I have been busy as heck lately, and playing a lot of games.
Work sent me out to GenCon, were I ran demos of Shadows of Brimstone, Forbidden Fortress, Last Night On Earth, Fortune & Glory, and A Touch Of Evil. It was super fun and I love sharing and teaching many of my favorite games to total strangers... but it was also very exhausting because GenCon is a huge show with a million faces and a hundred thousand games.
In my off hours at the con, I played a couple of new games I hadn't tried before.
Incan Gold is a fun press-your-luck game that I reliably came in... well, certainly not winning, but not in last place, either, so I feel like I did okay for a newbie. The best part was that I got to play the game with my old friend Brendan Riley, who lives far away and I hadn't seen in several years, and my buddy Bill French. I never would have expected them to meet, given that they live in different states, but GenCon is a place of miracles.
Brendan's company Rattlebox Games is playtesting a game called Udder Chaos, the only competitive cow-milking game I've ever seen. It's fast and goofy and full of rhymes. It was light-hearted fun, and you'd be helping support a old friend of mine, so check it out if you get a chance.
One night at GenCon I played a party game called Buy The Rights, in which you get a random hand of high concepts and genres and have to make your best pitch about why producers should invest money with you. I hammed it up, basically role-playing as a different screenwriter or producer in each round, and it turns out that nonsense is a very successful strategy in this game.
The other fun new experience of this GenCon for me was Hellapagos, a party game that starts out fully cooperative and then suddenly very quickly descends into murder and sometimes cannibalism. It was a social game that really felt like the first season of Lost. Everyone was working together to build a raft and catch fish, except for a couple slackers who just raided the wreckage for personal treasures. Much fun was had by all, including those who died when suddenly everyone started scrambling for the limited space on the raft. I, as one of those horrible slackers who spent a lot of turns searching the wreck, found a decent supply of bullets, which I traded 1 at a time to the only person who had found a gun, in exchange for her using them on people other than myself. In the end, 3 of the 8 players, including myself, made it back to civilization to tell the story of how we were the sole survivors of the wreck. Just don't ask about the barbecue.
Shortly after getting back from GenCon, I packed my suitcase a second time and headed to my favorite little (~1,000 attendees) local gaming convention, Dragonflight. I had originally planned to just go for fun, but at the last minute agreed to volunteer to run the Story Games Lounge when the usual volunteer dropped out. As it turns out, volunteering to run the Story Games room is itself a lot of fun.
First day of Dragonflight Game Convention:
GM'd an awesome double-length Psi*Run for 7 players.
Explored an alien planet in The Quiet Year
Lost a game of Snake Oil to the dreaded Fraud card
Played "2 Rooms and a Boom" till my brains hurt. It's a great social-deduction game, kind of like "Are You A Werewolf?" except everyone gets to play the entire game and know one has to die until the last couple seconds.
Won a game of Jetpack Unicorn. Honestly, I'm not crazy about this game. I think Superfight does the same thing, but better.
Played some more 2 Rooms and a Boom. (Across 6 games I've now been on both teams a couple times, been the bomber and been an Ambassador.)
On Day 2 of Dragonflight:
GM'd Og the caveman RPG for 5 players. No use big words play Og. The cavemen met The Doctor, and caused a regeneration.
GM'd another successful Psi*Run, for 4 new players. Hallucinatory madness derailed everything in a delightful way.
Hosted a giant marathon Microscope timeline for 6 players. It was epic! One of the best-developed, most fleshed-out microscope games I've ever seen. These new players really picked it up quickly and dove deep into the game.
That night, I got the band back together! Playing in Laura Mortensen's annual midnight Urchin game, as my recurring character, Rory Wanker of the formerly famous Rory Wanker and the Bloody Stickers. We're making a comeback, if only in my mind.
Other games played in the Story Game Lounge included more Quiet Year, some Zombie Cinema, and a few escapades of esteemed Baron Munchausen.
Day 3 of Dragonflight:
Played in a delightful Lego and d20s game run by Tim Beach. Two of the 5 players were kids, and they kept the game light-hearted and unpredictable. Tim did an amazing job of making the game work on the kids level and not lose the adults to boredom. Nearly all of my GMing experience in the last 20 years is with adults, but I can only imagine GMing for kids takes extra creativity, patience, and panache. Well done, sir.
Later that night:
I went to a birthday party at Zulu's game cafe. While there, we played a game of Dark Gothic. We all lost when the Shadows filled up in a sudden hurry. Quite the shame, as I was super close to winning, and probably could have done so in one to two more turns.
The next weekend:
Battlestar Galactica board game with old friends I hadn't seen in forever: Andy Collins, Gwen Kestrel, and Greg Collins (and their friend Ben). I was a frakking toaster the whole time, and I successfully destroyed the pathetic human fleet by breaking their morale. It was a solid game, and the humans came very close to winning. Possibly the closest game I've ever played of BSG.
After that, we played Between Two Cities, which is a very clever cooperative drafting and tile-placement game where you're building a city together with the player on your right and simultaneously building another city together with the player on your left. I didn't do so good at this, coming in 4th out of 5th place. I love the entire-cooperative nature of the mechanics, and how that's counter-weighted by the scoring. It's a game that exists in a very unique head space. I want the players adjacent to me to do well, and any other players to do poorly, but I don't really have a way cause that second part. There's probably some deeper strategy I'm not seeing yet, but I can at least admire the novelty of this truly unique game.
We followed that up with Royal Turf. It's a Knizia game about horse racing and betting on horse racing. In the abstract the topic doesn't sound interesting to me at all, like if you said "want to play a game about racetrack betting?" I'd reply with "not unless it's Royal Turf". Every time I play it I feel like a) I'm really not very good at it, and b) the game is surprisingly fun and enjoyable despite all that.
Then the wonderful Bobbie Hyde showed up to pick me up and we talked her into playing a round of Decrypto. It's a team code-guessing game, and we both really enjoyed it. If I didn't already own Codenames Duet, I would immediately rush out and by Decrypto. I feel Decrypto is a much better game than normal Codenames, but that makes it about equal with Codenames Duet (which is closer to codenames, but also generally a vastly improved version of Codenames itself).
So, it's been a summer cavalcade of new games and old friends. Pretty damn cool way to spend the days. And it ain't over yet. This weekend is PAX West! I will once again be running demos of Flying Frog adventure games. Sleep is for the weak.
Showing posts with label Dragonflight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dragonflight. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
Dragonflight game highlights
Last weekend I went to a local gaming convention, Dragonflight. It was a ton of fun. Because of my work and sporadic volunteering, this was the first game convention I'd attended in something like 5 years where I was actually off-the-clock and free to sign up for a full event schedule. Man, it was nice. I played the following games, including quite a few that were new to me:
That was a fun weekend.
