 I think we'll all do it. Let's do this! Yeah! Well, welcome. This panel is hallowed and made tabletop games. If you thought it was a different panel, you can leave an article to us at the booth, will you? I'll make fun of you, though, as there's more people coming in. Come on, grab some seats. We're waiting. Come on. I'm John Bowling. I'm the senior editor for tabletop games at The Escapist. It's nice to count. I'm here to moderate this panel, and I'm joined by as much people as I am, including Luke Gray. This is a lie. Hi, I'm Luke. I make games mostly really exterior tabletop RPGs. That's it. Oh, that's it? Oh, hey! No one wants to hear me talk about myself. Aww. Hi, I'm Donna Preyer. I work for Green Roan in Publishing. We do tabletop games, and I also work in video games, and I play a lot of games. Hi, I'm Christopher Badell. I own a company called Greater Than Games, and I designed a game called Sentinels and Multiverse. Another one called Black It's Triforce, and another one called Sentinels Tactics. Oh my God, there's so many games! Uh, yeah, that's me. My name is Rym. I do a podcast, and I review and really hate on a lot of board games, and I tend to spend a lot of time talking about games at lectures like this and panels at PAXs. Rym, have you reviewed my games? Panels at PAXs? I'm gonna take you. So, how many of you, let's just do a show of hands, play tabletop games? How many of you don't play tabletop games? You know what I'm saying? Yeah! We have an audience. That was close. Thank you. Did they thank you, come to this panel, or what? He's a ringer. We paid him five bucks to show up. So, we're gonna take off. I'm gonna move a little bit about, I'm sure a lot of you play one kind of game, or play another kind of game. You play one kind of game, you play a handful of board games from that. But, getting really deep into tabletop is something that can take a lot of time, and it can really be painful because it's a lot of people that disagree with you. So, what do we do when we play one role in the game, Luba and Donna, and we want to play more, we want to find out what you're like. You're fucked. Oh, you took the first one! You took the first one! Sorry. Aww. How many of you play D&E or Pathfinder? Cool. Those are cool games, right? How many of you kind of sometimes wish that your group would play another game once in a while? Yay! While their panel's done, get together. Okay, so there we go. Check out Fakwa. But there's often a lot of persistence. I know, we can just go... So, it is hard. When I first started playing back in many, many, many years ago, I couldn't get anybody to... All they wanted to do was play 2nd Edition Forgotten Wrong. We went from 1st to 2nd, and that's all they wanted to play. It's really awesome. We don't care. It is difficult if you are very much to... I only play Pathfinder, I only play this game and this game. I mean, they've got some really big communities and companies to do that. So, how do you support indie development? I think a lot of that comes from... really good, and you know the rules and everything. So, when somebody says, hey, we should play this other thing, like, hold on, I know this rule set, and a lot of the responsibility, a great thing about the indie tabletop and a lot of the cool tabletop games out there are not as heavy to learn, and there's a quick and easy way to get into it. So, that's kind of like, if you want to play a different game, take it to your group and be like, guys, we can play 15 minutes, we can start. I promise you, check this out. And I think that's one of the great things that we can do right now. I think there's another factor that if you look, especially back in the D20, like, third edition Dungeons & Dragons, D20 System Era, a lot of people would say, oh, I'm dissatisfied to say Dungeons & Dragons, and they want to play a different game because, like, the story they're telling doesn't really fit with the mechanics of the game, or they're having some problem, but if they just went to the game store and looked at the pile of games that are there, the different role-playing games, while they're all very different, similarly, either very similarly or similarly enough, where there wasn't enough of an advantage, like switching didn't buy them enough to be worth the effort, and there was no way for them to find the game that was starkly different. The game would actually let them play their, like, the elves are having a dinner party for four hours, and we don't want to roll dice during this. Yeah, and bringing up with some of the other systems is that a lot of people are really into the world and not necessarily the game setting. So, how do you get somebody to maybe try the game setting, you know, but stick to the same rules, ruleset, like fate and icons and things like that, where you can, which is kind of what GURPS was doing, really, you know, is like, here's your rules, but let's have this world that we love and just do a different system. So, last thing before we move on, because this is a bifurcated panel, a black and white panel. I also want to say that we immediately jump to, like, oh, how do we change, how do we move away from this? But it is totally cool to love a game to some so much that you never, ever want to play another game. Like, that is great. You should be so happy if that's your thing. Like, if you have found something that you love so dearly that this is it, you are fulfilled for, you know, the imaginable future, lucky you. I would play Classic Deadlands, and I would play that game, like, every week. If I could, if I had my brothers, I would play that game, Classic Deadlands, all the time. I love it. So, and then, I mean, but the other side of that is, if you know somebody who loves that game, don't be mad at them because they love a game and they don't want to play your stupid game. I think that friction, though, comes from people who love a game and their friends love a game, but there's something that bothers them about it and it's very hard for them to find a way to fix that thing over time. Like, that grows, like, the ring in someone's pocket until eventually they go crazy, and they decide to hate D&D, but actually they love 90% of D&D, and they start hitting their friends who don't want to play a different system. Just because of grapple rules. Really? So, we kind of flip to the same coin, but we don't see the same problem as much here. Board games, specifically. Not card games, though. I think you do see it in board games. You do see it in a lot of board games. And sometimes, right-street people really love to play board games. I know groups of people. I like my friends. They only play deck-building games. Nobody. Games like Dominion. That is it. That is their Dungeons and Dragons. They play deck-building games. That is literally all they care about. Their friends are like, hey, let's play this Konitia game. Let's play this card. They're like, no, we only play deck-building games. Are you talking about Scott? Scott only plays NetRather. No, but Dungeons is absolutely correct. In general, the general sort of truth is that an RPG group is going to find an RPG and stick with that for a long time because they're doing an ongoing campaign and they're playing for a long period of time. Whereas, a board game group is going to be like, they're going to get together once a week or once a month or whatever. And they're going to be like, okay, what board games are we busting out tonight? And a good board game group has a library of games. That library could be three games. It could be 17 games. It could be two walls. That's right. But generally, board gamers want all the board games. And RPG gamers want to find an RPG and then maybe expand out into a couple different ones. But the RPG group is going to get together and be like, oh, are we going to do birding wheel tonight? Or are we going to do fake core? And I was like, no, you knew what you were coming to. You were going to be playing your character and the story that you've been playing for the last three months and you really hope that you get the same that you were trying to get for the last three months. