contrarianarchon

So, I went to concentric, and then I promised a sufficiently large number of people information about what it was like and I did enough things that I feel like making a blog post on a blog I haven't posted on in two years is the right decision. This blog will have three parts: A summary of all the things I did, a very detailed breakdown of that one 20th level D&D 3.5 oneshot, and finally some rough thoughts about the sort of physical-reality TTRPG community I found here.

So first things first, what things did I do? Go play oneshots, mostly, with some exceptions. Concentric is a board-game con first and a TTRPG con second (TTRPG people were outnumbered 5-10 to one by people playing boardgames; there weren't any trading card or wargame people though, presumably because they have their own perfectly good spaces.). The vast majority of the games on offer were D&D or technically-not-D&D. (I can't remember the exact number and Warhorn doesn't let you view history for games you weren't in, but I'm pretty sure it's something like "40% 5E D&D, 35% other editions of D&D, 20% OSR systems which are technically not D&D but which are D&D in spirit. 5% things which are not OSR or D&D but which are otherwise still D&D-natured (e.g. "Dungeon Kids"), 0% things which are not D&D-natured.") Several people spoke about their desire to play things which are not D&D but there was a clear coordination failure here.

(What OSR games were people playing? Old School Essentials, mostly, which hardly counts, and beyond that, something which the GM just described as "Castlevania", something whose name was something like "legends in the mist" and while it wasn't played, multiple people talked about how much they liked Shadowdark.)

My actual schedule:
Friday Evening: Con opening. No game scheduled (There were a bunch of coordination failures here I'll gloss over). Instead, I wandered around failing to noticed anyone I knew and eventually spent much of the evening in a play-test of a star-trek-pastiche asymmetric 4x deckbuilder boardgame, which was neat except for how the victory conditions were fundamentally flawed (Specifically, to my eye, in the vast majority of situations the game comes down to the shared victory of a three-player coalition, or the loss of a two-player coalition to a different two-player coalition. Note that these aren't flexible coalitions; the rules mandate which factions can coalition with which other ones so if you're sitting down as the legally-not-klingons your only possible victory condition is to convince the legally-not-ferengi player that he has better odds allying with you than with the two other players). Had fun, won't be keeping an eye on this game.

Saturday Morning: Tomb of Horrors! Specifically, this was a watered-down classic Tomb of Horrors run in OD&Dish. There were a lot of players new to D&D somewhy? The specific watering-down was that nearly every instance of "you die" in the original dungeon was replaced with "you take 1d6 damage". This was a good rate of damage relative to rate of things which inflicted it for our 7thish level party. We got a decent way in but ran out of time. I haven't actually played or read Tomb of Horrors before this, and it was interesting. I think it was a pretty good instance of a trap dungeon, I see where the classics come from, but it just ... had so many secret doors. I guess the point of the secret doors is to demand that you actually physically touch and explore the space in character rather than just ghosting through without touching anything. But they were tedious and easy to lock yourself out of having explored a space, even with the GM running more-generous-than-raw secret door finding rules. (one check per room in which there is obviously a secret door, rather than one check per 5ft space investigated). Bring your 10ft pole, and also I told you so for everyone who mocked me for crawling through a tunnel with a conspicuous poisoned arrow dispensing mechanism who got shot with a poison arrow.

Saturday Afternoon: The 20th level 3.5 game. I will analyse this in detail, but it has solidly convinced me that I and people in general are right about the general problems with 3.x/pathfinder has when people don't respond to it in the various good ways that all my online friends have. 3.5 has too many skills; even a dedicated skill monkey was missing essential interaction skills by accident. The fighter and the rogue only matter to give the GM something to melee attack when he's softballing us. 3.5 Delanda Est; if you want to know more, let me tell you more about Fallen Tower. I enjoyed being a wizard a lot (like so much), and I enjoyed the format as a con game (bring endgame characters to a merciless* encounter with the endboss of someone's campaign) but this was not redemptive of the mechanical flaws inherent to 3.5.

*The encounter gave me a lot of cognitive dissonance that reminds me of myself running 3.5 in 2018. "I am the GM and I love the rules so I'm making a ruthlessly optimised boss fight, but also I need to deliberately misplay it a bit because otherwise it'd partywipe"

Sunday Morning: Got there late because I didn't have a oneshot played, wandered around seeing the sights. Played a small fanmade pokemon cardgame with a friend I ran into. Bought some books for my dad. Etc.

