Experience Point: Are you using too much gear?

Last week I got to vacation for a full week at the NC coast with my family. Not just my wife and daughter, but the entirety of my dad’s side of the family. All my sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces, and nephews were there. It was a good-sized crowd and we had tons of fun together.

Now, when I go to the beach, I’m mostly there to relax. I don’t like having a big agenda planned. However, there is a short list of activities that are mandatory, including a long walk on the beach, digging a big hole, building a sandcastle, and copious body surfing. It is this last activity that caused a sudden insight about gaming. I’ll get to the gaming part in just a moment.

When I talk about “body surfing,” I’m a real minimalist. It’s just me and my body (and a swimsuit) out in the waves, surfing. I don’t use a board, boogie or otherwise. I don’t use a raft or float. I simply wait for the right moment in the wave, launch myself forward, head down, arms extended, fingertips up, and ride the wave as far as it takes me. Most of the time it’s right up into the sand.

I noticed I was the only one doing it this way. My brothers-in-law were all out there among the waves with boogie boards or rafts, having a grand old time. I wondered which one of us was “doing it right” and made some observations. I was catching at least twice as many waves as they were and typically riding them in further on the beach. Fighting their way back out into the surf with a big floating object was slowing them down considerably. And the need to get their floating platform positioned properly was limiting which waves they were catching.

Does this mean they were having badwrongfun? Of course not. We were all having a pretty good time enjoying the waves as well as the periodic war stories about how good that one was or how badly crushed we got under that big wave. I’m not suggesting I was riding these waves in the “one true way.” I just couldn’t escape the idea that their gear was slowing them down.

Flashback to my first GenCon in 2005. I had never met or gamed with most of the ENWorld posse and I wanted to make a good impression. I brought with me two games I thought were pretty good: Sky Galleons of Mars and Orcs! They both used the d20 system in one form or another, but that’s where the similarities ended. Each used very different characters and scenarios. And for each I brought minis and terrain appropriate to the adventure.

I had loaded all this stuff into a pair of rather large plastic bins and proceeded to lug these things all over GenCon. Did I mention I was staying at the Best Western three blocks on the opposite side of the convention center from where I was running most of my games? I was a ridiculous and pitiful sight schlepping these huge crates around wherever I went. One night, after running a game late and stopping by the Embassy Suites, Piratecat took pity on me and let me leave the crates in his room to pick up the next day.

Now I will say, these props made an impression. Most folks commented on how well-crafted and elaborate they were. They definitely seemed big and bold on the gaming table. Quite a few passersby stopped to ask what we were playing and took pictures. But were these props worth the hassle? I have huge doubts.

It may be difficult at this late date to separate the favorable impression I made with some ENWorlders whom I’ve come to call great friends from all this elaborate gear I was hauling. I still cherish the moment after I ran Orcs! when Piratecat said, “You’re a really good GM!” And Teflon Billy pronounced it “The Year of Rel” since he was prone to making such proclamations back in the day (that dude SERIOUSLY needs to get his butt back to GenCon). Would they have accepted me and liked me if I hadn’t had scale models of Elvish Treehouses for my Orcs! game? I think they probably would have.

As proof of this theory, I submit that I have consistently brought less and less gear with me for my GenCon games in subsequent years. Most of the response to my games has been pretty good. Also, I’ve participated in lots of games which featured no battlemat and even ones without so much as a character sheet (I’m looking at you, Fiasco), which have provided some of my favorite gaming experiences.

Amusingly, I still tend to run games with figures and terrain in my home games. I got in on the Reaper Mini Kickstarter (which I’m hoping will finally arrive any day now) as well as Dwarven Forge. I’ve got some truly amazing dungeon dressing incoming, and I plan to merrily run a dungeon crawl of epic proportions this fall. I clearly have a great fondness for “gear.”

But I also like to think I’ve absorbed an important lesson along the way: Gear is great, right up until the point that it is getting in the way of having more fun. If you are catching fewer waves and not riding them as far, is that raft really your friend? Are you spending too much time counting squares or moving dungeon tiles around and not enough time laughing and saying, “Wow!”?

Don’t let that gear slow you down.

 

[Storminator]

I recently took our Scout troop to the top of a mountain. I carried as little as possible. Another dad carried everything he needed. Except I carried his tent to the summit because I got bored of waiting for him to lug his gear up!

I should really revisit what I bring to game days since I DM at someone else's house.

