Gen Con 2023: Gamers Cranked Up to Eleven

Our Gen Con trip began with a surprise road closure.

I was heading to pick up my son and his SO when I encountered a highway shutdown for road crews to work at precisely the interchange I was about to use, so I had to go past that interchange, get off the highway at the next exit, and then swing around and head north instead of south. 

So... Although I began my trip earlier than in past years, we arrived at Indianapolis about 1/2 hour later than usual. 

"Slight chance of rain" my ass.

This year was going to be a bit of a throwback to years past, when I had to tightly control my budget due to unforeseen costs.* If I hadn't already bought tickets for this years' Gen Con, I would have likely had to beg off. Still, we had already committed to the trip and arrived at the Indianapolis Convention Center with a half an hour before the Main Hall opened up, and all we had to do was pick up our badges from Will Call and head inside.

Uh, about that Will Call line...

That line on the left? That's the Will Call
line behind us. Our line snaked to the doors
at the end then doubled back where
we were going. Yikes.

From that pic, the Will Call line in front of us stretched the entire length of this hallway, turned right and across a busy intersection, and then entered the "official" Will Call line. Although original estimates posted online were for a 2 hour wait, traversing the line took slightly less than an hour. Or, for people who ride roller coasters, the equivalent of one length of time to wait to get onto The Beast at Kings Island.

My occasional plug for The Beast,
the world's longest wooden roller coaster.
It is still the best coaster I've ever ridden on.
Photo from Kings Island.

In the meantime, I became "acquainted" with the fact that there's apparently an RPG based on Avatar: The Last Airbender:

The signs were everywhere.
Really.

Eventually, we made it through, got our badges, and then set forth to go to the Main Hall. I asked the other two if they were planning on heading off their own way, and he said, "Yeah, I'm gonna take a few pics and then we'll do our thing."

"Okay." I saw the big balloon display, this time with an Apollo Moon Landing theme:

Human Not Included.
(She was posing, but for who I don't know.)

After I snapped a pic or two, I turned back to my son and.... They were gone.

Okay, that's fine. Time to enter the Main Hall.

Looking left....

...center...

...and right.

Hoo boy.

***

I decided early on to limit myself to two items. I didn't have much choice in the matter, and I seriously considered reducing that to one, but I figured I should aim for something that's not easily found at my Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS)**.

The first area I spent some time in was Studio 2 Publishing, where RPGs such as Savage Worlds and Traveller could be found. And yes, because it's Traveller, that's where I stopped first.

Traveller isn't nearly as popular as Savage Worlds --hmm, I should do an "RPG From the Past" about Savage Worlds-- so when I showed up at the Traveller section one of the Mongoose Publishing people was happy to find another Traveller fan. We chatted a bit about the game and the new revised High Guard sourcebook that was published over the past year, and what campaigns he liked to play. 

Yes, this was one of my two purchases.

Among the ships inside is the iconic Far Trader,
the Empress Marava class. It may not look
like much, like some Scoundrel I know
likes to say, but it's got it where it counts.

The Mongoose team was going to leave at 1 PM that day, but Studio 2 was planning on being there until the Main Hall closed, which was 4 PM, so I didn't have to purchase right then and there, but that didn't stop the salesperson from trying. I did resist at that point --barely-- because I did want to peruse more sections first before circling around and buying the splatbook.

***

As I wandered the booths, I recalled another goal I had: to visit the Art Show area and provide some artists for my old WoW Classic friend/raid leader, Jesup, to peruse. She is unable to attend Gen Con, but is on the lookout for art for her house. So I spent spent some time talking to the artists at the show and taking some photos of their art to send back to Jes. 

I really liked the whimsy behind these drawings.

Jesup, for her part, was appreciative, and getting a chance to speak to the artists was fun as well. One thing that stood out to me during my chats was that a lot of the artists really liked to paint women. It didn't matter what gender the artists themselves were, that just seemed to be a universal constant. A lot of them got into art through reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, and naturally RPGs had an influence on them as well. Watercolors as a medium were very popular, as was digital. The one term I did NOT hear --and I dreaded bringing it up-- was AI.

The colors absolutely pop here.

One of the artists I spoke to at length admitted he was here to determine the viability of a store. He paints a lot of contract work, but he wants to branch out and reach people for direct sales, and he said that the reaction he's been getting at Gen Con has been very encouraging.