- Night's Black Agents - The first of 2 different NBA sessions I played in, each set in a non-typical era for this RPG. Usually, it's a game of burned superspies hunting vampires in the modern day. Instead, this scenario was set in 1870 in the Ottoman Empire, with everyone playing real-life historical figures instead of modern superspies. I played George Stoker, surgeon, officer, and younger brother of the author of Dracula.
- The Captain is Dead - a brightly colored cooperative board game about everything going wrong on a space ship all at once. The game was really solid. I have some minor concerns about replayability because there are card decks where every card in the deck gets played every session of the game... but I'm still probably going to buy The Captain is Dead in a paycheck or two.
- Prime 20 - Tim Beach's ultra-streamlined version of the d20 system, GM'd by Tim Beach himself. He did something fun for character creation: we built Lego minifigs from a big bag of Lego parts, and then quickly stat-ed those minifigs in Prime 20 mechanics. The adventure was a rescue mission that evolved into diplomacy when we learned the "abducted" villager had actually eloped.
- Thanos Rising - The first of many pick-up games of this Marvel-themed cooperative dicefest that I played this week. OMG, I played so much Thanos Rising. Every hole in my event schedule was filled with a round of Thanos.
- Night's Black Agents - My second NBA session of the weekend. This one was set within 24 hours of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. We had a pretty cool chase/combat scene in a Berlin subway station.
- Cthulhu 7th - The new rules features in Cthulhu 7th Edition were enjoyable and meshed well with my gaming style and tastes. It seems like a more forgiving version of the game. That said, the GM had the Phobia Deck handy for when I found myself face-to-face with mind-bending horror. I drew the outburst of Violence card, and it colored the rest of the session. Pretty cool.
- Urchin - A recurring staple of my Dragonflight experience is the Saturday Midnight Urchin game. All those years when I was a volunteer or board member for Dragonflight, the midnight Urchin was the one game I'd make sure I always got to play. As is my tradition, I re-curred my favorite Urchin character, an outrageous over-the-top musician name Rory Wanker, who is forever chasing his (imaginary?) former glory in the music industry. I'm getting the band back together!
- Thanos Rising - So much Thanos Rising. Seriously, this game has no right being this good. It's a movie-tie-in by USAopoly that came out right after the movie did. That could have easily been a design disaster. How on earth did it end up being such a solid game? Shut up and hand me the dice.
- Dr Who: Time of the Daleks - This is a semi-cooperative dice game with some card and board game elements. It really nails the theme. If I had played it for the first time maybe half a year ago, I probably would have fallen in love with it. Unfortunately for the good Doctor, it's mechanics kind of scratch the same itch that Thanos does, but you can finish three games of Thanos in the duration of one Time of the Daleks, and Thanos is easier to teach to new players. Given all that, I just don't see myself buying Time of the Daleks.
- Gaslands - This game is everything I ever wanted Car Wars to be, but more elegant and much faster-paced. Our introductory death-race ended in a three-car-pile-up and massive explosion, in under and hour. I foresee myself buying and modding a bunch of Hot Wheels and Matchbox Cars in the near future.
- Thanos Rising - And we closed out the Con with another nail-biting Thanos struggle.
That was a fun weekend.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Rediscovering something about myself.
I wrote the following in the days between GenCon and Dragonflight, but didn't have time to edit/polish/post it then. This rambling digression really isn't about gaming, it's more crazy talk about my life. If you're just here for house-rules and game reviews, you can skip this post (and the previous one) and go click on the links down the side of the page instead.
Something I rediscovered about myself this week at Gen Con. I really enjoy hard work that culminates in other people being entertained. There’s this great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes from a long day of effort, especially when that work puts smiles on other people’s faces. That’s why I loved running the 50-player LARP and all those big Magic: The Gathering tournaments back in the day. It’s why I loved even the moments of set-up and tear-down before and after GenCon this week, and it explains what I find so fulfilling lately about my physically demanding job at the grocery store (at the store I don’t bring people entertainment or fun, but I do feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of most days).
About 5 years ago or so, a crushing malaise crept quietly into my life, slowly sapping my confidence and eventually dooming my marriage. As the pain and unease overwhelmed me, I responded by withdrawing further from the world. I kept thinking I just needed more time to myself, and I trimmed my social calendar down to a nub. It is so clear now that this was a self-defeating response. For three years I pulled back “for introspection and healing” and it just got worse. The health issues that I thought were the cause of my hardships just grew more dire the more I retreated, because it turns out they were merely symptoms of my lack of self-esteem. The more I worried about them, the more I tried to hide my Spasmodic Dysphonia, the worse all my problems became.
But this is not a story that ends in despair. Just in the past two years, I’ve started getting better instead of worse. I identified the change in trajectories and have been getting excited about it, but until this week I had misidentified the turning point. I thought (incorrectly) that my healing started when I hauled a bleeding friend (Sarah Bergstrom) safely off a mountain. Truth be told, while that day ended in victory, it was emotionally traumatizing for me at the same time and probably resulted in minimal net change in my long term mental state. As epic as that tale is, I realize now that what’s been actually fixing me these past two years has been a little more mundane, and it started a week before she fell off the cliff in the first place.
Since getting drafted by Mark Walters to help with Dragonflight two years ago, I’ve been feeling much better about myself every time I work a long day to help others have a fun. When the website at Dragonflight crashed last year, I stepped up and busted my ass to make sure the convention went on (with paper sign-up sheets). It was exhausting and prevented me from getting to play games most of the con, but it felt so good. The show went on because of me. That was a major victory, and a huge bolus of actual healing from my long-denied psychic wounds took place that weekend. The next weekend was the struggle on the mountain, and they came so closely together I failed to identify which victory started the healing process.
While I was on the floor at Gen Con this week teaching people a new game, fielding questions from strangers, and wrangling up players for demos, I felt like I was King of the World. All my shyness and social insecurity fled away. Then in the evenings, when I’d get to relax with smaller groups of friends and friends-of-friends, the shy retiring Rolfe would return with a vengeance. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it. Why was I confident and strong in a room full of thousands of strangers, but so darned quiet when it was half a dozen of us Frog people, several of whom I’ve been gaming with for months? On the last day when we where rushing to break down and pack up the booth in time to catch our flight, why did I feel so happy and strong? Why did I find it so easy to joke around with the other volunteers when we were “fighting” over who got to use the packing tape, but so hard to find the courage to talk to those same people when we were sitting right next too each other in the airport? Apparently I’m brave when I’m working, but a bit timid when at rest.
In the last few days and nights leading up to me flying to Gen Con, I was putting in full work days at the grocery, rushing home to do online administrative stuff for Dragonflight for a few hours, then carpooling up to the Flying Frog studio to pack boxes full of miniatures onto a big truck, and then coming home for a tiny bit more Dragonflight email trouble-shooting before squeaking in an hour or two of sleep. It was insane, and I loved it, and I feel like it was really good for me.
