Fluffy bored early morning notes.

I meant to get a picture of the holes in the floor at the hotel yesterday, but I actually kept putting it off. Apparently it was fairly short-term construction as there are now big pipes going up through them.

It's a pity, really. I've learned all sorts of things this trip about how to handle this con here - where not to stay, whether to get a car, etc. - and none will apply next year anyway. I've got stuff mapped for the day - now to see how much of it happens. On the one hand, I regret the Deryni game schedule today. On the other? I had fun yesterday - I will have fun today - and there's no real point worrying, I think.

I do so much better once I'm not actually waiting.

Friday GenCon Summary.

I'd whine about my feet and shouders, but Scott completely numbed his legs today trailing me around the dealer's room (and didn't realize why he felt tired till we got to our next game), then on the way back carried my (by then overloaded) backpack - with already-sore back and shoulders. (I had the same problem or would not have let him, but as it is? Very grateful!) I think we ended up about equal, but for the legs bit earlier n the day. Emily wins, though. She walked into a road construction sign while trying to read something to the side - her leg hit its, where the metal curved up into her path. OW!

Scott and I are driving down tomorrow. I have several 8 am possibles, and he is going to try for an Earthdawn game he really wants to play in that slot. He was not pleased that he didn't bring his Threads of Legends character this year (there were no events for it last year, apparently, so he thought it wasn't continuing), but he's going to play with one of the stock ones. Because of the early start, we'd like to be sure we get there in time, plus it may rain tomorrow - always nicer to drive.

As for today, it was excellent, for the most part. I do wish the Deryni game had been in the 5 pm timeslot (as the GM had thought it was yesterday - when someone told her it was at noon, her eyes widened a bit, and she said she was glad they'd seen that!). But I'm very very glad I didn't play in it, in the timeslot it was in. First, I got to talk to elfbabe and one of her friends for about an hour, which was very cool. Although, now that I think about it, also a touch sad - talking about LiveJournal volunteer stuff for a decent chunk of the time is an amusing way to have spent time at GenCon! :)

And I played the game I had originally wanted most (before Deryni wowed me) forthat day, in the 10 am time slot. A GURPS game, Devil in the DEtails. We played imps (and one Valkyrie) and it was great.

I played Nobody (to a chorus of the party saying, "Nobody did it!" - yes, that Nobody). Nobody was invisible, insubstantial (but could materialize hir hands and take things insubstantial with hirself), and also an impulsive paranoid kleptomaniac with a vow not to speak. Scott and Isaak played Pain and Panic respectively, and Isaak had way too much fun as Panic blamed things on Pain, got Pain tortured, etc. Hehehe.

We did ultimately make a wrong choice, and the Gods of Law (whom we were supposed to be saving) all died. The Valkyrie died with them, and I suspect some members of the group (IC) weren't very happy about it. On the other hand, about half the group would be just fine in the new order, IC, so....

Pity the 5 pm slot wasn't so kind. I was going to try for a 7th Sea game - and it turned out to be the GM who ran our excellent Thursday game of Exalted! Unfortunately, I was the fourth person to try to get in with generics...so no go. (She always has two extra characters, but all her players with real tickets showed up. Pity, but oh well.) The next-choice game was a totally empty table. No one there. Right.... It looked like a GURPS humor day for a moment, third choice was "GURPS Magic, What ELSE could go wrong?" - but on the hour, the last player showed up and bounced me. Bah!

So I went to the game Scott was trying to generic into, a Children of the Sun game (to show off the setting and system). That had room, and I'm glad I got in; it was a decent adventure and way better than no game. It was also a really bad attempt to show off setting or system. REALLY bad.

It was a huge dungeon crawl, with no intelligent NPCs, sketchy character notes with no real deep history or social notes (despite having numerous non-humans), and a so-so verbal intro that said far less about the world than I would have liked. The adventure was okay, but it didn't really show the system very well. I mean, we saw how the dice worked, but - not why. We didn't (of course) see chargen, but we also weren't even told what our target numbers were. The GM had us roll and tell him the numbers, then told us if we succeeded or not - so only the contested rolls (such as combat) were really clear to us.

Three big pet peeves:

• Loud room, not-loud-enough GM and players. We had to repeat things - or just give up - several times.
• GM tended to focus in on people - generally, if someone was acting and the rest of the group was nearby, it was hard at times to get his attention - short of out-shouting the table behind you - even if it was to, say, render assistance to the attention-focus person. Part of this was the loud room, but once someone was "focus" he wasn't even glancing aside most of the time. (At one point, a player got up and went to the restroom, walking about two feet behind the person who was at the time the "focus". A couple minutes later, the GM finished that, looked around the table, pointed at the empty chair, and asked when the guy left and where was he....)
• GM powerposing the characters. BADLY. In several cases, he simply said, "One of you (does whatever), and...." usually followed by moving us to a different room or place. The game was too long for its 4-hour slot if he didn't (which is probably not his fault - he barely seemed able to keep track of it, so I seriously doubt he wrote the scenario), but considering in many cases I couldn't imagine why we (pushed, poked, whatever)...well, I was left wondering who did whatever-it-was and why. It might have mattered, but I didn't even know what she knew. Simply saying who did it or why would have helped.

Peeves make poor pets, but those are mine. As a lesser "sin", he obviously didn't know the module well - he not only had to look things up in his notes at intervals, he often didn't know what page (of 5-10 or so in his packet) to find whatever-it-was on. The whole thing centered around a complex under a temple, and one of the characters served the goddess the temple was dedicated to (as a hook to get us in) - and he forgot the goddess's name about every time he needed it (sometimes he just couldn't think of it - sometimes he did and was wrong, either slightly or, on a couple occasions, wildly). GAH.

For all of that, it was still okay. It really was a decent adventure in some ways, just...not well-suited to its intent or its time-length. It was just only "okay" and compared to the other three games so far, that wasn't exactly thrilling.

After I talked to elfbabe and before I became a game critic, Scott and I went up and bought stuff. Okay, mostly I did - and mostly art stuff, a couple of t-shirts, though.

Ater the last game, our group gathered in the hall and played Apples to Apples, which Isaak had won a copy of in the tournament for it. Now I have to go back to the third floor tomorrow to buy that. Isaak's right, it's great fun. [Ed: I'm glad I found the web page, I didn't want to write up an explanation for it when I wrote this entry - as I put it at the time, "Sleep is starting to scream instead of beckoning.]

Tomorrow may be a long day - if we're not busy at 7, from the 5-pm slot, there's a game at 7 that runs till 11...but Sunday we fly out too early to really do anything at the con - but not so early that we couldn't sleep in a bit, either. I'm hooked. And next year is Indianapolis, with a way better hotel situation.

And maybe I will get into a 7th Sea game some year. This year's not being kind to that ambition. (Nor to my desire to try Nobilis - I didn't even see a game of it in the listing.)

G'night.