Day Three for me was a day of seminars. The first was a seminar entitled “Keep Your Science out of My Fiction”. It was run by VV_GM from the Treasure Tables website. The seminar itself was about how to be a decent GM; how to keep the rules from disrupting the game in a role-playing game. Despite the misleading name of the seminar, it was enjoyable with several good tips for GMs on leading a successful game group. It’s also interesting to note that I was the only woman in the room.

My second seminar was the Women in Gaming Roundtable Discussion put on by the Gamer Wenches. It was a forum for women to discuss what it’s like to be a girl in the gaming world. For the most part this was a really great discussion group. The GW girls said they’d been afraid that people would show up, but not be willing to talk, which was the opposite of what happened. There were girls from all gaming factions and genres that were more than willing to speak their minds on the subject, myself included. There were even a few guys that showed up to the discussion that listened in with interest. However, there was one guy that tried to steam-roll the conversation with his topics. He was also a little underhandedly condescending to the women during the discussions, but subtly so that no one really called him on it very often.

I hope that the GW women offer more seminars next year, and more gaming opportunities for women at the Con. It’s nice to see that there’s options for the “gaming widow” at the Con, but there’s not a lot of ‘girls only’ games, which I’d love to get in on.

I got to wander the floor a bit after the roundtable discussion. I played a demo of Theophrastus a game by Mayfair Games. Theophrastus is a game where you are testing to become the apprentice of the great Alchemist, Theophrastus (who was a real person). A recipe is chosen and as game play progresses, each person plays for Theophrastus and themselves. When Theophrastus’ version of the alchemical recipe is complete, the points on the cards for each player that matches Theophrastus’ is tallied to determine a winner. It was a pretty fun game that I’d like to play again. The best part about my demo was that the instructor for the demo was Phil Chase, the creator of the game for Mayfair.

I wound down the end of my day by meeting my WoW guild leader as she and her group waited for the NASCRAG groups to start game play in the final round. Then, it was time to meet up with some other friends down at the Claddagh Irish Pub for a few drinks to round out the evening.