Pilcrow

Okay, I'm back. Not that I went anywhere, but as I expected, I had too much going on with Doug's visit to want to make the effort to post every day. I didn't end up taking any photos besides some at Go Play NW—you can see my set of photos on Flickr, as well as a set that Doug took—so I didn't have any to post during the week. 

Although I say I had too much going on, it was a fairly mellow visit, actually. We were up until 4 am or so pretty much every night, and I got up around noon most days; Doug usually slept in a while later, despite the noise of building repair outside and me going about my business inside. We had dinner with some friends, but did not get to see all the ones we wanted to. We spent some time running about on errands. We didn't manage to see the final Harry Potter film (I still haven't seen films six or seven part one) as we didn't try to get tickets soon enough. We did get me a replacement Xbox 360 off someone selling theirs on Craigslist, and it's been working fine. (Now I have to decide what to do about disposing of my broken one.) We tried out a couple of the new boardgames I've had for months but hadn't yet played. And I brought Doug along for trivia night, at which we came in third out of three teams. So we did a bunch of things, but nothing exceptionally big and exciting, other than Go Play NW.

Go Play NW was a great success once again. We had around 120 people, and I believe everyone had a really great time. I got to meet some cool new local gamers and hopefully will get to play more games with them. I also had a good time playing games; I got to try Anima Prime and Polaris for the first time, and playtested a neat boardgame called "Oh My God, There's an Axe in My Head!". The Northwest Rooms at Seattle Center turned out to be a great space for us after all; the noise was manageable, there was plenty of room, and people even carried tables and chairs outside to play in the courtyard, which was fun. 

And a final quick note, having a car was very handy, and I quickly got over my initial nervousness and enjoyed driving again. That said, I'm just as happy to be done with the car, and to not have to be spending money on gas. I may yet get a ZipCar membership, but first I want to see how the car crash aftermath works out.

I've just made a new post on the Go Play NW site about Important Things to Know. It's got some info on where exactly we'll be (the Northwest Rooms, next to Key Arena on the corner of 1st Ave N and Republican Street), where the entrance is (the inner courtyard, no on-street entrance), where to park (the 1st Ave N garage is easiest), and where to eat, among other things.

Also, in case you're still wondering about printable tickets: there aren't any. It's a default setting for Eventbee that we apparently can't turn off. Don't worry about it, we've got you down on a list.

If you're still thinking about coming and did not register, we can still take people at the door.

This weekend! It's on!

We're fortunate to have the extremely talented graphic designer John Harper as part of the Go Play NW team. Every year he's created a cool t-shirt design for our weekend, and this year is no different. Because we're based in the Pacific Northwest, we naturally chose a sasquatch as our mascot, but John's alternated between a shaggy sasquatch silhouette and a more detailed ape / monkey king portrait for his designs. Because we'll be holding the event at Seattle Center this year, John went with an astronaut monkey king theme, tying it in to the Space Needle and general 21st-century background of Seattle Center. Check it out:



We're pretty excited for this year's event, which is happening July 8 to 10. There's still time to register and order the t-shirt—or even just order the t-shirt if you already registered but held off on the shirt—but t-shirts must be ordered by June 13 in order to be available for Go Play NW 2011, and we will not be shipping the shirts, you must pick them up at the event. We'll get some version of the design up on Spreadshirts as well, no doubt, so that people can custom-order their own shirts or sweatshirts with it. 

Oh, and I'm rather pleased with the announcement I wrote for our website about the t-shirts, so you could also go read that if you like. It's more entertaining than this post.

Although I’d been a role-playing gamer since I was twelve, I’d never gone to a gaming convention. When I was young, of course, it simply wasn’t a possibility. As an adult, I just never thought much about it. I heard of the big two, GenCon and Origins, which were off in the Midwest, and it never even occurred to me that I could attend one of those. Nor did I think of looking for a smaller convention in the area, such as in Boston, and when I did hear of some, I didn’t think about going.

The fact is, I’d never been much interested in playing games with people other than my close friends. In high school I did join the D&D Club and attended regularly for at least a year, but I found it unsatisfying. We’d start a game one week, and the next week a couple players wouldn’t be there and the others would all be interested in starting some other game. We also had clashing expectations about how to play the games. We started playing the first adventure in the Dragonlance setting, and I chose to play the insatiably curious and mischievous “kender” character, but promptly found myself shouted down by the other players when I would try to insist on investigating anything. I’d read the Dragonlance tie-in novels and so knew about the story and characters the adventure was supposed to be about, but whether or not the other players had read the books, all they cared about was plowing through as fast as possible to beat the monsters and grab the treasure; it didn’t matter to them whether a certain character was supposed to end up with holy artifacts as part of advancing the story, to them the artifacts were just things to make a character more powerful and thus something to squabble over. I know we played two or three sessions of that adventure, and that’s about all I remember from the D&D Club; I went to a bunch more sessions over the year but can’t remember anything else I played.

