Intercon H
Intercon is one of the few places one can run larps and be fairly sure they'll fill. In theory, it ought to be the place where all of the larps are polished. In practice, though, this is not always the case. The game we ran was decent, but still needed polishing. I think the same was true of the game Josh and Beth played in on Friday. The game Stephen and I played in on Friday was even rougher. Oh, the games will no doubt get polished and run again, but it still feels odd that the best audience for the polished game sometimes winds up being the beta test audience.
Friday
Beth got the minivan and arrived around 11 am. It was about 1 pm when we were out of Manhattan, due to traffic on the FDR, but after that, fairly smooth sailing, with lunch at a decent fast food Chinese place in Connecticut. We arrived at the hotel around 6:30 PM.
As Team Straightjackets Optional, we got 2 rooms, and, for the first time, they were adjoining, with connecting doors we could open.
Josh and Beth were in Mystery at the Fairytale Reservation. I gather that the basic idea was good, but the game needed a little work. Beth said that the quest mechanic for getting things done was generally good, but that it was used for everything, which she did not think was a good idea. Josh said that he'd found other ways of getting things done.
Julian was in Last Stop. He hated it. He said that he would have walked out if one player hadn't aggressively interacted with him, something he needs in larps, and that he came close to walking out anyway. As far as I could tell, he put on his casting questionnaire, under "Things the GMs Need to Know" "I am shy." The gms apparently parsed this as "Please don't force me to interact with others" or "You don't want to give me a role that will break the game if I don't interact with someone." What he actually meant was "I need people to pull me into the game or I will go around feeling bored. I don't have the social skills that would make interacting with the game easier."
I heard from one or two folks who also played in Last Stop, and they seemed to like it.
Stephen Tihor and I were in the same game.
AND THUNDER SHALL ROLL
Despite what I thought last issue, I hadn't actually received my character sheet for this larp. Wednesday before the convention, a day after we'd sent out our character sheets, Stephen and I got email apologizing for the lack of Thunder Shall Roll character sheets and assurances that we'd get them by Thursday.
By the time we crashed out on Thursday, or on Friday morning, we still hadn't received them. I was a bit smug, as this meant we were doing well by comparison, and I figured we'd get our sheets Friday night at the game.
At 8 pm or so on Friday, we arrived at the game. Stephen got his character sheet. I was sent to the line of players whose sheet still wasn't ready. One GM was seeing one person at a time on the line to summarize what would have been in the character sheet. Christopher Woo kept coming over to see if I'd had my infodump yet. I figured we were worst enemies or something like that.
The gms explained the combat and asked if anyone had a problem with getting shot by a nerf gun. The consensus was that head shots were a bad idea. Also, the lady who was playing the piano asked that no one shoot her, as she had some physical injuries.
It had to be said, so I said it: "Please don't shoot the piano player!"
The game had to end on time, because one of the two rooms it used was needed for the Dean Edgell memorial. And it started a bit late, given the character sheet situation. Despite that, it was fun. Stephen and I would like to see the full game and tweak it a lot, and Janet, who wrote it, said she was willing to write up the missing characters and let us have it.
The basics of the game: Slim Thompson is celebrating the fourth anniversary of his town in the Wild West by having a shooting competition for a lot of money. Meanwhile, the Hopi have been drumming and they say that the Great Spirit will raise his hand against the White Man. And, indeed, this happened. The town was destroyed by flood. Then, the gms sent the four folks on Team Good to one side of the room and the four folks on Team Evil to the other.
They said, "Okay, you all had a very important goal, a virtue, and a vice. If you believe you followed your virtue, go to Team Good's side, whether you succeeded or failed in your goal. If you believe you followed your vice, go to Team Evil's side of the room. If you fence sat, stay in the middle."
There were some fence sitters, and two people who went to Team Evil. Everyone else was on Team Good's side. They were told that the fence sitters would suffer terribly unless people from Team Good swapped places with them, and thus swapped fates. Despite much confusion and a short time limit, all the fence sitters were swapped out and the swappers did not suffer, as they had proved righteous.
The town was doomed, No Matter What. The question was what the PCs did: who chose good, who chose evil, and who failed to choose. The gms and some of the players thought that some of the people who decided their PCs followed the path of virtuousness were fooling themselves.
I don't agree. I think there were a number of factors contributing to the overwhelming win for Team Good.
First of all, one must understand that, all else being equal, most larpers will find a reason for their PCs to join Team Good. I believe this has been empirically demonstrated time and again. Regardless of what we say, most of us don't want to play bad guys.
So, if you have a game with 5 people clearly written to be Team Good, 5 clearly written to be Team Evil, and 10 written to be neutral, Team Good will almost always win. Team Good will keep its five people and will get a minimum of 7 people from the unaligned players. Odds are at least one person on Team Evil will defect to Team Good, if the game does not strictly prohibit this.
