Intercon N report (some spoilers)

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

HERE BE SPOILERS FOR CROWN OF HEARTS, THE WRECKERS, HEITHUR, SONG OF THE FAT MAN, AND INTERPLANETARY FEDERATION: THE CADET YEARS

We headed out Thursday, accompanied by my uninvited headcold. My memory of the Precon panels is somewhat vague. I remember thinking that the meta panel touched on a lot of cool things and ended before we could sink our teeth into them. I think I remember Stephen Balzac's talk about how groups become functional. I remember some keep-in-minds from the religion panel -- A character's religion should not be like hair color and characters that theoretically have religious authority only have it in actuality if other characters are written to grant it to them (for the purposes of the panel, we weren't going into large scale mechanical effects). I also remember thinking that I probably am getting the hang of 101 on a bunch of topics and would like to go on to 102.

I'm not sure which panels were Thursday or which Friday, as I spend a fair amount of time resting in an attempt to kick the headcold out. Friday afternoon, I was one of Derek Herrera's makeup models, and Vic gave me a great makeup job as a crone. It was a combination of subtle effects, as the idea is to emphasize the right parts of what's already there and deemphasize the rest, and broad strokes, as it didn't have to be perfect.

Friday, I was Carrokill in Crown of Hearts. Connor said that I was awesome, and I'm glad, but I'd like to know how, so I can keep it up. This was a great game, which isn't surprising, as I like the Paranoid and Crotchety games. I also like their treatment of the fairytale source material, with all its darkness and a dollop of genderqueer. (For those unfamiliar with this element in the fairytale context, there's the ballad "The Famous Flower of Serving Men" and the Welsh Peredur tale, where the ugly old woman who scolds Peredur for being an idiot turns out to be Peredur's young, beautiful, male cousin. In my overly educated and arrogant material, this is the role taken by a (at one point cross-dressing) homeless man in the movie The Fisher King.)

As with many of their games, there was a dearth of out and out villains, and I was pleasantly surprised that the characters were as understanding as they were about some of the dreadful things my character had done pre-game. This was a complicated character to play, as I had to take the information scattered in the character booklet and make cheat sheets, but it was also a very rewarding character to play, as I wanted something other than an innocent ingenue. This was also the type of character that everyone will go to for help or information, and it's good to play one of those at least some of the time.

I tend to prefer games where information flows, so I was glad that most of what my character knew was not stuff she had particular reason to keep quiet about, and certainly not stuff in the "never allow this to get out" category. Indeed, there were one or two pieces of information I had every intention of spreading, but didn't have a chance to do so while they were relevant, as they were less important, as far as I could tell, than other pieces of information. Fortunately, the largest of these actually made the game better by not coming out until it was too late, I think. It meant some dramatic and big stuff would go off without my character trying to interfere, and I'm fairly sure that was a good thing, both in terms of Tactical Good Stuff and Dramatic Cool Stuff.

I'm not sure if all the characters have enough to do or enough Cool Stuff. This is something hard to gauge for someone who's at the center of things.

Carrokill had a surprisingly victorious endgame, while Lydia had a lovely, bittersweet one, even if I'm not sure exactly what state the town was in by the end. Halbjorg, my character from Heither, my afternoon game, succeeded in her goals, but I'm not sure she outlived the end of the game by more than a few minutes.

Saturday morning, I was Lydia Browne in The Wreckers. She was a pregnant woman who had no idea of all the things going on in her town. She was also low energy, which was useful, as it meant I could take my cold medicine and not worry about being low energy. I had a lot of angsty roleplay with Tom Wohlers, who played her husband, something we both knew we'd signed on for. And, when the child was born (does anyone not expect a pregnant woman to give birth during the larp?), I used the towel I'd stuffed under my clothes as the baby. The GMs gave it a name tag, and then everyone wrote on the baby. The parents wrote the name they'd chosen (William John Browne), and the GMs and some of the players wrote on and crossed off various badge codes.