During college, I got to do a little gaming with my new college friends, but we were always so busy that we never got to play anything for any length. Some time after college, I learned of a local gaming club that met at the public library, and I tried attending that a couple times, but it was similar to the high school experience: the first week, I joined a large group of ten or so people making up characters for a cyberpunk science-fiction game; the next week, half those people weren’t there, the ones who were started a different game, and I joined a couple other people in trying a fantasy game and quickly realized that we weren’t going to have compatible interests at all, so I excused myself and left. Besides that, I gamed on a few occasions with new people that my close friends knew, and that was it.

When I moved to Seattle, I was reunited with my college friend and fellow gamer Tony, and was introduced to his Seattle gamer friends. I also got in touch with and befriended John, a gamer I knew from the Talislanta RPG mailing list that I’d been on for several years, and started playing games with his friends too. So both my gaming circles and gaming frequency expanded, and I enjoyed it a lot. Through John I also got involved in a couple online gaming discussion forums, discovered a bunch of new games, and became involved in designing new games. I still had no thoughts about attending game conventions, though.

But then in the summer of 2006, John went off to a mini gaming convention that some people from one of the forums organized. Unlike the big conventions such as GenCon, which were as much trade shows as fan conventions, this event was just a weekend of people meeting up and playing games, and John came back with tales of the fantastic time he had meeting people we’d only known online in the forum and playing games with them. He and Tony’s friend Brandon also went off to GenCon that summer, and again came back with more tales of the great time they had playing games. Tony and I looked at each other sadly and said, “We want to have a weekend of playing games too!” And we thought, well, the forum people organized their weekend on an ad-hoc basis, expecting it to be just for people in the Chicago area, and found that people from all over the country (such as John) were willing to fly in for the event; we ought to be able to organize something like that as well. John and Brandon were keen on the idea as well, and thus was born our own Seattle gaming weekend event, Go Play Northwest.

We planned our first event for June 2007, to be held at Seattle University. To facilitate the arrangements, we formed our own non-profit organization. We attracted over 50 people, mostly from the gaming forum but also some other local gamers we knew, and everyone had a great time. Having proved we could do it and having had a great time, we decided to continue, and we are now planning our fourth annual event for next June. I’ve had a lot of fun, and enjoyed the opportunities to play some great games with a bunch of people I otherwise never would have met, let alone gamed with. I also feel good about being one of the founders, about seeing something that I would like to do and then taking the steps to make it happen and having it succeed. It’s another reminder that when I do decide I want to do something, I can make it happen.

Go Play NW 2008 will be held at the Watertown Hotel in Seattle's University District, May 31-June 1 2008. Attendance this year is limited to 75 participants! Pre-registration is $40 for both days, and will increase after May 15, so sign up now! Visit the Go Play NW Wiki for more information.

Also, see the nifty T-shirt design by John Harper in this thread on the Story Games forum.

I'm just going to reprint the original announcement, as written by Mike Sugarbaker:

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In the great city of Seattle, Washington, at a moderately nice hotel, there shall be a weekend of those games we like to play. We (a committee of five that includes myself, John, Tony, Brandon (judaicdiablo) and Mike) are currently scouting locations and generally trying to finalize a time. Right now, we are heavily leaning towards one of the following weekends:

June 1-3
June 8-10
June 15-17

Our favorite is June 8-10. That's Friday through Sunday. Yes, we will have full-on gaming on Sunday. (Friday will be a little less structured.) June 15-17 has Father's Day in it so it is the least likely of the bunch.

We currently think our location will be a hotel in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. Food and drink are plentiful nearby and things are just generally swell there. The problem is that rooms will be more expensive - we don't yet have a quote that feels solid enough to relay to you all - and we will likely have to ask a touch more for covering the meeting space. That's just how it has to be in a place like Seattle proper.

As far as scheduling events, we want to follow the Forge Midwest model and keep things fairly loose, but we will be applying some technology to try and make things a little more transparent, both before and during the event. This will probably just amount to a wiki page.

It would be great if we could start to get an idea of who's interested in coming. Since we're posting this notice in multiple fora, we'd like to not do that part here in the forum thread. To express your interest in attending, send email to goplaynw@gmail.com. Feel free to include any preferences or commentary in your email for our reference. Some things you could possibly tell us that would be helpful:

Name
Address
Phone
Email
I will be renting a hotel room
I will be sharing someone else's room or staying off site
I'm not sure if I will be renting a hotel room
Game(s) I want to run
Game(s) I want to play
How I heard about Go Play NW
Comments and suggestions

This thread is of course for anything else you might do besides RSVP: express excitement and undying love, complain, tell us we're stupid, etc.

West Coast represent! Gooooo Play!

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Let me add that by "games we like to play," we are thinking of indie RPGs like Dogs In The Vineyard, The Shadow Of Yesterday, Prime Time Adventures, John's own AGON, and many many others; BUT, we would certainly be happy to have people who want to run more traditional games such as D&D or White Wolf's World of Darkness line. Also, a lot of the indie games are easy to learn and play in single sessions, like at at con - you don't have to commit to an endless series of weekly gaming nights in order to play and enjoy RPGs! - so this is a good opportunity to introduce new people to gaming. I hope to see some of you there!