Four people on Team Good and four on Team Evil, then, meant the game was skewed to Team Good. If you want Evil to have a fighting chance, you must almost always skew the sides in favor of Team Evil. As the sides were balanced, Team Good had an advantage.
Second, a lot of players did not get full character sheets. Now, in terms of an enjoyable role playing experience, this didn't matter. My character could be summarized quite succinctly. I was playing Luisa Wiggins. Her husband was a good man who tried to defend a woman's honor, protecting this nameless woman from a dastardly man. This dastardly man shot Mr. Wiggins dead. He died in his wife's arms. Now, years later, she was a gunslinger, hoping to kill this man. Her Virtue was Temperance. Her Vice was Wrath.
I had only two questions: What was her husband's first name?
GM: John.
And, what was the name of the villain who shot him? The gm looked that up.
GM: Brian Black.
Lisa (remembering that this was the name on the badge Christopher was wearing): Somehow, I thought that's what you were going to say.
And, I mentally patted myself on the back when he came up to me.
Christopher: Just one out of character question -- what's your husband's first name?
And that was all I needed to know to play Luisa Wiggins.
However, it wasn't necessarily all I needed to give serious thought to a moral dilemma, and it certainly wasn't all I needed to have more than a 50-50 chance of choosing the Vice. Let's say I started with that 50-50 chance. I'm a fairly good role player, after all.
Janet's gm briefing skewed the odds in Good's favor. I don't believe that she intended this to happen.
She explained that my goal was to kill Brian Black. She stressed that I had to decide between my Virtue and my Vice. I said that I wasn't about to do this early in the game. As in Across the Sea of Stars, I thought this was a decision that needed to be made in late game.
She said that this was entirely up to me, which was fine. She also said that, while I wanted justice, my Virtue was Temperance, and that if Luisa shot Black in the street, no one would understand why she had done it, and they might lock her up. Even if she told them, they might lock her up. After all, this was a long time ago, very far away.
The gm had just told me: You don't want to suffer the consequences of killing this man, and there will almost certainly be unpleasant consequences.
Wrong move. I started with a 50-50 chance of going either way. The odds were now 60-40 in Good's favor, and that's a conservative estimate. It might have been 70-30. Why? The GM has just told me to be cautious.
Stephen Tihor agreed and, reviewing his character sheet, said a couple of things. One was that Janet should not have said anything about unfortunate consequences. That was for me to think about -- or for other PCs to bring up in play. More on that later. She should have stressed the Wild West Frontier mentality.
The other thing Stephen said was that the Vices needed to be presented in a positive light. We're already aware that Virtues are good and Vices are evil. If one wants PCs to have a chance at choosing evil, one needs to talk up its attractions.
A third factor that probably pushed more people to good is that the four people on Team Good each had a list of people they wanted to recruit, and this list had the details of these people's past.
In this run, where a lot of folks did not get a full character sheet, that was devastatingly effective. For example, Brad, who played Mr. Butler from Team Good, told me that one player wasn't aware of what his character had done. This character had publicly bad mouthed the town's whores, even though he was their friend and they had stood by him in bad times as well as good. Either the GM didn't communicate this to the player or the player wasn't paying enough attention. In any case, the conversation went like this:
Butler: I hope that you showing your face in town means you're ready to apologize to the ladies.
Other character (as player draws a blank): Er, what? Oh, yes. Yes. What was it I've done?
Most larpers in his position, with Team Good pushing, will probably go apologize even when they start out with full character sheets. Add to that you aren't really sure what your PC was supposed to have done -- gee, it sounds scummy, and it's not like you've had even five minutes to absorb this in private and get into character. It's a rare larper who'd choose the path of Vice under those circumstances.
It wasn't as obvious as it might be that the town qua town was irrelevant and that the moral decision was the big thing. Thus, it may have seemed that yes, the thing to do is apologize, and go to the main plot. This is something that having character sheets earlier and maybe a clearer game description might have helped.
But, even then, I'm not so sure. I knew exactly what my character wanted, and she was from out of town to begin with. And this man, this Mr. Butler, approached her to ask why she was entering a gun fight. He knew everything about why she was doing it, but he didn't tell her this. I had no idea Brad had all of this in character knowledge about Luisa until game wrap.
I did wonder if some of my badge codes listed my character's Virtue and Vice, and whether Brad could read those. Certainly, as Mr. Butler listened to Mrs. Wiggins' story, he knew just what to say. She needed to temper her anger. Her husband wouldn't want her to die as well. Now, he wasn't there to judge, but that was his opinion, and if there were anything he could do for her, all she had to do was ask.
So, here's this lonely widow listening to a man who seems to care about her. This is a man whose job is to guard the door of the whorehouse and make sure that none of the clients hurt the girls. This... is a man who's not all that dissimilar from her husband, I was thinking. And it helped that Brad's reasonably good looking.