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm just curious, actually. I love my audience. And I log them all scientifically. I take pictures with my mind. So you all said, like, everyone except for... Except for that guy. Everyone except for that guy. So you just keep your hand down. You all said that you play tabletop games. So how many of you play multiple tabletop games in a night, like on game night? Cool. Does anyone play just like one giant war game on game night? Yeah. So you have to go like a risk of night or a war hammer night. People 4x. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Twilight Imperium. Man, I love Arkham War, but I don't often have 16 hours of poor dining room tables. Right. But it's just an interesting divide, an interesting perception about... And civilization. ...four games where we'll sit down and churn through multiple systems in a night with RPGs. We're much more proprietary and clingy to our... How many people actually play RPGs and not board games? Well, and not board games. I mean, RPGs is your big thing. Yeah, who here considers it primarily an RPG player? Oh wait, alright, so we... Hey! That guy's hand is up. So what do you play? Hold on. You're now the most important person in this family. What do you say you're an RPG player? What do you play? Great. What's the last thing you play? The most recent thing you play? Skyrim. Witcher 2. Dark Souls. Cool. Alrighty, look at what we in the program have. When we say role-playing game, some people think Final Fantasy, some people think Burning Whales. Everyone thinks a role-playing game is a different thing. It's alright. Very interesting. Excuse me, I'm mad. We're talking about tabletop. That's okay. No, no, no. Okay. What are the important, those entry points, right? Yeah. Yeah. What are our entry points for getting more of your friends into the table? Well, you know, a good example for me is because I do so many demos of Dragon Age, tabletop, and... Who knows that there's a Dragon Age tabletop role-playing game? I love you people! I love the Dragon Age video games. I'm doing a demo from two to four today. Not my expectation. But I get a lot of people converted who have never played tabletop. They are, you know, they're like, oh my God, I have to have all these books. And they don't realize that a lot of people are making games that are very accessible and easy to get into. And so Dragon Age is easy because they have a frame of reference. So if I said, oh, I've got this game that you love and it's a very story-driven boss, we got a tabletop. Let me show you how to do this. And then they fall in love with tabletop games. So I have an interesting tabletop game that for me, I'm like, well, there's video games, there's board games. And like me, I mean like me in the past. I was like, well, there's video games, there's board games. They don't really go together because a lot of the board games that were made off of video games were kind of bad. Not awesome, but a lot of them. And so the thing that's great is that with Dragon Age, when you play the Dragon Age video game, you know what the feel of the world is. You know what the feel of the people is. Like the feel, the presence of the game is very, there's a cohesive feeling to that game. And so when you approach it, you know, this feels like that. And that sort of feeling is really good. And that's one thing that I think a lot of RPG groups, a lot of tabletop RPG groups can take to heart is like, hey, establish a feeling. And then the system that you're playing is not nearly as important as the feeling that you're creating. I would argue the exact opposite. The feeling, the experience, the feeling that happens both in board, like ortho games, like competitive board games and role-playing games, the mechanics drive that. And the only time that's not the case is very charismatic, very good at telling stories and they sort of gloss over the rules. The mechanics themselves like a really good example. There's a tabletop RPG called Dread. It's, you know, you play survival horror things. Some people know this. So it's survival horror game. Like we're trying to survive the zombie apocalypse to save people and whatever. But it's like a horror movie. One by one, characters are dying. Conflict resolution is not lonely dice. It's not playing paper rock scissors or doing throw art, whatever stuff. It's a genital. Yes. I love this game. You do a pole and you do a pole and you'll see that the genital gets more and more unstable. Tension builds and builds and builds and builds and builds and builds and then someone knocks it over and the rules say that that character then dies in the most horrific inappropriate way possible. Just like a horror movie. So I don't need to be a scriptwriter. I don't need to be charismatic. I don't need to know how to tell a story, the physical reality of the game. The rules of the game trick me into telling the story I wanted to tell even if I'm terrible at telling stories. I think though there I think the genre or like the color of the game is so important. I don't care whether it's a tablehawk game or RPG or whatever. I mean I just see it like that's the hook. That's the initial hook for us all is like, oh, that sounds like an interesting world for me to mess around and for a little while. And like anybody play Command and Colors? Any of that stuff? Like, yeah, that's right. So good. I'm glad none of you play Command and Colors. Commit. So it's designed by Richard Gorg Memor 44 and other games. And they're they're crazy. They're simple, fast-play war games. They combine things like war and fun which is crazy. So my favorite iteration of it is the Napoleonic's version. I love it and I love these games and I'm a game designer blah blah blah so I tend to look at games through the mechanics. But I know that if I told my friend that, hey, we're gonna play this amazing war game with these really deep mechanics and you can make squares of bunnies because it's bunnies versus birds. Bunnies versus birds. Then he would not play that game. But as soon as I said, hey, Richard Gorg has a new Napoleonic's game now, he was like, where can I buy it? He actually went and bought his own set of it because he was so excited because it's the hook there is the genre. It's so so much like the initial step. And I mean, if the game was bad, obviously he wouldn't play it because he's very discerning about these things too. The game is unfortunately very good. But yeah, it's our first gateway but you'd have to love the color of the game. But I guess it's if the mechanics don't support that color, then it goes from this initial interest to extreme dislike. Sure, I've seen that happen. I think that's the that's what I was sort of trying to get at. I mean, I think that's why we hate licensed games so much is because we're like, love this thing. This is the worst design thing ever. Yeah. Yeah. When you go from like, oh man, I love Star Wars to this game. And actually I'm not thinking of a specific Star Wars game. Star Wars D20. It was D&D rules plus some stuff about ships like the proper nods are all shifted. And lightsabers. They were lightsabers. Yeah, you know