suggestion was that they sort events within each game type and time slot by something consistent. Looking at the RPGs, I couldn't figure out any order in which things were listed. If there are only a dozen events in that time slot, then it doesn't matter so much, but when there are 50... Also, I tend to skim listings looking for game systems I recognize, so I prefer to have the events sorted by game system.
My third suggestion was a large, detailed map posted in a central location like registration or outside the dealers' room. The maps in the con book were nearly useless, and the convention center is rather confusing, particularly if you're also trying to find things in the attached hotels. There were a couple of things I decided not to bother with because locating them was too difficult.
My final suggestion (actually, in my comments, I wrote this one up first because I thought it most important) took up the most paper. I'd like to see them put together a space for parents who want to do pick up gaming, probably card or board games mostly, while watching babies, toddlers and small children, a space where gamers with kids could hang out together while they're taking their turn at babysitting. The demographics are changing-- A lot more couples are attending now, couples who both play games, and more of those couples have kids. But you can't bring a toddler to a normal event. It's not fair to the other players, to the GM or to the kid.
I talked to an Origins staffer about this last idea. He'd been in charge of running the "Spouse and Family" track. That was billed as for non-gamers or those new to conventions. It was apparently popular beyond their expectations, and he said that the main limit on something like that would be volunteers. I told him that, if he lacked volunteers for a parents with toddlers space, it would be because he hadn't publicized it well enough. Volunteers get their membership refunded after they've worked a certain number of hours. My guess is that those who know they're going to be stuck with the baby for half of the convention will figure that hanging out with other parents and playing games while doing it is a great way to get their money back doing what they would anyway.
Hopefully, something will come of it.
We didn't end up running our LARP because we didn't get enough players. Some of that may have been because we weren't running it in the convention hall proper but in one of the attached hotels. At least one person we know told us after the fact that he had been unable to figure out how to get there based on the maps in the convention book. Still, I think that more of it may be that we don't yet have any sort of name at Origins. It took a few years at GenCon to get to the point of regularly filling our games.
Fortunately, I hadn't written a new game for this. We had prepared to run License to Plot, the first LARP I ever wrote. Because it has a history and because I know that it works, I didn't have as much emotionally invested in having it run. I didn't feel like the game had died.
We were favorably impressed by the convention staff, though. The hotel had double booked the space where we were supposed to run. When Scott went looking for Origins staff to resolve the problem, the guy at the LARP desk recognized our event and knew when and where it was supposed to be without needing to look it up. He also found us another room in the same hotel in less than five minutes. (The first room was a beautiful space, by the way. I *really* wanted to run the game in that room...)
lunargeography has suggested that I should try writing smaller games. Scott and I discussed the notion on the way back from the convention. I'm ambivalent. On the one hand, a smaller game would be easier to fill, but... I'm not sure that a smaller game would work properly for me. The smallest scenario I've got has 14 characters. I can run without two of them. If we drop under 12 players, the game cannot run. With a 20 character game, I can generally run with 14-15 players, and I have a lot more flexibility in terms of structure and casting. I can take more players if I get them without having to create characters and plots on the fly, and I can pull out entire subplots if I don't get enough players (down to a certain critical mass) as opposed to trying to have a character or two who simply don't have any important role in any plot.
The one 14 character game I have has, effectively, only one plot. There are a couple of very minor subplots (a couple of characters trying to investigate a year old possible murder, a father and son arguing over the son's career ambitions, a character with amnesia), but... They pretty much never go anywhere at all. I don't really like the game because it feels hollow.
My preference is to build a game on many little overlapping plots, each involving 2-4 characters, with each character involved in at least 2 different plots. Part of the challenge for players is generally finding the other people involved in their plots, and many people end up involved in plots that I didn't write their characters into, so that the plots more or less cross-pollinate. But this structure collapses once the number of players drops below 14. It's not so much that I can't pull out subplots so that I have a smaller cast of characters. I can. I've done it a couple of times. It's that the games aren't very interesting at that point-- Things either putter along without any real complications or interesting events or blow up immediately. I don't consider either a desirable outcome.
Well, it's something to think about, anyway.