Sunday Afternoon: Old School Essentials oneshot - GM was running a "sampler" type oneshot of his home game which he'd clearly put a lot of effort into worldbuilding-wise and also presumably in other respects. Collection of adventurers in town to hunt down falling meteors of chaos-energy. Like a collection of dumbasses, we collectively made PCs who couldn't actually use chaos-energy-metal weapons despite them being the main form of magic item in the region (see: fame for meteors of the stuff). This was a completely unforced error on our parts (I for example, just picked the patron which best fitted with my character concept without thinking about this). We rescued some slaves, the guy sitting next to me made some very uncomfortable jokes about the slavers "enjoying the spoils of war" and then we collectively TPKd in a completely unforced fight with some ghouls who were sitting on the meteor we wanted. Ghouls are fucking nasty, especially when they have numerical superiority, never forget that. We were a terrible party with regard to decision making and I'm pretty glad we got what we deserved for our mistakes; conventions and oneshots are a good time for it.
 

( That 3.5 fight summarised in detail. )

To finish up with some thoughts about the experience overall, mainly about the social experience of being here: Going to cons to make friends works at all, which is nice. I left with several people's phone numbers. Now I just need to figure out how to convert that into actual interactions or friendships, help. But I felt really out of place at this con; the demographics skewed much older than me, I felt like very much like the median person there was a married couple ten or thirty years older than me. It was also surreal to go to a con which hasn't run since the before times, seeing the same cast of organisers and people who I don't know but do recognise floating around the place, all five years older. Also, I've spent enough time in my little bubble that I've forgotten viscerally how extensively I am a weirdo; maybe this just wasn't the space for it, but I'm very used to - having transcended the dichotomy that goes "there are two types of games: D&D, and games which are lighter and more story-focused than D&D, like WOD and the Index Card RPG." The people I talked to today did not seem to have done that. They also seemed, collectively, very resigned to the idea that they would mostly play TTRPGs with people who did not much want to play TTRPGs and who definitely did not particularly want to play any particular TTRPG they liked (this is, presumably, selection bias).

I am so intensely grateful I live in the world where Shadowrun isn't an impossible myth, where people play tactical TTRPGs other than 4e, where Exalted and Jenna Moran are things people have heard of at all, where there are mystery games with mystery mechanics, where people actually form intentions about game design, and not the world they live in. I'd still love the hobby if I was in their boots, but. It'd be worse. I still wanna be friends with them, though! They seem like cool and interesting people on their own merits, and their home campaigns seem just as cool and interesting, and I'm sure I'm doing wrong by many of them by painting them with this brush based on minutes or hours of talking and playing with them. But the contrast has reminded me why and how much I love the people I play, write, and talk with regularly (that is to say, you, the target audience of this post).

 My honours thesis is submitted! Finally! I think it's a really good product, all things considered, well written and comprehensive and saying useful things, though apparently I use pronouns appallingly by all accounts. 

... now off to sleep, I have to leave for a practical worth 8% of my term grade for another class in 7 hours. 

Made eggplant parmigiana, per the serious eats recipe for such (https://www.seriouseats.com/italian-style-eggplant-parmesan-melanzane-alla-parmigiana-recipe). Came out very greasy, like, "frying these eggplants soaked up like half a pint of oil" greasy. Should have been less of a coward, I think; twice as much oil at a higher temperature would have produced much less greasy food (but managing large amounts of hot oil is stressful, and temperature management is hard). Took the leftovers and fried them, spooning off the excess grease, and added cumin and chilli and an egg to make breakfast! Was tasty, still too greasy. Overall, good food, except for the thing where it was very very oily. 

 I've been listening back to some back issues of the podcast of cortex (Episode 15 I think) while playing Minecraft, mostly for lack of better podcasts to listen to, and it was full of really poorly reasoned considerations about adblocker morality. So now I am going to lay out for the benefit of myself (because you all will try to correct me if I'm wrong) and maybe also other people, the set of obvious ways that exist to fund your website on the internet. 

( Read more... )

 Vaccination get! 