what they did about as much damage as a long sword. Right. I mean, it's funny I put the mechanics because game mechanics will turn me off to, you know, I love, love, love, but my hands are not large enough to hold that many dice. Come on. It's like 40 d6. And I hate math. Which why, I'm not a game designer. But yeah, the story, but you're right, the story is exactly what hooks me in. And if I don't like the mechanics, I put them to a system I do like. Something I can teach other people. Right. We've approached into talking about complexity and how you find games in your play style. Say, your friends really only like to play cards. I'm sure some of you are that good. I'm your friends. Your friends are great. Well, you know, I don't think it's about complexity. I think there's another thing at play here. There's basically multiple reasons why we like playing games. Does anyone in this room simply play games because they like hanging out with their friends? Right. Yeah. Like the game night is a fun time. It's better than going to a bar. It's better than going to a movie. It's cheaper in general than all of those things. But, right, I think there's a higher level. It's a social activity. What's it? It's a social activity. It's a great social activity. And then there's getting hooked into the game for its complexity. Right. And then the opposite of playing games because you like to play with your friends is like playing diplomacy. You're playing games because you hate your friends. Or you... Are you trying to let somebody go in a passive aggressive manner? So, hey, let's play diplomacy. But, no, you're absolutely correct. You're playing... And this is one of the reasons that I primarily make cooperative games is the point for a large point of playing games is a group activity that we're all doing together. And cooperative games can fill that very well and RPGs fill that very well. Where it's like, hey, we're all doing a thing together and at the end of the night it was, oh my God, you talk a little bit about remember the time I rolled the natural 20? We talk more about remember the time the story thing happened and the mechanics were just supporting this. I mean, if you follow Willeyton, you know, and it was really funny. So, you get those stories, you know, they can be in tabletop and role-playing or card games and whatnot. You know, you can take pictures to put on Twitter and start conversations of people that want to get involved and play that kind of thing. But you've got to be aware of why, not just why, you're playing the games to hang out with your friends, but you've got to be like one more level aware if you really want to find a game group that will be strong and play the kinds of games you want to play or however you want to do it. You've got to test each other's skill, figure out who's the best at this game. Are you really focused on the competition? Are you trying to tell a story? Do you want a game that's just context for your social interaction? And that is the biggest sticking point in gaming groups. People play Cards Against Humanity to break the ice. Not many people play Cards Against Humanity to win or for the mechanics. How would you give a review? It's really easy. I just bring games and I say, this is what we're playing. Great, Alpha like Gamer is definitely a thing. I do the same thing in my group too. People ask me all the time, like, how do you get your group to play tests? And I say, well, they're dumb. None of them want to be the Game Master, so I just say, this is what we're doing this week. And they go, butt, butt, butt. And I say, okay, you run a game. And they say, okay, we'll do it. I mean, honestly, not to be the cynical one, but I found that I have different circles of friends depending on what type of game I want to play. The indie RPGs I play, I play with this one set of people who just don't overlap. If I come to PAX, I want to play like my for real, like, we're gonna play Puerto Rico and he gives me a phrase 10 times in a row with all experts. We go hide in the corner, like around from tabletop and just wall ourselves up and play with that little group. And then we go back and join everyone else. I form a different gaming group for every type of game I want to play. And I mean, that makes a lot of sense that that's fairly self-selecting and that if you have somebody in your gaming group and they're like, man, this is just not the game for me. Like, ah, because this is not the game for you, I think I know what the game you might be. But look at the problem this causes. I'm now off the radar if there's someone who totally likes to play the kind of games I like, there's almost no way for us to bump into each other. So, two questions. Would any of you play a game that you really don't like with your friends? Like, just to play it? No. Yeah. Right? I would never know. Maybe you wouldn't. No, no. Actually, I have, I won't name the game, but I was so angry. I was angry at a game mechanic. I was angry at this game. And everybody was having fun, and then they started making fun of me. Because I was angry, I flipped the table. No lie. Literally, literally flipped the table. What? Put it back. So those people, no, I made them clean it up. They need to make a table that's designed to be flippable. Exactly. This won't, where all the pieces just stay on it. Let's get on, get on, hey guys, can you make this table and we just flip around? Get on this. It'll be a great thing. Sorry. So, sorry. You kind of missed out on this, most of the time you're transitioning to play the game with you, right? And they're going to try it once. Let's talk about teaching games to people a little bit. Madonna, I think you have something to say. You're on point now. Yay. So that is, you teach people to flip tables? No, because I play in public. And I would never do that to anybody who owned a public, like a store, or a cafe, or a pub. I want to come back and I want to drink their delicious beers. So, actually, my whole thing, why I started my meetup group and I've been doing it in different cities as I go from game company to game company, you know, because that's what you do in video games, is that I established that this is a meetup that's specifically for people who have never played games, board games, who like beer because we try to do beer geek, because it makes it more social and comfortable for people to kind of come in and look at stuff and then leave comfortable and, um, like that guy. Like that guy. Shaming him. Shaming. We're talking about the panel. You're the nice guy. You're the nice guy. So, teaching games. So, teaching games. So, my thing is, that's why, I know, I know, I go a trap. But, um, I don't sit down and play during my meetup. I host. So, I welcome everybody who comes in the door and this is something I'm actually very critical about gaming groups and people that host friendly things and then we never know who's in charge and it's really difficult to go in or, you know, as a woman it can be difficult going into spaces. So, what I do is make them really, really welcoming and I just say, hey, what kind of games to play? Well, I've never played a board game. Here, let me teach you this. And a lot of people come in and they're just like, well, I don't know any of these games and I'm like, neither do we. We just bought them. Let's all learn how to play them. And that's what we did. So, view the hosting is more important than teaching. Okay, I got this real cute two-person thing. Well, you can wait till there's another space open in this game. And they're like, oh, okay. And then I just go and grab a game and we sit down and play and then I get to know