Jason Corley, in addition to being a regular commenter here at Gameplaywright, is an assistant attorney general for the state of Arizona, a long-time roleplayer and GM, and a husband. He co-hosts the “Out of Character” podcast on the Pulp Gamer media network and is on the Board of Directors of the Southern Arizona Gamer’s Association (SAGA).  He tells me that he has been “yelling at people about RPGs online since the mid-90s.”

Earlier this year, Jason mentioned that he was putting together a GM’s conference in his area — the Southern Arizona Gamemaster’s Conference — as a means of helping GMs share and learn the craft of GMing. (Here’s the “Out of Character” podcast episode about the conference.) Yeah, I was as thrilled to hear about this as you think I would be. Short version: very.

So when Jason radioed back to let us know the thing had gone swimmingly, I tossed a few questions his way to see just what this GM’s conference was… and how others could do get one going in their area. After the jump, my interview with Jason Corley.

// Read the Interview

For me, this past Gen Con was more about shopping and conversation than it was about playing actual games. This was a terrible mistake on my part. I could’ve been having conversations while I was playing games, but I didn’t quite manage to pull that off.

It’s not like I didn’t play anything, though. For example, I got to play (at last!), but didn’t buy, the Diana Jones-award winning card game of fantastical deck-building, Dominion, thanks to Andrew Hackard and Paul Tevis being on the ball and on the Twitter. Better still, I got to play it in a bar, which is a fine place for playing card games. (Also a fine place to spill beer on card games, it turns out.) Readers of Things We Think About Games take note: Dominion, in addition to being brilliant and perhaps airtight, legally violates Thing #24. I couldn’t find a way to shuffle the discard pile early.

But this is a post about what I spent time buying or selling. On with it.

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It is done. Gen Con Indy 2009 has come and gone and, with just one missed Gen Con between this one and my previous visit, the whole thing still managed to take on an odd foreign feel. I spent a large part of the show being introduced to people it turns out I knew already but did not recognize, or pestering people I know and like with the two most boring questions of the show:

1. “How’s the show going for you so far?”
2. “Seen anything good in the exhibitor’s hall?”

The answers to these questions can be interesting, provocative conversation starters, but I asked these questions so frequently — often of the same people, especially for certain values of “the same people” that equal “Robin Laws” — that even I got tired of hearing me ask them. So it goes; I was out of practice.

Over the course of this week, though, I’ll write a bit about games I saw or played (not enough of either, by far), starting with a quick rundown, right now, of a few things that jumped out at me, but which may not get posts of their own this week:

1. (more…)

Here’s another question for you tabletop RPG types:

When have you fudged a roll of the dice?

I’m less curious about your policies on this matter and more interested in a specific example that you can recall of when you have fudged, faked, or ignored a dice roll… and why.

// Share you answer.

You’re aware that BoardGameGeek is the best-in-breed website for information about board games. The incredible thing about BGG is that it doesn’t require the qualifier hobby board games, or adventure board games when you describe it. It’s a site for geeks, about board games, whose purview legitimately expands to include definitive information about even mainstream games, for mainstream humans.

Those behind BoardGameGeek have recently launched a similar site for tabletop roleplaying games. It’s apparently part of a new umbrella brand they’re trying to create, “Geekdo.” This, clearly, is a horrible name—worse than “Gleemax”—but who am I to complain if it results in a site for RPGs that brings the raw information and functionality of BGG to the unwashed masses of roleplaying. Luckily, it appears that we can all safely refer to the new site as “RPG Geek,” since rpggeek.com seems to redirect to rpg.geekdo.com.

The unique excellence of BoardGameGeek lies, largely, the way it leverages the site’s community to create excellent content. The first step in launching RPG Geek toward similar greatness is to get on over there and start plugging in a breadth and depth of great RPG info. Let’s get to it!