Dreamation

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Dreamation was a lot of fun. I went primarily for the indie gaming scene.

Buying

For the first time, I knew that I would not be able to pick up every indie game I wanted that I didn't own. Heck, these days I have to be on my toes to make sure I've even heard of most of what is out there.

I picked up

Spirit of the Century
Zorcerer of Zo
Hero's Banner
Seven Leagues
Cold City

Networking

anacrusis wisely would not say when The Dresden Files would be coming out. judd_sonofbert said he'd send a playtest version of 1st Quest my way, though, as jlighton noted, logically, the home group should do it without me the first time. I told the_stalwart why he is my hero.

Playing

I played 6 rpgs I had never before played:

Mortal Coil, deliberately stretched to sf. Fun, though I am not sure I should be gming it.

Don't Rest Your Head, which I am sure I could gm, though I want to see Dark City first.

Grey Ranks, playtest. It may need a bit of tweaking, but pretty solid. Probably not for me, but nrivkis would probably enjoy it.

Spirit of the Century, which was light, but fun. We had to rescue the king from demons. That's just cool.

Burning Empires, mixed results for me. Where it was good, it was fabulously good. Where it was annoying was where there was too much debate over mechanics and tactics for my taste, and I am not sure how much that's just group dynamics and how much it's exacerbated by the mechanics. Also, fitting BE into a 4 hour slot means cutting a lot of stuff that makes it BE. Definitely worth doing the game.

Ganakagok, with the Menominon tune in my head. 7 players, midnight to 4 am, with at least 2 of us sleep deped badly. Loads of fun, though there are a few things I'm not sure I like about the system. As with BE, must reserve judgement till I've read and tried to play it outside con setting.

Post-Convention

mnemex and I paid a shiva call to mabfan and family. mnemex was able to help make up a minyan, and mabfan's discussions about sf and observing shabbas on Mars prompted me to ask some questions about shabbas observance in the play be email game I'm running, where there are four campuses in different locations, linked by magical gateways. The questions I had involved situations that easily defaulted to known cases.

Then, mnemex and I met jlighton, ebartley, and Dave Demast for dinner and jlighton's Feng Shui game, lest the five of us feel gaming deprived after a weekend of Dreamation.

Comments

Re: Ganakagok issues

[bill-white.livejournal.com]

Those are some good points. I'll take the hit for the Ancient Ones and the Ancestors being too similar as names, but you have to agree that conceptually they're different. Rather like Sauron and Saruman, if the comparison isn't too high-falutin'. In practice, I suppose it'd be easy enough to call the Ancient Ones the "Old Ones" or maybe even the "Dead Gods," depending on what you as GM wanted to evoke. But I should have thought of that first.

I hadn't thought that people might find using Medicine to signify important relationships a disincentive to creating them, but you're right to imply that such a disincentive exists. Huh. I've never seen it actually be a problem, though. In larger games, the interplayer dynamics almost always drive things. In smaller games, characters tend to leave the village early in order to seek out some answer to the riddle of the Sun, and the story very much becomes a kind of hero-quest.

But there are solutions if it seems to be a problem when you run the game. The GM has a lot of power (that I didn't have to use in the game we played) to make things true as part of general and specific situation creation, and can connect an isolated character to the rest of the village by narrating the existence of a relationship and spending fiat points to "make it true." Similarly, if a player wins narration, he or she could narrate in a relationship that the GM would then be required to make game-mechanically true by the expenditure of fiat points.

Of course, it's important to remember that it's also a case of "you gotta pay to play," in the sense that characters that are more central in their connectedness to other characters have a lot of influence on them during play, so there's a counter-balancing incentive to create relationships, since they are among the most useful Gifts in the game. Network externalities and all that jazz.

By the way, what relationship did Fred slip in? I must have dozed off ;-)

I like to think of the random draw for Medicine as a feature rather than a bug, if you'll forgive the cliche. The possibility of giving and receiving Medicine helps establish group dynamics, and there are rules that let a player who is dissatisfied pick up more Good Medicine by taking an equivalent amount of Bad. But the random draw establishes some kind of situation or context to drive at least the initial spate of character actions. I suppose if the Good Medicines are all very high and the Bads are all very low, the situation may theoretically not be all that compelling, but in that case the fight is purely over who gets to narrate, and the game is always about whose vision for the Nitu gets fulfilled. Something to look out for as the GM: if everyone is sitting pretty, the GM has to use all his or her resources to make them sweat.

How many dice to roll is random, and we just lucked out in the draw during play. Again, I've never seen it prove too disconcerting, and the option of spending Medicine to make a roll with more dice mitigates a little. If you don't like it, you can simply establish a set amount of dice to roll, say 6 or 8 dice, with rules for adding dice depending on the phase and maybe using or staking Gifts, plus of course simply paying Medicine. That's actually a good optional rule.

I'll note that other people besides me have run the game successfully, though only as one-night one-shots or con games. But it seems to work out, usually.

You raise some good points, though. I'll be on the lookout for them as problems whenever I play. Thanks again!

Re: Ganakagok issues

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

My only objection to "Ancient Ones" and "Ancestors" is the name similarity. I have no idea how either function, having blurred that part of the evening. I presume that the game explains.

A lot of the things I'm listing are things that I'm not 100% sure are problems, but that, after a very enjoyable game, had me wondering, "Okay, but how well would this work with my group or some random group, when the game's not being run by the designer?"

Fred slipped in that a) his PC had a wife and b) Matt's PC was a rival for her affections. Mind, I didn't think that this was a bad thing; it just struck me after the game as outside of the rules.

Ultimately, I won't know until we try running it here, of course.