them, get to know what kind of games that they like and then try to hook them up and work with other meetup groups and other game stores and I'm here at local. So it's easy to do a cafe mox and we take over the back rooms. So there's, we have our own space where we can, and all my people that are hardcore gamers that consider themselves hardcore that play and love teaching games. So you have a group of teachers. I have a group of teachers and I manage them. Sure. Meetup.com is a really great place to go. That's my favorite place. I've been on Meetup since 2002 and it's a really great source of finding gamer groups because you can show up at different locations and just kind of see if it's a good fit for you. Also, you can go to your friendly local gaming store or gaming pub or gaming tavern or things like that. Those things are becoming more and more popular. We have some representatives from the audience from one of my favorites, 42 Lions. Oh my gosh. You should tell me more. Right. They're pretty cool. You should talk to them. Anyway, so, but you go to your friendly local gaming store and there is, and you might find out that this may be not the store that has this sort of thing but a lot of stores run events and they have groups of people that have got a cork board that just put a piece of paper saying, hey, we're looking for another player. Worst case scenario, you play with them one time and go, this group wasn't for me. Best case scenario, make a new group of friends. So, you know, there's lots of, you know, local gaming store and finding those things is kind of the offline retro version of meetup time. That's the way we used to do it. There's a sticky board. So, yeah. So, yeah. Put stuff up. So, they still do. I think that, Rym, was there something you wanted to add there? You can go. I was going to say something really neat. So, I'm just going to back off. Are you sure? Well, we have a talk at the last PAXE Institute. We called it Why No One Will Be With You. And I found that, at least in my experience, there's a lot of people, like, you do a very good job, it sounds like. You engage. You have people who come to a gaming group with a good experience, they're set up with something. Most open gaming meetups I've seen, the people who engage first tend to be the kinds of people that gaming is notorious for having. And I found that people go to those events and if they find someone they can game with, they leave secretly exchanged contact info and then meet up in an apartment like the next week and never go back to that event again. So those places, like the mechanism design of that is that it's like a hot dog problem. Over time it's all those people, like the percentage of those people are, it's like I was moseying into a concentration. A lot of gaming meetups in my opinion would be the worst places to find. I've got a story to support that. When I was in San Diego I was like, oh, look at this game group. It's right where I work when I was working for SOE. I was like, this would be really great. And I went in there and there was a man every woman that was there, he would come up while they were playing games and massage their shoulders. Oh, good. Why is it always that? Why is it that specific? Like, hey. And there was one guy, one guy, all he wanted to do was play Munchkin. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's great. But he was mean about it. And that's different. He was mean about it. And he's like, well, you know, what do you got a problem with Munchkin? I was like, I think this actually comes down to like what you choose to do when you're teaching cooperative games. When I play cooperative games, because I know that when I'm playing a competitive game, I'm a really competitive player and I like rinding the lifeblood of my opponents. And so I made cooperative games so I could play with my friends. Right. So this is exactly it. So we exist right now, all of us, you and I and everyone here exist in the golden age of gaming. There is never, ever on Earth been a time like this where there are so many games to play, so many options. You can game every second of the day through multiple mediums. It's fucking amazing. I'm going to interject. It's number two. My list of board games. Board games that came out this year as it worked 500 hours. Ooh. Right. So. 500 hours. This is amazing. But we have a problem. We are terrible. Like even though like the gaming medium is so compelling that it works anyway and we want to play these games, we get so interested. We are awful at teaching one another how to play games or inviting one another into our groups. Role playing gamers are notorious for this but I've seen the same thing in board games. Where you sit down and your group has a complete subtext to it. Your group has in-jokes. Your group has favorite games. Your group knows, this guy knows the rules. There's all these, you know, all these lovely things that make your group work. When new players come in, they don't know any of this stuff and they are just completely alienated by all your dumb jokes and your, you know, your weird snacks and all this other stuff. And this isn't even intentional. We're not talking about the creepy guy. This is like functional people that have jobs and take showers and like have been to see a movie in the last year. Like, like totally, like, you and my friends, these are my friends. I'm talking about my friends. It's not their dumb stats. Your friends are really weird snacks. We did get some weird snacks. Oh, I cook for all the ones at my house, so I'm like, so one of the things that I found was really important as the occasional alpha dog and my friends is to kind of break the ice up like the iceberg, the ice flow. That's right. I'm melting the glaciers. So, and you play a new game. Play it. When you have new people there, play a game that none of you have ever played before. Right? And don't play, don't play like pandemic or something where one person is just going to be the general, but pandemic is not a co-op game. No, it's volunteer with other people who are holding up. Flashpoint. I like flashpoint. Yeah, flashpoint is great for putting people in. Seriously, play, create an experience, inviting people over, ask them how, see if they're worthy to be part of your crew. And, but play, do things, get new snacks, right? Break everybody's habits, mix it up, invite, you know, try to do it on a night when like your super alpha friend is busy. And then, so that the people, new people can be comfortable when he, or she's sure. Like an example, you have a, you have your weird inside joke. You haven't told the story of where that came from in 10 years and there's someone new, this is the opportunity to explain that inside joke and tell that funny story. That story is not as funny as I think it is. Unless you're the group that tells that story every week and then maybe don't. I mean, because I'm doing this from the perspective of somebody who's been trying to play games and been told as a woman that, like even in high school that women don't play games, women don't play RPGs, women don't play Dungeon Dragons, women don't play miniatures games and all this. And I still fight this and still women come to my meetups and to come to my panels about this and try to join, you know, a game and everybody was kind of, what do you mean you don't know the rules and I still feel like, oh, here's a cleric. By the way, if any of you people ever do that and you're like, oh, you're the woman, you're somebody's girlfriend or spouse and you give them the cleric, I will come to your house and punch you. I'll be right there holding you. You know what? I love