By now, odds are definitely 75-25 in Good's favor, at a conservative estimate.
Now, Christopher did his best. Brian Black was on Team Evil, and one of his goals was to try to get me to gun him down. But, he couldn't exactly tell Luisa Wiggins this. He made some poisonous remarks, and I even handed him an opportunity to twist the knife.
Luisa: Was she worth it?
Brian: Was who worth it?
Luisa: The woman you shot my husband over.
Brian: I don't even remember her name.
Christopher wanted to set up something with Luisa talking to a child so that he could say that she'd probably be very good with kids of her own. Oh, right, her husband was dead. Oh well. Unfortunately, that didn't get set up.
Luisa talked to a couple of other people who didn't want her in the gun fight or shooting Black, including one guy, Alex Miles, who said that if the gun fight got cancelled, she could talk to him about justice. She talked to one person who thought she should just gun Black down, Mr. Sean Bright. Then again, he thought she should spend one night with him, and it would convince her she had something to live for.
Someone from Team Evil other than Brian Black needed to work on Luisa Wiggins.
The fourth factor was the system for gun fights. In theory, your skill was represented by a number from 1 to 5. 5 meant you were the best, and folks could tell this just by looking at you. 4 meant you were pretty good. Mrs. Wiggins was a 4. Mr. Black was a 5. She wasn't at all sure she could beat him.
The fifth factor was a combination of Slim Thompson's decisions and how the gun fight rules really worked. Slim decided that there'd be a qualifying round before the actual rules were explained. Would be competitors had 3 chances to hit a block. In theory, everyone should have qualified. We all had a score of 4, except for Black, who had a score of 5.
But, despite what I said above, the numbers didn't actually mean anything. We have nerf guns. If you hit your target with a nerf gun, your character hit his or her target. I did my very best to hit the target, and all three shots missed.
By now, Luisa had about 3 people saying she shouldn't get involved in the competition. She had heard so much about what the town needed that she was wondering why Slim didn't put his money into the town, rather than a competition. She had heard about the dead rising and an underground city of Hopi in the mines. Slim wasn't being very forthcoming about the rules -- the competitors were to shoot at each other. But, they weren't to kill each other. Or something. It meant that killing Black in the gunfight was a lot less likely to go over well, and Mrs. Wiggins didn't want to go to jail for murder. And, one of the competitors had a sister he wanted to give the money to so that she could stop being a whore. That's surely more worthy than entering a competition just to murder someone.
Really, by now, going for the Vice might have been dishonest. But, I figured, we'd see if I could hit a stationary target. Nope? Well, maybe that's a sign, you know?
Christopher was disappointed in and out of character, and had been rooting for me to hit the thing. I figured Luisa could help Butler out with whatever was going on in the mines, then come back and maybe have a shootout with Black. She certainly didn't feel like watching him win the prize.
As it happened, there were only two competitors. The man who wanted to rescue his sister from the whorehouse dropped out, deciding there were more important things than money. Desiree won the competition, despite having a skill of 4 to Black's 5. Slim, you see, had decided that the competitors would shoot at each other's toes. This is a tricky target with a nerf gun.
Black tried to kill Desiree, but she killed him. Christopher said he was okay with going down in a hail of bullets, but thought he ought to have been able to take someone with him. Alas, his real skill with a nerf gun was not good enough to pull that off. On the other hand, everyone who died came back to life anyway.
If I'd known that the dead came back to life, I might -- might, mind you -- have tried killing Black at the beginning.
Actually, there were a lot of characters who should have known that this was true. No one in the game had come back from the dead at game start, but all the townsfolk knew someone who had. The players were ignorant of this, except for the man playing the undertaker. He did the right thing, talking early and often about how every time someone was buried, the person would ring the bell put in the coffin for just such emergencies and he had to dig them up.
One other interesting thing had happened prior to this. Luisa was with Slim's wife when the woman had a confrontation with Mr. Bright. It seems he'd slept with her, unaware that she was a married woman, and her husband had just found out about it. Slim had hit him. He'd hit Slim back.
As the confrontation continued, Luisa put a hand on her gun. She kept starting to draw it, then putting it back, because, while Mr. Bright was not a good person, he did have a point. He wanted to know whether he'd have to worry about Slim shooting him. He also wanted to know whether Mrs. Thompson would leave town with him. She declined, rather emphatically.
So, Luisa washed out of the competition. She did point her gun in Black's direction a couple of times, but nothing came of that. The first time was when she was aiming for the target, and I was utterly unsuccessful in catching Christopher's eye. The whole point was for him to know. The second was when he said he was disappointed that she hadn't made it. That he did notice, but then, she put the gun away and looked for Mr. Butler.
He was trying to get information on the Hopi from the half-Hopi bartender. Alas, the man knew nothing. So, he and Mrs. Wiggins headed into the mines.
