Game Nights of the Round Table

 …That’s a terribly misleading blogpost title in search of some grain of ‘cleverness.’

As all participants of the Tabletop Mentorship Program should know, this past Saturday (yesterday as I write this) was “Round Table Day.”

My day started before dawn and ended after nightfall. I joined five very different round table discussions and managed to squeeze in my weekly D&D session and went on two quick excursions with my daughter, just to get out of the house and clear my head a bit.

Being of the mindset that if you are “on time” you are late I signed in to each session a few minutes ahead of schedule and as a result ended up getting the additional benefit of a few minutes one-to-one in most sessions with the roundtable “leader.”

My pre-dawn session was on Prototyping and Production with Geoff Engelstein. Our one-to-one was very small-talky. We’ve exchanged a few Tweets in the past – and my experience has always been that he is nothing if not approachable and friendly.
Geoff broke the session up into three 20-ish minute segments (Physical Prototyping, Digital Prototyping , and Production) where he talked about his thoughts – which he has clearly spoken about at length before as they were without notes, but felt very pre-considered/prepared. He would then take questions and encourage discussion. The contracted nature of each 1/3^rd meant that we didn’t really get too deep into any of the subjects. Though most of the session covered material that I have heard before (from Geoff on Ludology), the few fresh bits of knowledge were probably the clearest single bites of learning I had all day. The one that I can sum up most pithily is that in Geoff’s experience the PX aspects of graphic design tend to get lifted directly from the design into production.  Here I was assuming that only the most intuitively functional bits of my design would have a chance of not being redesigned once in the hands of a publisher. Recently I have been thinking about how to improve those aspects – and assuming that wherever I failed, more experienced minds would fill the gap… so I guess I need to up my game even further than I imagined!
The other takeaway… is a bit more complex and numbery and came more from me putting elements of his discussion together than anything that was explicitly said – and has resulted in me deciding I have to add Geoff’s book GameProduction to my library as a reference. I won’t draw the picture here – it would be too verbose in what is already destined to be a long post – but it revolved around the math and ROI of production and the ratio of cost to produce to shelf price.
By the time we were done, it was light outside.

I made my morning coffee and got ready for my second session. This one was led by Jonathan Vallerand and had the winning title-of-the-day “What Makes a Good Decision Point?” Jonathan has an excellent on-going blog with lots of good thinky subjects, and in theory this discussion was a revisit and re-think of a pair of posts of his from a year and a half ago. Jonathan structured the discussion around several general questions around the larger subject and following each turned the discussion “to the floor” for the group to discuss. There was a lot of good discussion, and one of the participants, Jeremy, deserves a special shout out for using Sushi Go as an example that proved to be so fruitful that it effectively fueled the back 2/3rds of the discussion. Conversely, one other participant took it upon himself to shoot-down two examples I made. One of which was (I realize after some staircase wisdom set in) that he was objectively wrong about, and the other… he was right about from the perspective of the position he was taking – except that wasn’t what I had been saying. I’ll leave it at that. He wasn’t trying to be a jerk I don’t think, and I chose not to have an argument about it – but it did have the effect of making me less interested in engaging in the discussion. From there out I pretty much limited my input to trying to encapsulate what had already been said at length in various back and forth exchanges to single statements. My favourite of which was “The opacity of complexity can make decisions arbitrary.”

Then I went and played D&D with my daughter and our friends in England.