Holy crap! Am I in danger of becoming a workaholic? That kind of schedule is not sustainable. Does it matter, if it’s healing me? There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m healthier and happier right now than I was 2 years ago, despite the fact that large portions of my life fell apart less than 2 months ago and I find myself crying over random memories. It is all so weird. Is there a way I can reconnect with the braver version of myself without burning myself out? I hadn't seen that part of me in years. Is the solution to volunteer for every imaginable event until the boxes around the days on the calendar start to burst from the pressure? I have some serious soul-searching ahead of me, and _so_ much healing to do, but somehow hope is easier for me to envision now than it has been in years. That's gotta count for something.
Disclaimer: I am a volunteer for both of the organizations mentioned below (Dragonflight and Flying Frog Productions), not an employee. While I do sometimes speak from a position of some authority in my work for Dragonflight, I do not speak in any official capacity for Flying Frog (I'm just a volunteer who helps when need with playtesting and teaching demos). Any opinions expressed in this post are mine, and mine alone, and should not be taken to represent any official positions of either of those two organizations. This isn't really a post about those groups, it's a post about my life, parts of which just happen to occur in the vicinity of those groups at the moment.
Something I rediscovered about myself this week at Gen Con. I really enjoy hard work that culminates in other people being entertained. There’s this great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes from a long day of effort, especially when that work puts smiles on other people’s faces. That’s why I loved running the 50-player LARP and all those big Magic: The Gathering tournaments back in the day. It’s why I loved even the moments of set-up and tear-down before and after GenCon this week, and it explains what I find so fulfilling lately about my physically demanding job at the grocery store (at the store I don’t bring people entertainment or fun, but I do feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of most days).
About 5 years ago or so, a crushing malaise crept quietly into my life, slowly sapping my confidence and eventually dooming my marriage. As the pain and unease overwhelmed me, I responded by withdrawing further from the world. I kept thinking I just needed more time to myself, and I trimmed my social calendar down to a nub. It is so clear now that this was a self-defeating response. For three years I pulled back “for introspection and healing” and it just got worse. The health issues that I thought were the cause of my hardships just grew more dire the more I retreated, because it turns out they were merely symptoms of my lack of self-esteem. The more I worried about them, the more I tried to hide my Spasmodic Dysphonia, the worse all my problems became.
But this is not a story that ends in despair. Just in the past two years, I’ve started getting better instead of worse. I identified the change in trajectories and have been getting excited about it, but until this week I had misidentified the turning point. I thought (incorrectly) that my healing started when I hauled a bleeding friend (Sarah Bergstrom) safely off a mountain. Truth be told, while that day ended in victory, it was emotionally traumatizing for me at the same time and probably resulted in minimal net change in my long term mental state. As epic as that tale is, I realize now that what’s been actually fixing me these past two years has been a little more mundane, and it started a week before she fell off the cliff in the first place.
Since getting drafted by Mark Walters to help with Dragonflight two years ago, I’ve been feeling much better about myself every time I work a long day to help others have a fun. When the website at Dragonflight crashed last year, I stepped up and busted my ass to make sure the convention went on (with paper sign-up sheets). It was exhausting and prevented me from getting to play games most of the con, but it felt so good. The show went on because of me. That was a major victory, and a huge bolus of actual healing from my long-denied psychic wounds took place that weekend. The next weekend was the struggle on the mountain, and they came so closely together I failed to identify which victory started the healing process.
While I was on the floor at Gen Con this week teaching people a new game, fielding questions from strangers, and wrangling up players for demos, I felt like I was King of the World. All my shyness and social insecurity fled away. Then in the evenings, when I’d get to relax with smaller groups of friends and friends-of-friends, the shy retiring Rolfe would return with a vengeance. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it. Why was I confident and strong in a room full of thousands of strangers, but so darned quiet when it was half a dozen of us Frog people, several of whom I’ve been gaming with for months? On the last day when we where rushing to break down and pack up the booth in time to catch our flight, why did I feel so happy and strong? Why did I find it so easy to joke around with the other volunteers when we were “fighting” over who got to use the packing tape, but so hard to find the courage to talk to those same people when we were sitting right next too each other in the airport? Apparently I’m brave when I’m working, but a bit timid when at rest.
In the last few days and nights leading up to me flying to Gen Con, I was putting in full work days at the grocery, rushing home to do online administrative stuff for Dragonflight for a few hours, then carpooling up to the Flying Frog studio to pack boxes full of miniatures onto a big truck, and then coming home for a tiny bit more Dragonflight email trouble-shooting before squeaking in an hour or two of sleep. It was insane, and I loved it, and I feel like it was really good for me.
Holy crap! Am I in danger of becoming a workaholic? That kind of schedule is not sustainable. Does it matter, if it’s healing me? There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m healthier and happier right now than I was 2 years ago, despite the fact that large portions of my life fell apart less than 2 months ago and I find myself crying over random memories. It is all so weird. Is there a way I can reconnect with the braver version of myself without burning myself out? I hadn't seen that part of me in years. Is the solution to volunteer for every imaginable event until the boxes around the days on the calendar start to burst from the pressure? I have some serious soul-searching ahead of me, and _so_ much healing to do, but somehow hope is easier for me to envision now than it has been in years. That's gotta count for something.
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Catching Up With The Summer Of Extremes
It has been a while since I blogged. Life has been far more complicated than usual, and gaming has been in "feast or famine" mode this summer. 2015 has been terribly extreme. The good parts have been really truly
wonderful, but laced between them has been some absolutely crushing bad
news for my personal life, from which I haven't completely recovered.
Let's just start with the elephant in my (entirely new) room. After over 14 years together, Sarah and I are getting a divorce. (That's why you'll no longer see anything about me being a "kept man" in my bio on this site.) It came on suddenly, without really any warning for me. There was some weird tension for a couple of weeks, but it started while my mom was visiting for 2 months, so I misinterpreted all the tension as being just a function of the extended house-guest. Then, boom!, "I think maybe I don't love you anymore", out of nowhere, followed by a demand for divorce just one marital counseling session later. No fights. Not much effort spent trying to fix things, either. Just done and gone in a hurry. One minute I was a house-husband, the next I'm a grocery-store clerk living alone. (Apparently, she'd been unhappy for some time, and I just didn't see the warning signs at all.) I'm still working through it. That much is essentially public record and I don't feel I'm betraying any confidence in sharing the story, such as it is, of our sudden dissolution.
