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2018 METATOPIA OVERVIEW (ae326)

I don't usually do panels at GenCon, but I do at Metatopia. Last year, I was on panels. This year, I wound up building my schedule around two panels I decided I needed to attend. I kept my mornings open, although in two cases, I added a panel before my first game. My schedule for this year's Metatopia was:

Thursday, November 1: Head out to Port Authority and take the bus to the hotel. Check in, decompress, text Josh the room number, and go downstairs to socialize.

This included talking to Jason Morningstar, who'd spoken with someone Lee had sent a bunch of A&Es to. He showed me a picture of the cover of one of them, one of the ones I'd contributed to quite some time ago. I showed him the one I had with me, which was #516.

Before the convention, I had made an impulse purchase of two sheets of press on fake gems, and I started giving them out once folks got badges, and people pressed them onto their badges. I'm sorry I didn't have more, but the store I bought them from only had so many sheets.

Friday morning, I did the breakfast buffet, then went to a panel I'd not explicitly scheduled:

10 -11: D003: "Mechanical Atmosphere: Emotional Feedback in Game Design" presented by Jabari Weathers and Jacqueline Bryk. The panelists spoke about setting expectations and supporting them with rules, and how the mechanics and rules taught us a language with which to speak about the game.

From 11-1, I had Neal Stidham's beta playtest of Glorious & Fearsome, which is essentially an Everway heartbreaker. I'm all for this, as I like Everway a great deal and am sorry it never took off big.

From 2-3, I had my first officially scheduled game, Horror Mechanics (For More Than Just Horror). The panelists were: Anne Ratchat, Kenneth Hite, Elsa Henry, Julia Ellingboe, and Jabari Weathers. It was a good panel, and I hope to listen to the recording, as I was dozing in the middle of trying to take notes. I do remember learning that Dread is not accessible to the visually impaired -- Elsa explained that she would constantly knock the tower over accidentally, not when making pulls, but because she could not see it on her blind side. I remember hearing put into words something I'd been groping towards, that a good way to deal with the problem of horror robbing players of agency is not to rob them of agency. Instead, give them Lots of Agency within real, but very broad, limits -- which horrible choice do they wish to make? Also, horror gives permission for other forms of transgressiveness, for both good and ill.

From 8-10, I had Jackson Tegu's Silver and White. He put the box with the game on the table, stepped back, and watched us play. Our primary complaint was that we didn't have enough time to finish the game, which is a really good complaint to receive. It's a solid game.

Josh had his game of The Steps Between here. I was to play it later in the convention.

From 10-midnight, I had Nahual, written by Miguel Angel Espinoza, who watched, while Mark Diaz Truman ran it. For me, the kickstarter was a "shut up and take my money" thing, and the playtest backed this up. It was wonderful. It's a weird setting, based on Edgar Clement's comic books (which I don't think are yet available in English), and I'm sure the setting would have made a bit more sense if I'd not had to run to the bathroom while it was being explained.

But I didn't really care how much sense it made. It was the premise; I was fine with that. Not everyone will be. If a game about cutting up angels' bodies for food disgusts, horrifies, or offends you, this is not the game for you. (From what I understand, angels in the game world are not Good beings, but that's not going to mitigate things if the previous sentence describes you.)

This is a Powered by the Apocalypse game, which meant tangled relationships. I love those. The person sitting next to me and I were praised for creating a twisted angsty relationship -- we were told we had achieved proper Mexican Soap Opera levels of angst. I also really liked that the abilities we had did what they said on the tin, that is, that they worked as one would expect.

I've gotten used to games where I needed to adjust expectations, and that's not always a bad thing. Bluebeard's Bride is about being powerless, and one simply needs to understand that the Witch part of the Bride is just as powerless as the rest. Bluebeard's Bride is a great, creepy, not-for-everyone game. And so is Nahual, and I love that my character, who could turn into a dog, had moves about loyalty that were powerful and did exactly what I thought they would do. My primary complaint was the same as everyone else's, that we only had 2 hours, not 4.

Friday, I either skipped breakfast or ate food we had in the room. My first game was from 11-1, The Solvers, from Betsy Rosenblatt. This is a game about the kind of mysteries solved by Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, and Trixie Belden. The GM said anyone who'd heard of Trixie Belden was hardcore. I mentioned I'd been in the Trixie Belden fan club for a while, which was the first she'd heard of the fan club.

The game had a great mechanic for chapter titles, and these generated the right sorts of plot twists. We weren't sure that there was enough roleplaying in it, but Betsy said that what our particular playtest showed was that the game didn't work with five players. She'd had an earlier playtest with four, and that apparently had plenty of roleplaying. Presuming she's correct, I'm guessing that if we weren't trying to fit in as much as possible into two hours, we'd have had more roleplaying, even with five players.

I grabbed food from the room. Then, I had my 2-4 game, Lucian Kahn's Visigoths vs Mall Goths. It was a very silly game that was a lot of fun. And I'd probably back a kickstarter of it, which isn't usual for this sort of silly game.

From 4-6 was XIG Games's Velvet Generation, presented by Rich Ranallo. We only did character and band generation, but it was fun and included making a tangled relationship map. This is the new edition of Starchildren: Velvet Generation, about aliens who've heard amazing Earth music showing up to form rock bands only to learn that Earth is now in the grip of a dystopia that censors everything, particularly music. I think that this edition will have more focus on Revolution.

8-10 was the run of The Steps Between that I was in. I made sure to let the con staff know that Josh and I had both read some of the Skullduggery Pleasant books, as the game uses these as source material. In the USA, only the first three were available as of 2014, when we went to London and Paul Holman took us to Forbidden Planet where we learned there were 9 books in the series, more or less.

Amr El-Azizi, who wrote the game, said that he'd grown up with these books, all of them, as he was born outside the USA, and he told me there are now two more books. The game worked well, with one player, who hadn't read the books, coming up with a concept eerily similar to the title character, one player deciding to go Dresden Files-esque and create a character similar to Molly Carpenter, and one who decided to create someone similar to Neverwhere's Richard Mayhew. I know the game needs some more work, but I'm really excited for this one.

From 10-midnight was the other panel I built my schedule around. Actually, it was more of a seminar. It was James Mendez Hodes's Game Design Trash Fire Makeovers! To break the ice, he had us introduce ourselves and list our favorite problematic book / movie / what have you. He then split us into 2 groups and gave us some wince-provoking passages from several published games. Each group had to pick one to focus on and to explain to Mendez-playing-Mark-Rein-New Symbol-Hagen what the problems with it were. Then, we switched material, and each group focused on how to fix the other's piece within constraints Mendez told us we were stuck with. After, he told us that while he had exaggerated his persona's cluelessness (and apart from the name, wasn't, I think, mostly based on Rein-dot-Hagen), it hadn't been by much, and I am fairly sure he can back this up if he needs to.

Sunday, I did breakfast in the hotel again, and went to a 12-3 playtest of Kevin Kulp's Swords of the Serpentine. It was fun, but I'm not sure it was a good playtest, as we never got close to breaking what he wanted to stress test, and I don't think that's because it was too strong. I think we just didn't have enough time and energy to figure out how.

Josh had a later game, but there were too many people in it, and he was ready to go home. He'd also left a book in the hotel room, so we waited until it reached the front desk, as Housekeeping had indeed located it, then headed for home.