I also had some angst with both Nyren and Kreg, as Lydia sought advice. Kreg played a bitter sailor who seemed to soften a bit when he realized she wasn't so much criticizing his decisions as worrying about her own. I still don't quite understand all of what he and a couple of others said in character, but I did try to spread whatever I found interesting from the various conversations I had.

The one thing I'm not sure I played as well as I could was Lydia's bigotry. She did not like the Native American characters, two woman and a man. I mostly avoided the man, which wasn't hard and didn't mess anything up, near as I can tell. The woman she disliked the most had formed an alliance with two characters she trusted -- her midwife and the priest. So, it was a tricky call about how much to decide "Well, if they trust what she's saying and I trust them, I will at least not make a scene and will accept what help is offered." And, it's hard to make oneself be disgusting in certain ways.

This wasn't necessarily a bad thing. My character was low energy, and I did try to play her shrinking away from one of the woman at one point, which was taken as my being in pain. But, I probably should have tried to be a bit nasty. It's entirely possible to do this without using certain terms.

I enjoyed my afternoon game, Heithur, but I did recognize it had some flaws. The action took place mostly on a boat whose borders were limited by chairs. A bit more space would have been useful, but only a bit more. Also, given certain taboos, a certain unpropped item should perhaps have been at least marked in outline. I got tired of being told I was stepping on / in danger of stepping on it. I have no doubt that this was correct, but even an outline or paper cutout would have made it easier to know what to avoid.

As we were on a boat in perilous waters, waves and sea monsters would attack from time to time. I am VERY glad I wasn't one of the characters whose job it was to fight them off via shooting at them. One of the players of one of those characters quickly taught us to move to assist whoever was at the tiller.

A little of this kind of attack goes a long way when the point of the game isn't really to play the Man vs Nature thing. Certainly, that was not what the game was advertised as. I would have preferred the wave and serpent attacks be kept down to once every half hour. Heck, I suspect even once every 20 minutes would have been less frequent than what we faced. And, when it seems that the GMs are having the attacks happen every time it looks to them like the PCs are starting to make progress on their current goals or when it looks to them like things have slowed down, it gets really old and annoying really fast.

There was also a fair amount of adversarial GMing, as far as I could tell, in terms of interpretation of certain things, and I'm not a huge fan of that. But, you'd have to poll the other players for that, as I had no quibble with how the GMs dealt with my attempts to accomplish my character's goals, perhaps because I succeeded.

(I think the kind of GMing I want to strive for is what the Monsterhearts rpg (and probably, therefore, the Apocalypse World rpg) calls being a fan of the PCs. This does NOT mean making things easy for them, but it does mean not deliberately trying to twist everything they try to do to go as horribly wrong as possible all the time, granting success only when you can't figure out a way to misinterpret what they do.)

I am also ambivalent about the set up. I had thought that all characters knew basically what was going on and had interesting goals that reflected that. It turned out that this was not the case. I don't know if that's a bad thing per se, as I don't know if anyone minded it out of character, but I do think it was a lost opportunity.

That said, it was delightful how sticking to the Old Ways and being properly generous paid off for me, and how one stupid thing I did cancelled out another stupid thing I did, keeping things from getting worse.

My evening game was Song of the Fat Man. This was slow in spots, at least for me, and had different kinds of issues from Heithur. If the GMs are new to larp writing, these are quite understandable, especially as mysteries in larps (and rpgs) are tricky to get right.

Nick Charles's player was busy enough he couldn't fit in a bathroom break until after the game, and I suspect that was true of a few others as well. For myself and I think some others, we were trying hard to find inconsequential things to talk about when we ran out of stuff to do, and this was a shorter game, i.e., one slated to run in 3 hours that ran a touch over, not a 4 hour game.

Mystery-wise, there were certain things about my character that were intended as clues and / or red herrings. But, I don't think any other character sheet had anything to indicate that these things existed, let alone that they were clues.

