Ethnography Results, Weeks 1-3

So, apparently ethnography is supposed to include individual blog posts and not just a group one. Glad I didn't figure that out any later in the process.


To recap what's happened to me so far:


Week one, I was asked to sit out to avoid overloading the group we were sitting in on with a whole bunch of new guys, so nothing to report there.


Week two, I was there for the gaming session that failed to launch, but I think everything was adequately covered by my group-mates.


In the interest of full disclosure, I should note at this point that I have a lot of gaming experience (Although only with a couple of groups, both of which were atypical in terms of composition and culture. There's still definitely some of that discomfort I was told I had to have in order to be dong this right.), so I'm not as totally lost as Derek and Stuart started out, and have also been kind of acting as a translator.


This past weekend, I went to the same group as Derek, which he has written up in detail on his blog, and after he left accepted an invitation to hang around and play the nBSG game Stuart wrote about in his blog. So, that synced up nicely.


The concluding combat was a lot slower paced than the rest of the session; a lot of that was due to a lot of consulting of the rulebooks, which may partially still be due to the group trying to learn Pathfinder. There was a discussion as to whether the monk's auto-summing on his character had made a math error increasing his attack power 50%, which I understand was going to be fully examined over the course of the week, about which may be wrong.


The actual D&D game slowly ended shortly before 11; there was still discussion of what was happening next while the pieces were being put away. I wasn't really taking detailed notes, being way over the two hours, and actively trying to save humanity from the evil robots win the game, an activity understandably requiring most of my attention. The game wound up ending a shade after two, for those keeping timescore.


Now, where Battlestar Galactica has stuff to tell us, I think, is mostly in this category:


"Another curious observation was that during this intro time, each players amount of involvement was directly proportional to their distance to the DM. If the person was not at the table, they talked little if at all, this might have only been because they were eating but they did seem to be listening and thinking critically about what was happening.  In fact if it weren't for the people to the DM's right and far right the game could have stopped as these two players really pushed the story forward."


One of those two players (the D&D cleric) sat out nBSG, and I jumped in. That was the extent of the changes in player base between the two games. From my perspective, the center of the conversation at the table (which was almost all game talk with a little talk about the show in question, although I may have tuning out quite a bit of other stuff) moved away from the DM and kind of wound up in a triangle of myself, the second aforementioned player, and the paladin's player (I really hope I'm keeping all the right characters with the right players, or I'm going to be really embarrassed) although I felt he was mostly talking because I kept prompting him - due to events early in the game I knew for a fact he was my ally and he was seated right across from me.


In this case, I certainly wouldn't argue that involvement in the game situation was correlated on involvement in this discussion. The two biggest tactical errors were made by the two most talkative players, and certainly the monk's player timed his game winning move well in spite of not being part of my group. Of course, I'm not sure that silence should be taken as disengagement in the case of the D&D game, either. Finally, I want to restate that I didn't have a good "viewing angle" as I was heavily involved and not tracking conversations that I wasn't in or that took place away from me.