Hotel Blogging

So I'm in a hotel room at Kublacon.  I've signed up for the LARPS (live action role playing) games that will be happening that I want to play.  In an hour or so, I'll wander down and try to get into the LARP that's tonight and can't be signed up for using the computer.

I like conventions, but I like them for very different reasons than most people here seem to.  I don't stay up until all hours, play game after game after game until I can't see straight.  I don't wander open gaming like I'm on the hunt.  I like seeing my peeps, but I am a curiously antisocial animal--preferring intimate conversation and meaningful interaction to the cotton candy kinds of interactions that happen in large groups.  I mostly sign up for LARPs, hang out in the room reading, catch up on sleep, and maybe take hot baths.

It's bliss.

But it is also a bit of a reminder to me how much I am usually marching to the beat of a different drum when I'm with people I love, doing the things we love, and it is still very clear that I'm doing them in a different way and for a different reason.  I love conventions because they are a great recharge for my writer batteries.

Live action role playing sometimes puts people off.  Even geeks who love getting down with some thick rule books and strangely shaped dice, often recoil in horror from my touch when I admit that I LARP.  I get holy symbols thrust into my face and occasionally suffer communion wafers flung at me like little ninja stars from people who only play games on table top and don't need me weirding up the place.  As a writer I love LARPs, though.  The focus is on character interaction and it runs more like a impromptu theater or one of those How to Host a Murder games than a game with dice and lots of rules.  Most of the table-top games here focus on a single mechanics-centric adventure and not character interaction, drama, or the things that tickly my artsy fartsy pickle.  I'd rather have a game come down to a climactic character choice than a climactic dice roll.  (Though I admit the best games come down to both.)

I've signed up for a game every basic slot.  (The LARPS run for half days, so there are basically five slots.)  Part of me hopes I don't get every choice because some time to chillax in the room and bury myself in a book sounds too delicious.

I debated shutting Writing About Writing down for the weekend, but I figured I come up with a few things to say "in the field," and then process stuff out a bit once I'm home.