In the afternoon my first session was on the subject of whether self-publishing or seeking a publisher is the best path for you. It was led by Tim Fowers.
 I won’t get into the details – but my first impressions of Tim were not good. That was years ago. I don’t attribute fault on the matter to anyone but myself – most of which can be summed up as “uncharitable assumption.”  Suffice to say that when I saw Tim was leading this particular roundtable, I did not hesitate to sign up. Of all my early sign-ins, the discussion with Tim was the most gratifying. A friendly discussion about how Hardback is the perfect intersection of my Scrabble-lovin’ Mom and my deck-building-loving own game sensibilities.
I also signed-up for this round table as a challenge to my own preconceptions around the subject. Twice before in my life I have been part of an effort to bootstrap a creative business into existence – first as a member of a comedy troupe that ended up touring for six years (a veritable success, though there is almost no chance you ever heard of us) and later in film-production (again, you have never heard of The Beast of Bottomless Lake, though it did get sold theatrically, for broadcast, and on DVD…which shows its age – before missing the prime window for a film of its level in the streaming market. Hence being available for free on YouTube). I was never really the business-guy in those projects. Not much aptitude for it and even less desire to learn.  So I kinda think Kickstarter is not my bag – but, as with my assessment of Tim, I really shouldn’t be making unfounded assumptions.  So I signed up!
This was probably the best pure discussion of the day.  Very open – both in terms of participatory structure and in subject. While it definitely circled around the stated topic and did regularly come back to touch ground in scope, it also ranged well afield into the world of tabletop philosophy. It was very enjoyable.
My favourite point mad in the discussion was from Tim (referring to someone else’s thinking – I did not catch who he was attributing to) when he declared to the effect of “around the blackhole in game design of things you can ‘never do’ (eg. roll & move) is a very fertile corona of very good ideas.”

If there was any theme to my day it came in the after dinner sessions. The first was with Matthew Hocker on Online Playtesting Communities. Matthew definitely earned the gold-star as far as facilitating discussion goes. He had a long list of discussion topics related to the umbrella discussion and he would present each with a few leading thoughts then systematically, in his NPR radio-ready voice, prompt input from each person in the round table. It felt like we were roleplaying a panel discussion at a convention with Matthew as moderator. The greatest value of the discussion was the range of perspectives. Every previous panel had been marked by the reality of the ever-present average-CIS-white-male (which count myself among). I think every panel had had a woman… but only ever one. Every panel had had a person of colour… or maybe two. Hard to say about less obvious minority demographics. But this panel ticked all of the above multiple times as well as the non-binary community. I felt a little bit like an outsider… as I know anyone in those minority demographics feel, pretty much ALL of the time. The conversation encircled that challenge, but surprisingly never actually directly acknowledged it.
Personally I have definitely felt various barriers to entry in the online playtesting community – whether that was unfamiliarity with the social norms of a given group (while being unable to access the cues of direct contact); or the technological gap – I really don’t like Discord (but it seems to be a necessary evil these days of armaboredom); and dealing with the plague of online toxicity – which is just generally repellant (and I am very rarely a target!)

I’ve had a bit of a Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan moment here – my daughter wanted to sign up for Terminal City Tabletop Convention events together, and I indulged her (BTW: The Queen Must Die is demoing there if you want to come check it out.) – and I have rather lost my specific train of thought on the above.
…Anyway – it was good to see a spectrum of people in a roundtable and to have it really well moderated, on point, and to have truly invigorating discussion.

As I logged into my last roundtable daylight was on the precipice of failure, and inevitably would, as it always does.  It was getting to be a long day.  Carman Lam hosted a discussion on “Marketing, Community Building, and Lead Generation During a Pandemic.” I didn’t know until I logged in that I knew Carman’s work – she is local to me and had been instrumental in building the buzz around Chicken Heist – a local Vancouver area game that I played at a convention roughly 2 years ago,

Proof I'm Not Just Blowing Smoke...

supported the KS for, got the game last spring… and finally gathered enough players safely last week to play. Once again I was a minority (I cannot stress how very specific to this single event I am using that term.) participant – this time the only male. The conversation moved very quickly to a lot of very specific discussion that I could only pull very general principles from – one design team who was participating is working on a game intended for immigrant families… pretty specific.
I did get a number of good ideas about how to add some polish to presentation online in general and specifically at Terminal City Tabletop Convention next weekend. I also walked away with some renewed resolve and processes for gathering emails for future building of community around The Queen Must Die.

Night had fallen. I had absorbed so much and filled pages with notes. But my head was full.  Best to bed – read some of a novel I had set aside weeks ago in order to focus on the mentorship. Perhaps some sleep would help sort it all into workable chunks.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but the mentorship has been a firehose of information in general and this weekend magnified that feeling and double struck it with underlines. I hardly know how to process it all.