playing clerics and I really love playing clerics but I don't like that default of somebody just handing me the cleric because, you know, the funny thing is when a new person shows up regardless of their gender or persuasion or anything like that, I hand them a DPS and I'm like, okay, you're going to be dumb and just go stab things. Go stab, go stab. They're just saying they're dumb? Yes. No. I like to have stabby things. Don't get us wrong. My character's name is Stabetha. Now it's totally okay to want to have the occasional like, we're all experts playing our expert game thing. Like, it's okay to have a gaming group and someone says, hey, can I play that game you already know the rules? We're playing one game of this where like, we're all super serious to hardcore and you probably wouldn't have fun but we have to be honest about that. You can't be the jerk of us like, no, go away or like, you're not smart enough to play this game. It's okay to say, I'm going to, we're playing this game now on non-teaching game. We'll run a teaching game later. Come back in like an hour and we'll be here. How many of you would characterize your group as a group that plays? You, how many of you are expert gamers? One, two, three. Okay. So, okay, so hold on. I'm actually going to follow up on that. How many of you when you play games more than half of the time there's a new person in the group that you're playing with? More frequently than the expert gamers. Hmm. How many of you have never played a game on expert advanced elite mode? A teaching game, a teaching game, how many of you have never played character? Never character. You have to play it on an expert mode. You don't want to play a nine hour game of the toilet. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, right. That's fine. That's like three meals, okay? When are we playing five in a period? When are we playing five in a period? An hour and a half? Sounds good. Okay. So, I mean, so, other than the funness of raising hands and stuff, that's interesting and important because it's like, okay, like, so generally, and this is fairly indicative of most table-up crowds that I've seen, is that it's more about, like we said earlier, playing with your group of friends and then sometimes you get that tight group together and that tight group does a thing but most gaming groups are about, hey, this is a group of people that actually get along pretty well and maybe there's that one guy that's kind of a dick but we still like him. That's me. But, and yeah, just going to say good, great. But the group is about the fellowship and then finding new games to play and throwing new stuff at the table and that can be new RPGs and it can be new card games and board games and so a lot of it comes back to what we talked about earlier is teaching games. There's a lot of game teaching going on and what seems to be the best thing or at least a good thing is doing a game that, not one version of teaching, where like, oh, I'm the expert, I'll teach you all. No, it's better to be like, hey, let's get a game we've never played before. So if you're looking for a way to bust after a gaming group in some way, in a good way, not bust up as in a ruin, get a game that none of you have ever played before and that you don't read the rules in advance. Say, hey, this looks interesting to me and it also kind of looks dumb and weird but the cover art's cool so let's get it, let's all read the rule together and you know what, even if you don't really like the game by the end of it, you'll probably have an experience that's enjoyable and even if it ends with throwing the game over your shoulders. Yeah, do it. Don't flip the game. Don't flip the game. If you do want to play through a game or if you've brought this up, diplomacy is the game. Yeah, yeah. Whatever. I love diplomacy. I love diplomacy. It's the best game ever. Yeah, no, right. Also, if you don't play this, you want to play diplomacy. Yeah, let's play diplomacy while playing Twilight and Fury. Let's play diplomacy right now. Who's Russia? Who's Russia? Okay. So, I just want to give you a little bit to talk about now that, you know, you're raising the gaming community and this is the cover art in the case of a lot of people, how do you learn to talk about games so that you can talk to people who like the games you like so that you can find new games that you enjoy? There's some words I really hate, some names that I really hate that people use all the time that are true things and are useful and we should talk about them a lot of times, you get a brand new person coming in and it's like, hey, check out this game, it's a deck-building game. What the hell does that mean? This game... Great story about the term deck-building game. Cryptozoic is a company that makes a lot of deck-building games. They made the NHL, so that's hockey, deck-building. The National Hockey League, I believe you've heard of it. They stole the crap out of it in Canada, I don't know. So Bryson is just a no one shopper and they took it to the NHL craft because it was part of their license and they set out and, you know, they're the only board game in a hundred miles. Right. And... There's moves. There they are and people walk up and they want to play the game and they're like, look, there's a card game. I'm not gonna play the card game. It looks interesting to play over and over and there's a deck-building game. And then that person walks away and you feel like... Because they just said a thing that you've never heard before and you don't understand. They're like, I'm like, how do you call my house a board game? This movie is the noir where it's a black movie. Like, if someone isn't familiar with the lexicon, we use these lexicons in every other medium. No, no, no. But that's fine. But you don't see someone, hey, you've never seen a movie ever before. Come to my house and watch a film noir movie. I'm sorry, what? Like, if you have somebody that you're getting... Like we said, there are so many people to raise their hands on. How many times you're playing with a new player? You're playing with a new player? Like, let's not use words like, word replacements. Well, I think we need to use the words so that people learn the lexicon. Yeah. After you play the game. You have to say to people, hey, we got these games. Do you want to play a tech building game? Or do you want to play a cooperative game? Or do you want to play a word replacement game? And they go, I thought we were playing board games. What the hell did you just say? Yeah. I usually just describe the game itself. Let's say flashpoint. We're all fire peoples. And we're trying to save the peoples and the doggies and the kitties. And we do this all together. And we get to drive a fire truck. And they're like, that sounds really fun. That's exactly how it is. But it really depends. You have to understand a lot of nerves and geeks. We lose sight of who we're talking to. If I'm describing a name of my gaming group, I say things like, oh, this is a political orthogan. But if I'm describing to a stranger, I'll use that terminology. But read social cues. If the person obviously doesn't immediately like rock what you're saying, explain the term without waiting for them to get confused and frustrated. I think it's important to note that you said reading social cues. One of the big stereotypes that is not untrue about gamers, myself included many times is that reading social cues is not as necessarily as important as being super passionate about stuff. The thing that the nerves and geeks are good at is being super passionate and often I'll be super excited about explaining something and somebody