Andy -
I'm currently about 90% confident that I should be able to do a day trip on Saturday to help out with card game demos. If somebody wants to offer me a place to crash overnight, I could possibly even arrive on Friday night around 7:00 or so Indy time, but I figure that's pushing it.
Cool. Please send me an email: arenson@spatzel.net
Done.
Who's Yer Con is Friday! Tournament is Saturday at 1pm! Anyone here planning to play in the tournament?
I ran five demos today. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and a few people were really enthused. I'm a bit optimistic that we'll get at least enough players tomorrow for four teams. Russ also ran at least a couple games (as well as some games of SotM) and Ian ran at least one earlier in the day before the rest of us arrived. Peter got in late and was almost immediately recognized as the person running the Scuttle Kickstarter! At which point he whipped out a copy of the game to play with a couple of people.
Tomorrow we'll be running demos by 10am in two spaces -- our designated tables (GP-19-22) and the free play area. A little bit more time to try to encourage some more people to join the tournament.
Tournament starts at 1pm. I saw four of the six people who were in ast year's finals today, and one of the other two has moved to FL.
The tournament has 'Player Wanted' signs to put on tables. Most are just generic, but a few are 'personalized' to particular, often played games. One of the people who was in on the con decision making is a huge fan of SoTM, so there are a few that specifically mention SotM. Super fun to see that!
We had a good tournament yesterday. Not as many participants as I would have liked (9), but still plenty to have a ton of fun. We had some people come by later looking to join the tournament, so maybe we could have done more to be clear about the start time.
It was great having so many people helping. In the morning we had enough people to have demo games going in both the free play area and at our assigned tables while having others to help find new players, etc. While Peter and I judged matches we regularly had two Tactics games being demoed by Russ and Ian while Jeff had gone off to the free play area to run a demo of Sentinels. Ian's 3D buildings (modified from Spiff's and available on Spiff's site) were a great draw -- really caught the attention of people walking by.
Our tournament map was the same as the one from the initial tournament in St. Louis (and last year's Who's Yer Con), with the addition of an additional volcano tile closer to the starting hexes. Our nine players sorted into four teams. The first round saw a runaway victory by Not in the Face, Not in the Face using the Dawn/Truth strategy to devastating effect, while the other first round match was a close fought battle, won by team JT.
For time constraints, the tournament was single elimination, but we gave the two remaining teams an option of single elimination or best two of three for the finals and they elected for best two of three. The finals ended up going to three games, all of them close, but Not in the Face, Not in the Face pulled out the win, coming back from a close loss in the first game to take both game 2 and game 3.
Game stats:
More stats:
Number of games each characters was banned/picked in:
Dawn, Legacy, Wraith, Bunker (5)
Blade, Omnitron (4)
Tachyon, Ra, Beacon, Operative (2)
Absolute Zero, Unity, Ambuscade, Proletariat (1)
Visionary (0)
I talked a little bit about my experience running the SotM demo game with Andy, Ian, Russ, and Peter over the course of the day afterward, but I'm still not comfortable with how I handled a couple of things and am still trying to figure out what I might have been able to do differently.
Background: The people for whom I was running the demo game were a family, two parents and a girl who was probably in her early teens. The kid was in a furry costume for much of my interaction with her, which initially made judging her age difficult. The father said something that suggested 12, but after she had pulled the head off later on, I still think my instinct of 13 might be closer to right. The parents expressed some interest in learning, so I grabbed my big bag of SotM and we went looking for a place to play. (Eventually, we ended up in the same room as where Platinum Warlock was running a CSW game. PW, I know that you were busy with your own game, but if anything jumped out to you, let me know.)
Game scenario: Baron Blade (because training game) vs Legacy (me), Tachyon (kid), Wraith (mom), and Bunker (dad) in Ruins of Atlantis (their choice).
As we got into the game, it became clear that the teen wasn't entirely focused. I think that some of that was being hot under her furry suit, but it later also seemed that some of was connected to her being overtired and some was that she was a video gamer at heart. (I did subsequently make a point of trying to plug Sentinels Digital afterward.) OK, I can deal with that - I deal with partially/dis engaged teens in my day job all the time. When I run teaching games, even for my 5th grader & his friend, I have two things I consistently do in service of keeping their immersion and agency. One is that during a player's turn, I'll prompt them along the lines of "Tachyon, you get to play a card. Tachyon, you can use one power now. Tachyon, draw a card." The other is that, if asked for suggestions, I will try to explain clearly what options exist, sometimes identifying that these are what I think are the best two or three options of more than that, but ultimately leave the final decision up to the player.
One thing that bugged me, and that I didn't feel like I had a way to intervene more directly, was that the dad kept pressuring the daughter to pull her furry head off. He kept arguing it from the perspective of making it easier for to interact with the rest of us, but despite some of his behavior in the public area of the con, I couldn't shake the feeling that part of why he was going it was because he wasn't comfortable with her identity. The best I could do there was just to say things like, "I'm not having trouble hearing her." It felt like any more direct intervention would have been interfering in a family dynamic that I had no place interfering in.
