Today's Topic: Tipping at-con

We're grown-ups now. Instead of bouncing around at the whim of our parents, we can and do take ourselves to cool places to do fun things.

Yes, I'm talking about sf conventions.

There are two big ones this month, WorldCon in Reno, and Dragon*Con in Atlanta over Labor Day weekend.

You're ready to go.

You've preregistered for the con.

You have a hotel room.

You have your travel plans.

You have books or other items that you want autographed.

You've looked at the convention website and are getting an idea of panels you want to attend.

You have comfortable shoes.

You know the 6-2-1 rule: 6 hours of sleep, 2 meals, 1 shower/bath for every 24 hours at the con.

Now here's the thing you may not have planned for but you need to do anyway: TIP THE HOTEL STAFF.

The person who unloads your car and takes your bags to your room should get $1-2 per bag.

The person who cleans your room should get $2-5/night.

This website is a good guide.

Yes, if you have a lot of bags and are staying several nights, this is not an insignificant amount of cash.

Budget for it just as you budget for how much you're going to spend in the art show or dealers' room.

Because really, not tipping is a jerky thing to do. And please, no excuses of "I don't have cash on me, I'll make it up to the person later." You know you need to tip the bellman and the maid; show up at con with small bills in the appropriate amounts.

Don't even start with "I can't afford it." Grown-ups leave tips. Remember that bit about how we're not children anymore? Yes, you have more Star Trek figurines than your 12-year-old nephew, but you know what? That still makes you the grown-up. And odds are that the cost of one or two of those figurines is about what the total hotel maid tip is going to be for your next con.

So maybe skip getting the Khan figure so you can go to the con, and do it the way it should be done.

As a grown-up.

Yet another one for the DON'T DO THIS files

If I'm selling a spare convention membership and offer it first-come, first-serve and you're the first person to respond, don't spend several days jerking me around. Either you're going to buy it or you're not.

Don't try to scam me with "Oh, it's for my son's girlfriend and I don't have her info right now" then a few hours later, "I can't get it to you today, will two days from now be OK?" Then... silence. No money in my PayPal account when promised, no transfer request fax waiting for me.

Membership is now being re-listed for sale and will only be marked as "sold" once the funds hit my PayPal.

Don't be a dick, y'all.

Another for the "Don't be that person" file

So much of this comes down to a simple rule, as expressed by Wil Wheaton: Don't be a dick.

Really.

In "Don't Be a Dick" news, O'Reilly has just released a strong anti-harassment statement for their technical conferences, including putting the big freeze on "stalking, offensive comments, and unwanted sexual advances," and expressing the idea that if you ARE "that person" and the conference gets enough complaints about you, you may not be invited back.

Given the strong overlap between tech types and people who also like science fiction/fantasy/horror/gaming/comics/anime/etc., I would love to see sf conventions and conferences take a similar strong stand, up to and including the option to not invite certain guests back to their events year after year after year, despite repeated complaints.

It would be great to see fandom come together as a whole and say "No More. Enough. You--out of the con circuit."

Instead, we seem to have a group case of the Five Geek Social Fallacies, in which bad behavior is perpetually written off as "Oh that's just so-and-so being so-and-so."

Yeah, I'm a starry-eyed idealist sometimes. But in my dream sf con circuit, "just being so-and-so" isn't a "Get Out of Jail Free" card.

Corollary: having the following ALSO are not "Get Out of Jail Free" cards, IMAO: Asperger's or other diagnosis on the autism spectrum/mental illness/depression/social anxiety/GAD/[other illness here]/previous history of being abused.

But, but but... But NOTHING. Even if you can't understand the reason why a particular behavior of yours is skeevy and wrong, you CAN learn to not do it anymore. And if you don't, then the price is that we as a society can decide to not associate with you.

Jim Hines has a great post on Reporting Sexual Assault in SF/F that's an excellent compilation of resources, including a list of who to contact at various SF publishers, plus links to the Con Anti-Harassment Project, and the Back-Up Project.

Call me crazy, but I have this idea that we should be able to get together for one weekend and NOT be jerks, NOT foist unwanted attention on people, and NOT belittle each other.

We're all at convention X, Y, or Z because we want to have fun, right?

We're there to see and interact with the guests and other fans, right?

We're not there to be creepers, right?

We--the collective convention-running and convention-attending "we"--need to stop giving the creepers a free pass on their behavior, and if you're a creeper, you need to stop being one, lest you find yourself uninvited to fannish gatherings.

Who's with me?

Just doing my @#^% job

Every club and convention on the planet needs to read and memorize this:

HARASSMENT IS NOT NEGOTIABLE.

To wit:

When you get a valid harassment complaint--and while investigation is always a good idea, so is starting with the assumption that said complaint is valid--you go to the person responsible, who I will hereafter call Gray Icky Thing...

You say: "Icky Thing, we've received reports that you're harassing people," or whatever. You say "We want you to stay away from Bob/Jane/freshman girls in the future."

Some of you, I hear, consider the following alternative: "Hey, Gray, what will make you stop harassing people?"

To you I say: NO. DO NOT SAY THIS. NEVER SAY THIS. THERE IS NOT ENOUGH CAPSLOCK IN THE WORLD FOR ME TO TELL YOU HOW WRONG YOU ARE. SWEET GOD ON BUTTERED TOAST, THIS IS NOT OKAY.

Just go, read the whole thing. I'll wait.

Done? OK.

I've been in the position of having to be the club's bad guy and kick out someone who was holding the club (and club's mailing list) hostage with her Borderline Personality Disorder antics--she was gaslighting, and making a couple of people into her personal villains--her very own "black hats."

But some people thought that I was being "mean" for excluding this horrid person, who'd been sabotaging the club for several years. Finally, I'd had enough, and as one of the club's officers, I put my foot down. I wanted to get a printout of the Five Geek Social Fallacies and smack these people with it.