The stylized designs are fantastic in person.

I spent a bit of time asking this artist about
her inspiration, and she was happy to
'talk shop' for a bit. She also enjoyed getting
a chance to be at the con to talk with her
friends and fellow artists.

If there was one place that was going to test my resolve to limit my purchases, the Art Show was it. I survived, but oh was I tempted. I think the thing that kept me from pulling the trigger here wasn't so much a lack of desire, but in the back of my head I kept saying "Just where would you put this artwork, anyway?" And to that, I had no answer. (Yet.)

***

We reconnected for lunch, which for us typically means hitting the food court at the nearby mall. Given my dietary requirements, I tend to choose the least problematic path and get a few tacos from Taco Bell, although the food from the couple dozen food trucks outside the Convention Center looks far more appealing.  I know that Taco Bell and 'least problematic' aren't what you typically put together, but I know the nutritional data for the crunchy taco and can fit it into my dietary restrictions without much effort. Almost all of the other options, while potentially better tasting for me, have a lot of carbs or sodium (frequently both), and I can't really risk that. 

During lunch, I asked my son if he went to the Warhammer area first, and he sheepishly grinned and admitted they made a beeline for there as soon as my back was turned. I then noticed the rather large bag with "Warhammer" designs all over it. He'd acquired a pack of Aeldari, which he informed me is one of the least popular factions in Warhammer. Apparently they weren't even in stock at the game store near Lancaster University, which he attended when he was studying abroad, so when he found it at Gen Con he quickly snapped it up. 

"Do you want to drop it off at the car?" I asked.

"No, because I can use the bag to carry other stuff as well."

His SO was in the process of tracking down a pair of ears --bunny ears, wolf ears, or something of that sort-- so they were plotting out their path to success. But that's one of the things about the con: you'd think it was strictly gamer related, but in spots it's just purely a geek hangout. Sure, it's as if Hot Topic had been dunked in a gamer vat, but that's fine. 'You be you' is what I'd say.

One thing I did see coming back from the food court was --ironically enough-- MMO related:

Who knew that World of Warcraft players
had an entire garage devoted to them?

***

When we returned the Main Hall, I encountered more evidence of Airbending:

Did I mention there was an Avatar: The
Last Airbender RPG out?

I made a point of picking up that Traveller book and then focusing on games that I found interesting. 

Such as The Plot Thickens by Bright Eye Games.

Yes, the box for each version is cleverly designed
to look like a book.

The Plot Thickens is a card game with three different yet compatible editions: Sci-Fi, Detective, and Romance. The game revolves around your ability to string together plot elements to create a story, and after the first round, you can begin to use cards that the other players have played to "thicken the plot" as it were from your own plot. For example, I held the cards Time Traveler, Undersea Base, Portal, Derelict Spaceship, and the profession "Engineer". I then had to string together the cards into a plot, such as "I'm an Engineer, and while exploring we came across a Derelict Spaceship, so we towed it back to our Underwater Base, and once we did so a Portal opened up and a Time Traveler stepped through." I'd have gotten 4 or so points for that work. Now, on the next round, another player could use one of the cards I played to incorporate it into their story, placing a marker on it, and gaining extra points for using the already played card.

I'm a bit hazy on final scoring, but the game played well enough, and even if you're not into playing the game the potential for writing prompts are pretty broad. The three published versions can be integrated with each other, so you could mesh Sci-Fi and Romance together, for instance. Apparently the "Loins" card in the Romance version has been used to hilarious effect in this fashion. The designer is working on new genres of the game, so watch this space for future iterations. 

I eventually made it over to the Modiphius Entertainment area, where I was hoping to see a copy of the Star Trek Adventures RPG splatbook Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide. 

The graphic is from Gizmodo.

Yes, the cartoon has come to life. So to speak.

Modiphius had the book ready for release just in time for Gen Con, and given that I've been a fan of meshing Star Trek with humor ever since the Original Series' Harry Mudd stories, I've been hoping to get a glimpse of how the splatbook worked.

Alas for me, they had none left on display by Sunday afternoon. I mean, if they sold out the copies they brought to Gen Con then that's a good thing, but I was kind of hoping to check it out.

