Phantasm

I went to my local, *local* (in my small hometown) gaming con, Phatasm this past weekend. My participation was pretty casual; I ran a demo of Ready 2 Run for a small group, chatted with various people from the local community and drank some beer with a houseguest and assorted friends.

The R2R demo was pretty successful, considering that I didn’t really have time to prepare. I basically winged that mother with the core rules and the outline for an upcoming creator-owned project from a partner, This actually worked pretty well, since R2R’s strength is that it’s supposed to move through the prep/play barrier as smoothly as possible. Making characters at the table took about 20 minutes for 4 participants who’s never played the game before.

Peterborough, ON has a pretty good gaming community. It has three games retailers (well, two, but one has two locations), two LARPS and an interesting mix of students and local gamers. But I have a confession: Cons are my absolute last resort for gaming.

The RPG community has increasingly rebuilt itself to compensate for not having a regular game and not gaming with your friends. I am now more convinced than ever that much of my alienation from other gamers come from the fact that, to sound immodest, I actually *play* RPGs more often than they do. More and more, I read about the objective of game theory being to smooth over encounters between strangers to hack together games. No wonder “Fun Now” infects the climate of ideas and no wonder rigid social rules, pathological distrust and rigid consensus enforcement are the trends of the day. I’m sure I’d feel this way too if I had to get my fix from people I didn’t know on the odd occasions I could catch them.

But if this is the face of RPGs and what people are designing for, I have a question: Why the fuck are you playing RPGs? Why don’t you give up?

I’m serious. Isn’t it kind of stupid to approach a hobby like a beggar or a junkie looking for a fix? Isn’t scrounging odd games with fellow net-based hobbyists at rare get-togethers a sign of something kind of pathetic? Shouldn’t you just *pack it up* on anything that requires Web 2.0 idiocy to even maintain activity?

If you can’t game with your friends, why bother?

I think the secret to Peterborough’s gaming community is that members actually game. Phantasm went pretty well because we’ve all experienced the foibles of friends, screwed things up and generally want the game to succeed. So even when you are playing with strangers, you’re treating it as an extension of a positive, friendly experience in your everyday life.

I suppose my problem is this. If you can’t come to the table with this feeling, if you are unpracticed at actually gaming in an environment of trust, I have almost no interest in designing for you or playing with you. Y’all should’ve gotten over this shit when you were playing teenage D&D.