said, yeah, like six sentences ago you said a thing and since then it's just been like, ooh, acid trip words. Nothing scares me away from someone who's like, I don't know. Like, hey, can I play a game with a person in line? Like, I am very rapidly making up an excuse to get out of there. But so, that's why I'm saying like, you know, just be prepared to start with the, use the dumb words and be like, oh yeah, I got it. Okay, cool. Then ramp it up. But because like rather than, I mean, it's good to be, it's easy to be more inclusive and somebody says, look, I know all about those words. It's like, oh great. Now we can step it up. I find that we really as a culture we just fucking talk too much. But you're, like, your passion is, is infectious. Like, totally be excited about your games. Fleck spit on the person's glasses. You're so excited about them. Like, it's cool. But then just shut up and play the game. I'm serious. Just like bust the game out, show your excitement and don't explain all the rules to the game because I will hurt you. There's nothing, like, I play a fair amount of games. Rim plays a lot of games. I play a fair amount of games and I am so bored the moment you start describing the rules to me. I am instantly bored because I play enough games where I will get it. If we start walking through a turn structure, I'll get it. So please, be excited. Tell me how awesome your game is, your new favorite game or whatever it is. I actually really do want to hear. But then just let's play a fucking game. Yeah. You know, I saw the people who do that, who loved to read everything ahead. I just say, here, this is Istanbul. And then I hand it off to somebody, and then they come back and they go, oh, well, it's really cool. It brings all these styles in. I think that you're going to like it. And I was like, okay, well, tell me why I would like it. And, you know, to talk about why they think it's a great game, not, oh, it won this award. But again, it comes back to you have to know who you're talking to, like be social and like, really, what are you there for? Are you there to play a game and hang out? Then play the game, because someone like me is going to start explaining these rules, like, this is a cube, this is a double cube, this is an ortho cube. They move orthogonally and I start explaining everything. Now, that is all I want. If someone's teaching me a game, that is literally what I want them to do to me, because I'm a very different person, but if I start to do that to someone and I see Luke like pulling out the pistol and loading it up, like I know to back up. Yeah, I actually had somebody do that up in the 6th floor and they started, they actually started, you know, I was like, oh, hey, I'm going to go do a panel. I can't say to demo, I'm doing a panel about loving and hating tabletop. And they're just like, oh, so you want to learn how to play tabletop games? I was like, no. And they started explaining at a very juvenile level about what their game was. And I'm like, can you just give me the quick one, please? And they're like, what? Well, that's the, you know, it's that whole thing. I'm like, you know, we're done with the social, again, the social cues. We, a lot of nerds and geeks and people are excited, you've queued up a bunch of words that you're going to say. And it doesn't matter what, like someone says, hey, I'm looking for my lost dog. Yeah, this is a deck-building game. To be talking to your student that I wouldn't really want to hear, how about joining the online game for games? Because tabletop games in a way that's really quite what it's about. It's just, what people say about the game online is incredibly important. The majority of reviews of your game are going to be from people who've sat down and played it. Reviews are terrible. They're all wrong. They're bad. And since every review then is wrong, how do you write a review that is correct? Or is it going to find someone who's going to be like, oh, this could be makes sense to you? Has anyone written a review, even just like a one paragraph on Horton Geek or anything like that? Has anybody done that in here? Okay. Has anybody gone to the website Horton Geek and is able to fully parse exactly how that website works? Could you help us out here? Because I'm like, ah. And I'm like, you know what I want to see? I like it. This is why I like it. I don't like it. This is why I don't like it. But that doesn't mean it's, you know. There's a section on the website you can get to that says that. I write it gets up with your advocate, you know? Your advocate. And I'll write it up there. And it's like, I really like this. This was really cool and refreshing. You guys should try it. And then people are like, oh, well, you know, maybe you just don't know what you're talking about. I'm like, what? Well, I hate reviews that have any sort of like, I liked it. I didn't like it. I want to see this kind of person to like this game. Yeah. Well, if you like this, you'll like that. Right. That's the part. Because to say, this kind of person like this game, like who the hell are you to say this kind of person plays like this. This game feels like this. And whereas that person, it's going to be different for every person. If you read 17 reviews and 14 of them say, this game feels a certain way and that sounds attractive to you, that's useful information. But when people say, I don't like this game and thus it is a bad game. Like, that's great. Very useful and strong. You know, just saying something is a bad game. It's like almost the laziest thing. This is a good game or a bad game. It's the laziest thing you can say. So, the fiddly words, fiddly is another term. Fiddly is a good game. So, basically this gets applied to my games and a lot of my friends' games. So, if you ever see this, these two words in a game review, you know that the person has no idea what you're talking about. Unless you've said it yourself and then I'm going to tell you no idea what you're talking about. It's a needlessly complex fiddly game. Needlessly complex. It's as complex as it needs to be to work that bad. Yeah. So as soon as you see a review or anybody saying this game is needlessly complex, they're being dismissive, they're not being honest, they're not talking about what the game does or why they like it or why they don't like it. They're just having an emotional response. If you've ever, I hope that those people have said that. You know people who like listen, needlessly complex in my favorite world. It's hard to argue. Oh, God. It's like, bouncing off that and kind of like that whole complexity thing is that I teach people who are brand new and people tell me I should never do this. I teach them small world. It's a gorgeous, wonderful game to teach people and that people can understand strategy and things like that. And if you explain it with that, say, oh, it's kind of like, it's like a cartoon version of access and allies. Well, that made me never want to play the game. You know, I was just like, oh, I don't have the time for that. And this is not a game that takes a long time. And when somebody said, oh, well, you know, here's how it is. This is why I like it. And this is, you know, these are what you do in the game. So I'm like, oh, well, it doesn't sound like, you know, when you get too caught on genre, you know, of this. And so I actually teach it to brand new people. And a lot of times they win because they get when I'm like, you know, don't worry about, you know, I mean, how I play these games with people, like with you guys would be totally different how I would play it with new people. I think something that's interesting is