Modiphius was also leaning heavily into their Dune RPG, which I still find... puzzling. It's not that the Dune universe couldn't be mined for RPG material, but that the novels focused so much on factional plotting that you don't get nearly as much of a glimpse of the universe as you'd expect. Or as my son put it, "the book focuses so much on Paul that I'm not sure what you can do for an RPG." The Dune boardgame has been rereleased after a long hiatus, and the factional nature of that game fits perfectly with the Dune universe, but still, I'm not sold on a Dune RPG. But apparently I'm in the minority, as Modiphius was doing some brisk business with the game.

Finally, there's a new RPG that Modiphius had a Starter Set available for sale: Dreams and Machines.

If you can imagine an RPG that scratches the itch that video games such as Anthem and Horizon: Zero Dawn, in a post apocalyptic world with sleeping gigantic terraforming robots littering the landscape, waiting to come back to life to finish their "programming" of destroying humanity. 

It looks really well done, but what especially interests me is the card-based character creation. I picked up the Quickstart available on Free RPG Day (because of course I did) and I came really close to pulling the trigger on this Starter Set.  I decided to wait until later, however, while I perused other game companies' work.

Such as, oh, What Steve Jackson Games has for Munchkin these days:

WARHAMMER Munchkin??
And Age of Sigmar at that.

But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that an old classic was back for another drive around the block:

Oh wow.

Yes, Car Wars is back.

I remember playing the Commodore 64 equivalent of the game back in the day, so seeing the game back on the market makes me smile.

***

At one point I passed by a rather uniquely closed off booth with the entry guarded by a couple of people. "18+ Only" were the signs.

"What the--" I began, then I saw who it was.

Ah. That explains a lot.

I knew of Cosplay Deviants, so I understood why it was protected that way. 

Okay, I have to admit I was tempted to take a peek inside. I had some idea as to what might be there, such as calendars and even some of the Deviants themselves in their trademark risqué outfits, but I told myself that it wasn't worth it to take a look 'just because'. 

Good thing too, because after I took that photo and kept on going, less than a minute later my son caught up and surprised me from behind. Yeah, that would have been awkward.

***

The Modiphius Entertainment booth was on one corner of the Main Hall, and on the other end, diagonally, was Chaosium. Okay, Paizo was nearby, but there was a big crowd there already and I didn't feel like sticking my nose in there at the time. After working my way through a metric ton of people, and some with that characteristic "gamer funk" smell, I was happy to be away from the crowds for a bit.

So I got to pick the brains of a Chaosium rep, talking about a game I'd known about for a long time: Runequest. 

I remembered Runequest from the days when Avalon Hill --yes, the same Avalon Hill that is now owned by Hasbro-- owned the rights to publish the RPG. The Avalon Hill edition was nominally based on the world of Glorantha --a Bronze Age fantasy world created by the late Greg Stafford that actually predates Runequest itself-- but it was also generic enough that you could plug other sorts of homebrewed campaigns into the system. However, the current edition of Runequest is tightly integrated into the world of Glorantha, and the sourcebooks and whatnot are of very high quality. The rep strongly suggested I pick up the Runequest Starter Set to play, because it would do a much better job of explaining the world than he could. 

While I was considering that, I found a new version of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur come to life:

Holy crap.

"I'd heard that a new version of Pendragon was coming out," I confessed to the Chaosium rep. "I just had no idea it was going to come out so soon."

The Chaosium rep told me that they started planning on a new version when they got the license back, but Greg Stafford had passed away before they could finish the job. So they spent a lot of time looking over the editions and Greg's sketches/notes, and have been steadily assembling a new edition.*** The new core rulebook is due out this Fall or Winter, so given the quality of the work that Chaosium has been putting out recently, it should be well worth the wait.

And yes, they had me at "Pendragon Starter Set".

I'll have to do "An RPG from the Past" on both
Pendragon and Runequest. For now, here's what's
inside the box for the Pendragon Starter Set. And
yes, unlike the early editions, you can have female
knights in the game. Score one for Linnawyn!

So I hit my two item limit and spent the rest of my time wandering around, enjoying the Main Hall without buying anything. I won't say I wasn't tempted, because I sure as hell was, but I set a hard budget and I stuck to it.

I did see some designs for games that I've already played in video game form, and while they look pretty I do have to wonder how they'll play out.

Such as Stellaris:

Yes, it does look pretty.

There was one item I was definitely curious about, which was the Ravensburger Limited Edition Gen Con 2023 jigsaw puzzle:

From comicbook.com.

