2018 is on the horizon and it's going to be a busy year...

So as ever I've not posted here for some time.

Why now?  Well this remains my primary "brain dump" source for what's going through my head hobby wise.  I do brain dumps less and less these days because I have a number of other channels in which to do that but if I want to rattle off a few things then I'll likely come back here.

2017 has been an interesting year for me and my hobby.

End The Turn ended.
Largely down to availability, surprisingly not my availability but Liz's.  Will we revisit a podcast in the future? Unlikely but only because of other stuff that's going on that is eating up time.
It was an interesting and enjoyable experience doing the podcast and whilst I have no desire to start another one I'm not ruling it out.

RPGLiveUK happened.
I ran a RPG at it and that seemed to go down really well.  The weekend as a whole was great fun and I came away from it with the desire to run more RPGs but also accepting that right now that isn't going to happen for all the reasons I've listed previously in this blog.  I'm not giving up but if I do run something I can see it being one-shots and I'd definitely re-run Brave New World again if the notion took me.

Roll Against Cancer faded.
Largely down to venue challenges, i.e. not finding one but more on that to come...

Convention Calendar on Google Sheets became a "go to" thing.
People on Facebook and Twitter started to contact me about it and were actually USING IT to plan their convention travels and perhaps more importantly convention organisers started to contact me about getting their 2018 dates on it.
If you've not seen it before I've tweaked the Bit.ly link to be - http://bit.ly/UKRPG_BGCons - if only because it's not just a 2017 list now...

Objectives & Principles largely remained on track...
If you ignore the lack of RPGing and End The Turn ending that is.

What does 2018 look like then?

Well 1st of all this is happening...

After 4ish years searching for a suitable venue, one appears from left field and I have to say it's damn near perfect.  So on the 1st and 2nd of September 2018 you should come to the Dewars Centre in Perth to attend Tabletop Scotland.
I've written a fair amount on this blog on what a convention should and shouldn't be.  34 posts (excluding this one) are tagged with convention.  I'm sure some of that will come back to haunt me but that's absolutely fine.  If my team and I fail to hit the heights of what I expect then I assure you the first people who'll be pointing that out will be us.

Alongside that I will be going to GenCon again. Whilst I won't be posting with quite the same voracity as I was ahead of that first trip, I hope to post some stuff in the run up to this trip.

Since announcing Tabletop Scotland I've visited a lot of game stores that I haven't been to before.  That will continue with some repeat visits no doubt for those I've recently visited.

I'm hoping to be at UK Games Expo, potentially going to AireCon and more than likely will be at Conpulsion at least for the Saturday to promote Tabletop Scotland.

I'll obviously continue pushing East Neuk Tabletop Games forward and go to DWARF for regular gaming.

Beyond that I've no idea.  All of my spare time and energy is going into making sure that this convention is all that it can be.

So yeah.  2018 is going to be a very busy year.

#RPGLiveUK A RPG mini-con in Nottingham

So I probably should have posted about this a long time ago but other things took priority.

This Saturday (14th October) I am running a RPG at #RPGLiveUK which is a RPG mini-con being held in The Dice Cup in Nottingham.

There are 4 games currently on offer and tickets are on sale here - https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rpgliveuk-tickets-36042083843?ref=estw

Games are -
1) Shotguns and Sorcery (Cypher System)
2) Gamma World 4th Edition
3) Starfinder
and
4) Brave New World which is the game I'm running.

Long time readers of this blog will remember me talking about Brave New World before and may recall a post I did on Super Hero RPGs in general.

In short I decided to run BNW because it's been sitting on my shelf for more years than it should without being played.

I find the mechanics (particularly around how damage works) a bit clunky so I've refined those for this one-shot. I might revert in due course but for this one-shot I wanted to make some changes to how it works.

So yeah, I'm running an RPG at a mini-con this Saturday.  Who knows what will happen, certainly not me!

UK Games Expo 2016 - RPGLifeUK TweetUp

As per my previous post about RPG Life UK I met up with some twitter folks to talk about RPGs and other stuff.

Tweetup Part 1 - Hilton Thursday 8pm

For something that was largely a random collection of twitter folks this went better than it probably should have.  Ok, so we didn't really get into any kind of debate about the UK RPG Scene or anything like that other than to conclude early on that there really wasn't one.

The group chat seemed to only last for about 15 to 30 minutes but after that we largely split off into different groups to chat about all things hobby and not just RPGs.  Also had the benefit of chatting with a retailer post the retailer event to get the inside “scoop” on what was coming out.  Some cool stuff was talked about (Mystic Vale I'm thinking of you) but nothing ground breaking or market changing etc.