By now, there was a flood in the mines, blocking passage past a certain point. The mine owner, Barry, was there with his servant, Mohammed, played by Jim MacDougal, aka Mac. So was someone else, the man who'd first reported the Hopi city, and Alex Miles. There were other people as well, but I'm not sure who they were, and there was a certain amount of folks coming and going and some confusion about what was and was not accessible.
The Hopi possessed Mohammed and started to talk through him.
Brad: Ah, the mountain has come to Mohammed!
Mac (giving him a very dirty look): You've been waiting all game to say that, haven't you?
Mr. Miles banished the spirit before a dialogue could be established. Then, I'm a little vague on what happened, but I think Miles' player was annoyed at not being able to do some kind of cool thing, and Janet had to talk to him to find out what it was he wanted to do. After some minutes of this, things started up again, with Mr. Miles using some kind of power to hold back the growing flood, the Hopi spirits possessing Mohammed and saying that the town was bad.
Two ghosts said, "Hey, what about us?" and were told that their deaths had been an accident.
Barry pulled his gun. Mrs. Wiggins pulled hers on him, until he put it back. He wanted to save Mohammed, who had once saved his life, but, I gather, he was also a fairly selfish guy, and without Mohammed, who would carry his coat?
Mr. Butler said something about how the people in town could be good, and many were trying to be.
At some point, Mrs. Wiggins squeezed his hand. Brad figured this meant a romantic interest, and at game wrap, said that he was sorry he didn't have time to play to that. I was a little disappointed as well, but mostly delighted that he noticed.
The reason he didn't have time is that it was now close to midnight, and the gms jumped to endgame. Everyone, except the people in the mine, were washed into the saloon by the flood. A couple of minutes later, the people from the mine were washed in there as well. And, at that point, the gms gave their instructions about deciding where each character would wind up.
At game wrap, I asked if there had been any chance to save the town. Nope. What had happened before the game started was that Slim was captured by the Hopi, and they were going to execute him for trespassing on their sacred grounds. He pleaded and whined, saying that he hadn't known and hadn't done anything wrong.
Hopi Chief: No, you have done everything wrong. You could not make the White man live right even if you gave him all the power and money in the world.
Slim: That sounds like a wager to me.
So, the Hopi agreed that he would have 4 years without interference. This was why no one died. Death, after all, is an interference.
Slim didn't know what would happen in four years. He thought perhaps there would be an Indian attack. This is why he held the competition. He wanted a lot of good gunfighters around. But, he didn't want them killing each other, as they couldn't help him defend the town. Meanwhile, two spirits took on human forms and recruited folks, one side being Team Good and the other Team Evil. These spirits had played this game many times before and would play it again. But, the Great Spirit was going to destroy the town, no matter what.
Post-game quote:
Lisa: So, my character was talking to Slim's wife --
Stephen (who played the saloon owner): Slim had a wife?
There is just so much about this game that makes us want to tinker with it. First of all, if the town is doomed from the get go, the game needs to be framed differently, to avoid player frustration. Second, it needs to be framed differently to make some sense to me. The bet is that Slim can't make the people live well. So, why are any people being spared? Because some do or at least can live well? Then, hasn't Slim won his bet?
Second, I wonder if Slim should be an NPC role. The guy who played Slim played a similar role in a Sunday game, whereupon he remarked, "Oh, good. This is the second time I play the guy who invited everyone here and who has no real game." But, when I talked with him about this on his blog, he made it clear that he enjoyed the role of Slim. He explained that he'd made it clear that he was fine with playing a thoroughly hosed character, so long as he knew in advance that the character was hosed. Slim had a moral decision to make. He decided that he didn't want Mr. Bright in town, but that he wouldn't kill the man.
Third, things have to be re-skewed to give evil a fighting chance. Josh suggested working Virtue and Vice into the mechanics in sort of a reverse of the mechanics of Across a Sea of Stars. There, the gms award points to each stat for certain things. Here, Josh said, one should start with a certain number of Virtue points and a certain number of Vice points. These points can only be spent on certain things, and what those are depend on the character.
So, Mrs. Wiggins was really worried that she couldn't best Mr. Black in a gun fight. Well, what if drawing on her Vice of Wrath meant she could boost her combat skill? Yep, that would have gotten me more likely to plot Mr. Black's demise.
Then, at the end of the game, look at the characters' Virtue and Vice scores. The lowest score is clearly what the character has been drawing on the most. No need to rely on the player's subjective judgment -- or the gm's subjective judgment, even if the gms had enough time and could oversee the entire game at once.
Fourth, I'd want to review the locations. They might be fine as they are, but if one wants characters be able to interact with each other as much as possible, there is something to be said for limiting the locations. If the town is doomed, no matter what, and the Hopi cannot be appeased, is it really necessary to have the mine location, for example? Given that the brothel was on the second floor of the saloon, something I hadn't realized until late game, there may be advantages to limiting the space to saloon/brothel, street, and maybe church.