I was at least curious as to whether it was still around and how much it cost. If it cost $20 or less, I could probably make it fit in my budget. When I arrived at the Ravensburger booth, however, their sign up on a door behind the counter had a lot of "Sold Out" all over it. 

I began to maneuver for a better look to see what was exactly sold out and I was stopped by one of their personnel. 

"This is the exit," they said. "You go around that way to the front."

"Okay," I replied, and stepped back.

Luckily for me, someone opened that door and the full sign swung into view, so I could get a good look.

"Sold Out, Sold Out, Sold Out, Sold Out. Got it. Thanks."

So yes, I embarrassed myself by not realizing the one location was the exit (it wasn't marked as such, btw), but I got over it. The puzzle was long gone.

***

Getting out of the parking garage was an adventure in patience, as we were on the fifth floor, but after about 20 minutes or so we finally got out and on the road home.

Unlike prior years, I actually got enough sleep the night before that I wasn't konking out on the drive back home. And believe me, that's a pretty rare event for me at Gen Con.

The crowd was significantly larger this year at Gen Con than last year, and today I saw the press release that over 70,000 attendees were at the con, up from 50,000 the year before. That explains the crowds and sweat and gamer funk in spots. 

As I told my son and his SO on the drive back, "Next year we're getting our badges early enough so that we don't have to stand in Will Call." That does have the additional advantage of being able to relax a bit before the Main Hall opened at 10 AM. And believe me, not standing in line for an hour does have its advantages. 

We did miss my sister-in-law's husband this year, as he was unable to attend due to a family matter. And hopefully, next year we won't have all sorts of money tied up with car repairs. (Or anything else, for that matter.)

#Blaugust2023

*This year it was the cars. All three cars required hefty repairs over the past 12 months, and 2 of them required major repairs in the past 2 months. And two weeks before the con, the A/C on the oldest car started misbehaving, so I know that I have to get that fixed this week. Oh yay.

**Woo, YottaQuest!

***For reference, Greg was able to see the current edition of Runequest's core rulebook out in print before he died, so at least he had that.

EtA: Clarified that I was talking about the Dune novels, not "books", as that could be construed to mean RPG books.

EtA: Added the #Blaugust2023 identifiers.

Meme Monday: Gen Con Memes

Well, this is the easy way out of having to think about how things went on Sunday up at Gen Con. That's not to say that things sucked --they rarely do at Gen Con-- it's that I wanted to keep up with my Meme Monday theme.

I suppose a lot of these memes could be stand ins for just about any gamer/nerd convention, but since I went to Gen Con, here goes...

Yeah, it's kind of like that.
From imgflip.

Uh, yeah. I kind of have to watch
out for this. From imgflip again.

I'm not so sure that's as much of a thing
at Gen Con as it is, say, DragonCon.
I've heard that if you can't get hooked up
with someone at DragonCon, you're actively
avoiding it. From diy.despair.com.

There are people who go hog wild
at Gen Con. So yes, I've seen this
sort of thing before. When you pull into 
a parking space and get out, and the people
next to you have bags as big as a coffin carrying
all sorts of stuff.... Yeah. From Gen Con's FB page.

On The Road Again...

I'm setting this up ahead of time because I'll likely be too exhausted to remember to post it later in the day.

Gen Con Indy started on August 3rd*, but we usually make a point of driving up to Indianapolis to visit on Sunday, which is "Family Fun Day". Back when the mini-Reds were a lot younger, it was a very cheap way of paying to see the con: one price for a family of four. Even paying for the extra mini-Red, it was far cheaper than individual tickets on a Saturday. Today, with the mini-Reds anything but mini, it's still cheaper for an individual Sunday ticket than any of the other days.

So my son, his SO, and I are presently en route up to Gen Con as this is posted. 

Hey look, a Redbeard!
No, it's not me, but it is
'a redbeard'. It's @diceandautism
from TikTok.

I shall report back afterwards. Probably Tuesday.

#Blaugust2023

*Okay, the party really started on the 2nd, but the con officially opens on the 3rd.

A Short Ponderable about MMOs and Motivation

As much as MMOs are driven by so-called Big Bads, the top enemy of whom people have united against, it's kind of funny how few times that plot device has worked in the real world. 

The most obvious example is ol' Adolph Hitler, with folks such as Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and other great conquerors as other examples, but for the most part conflicts and wars have little to do with opposition to a specific leader. If you made a list of the top reasons why people go to war, there's race, territory, resources, and history*, but the one bugaboo that almost never gets brought up in MMOs is the one I was wondering about: religion.