There was a little craft fair going on in downtown East Tawas while we were there. I ended up buying a new sunhat. My old one didn't survive the trip to Florida very well, but this one can be folded and bent without falling apart. It was expensive, but I think it'll last for quite a while. Scott bought some shoes on sale. Delia just enjoyed the crowds.
We took her to the beach one morning. It was too chilly and windy even to think about going in the water. Not that we had intended to do that anyway. We just wanted to introduce her to sand and see if we could get her to explore it a bit. She didn't actually step off the blanket, but she did touch the sand and lift a couple of handfuls.
Delia also learned to climb up stairs while we were at Grandma's. She heard Scott talking up there and wanted to get to him, so she started up. I followed behind her. She managed to go up several times, but going down remained beyond her skills. We need to find a place where she can practice safely.
We went home on Monday so that we'd have all of Tuesday to get ready for our second trip-- Wednesday about noon, we headed south for Origins, a big gaming convention. I'm still not sure how to rate the experience. There were parts of it that were good and parts that were dreadful. I'm not sure how those pieces balance out.
Delia had a blast. There was a lot for her to see, places she could run around, other kids near her own age, adults willing to play with her, everything a toddler might want. For me and Scott... Well, we took turns watching Delia. That was more challenging for me in some ways than for him because he could carry her around while I was confined to the hotel room when I was watching her. (Basically, I can't walk all that far or long without increasing pain, especially when carrying things, so I rent a motorized scooter/chair for these conventions. But I can't carry Delia safely *and* operate the scooter safely, at least not if I run into any challenges like tight corners or crowds or doors. That meant that when I was watching her we had to stay in one place and that that place needed to be somewhere that had food, beverages, easy bathroom access and a way of keeping Delia confined when I needed to use the facilities-- Holding a squirming toddler while trying to use the toilet comes strongly under the heading of Not Fun.)
The Origins space was only moderately accessible for someone using a scooter. There were several places (including the connector to and from our hotel) that I couldn't go without someone to assist me, and the bathrooms were dreadful. Doors that spring back are fairly easy to handle when a person's walking, but it's hard to push through on a scooter (or I would imagine, in a chair). Tight corners are also very nasty, particularly where there's more than one right on top of each other (one of the bathrooms had a push door followed by two very tight turns). Finally, some stalls that are supposedly accessible simply aren't big enough for both scooter and toilet (there was one that I could get the scooter into only if I either didn't shut the door or was willing to have the basket on the front protrude over the toilet and, um... limit my access). At least, I'm lucky enough to have the option of leaving the scooter outside the stall. I don't like to leave it outside the bathroom itself unless I've got someone to watch it for me because the dratted things are expensive and we'd have to pay for it if it got stolen.
I also face another challenge at conventions like this-- I can't play most board or card games, especially ones I don't already know really, really well, with any pleasure. It's kind of a phobia and kind of, well... A near analogy would be test anxiety or stage fright. I get so knotted up over the process of playing that the experience is utterly miserable. So far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with fear of losing; I don't care all that much one way or another about it. I just can't relax at all-- I shake. I get headaches. I can't talk. Utterly not worthwhile.
I'm okay with sitting and watching other people play, commenting on the game, asking how it works or talking about other things. I just can't play myself. This has been very difficult to explain to most people because it's so alien to their experience and because many of them think it would be good for me to work at overcoming it. I know how to overcome phobias. It's a long and painful process both for the person with the phobia and for the people around her. I don't really feel that the payoff would be sufficient. My quality of life is not decreased by an inability to play dominoes or bridge or the Cheapass game of the month.
Except at gaming conventions. At conventions, it's much easier to find people willing to play an impromptu round of a card or board game than of a role playing game. RPGs require planning and someone with skill to GM. Board and card games just require space, sufficient players and another copy of the game. Usually, I plan out my schedule and buy tickets for role playing events well in advance so that I've got lots to do, but this year, we were improvising because we weren't sure how things with Delia would work out.
