thedeadone.net » Irish-Gaming

Some of my thoughts on the Irish Scenario-Con question

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:30:54 +0000

There is an interesting discussion going on right now over on the igaming mailing list (and cross-posted to LiveJournal), but one I’ve consciously chosen not to comment on. The people involved have much bigger stakes in it than I ever have and I’ve had my share of being on the virtual battleground but I have little to add on this.

So I guess I’m doing it here. If you take the time, read the original post. It’s roughly about now in the year that some argument occurs (though the last few years have been quiet). The discussion is about how scenarios, or rather TableTop RPGs, are run at Irish Conventions. Apparently we do it differently to everyone else and one of the “old hands” in the scene has strongly suggested that cons change the way they do things.

Unlike most of the people involved in the discussion, I’ve only GMed at a few conventions, submitted only two (may be three, I can’t exactly remember) scenarios, attend conventions every few years and I’m not really part of the “scene” though I know a lot of the oldies and some of the younger ones by face or name. We’re a small enough country you know.

I’ve GMed at conventions but only in my younger teenage years (15+ years ago, maybe even more), when the offer of free entry and T-shirt were a big thing for me. I ran only systems I knew but I barely remember the experience. I do remember being called up a few days before one Gaelcon and being asked if I’d GM some game because I did it the year before, I could hardly refuse. I remember as youngster it was the systems I knew that I want to play.

As I entered collage, I wasn’t really involved at that level again. The only scenarios I submitted were because friends asked me to, no other reason. I put a lot of effort into them at time, getting them in on time, trying to layout them out to support GMs, etc. But I found as a newbie scenario writer, I was given the short stick for a lot of it. My second scenario was ran on the dreaded Sunday morning slots where one of the players arrived and promptly fell asleep, because, like everyone else, he had been out drinking at the pub quiz the night before.

The complaint in this discussion is that numbers are dwindling and the organisation behind scenario submissions and finding GMs is breaking down. Writers submit their scenarios late, GMs don’t get them until five minutes before the session starts, everything is a mess and with dwindling numbers, it’s just badness. The solution, proposed, is that the writer is the GM and there is only one table per scenario (ran by the writer). So no bad GMs to run that scenario, but then you have lack of tables, people don’t get to play the games they want, and so on.

I have to agree, at the few conventions I’ve been at, I’ve been lumbered with GMs who didn’t know the system but knew thew world (we still had a good game), with GMs who only got the scenario as we sat down (that game sucked) and games that didn’t run because there wasn’t enough players. Hell, in one case, I heard about game that was going to be scheduled and offered to be a GM, but that fell apart because of not enough players.

From my writer perspective though, it was always a one writer-table experience. Unless you’re one of the “superstars” of the scene or writing one of the stable games (like D&D or in the olden days Vampire), you only ever got one table. Most of the games I’d like to play are not the big name games (and this was before the big “indie revolution”), I play those with my regular troupe, it’s the unusual or less popular ones that I grab my interest. They regularly only have one or maybe two tables. To me it seems like we have the two systems already in place, but then I don’t have the vast amount of con-experience to validate that assessment.

So on side we have the big popular games or writers with several tables and GMs running the scenarios. This is the given impression of how cons are ran. And on the other side then, lesser popular or well known games and writers often only get one table (possible two). So it already looks like, to me, we have a hybrid system of multiple GM to one scenario and single-table-writer-GM scenarios. The commonality is how the scenario is submitted to the con as a scenario writer must assume that other GMs may read their scenario and can’t just run with a few notes in their head.

So is the issue really with the scenario submission process? Should it be more flexible, lower the bar to get more in or raise the bar to get only the high level of quality? Or am I missing the fundamental difference in the two styles of organization?

It would seem to me that the clog in the pipe is the scenarios received by a con more than anything else. Cons need to have a better submission process that encourage new writers to contribute but keeps a high level of quality. Not easy I guess when everyone involved is volunteers. The more I think and write about it, the more it seems to me that conventions are like publishers in many ways. They need to be to maintain a high level of quality of submission. Yet unlike publishers there is very little feedback from the cons until the actual day of the convention (i.e. the public launch of the scenario in a live game), (in my experience but if yours differs, that great). If you don’t care about the quality than the model needs to change and give more flexibility to writer/GMs to just run stuff.

If we keep the old way, you need more writers to get involved. I think the first thing to do is reduce the foreseeable “barriers to entry” as much as possible, provide some sort of enticement to get new writers in and then provide good and decent feedback before the convention.