Because in actuality, the people we were being unfair to were the ones who'd felt too uncomfortable to participate in any of the group's activities as long as this one person was still in the group. So one person had been ruining it for a lot of others, and I'd eventually had enough.

So yeah. I'm an Evil Ostracizer. Whatever. Shut up.

GameMaster's Girlfriend Sydrome

If you've been a gamer long enough, you'll eventually run into the dreaded GameMaster's Girlfriend Syndrome. I'll have a longer post on it anon, but for now, I'm opening up the floor for other folks to share their stories.

I'll share a brief one of my own. I was dating a guy who bent over backward not to show me any favoritism in the game he was running. He took it so far in the opposite direction, however, that my character was ruined, and even the other players noticed and commented on it. That game lasted about three sessions because it simply wasn't any fun for me, constantly being nearly killed, having my transportation slagged the first session (with no way to replace it), weapons continually misfiring, allies who weren't.... and what's more, the experience pretty much killed my desire to ever play Shadowrun again.

I wasn't looking for special treatment, just equal treatment. But is that possible, when love is in the air? What do you all think? What have your experiences been?

This week's topic: Gamer Etiquette

To be clear, I'm talking about role-playing games in this post. I'm sure there are dos and dont's for MMORPGs, but I don't know what they are, so I'm sticking to what I know.

First up, dice.

1. DON'T TOUCH ANOTHER PLAYER'S DICE. Yes it's silly, yes it's superstitious nonsense, yes it's laughable, yes I'm sure it has zero effect on how they roll. Still--don't touch my dice. Unless I hand them to you for you to look at because they're a nifty color or because they're solid pewter or made from semiprecious stone, do not pick up my dice without my permission. Do not move them or rearrange them. Do not randomly grab an extra handful of six-siders because you didn't bring enough of your own. Ask first.

2. DON'T QUESTION ANOTHER PLAYER'S DIE ROLLS. If you think a fellow player is consistently fudging his or her die rolls, do not confront the player yourself. That's the GM's job, not yours. If you do it, you're likely to be labeled a troublemaker, and the player in question will probably accuse you of not trusting him/her.

Your options here are to either live with the cheater and carry on, secure in the knowledge that you're not lame enough to stoop to such tactics, or, if it's really affecting your enjoyment of the game, talk to the GM--privately. Even then, tread carefully: the person may be the GM's best friend, or gawd forbid, girlfriend (next week's topic: Gamemaster's Girlfriend Syndrome and What to Do About it).

Don't just blurt out, "So-and-so is cheating on their rolls!" No. The name of the game is subtlety. "I'm not sure, but it seems to me that so-and-so is rolling a lot of [whatever number keeps coming up more than it should], more than statistics would account for. I could be wrong, though, so I'd appreciate it if you could maybe keep an eye on it next session." You've let the GM know that there's a problem, and if s/he decides to take action, your cue comes from that. The GM may decide that you're right and decree that everyone has to make their die rolls in the open from now on. If the GM notices the cheating and does nothing, then you have to decide if you can live with it or not.

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Next, characters.

1. NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER. It's sad but true. Not matter how awesome a character it is, no one else cares -- not even your fellow gamers. So don't even start.

1a. NOBODY WANTS TO SEE A GAJILLION SKETCHES OF YOUR CHARACTER. This is the corollary to #1 above. No one wants to hear about your character, and no one wants to see half a million pictures of your character, either. Not even if she's naked.

2. NO, YOU CAN'T PLAY KAL-EL, BIG GUY.

2a. OR BRUCE WAYNE, EITHER.

It's been done before, by people way better than any of us. See here and here. So no, it's not clever or funny or original, it's just lame. Come up with something else.

3. DON'T LOOK AT ANOTHER PLAYER'S CHARACTER SHEET. As much as players like to talk about our characters, you'd think we wouldn't mind people looking at our character sheets. You would be wrong. In any event, it's just plain rude to go over to someone and read over their shoulder, period. As with dice, the exception is if I hand you my character sheet.

4. DON'T COPY ANOTHER PLAYER'S CHARACTER CONCEPT. This is crucial if you're playing in the same game--if you're the new player coming in, and the game already has a wizard, a gnome thief, a paladin, and an Elven archer, for the love of all that's holy do NOT create a character that is an Elven archer. I don't care if Elven archers are all you ever play. Not only is it disrespectful of the player already in the game and his/her pre-existing character, it shows a lack of originality, a lack of planning, and a dollop of selfishness to boot--what other types of characters might the group need?

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Finally, ten rules to game by, which all boil down to: don't be a douche (paraphrased from the awesome Wil Wheaton).

Specifically:

1. Don't bogart all the snacks and drinks at gaming each week without contributing some snacks/drinks/cash in return.

2. It's not all about you. Other players and their characters like a chance to shine, too.

3. Try not to be consistently late (or early) for gaming sessions all the time.

4. Keep track of your own character sheet, dice, and experience points.

5. Remember to keep real life and gaming separate. Yes it sucks that Billy-Bob dumped you, but your character has no in-game reason to suddenly knife his character in the back, does she? So don't do it; it's petty and immature.

Likewise, it sucks that your real-life husband's character is married to a character that's played by someone who isn't you. Put your big-girl panties on and deal with it instead of sulking in a corner and insisting that they get an in-game divorce. It's called role-playing, honey.

6. Everyone hates a rules-lawyer. Don't be one. Any sentence that starts with, "Well, technically..." is being uttered by a rules lawyer. Whatever you're about to say ... don't.

7. Min-maxing just proves that you're good at math. Congratulations.

8. You can't beat the GM.

9. Above all, have fun!

10. And don't be a douche.