Scott tends to fill in time by wandering the dealers' room, looking at new games, new supplements, etc. I generally sweep through there twice, once early in the convention to see if anything really strongly catches my eye and once just before we leave to buy things if I notice them again and am still interested. Using the scooter complicates things because I can't get in very close to most booths and because I'm giving about 75% of my attention to navigation so that I don't plow into people or displays. I suspect that some of it is also that I'm not interested in the card games, board games or computer games-- That kind of wipes out a large percentage of the displays as things worth my attention.
Ah, well... I *did* actually do some things that I enjoyed. I played in two games, and we roomed with
dagoski and his wife, Michelle. We last saw them in November, at a wedding, so it was really good to see them. They didn't even complain when Delia woke them early in the mornings; Michelle just noted that it was later than their cats would have let them sleep. They also gave Delia a lovely quilt that Michelle had made (I can't describe it since it's in Delia's room at the moment, and I'd rather not wake her by going in to get it).I wrote up some detailed suggestions on the Origins feedback form. Two of them would be pretty simple to implement. The first was to put the day of the week at the top of each page of the schedule in the convention book. When you've got thirty plus pages of events in each category (categories such as "Seminars," "RPGs," and "CCGs") and they're in order by date and time but only labeled by time, the day of the week *matters*. The second easy suggestion was that they sort events within each game type and time slot by something consistent. Looking at the RPGs, I couldn't figure out any order in which things were listed. If there are only a dozen events in that time slot, then it doesn't matter so much, but when there are 50... Also, I tend to skim listings looking for game systems I recognize, so I prefer to have the events sorted by game system.
My third suggestion was a large, detailed map posted in a central location like registration or outside the dealers' room. The maps in the con book were nearly useless, and the convention center is rather confusing, particularly if you're also trying to find things in the attached hotels. There were a couple of things I decided not to bother with because locating them was too difficult.
My final suggestion (actually, in my comments, I wrote this one up first because I thought it most important) took up the most paper. I'd like to see them put together a space for parents who want to do pick up gaming, probably card or board games mostly, while watching babies, toddlers and small children, a space where gamers with kids could hang out together while they're taking their turn at babysitting. The demographics are changing-- A lot more couples are attending now, couples who both play games, and more of those couples have kids. But you can't bring a toddler to a normal event. It's not fair to the other players, to the GM or to the kid.
I talked to an Origins staffer about this last idea. He'd been in charge of running the "Spouse and Family" track. That was billed as for non-gamers or those new to conventions. It was apparently popular beyond their expectations, and he said that the main limit on something like that would be volunteers. I told him that, if he lacked volunteers for a parents with toddlers space, it would be because he hadn't publicized it well enough. Volunteers get their membership refunded after they've worked a certain number of hours. My guess is that those who know they're going to be stuck with the baby for half of the convention will figure that hanging out with other parents and playing games while doing it is a great way to get their money back doing what they would anyway.
Hopefully, something will come of it.
We didn't end up running our LARP because we didn't get enough players. Some of that may have been because we weren't running it in the convention hall proper but in one of the attached hotels. At least one person we know told us after the fact that he had been unable to figure out how to get there based on the maps in the convention book. Still, I think that more of it may be that we don't yet have any sort of name at Origins. It took a few years at GenCon to get to the point of regularly filling our games.
Fortunately, I hadn't written a new game for this. We had prepared to run License to Plot, the first LARP I ever wrote. Because it has a history and because I know that it works, I didn't have as much emotionally invested in having it run. I didn't feel like the game had died.
We were favorably impressed by the convention staff, though. The hotel had double booked the space where we were supposed to run. When Scott went looking for Origins staff to resolve the problem, the guy at the LARP desk recognized our event and knew when and where it was supposed to be without needing to look it up. He also found us another room in the same hotel in less than five minutes. (The first room was a beautiful space, by the way. I *really* wanted to run the game in that room...)
lunargeography has suggested that I should try writing smaller games. Scott and I discussed the notion on the way back from the convention. I'm ambivalent. On the one hand, a smaller game would be easier to fill, but... I'm not sure that a smaller game would work properly for me. The smallest scenario I've got has 14 characters. I can run without two of them. If we drop under 12 players, the game cannot run. With a 20 character game, I can generally run with 14-15 players, and I have a lot more flexibility in terms of structure and casting. I can take more players if I get them without having to create characters and plots on the fly, and I can pull out entire subplots if I don't get enough players (down to a certain critical mass) as opposed to trying to have a character or two who simply don't have any important role in any plot.The one 14 character game I have has, effectively, only one plot. There are a couple of very minor subplots (a couple of characters trying to investigate a year old possible murder, a father and son arguing over the son's career ambitions, a character with amnesia), but... They pretty much never go anywhere at all. I don't really like the game because it feels hollow.