DEAN EDGELL WAKE
After game wrap, I hooked up with Josh, and we went to the memorial for Dean Edgell. I am not sure if I ever met him, but our history is often an oral one, and I wanted to hear about him.
The general consensus is that he was a great guy, and that he quietly pushed people to do better in larps. Mac told us that he pioneered the senses system that appears in Intrigue in the Clouds, as well as a certain type of contingency envelope. Usually, one gives a player an envelope saying "Open when you meet X character" or something like that. I think Dean was the first to do this the other way around: "Give this envelope to Y character when you see him". See, if I have an envelope about my character, I shouldn't go out of my way to make the contingency happen, but I will. If it's the other way around, I'm helping someone else, and that person will be surprised because he has no way of knowing there's a contingency envelope for him.
Brad explained that Dean is why he was at Intercon H. He met Dean at Intercon MidAtlantic last year, when both were in The Trial of the Big Bad Wolf. Brad played the wolf. Dean played the leader of the pigs.
Brad: So, what do you other animals eat?
Someone: Oh, grain.
Dean: Yes, say what you will about fascist pigs, but at least we make the grains run on time!
This, said Brad, is why he was here.
Saturday
GHOST FU
This was the game we ran. Twelve years ago in Yuan Dynasty China, there was a martial arts competition and everyone died. Now, their ghosts gather to finish the competition and deal with other matters of life and death.
The game went very well, making the final hellish week worth it. Almost immediately after, we were using our mobile Devices to send each other email about how to improve it, and I'm hoping that the players will be willing to give us feedback. 9 March 2008: Several players have gotten back to us with feedback. Much constructive criticism. Everyone who emailed said that they liked the game, and 2 people said that they'd like to play it again, high praise indeed for a one-shot larp.
We demoed the combat system, with me hamming up a thug who wanted to enter the tournament. This was fun, and it made it clear that the players were very much encouraged to pose and chew scenery.
Christopher Woo did a fine job as the head judge. I'd feared the role might not be the best match, but he was good about running the matches, pointing people at their best teachers, and so on. The 12-year-old kid did not perhaps have as much fun as he might have, but I think this is more because he was a 12-year-old than because of the character itself. We will want to review the characters and their chances in the tournament.
One player told us that she'd laughed aloud while reading her character. Her reaction was "Yeah, yeah... kind of boring.. why did I get this one?" Then, she hit the line Josh added: "Wow, that sounds boring, doesn't it?" And then, she read the rest of her character sheet, and, I am sure, started cackling with glee. Timing is everything.
Andrew McNeill, whom we cast as the eunuch, told us that he'd never before been so delighted to be so cast, and that he hoped he could do the character justice. From what I could see, he did.
As my igtheme essay explained, characters could improve their skills by getting training, but only from different people than their original teachers. So, Crispy Peach, student of the Drunken Master, approached the GM character Golden Sloth Long. Long exists for there to be a third judge of the tournament, allowing 3 bouts to occur at once, or allowing the two judge PCs to do other things. Long is very lazy, though, so he won't do much besides judge bouts and sleep.
Crispy Peach: Master Long, will you teach me?
Long (currently played by Stephen): Hrm. (goes to sleep)
Crispy Peach: Master Long? Master Long?
Long: Sleep is not to be interrupted. (goes back to sleep)
Crispy Peach: Master, I do not understand your style, but I will study it. (goes to sleep)
And the player mimed being asleep for 5-10 minutes, which is a long time to do that. We agreed that he should get a card for that Long's style of Kung Fu, which did indeed exist, just on the off chance that someone attacked him. When Crispy Peach played his new card near the end of the tournament, one of the players was very impressed.
Player: You actually got Long to train you?
There's a lot I don't know about what happened during the game. I gather that some characters went on quests, aka "Tell the gms an amusing story to convince them you can actually get the result you want." I mostly updated the tournament sheet, tracked down people for their bouts, and played the occasional NPC.
In one case, this involved serving two players' goals. The 12-year-old was not happy that his character had washed out of the tournament. There was also a character who wasn't in the tournament, but who wanted to speak to a demon. Ah, sez I, we have the kid beat up the demon, and then the demon talks to the other character. I was told to do it the other way, which worked out well.
My demon NPC approached the character who wanted to talk to him. The character asked a question that the demon didn't want to answer. Nope, there was no way the demon would answer it, unless, say, someone were to defeat it in combat. And, I flat out told the player to ask the kid.
He did, and the kid was delighted to have someone to fight. Now, I had previously played this demon, and it had defeated two other martial artists. One of these urged the boy -- the 12-year-old was playing a 12-year-old martial artist -- not to fight this powerful demon. When the boy still insisted, he convinced the boy to get some additional training from him. This was good. I had previously toned down the cards I used, but, with the extra training, I could use cards nearly as good as those the demon had started with.