There was one particularly interesting snippet from the overall conversation - "There are lots of RPG conventions in the UK so we don’t need any more."

Ok so this wasn't what was actually said but it was how I interpreted what was being said.

We didn’t really get into this in the tweetup but I've been reflecting on it since the tweetup itself and I suppose my underlying thought here is that it’s not actually reflective of the UK.

It may be reflective of England but then that’s probably not a surprise given the relatively healthy state of the English RPG con scene.
It is also probably a reflective position as the diversity of RPGs people were interested in and able to talk about at the tweetup likely has a causal relationship to the diversity of the cons where RPGs are played in England.  A lot of the games people talked about were small press and relatively obscure (to me), including a decent selection of home designed systems.  All of which is great but serves to remind me that I’m not gaming enough, or specifically not RPGing enough to enable any form of diversity in my RPG gaming.  Something that I need to resolve or accept.

Tweetup Part 2 - Beer Bus Saturday 2pm

A few extra / new faces this time and it was a more general meet & greet.  Managed to chat with Adam from RPGKitchen about Game Jams / Game Chef (I’ll include content in the post I’ll do on the seminar) which was a lot of fun.

Again it was a pleasure to chat with folks who have a similar interest and for want of a better word “belong”.

Conclusions?  Well other than I need to do more of this sort of thing I also took away a number of outcomes that I will endeavour to achieve.  Let's cover that in a future post though as I think reality it's as much about a re-visit of my hobby objectives as it is anything else.

UK Games Expo 2016 - Summary Thoughts

Summary

I had fun, met some great people, played some great games, bought some games, drank beer (some good, some not) and all in all had a great time.

Highlights

• Travel there and back went smoothly. No real delays and we made good time despite some crazy drivers on the road at times!
• RPGLifeUK TweetUp - Will cover that in a separate post, both the tweetup(s) themselves and the outcomes I am considering, but all in all it was fantastic to be able to meet up with folks.
• Seminar on Games in Education - Also a separate post but at a high level the seminar was a) overly focussed on those who want to work in the industry (negative) and b) great at providing an insight into the Game Jam process (positive).
• Using the NEC really gave the con a feeling of scale and of course fantastic presence with general public.  What it also enabled was a fantastic amount of game space in the Hilton which removed the need for what must have been an expensive marquee from last year.  There are niggles with the split site (see below) but overall the UK Games Expo team delivered.
• Trade presence. Good balance between small press <=> publisher <=> retailer and but still some notable absentees. Someone needs to kick people like Wizards Of The Coast to make sure they know how big a deal this convention is becoming. 12,500 unique attendees (current estimates) is a huge deal.  Last year the Origins convention in Columbus Ohio reached 15,938 unique attendees with a turnstile attendance of 43,791 over 5 days (versus an estimated 25,000 over 3 days at UKGExpo).  This isn't to be sniffed at as Origins is a flagship event for the hobby.
• Food trucks were fantastic serving some fantastic food at great prices.  I can't compliment them enough.
• General ambiance of “comfortable happy” with added sprinkles of fun. It was a more relaxed experience compared to last year where the whole con felt rushed and compressed.  There was room to breathe this year.

Lowlights

• Split site…  Ok so I always knew that this was going to be a grumble topic. 2 perspectives of the split site arrangement between the NEC and the Hilton.
• The NEC set up - Hall 1 is pretty big. What that meant was that on the Friday the hall felt bigger than the con needed, on the Saturday that was less the case though as the masses turned up. Is that emptiness a bad thing?  Well no but it sends a signal (to me at least) that the event wasn’t necessarily getting the industry support that it requires.
  Now to be fair(er) the leap in space from single site is significant but at the same time there were areas of non-use in the hall and areas of “poor” use in the hall.  By non-use I mean there were cordoned off areas that were actually empty.  Devoid of content.  Not small areas either. Unsure if this was a necessary evil or something else was at play...
  Poor use elements would include the seminars being in a cordoned off area that struggled to cope with the background noise of the wider hall - or at least they did in the case of the 1 seminar I attended.  Not exactly a representative sample I know.  I would have thought that seminars would have been better served in the Hilton OR if they'd used / created an actual room in the NEC for them...
• The dual site nature - It’s a short walk which is absolutely fine. I’d almost go so far as to say it was a good thing to encourage attendees to take in some fresh air and move (other than round the trade hall) as the temptation is to sit and play games all day.  The kicker is though that by having the con split it breaks the ambiance and atmosphere a little. It also breaks the attendees into 2 distinct groups.  Those who are there “just to shop” and those who are there to game throughout the con.  If I’d been playing in RPGs all weekend or even the Heroclix events I wouldn’t have done as much browsing in the trade hall never mind any actual shopping.  Plus given that 99% of all the ticketed events were at the Hilton I don't really understand why the ticketing was at the NEC...
  