that we're talking about like reviews. We said at the beginning, you know, who here is written review and there's like very few minutes ago, we said how many of you played with brand new people and a lot of hands went up. So you've all reviewed games for people before because when you're going to play with a brand new person, you're like, hey, here's what I like about this game. Here's just how this game feels. Here's this and that and the other. That's game reviews. You may not be writing it down. You may not be a journalist, whatever, who cares. You're doing game reviews and game reviewing, this is what's important here is being able to communicate in a way that makes sense to say, this is the game that we're going to be playing and here's why we're playing this and that and the other. There's no review for this game because we've never seen it before as we talked about. But other games are like this is my favorite game and here's why and if you get so into the passionate like, oh my God, you're not actually communicating anything useful in terms of other than this game is fun, I guess to me. Corollary, if you find that your friends very rarely want to play the game that you suggest, you're probably, to be perfectly honest, you're probably reviewing the games very poorly. You're probably expressing the wrong things not the game, so your friends have been burned and I've done that before. I've found friends who don't want to play games that I suggest just because I described the games in a way that turned them off or I described the game they would love and the game wasn't that. So, you reviewing has a direct impact on your playing. Yeah, that's basically true with the most important game. You have a lot in that to play. No, let's go. What's the next topic? Moving on. Moving on. So, we're going to take a couple of minutes and we're going to talk about fighting and starting. We're going to talk about some of our favorite games, what we think. Maybe you'll be able to take to your friends favorite starter games or favorite games? Starter games. Starter games? I don't have any favorite games. Starter games are a super great starter game. Carcassonne? Yeah. That's a super great starter game because you're like, here's the four rules you need to know. There's farmers this is your first game go super worried about farmers is probably how I'm going to win this or that. But then, like, you're a city dude. They've got some name too. And it's going to be fine and you're going to put these chicks down and they look super cool and the tiles are fun. And at the end of the game I guess we'll count up points but hey, let's just play this damn game and stop talking about the rules now. And then you have to play it at once. It's like, oh, that was fun. We'll do it again. Okay, cool. Carcassonne's very good. My number one is to Thurow. Not Thurow. Thurow is definitely a good starter game. Thurow is a great game. Well, it has a Thurow is fun because it is, it's not randomness by being smart but even if you play it very poorly you're still engaged with most of the game. It's fun. It's quick. So if you get eliminated the game is over a couple of minutes later. They don't feel left out and the game has, I've heard this term a couple of times just in the last few weeks. It has an ego shield. The good starter games are the games where a player who learns the game and loses has some form of ego shield. I'm not dumb. I just didn't understand the game that well. I'm not dumb. The game has some randomness. Some sort of way to, one of my favorite board games ever is a terrible starter game because it is the sum of the decisions you make. If you lose there is literally no way to escape the fact that you made poor decisions the entire time. Or work as hard as the other people on the table. No, it might be true but as a result if you learn that game first it's very easy for us to forget that I didn't know the rules that well. It's very easy for us to think, wow, I'm dumber than all my friends and start feeling bad. This is now their spiral. The starter games are good games with people who lose and don't have an excuse to rub it in their faces. They can be like, I'm the best at Siro for some weird reason. By the way, the game that we were talking about is Siro. I saw some people and I was like, this is Siro. Yeah. And it's super good. You should look it up. So we're talking about starter board games and card games. Well, there's this little game called Dragon Age. It's always really great. There are a lot of people that are doing starter kits where you don't even have to know. When Chris wrote Dragon Age he wrote this the team that all got together wrote this. They made it if you have never been a GM in your life here's this box and all this stuff in this one little box they will tell you how to handle problem players what kind of players how to set up a game how to keep track of everything. I mean, there's some good games that are doing that and I mean, that's right there is my favorite game. I can take a moment out of my head. If you're an RPGer and you want to bring your friends into RPGing or if you just want to start playing role-playing games, you might have heard of a game called Dungeons and Dragons. You should play this game. Everyone in this room should play this game even if you never want to play an RPG in your life. Dungeons and Dragons it's an amazing game. The new edition looks great but it really sit down and play any books that you can get your hands on. This game changed the world. We wouldn't be here and without this game things like little things that we just take for granted like levels and hit points and classes and it only has four level one spells right now. Yeah, spell selection, armor class, probabilities to hit, persistent characters, tiny things like that that existed well outside of the realm of role-playing games at this point. Figure it out, sit down and play that game and find the magic in there because there's tons, there's so much, so much good in that game even if you're like, eh, it wasn't for me. You'll just have a different perspective on games and gameplay and honestly you're more than likely to have fun. It's a great fun. There's story games. We haven't even talked about story games. You know, you basically have a facilitator that kind of you build the story together so you don't need the dice and you don't need that if that's not really your thing and then story them. If you want to start around that, I would recommend if you want to take someone who's never played a role-playing game before, independent dungeons and dragons which even if you hate it as Luke was saying, it's really important to have played it to see that context. Yep. Oh, Lady Blackbird is fantastic. You can learn this game. Your game master can learn this game in 10 minutes. You can start playing within 15 minutes and you can have a session that's done that you can turn into a movie within two hours. Steve Kensen's ICONS superhero role-playing we just republished it. It is fantastic. So if you're not getting like in the full Muse of Masterminds or full, you know, other superhero games is that ICONS is really quick to build characters and play so you can play a lot more with it for a gaming group that wants to maybe invite new people in. I'm doing one, like next year at GenCon I'm doing Sailor Moon versions of it. So, you know, because it's a great system to do that kind of, you know, in the name of the moon I will punish you. If you've never played, so we talked about like oh, you're trying to get new players in. If you have a gaming group and your gaming group plays a lot of board games or