Both of my RPG campaigns (an Everway campaign, as well a Dark Heresy campaign using a hybrid of Warhammer 3rd and Edge of the Empire rules) collapsed in the process of the rapid separation. She's been a player in every multi-session game I've run in all those years, and was my co-GM in the Everway campaign. So my most recent big creative outlets vanished. To be honest, I kinda crumpled there for a while. She started her life over pretty fast (from my perspective anyway), but I've found it hard to get going again, at least on a personal level. For the past few years I've been the quiet one, and she's always been our social scheduler. Charisma and organization are among her strengths. So, before I knew it, she was the one with invites to events, including regular RPGs on the evenings most of our friends have free, and I'm only this week finally trying to cobble together a group and a game. Now to be fair, I've still been attending the weekly rotating-GM one-shot group that I've been associated with over the past 6 years, but that group doesn't always meet regularly, and I've had no time (my hours filled with Dragonflight prep, see below) to GM anything myself. GMing has always been my first and favorite hobby. But more than that, the creative process of GMing is the way I recover from stressful days. GM prep work is my preferred way to fill dead hours and keep my brain busy enough that I don't obsess over the little things in life. So, the extended break from it has further slowed my own healing over the gaping wound in my life, at the same time that I suddenly have a lot more hours to fill and lot more little things feeling wrong.
I'm sure there's a large helping of green-eyed sour grapes of envy poisoning my perspective there, as well. There were a couple of weeks early in the separation where every time I got up the nerve to call friends to see "what are you doing tonight?" the answer was invariably "going somewhere with Sarah, so sorry but you're not invited" and that hurt. I know she wasn't maliciously out-scheduling me, it's just in her nature to plan something cool for every box on the calendar, just as it's in my nature to focus on the now and go with the flow. Problem was, my flow had gotten a little damned up. There were big things on the horizon, and I couldn't figure out how my social life was going to trickle around them. Which, convenient to the metaphor but unpleasant for me, meant I worried a great deal about washing up on the rocks.
Convention season was, at that time, just ahead of us. I'd swung an invite to attend GenCon as a volunteer helping the Flying Frog Productions team, and of course I was running the main ballroom as Board and Card Game Coordinator for Dragonflight the week after. Both of those were solid, upbeat accomplishments that I own, and can be proud of. That said, the invite I'd landed was for both of us to volunteer, and the tickets to Indianapolis were already purchased before we contemplated divorce, and she was signed up to be the Registrar for Dragonflight, too. So there was a lot of motivation to part with a functional friendship or at least a working relationship, rather than just kick and scream and break each others' toys. We seem to have pulled that off for the short term anyway, and with any luck we may actually be one of those rare few ex-couples that stay friendly over the years. I still have some sore feelings over the sense of rejection that comes from losing love, but things could certainly have gone a lot worse and been even more painful had either of us decided not to be so smart and adult about it. Life is a cooperative game, and it doesn't do anyone any good to mess with the other players at your table. I'll take my victories where I can get them, even snatching them from the jaws of divorce.
On that note of victory, I should add that both conventions went really damn well, and I've been invited back to help next time(s). So that's really good. Hard work, but rewarding, and they gave me something to throw myself into instead of just sitting in a room by myself feeling pitiful. I think overall they did me a lot of good, even though it meant I was too busy every night leading up to the Cons to consider putting together the game that might have helped me de-stress. It's a trade-off. GMing sooner might have been more helpful, but these Cons required me to interact with people and not just lock myself up in my new little apartment. If I didn't have the Conventions to keep me busy, there's no guarantee that would have turned into "more time to GM" and not just "more time to wallow in my loneliness". Especially early on.
First was the unending stream of games that was GenCon. I lost count of how many dozens of people I taught how to play Colonial Horror / Dark Gothic at the Frog booth. It was quite a few, many of whom went on to buy the game. In the evenings I hung with new friends on the Frog team, playing card games over drinks and slowly processing all the crazy new emotions just barely contained inside my head. Jason and Scott Hill (the brothers at the core of Flying Frog Productions) are two of the most generous people I have ever met, and they made us all feel like family. Hotel, airfare, food, con tickets -- all paid for, and all I had to do in return was spend my days teaching people how to play a game I really enjoy. I got my quota of much-needed fun that week, that's for sure. And for several weeks before that too, as the fine folks at Flying Frog have been inviting me up once-a-week for the past few months to help playtest upcoming Shadows of Brimstone expansions (many of which debuted at GenCon). That's been a series of very cool experiences. It's rather amazing just how well they treat their volunteers.
One night at GenCon they took us to True Dungeon as a group, which was staggeringly enjoyable, and very unique. Live-action puzzle-solving in a 3D life-sized dungeon, with a shuffleboard to-hit system and memorization minigames for the spellcasters. It was a lot of fun, and I definitely carried my weight by solving one of the puzzle rooms singlehandedly, and by scoring some high-damage spells during our fight scenes. Go me!
The weekend after that was Dragonflight. GenCon had over 60,000 gamers in attendance, and Dragonflight had under 800. That gives two very different experiences. One is roiling chaos, the other feels more like a community. (Though, as I said, the Flying Frog crew was my community while in the GenCon chaos, so I've been surrounded by friends this whole time.) This was my third Dragonflight, so there were a lot of familiar faces, and I'd gotten a good sense for how the convention rolls along.
It was my first year as Area Coordinator for the main room at Dragonflight, so I had a lot of responsibilities... and yet, it felt like less work than the previous year. Last year, we'd had a big computer problem, and I'd been "Johnny on the spot" retro-converting us back to a paper sign-up system when the website went down. That was grueling work, but worth it to keep the convention running in spite of tech failure. This year, I pushed to just use electronic/online for pre-registration leading up to the convention, and have paper sign-up sheets prepared in advance for the events. I didn't have to reinvent the wheel, and it all went really smoothly. Smoothly enough I was free to actually play a couple games during the convention. (Meanwhile, Sarah had similar impressive success at the Registration booth. Go, Sarah!) Multiple people have told me that this was the smoothest running Dragonflight in over a decade, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. Attendance was up 25%, but numerous people actually said it felt like it was down a little from last year because the lines were so short and it was so easy to get into a game or find a table. I went to a lot of trouble engineering the flow of the ballroom to make it feel that way, and I'm thrilled it paid off so well. Go me again!
That said, there were a number of other changes and improvements I was unable to implement this year at Dragonflight. I didn't get to everything on my list, partly because I was away at GenCon the week before, partly because it was my first year in this role and I underestimated how much work it would be, but partly because all the stress and craziness in my life eroded my focus and efficiency a bit this summer. Regardless, the convention still went well enough that people were impressed, and partly as a result I've been elected to the Dragonflight Board of Directors. So I'll get to implement my ideas next year. And to be honest, the hours I put in in the last two months before Dragonflight were a little unreasonable anyway. I had around 400 games to coordinate -- I had to solicit GMs and game hosts, assign them rooms and tables, create a schedule and a map, approve listings on our web software, edit descriptions for the program, and answer a lot of questions over many months to make this all run so flawlessly on the weekend in question. The only person who had more work than me was Amy, our Convention Director (though I'm sure Ted, our Web Developer, would disagree with my assessment). Next year I hope to "hire" (it's an all-volunteer organization) an assistant to handle some percentage of the work. I've got a lot to be proud of, and have laid a solid foundation for even better events next year.