For example, one of the “barriers” people throw about is that people don’t know how to write scenarios and so there should be workshops and guides etc. These are all great but don’t necessarily encourage writers to submit their work to cons. Perhaps cons could start with a “Style Guide” that gives suggestions on format and layout, sections/chapters and notes on readability, much like you’d get from a publisher who may solicit freelance work. Of course they shouldn’t necessarily be about how to design the scenario though as there is “more than one way to skin a cat”, but guides and references are always useful, if well presented. You could use the wiki to “crowd-source” it even.

Also, why not promote the scenarios submitted last year? Make them available from the con website, with snippets of positive quotes from the players. I always find it odd that last year is forgotten, websites deleted and and the scenarios get banked and gather dust. I don’t see an issue with an old scenario being run again if there is demand for it. Also, by using last years scenarios as promotional material you’re also playing to the ego of the writers, encouraging them to come back and write more this year.

And you need to entice writers as early as possible. Awards don’t do it BTW. Not saying awards are bad, they serve their own function, but only one person can win an award, the rest are losers. You don’t want you’re new writers to be losers, you want them to write for the con next year. I know cons aren’t going to pay writers, and while it’s nice to provide them with snacks and give free entry, its not a particular enticement for someone like me. It’s nice, but really not enough. Instead it’s the little bit extra that con might do. As way of example, I write some free software. People use it and come back to me for support. A small small minority of users will donate a few Euros my way to say thanks. That’s nice. I also provide a wish list of books and that is really really nice when I receive a surprise parcel with one of those books. It’s how I discovered Watchmen. Those little things, are what keep me developing the software and trying to help and support the users. GreyGhost who publish Fudge RPG, for example, will send you free stuff if you run a fudge game at a convention. So to get new writers and keep them, there has to be that little extra something to entice them and keep them. Perhaps a free signed RPG book, a piece of art from a local artist or even getting their scenario illustrated for example. I don’t know whats available to the budget or ingenuity of con RPG organisers, but it doesn’t have to be expensive. Con goers know what to expect from the con experience, but it’s that little bit extra that can make it memorable.

There are less physical ways too, such as proper feedback. If you have a hard deadline for scenarios and those that arrive on time should be reviewed and feedback provided back to the author. For a new writer, knowing that someone took the time to actually read the work in its entirety and make a point of providing useful feedback is great. In fact, feeding to the egos of the writers is cheap but just as effective as physical gifts. Send them a copy of the con pamphlet with their name highlight and their scenario listed.

In the end however, we’ve got to recognise that on all levels of these experiences are people who volunteer and provide their creativity and effort for very little return. So I can imagine it’s hard to change the way things are done or to take criticism from people like me who haven’t done their time. So I offer my thoughts as is.

New: The Adventuring Party podcast

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:37:21 +0000

Two friends I know from the Irish gaming community (and someone else I don’t know) have gone off and setup a podcast about the Irish Gaming and Roleplaying scene: The Adventuring Party. (I’ve already added it to the Planet Irish Gaming feed).

I haven’t listened to it myself yet, mostly because I don’t normally listen to podcasts and I don’t own an ipod, but I think I’ll have to make an effort for this.

I’ve been regularly roleplaying with Liam for a while and so I know he’s a good guy and fun to game with. He’s involved in the Irish gaming scene on the ground more so than I ever was and was activiely involved in STOCs and Sillicon when it he was in DCU.

Shane is another STOCs head and while, oddly, I’ve never played a game with him but we have on occassion discussed gaming and roleplaying. While having different opinions about it, he always has some good points to make. If you follow his livejournal, I think irishgaming.com describes him pretty fantastically:

The martial artist, RPG writer, paramedic, snowboarder, LARP writer, ex-online-RPG-pundit, James Bond afficionado and wearer of a fine selection of Hawaiian shirts Shane O’hUid

So best of luck guys and to everyone else, get listening!

Some fun with Planet Irish Gaming

Mark Cunningham — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:27:43 +0000

So I’ve been doing some hacking for and analysis of Planet Irish Gaming and I’ve added one new feed and welcomed back another.

Using the power of python, I wrote a site scraping script that generates a feed of LiveJournal blogs that are members of the irishgaming LiveJournal blog i.e. an RSS feed of the friends page. It’s updated three times a day (which seems to be good enough for the rate of posts) but any post that doesn’t have comments enabled can’t be included (because the site scraping script can’t generate a permalink for that post). The link to it is here on Planet Irish Gaming and it’s included in the big feed. It’s pretty nifty.

