two items from Paul and Paul

Anyone else having trouble leaving comments on blogspot blogs?  For the last week or so about 50% of the time I get stuck in a captcha/login loop.  That's why I'm writing this first part here instead of over at Quickly, Quietly, Carefully, where on Monday Paul Gorman turned an eye towards an old Judges Guild map.  In the comments to the post Paul says this:

I'm ambivalent about non-rectangular rooms. They make maps look more interesting, but rooms that take too long to explain piss-off the mapper and bore the other players.

The maps I draw for actual play tend to have something like one odd shaped room for each eight or ten rectangular ones. I'm not above sketching such rooms for the mapper to keep things moving.

I wonder if the maps in published modules tend to be spruced-up with more irregular rooms than the authors might use in their own private games.... 

I think Paul is on the money here.  To avoid bogging down the mapping, here is a simple technique: After sketching out a weirdly shaped room, try explaining its dimensions out loud to an imaginary mapper.  Do this and you'll probably find yourself simplifying your more elaborate rooms without omitting them altogether.  And/or you'll get better at describing room dimensions during play.

Also I think Paul is right that some maps in modules are clearly designed to be appreciated as cartographic art rather than as tools for play.  Its very easy to flip through a module and end up turned off by a bland dungeon map, so it should be no surprise that publishers respond to that.

Meanwhile, over at the blog of another dude named Paul we get this lovely GenCon item:

After a leisurely breakfast in the hotel, we headed off to the convention center where my first game was at 10. We arrived pretty early, so I was seated at my table 15 minutes ahead of time: Sagamore Ball Room, Open D&D Area, 8-9. I found table 8 which was empty, and sat down to wait. And wait. As 10 rolled around I started to worry that I was the only person there. I went downstairs to find out if it was moved or canceled, but could find no such listings (really, I swear they posted that stuff in the past, but I couldn’t find it anywhere). I went back up stairs and asked one of the volunteers, as this “Open D&D Area” bit confused me. There was no label for such an area, but then again when I made a circuit of the room every table had a unique number or letter.

Ah, that’s the problem, it turns out the lettered area was the “Open D&D Area”, and I was supposed to know somehow to translate table 8 into table H. Only they weren’t there either. They were at table I. I eventually found them and made it into my game by the skin of my teeth.

Scheduling fubars can happen at the best-run of cons, but this business about having two different numbering systems for the same tables is the sort of stupid bureaucratic thing that can only happen at really big conventions.  One of the things about small cons that I like is that either the people at the reigstration desk are in charge, or they can put you in touch with the people in charge.  Who is in charge at GenCon?  How many layers of personnel stand between you and them?  I had fun Saturday, but I did so while swimming upstream in a river of Too Big For Its Own Good.