PS

 

[Morrus]

Absolutely! Of course, for those of us crossing oceans to be there, lots of gear isn't an option - but even so, I find that traveling light at Gen Con is important for another, different reason: there's a strong chance you might end up buying lots of stuff! Hardback books and boardgames can get pretty bulky and heavy, and there's a LOT of stuff you'll want to buy! So yep, I'll echo that "travel" light advice!

 

[Janx]

I have a simple rule for dressing up for RenFair that applies well to real life.

Keep your hands free. if you bring it, you carry it or wear it.

As such, it's all great to want to be a wizard, but if you do, you're going to be carrying that staff in your hand all day.

That makes it harder to eat with 2 hands, or look at stuff in shops, or even go to the rest room.

In real life, I don't even like to carry a bag. Everything I need should fit in my pockets. Knife, wallet, smart phone.

I have a great leather messenger bag. But if I bring it, it means bringing my ipad, and then getting handed everything else that needs carrying.

Travel light.

that said, I like good tools and especially multi-purpose tools. Pocket knives with a few different utility blades, but not so many that the knife itself becomes a burden in my pocket. Smartphone, because it really does a ton of different practical things (tell time, make calls, get a map, play music, get information). Why would anybody want to carry a watch, a dumbphone, an MP3 player, a GPS, a book reader as seperate devices when they are out and about.


Now as to Rel's case of "body" surfing, that's an odd duck. I don't know anything about surfing. It is possible, that his minimalistic style will become a new olympic sport. Or, his relatives really suck at surfing and thus struggle to get out there with a board. And his body surfing really was more like being washed ashore like a piece of flotsam, he just couldn't see it from his perspective.

Basically, there is the inverse extreme of carrying too much stuff, and that is carrying so little that you don't know you're struggling harder than you need to. Kind of like pulling slips of paper to roll dice, because you thought it was more efficient to go to GenCon without any dice. As the greeks allegedly used to say, "nothing to excess." Carrying a single set of dice, a pen and notepad to GenCon is probably a smart payload. Carrying your entire dice collection, not so much.

For gaming, I found that a dice set and ipad are a really compact payload.

 

[Piratecat]

I would not, in fact, have liked Rel as much if he hadn't had awesome scale models of Martian sky-ships. There. I said it!

Seriously, I remember those plastic bins so clearly. They were huge.

 

[Janx]

I would not, in fact, have liked Rel as much if he hadn't had awesome scale models of Martian sky-ships. There. I said it!

Seriously, I remember those plastic bins so clearly. They were huge.

i think that's the chance all the Mr. Suitcases take. They either look ridiculous and annoy everybody with the extra time waiting for them to lug their crap, dig in their crap to find that thing they brought, or it all pays off because all the stuff they brought actually was contributing to the event.

It sounds like Rel's paid off, because he brought stuff he used in his event, and it impressed the PirateCat.

Most folks who over-carry just annoy me as they show a lack of intelligence about what they really needed to bring.

 

[DaveStebbins]

That same question should be asked in our lives, too. How much emotional gear/baggage are we lugging around with us everywhere? How much lighter would our steps be if we could just put all that baggage down and leave it behind?

 

[Unpossible E]

What a great post! As a kid I spent many long days at the beach catching wave after wave without any gear. There is something very powerful about that feeling of self-reliance, the knowledge that the fun is really coming from you, from what you bring to the beach/game table/life.

 

[Umbran]

Hr. And here I have been musing that many of my games have too few frills.

For vacationing, I heartily agree with the sentiment, though. I don't need many *things* to enjoy a place or an activity. I don't need many *things* in life (which my wife says makes me devilishly difficult to shop for around the winter holidays, my birthday, and the like). We have shifted much of our thinking to making sure we have experiences, rather than stuff.

Now, sometimes you need stuff to have the experiences - if, for example, you want to have movie nights with friends, you need a decent TV. Maybe not super-expensive, top of the line, but decent. The point being that the stuff is a means to an end, and you should be able to check and see if it really is helping you reach the desired end.

 

[Nytmare]

I'm a weird combination myself.

On one hand, I'm huge on traveling if not "light" at least smart. I scale down, try to find as many multi purpose items as I can, and try to be realistic about the big "what if" items that I know from past experiences that I'm going to kick myself for dragging along with me.

But at the same time (and I'd hazard a guess that working in the film industry has a lot to do with this) I want to have not only everything that I will probably need, but also a handful of worst case scenario items, as well as the necessities that the people around me are probably going to forget. This usually translates into not only bringing more than I know that I'm going to realistically need, but to pack and organize and devise ways to carry everything so that it has a Batman's-utility-belt accessibility to it.