I continued with my script-hacking and created a script that “fixes” the feed from irishgaming.com. There are some technical problems with their feed so that I couldn’t include it in Planet Irish Gaming. As far as I know, they were not going to get fixed any time soon. My script fixes them and generates a valid feed so now I can include the feed. Yea!

Ah scratch that. I just checked both feeds and they have totally the wrong date. *hack* *test* *debug* *fix* … an hour later… fixed. It seems individual items in both of these new feeds were picking up the latest date rather than the last date the item was added. Should be working fine now.

Because I added the “fixed” feed from irishgaming.com to Planet, I saw this morning that they have added “ads” to irishgaming.com. So I guess I shouldn’t really have been worried about adding ads to the irishgamingwiki.com - not that it’s earned me much (if anything).

If you’ve been using the big feed from Planet Irish Gaming, you’ll know that it gets very busy. Quite a large number of posts per day. Mostly polite drivel from forums around the place, so much so I barely scan the feed. I thought that normal users might find it overwhelming. Well, thanks to the power of WordPress, you can just grab a feed without forums (I’ve even added this feed link to the frontpage of Planet Irish Gaming) and that includes the new friends feed from livejournal so it’s pretty digestible.

Still though, even doing that, there isn’t really that much genuine roleplaying or gaming news in there. There isn’t really that much genuine Irish roleplaying and gaming content to be honest. The thought had occurred to me that I add a new category to the site (and hence a new feed) that contains only items that actually pertain to roleplaying and gaming. What I could do is add a “vote” like link to the other feeds and if an item gets a few votes it gets automatically added to this category, much like digg.com or reddit.com. However this would require users to interact with the site on some level and I’m not sure the effort I’d have to put in to implement this feature would pay off in terms of people using it. Anyone got any opinions on this?

Finally finished my 2008 “spring-clean” of the IrishGamingWiki.com

Mark Cunningham — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 09:13:07 +0000

Thats what I’ve been spending my non-work non-family energy on recently. This is what I posted to the igaming mailing:

Inspired by the relaunch of IrishGaming.com v2 by Nick last month, I
decided to give Irish Roleplaying and Gaming Wiki [1] a big spring
clean (not a relaunch). I’ve changed hosts, upgrade the software,
gotten rid of all the spam and other malicious edits, re-did the
front-page (more to do there) and allowed file uploads. I hope people
take a moment to have a look and see if anything important to them is
up to date.

I have also updated Planet Irish Gaming [2], brand new spanking
software, tons of Irish Gaming sites, its actually very busy compared
to the old planet. There are also features to create a post directly
to the feed and the ability to submit new feeds.

During my spring cleaning, I found a number of articles about groups
and websites of which I have no idea of the state of them:

http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/SaneSpotting
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/DU_Gamers
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Gamers_Realm
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/White_Elephant
~~http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/D15_Gamers~~
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Fabled_Games
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/STOCS
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Red_Branch_Guild
~~http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Vaticon<~~/a>
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Forgotten_Legacy

Anyone able to give an update on their state or current
web-location/presence of these things?

Also the http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Convention_Calender has died
a death quite a while back. Is there another resource that’s actively
used? I know there was one for a while on the IGA/Gaelcon site but
that seems to have disappeared.

[1] http://IrishGamingWiki.com
[2] http://IrishGamingWiki.com/planet

Someone has since updated the Convention Calender, which is cool. There is a lot of work still to do on the wiki, but for the moment I’m content to watch over it and if someone starts the initiative, I’ll help and finish it. For example, I’d like to have “templates” for conventions, retailers, groups and organizations. Right now they are all done sort of ad-hoc and the current status of a lot of them, I don’t know.

Anyway, if any of the readers of this blog know of something on the wiki they might care about, please take a moment to update it or even better if you know something about the Irish Gaming and Roleplaying community that isn’t on the wiki, please feel free to add it! And if you have any feedback, you can drop a comment here, or on igaming or the wiki itself. Those three methods are the best way to get a message to me about the wiki.

Planned changes to IrishGamingWiki.com

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 11:27:24 +0000

I don’t know if they’ll be a reaction to my plans for the IrishGamingWiki.com but I certainly know that within the online community there are a few that have strong opinions (or use to have) but I also know there isn’t that much concern between projects or users about these things. To put it another way, I don’t know if people care what happens to the Wiki.

