![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Okay, I'm dividing the GenCon posting up into two posts. You are looking at the games post. The post about general stuff is here.
Warning: there are spoilers in the game section. Most of them probably won't matter to you, because most of these games don't run the same from year to year, but I believe the Dragonquest and 7th Sea games may be the exception, and for all I know the groups could plan to run the same scenarios at other cons later this year even if there will be new ones by Gencon Indy next year. At any rate, I'm using cut-tags per game on it; if you were deep-linked into this, you can go to the day of this post to view the post without the spoilers.
Thursday, 12:30 - Star Trek: Operation Assimilate
This was actually intended to be an adventure called "Back Streets of Rigel VII" but the GM said it scaled poorly to as many players as we had, and asked if we were willing to switch scenarios; we were all cool with that as none of us were playing in the official 'Assimilate' slot later in the weekend.
Unsurprisingly, this involved Borg. Specifically, there was a Romulan installation working on some new energy source, and the Borg had taken over. We went in not knowing about the Borg; our ship then came under attack by the Borg who were in orbit (fortunately not a Borg ship, but a Romulan one they had coopted) and we had to deal with the gorup on the asteroid without any assistance. It was basically a matter of a bit of a shootout - the whole format of the module was "arrive, figure out the Borg are here, decide how to kill, kill." Complicating matters was the energy source, involving a particle that (by Starfleet directive) must be destroyed if it even might exist. We came close to a suicide run with a plasma grenade; the GM had us roll and suggested an alternate course of action.
The suicide run with the plasma grenade would have been more fun, since it would have completely avoided having to play out the shootout. Of course, I was severely disenchanted by then. Offering the ship's counsellor - who favors self-defense when at all possible and is rather lacking in martial skills - as a character option on such a scenario is just mean. (I did manage to telepathically force a Borg to attack another Borg, which felt wrong - I would think they should be immune to that. That aside, the other PCs promptly shot my chosen target before the guy I'd nailed could do anything about the urge to kill his fellows.)
The system didn't impress me overall, either. Right after the game, I was really hyped about the game, simply because it was the first one of the weekend, but the shiny wore off really quickly. It was fun, but it wasn't nearly as good as it could have been nor as many other things were. It wasn't the least-fun of the weekend but isn't an experience I'd repeat.
Thursday, 5:00 - Graveyard Grins (Revelations)
Scott and I both played in this one. It's a horror game, unsurprisingly; I'd actually played this system last year at Gencon and not realized this was the same system again this year when signing up. I realized as soon as we sat down at the table as several of the available characters were quite familiar to me. I latched on to the same one I played last time, which in retrospect was a mistake; trying something new would have been cooler.
I wouldn't have signed up for this at all if I'd realized the system involved, as I tried it and found it fun but not spectacular last year. This year's offering I was less impressed with than that, even, although it was still okay. This is the "heroes beat it back" style of horror rather than the "doomed man" type (although I'm sure you could still turn it into the latter with the right/wrong decisions...). I think this one could have been an outright fizzle for me, except that everyone was having so much fun it was sort of contagious, and the quotes were excellent, and that kept me in a good enough mood to really enjoy the good points and let go of the moments I wasn't as much into the game.
A very cool scenario premise, however. The basic theory of either the system or at least this series of games (not sure which) is that you are part of a supernatural troubleshooting team, trying to take out the bad guys and keep the normals from having to find out about them. Our team leader was a half-angel, son of an angel and a human; I was a mortal monster-hunter with a love for guns; the team leader's girlfriend was the daughter of a vampire and a human (needless to say an odd match there!). Scott played Lily, the vampire-child in question.
It opened with us botching a catch (we were guaranteed to botch it) and being seen chasing a limo down the street in a van. Our superiors weren't amused. (We were in the middle of doing this when the scenario opened: I think it was to underline the nature of the characters, which it did well.)