Most MMOs out there don't have religion as a primary motivating factor in warfare or conflict like we do in the real world. Hell, even in a lot of RPG campaigns I've been in, religion has hardly been a motivating factor. More frequently I see a "orcs hate the elves and the dwarves hate the goblins" dynamic but you rarely see an "our gods hate your gods" motivator. If such a motivator exists, it's kind of a secondary thing, where "yeah, the gods dislike each other" motivation tacked on to the primary ones. 

In a world where the gods actively intervene on behalf of their adherents, you don't get a lot of "Our gods are real, and yours don't exist" assertions. Neither do you see the "we worship the same gods, but ours is the correct way to worship them!" argument.

Ah, Life of Brian. I love that movie.
From Yarn.

***

I was put into this frame of mind when I remembered a story that my sister-in-law once told me about when she was in Vet school in the Deep South. This first year she was there, they were coming up on the end of the semester and the Winter Break. Conversation with some of her classmates devolved into what they were going to do for Christmas. 

Knowing that she was Catholic, one of her classmates asked my sister-in-law what she was going to do instead of Christmas.

"Uh, celebrate Christmas," my sister-in-law replied.

"Oh," her classmate responded, "well, we know that Catholics aren't Christian, so when we celebrate Christmas, you celebrate...."

"Christmas. Catholics are Christian."

"No they're not."

My sister-in-law was flummoxed. This was the first time she'd encountered anybody who didn't think that Catholics aren't even Christian, which would be a bit of a surprise to the Pope. 

Then again, I've met people whose version of Christianity is such that they believe the Pope is the Anti-Christ, so... Yeah.

***

I guess we kind of tend to sweep these sort of conflicts under the rug when we play MMOs or RPGs, because the concept of "nobody is correct" and "everybody is correct" with regards to religion touches a raw nerve with people. Besides, religion in the real world comprises a large amount of a person's identity --whether we realize it or not-- and that's kind of hard to replicate in a fictional world where you don't have any real personal stakes. At most, you tend to get what I call the "Exorcist" type of religious interaction. As in the book and movie, the "Exorcist" references the temptation to worship and devote yourself to evil, as opposed to merely worshiping somebody else's gods.

Once in a while religion does come
up in an MMO in a way that is relatable.
But you know, it could be worse.
From Knowyourmeme.

This conflict is comfortable --if you want to call dealing with evil comfortable-- because we're familiar with the tropes involved. It's much harder to drop, say, the Wars of the Reformation into an MMO or RPG because it forces us to look harder at why religion makes us do what we do. That's not a path toward a successful and popular game.

But what do you think? I've talked enough, and danced around certain aspects of this topic enough.

#Blaugust2023

*The "you started a fight with us years ago, so now it's our turn to get back at you!" reason.

How My Brain Works, Part Whatever Plus One

My son challenged me the other week, saying that I just buy games and never play them.

He's not wrong, given the number of paper and pencil RPGs and board games I own that I've never played. Gotten out of the box and devoured, yes, but actually played? No.*

The ironic thing is that prior to his challenge I had actually begun playing some of the video games I'd bought and sat in my inventory.

None of the RPGs that would likely suck me in for hours at a time, mind you, but some of the other games that scratch that building itch. Such as Old World, Surviving Mars, or the reimagining of Master of Orion.

This is the MOO I know, as I never played
the subsequent iterations of the game. And yes,
I know that MOO2 was supposedly better than
the first game. From Steamcommunity.

These three --and others-- can be as nit picky and as complex as you want them to be, but I can also step back and play them with only one eye on the details while I do other things. (Like listen to some of the meetings I'm required to attend but am only peripherally involved with at best.)

But still, I want to get a chance to play those long running single player RPGs.

***

Back when I played Ultima V I used to keep a notebook of all sorts of game info for easy reference. It helped me to know those details as there wasn't a quest system like that found in modern games, so a player had to keep track of everything to give them a chance at completing the story. Even before I formalized notebook usage I scribbled down info from Ultima IV and the original Bards Tale on scrap paper from my dorm room, because a busy college student needed this so they could get their coursework done and keep up with playing the game on an occasional basis.