Disclaimer: I am a volunteer for both of the organizations mentioned below (Dragonflight and Flying Frog Productions), not an employee. While I do sometimes speak from a position of some authority in my work for Dragonflight, I do not speak in any official capacity for Flying Frog (I'm just a volunteer who helps when need with playtesting and teaching demos). Any opinions expressed in this post are mine, and mine alone, and should not be taken to represent any official positions of either of those two organizations. This isn't really a post about those groups, it's a post about my life, parts of which just happen to occur in the vicinity of those groups at the moment.
Let's just start with the elephant in my (entirely new) room. After over 14 years together, Sarah and I are getting a divorce. (That's why you'll no longer see anything about me being a "kept man" in my bio on this site.) It came on suddenly, without really any warning for me. There was some weird tension for a couple of weeks, but it started while my mom was visiting for 2 months, so I misinterpreted all the tension as being just a function of the extended house-guest. Then, boom!, "I think maybe I don't love you anymore", out of nowhere, followed by a demand for divorce just one marital counseling session later. No fights. Not much effort spent trying to fix things, either. Just done and gone in a hurry. One minute I was a house-husband, the next I'm a grocery-store clerk living alone. (Apparently, she'd been unhappy for some time, and I just didn't see the warning signs at all.) I'm still working through it. That much is essentially public record and I don't feel I'm betraying any confidence in sharing the story, such as it is, of our sudden dissolution.
Both of my RPG campaigns (an Everway campaign, as well a Dark Heresy campaign using a hybrid of Warhammer 3rd and Edge of the Empire rules) collapsed in the process of the rapid separation. She's been a player in every multi-session game I've run in all those years, and was my co-GM in the Everway campaign. So my most recent big creative outlets vanished. To be honest, I kinda crumpled there for a while. She started her life over pretty fast (from my perspective anyway), but I've found it hard to get going again, at least on a personal level. For the past few years I've been the quiet one, and she's always been our social scheduler. Charisma and organization are among her strengths. So, before I knew it, she was the one with invites to events, including regular RPGs on the evenings most of our friends have free, and I'm only this week finally trying to cobble together a group and a game. Now to be fair, I've still been attending the weekly rotating-GM one-shot group that I've been associated with over the past 6 years, but that group doesn't always meet regularly, and I've had no time (my hours filled with Dragonflight prep, see below) to GM anything myself. GMing has always been my first and favorite hobby. But more than that, the creative process of GMing is the way I recover from stressful days. GM prep work is my preferred way to fill dead hours and keep my brain busy enough that I don't obsess over the little things in life. So, the extended break from it has further slowed my own healing over the gaping wound in my life, at the same time that I suddenly have a lot more hours to fill and lot more little things feeling wrong.
I'm sure there's a large helping of green-eyed sour grapes of envy poisoning my perspective there, as well. There were a couple of weeks early in the separation where every time I got up the nerve to call friends to see "what are you doing tonight?" the answer was invariably "going somewhere with Sarah, so sorry but you're not invited" and that hurt. I know she wasn't maliciously out-scheduling me, it's just in her nature to plan something cool for every box on the calendar, just as it's in my nature to focus on the now and go with the flow. Problem was, my flow had gotten a little damned up. There were big things on the horizon, and I couldn't figure out how my social life was going to trickle around them. Which, convenient to the metaphor but unpleasant for me, meant I worried a great deal about washing up on the rocks.
Convention season was, at that time, just ahead of us. I'd swung an invite to attend GenCon as a volunteer helping the Flying Frog Productions team, and of course I was running the main ballroom as Board and Card Game Coordinator for Dragonflight the week after. Both of those were solid, upbeat accomplishments that I own, and can be proud of. That said, the invite I'd landed was for both of us to volunteer, and the tickets to Indianapolis were already purchased before we contemplated divorce, and she was signed up to be the Registrar for Dragonflight, too. So there was a lot of motivation to part with a functional friendship or at least a working relationship, rather than just kick and scream and break each others' toys. We seem to have pulled that off for the short term anyway, and with any luck we may actually be one of those rare few ex-couples that stay friendly over the years. I still have some sore feelings over the sense of rejection that comes from losing love, but things could certainly have gone a lot worse and been even more painful had either of us decided not to be so smart and adult about it. Life is a cooperative game, and it doesn't do anyone any good to mess with the other players at your table. I'll take my victories where I can get them, even snatching them from the jaws of divorce.
On that note of victory, I should add that both conventions went really damn well, and I've been invited back to help next time(s). So that's really good. Hard work, but rewarding, and they gave me something to throw myself into instead of just sitting in a room by myself feeling pitiful. I think overall they did me a lot of good, even though it meant I was too busy every night leading up to the Cons to consider putting together the game that might have helped me de-stress. It's a trade-off. GMing sooner might have been more helpful, but these Cons required me to interact with people and not just lock myself up in my new little apartment. If I didn't have the Conventions to keep me busy, there's no guarantee that would have turned into "more time to GM" and not just "more time to wallow in my loneliness". Especially early on.
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| Apparently, I felt very strongly about that card. |
One night at GenCon they took us to True Dungeon as a group, which was staggeringly enjoyable, and very unique. Live-action puzzle-solving in a 3D life-sized dungeon, with a shuffleboard to-hit system and memorization minigames for the spellcasters. It was a lot of fun, and I definitely carried my weight by solving one of the puzzle rooms singlehandedly, and by scoring some high-damage spells during our fight scenes. Go me!
The weekend after that was Dragonflight. GenCon had over 60,000 gamers in attendance, and Dragonflight had under 800. That gives two very different experiences. One is roiling chaos, the other feels more like a community. (Though, as I said, the Flying Frog crew was my community while in the GenCon chaos, so I've been surrounded by friends this whole time.) This was my third Dragonflight, so there were a lot of familiar faces, and I'd gotten a good sense for how the convention rolls along.
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| Dragonflight ballroom, on a slow morning hour. |
That said, there were a number of other changes and improvements I was unable to implement this year at Dragonflight. I didn't get to everything on my list, partly because I was away at GenCon the week before, partly because it was my first year in this role and I underestimated how much work it would be, but partly because all the stress and craziness in my life eroded my focus and efficiency a bit this summer. Regardless, the convention still went well enough that people were impressed, and partly as a result I've been elected to the Dragonflight Board of Directors. So I'll get to implement my ideas next year. And to be honest, the hours I put in in the last two months before Dragonflight were a little unreasonable anyway. I had around 400 games to coordinate -- I had to solicit GMs and game hosts, assign them rooms and tables, create a schedule and a map, approve listings on our web software, edit descriptions for the program, and answer a lot of questions over many months to make this all run so flawlessly on the weekend in question. The only person who had more work than me was Amy, our Convention Director (though I'm sure Ted, our Web Developer, would disagree with my assessment). Next year I hope to "hire" (it's an all-volunteer organization) an assistant to handle some percentage of the work. I've got a lot to be proud of, and have laid a solid foundation for even better events next year.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Second-Fiddle to the Urchins
The Urchin RPG is weird. It’s not just because you’re playing crazy homeless people living in the tunnels beneath New York. The mechanics of the game upend the usual power-structures, leaving the GM the person at the table with the least control of the plot and world.