They didn't punish us, though, because they had something else that needed us more. Graves were being robbed in very old cemeteries - they wanted us to investigate as it could get ugly. So we went and poked around, got attacked by nasty things, etc. At first, our research and understanding suggested someone was demon-summoning and turning them loose without controls; then we got distracted when we were jumped by zombies or ghouls of some sort, risen from the graves.
Eventually, we tracked down more information and realized they weren't demon-summoning, but raising the dead, with a spell that could have "side effects" if the people raised were magically gifted. Of course, they all were....
So we nabbed an invite to a party being held by a guy whose relative was raised (our team lead had some associations with that group I think). And promptly realized he was the mage doing the raisings, his party was full of vampires (about 15; plenty of humans about too), and the pictures on his walls (and even his pen) were power-imbued and evil.
This led to punch spiked with laxative (after killing the bathrooms on the same floor; to get the humans out of the line of fire) and a massive firefight. Toward the end of it, one of our people (wearing a suit of armor) fell out a window and the team lead produced wings and dove out to catch him. Alas, there was a cop about. The team lead knocked the cop out and they fled. Pity the patrol car had a camera.... The rest of us made a cleaner get-away, so mostly just the team lead got yelled at. :)
Thursday, 9:30 - D&D Skill-Based
I was curious about what this person thought they had done differently with the D&D system and, after much debating, signed up to find out. Scott was sensibly back at the hotel sleeping, which is really where I should have been. This was good enough that I wasn't wanting to be rude and walk out in the middle, but it wasn't very impressive and I rather wish I hadn't gone. The sleep would have been more valuable.
The GM was a bit "fumbly" - no GM screen and had to refer to the NPCs sheets and his notes a fair bit, but had them in manila folders, so couldn't easily access them (I presume, had he had a GM screen, he might have set them out where he could more easily put his hands on what he needed).
I didn't really see the advantages of his system over the third edition game. It was definitely different; it didn't seem horrible; but I didn't really see the advantages. I mean, you could do the same thing with several other existing systems already anyway....
The scenario wasn't all that impressive, eitehr. It started out with our Paladin having repetetive dreams of being bound at ankles and wrists on her back on the floor, and sacrificial knives being stuck through her hands and feet. After some consultation with her superiors in the force, they traced the issue to this specific area (a town) on the border of the war with the dark lord of the undead, and our team was sent there.
The whole area was nastily blighted, and the high priest in the town was fleeing (the people were already mostly gone, and he was going with the last group) before the darkness he couldn't figure out how to stop. We asked him for any information he might have on unusual events that might have triggered this. He didn't have any, but ranted about another high priest of the same god who had taken his followers off into the forest to purify themselves away from the sins of the city (he seemed to feel that perhaps we had been sent by this person to further criticize him).
Since he was useless, we set off to find the other high priest and encountered him on the road, beset by werewolves, whom we chased off (being not familiar with them from our own land; but the people we had spoken to feared them). He then took us back to his compound, along with one of the werewolves who had been knocked unconscious and became a captive.
Long story short, the compound high priest and his senior priests were working together to further the darkness, trying to open a gate to Hell for an evil deity to pass through, in a set of underground tunnels beneath the complex (created by stoneshaping) in the shape of a pentagram. The werewolf was to be the last sacrifice, but we snuck around, found blood in his house and a secret tunnel, and worked out the secrets of the place.
I think I guessed where it was going about 1 hour into the 4-hour session. It was telegraphed so hard that all the time spent where our characters went on in their trust felt like a total waste of time, like sitting through a movie when someone has already told you enough of the ending that it all feels predictable. Feh.
The one concept I did like was elves being telepathic with each other, as the explanation of how they can be so fiercely individualistic and yet so coordinated in battle.
He gave the rules free to the best roleplayer of the session, offered them to the rest of us for $4. I have never before been grateful (indifferent, yes, but grateful?) to not be selected as the best roleplayer in a game where such a thing was being considered....