My preference is to build a game on many little overlapping plots, each involving 2-4 characters, with each character involved in at least 2 different plots. Part of the challenge for players is generally finding the other people involved in their plots, and many people end up involved in plots that I didn't write their characters into, so that the plots more or less cross-pollinate. But this structure collapses once the number of players drops below 14. It's not so much that I can't pull out subplots so that I have a smaller cast of characters. I can. I've done it a couple of times. It's that the games aren't very interesting at that point-- Things either putter along without any real complications or interesting events or blow up immediately. I don't consider either a desirable outcome.
Well, it's something to think about, anyway.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-07-06 06:21 pm (UTC)You're not the only one who feels this way.
>So far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with fear of >losing; I don't care all that much one way or another >about it. I just can't relax at all-- I shake. I get >headaches. I can't talk. Utterly not worthwhile.
Your anxiety is probably more intense than mine. But mine is plenty intense enough to ruin the game. And I can get it with games I know, if I try to play them when I'm tired. There are games I can enjoy 1 or 2 rounds of, but not 3, and if I try to play them 4 or 5 times in a row, I start getting the symptoms you describe.
>I'm okay with sitting and watching other people play, >commenting on the game, asking how it works or talking >about other things. I just can't play myself.
That's how I'm most comfortable learning a game.
>This has been very difficult to explain to most people >because it's so alien to their experience and because >many of them think it would be good for me to work at >overcoming it. I know how to overcome phobias. It's a >long and painful process both for the person with the >phobia and for the people around her. I don't really >feel that the payoff would be sufficient.
The most important point here is that it's YOUR life we're talking about, here. You get to decide whether you're wasting your time, or being cautious. You get to decide whether you're preserving your quality of life or throwing it away. Nobody else can have the right information to know. Not really.
A secondary quibble is that you ARE working on overcoming the phobias, every time you hang out in gaming space and build your familiarity with a particular game. I doubt you have one phobia about "games," to confront simply. Maybe it's a large set of phobias about "dominos" and "bridge" and "Settlers of Catan" and "Risk" and so on, and you deal with it quite sensibly by developing familiarity with each game before wanting to play it. Maybe you just want to have the game itself, the intellectual part of the play, well under control before trying to integrate it with the social aspect of game-playing. Especially when you can have the social aspect without the pressure of the game itself.
>My quality of life is not decreased by an inability to >play dominoes or bridge or the Cheapass game of the month.
Hear, hear!
no subject
Date: 2004-07-10 10:16 am (UTC)I think, though, that it is one phobia-- I don't deal well with learning or trying new things. I can handle classes, generally, because I have a rough template for how they're supposed to work and because I have confidence in my general competence in the basics. I *know* that I can write. I have equal confidence in my ability to hear or read and understand and in my ability to memorize. I also know that I'm good at taking tests.
I can handle role playing games because I can cast them in my head as writing or acting exercises. I've done improvised theater in the past and know how to dive into the story and characters well enough that I don't have time to think. As long as I don't think about rules and don't have long stretches of down time, I do pretty well. But every new campaign is a bit terrifying, and ever session produces anticipatory anxiety.
With most card and board games, I can't put aside thinking and just do. Each move, each decision, ends up carrying a tremendous weight of fear. Each one is like starting over again. I inescapably have to do *something*, and I have to weigh variables and decide what that something is. The relief of having made and carried out the decision doesn't last long because the next turn is always coming soon.
The start of things is always hardest for me. When I need to go downtown on the bus, the hardest part is stepping out the door. I'll still be tense and stressed as I wait for the bus or ride it, but unless something unexpected happens, I won't fall apart or even be more than normally anxious.
Does all that make some sense?