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Nov. 13th, 2017 04:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretPhilcon was this weekend. It was a very good time.
I got there right before Shabbos, had a few minutes to check into the hotel room before Kabbalat Shabbat services. Which were well attended- about 15 men and 5 or 6 women, the largest crowd I can remember at Philcon. In the morning we actually managed to get a minyan for Shacharis for the first time (by anyone's standards, one of the more observant attendants wryly observed.). Afterward, we went to the hotel room for kiddush and Friday night dinner- I'd made chicken and baked a challah, and brought a store-bought kugel, my roommate brought wine and a delicious broccoli and tomato dish- and enjoyed the experience of bringing in the Con and the Sabbath simultaneously. The challah was a little oversalted, but otherwise the meal was great.
Afterward I spent most of my evening in the game room running my Jewish D&D "shtetlpunk" game, which was fun but didn't go off as well as I'd have wanted. I used this metaphor in explaining the game to people, that basically what I was doing was taking the Christian parts of D&D and drawing over them in crayon with Jewish stuff. That metaphor really worked well and the players took to the reskinning game wonderfully. The invoker was great at taking these powers with names and ideas taken from Revelation and reinterpreting them as invoking the hidden names of God or figures from Jewish angelology. Our cleric took the Consecrated Ground spell and turned it into a Burning Bush evoking spell. The crayon metaphor really worked, the idea that we were messily reinterpreting D&D on the fly in this really crude and only quasi-thoughtful but forceful and powerful way.
So that was great. And the initial part of the adventure, wandering around the shtetl, interacting with the Rabbi and his wife and the town drunk and various merchants and a sinister Catholic priest, was fun and immersive, I think. Even the first combat, an attack by some demons in the woods on the way to the lost Kabbalah library buried in a cave, was a good way for the players to sink their teeth into their powers and enjoy the pleasures of 4E combat. But the cave... that's where I lost track. The cave was supposed to be a thing of minor resistance, an appetizer leading up to the esoteric fascination of the actual library dungeon. Instead it bogged us down in the worst 4E way in these overly long, bog-standard D&D combats against almost random Monster Manual enemies- some demon-enhanced goblins, a couple green oozes. And it gave the players a mistaken sense of the unwritten rules of how this dungeon worked, and that led them to be too wary to explore some of the most interesting things I'd put in there. So unfortunately the ending fizzled and I didn't even have time to show them the library dungeon. I think I have a good sense of how I'd run this adventure differently if I get to run it again, so that's good. What I've realized/remembered is that unlike in 5E and early D&D, a 4E DM needs to design encounters, even minor ones, with full pre-planning to making them tactically interesting and well-paced, not just to fill a narrative role. The players did seem to be having a good time in general, but I'm disappointed. And I've sworn to not run 4E again at a Con, please hold me to it. 5E all the way.
Saturday morning I went to the concert with Seanan McGuire, author guest of honor, singing with Bill and Brenda Sutton ("Bed and Breakfast"), music guests of honor, backing her. Concert was fun and full of bleak and depressing songs about death and worse fates, as you expect with McGuire singing. After lunch I went tobatyatoon's concert, which was also great. I particularly enjoyed her Billy Joel filk "Always a Planet to Me" about Pluto, and a refilk of Ada Palmer's "Somebody Will" (I think she said it was not her refilk, but I didn't catch the name of the lyricist) about how each member of the Rogue One team was needed to transmit the plans, which had me completely in tears. And she ended the show with Frank Hayes's "Never Set the Cat on Fire" with the whole audience directing the chorus to the two young children in the audience. Never too early to indoctrinate the next generation.
In the afternoon I sat in on a panel on sentencecraft that featured Samuel Delany and some other people I don't care about and then mostly haunted the game room. We played Willy Makit, a delightfully middle-schoolish-humor card game about racing to the crowded mall bathroom before nature calls. We played Gloom, a card game that uses almost identical card mechanics to completely different effect, as a storytelling game about the uniquely terrible miseries endured by stock gothic families. We played Concept, a really clever pictionaryish game that I want to play more of. And then after dinner, while others at the next table played a late night edition of Cards Against Humanity, I pulled out Dick, a knockoff of Cards Against Humanity where all the cards are quotes from Moby Dick, and we played that for a couple of hours.
Sunday we checked out of the room, then I hit the dealer's room and bought a few books and a filk CD, and then I spent a while hanging out with random people in program ops arguing about the Ferengi as anti-semitic tropes for a while. Then we went to a panel arguing about whether A Christmas Carol is a good story- verdict mixed, and then we declared our Con over.
But yeah, over the course of the Con, I went to about three panels. That's low, but not that unusually low for me at Philcon. I don't go to Philcon for programming, I go because there's a ton of awesome people there, and the people who come as my roommates are great, and it's fun to hang out with awesome people all weekend.