Friday, 12:30 - From Deepest Africa (Fudge)
I've played in Fudge games before. The system neither deeply impresses me, nor annoys me; it works okay and I'm willing to play under it if that's what the GM wants to use, but that's about it. I signed up for this game with the knowledge that I might not enjoy it so much; it was a pulp-fiction-themed game, and I have always disliked pulp fiction. However, I also hated Zelazny's writing and love playing in the Amber setting, so I figured giving it a chance (after grouching about it for so long without trying to play it) was a good idea.
The game suffered, since I was up at 6:30 after a late night the night before. I napped for an hour and a half or so prior to the game and was not entirely awake for the first two hours. That wasn't really a loss, though. Mostly-asleep or mostly-awake, I did not find this game nearly as engaging at the others. I was interested in it only for the sake of "winning" it, not the roleplay or the setting or the (heavily dropped) significant names (of historical and literary figures alike). Some of which I missed. Others would react and I would just blink, having no idea who the person was. I didn't care enough to ask, either.
However, I'm really not sure how much of it was the pulp setting and how much was what I found to be a poor job of GM'ing. Either way, my lack of interest in the game for the plot or the setting or the characters means I shan't repeat this experiment. But the game definitely had other problems than being something that (as it turns out) doesn't interest me as much as I thought it didn't interest me....
The GM wasn't good at involving players with quieter voices, or uncertain players (I was actually one of the former, not the latter, for once). He tended not to be able to hear (understandably, the room was quite loud), but also only rarely looked around the table to see if anyone else was trying to get his attention. Loud voices drew his attention, and not much else. At one point, I kept trying to say something, and finally the guy sitting between me and the GM signalled the GM (I can't recall if he waved, said something, or tapped him on the shoulder). That really shouldn't have been necessary, IMO....
The characters also weren't well-balanced. We had a fairly large group, but the presence of a lord (Allan, I've forgotten the last name) with an elephant gun, Nicola Tesla, and Sherlock Holmes, made the rest of us frequently superfluous. Wyatt Earp got to drive the carriage, and me-as-Nellie-Bly got to interview the servants early in the game, but it basically felt like we had too many over-skilled characters, such that the loud ones with diversified characters could take over almost anything. (We had Houdini, whose main contribution that I can recall was to constantly accuse anyone talking about supernatural stuff of being deluded or the like; and despite this excellent following of character, the GM never rewarded him for good roleplay, either. We also had a hedge witch who tried to use her powers on anything, I suspect because she wasn't capable of anything else, just at a guess.)
Also, some of the players were abusive of the IC/OOC line and the GM not only didn't care, he rewarded it. For example (the one that really irked me, although it happened in other cases too, whenever the party was divided), Tesla, Holmes, Watson and someone else went to the library to research the artifact we were trying to track down, that had been stolen. I could have done research, but since they were all doing that, while they were so doing, went off to interview the servants as that was a particular skill of mine. I explicitly stated, "while they're in the library" to indicate my time frame. I started with the upstairs maid, but as soon as she said something they wanted followed up on, Tesla and Holmes started asking follow-up questions. (Not suggesting them to me OOC - asking them, IC.) And the GM answered them. IC, they would have had to have been bellowing back and forth (and we would have had to have been bellowing our interview), or else I took the upstairs maid into the library while it was full of strange men (all of whom were busy with their books and would presumably not have welcomed an interruption if we were being strictly IC) while I was questioning her.
I was more than a little annoyed. Thanks for taking one of the few times that really fits my character and refusing to let me have it, and thank you for breaking suspension of disbelief and IC reality so sharply.
The last half or so was a running firefight, and it was run so we couldn't win (deliberately so, from the way it was handled). We caught up for round 2 at a building (presumably this is why we weren't let to win earlier) and finally just burned the building down (then had to run in and get the artifact, as we realized it might go out an escape tunnel otherwise).
This was so not fun. Some of it was the massive GM incompetence (or style mismatch, but I honestly don't believe that severe abuse of the IC/OOC line and ignoring of players who aren't loud is not a legitimate "style" at all). Some of it was the lack of interest in the whole game. By the end, I wanted to either win or die, just so it would be over. I don't think I was the only one, either, as everyone cheered on Tesla when he just started lighting anything that he could on fire. I think we were pretty much all tired of the game by that point.