Also, there had been a drop from the game. This very much affected my game. The GMs did their best to fill the gap, making sure that the character was available for people to talk to, one of them putting on a badge for that, and also making sure that the character got certain bits of information out via roleplaying. But, I still reached a point where I could either sit and smile and have nothing happen in my game or I could move things forward. The first option was the safe one for the character, but the boring one for the player and probably worse for the game. So, I had my character have a conversation with another that she might not have had if there hadn't been a drop. I think this helped all around.

Now, as this was a game with Nick and Nora Charles, I think we all knew that there would be a murder. But, in character, many people did not realize that there had been one for a long time, as this was being hushed up by those trying to solve the crime, while those with some involvement in it obviously weren't about to announce it. Ben Llewellyn did a fine job of making sure this came out to everyone by having his character confront Nora Charles and make enough of a scene that a) many of us followed them to hear the rest of it and b) most of those who didn't could still hear it. This was also good for the game, as it is not fun to spend one's mystery game never finding out in character about the mystery.

As far as I could tell, Nick and Nora did finger the correct culprits. The core of the game is solid, but I think there needs to be more game for many of the characters, more ways to find stuff out, and ways to make sure the game moves forward in the case of players trying to keep information (like the existence of a murder) from coming out. That last is a very delicate thing, as there's a fine balance between keeping the game moving and destroying player agency.

Sunday, we seriously considered dropping our games to outrun the snow. The reports we were hearing of snow turning to rain and back to snow indicated bad conditions for driving. But, we decided to stay for our games and leave immediately after. I'm glad we did, as the snow did not hit.

I enjoyed Interplanetary Federation: The Cadet Years, Starship Artemis more than I had expected, especially as the roleplay aspects wound up getting ditched, by me, at least. I had watched the demo before the game and realized that there were only two stations I had a prayer of being able to handle -- Communications and -possibly- Engineering. Fortunately, the GMs assured me that I was a fine match for Communications, which was my first choice.

Once it was up and running, Communications was wonderfully straightforward. Also, the Blue team lucked out in having a waitlist spot open for its captain filled by someone who knew the system already. He could absorb the ton of information that came flooding in, interpret it correctly, figure out the orders to give, and give them quickly and clearly. This meant that I could focus on doing my job and giving the captain what he needed. I am very comfortable in that role.

The communication between the two ships, via headset, was spotty enough that both I and my opposite number did not try to roleplay beyond making sure each of us knew what was going on tactically. This was regrettable, but the tactical game went well enough that the GMs decided they / the PCs' instructors were impressed and would give us an extra credit assignment, ala Kobyashi Maru. Alas, this overwhelmed the technology, so we had to pass on that.

The technology was not perfect. Helm kept locking up, and jumps happened either slightly ahead or slight behind the countdown. I noticed two options missing from the Communications menu: I could ask for enemy surrender, but not offer our surrender. Also, when we accidentally hit one of our stations, earning a "what the )%$(*_ are you guys doing?" response, I could not apologize. Neither of these was a game breaking omission.

After our games, we hit the road, making two food stops, one of which had stuff I considered sufficiently edible. (I got an ice cream sandwhich at the other.) The weather held, so everyone got dropped off at home, and we didn't use the back up plan of supplying crash space. After the first drop off, we even made time for a dinner stop, as we saw a) a restaurant in Manhattan's Chinatown that we all liked and b) a parking space nearby.

Comments

[pokedigimaniac.livejournal.com]

I had similar issues with Heithur, as one of the characters that was not involved in the wave/sea serpent mechanic beyond assisting - it seemed really unnecessarily disruptive/adversarial, especially with the complexity of what the leader (name escapes me) was trying to do. Our run was fairly frustrating, as it seemed that most of the characters had very little to do beyond being manipulated by the leader to satisfy his puzzle, and he was having a lot of challenges with piecing that together.

Also, I just plain old hate combat systems that involve shouting out numbers... but that's purely personal preference. :)

Glad to hear you had a great time, and hopefully I'll catch you at another event sometime soon!

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Who did you play in Heithur?

[pokedigimaniac.livejournal.com]

I was Baldur Nielson, the judge/dispute mediator. Also, remind me, what was the un-propped item in Heithur that you had issues navigating around? Nothing is immediately coming to mind...