labcats | Countdown to Intercon I (Reply)

Last week, we had a sort of first draft of the character sheets, and I was fairly depressed about the state of the game. Oh, I was sure it would run, and fairly sure that our enthusiastic players would make up for a fair number of the shortcomings, but it's no Ghost Fu or Jamais Vue.

Then,

mnemex pointed out that we weren't actually trying to write the same game over and over, so this was actually a feature, and the things that looked like problems were actually deliberate inversions of some of the usual tropes and structural features of a larp. This helped.

So did talking to

crash_mccormick, who sat me down and had me give him small task after small task so that we could make progress. Some of these were small, but essential things like "Send out the casting questionnaire" and "Help me with the email about what furniture we need", which involved looking up the hotel plans and pacing out the rough dimensions of the gaming area.

Then, we drafted the combat system which is simple enough that even I think it's simple. This isn't Ghost Fu, so we neither need nor want something complicated. After that came the stuff that actually makes the game go. I took some notes on that. And, we did a bit of filling in of obvious blanks.

Yesterday,

jlighton and I came over to crash_mccormick's place, and the three of us spent about five hours on the game. Net result: We all seem to be on the same page about what we're doing and how, and the right people have talked about the right things. We may wind up rewriting, oh, everything, but the game will run.

jlighton may have a point that he and I don't work well creatively together, though I'm not sure it isn't a case of "we don't work well creatively together when there's a complicated piece that neither of us get, but that actually exists in someone else's mind". That certainly is true, because then we bounce around the edges of the game, unable to do much. At that point, we don't need creativity -- we need to be talking to the right person. But, currently the piece is in our minds.

My next steps are to put some stuff I put in the spreadsheet on my laptop into the wiki for the game, and to type up my notes for the same place. I'm thinking the sprawly sloppy notes should also get their own page, perhaps called the Sprawly Sloppy Notes page. Good organization really helps.

The item I was most worried about ordering has been ordered, and, if it doesn't arrive on time, I will gnash my teeth, but there is a viable workaround.

We have the hotel rooms reserved. We still need a vehicle rental, and that will fall to our driver,

ebartley, who has been largely silent on account of wedding planning, wedding itself, and honeymoon. She's helped run the other larp we're doing, Jamais Vue, and she printed out what we had of Presque Vue to read. Of course, that was before the power meetings, but what she printed out is still valid, just no longer complete, and I told her the highlights, like the combat system. I love a combat system I can explain.

So, all in all, I'm feeling better about the game. I still want to switch gears back to Dark of the Moon writing after Intercon I, as I would like to live to see the game completed and run.