Friday, 5:00 - Take Two Aspirin and call me at the Apocalypse (Amber)
I quite like playing in the Amber setting, and with very little clue what I was getting into, looked forward to this. It used a modified version of the Diceless RPG rules, which worked well. All the pregen characters were book/canon characters, which was kind of cool. Three people (me included) tried to pounce on Sand; I ended up as Coral. The game was set between the two series, a year after Random became King of Amber.
Coral was a blast to play - this was before the others knew of her Amber heritage, although they learned it in this game. (She needed to get the Princes to act on something, so went up to Caine and told him several things that she could in no way have known had she not had Pattern. She was white as a sheet: Caine was not her first choice. He was, however, the one who was still around.) Of course, we focussed on the wrong thing....
Dalt was attacking Amber. This was actually a way to bring his character in. It was bad for a couple reasons. First, Dalt's player sat for an hour of the game doing nothing because he wasn't there yet and things were moving according to scenario definitions. I'd have asked for $3 from the folks running the game and walked off. He was peripheral for the subsequent hour, getting much less play time and information than the rest of us, too.
Secondly, this wasn't the plot, but we all focussed on it. I mean, Coral focussed on the main plot briefly, but concluded she couldn't do anything about it and the elders were working on it (which was true). (The main plot involved a plague loosed during the anniversary celebration of Random's rule. It was a gift - ostensibly from Begma, Coral's kingdom - that turned to a cloud of dust and dissipated, infecting the castle and city. It seemed to strike people and make pieces of them fade; it affected the royal family but had a much stronger effect on mere Amber citizens, or Shadow denizens.)
But after that we figured (at least I did) that it was probably a subplot of Dalt's invasion and we needed to stop him (and we could see how to). As it turned out, fixing the plague required time travel...and while the elders were working on it, they'd all been alive in the time when it needed to be fixed, and therefore could not go. They needed us. They realized this and trumped all of us in....
...but that part of the plot only "triggered" when one of the PCs would enter the Pattern room, where they were working. There was no set time at which it would trigger if the PCs had not yet gone there. Delwin & Sand were the first to enter the Pattern room, looking to talk to the elders, at about 15 minutes before the end of our session. So we got the entire resolution and nature of the main plot as a couple quick cut-scenes and a summary.
On the whole, I don't mind that; I quite enjoyed the battle scenes and the game we did have. But being told we skipped the whole main plot sort of rankled, especially when a better scenario setup could have cut the side-tracking off at some point. It didn't seem well-designed for a convention scenario.... I mean, a lot of side-tracking in a regular game works, you just come back and finish next week. Con games are not so forgiving and this one would've been easy to clean up so that it worked, just by having them trump us anyway at some point. But it was fun anyway.
Friday, 9:30 - Beneath the Idol: Kali Ma!
Argh. This game said "Bring your steady hand." That was the only clue that the action resolution involved jenga. Kid you not. Pull a block from a jenga stack whenever your action is in question. (You could choose not to pull, and automatically fail; you could push the stack over, and succeed but die in the process; or you could pull. If you pulled and the tower fell, you failed and died. If you pulled without toppling it, you succeeded and lived.)
I wouldn't have signed up for it if I had realized that. I don't have the world's best hand-eye coordination and am not especially fond of jenga without having it tie to my character's life. Still, there was a plus side - the character creation was really need. They didn't have any points-based stuff - instead, your "sheet" was a series of leading questions that were handed to you. Your answers created your character. (Questions such as, "You have a criminal past that your teammates don't know about; what did you do, and what physical mark or scar has it left oyu with?") That was really, really cool.
I ended up playing a 15-year-old girl, a bit impulsive and quite athletic. Scott was also present, playing a sailor. And despite the mechanic, the game was fun; the scenario rocked, and the GM was very good at running it and telling stories. But I'll watch out for the "steady hand" line at future cons, and avoid it.
