RopeCon, the largest non-commercial gaming-related event in Europe (or something like that) begins tomorrow. I’ll be there over the weekend, as will many members of our “guild”, including Lauri.

Well, so far it sucks. I was trying to get some sort of grasp on what games I should participate in, but the problem is that the program page is missing events, such as one event I preregistered for. Gladly, I know the organizer, so I could easily get the right time, but I’m sure there are plenty of interested parties, who don’t even know about it, because you can’t find it on the page.

Also, I scanned through the RPGs at the event. Sadly, they are listed in a format with a very poor usability, with all the descriptions on their own individual pages. So, I have to load a bunch of pages to find out what these games are about. Even then, most of the descriptions are poorly written and seem to be missing plenty of information, including the game system in many cases. Also, many of the GMs seem to have gone for a short tagline, which they feel is enough. Mostly, it isn’t. They are just not descriptive enough. They are basically just stating the system in other terms.

One thing I always wonder about: Do the GMs who have “refined” or “developed” a popular system to suit their personal tastes, really think they are marketing game properly by informing us of that? I guess there are some people out there who can really make an existing system better, but even so, trying to make a system better for a con is just not a good idea. There are players out there, who know the system already. If you change it, you lose some of the advantage of using a known system. There is a learning curve to games. Why make players go through it again for some self-glorification? Especially, since we all know most of these changes are generally damaging to the game.

… but hey, I’m going to try and have some fun. I’ll try to make at least three games and I’ll report on them Monday, if not before. Although participating in the games of the guests of honor would be great, I’m not banking on that and my primary goal is to take part in a MonsterHearts game and traumatize someone permanently. There are also a Fiasco and a Dungeon World games, but scheduling everything is hard, because so many of the interesting games either overlap or are on Sunday, which means I probably don’t get to participate in pretty much anything I want to. I can’t really blame anyone… except maybe the GMs who could run more interesting games, so I wouldn’t have to try to juggle the few interesting games.