labcats | T-7 to Intercon H (Reply)

And the countdown to Intercon H begins. I'm busy doing my editorial pass on the characters for Ghost Fu, the larp we'll be running. I've gotten all but one of the character sheets for the larps I'm playing in.

Larp writing exercises my editorial skills to the max. One of the odd things I like is that the deadlines are non-negotiable, once one bids a game. On March 1, the game goes live.

We're using a wiki to write the game. As the martial arts genre isn't my forte, it's only recently that I've been able to do the kind of nitpicking I do well. The characters are all defined well enough that I have a baseline.

And, they're defined well enough that I'm getting fond of our game. What I've been doing is going into the characters one by one and leaving comments, questions, critiques, and so on. Then, someone else does a pass through to deal with that. And we repeat as necessary.

Sometimes, it's breaking sentences up or rewriting so as to avoid the passive voice. Sometimes, it's a matter of taking things out of parentheses. I prefer to avoid parentheses in general, and, in my arrogant opinion, important details should not ever be in parentheses on a larp character sheet.

Sometimes, it's asking for certain things to be made clearer. Sometimes, it's critiquing various mechanics or explanations, e.g., "Wouldn't this kill the game in the first ten minutes?" Or, "Okay, if this works as it reads, you've just screwed Character X, so it shouldn't work that way. But this screws Character Y, so explain that this ability doesn't work under Z circumstances."

And sometimes, the muse flips the switch and I get ideas. That's fun. One character I'd been dreading as probably too light actually isn't -- I found a lot of things in other character sheets that can be used to round things out.

I have 5 more character sheets to go over that way. Of these, one struck

jlighton as needing just a little bit more, and I think I've found that little bit more.

We're getting there. And we have some very enthusiastic players. Let's hope the game lives up to their expectations!