A week and a half ago, I played Urchin during one of the midnight time slots at the Dragonflight convention in Bellevue, WA. Two days ago, I GM’d urchin for a group of 6 that included 4 new gamers with very little (1 to 5 sessions each) previous RPG experience. Seeing it from both sides of the GM screen in such a short time has convinced me Urchin is a game where the GM has the least interesting job, and the least narrative power. The GM is at best second-fiddle to the urchins, but even that probably over-estimates the GM’s importance in this game.
At the game where I was a player, I absolutely dominated (and created from whole cloth) the plot. At the game I GM’d, I couldn’t make my pet plotline materialize no matter how hard I tried to push it.
In the real world, I (the player) once (many years ago) met a friend of a friend who claimed that they’d accidentally left a diary at a bus stop and a year later one of the poems they’d written in that lost journal was now a top 40 pop song. I was skeptical, but, whatever, the truth of their story is beside the point. The idea at least has dramatic potential. I’ve always kinda wanted to use that notion in a character (in an RPG or a piece of fiction) but never got around to it… until the game at Dragonflight.
My character, Rory Wanker (of the once-almost-famous “Rory Wanker and the Bloody Stickahs”) took that diary story and dialed it up to 11. He also had serious psychopathic delusions, and was convinced that he had previously killed Sir Paul McCartney four times and They just kept replacing the blighter with clones. I was basically claiming to have written the lyrics to every Lennon-McCartney song ever, and also claiming to be the cause of the “Paul is Dead” meme. I just riffed off that nonsense all night long.
Every time it was my turn, I pushed the rest of the our group of punks and bums towards tracking down Sir Clone McCartney and offing him again. As a group, we raised the Kill Cartney Count up from 4 to 6 over the course of the session. At least one of those two kills was deliberate misdirection from my fellow PCs, but who was I to quibble over the identity of the body they’d shivved? So our characters invaded the random hotel that I, in my delusion, insisted was where Sir Clone McSongthief was staying while he was in town.
So there’s this major player-driven plotline that served as the backbone of the session. About the only decision left for the GM was whether Paul McCartney was actually staying at that hotel - but from my crazed perspective it was irrelevant because no matter who was in that penthouse, I would fill in the connection to make them part of the Clone McCartney conspiracy. That’s kinda the point of playing a crazy person.
Long story short, I jump off the roof of the pent-house where we just killed McCartney #6. I did this at the end of somebody else’s scene that I happened to be present for. I chose my timing because I’d get to Kick the next scene:
In any normal RPG, it’d be appropriate at that point for the GM to say “No, you’ve jumped off the roof, and now you’re dead.” Or at least roll damage or call for a saving throw vs falling or something.
I feel urchin is broken. The rules are flawed. Every time I enjoy the game (and I usually do) I feel simultaneously guilty and lucky. The game is a house of cards that could topple over at any moment, but more often than not we get to the end of the session without bumping the metaphorical table.
In Urchin, players go around that table taking turns. Turns are entire scenes that could last anywhere between 10 seconds and 10 minutes. You can either “kick” a scene, or “grab” a scene. Kicking a scene is where the player narrates the situation and what their character is trying to do, and the GM just adjudicates the rules (and maybe sets the difficulty and results if the player chose to do something that’s not covered by the rules). When you Kick, you as player are usurping at least 80% of the power a GM normally has. A good game of Urchin is one with colorful PCs who take the initiative to do interesting things.
The other option is Grabbing a scene. Grabbing frees up the GM to narrate and frame the scene (giving them back the power most other games assume they always have). The rulebook also provides a chart the GM can roll on if no obvious scenes spring to mind. The Scene Grabbing Chart ranges from absolutely devastatingly terrible (attacked by multiple bad guys that each individually outclass you), to just mildly better than the average turn. Once the players have been bitten by that chart once or twice, they’ll stop grabbing and start kicking hard.
There’s only three ways a session of Urchin can end:
Sadly, the path to Agharta is mathematically solvable. Each time around the table, one scummer needs to collect money to pay the lights. Everyone else can focus on the Blessing. You can scavenge for the raw materials, which you’re guaranteed to find, and if you’re willing to Push you can even ensure nothing bad (other than Mind Rot) happens while you’re searching. So Scummer A finds the components, and passes them off to Scummer B. Scummer B brews a few hits of the drug, pushing the roll if needed, and possibly suffering some Mind Rot. They pass the finished blessing to Scummer C who sells it to meatheads for 2 to 3 cash tokens per hit. In a four (or more) player game that can be done in one round. In the second round (or the same round if you’ve got a lot of players) you spend the cash buying more blessing from NPCs, and then selling it to other NPCs. It’s a goofy loophole that lets you, once you’ve got the initial investment capital, generate a feedback loop that slowly inches towards infinite blessing. Even if the GM plugs that rules-hole (and they might not want to, as being able to buy the blessing from NPCs is a nice safety net for low-mind PCs struggling with Madness), it’s still pretty easy for a 4-scummer circle to generate large amounts of blessing in just a couple low-risk rounds. Ultimately, Blessing is easy to come by.
Lots of blessing = lots of money and a high mind score = the lights never go out, and somebody becomes Captain. So if you’re concerned about winning the game, and willing to cooperate like a normal RPG party instead of struggling like scummer nutjobs, “winning” the game becomes a trivial exercise. The only thing that can trip up a coordinated party is rolling a 3 or a 5 on the Quest chart (but even that can be solved by aiming the blessing machine at a second player to generate a new Captain and a new Quest in the next round).
The more I play the game, the more strongly I feel that Urchin desperately needs a 4th ending scenario. It could really use a little more narrative structure in case the players scatter, but that would require rules revisions, since the rules-as-written keep the GM from introducing any sort of plot at all.
When I was GMing Urchin on Sunday, I tried to work in this oddball subplot about a were-alligator in the tunnels. In a five-hour game with 6 scummers, they Grabbed a scene exactly twice. Every time I could get away with narrating a background detail in somebody else’s scene, I mentioned the beast howling in the distance or causing problems with the subways, but nearly every time the players Kicked a scene they (wisely) narrated themselves far away from my were-villain. Most of the group individually chased after the Blessing right away, but weren’t very cooperative or coordinated about it early on, so they doubled-up on redundant steps and never actually got enough of the drug to boost someone to Captain status. Along the way, they mugged a rich person just outside an opera house, and drew police attention. Immediately afterwards they neglected to pay the light bill and rolled a Meathead Invasion that resulted in a (police-based) TPK that had nothing to do with my alligatanthropic monster.