I hope people do because I’m certainly feeling guilty about letting it languish over the last good while. I couldn’t update the MediaWiki software without a bit of effort on my part and it got spammed heavily. But recently I did do an update and finally cleared out the spam and blocked users and IPs. (If spammers continue to be a problem, I’ll look at better spam-fighting techniques). The administrative and backend parts of the Wiki need some love, certainly some work on the webpage look and feel, updates to the RSS feed, etc. I even have a logo designed at home that I haven’t scanned in yet.

I haven’t set aside time to do this necessary work. I haven’t had the motivation at all. I did recently update and tidy up Planet Irish Gaming as I was briefly inspired after IrishGaming.com was kind of re-launched (IrishGaming.com has nothing to do with me in any way). But beyond that, my motivation is still waning. I’ve even been tempted to find someone or group who would be willing to take over the wiki because there is a lot of cool info captured there. No-one has shown any interest to me about it up until now and I haven’t see any group I’d trust with it (things for Irish Gaming have a tendency to appear and disappear with frequency online).

So what is my big plan? Change host for the IrishGamingWiki.com and stick Google AdSense advertisements in the side bar. That’s it.

If you’ve just shrugged your shoulders and thought “so what?”, I’d agree with you. I have AdSense ads running on my thedeadone.net and, to be honest, the income generated so far would indicate to me that it probably won’t cover the cost of hosting the website over a year (even though hosting it is relatively cheap).

However, payback in nearly any form is a great motivator. Certainly, while working on TDOMF, which is completely free, donations, gifts and ad revenue that I have received have been great motivators (though peoples’ feedback is by far the most rewarding). Without it, I don’t think I would have continued to support and extend TDOMF so far (and to think that came originally from the failed Game Crafter’s Guild of Ireland website). So hopefull I’ll be more motivated to put effort into maintaining it and doing work on it.

Anyway, comments, feedback, criticism welcome but name-calling will have you tarred!

Maybe not the end of an era, but the end of something!

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:04:27 +0000

I’m sure everyone is already aware that Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of Dunegons and Dragons, passed away on Tuesday. Was never a fan of D&D but without it, I wouldn’t be playing Nobilis or writing roleplaying stuff today. Muted feelings really.

Also announced on Tuesday (before the news of Gary’s death): STOCs (irishgamingwiki link) one of the oldest running Clubs in DCU proposed “merging” with the Games Soc. STOCs is/was the gaming & roleplaying society in DCU and even though I’ve been long out of college, I still have strong ties to the club. The “merging” is rather actually being subsumed into the Games Soc which is oriented towards Computer Games (though originally the Games Soc was an off-shoot of STOCs, I’ve been led to believe). STOCs ran the small annual games convention Sillicon with it’s popular Pub Quiz (irishgaming wiki link). I’ve even ran and wrote games for Sillicon in the past. I do not know the fate of the future of Sillicon. This has saddened me.

On the internet, you can’t take anything back: Maybe Fudge has some life yet…

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 10:11:04 +0000

Apparently, my last post on Fudge, got some people annoyed. Fred Hicks of EvilHat (Fate and “Spirit of the Century”) and Chris Helton of Seraphim Guard etc. both chipped on my blog to say they don’t believe Fudge is dead! (I didn’t know I was so popular). This weekend, on top of that, I got a message back from Brad at Now Playing that he is very interested in publishing Reboot as both a Fudge and Now Playing product. Sounds all good to me. So perhaps the “rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated”.

But I can’t shake that feeling of deja vu. I remember when specky caused a huge storm on the Irish online gaming community, things were shook up, events even happened. And then it seem to go quietly back to the mists it came from. Don’t get me wrong, the community is still there, particularly offline, but there is no cohesive online group. At best it is a distributed announcement list, at worse it’s just a pile of dead forums and mailing lists, still active because no-one has the heart to kill them off.

Is Fudge community going the same way? Fate seems to be super strong in terms of online presence. But it is not Fudge per say. It is a specific brew of Fudge, much like Now Playing and Seraphim Guard. People using Fate don’t come back to Fudge. The whole remaining Fudge community seems centred on the Fudge List which, doesn’t seem healthy as it’s part of a bigger site, the phoenyx which I really know little about. One of the people behind the software, seems to think Fudge is dead or at least the parts not in Fate (that’s certainly not good, no?). There are rumours of a “Fudge Planet” from GreyGhost that would be the place for Fudge publishers and fans… but it must be over a year since I’ve heard anything concrete on that. Why does it take so long to put together such a site? (I’d like to say, I’ll do a site next week! But I’m wouldn’t get the traction. I mean, “who the fuck am I?” to everyone else).