I got there right before Shabbos, had a few minutes to check into the hotel room before Kabbalat Shabbat services. Which were well attended- about 15 men and 5 or 6 women, the largest crowd I can remember at Philcon. In the morning we actually managed to get a minyan for Shacharis for the first time (by anyone's standards, one of the more observant attendants wryly observed.). Afterward, we went to the hotel room for kiddush and Friday night dinner- I'd made chicken and baked a challah, and brought a store-bought kugel, my roommate brought wine and a delicious broccoli and tomato dish- and enjoyed the experience of bringing in the Con and the Sabbath simultaneously. The challah was a little oversalted, but otherwise the meal was great.
Afterward I spent most of my evening in the game room running my Jewish D&D "shtetlpunk" game, which was fun but didn't go off as well as I'd have wanted. I used this metaphor in explaining the game to people, that basically what I was doing was taking the Christian parts of D&D and drawing over them in crayon with Jewish stuff. That metaphor really worked well and the players took to the reskinning game wonderfully. The invoker was great at taking these powers with names and ideas taken from Revelation and reinterpreting them as invoking the hidden names of God or figures from Jewish angelology. Our cleric took the Consecrated Ground spell and turned it into a Burning Bush evoking spell. The crayon metaphor really worked, the idea that we were messily reinterpreting D&D on the fly in this really crude and only quasi-thoughtful but forceful and powerful way.
So that was great. And the initial part of the adventure, wandering around the shtetl, interacting with the Rabbi and his wife and the town drunk and various merchants and a sinister Catholic priest, was fun and immersive, I think. Even the first combat, an attack by some demons in the woods on the way to the lost Kabbalah library buried in a cave, was a good way for the players to sink their teeth into their powers and enjoy the pleasures of 4E combat. But the cave... that's where I lost track. The cave was supposed to be a thing of minor resistance, an appetizer leading up to the esoteric fascination of the actual library dungeon. Instead it bogged us down in the worst 4E way in these overly long, bog-standard D&D combats against almost random Monster Manual enemies- some demon-enhanced goblins, a couple green oozes. And it gave the players a mistaken sense of the unwritten rules of how this dungeon worked, and that led them to be too wary to explore some of the most interesting things I'd put in there. So unfortunately the ending fizzled and I didn't even have time to show them the library dungeon. I think I have a good sense of how I'd run this adventure differently if I get to run it again, so that's good. What I've realized/remembered is that unlike in 5E and early D&D, a 4E DM needs to design encounters, even minor ones, with full pre-planning to making them tactically interesting and well-paced, not just to fill a narrative role. The players did seem to be having a good time in general, but I'm disappointed. And I've sworn to not run 4E again at a Con, please hold me to it. 5E all the way.
Saturday morning I went to the concert with Seanan McGuire, author guest of honor, singing with Bill and Brenda Sutton ("Bed and Breakfast"), music guests of honor, backing her. Concert was fun and full of bleak and depressing songs about death and worse fates, as you expect with McGuire singing. After lunch I went to
batyatoon's concert, which was also great. I particularly enjoyed her Billy Joel filk "Always a Planet to Me" about Pluto, and a refilk of Ada Palmer's "Somebody Will" (I think she said it was not her refilk, but I didn't catch the name of the lyricist) about how each member of the Rogue One team was needed to transmit the plans, which had me completely in tears. And she ended the show with Frank Hayes's "Never Set the Cat on Fire" with the whole audience directing the chorus to the two young children in the audience. Never too early to indoctrinate the next generation.In the afternoon I sat in on a panel on sentencecraft that featured Samuel Delany and some other people I don't care about and then mostly haunted the game room. We played Willy Makit, a delightfully middle-schoolish-humor card game about racing to the crowded mall bathroom before nature calls. We played Gloom, a card game that uses almost identical card mechanics to completely different effect, as a storytelling game about the uniquely terrible miseries endured by stock gothic families. We played Concept, a really clever pictionaryish game that I want to play more of. And then after dinner, while others at the next table played a late night edition of Cards Against Humanity, I pulled out Dick, a knockoff of Cards Against Humanity where all the cards are quotes from Moby Dick, and we played that for a couple of hours.
Sunday we checked out of the room, then I hit the dealer's room and bought a few books and a filk CD, and then I spent a while hanging out with random people in program ops arguing about the Ferengi as anti-semitic tropes for a while. Then we went to a panel arguing about whether A Christmas Carol is a good story- verdict mixed, and then we declared our Con over.
But yeah, over the course of the Con, I went to about three panels. That's low, but not that unusually low for me at Philcon. I don't go to Philcon for programming, I go because there's a ton of awesome people there, and the people who come as my roommates are great, and it's fun to hang out with awesome people all weekend.