I was taught how to take notes during
a seminar on studying we all had to take
in 8th Grade, but really it was the old
Colossal Cave adventure that got me started
on this path. From DOSGames.com.

Today, a lot of that bookkeeping is done for you by the games themselves. If the info isn't there, you can also find it on a wiki or somewhere else around the internet. That makes it easy to find answers, I suppose, but for me it also means it's harder to re-engage after being away for a while. I find this lack of direct participation in the note-taking and bookkeeping makes me sloppy, and it leads to me wanting to keep playing a game more so I won't forget what I've been doing. 

This isn't exactly a new phenomenon for me, because I experienced it firsthand in a few classes I had in college. 

A lot of my classwork while attending college revolved around how good I was at taking notes. Or copying equations down from the whiteboard or blackboard (yes, I'm old school), and the subsequent discussion surrounding the problem solving process. Some of those processes, such as solving for the Hydrogen atom in Atomic and Nuclear Physics class**, took about half of the semester. That meant that if you weren't keeping up on your notes, you were going to fall far behind very very fast. 

Here's the proof I actually took A&N
30+ years ago. (!) From Modern
Physics, by Paul A Tipler of
Oakland University. (My copy says 1978,
not 1977 that Goodreads says.)

However, there were a few classes that I had that the notes were passed out prior to each session, and then we discussed the notes in the lecture itself. At first, I thought this was absolutely great, because I wasn't spending my entire class writing so fast that my hand began cramping. I could focus on the concepts and not worry about missing anything. What ended up happening, however, was that I had less retention in those classes than the others.

Back when I was in high school, my teacher in my Physics class allowed us to create a "cheat sheet" on a 3"x 5" index card for use in our mid-term exam; we could cram as many formulas into the card as humanly possible, as long as it was on a 3x5 index card that he handed out a week prior to the exam. The nights before the exam I feverishly shoehorned every formula that I thought I might need into the card without requiring a magnifying glass, and on the day of the exam showed up --card in hand-- ready to go. What I discovered, however, was the act of me writing everything down as I reviewed what might or might not be important meant I committed to memory all of them, so I didn't need the cheat sheet at all.***

I am apparently one of those people who have to actively participate in the writing down of notes for me to retain them better. 

***

Why is this so critically important? Because if I'm going to play one of these single player RPGs, I'm going to have to ration my game time. 

I have multiple demands on my time, and while I thought that once the kids grew up and left for college I'd have more free time, I've found that my time has simply been filled up with other things that demand a slice of the pie. Therefore, unless I suddenly enter an alternate dimension --hey, don't laugh, because if the Cincinnati Bengals went to the Super Bowl in 2022 anything can happen-- I won't have a ton of free time to devote to playing these games to my heart's content. 

As you can see, keeping up with the games doesn't mean "more automated processes" for me at all, because that won't help nearly as much as me actually writing stuff down. I need that act of writing and note taking to make things stick, and therefore it's time to invest in a few notebooks of my own. I am going to play some of these games, and doing so will take discipline on my part; I guess I'm going to suck a bit of the fun out of those games by doing so, but I have to acknowledge reality.

And oh look, Back to School sales are going on right now, with plenty of notebooks to choose from...

Imagine that!
A partial snapshot of the Target
website on August 3rd, 2023.

#Blaugust2023

*There's actually a method to my madness with the pencil and paper RPGs, but that'll have to be on another post. Let's say that it has to do with worldbuilding and leave it at that for now.

**Hi, Dr. Craver! I'm almost 100% certain you don't cruise the net looking for where your name might show up, but if you do, it's great to see ya! Just wanted to let you know I've very fond memories of A&N as well as Physics 206, and I miss those times when you'd slyly sing the Hail Purdue fight song when we were talking Big Ten football after the Friday seminars. And I see that A&N has mutated into a "Physics IV: Modern Physics" class, which is fine by me. Times change, you know.

***Before you ask, yes, I got a really good grade on the exam. No, I'm not going to tell you what it was.

Who Dresses Up For Plowing the Fields, Anyway?

Waaay back when I first tried out Guild Wars 2*, one of the main complaints I had about the game involved fashion. Or rather, that the game was full of beautiful people wearing their Sunday Best clothing, even when they're out in the field farming and doing menial tasks.

Okay, so I'm in Divinity's Reach.
One of these NPCs actually said,
"He's going to look across a crowded
room and instantly be smitten."
So at least they're self aware.