Yes, this is blatant cheating to make a player feel good. I'd do it again without hesitation. And, I'm really glad there was a training sequence first, because it meant I could make sure the character defeated the demon without toning it down too much.
The game was not perfect. Among other things:
The tournament diagram should have included the English translations of the first two Chinese names. People just didn't recognize their character's Chinese name.
For later rounds, the full name -- English two words, Chinese patronymic -- should have been used. Using just the Chinese patronymic on the diagram meant that too many names sounded alike, e.g., Zheng, Yang, Peng, Ping.
Players had a lot to absorb. We got their character sheets to them in advance, and all but one of the background sheets everyone got. The exception was the combat sheet. We did not get individual sheets to people, and some folks had a lot of these. One player noted that he was able to achieve 3 of his 5 impossible goal despite this, and wanted to play again, perhaps in a different role. The next time we run the game, we hope to be able to mail out all of the background information early. This time, it was still being written during the final week.
For some people, the karma system felt like an unimportant add on. You know how, no matter what, something always seems to get left until the last minute? For us, this time, it was the karma system. The players whose characters were more focused on this seemed to be fine with it, probably because their character sheets reflected it better. A bit of tweaking will help, as will Stephen's lovely idea about certain characters having lists of previously committed good and bad deeds.
The later bouts dragged. Changing the training rules so that cards are replaced with superior cards, rather than supplemented by them, will help. As it was, the reason the final round did not drag on past end time is because the player whose character was currently losing decided that his character would concede defeat. This was appropriate to the character, as he was losing to his well trained student, but I am sure the player also did it to end the agony of the knock down drag out neverending fight.
Item cards, skill cards, and combat cards were all the same color and all stuffed into one envelope for each character. This made sorting through them challenging, and sometimes time consuming. Making Item and Skill cards look different from Combat cards will help, as will making the different types of combat cards different colors.
Some of the characters were less buff than they should have been. We are already discussing how to fix this.
As a subset of the above, each character had a combat number. If the difference in number were great enough, the high number just won immediately. This should not be a possible outcome for any of the characters in the tournament, i.e., most of them. We have discussed strategies ranging from junking the numbers to making them tie-breakers only to collapsing the range so that no contestant will ever outrank another contestant by that much. I'm not sure how that last dovetails with the training rules.
On the other hand, people did enjoy themselves. We had a lot of buy in, good costumes, and respect for genre conventions. Various quotes:
Judge Ye (teaching a student): No, no. You are too much metal chi.
Burning Star Yang (in private bout with the woman he loves): Ha! Monkey style! My monkey climbs all over you. (As her player plays a card trumping monkey style): Oh! You have touched my monkey!
After game wrap, Beth and Julian pointed out that they didn't have a game scheduled and could do some of the clean up for the rest of us. Josh and Stephen played in Intercon Hertz, a mini-Intercon involving several one hour games.
FORGIVE ME FATHER
My afternoon game was Forgive Me Father. I enjoyed it, as I was basically playing Harpo Marx, and I think I had more to do than most people. I do agree that the game should have ended earlier, as there was a period where everyone was clearly marking time until endgame.
The game was advertised as a zany version of the usual political larp. Lots of different factions were gathered at the investiture of the new Pope. Okay, he wasn't called a pope, and all of the European countries had different names. And, we were told that the feel was Monty Pythonesque.
In practice, the game wasn't quite funny enough to work as a spoof, especially at four hours long, and it wasn't quite serious enough to work straight.
I got the 14 page world document, the 3 page document of my character's homeland Simurgh (Moorish Spain), and the 1 page document about the secret society of assassins via email a month before I got my character sheet. These documents did come with a character hint, but the gms felt that there was a lot to absorb, and they didn't want to burden us with a whole character sheet.
Unless this was code for "Er, we haven't yet done with writing the character sheets", I think it was a mistake. I had absolutely no interest in reading 17 pages of material without my character sheet. I also thought that 17 pages was excessive for a 4 hour game that was supposed to be light and funny. The gms said that next time, they'll probably send out a much shorter version, with a url for the extended version for those who want it.
Basic situation: Once upon a time, there was Dami, a Christ-like figure. He was executed. Then, his followers found someone they thought was Dami reborn, and so it went, from person to person, the Dami folks lead by Dami himself, and the Church became at least as powerful as in our Middle Ages, perhaps more so, as Dami's incarnation was also the secular head.
Because too many people knew of an incident where Dami said that a woman who asked intelligent questions of him was as a man to him, the Church could not expunge this from the scriptures. Instead, the Church proclaimed that any woman who acted like a man was obviously a man born in a deformed body. This was used as a political weapon against women who seemed too ambitious or intelligent. Designated Males were immediately divorced from male spouses and their children proclaimed bastards.