(it's the one with the almost-certainly-not-a-risk-but-I-had-to-spend-ten-minutes-confirming-I-understood-that-to-a-doctor blood clots, though) 

... also I seem to have picked up a streak of deep anxiety about interfacing with medical bureaucracy, presumably re: Norway, which is annoying but not unsurprising. 

Product: "This product is funded by people like you, donate now!" 

Me: Well I think they're unlike me in at least one vital respect *closes tab* 

(... this is not actually true across as assessed over all products, since I ever do give money to the people making free applications or fiction that I consider of particularly high quality and non-fungibility, but it's not a *common* thing and I don't do it in response to begging messages at the end of installation processes) 

 ... I may have spent most of a week locked out of this account because I moved to a new laptop and have been doing stuff other than try and dig up my password. Well, I'm back now? Now with extremely shiny dell gaming laptop! 

(moving to a new laptop and with it a new browser (vivaldi, btw, it's proving pretty neat but I haven't stress-tested it yet) locked me out of so many things. It's like having all of the tendrils of my self into useful programs and such cut off. Well, less painful than that but a distinct sense of being smaller and lesser and wounded and grasping at broken interfaces.)

brin_bellway at some point in the fairly-distant past (and also much more recently, but the tabs sat idle in one of my backlogs for a good long time) recommended to me to read The Prepared for advice regarding prepping stuff (which is to the extent of my inexperienced judgement in these matters a pretty good site, but that's not the point of this post), and they mentioned an image of the successful prepper as someone who disappears alone into the woods and survives by themselves with maybe a dog (they mentioned this idea to reject it, to be fair, and I agree with their reasoning from the practicalities) and just .... why would you want that? It seems so ... pointless. A life lived without other people and without a legacy, leaving, at best, a bunch of animal corpses and an empty hut behind you? I can understand the desire to learn those skills to prove you have them or to survive periods of time between [something] and reconnecting with greater civilization, or because you want to work as a trapper or something but to just ... leave into the wilderness and never come back and maybe know that that's because there's nothing to come back to, that just seems ... awful. Intolerable. Maybe if you loved it out there, maybe if that was genuinely your best life living alone in the wilderness, you could extract some utils from that but to just survive? without a plan for rebuilding with others? Without being a part of the great work of civilization? What? How would you like, motivate yourself? How would you achieve goals? I guess you could ... try and terraform a bit of forest into a nicer bit of forest? But mostly you could just ... spend however many years between now and (either old age or bad luck or both) results in your death and then be a corpse that took a few decades longer to go than the rest of the body of work that is our civilization.

(... I think what this says is pointing to the fact that my utility function can be crudely approximated by "[maximize number of interesting things read over lifetime] + [leave a lasting legacy of meaningful change and good things into the world] + [some amount of abiding by regular human imperatives of nice sensations, avoiding pain, socializing, sex drive, etc, to the extent that these things aren't ego-dystonic or instrumental as part of the structure of the infrastructure I find myself in]". That's not actually true but it's instructively false? But I think whatever your utility function, the low-hanging fruit of human mediocrity and the force multiplying powers of human civilization make it really easy to extract massive amounts of utility from relatively little effort unless your goals are very internally oriented?)

You know sometimes I think about the fact that if I went back in time there would be good reasons why I couldn't implement the vast majority of the technological improvements common to such memes and would immediately get myself killed for heresy if I tried to pass myself off as an academic but I do in fact have the design of the good beehive that wasn't invented until really late and which is a massive improvement memorized and that just requires passable carpentry in terms of tech-base and I don't really know how to feel about that.

And so I return like a comet swinging briefly through the sky to notice that people have posted a bunch while I wasn't paying attention. I've tried to comment on things but also I've given up on composing comments for a bunch of months-old posts that have been sitting somewhere waiting to be commented on. Not all of them though, if I can come up with something to say when I check a tab I will, just, like, not gonna listen to the little voice in my head saying "that was an interesting thought so you should be obligated to form a cogent response"

That said, overall things have been doing pretty well on my end. Being home from the little personal hellscape that was pandemic norway (after exactly a year and a day, no less), has been excellent, and I'm starting to get back to my old form in terms of energy levels, socialization, etc. Also going into honors this year, so lets see how that goes. Overall, so much to do, but more is getting done than previously!