Origins Experiences

Reynard said:

I think origins allowed anyone to upcharge. It looked like from the catalog it was mostly one host group, a pro-GM co-op sort of thing, and their additional fees varied wildly from $6 to $24.

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Wild. My brother-in-law and his friend normally run "mega-games" at events like GenCon. They told me they didn't consider it at Origins because they said they weren't allowed to charge - even for a 7+ hour event with a lot of planning and handouts. Perhaps they didn't know it was an option.
I can say that of the thousands of RPG and boardgaming events I saw in the events catalog, none were charging.
One would have to work hard to find events to pay to play.

Retreater said:

Wild. My brother-in-law and his friend normally run "mega-games" at events like GenCon. They told me they didn't consider it at Origins because they said they weren't allowed to charge - even for a 7+ hour event with a lot of planning and handouts. Perhaps they didn't know it was an option.
I can say that of the thousands of RPG and boardgaming events I saw in the events catalog, none were charging.
One would have to work hard to find events to pay to play.

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That was not my experience this year. When a bunch of us (5 friends from high school going to the con together for the first time in decades) tried to find games we wanted to play together, we ran into paywalls pretty regularly. We ended up doing a couple organized play events because those were able to accommodate our group size, but I did end up paying to play Dragonbane.

My bigger problem with origins was that there just weren't the games on offer. I wanted to play Vaesen and Thirsty Sword Lesbians and other games, and while they were on offer, it was only one or two sessions of each and they filled up fast. Big cons are generally where I get to be a player in games I am interested in running and it was disappointing that D&D was still eating up the vast majority of the space.

True, my group had 3 players and yours 5.
We got into every event we attempted (except 1), including Thirsty Sword Lesbians.

Retreater said:

True, my group had 3 players and yours 5.
We got into every event we attempted (except 1), including Thirsty Sword Lesbians.

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We also did not jump on registration as quickly as we should have. I think it took us a week to get organized as a group after reg opened.

Celebrim said:

I play with a younger daughter and as such I tend to be picky about the GMs and games I sign up with because well, both her age and her gender sometimes make her the target of casual dismissal or condescending attitudes

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Celebrim said:

As such, I tend to favor female GMs and story lines that aren't likely to be problematic in certain ways.

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Funny how gendered assumptions lead to more gendered assumptions.

Celebrim said:

she reported this as a worse RPing experience than playing at tables with male chauvinists that didn't seem to think girls should participate, or toxic groups of teenagers with horrible social dynamics. This was literally her worst RPing experience of her life.

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Turns out lack of agency is worse than bigotry.

Celebrim said:

The central reasons that players had no agency in the game is that no action has discernable stakes. Players never know what they are risking or attempting really, because any result is possible for any throw of the dice.

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Which is why I consider establishing stakes before taking action to be mandatory.

Celebrim said:

What made the experience particularly bad for my daughter was randomly choosing a female character that lacked an active motive to be in the scenario or to engage with it and whose motivations and feelings were described in the character background as "flirting with the hot guys",

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Only #RedFlag I'd need. And if this had been drawn by a woman signifigantly younger than myself I would have left.

Celebrim said:

any attempt by her to ever get off the rails was met by various versions of "you wouldn't want to do that" or "the fairies arrive to tell you that you are going the wrong way".

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Nothing worse than the GM playing your character.

Celebrim said:

The other survivor of the session did so by avoiding any dice tests, basically figuring out a story that the GM wanted to tell and then letting that happen to them, surviving without the need to roll a die because the GM just fiat decided that it worked because the GMs attachment to that particular PC.

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Except maybe punishing you for not playing your character properly.

Celebrim said:

The organizers had a QR code you could scan to give feedback, but despite the fact I write software I find smart phones a pain to use and didn't want to mess with it. I regretted it talking to my daughter after the session about how angry she was from the experience, but I didn't want to make the long walk back just to pointedly scan the QR code on the table.

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QR codes were all over the place for vendor purchases at the last con I attended, and multiple folks had trouble getting them to work. Even my obscenely expensive iPhone 15 Pro Max (which I bought for the audio/video capabilities) can't properly focus on them. Technological advancement really is moving backwards.

MichaelSomething said:

You can give negative feedback without starting a fight.

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In this economy?

MichaelSomething said:

Too bad people can't get an "EnWorld Seal of DMing Quality" certificate to show that they're good. I would totally trust Morrous to set up a process that would gauge how well someone can DM!

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I don't. And the last thing I want are more 'certifications' as I guarantee they'll be used to filter folks based on ideology rather than ability. And how would he make this assessment in the first place? Where would he find the time?

Anon Adderlan said:

In this economy?

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