The other thing that happened was that about 1/3 of the way into the game, we had somebody come by and start to watch what was happening. That's not an issue - we're at a con; we should expect to have an audience. He started to offer "help" - also something to expect. However, the help he was offering was much more in the vein of "you want to do this" than "these are your options and what will happen if you pick each." Shortly after he had come over was when it became really clear the teen was having a hard time focusing on what we were doing, and so I didn't directly ask him to let me handle teaching the game. But, despite my saying at least twice that I was trying to do this, rather than what he was doing, he didn't take the hint and continued to try to quarterback the rookies' turns. I suppose I could have asked him to leave, but as I didn't think we was engaging in behavior that rose to the level of "alert con security," I wasn't comfortable doing that, either.
The game ended in a victory, and the parents definitely thought they had a neighbor who would love it. The dad was interested in playing again sometime, as he was starting to see how the pieces came together (getting a 20-point Omnicannon shot off probably helped); the teen might come around to it via the app eventually. (Earlier in the day, I also helped use the app to teach a father/son who were waiting for somebody else in the family to finish something else. He came by and thanked me later - I think he had a really good time with it.)
I think I'm especially sensitive about this right now in part because I just finished reading a long, and depressing, piece about how tabletop gamer culture has a major problem with harrassment, racism, and rape culture. (I agree with much of said article.) I've also got a daughter in kindergarten who is one of my main gaming partners, when she & her brother aren't busy fighting about who gets to play Minecraft.
tl;dr - introduced two families to SotM card game, one via app & one via physical game. Had issues with how dad interacted with daughter over furry outfit wherein I wasn't comfortable with interaction but was more uncomfortable with intervening. Also had issues with a passerby "helping" (almost?) to the point of taking over at least two of the new players' turns. Maybe should have asked him to leave & let me teach the game, but didn't.
I love that you're thinking about these issues, Jeff. It looks like you handled it as well as you could in the moment. It's hard to work up the courage to ask someone (like that onlooker) to leave, but sometime it's necessary.
At GenCon last year, I had some issues with family dynamics as well: a family had signed up for a Villains demo, and the father (or grandfather?) was just clearly not as involved as the others. But it was less globally problematic, due to gender and age.
[quote=jffdougan]I think I'm especially sensitive about this right now in part because I just finished reading a long, and depressing, piece about how tabletop gamer culture has a major problem with harrassment, racism, and rape culture. (I agree with much of said article.) [/quote]I also read that article! Like you said, long and depressing.
Well, there's a family I know who has a pair of kids in the same grades as The Grasshopper (5th) and The Munchkin (K). Gender-reverse their kids and mine to get matching ages. The dad in that family is a lifelong hobby gamer; the mom can take or leave - about like my situation was before my separation (divorce not yet final).
The older kid in the other family had decided pretty early into my knowing her that her dad's kind of games were a boy thing. I've been really conscious to try to make sure that The Munchkin gets messages saying that this is an OK thing for girls to do.
Sorry I couldn't chat more, brother! I ran something like 10-12 hours of CSW that day, plus more on Sunday…
It looked like you were doing a solid job, all told. Your explanations seemed pretty thorough and I didn't overhear anything particularly egregious.
I think part of the issue with the furry-kid comes in terms of eye contact. The kid's facemask prevented pretty much all actual eye contact, which makes getting a read on them particularly difficult. Are they paying attention? Are they engaged? Can't read their face or their eyes, which can make things difficult. I'm in agreement that 'gamer culture' definitely has an issue in terms of inclusion–women, minorities, and LGBT persons, specifically–but none of those descriptors provide a physical inhibitor to person-to-person communication. While Dad might not have been happy or understood his kid as a furry, airing his grievances at the game table wasn't the answer. But, at the same time, I don't think it's an unreasonable request to take off a full head-covering when it actively inhibits you from learning a game you're not familiar with.
Unfortunately, I didn't catch the "quarterbacking" player in my passive-perception. Maybe actually offer him a seat next time and let him play? At least then, you could corral the quarterbacking? I've found that Sentinels isn't too hard to drop in a player midway through, under normal circumstances…just shave off a few hit points and start them with a random card or two in play.
He was definitely harping on the ability to interact as his stated reasoning, and that I got. Out near the Tactics Tournament, he'd seemed to get her being different and be OK with it, which I think is part of what threw me for a loop once he started trying to get her to show her human self.
At this point, I think I've got my explanations pretty solid. I've run Sentinels for The Grasshopper & some of his friends on more than one occasion, so I've had a lot of practice at ironing out how to set up the game & get people going & focused. (Keeping five 3rd-graders, 4 of whom don't know the game, focused at the same time was a challenge! Fortunately, they're a bit older now.)
I don't have a lot of experience with dropping somebody in partway through a game, but I'll keep that solution in mind. The guy in question was the one who was standing next to the table for most of the game, and I'm not surprised your passive perception didn't pick up that was what he was doing, since your primary job was to make sure the people playing CSW were having a good time.