To my mind, tasks where you get grimy are not the sort of time to be wearing your best clothing, and I likened it to looking at Medieval and Renaissance art depicting people farming in the clothes you'd wear to Mass. 

Take a look at the bottom right, and remember
that those are the peasants.
The Three States of Medieval Society,
from The Regime of Princes by Rouen,
Based on Gilles de Rome's work of
the same name. From classes.bnf.fr.

Fast forward to today, and I still have those opinions, although I can articulate them better now.

As much as I admire Kamalia's fashion design using WoW's transmog capability, I will be the first one to admit that wearing those outfits while "working", ala fighting and adventuring, is akin to those peasants in the painting above wearing their finery while being on the business end of a horse and plow. 

This is an entirely separate argument from the "boob window" and other sins of F&SF armor design, as while the boob window is designed to titillate, the fashion behind RPG gear doesn't really fit with the job description. After all, it's as if we're a modern soldier wearing our dress uniforms while on patrol in a flashpoint area around the globe. As much as camo is its own fashion these days --go to your average Bass Pro Shop or Walmart and you'll see what I mean-- its original and still most common usage is to blend in with the background while hunting/fishing or in active duty military.**

***

If there's one thing that's a trope of any society, it's that fashion matters.

As much as I've tried to dance to the beat of my own drum, even I have to conform to societal customs if I want to blend in and not be noticed.***

Are you going to work? Wear the clothes most commonly worn at work.

Are you going to a wedding? Dress up. In prior years that meant a sport coat and tie, but now you can get away with "business casual", especially if you're corralling a bunch of kids in tow.

Are you going to a funeral? Dress up.

Are you going to work out in the yard? Wear old clothes you don't mind getting dirty.

It's pretty much common sense, and if, for example, you go to religious services --pick one, any one-- you're likely to be dressed up to varying degrees. And if you're a kid and you come home from church and want to go play, well, you'd better change out of your church clothes before you do or you'll have to be really careful not to get those clothes dirty. 

Or you could have parents like mine who, after going to a Saturday evening mass (yay, Catholics) gave my brother and me the ultimatum that if we came inside (even just to change) we had to stay inside. And you can guess what I decided to do: stay outside even though I was wearing slacks/corduroy pants and a button down shirt. And you want to talk about standing out, especially in the Summer, that was definitely it.****

If society places certain demands on fashion now, imagine what that might have been like "back in the day". The scarcity of certain hues and dyes meant cloth made of such colors were reserved for highest classes; such as, oh, Royal Purple. (It's right there in the name.) And that's not even taking into account the types of clothing worn by the various classes of society.*****

***

Now, it's one thing if your toon looks something like this:

Been hanging around with those ne'er-do-well
pirates in Stranglethorn Vale, have we?

Obviously Card's wearing stuff that nobody would confuse with something formal, such as this:

Neve: "A Dawnweaver always presents well."
Me: "Yeah, whatever."

But which look would be more appropriate for getting in a mix-up with some nearby yetis?

Me: "You stay out of this."

I was thinking about the appropriateness of Neve's Robe of Power when I remembered an event well over a decade ago. Back before the woods near our house were torn down and houses went up, there used to be an old wooden shack back there. I used to hear from neighborhood kids at the bus stop while I waited with the mini-Reds about how the shack was haunted --typical kid stuff-- and that people would go back there and drink beer without being caught by their parents. I stuffed that knowledge in the back of my head but never thought much of it until one night in the Spring. It was roughly around midnight when I heard quite a few cars going by the house all at once. Our neighborhood used to have its share of people who would speed through as a short cut, so I poked my head out to see if it was enough of a problem to warrant calling the cops.

It turns out that wasn't what was going on at all.

A bunch of teenagers were parking their cars up and down the street and then walking up toward the woods, carrying six packs. All were dressed in very formal outfits, especially the girls.

"Huh, didn't know it was prom," I mused as I shut the door. I knew exactly what they were all up to that night.#

The sight of those girls in those big bright formal dresses and heels navigating the woods at night is what I think of when I see toons wearing gear that look like this out in Azshara:

Uh, yeah. Shouldn't Card be
at a dance somewhere?

***

We're obviously not playing Dragon Age; the gear isn't getting splattered with mud and blood, and we're not leaning into the grimdark aspects of gaming ala Dark Souls. I'm not advocating for gear that is a constant downer; people want their toons to look good and have fun playing the game. I guess that for me that means that --especially for the NPCs-- their clothing match the their activity. Or at least look like, well, what you'd expect people to look like. 

