benlehman: (Default)
benlehman ([personal profile] benlehman) wrote2009-09-09 10:55 am

Random KumoriCon Thoughts

I posted an "executive summary" of KumoriCon here. These are some random thoughts.

The con staff was incredibly disorganized. They were, with a few exceptions, very friendly, but no one knew where we should go or who we should talk to. Despite running a big chunk of the RPG track, I never got a badge all weekend. Finally I decided to just ignore the bureaucracy rather than work with it, which was fine.

Within five minutes of walking around, Alexis looked around and went "well, there's a lot less blackface than at a gaming con." This was true. She then added "of course, there's a fair amount of orientalism." This was also true. Baby steps?

We had fantastically awesome players. One of them, a 17 year old girl from the Olympic Peninsula, managed to exactly summarize my (and her) game play preferences as follows: "I like playing like this. You role-play a lot, but when it's time to roll the dice, you roll the dice."

Hugely friendly in terms of content and reception. We packed every game that we ran (7-player Bliss Stage games!)

I got to watch Alexis run Bliss Stage. She's much better at running the game than me. I have learned a lot that's going to go into the next revision of the book, much of it GM advice, but also including new rules like rules for some players only playing Anchors.

[identity profile] benlehman.livejournal.com 2009-09-09 10:08 pm (UTC)(link)
There are a lot of people at gamer cons cosplaying dark elves in a way that ... strongly resembles blackface.

Anime cons do not have these people.

Let's just leave it at that for now.

yrs--
--Ben

[identity profile] l-the-fangirl.livejournal.com 2009-09-10 12:03 am (UTC)(link)
...Eew.