card games or video games or whatever, but you've never actually played a tabletop game, a game that I think, and I might get people to disagree with me, but a game that I think is a really good way to just take, you know, the one or two books we need for this, learn them and do that from scratch, is Fatecore Accelerated, which just, you could take anybody who had no idea of any of the things we've been talking about and said, just read this book and do it, and have fun, and they're gonna have fun. Like Fatecore Accelerated is a great way to jump into the world of tabletop RPGs, I think. Okay, so we talked a lot. Let's take some questions about 10 and stuff. Do we have a question, Mike? Do we have a question, this guy, he's gonna pass around. Woo! That's no, do we have an enforcer? Oh, no. Yay, enforcers. We don't have a lot of time, so we don't have a lot of time. Bye, everybody. Ken Steyts. I'm gonna ask you a nice question, do you have any more than two pieces of information? Can you talk more about how true you mean to people? Sure. Yes, you can. Next question. So, I'm so glad somebody asked me a question, I could do that joke answer. So, certainly, I think that you are explaining not just what happens in the game, like, if you do this and you put your worker down and you get free food and you trade it to your friend for sheep, you need to also be able to say, it feels like this to play the game. The value in written criticism tends to be not from a simple overview of what the game is or what the game does. Right, and to just expand on that, I actually, when I'm reading a review or any kind of criticism of the game, I want to know about you, I want to know about the games that you like, what your perspective is, I want to know where you live. I'm a jerk who has no friends. I play games that make people cry. Well, that's the real thing. But seriously, like, I know it's an opinion, so I want to know more about the perspective of the opinion, much less about the individual game mechanics. I want to know a little bit about how the game plays, but tell me where you're coming from with this game and other games that you liked, other games you didn't like. So, I'm not interested in how to convey that as a game. Sure, I would... Sure. Yeah, sorry. Play more games. Seriously, play a lot of games. Sure. How do you spend the summer playing a game called Portugese, or four other games? Five or six times a day every day for three months. I play more games. All the time. Live your games before games you play. That is the fastest way to start to understand how games work. What's important about a game, like, not focusing on the things that actually don't matter, but review. The other thing is how to break things into categories. Like pros and cons, sure, but even deeper beyond that and say, okay, in this realm, for this type of game, it just works this way. And the more different categories you can break things into and the more like, okay, analyze the game on these levels and on deeper levels and on a shallower levels and all those things, that's going to help you get a feeling for, okay, this is how this game can put together and the way the game can put together versus or sometimes in conjunction with the feeling of the game. It's really breaking it down into how it works on various levels. And so hopefully that's helpful. Very good news. Let's chat about the game. It's called Characters to Games, Irish and Norfolk and Other People. Don't use any of the words in that book or review or read the book and understand what those words mean. Sorry. So, in terms of roles, you fall asleep and you, like, get everything. So, I've had a position where you try to get the role and then for simplicity or because you forgot one, there's a rule again that shame you go to the game when you play and then people get upset. So, where do you, like, do you bring that up when it comes up and then the people who had the gym who maybe didn't know that that will be able to see it over? Or do you, like, how do you do that? For my groups, we all of a sudden realize, you know, because like somebody is still reading the rules and then they go, oh, we just go, whoops, and we start over. We're like, oh, we did that wrong. No worries. We'll do it next time. We're still having a fun time. Is the point of playing games, playing games right or playing games with friends you're fine? I mean, that's like, then you start over. If that's your problem. We use a trick. We call it the asterisk. If a game messes up and like someone, like a friend of ours who was new to the game loses because they glossed over the farmer rules and Kirk's up and then they get really mad about it. What we say is, oh, you didn't understand that rule. There's an asterisk next to this game. There's an asterisk in the record. So we say, yes, I won, but we recognize that this was not a good play of the game. I found that that is like the most powerful way in the world to suit everyone's ideas. But yeah, I also like, especially if it's a first game demo game, don't be afraid to rewind like retcon a few turns and say, okay, would you have made a different decision here if you had known that and played from there? Like you can't hurt me. Yeah. All right. All right. We ended up with that and then joined a team of a co-worker that had been playing for years. First, I'm playing and he didn't teach me well enough on making a character. I felt really confused because there's a lot going into building a character. And then, how do you approach someone that has never played it in making a character? Because for me, that was the hardest part. I sit down one-on-one. I sit down on one-on-one and make sure they understand the world that they're joining because, you know, if you're making a character for forgotten realms, it's going to be different. How you make a character for everyone. This example. And if you really, like you're there to have now, see about rebuilding it, if you don't, that gives you a nod and you can be somebody else. Like, is this curiously, like seriously? Or die or go on a ship on a journey or decide to become a farmer. It doesn't matter. I throw down my arm. Right. Whatever. But so, like, if you're playing a game for a while and you're like, oh gosh, I'm just not having fun with this anymore. What's the point if you're not having fun? If you're just made poor decisions because eventually the character died because of the new character died. So I had to remake another character and it was at that point that I was like, I don't want to do this anymore. Okay. Because within a month my character died. Not usually like this. Sure. But you've learned something about yourself. You're a new role-playing game player. You should always look comfortable. Hey, I want to do this. Can you make a character for me? Or with me? Oh, with me? Yeah. Most people aren't complete jerks to figure out the system by if you find out what you want to play with. Yeah. It's super hard to ask for help in these situations. But remember that you're not making a life-long commitment to this. You're not marrying that character. Seriously, like, don't be afraid to play for a few weeks and be like, I made this wrong. You might put a tattoo of your favorite character on your arm. Well, it could be a life-long. But seriously, don't be afraid to restart and try to focus on what you prefer. And because games of suspicion plus the whether it's out. So don't be afraid to admit that and start again. Yeah. He's exactly right. Yeah. Is that it? We got to go. That's all we got. That's all we got. Unfortunately, we're out of time. We'll answer other questions out in the hallway. Yeah.