  Obviously this is all a learning curve for the organisers as the inclusion of the NEC has added some extra funkiness.
• Bring Buy - I think this has become too big to be something that can be adequately managed. It's almost become one of those "big cons don't do it" things.  To give it the space that it would need to make it work better & smoother and avoid it being disruptive to surrounding traders I think the con would reach or breach that point where it made sense financially.  Yeah it raises a fantastic amount of money for charity, truly a fantastic amount but there must be a tipping point where the square feet it would need would cost more than the money involved.
  Or an alternative is found... 

So there are more bullets under Highlights than Lowlights and in reality the Lowlights are more about the challenges that scale brings to any event.

There are other things I still want the con to do that it isn't and other things that I'd change / seek to improve on but those aren't Lowlights per se...  I may re-visit my evolutionary steps post from last year to look at what I’d change for future years but in reality there's very little wrong with UK Games Expo and that is something to celebrate.

Pre UK Games Expo 2016 Thoughts

So Thursday sees the return of UK Games Expo which this year is bigger than ever and is celebrating it's 10 year anniversary.

Those who've been with the blog for some time may recall that I went last year (see here, here, here, here and ultimately here for info) and thoroughly enjoyed my time there.

This year I plan to approach it in a similar way to last year.  No events booked and treat it like a gamers holiday where I'll float about, chill out, play the odd game, buy some stuff and of course have a few drinks with friends (real and virtual).

That said... I will be doing at least 2 things different from last year.

My previous post about RPGLifeUK is one of those things.

The other is that they've introduced Seminars, or more precisely Seminars I'm interested in.

Namely - Hall One Events - 14.00 Teaching with Games:
How are games used to teach and learn? Games Jams, boardgames sessions and design are increasingly used in universities around the UK to help the next generation of games developers explore gaming. Come and find out how games help us learn, what academics are getting up to in various universities around the country, and where you can learn games design! 

Dr Esther MacCallum-Stewart is joined by Douglas Brown, Brian McDonald, Patrick Morrison and James Wallis.

This is similar in context to a seminar I went to at Gen Con but different enough to pique my interest. Also helped by the inclusion of the phrase  "Game Jams" as there's been some chat about those at ENT of late.

So expect some sort of post-UK Games Expo assessment of how the event has progressed in 12 months.  I suspect the split-site element may bug me a little but let's see.

If you're there then pop along to the RPG Life UK meetup if you can and say hi.

RPG Life UK

So a while back I stumbled upon a Twitter chat using the hashtag #RPGLifeUK

Curiousity got the better (?) of me and I started to interact with the chat and found myself amongst fellow hobbyists with a particular interest in Roleplaying Games.

Now that's not really a surprise.   What was a surprise though was how easy I found the conversation to interact with.

Backtrack a little...

Twitter has never really worked for me.  As a medium for conversation I've mostly used it to promote ENT and for direct messages.  Very rarely have I found it conducive to conversation.

A large part of that is because I don't usually access social media during office hours, not because it's banned or anything, moreso because when I'm at work I'm almost always in "work mode".  So my Twitter use was and still is largely binge based at night when I settle down post work and post family stuff.

Anyway, as I said I discovered #RPGLifeUK and for reasons unknown I decided to make a suggestion.

Has @symatt or anyone thought of hosting a #rpglifeuk discussion "in real time" at a con? Sunday 11-12 at UK Games Expo suits me.

— David Wright (@A2ndChapter) March 13, 2016

Which has turned into -

10 days before #RPGLIFEUK LIVE @UKGamesExpo Topic suggestions? 8pm Hilton 2nd Jun @symatt @pedr @richgreen01 @paulbaalham @FarlandsGames

— David Wright (@A2ndChapter) May 23, 2016

So, if you're going to be at the Hilton at 8pm on Thursday 2nd of June and fancy chatting about RPGs with some random Twitter folks then let +sy matt or myself know.

See you there! I'll be the one in the geek t-shirt.  Oh wait...