The one time I got people to interact with my were-gator, the player Kicked his next scene by narrating that he was searching for ricotta cheese. Because “everyone knows” that ricotta is like wolvesbane for were-crocodiles. In a normal game, the GM would have control of whether or not this ludicrous notion was valid or just going to endanger you further… but in urchin searching for a piece of gear that gives you +1 die on rolls vs the crocogator is an automatic success and the player gets to narrate what that found gear is. In later turns they can even DIY themselves a better version of the object (maybe a cross-shaped cheese-log?) that gives even more dice. That’s cool. Bizarreness like this is at the heart of Urchin, but it does illustrate what I’ve been saying about the GM having very little power. I leaned hard on my big threat, and all it got me was one player spending one action to invent it’s weakness while everyone else just steered clear.
Everybody had fun playing weirdo nutjob scummers, so it all worked out for the best despite the relative lack of plot and the the TPFM (Total Party Ferguson, Missouri-ing) ending. Urchin is broken, but it’s not unplayable. It’s like the first edition of Og - you can run it as a one-shot and have a lot of fun, but consecutive plays in a short time frame are less fun and become increasingly focused on the mechanical failings. Urchin could really use a revision with the same goals as Robin Law’s “Unearthed Edition” of Og (which is to say a rewrite that preserves all the best bits of the current game but fixes core mechanics and gives you more reason to play a second time). I’ve got a couple ideas towards rebalancing it, and I may type them up in a future blog post, but for today I’ve probably rambled on long enough. There's blessing to brew, and somebody's gotta pay the lights around here.
A week and a half ago, I played Urchin during one of the midnight time slots at the Dragonflight convention in Bellevue, WA. Two days ago, I GM’d urchin for a group of 6 that included 4 new gamers with very little (1 to 5 sessions each) previous RPG experience. Seeing it from both sides of the GM screen in such a short time has convinced me Urchin is a game where the GM has the least interesting job, and the least narrative power. The GM is at best second-fiddle to the urchins, but even that probably over-estimates the GM’s importance in this game.
At the game where I was a player, I absolutely dominated (and created from whole cloth) the plot. At the game I GM’d, I couldn’t make my pet plotline materialize no matter how hard I tried to push it.
Band On The Run, aka Let Me Tell You About My Character:
At Dragonflight, I played a has-been failed punk-rocker with dreams of getting his band back together.In the real world, I (the player) once (many years ago) met a friend of a friend who claimed that they’d accidentally left a diary at a bus stop and a year later one of the poems they’d written in that lost journal was now a top 40 pop song. I was skeptical, but, whatever, the truth of their story is beside the point. The idea at least has dramatic potential. I’ve always kinda wanted to use that notion in a character (in an RPG or a piece of fiction) but never got around to it… until the game at Dragonflight.
My character, Rory Wanker (of the once-almost-famous “Rory Wanker and the Bloody Stickahs”) took that diary story and dialed it up to 11. He also had serious psychopathic delusions, and was convinced that he had previously killed Sir Paul McCartney four times and They just kept replacing the blighter with clones. I was basically claiming to have written the lyrics to every Lennon-McCartney song ever, and also claiming to be the cause of the “Paul is Dead” meme. I just riffed off that nonsense all night long.
Every time it was my turn, I pushed the rest of the our group of punks and bums towards tracking down Sir Clone McCartney and offing him again. As a group, we raised the Kill Cartney Count up from 4 to 6 over the course of the session. At least one of those two kills was deliberate misdirection from my fellow PCs, but who was I to quibble over the identity of the body they’d shivved? So our characters invaded the random hotel that I, in my delusion, insisted was where Sir Clone McSongthief was staying while he was in town.So there’s this major player-driven plotline that served as the backbone of the session. About the only decision left for the GM was whether Paul McCartney was actually staying at that hotel - but from my crazed perspective it was irrelevant because no matter who was in that penthouse, I would fill in the connection to make them part of the Clone McCartney conspiracy. That’s kinda the point of playing a crazy person.
Long story short, I jump off the roof of the pent-house where we just killed McCartney #6. I did this at the end of somebody else’s scene that I happened to be present for. I chose my timing because I’d get to Kick the next scene:
Fade to black. Fade in to a fancy office with a huge desk, and framed gold records on the wall. Rory is there with his agent. “And that’s how the concept album ends, hence the name ‘Paul is Dead’. I’ve got most of the songs written, I’m ready to go to the recording studio.”That’s a complete dick move, right there, narrating that the session only existed in my character’s album pitch. I tell myself it’s okay because my character is nuts enough that if anyone has an issue with my ending, they can just write it off as the crazy thing running through my head as I fall 20 stories. I was being a bad player, grandstanding and spotlight-hogging, then invoking my own Deus Ex Machina after I made a bone-headed suicidal move. That's totally the sort of nonsense I engage in as a player, especially in a rules-light "hippy game" like Urchin.
In any normal RPG, it’d be appropriate at that point for the GM to say “No, you’ve jumped off the roof, and now you’re dead.” Or at least roll damage or call for a saving throw vs falling or something.
Mechanical Failure:
Urchin’s mechanics aren’t really set up that way. PCs don’t die unless the player wants them to. Instead they end up “in the gutter”, which is just this unfun quantum state where your turns are skipped until a fellow PC brings you food, then you’re magically all okay. With the rules as written, the only way your PC can die against your will is if all the PCs end up in the gutter at the same time… or if all your fellow PCs hate you so much that no one will bring you a candy bar to save your life. You are expressly granted the narrative control to set your scene where-ever you want, and the GM’s main job is say “yes” repeatedly.I feel urchin is broken. The rules are flawed. Every time I enjoy the game (and I usually do) I feel simultaneously guilty and lucky. The game is a house of cards that could topple over at any moment, but more often than not we get to the end of the session without bumping the metaphorical table.
In Urchin, players go around that table taking turns. Turns are entire scenes that could last anywhere between 10 seconds and 10 minutes. You can either “kick” a scene, or “grab” a scene. Kicking a scene is where the player narrates the situation and what their character is trying to do, and the GM just adjudicates the rules (and maybe sets the difficulty and results if the player chose to do something that’s not covered by the rules). When you Kick, you as player are usurping at least 80% of the power a GM normally has. A good game of Urchin is one with colorful PCs who take the initiative to do interesting things.
The other option is Grabbing a scene. Grabbing frees up the GM to narrate and frame the scene (giving them back the power most other games assume they always have). The rulebook also provides a chart the GM can roll on if no obvious scenes spring to mind. The Scene Grabbing Chart ranges from absolutely devastatingly terrible (attacked by multiple bad guys that each individually outclass you), to just mildly better than the average turn. Once the players have been bitten by that chart once or twice, they’ll stop grabbing and start kicking hard.
There’s only three ways a session of Urchin can end:
- Agharta — Someone raises Mind up to 10 via the Blessing, receives a quest, and follows that to fabled hobo heaven. This is the intended ending the rulebook sets you up for.