#Blaugust2023

*A decade ago if you were keeping track.

**I mean, duh. Camo is short for camouflage.

***As much as a red headed bearded guy can blend in, that is. After all, there aren't that many of us out there, and because of that we do tend to naturally stand out.

****I have a story about an event that occurred one evening while I was still in all of that church clothing, but it's one of those stories that requires a very specific topic to dredge up. Let's say it involves puberty, girls, relationships, and perceptions of the same, and it's a story I've never ever forgotten.

*****You know you've been playing too many RPGs and MMOs when I have to clarify what I meant by "classes".

#I know Bruce Hornsby and the Range aren't trendy --they weren't very trendy or popular among fans of the bands I listened to back in the 80s-- but I liked them. And really, if you like what you're listening to that's all that counts.

Because I'm Getting Old and Have Seen It All

The other day, I was querying my Questing Buddy how the Friday raid went. "It went well," she said. "We downed Ony first and then got a group for TotC."

"Did you get an Ony bag?" I teased, as that was one of the reasons why people would continue to run Onyxia even late in Vanilla Classic. The "revived" Wrath Classic version of Onyxia returned in Phase 3, a month or two ago.

"Oh, I got it the other week, but I won the head!" (That's the other big reason why people would run Ony.)

"Wait, what?" I was not expecting that reply. "There's an Ony Bag in the L80 version of Ony?"

"Oh yeah! It's a 22 slot bag."

"Huh." I just got outfoxed by Blizzard, as I wasn't quite expecting that they would put an updated Ony Bag in the loot. "I kind of expected it to be a 24 slot bag."

"No, it's like the bag out with the dragon area," she replied, referencing The Obsidian Sanctum raid from Phase 1, which also dropped a 22 slot bag. 

"Hmm..." I replied, trying to remember. "I can't recall if I got that bag or not." Given the amount of effort people put in back in TBC Classic to min-max everything, including bag space, I kind of tuned out these sort of reward drops. I looked at it as representative of the problems afflicting the Classic community, and my appetite for these little quality of life rewards from TBC Classic onwards turned into revulsion instead.

My Questing Buddy, of course, didn't know about any of this. "You DIDN'T?" she said incredulously.

"I just really didn't care if I won it, so I skipped rolling a lot of times."

I could almost see her rolling her eyes. "Why am I not surprised?"

I went back through some notes I made on those Phase One raids. "Oh wait," I corrected myself. "I did win it on the last time we went through that raid. I waited until everybody else had won it and then I got it."

My Questing Buddy sighed.

***

There's another reason why I mentioned this story, and it's this:

If you need to click on the pic to bring up
the original size, that's fine. But it's
pretty obvious that I'm not talking about
the regular maintenance window here.

Even if I didn't have some revulsion toward Blizzard courtesy of their corporate behavior, the "fund raising" pet sale in support of Ukraine would have generated a ton of ick all by itself.

Not that I'm anti-Ukraine or anything, because I'm most definitely not, but because of the corporatization of doing something for a good cause. 

It's not any sense of purity that I feel this way --okay, maybe a little, if I'm being completely honest about it-- but that I know that very very few corporations look at something as an altruistic endeavor. Over the years I've seen the man behind the curtain, and I know that at their heart most companies put only profit. Not good deeds, not society, and most definitely not people. So when I see something like this, where Acti-Blizz recruited Mila Kunis* to promote pet sales in support of BlueCheck for Ukraine, I simply can't see the altruism.

At this point, I'd much rather that companies simply stop trying to put lipstick on a pig about their corporate altruism if they're going to prioritize profits over everything else. That's their prerogative to do so, but they're definitely not fooling me into thinking that somehow Blizzard has turned a corner and will behave like a responsible corporate citizen. Maybe when the wheel turns and shareholder primacy yields to another form of corporate activity I'll change my mind about this, but until then I'll do my good deeds out of the public view and not in service of a corporate master.

#Blaugust2023

*Holy crap, she's matured. I don't know why, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that she's grown up and reached the cusp of 40. Before you accuse me of being ageist or something, I think that she looks absolutely stunning, and not just "for her age". Of course, me being in my 50s, I still think of her as being young, but that goes with the territory.

EtA: Corrected spelling.