Simurgh had recently been conquered by the Church. Well, sort of. Simurgh was vastly advanced technologically -- Industrial Age level -- and didn't want anyone to know. Nor did Simurgh want to massacre all of Europe. So, it surrendered and kept its secrets for 200 years.
The Simurgh diplomatic team was played by the Marx brothers and Margaret Dumont. As Harpo, I had to protect Groucho and the pope-elect Florian. I was also an assassin, so it was my job to take secret messages and decide whether to deal with them myself or pass them on to my offstage superiors.
I'd assumed that Dami had reincarnated and ruled the Church, and that the current pope-elect wasn't necessarily Dami. I wondered if I were, and at least one player thought it might be possible.
Actually, until now, the pope was not Dami, but some easily manipulated pawn. But, Florian really was Dami. And, one of the good things the GMs did was to put in the player's character sheet: "Out of character note: Florian is not insane. He really is Dami."
Trouble is, there was no real opposition and almost no way for most folks to lose. Anyone trying to kill Dami would trigger miracles. And, no one seemed to want to kill him, or Groucho. Even the secret Nyarlathotep worshipper didn't want to kill anyone, having recently learned that the "little death" was just as potent as an actual death.
I had more to do than most, as I didn't know until game wrap that Dami / Florian was invulnerable. I tried to watch both Florian and Groucho, and I was a bit distressed when Florian collapsed. How can one protect a man from something one can't fight? But, this just proved to be a touch of flu caught from Florian's companion, Baron Felix. Astonishingly, only one person tried to keep me from getting close to Florian, and she asked very politely that I move further away. She did not try to get me especially far from Florian. The player explained that she was getting a bit fatigued by then.
I also felt taunted by the person with a black rose and a yellow piece of paper, a sure sign he wanted an assassin. After the first hour, the rose vanished. I think he put it in his character envelope. Then, it reappeared as he and Groucho wrote on yellow paper -- but that was just a Groucho contract: "The party of the first part...."
Finally, the guy put down the rose and paper, and a woman's eyes went wide and she fled the room. Before anyone else could intervene, I openly took the note, as only two people were paying attention, the note's author and his team leader. I stuck it in my boot, read it secretly, then gave it to the gms saying I was giving it to my superiors with a thumbs up on the assassination. Then, I went back to retrieve the rose. It was very large, on a big stalk. In retrospect, it should have been smaller.
One PC, Kearny, had an Igor-like personality. If she'd been hit on the head, she'd have had a Zorro-like personality and been able to defeat anyone in combat except Harpo. But, no one knew that a knock on the head would trigger the shift in personality, so she missed half her character. One player said that if he'd known, he would have made sure to find a reason for his PC to hit hers on the head.
The game stopped for half an hour to an hour as people found themselves with nothing to do but wait for the investiture, and that was scheduled to happen at the end of the game slot. Immediately after it happened, we went to game wrap. For the first time, Dami himself was back in control, and Chico had set him up with secret contacts to make all of his proclamations so public that the Church couldn't just kill everyone who heard them, kill Florian, and pick a new dupe.
How Florian got elected in the first place was that, before game start, Cardinal Josef had made a pass at him and written his name down, then lost the list of candidates. When asked for this list, he found only the paper with Florian's name, extolled Florian's made up on the spot virtues, and was astonished that everyone believed him. Florian's actual lover, of course, was Felix. All three of these were Actual Men, as opposed to Designated Men. All but two of the women in game were Designated Men. We wondered about restrooms and whether they came in Men, Designated Men, and Women flavors.
During the dinner break, I was able to sing a verse of "Sue Me" to Mike Young, so he could get a quick idea of my vocal range for a full weekend Broadway Musical Larp. Then, we went to our evening games. Stephen helped Kelly and Jim MacDougal run Blackie's Bar & Grill, about supervillains meeting with UN reps to discuss How Not to Blow Up the World. Beth played in that.
Julian played in Alice, which sounds like Alice in Wonderland archetypes as drug dealers and cops. His character, a cop, was killed shortly after the moratorium on killing, which makes him think he should avoid games with such moratoriums, as that is a signal that they will become high death toll games.
THE LAST SEDER
Josh and I played in this. It was a lot of fun. This was a game with tales within the outer tale, so we had home characters and tale characters, just like in Across the Sea of Stars.
Unlike that game, though, The Last Seder was only four hours. The outer tale was about 14 people gathered for a seder. Every couple of minutes, the hostess would say, "And now, I will tell you a story." Then, we all went into another room where the gms handed us new characters for a short scene, lasting about 5 minutes.
The characters we got were usually similar in type to our home character. While it might have been nice to know this, I think it also worked that we didn't get told it explicitly until game wrap. All of my characters were just a little out of it, and not knowing this definitely added something to my role playing.