Deja vu. A community that feels like it’s crawling along. It’s still alive, but when you prod it, it kinda grumbles and turns to the other side. Fudge hasn’t changed. It can’t. Everything else has though: software, games, market, community-ethos… etc. I don’t think Fudge can die. From it’s burning embers, many things are still be crafted. That will go on for a long time. Is the community waiting for something or is that all it is now?

But you have to remember, an online community is just an online presence. The Irish online community is just a zombie, but there are still conventions every year, clubs and societies every where, the IGA still occasionally organise events, etc. It continues like it did before anyone claimed it was dead online. I think the same is true for Fudge. It will continue but by it’s nature, it’s buzz and community may not. People will produce Fudge games, re-discover Fudge, use Fudge in their own home brew worlds, etc. Fudge isn’t dead. It may be a bit of a recluse, but it has that “something” that brings people into it’s fold. If you put a positive spin on it, the success of Fate should allow you to recognise that Fudge still has something that appeals to modern-day gamers, not that Fudge is dead. IMHO, etc. etc.

The Irish Roleplaying and Gaming Wiki is not dead and needs your help!

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:00:21 +0000

My last post was about Planet Irish Gaming which is part of the uber-cool and useful Irish Roleplaying and Gaming Wiki. One of the biggest uses of the wiki was the convention calender, which is updated regularly enough by lots of people. Though this may now be superseded by a Google Calender yokey ran by TygerKrash but at least the wiki page is still free for anyone to correct the information.

Well, even without the convention calender, the wiki is certainly not dead. It’s regularly getting updates and this last little while a user called Oldfartgamer has been doing a tremendous job of doing lots of historic updates.

So I’m calling out for help in filling in lots of blanks. Oldfartgamer has added a number of stubs for people and has been trying to restore information about cons gone by like Gaelcon 1996.

If you “know stuff, like” about Irish gaming and roleplaying, which I’m sure you do, you can add to the wiki. If you’ve doing something in Irish gaming, such as shop or independently publishing games, check to see if you have an entry (and make sure it’s correct!).

Planet Irish Gaming

Mark Cunningham — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 22:37:04 +0000

Check out Planet Irish Gaming.

Yep. That’s the whole purpose of this post. Plugging Planet Irish Gaming. It’s something I setup a long time ago and it’s been running for quite a while, and I’ve been adding feeds as requested. I recently did some tidying up of it and added some new features (such as getting updates as emails!).

So if you’ve got a feed that you’d like me to included, please drop me a mail (or leave a comment). Anything related to Roleplaying and Gaming (nominally related to Ireland) would be welcomed.

(I guess I should I should add a feed from thedeadone.net…)

A personal perspective of the demise of DiddlySquat

Mark Cunningham — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 08:27:19 +0000

Specky, one of the founders of DiddlySquat, has given his personal account of the demise of DiddlySquat.

According to the Irish Gaming and Roleplaying Wiki:

Diddlysquat is an RPG publishing company founded by Geoff Moore in 2004 with the intention of producing a horror/sci-fi tabletop RPG called Spectres. The Spectres game was intended to be released as three prequels followed by the main game system.

But sadly DiddlySquat is no more and I guess we won’t be seeing Spectres as a full game (though the work will probably be made available via GCG).

When you read this kind of things it really makes you cynical about the communities involved (both online and offline). Sure I’ve argued and caused near-flame wars in the online half of the Irish gaming community, but I would hope that people don’t bare grudges and that they should realise that, sometimes, antagonistic nature of online discussion is actually healthy. But I don’t think that’s true. People do hold grudges for the slightest things.

So, here is a farewell to another doomed project of the Irish Gaming Community. I roll my dice to you (*sounds of all dice scattering across the table and getting lost on the floor* doh!)

As an aside, I can’t help but draw some parrallels to this earlier history of other projects in the community too and the recent flop of the an Game Chef concept (see this comment). I guess I’m too old for this shit.

thedeadone.net » Irish-Gaming

Some of my thoughts on the Irish Scenario-Con question

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