Alienating My Audience Part 1: RopeCon 2009

The description of my blog does say that one of my topics is geekery, so be adviced that if you don't enjoy RPGs or reading about people's experiences you might want to stop reading this.

Didn't you hear me? Stop reading right now!

Is he gone? Good. I never liked his type.

Anyway, for those of you who don't know, RopeCon is an annual RPG convention held somewhere around July and August in Otaniemi, Espoo. The exact location of the convention is Dipoli, a building which I won't describe because my friend NiTessine does it so much better in a pre-RopeCon post of his on his blog:

Seriously. They say there isn’t a single straight angle in the house. While I know this isn’t exactly true, they aren’t exactly abundant. This is like my eleventh Ropecon in Dipoli and I can still get lost there. I only figured out the layout of the bottom floor two years ago. Last year, I had trouble finding the room where I was supposed to give a presentation. It’s a confusing place, but in a really cool way.

With that said, RopeCon was last weekend and I spent all three days of the con there. This was the first time in two years that I've actually attended RopeCon, because for the past couple of years I've always ween chronically broke by the time the con has rolled around. This year I had the pleasure of GMing at the con, meaning that I got free entrance to the con. There was much rejoicing.

On Friday I ran a game for the Finnish branch of Pathfinder Society, namely The Prince of Augustana. My group included one complete newbie, one person I regularly game with and two old beards from Living Greyhawk. The session was alright, no thanks really to the scenario since it's just a railroaded succession of combats with no challenge to speak of even for a low-level party. The players breezed their way through the scenario and into the rather anti-climactic yet funny twist ending. After the game was over I wandered around aimlessly until I found a spot in an AD&D game run by one James Raggi, a most awesome gentleman. He was running the Tomb of Horrors, a module which is pretty much synonymous with "Gygaxian dungeon crawl." Most of the players had previously played the adventure and even those who had not (myself included) took a healthy degree of paranoia into the game with us. I was playing a level 14 Cleric and for my spells I mostly prepared augury, just so I could ask the gods whether a certain course of action would lead us to weal or woe. Unfortunately sleep deprivation took the better of me and I was forced to withdraw from the dungeon at around four. Still, I had a great time playing.

After about four hours of very bad sleep I made my way back to the con to run a game of Best Friends, an award-winning storytelling game by Gregor Hutton about girls, their friends and their petty hatreds. I was surprised to find that the game had been booked full, so me and the five players who showed up played the game for three hours, exceeding my table booking by a good hour. It was hysterically funny and by far one of the best con games I've ever been in. I'm not saying this because I ran the game, since my role as running the game was pretty subdued as my only role in the game was to introduce the players to the system, help them with creating their characters (I also had a character of my own since Best Friends is very easy to run GM-less.) and then get the ball rolling by getting the story started. After this the game pretty much ran itself, with the players introducing new characters and events into the mix, creating plot twists and drama and generally just helping me have a great time. Sadly, after the game I really started feeling the effects of not having slept too well last night and made my way back home for a good night's sleep.

On Sunday I ran another Pathfinder Society scenario, this time The Third Riddle. I'd run this scenario earlier to a higher level party at the higher tier (i.e. all encounters scaled up to be more difficult) and the scenario was a pushover back then. Thus, I assumed that a party of mostly 1st-level characters could easily pull this one off at the lowest tier. How wrong I was. While two out of three of the main encounters were pretty easy there was one encounter which should never, under any circumstances be run as written for a tier 1-2 group. When the dust settled only one of the PCs was standing, everyone else was either unconscious or bleeding to death and one was dead. Thankfully the PC left standing had stocked up on healing potions and quickly got his companions up on their feet. A near total party kill, but they pulled through in the end. The rest of the day was spent discussing the implications of the new and updated Pathfinder Society Guide to Organized Play. Suffice to say that brokenness has already been found. I'm personally not that bothered by the brokenness as I am with the new trait system. It's not that the system itself is flawed but the fact that there are a few real stinkers in there, such as:

Charming: Blessed with good looks, you’ve come to depend on the fact that others find you attractive. You gain a +1 trait bonus when you use Bluff or Diplomacy on a character that is (or could be) sexually attracted to you, and a +1 trait bonus to the save DC of any language-dependent spell you cast on such characters or creatures.

Now, I don't really have that much of a problem with this until you realize that it's completely up to the GM's interpretation when it applies. Could an orc be sexually attracted to a gnome? It's entirely possible, taken into account the fact that dragons regularly breed with almost anything living (as demonstrated by the half-dragon monster template). That's the thing: the truth is that in a world like the assumed setting of D&D almost any creature with a defined sex could be sexually attracted to almost any other such creature. The second problem comes from the fact that this trait is completely dependent on GM-fiat: the GM may deny a male character the possibility of using this trait's bonus on another male creature simply because "He's not gay," which is purely bullshit. As I consider any tagging of people's sexualities as completely arbitrary and not even taking into account the fact that pretty much every person has a unique sexual history this trait just opens up a can of worms, especially due to the fact that it contains the text could be. If I wanted to do a dick move I'd just make a male character with the said trait and insist on it applying to my skill rolls with all males, because there have been males who have been attracted to males before so therefore it's a simple fact that any given male could be attracted to my character.

God, I love semantics.