- Total Party Kill - Usually the result of failing to pay the light bill. Sometimes the lights are covered, but you still get a TPK when somebody grabs a scene after they or other players have stirred up the sort of trouble that could logically draw a police response.
- Fizzle — The party splits and rambles, having some good flavorful scenes but never really engaging in anything that smells of plot. You eventually call the game because you’re getting tired and the game is growing old.
Sadly, the path to Agharta is mathematically solvable. Each time around the table, one scummer needs to collect money to pay the lights. Everyone else can focus on the Blessing. You can scavenge for the raw materials, which you’re guaranteed to find, and if you’re willing to Push you can even ensure nothing bad (other than Mind Rot) happens while you’re searching. So Scummer A finds the components, and passes them off to Scummer B. Scummer B brews a few hits of the drug, pushing the roll if needed, and possibly suffering some Mind Rot. They pass the finished blessing to Scummer C who sells it to meatheads for 2 to 3 cash tokens per hit. In a four (or more) player game that can be done in one round. In the second round (or the same round if you’ve got a lot of players) you spend the cash buying more blessing from NPCs, and then selling it to other NPCs. It’s a goofy loophole that lets you, once you’ve got the initial investment capital, generate a feedback loop that slowly inches towards infinite blessing. Even if the GM plugs that rules-hole (and they might not want to, as being able to buy the blessing from NPCs is a nice safety net for low-mind PCs struggling with Madness), it’s still pretty easy for a 4-scummer circle to generate large amounts of blessing in just a couple low-risk rounds. Ultimately, Blessing is easy to come by.
Lots of blessing = lots of money and a high mind score = the lights never go out, and somebody becomes Captain. So if you’re concerned about winning the game, and willing to cooperate like a normal RPG party instead of struggling like scummer nutjobs, “winning” the game becomes a trivial exercise. The only thing that can trip up a coordinated party is rolling a 3 or a 5 on the Quest chart (but even that can be solved by aiming the blessing machine at a second player to generate a new Captain and a new Quest in the next round).
About the lights and turn order:
It’s vital that the turn order get shaken up from time to time (don’t always start the round with the same player) or else the player at the end of the line usually gets stuck having to chase Cash Tokens every single turn. That player is left feeling like they have no freedom (as their only choice is whether to panhandle or mug from turn to turn), and probably won’t enjoy the game as much as the others. They may be tempted to not pay the light bill. The Lights Out Table is certainly fun, but it has at least a 1 in 3 chance of producing a TPK. I'm happy when that table gets action on in any Urchin game I'm involved in, but I can understand how it may not be some scummer's cup of tea.
The more I play the game, the more strongly I feel that Urchin desperately needs a 4th ending scenario. It could really use a little more narrative structure in case the players scatter, but that would require rules revisions, since the rules-as-written keep the GM from introducing any sort of plot at all.
Curse of the Were-Gator:
When I was GMing Urchin on Sunday, I tried to work in this oddball subplot about a were-alligator in the tunnels. In a five-hour game with 6 scummers, they Grabbed a scene exactly twice. Every time I could get away with narrating a background detail in somebody else’s scene, I mentioned the beast howling in the distance or causing problems with the subways, but nearly every time the players Kicked a scene they (wisely) narrated themselves far away from my were-villain. Most of the group individually chased after the Blessing right away, but weren’t very cooperative or coordinated about it early on, so they doubled-up on redundant steps and never actually got enough of the drug to boost someone to Captain status. Along the way, they mugged a rich person just outside an opera house, and drew police attention. Immediately afterwards they neglected to pay the light bill and rolled a Meathead Invasion that resulted in a (police-based) TPK that had nothing to do with my alligatanthropic monster.
The one time I got people to interact with my were-gator, the player Kicked his next scene by narrating that he was searching for ricotta cheese. Because “everyone knows” that ricotta is like wolvesbane for were-crocodiles. In a normal game, the GM would have control of whether or not this ludicrous notion was valid or just going to endanger you further… but in urchin searching for a piece of gear that gives you +1 die on rolls vs the crocogator is an automatic success and the player gets to narrate what that found gear is. In later turns they can even DIY themselves a better version of the object (maybe a cross-shaped cheese-log?) that gives even more dice. That’s cool. Bizarreness like this is at the heart of Urchin, but it does illustrate what I’ve been saying about the GM having very little power. I leaned hard on my big threat, and all it got me was one player spending one action to invent it’s weakness while everyone else just steered clear.
Everybody had fun playing weirdo nutjob scummers, so it all worked out for the best despite the relative lack of plot and the the TPFM (Total Party Ferguson, Missouri-ing) ending. Urchin is broken, but it’s not unplayable. It’s like the first edition of Og - you can run it as a one-shot and have a lot of fun, but consecutive plays in a short time frame are less fun and become increasingly focused on the mechanical failings. Urchin could really use a revision with the same goals as Robin Law’s “Unearthed Edition” of Og (which is to say a rewrite that preserves all the best bits of the current game but fixes core mechanics and gives you more reason to play a second time). I’ve got a couple ideas towards rebalancing it, and I may type them up in a future blog post, but for today I’ve probably rambled on long enough. There's blessing to brew, and somebody's gotta pay the lights around here.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
The Doctor meets The Great Gazoo
Lesson learned while running Og last weekend at Dragonflight:
Never schedule The Doctor and The Great Gazoo for the same session of Og. It's too hard to keep their voices and personalities separate. Limit one annoying time-traveler per session, please.
Never schedule The Doctor and The Great Gazoo for the same session of Og. It's too hard to keep their voices and personalities separate. Limit one annoying time-traveler per session, please.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
No Use Matrix Tables, Play Og!
I just signed up to run a session of Og: Unearthed Edition at the Dragonflight convention next month. I'll also be GMing it this weekend for a group of friends from my wife's workplace.
I just keep coming up with crazy ideas to spring at the poor cavemen. Ran down to Top Ten Toys and Archie McPhee to get some megafauna and other props. Being a gamer is fun.
I'm also currently toying with the idea that a sheet of black construction paper and an old Icehouse set makes a good simulation of the table with the matrix of control crystals from the inside of a pylon in Land Of The Lost. The idea is to present the players with the sort of intellectual challenge that makes D&D gamers groan and start asking to short-circuit it with an Intelligence check... knowing full well that as cavemen, they'll just smash the device with rocks and clubs. It's your classic unsolvable puzzle situation, but this time no one has any delusions about needing (or being able) to actually solve it. I mean, I did work out a puzzle for it, but I'm not expecting the players to actually solve it, and the plot won't bog down regardless of whether or not they do. No use smart thing, play Og!
I just keep coming up with crazy ideas to spring at the poor cavemen. Ran down to Top Ten Toys and Archie McPhee to get some megafauna and other props. Being a gamer is fun.
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