There was one tale where the gms really needed to remind everyone about the No Touching rule common to larps. It's one thing if you clap someone on the shoulder. It's quite another to find oneself pushed against a chair back (simulating a police barrier) with someone else's arm way too close to one's throat.
The tales came fast and thick. I wonder if this curtailed some role playing of the home characters. On the other hand, it isn't as if we had much time to spare. And, dropping in and out of the home character provided us mental breathing space.
In some of the tales, some players were playing their home character. In some tales, we played the same character we'd played in an earlier tale.
In retrospect, I should have forced myself to reread my character sheet right before the game, or at least page 2 of it. I think I played my character as too coherent, though one of the gms assured me that she liked how I played him. And, we had a lot of scenery chewers, which means that some of us have to rein it in.
I think part of what made me play my PC too coherently is that there was a sort of mystery plot, and when I encountered it, my brain went into puzzle solving mode. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. My character was not stupid, and he was aware of his mental issues. He was also aware that some of the others had even more issues than he did, which, as the character sheet said, was quite impressive. And, I think the moral decision I eventually decided he'd make was in character. Again, in retrospect, I should have approached one of the scenery chewers to give her character more of a pep talk. I don't know that it would have worked, but I think the player would have enjoyed it.
I'm being vague here because, to the degree there are surprises in the game, I don't want to give them away. And, I would like to gm this one. The folks who ran it said they're willing to let us, but that they want to rerun it first, I think at Festival of the Larps at Brandeis.
After the larps were done, Josh and I went to the con suite. We talked with Andrew Zorowitz, and with Scott Meeks and Emily Care Boss. Then, Josh played a card game with folks, while I talked with Ben Llewellyn, who described the Muppet Purgatory game he'd played in, and the Union-Company game he'd run a couple of times. That last sounds challenging, and also astonishingly similar to my recollection of the transit strike we had in NYC a couple of years back. Josh told me he'd played in it, but hadn't interacted with the union plot.
Sunday
Beth and Julian didn't have games, so they were able to do the checking out and initial car loading after breakfast, while Josh, Stephen and I played in our final game of the con.
ONLY MIGHT GUESTS
This was a light Sunday morning game. It probably could have been half an hour shorter, but this wasn't as big a problem as it was in Forgive Me Father.
I wasn't sure how to costume for this one. As I told Chris Murray, I was basically playing Josh's character from the Cthulhu High pbem game -- someone who could change genders at will and who was a detective. I was not really clear on what my character's cover was. I was also uncomfortable playing someone who was supposed to be a really good detective, as I am very talented when it comes to missing the obvious on a Sunday morning at Intercon.
The game had a slow start for me, but I felt a lot better once things started happening. I even managed to solve a minor mystery on my very own. It wasn't a very tricky mystery, but that wasn't the point.
The person who'd supposedly called the meeting we were all at had actually only invited two people. He had no idea why the rest of us were there. I had no idea what my cover was supposed to be, but I figured it probably involved working for him. The gms confirmed this at game wrap, and also added that he hadn't been the one who actually hired me and genuinely had no idea who I was. I'd guessed as much, but something to this effect should have been in the character sheet.
The game's economy was food. Everyone had a certain amount in their body, and if they ran out, they'd fall unconscious, and then die if they didn't get food quickly. The chef pcs were quite busy.
About halfway through, one player got utterly bored, and so he left the game, handing his character's stuff to the gms. He later said that he probably should not have signed up for that game. His leaving was the only reason my character "solved" the case. More precisely, the offstage cops found out what was going on, because that was the only way things could work with the missing pc.
I had fun with the gender bending. Two of my ability cards were "Dude, I'm a guy" and "Dude, I'm a girl", and I had two related abilities. One was to make a guy follow a non-suicidal command of three words or less when I fluttered my eyelashes. The other was to make a girl do the same when I flashed my cute smile.
Throughout the game, I'd flashed the "Dude, I'm a guy" card a lot. But, as things got slow, both to use what I had and to make Josh laugh, I flashed the "Dude, I'm a girl" card at him and the related ability, and said, "Kiss me!" The cooks sent us out of the kitchen for that.
Josh was playing Fabio. He could draw attention by flexing his pectorals.
During the slow parts, I looked for buttons to push and levers to pull. I guess that's sort of like the Black Box model Chris Murray talked about. Some of the buttons were other player characters, which was how I solved the minor mystery.
One button was the television. The gms had said there was one, and indicated the space where it sat. I walked over and saw a sign that said, "Television. Currently off. See a gm if you turn it on."
Ah, thought I. Something to push. Sure enough, turning on the television tended to make things happen in the game.
After game wrap, Josh and Stephen talked with one of the gms while I zonked out. Then, we all loaded the car and headed back home, talking next year's larps.
