Friday, February 16, 2007

Bye Bye Nationals

So, as of today I've withdrawn from GMing at the Nationals. I dare say there's going to be a few choice comments about "unreliable" thrown in my direction, so I thought I'd get my side out first. Anyway, ranting is good for the blood-pressure.

First, for the uninitiated, that's the Student National Wargaming and Roleplaying Chamionship. Basically (supposed) students sign up for a category, then play a six to eight game on Saturday, and another on Sunday. In the early days these were mainly for named systems (D&D, Runequest, etc.) More recently they tend to be weirdly named categories like "Film and Television" or "Open Fantasy", so you have no idea what you might play.

Anyway, this year's event is being hosted by Edinburgh. I wanted to ignore it, but it was pretty clear they'd need every GM they could get their hands on. So Claire and I offered to run a Freeform category, writing one game each. Claire started working on a political/mythical game based on her Sacriston Barrow setting. I worked on a Pirate game, with rules for drunks and ship-to-ship battles.

Then the problems started. The programs went out with a poor description of our category, which now had the stupid name of "non-contact LARP". (Sounds like touch rugby - "just like the real thing, but you don't get to hit people with rubber swords...") We didn't get asked what sort of rooms we'd need. We didn't get asked anything. Questions we asked got ignored, half-answers, or the answer was changed two weeks later.

Finally, three days ago, we got numbers for how many we were writing the game for. (Did I mention this event is in SIX WEEKS!) So I asked for a list of names and e-mail addresses for the players, so I could send out casting questionaires. No. All information must go through the committee, when we have time, maybe as part of the information pack we haven't put together yet, and anyway we didn't bother asking for e-mail addresses on the attendees, and even if we did they probably wouldn't respond, and we'd assumed that you wouldn't need to cast people in advance, and we'd assumed that costuming wouldn't be an issue, and...

The Nationals is normally poorly organised. Not surprising - its a 300 person con run by people with no experience. This one is poorly organised FOR A NATIONALS. Someone is making assumptions without checking. Someone is refusing to delegate anything. Someone doesn't realise that when someone else is doing you a favour, don't make them ask three times for a simple bit of information.

I was going to GM at the Nationals as a favour. Its become too much effort. I quit.

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