We started out in a boat, part of a diving team exploring an underwater ruin in shifts. Needless to say, our teammates (on another boat and below the water) were missing in the first scene. We actually had to dive to solve it, but the first half was above water, as we figured that out and gave in to the inevitable. I was - not to my surprise - the first one dead and the only one to die above water, going at the two-hour mark. (I died to preserve a boat that they abandoned very shortly, allowing it to be destroyed. What a waste...except at least it was destroyed when they weren't still on it.)
As a sign of how good the story and GM were, I enjoyed the following two hours very much, and all I was doing was watching. There was an underwater sacred space, with a statue guarding an urn that contained the remains of a deeply evil child (I think). All our teammates had been turned into zombies and were found in the cave, bowing in homage to the statue - or the child. The statue had been meant to guard the urn but had been off-set when the land sank beneath the waves, so that eventually the influence seeped out and summoned others (our teams). They took the urn back to the underwater space, and used a welding torch to burn out its contents, poisoning all the air except what was in their suits but ending the threat.
I thought more people would die than did, but only two did - the other died when they dealt with the zombie teammates. I had realized just in time and pushed; he didn't. The other four (including Scott) all survived. I wonder if Scott had fun, as his character was very little active due to a combination of character and scenario.
Saturday, 8:00 - Dragonquest
Scott was in this also; a neat system but not one I feel the need to own. This was very much an introductory adventure, with character creation and all. The first half was a snapshot of a festival day in our village, including contests; my character won two of them.
Then, the baron's men came into town and passed over to his manor house, badly bloodied. They'd been fighting nasties not normally found in the area. Eventually they came back to get quite drunk at the celebration, and the baron and most of his family came down.
Then his wife ran down, white-faced, told him something, and he turned white and led his soldiers back toward his manor at a run. We followed. They were trying to break the door down; we ducked around back, found a secret entrance, forced it, and found our way through the house. We had to battle the nasties that were in the house, and in the Great Hall they had a chest (taken from the Baron) and a bag that moved (and we remembered the baron had a daughter...). We fought them off and saved the day.
Really simplistic, but fun as such things go and well-suited to introducing new players to the system, at least. I enjoyed it and may play again some con.
Saturday, 12:30 - Courting Murder: Deryni Threat 1
I adore Katherine Kurtz's Deryni series and setting. So this sounded quite fun. It was listed as an RPG. It turned out to be a LARP. Had it been listed as a LARP, correctly, I would not have signed up. I don't like the things.
That would have been my loss. This game was a lot of fun.
Basically, the setting was not hers but an original one, but the Deryni abilities and the tense relation between them and "normal" humans were replicated. Each of us had goals and interests on our character sheet; some of us were willing to kill. (Killing produced ghosts, temporarily, so you had to make sure that the person you killed didn't know who did it or you would be given away.)
I flubbed my goal of winning the man my character loved, but improved the lot of Deryni in the kingdom (along with a good many others who also had and worked toward that goal!), which was another goal of mine, probably the main one despite the character's distraction over the prince. She was debating whether she should marry the King to be able to influence him in regards the Deryni, despite the fact that she didn't love him and was nervous of having to hide her abilities. He married someone else and she still got what she wanted - score!
Two NPCs were killed, and one PC. The PC was offed by his daughters by means of a roof falling through.... Ooopsy. :)
I'll probably play in one or more of these next year. I very nearly acquired generics so that I could play in the one they were running at 9:30, but I'd told Scott I'd come back to the hotel after my last game ended at 9, plus I knew I really wasn't up to a third late night. I still wish I had played in it, but I don't think it would've gone well if I had, honestly.
Saturday, 5:00 - 7th Sea
The triumph of stubbornness. This is another "try what you think you don't like" game, as swashbuckling stuff has never really interested me.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
utsuri told me back when it came out how cool the game was, and I tried to get into it at Gencon last year. And failed. They were full. This year was hard - most "beginning" sessions were full, but I got this one.
This game started off badly, but not in the game sense. At 5:10, we still had no GM, only an apologetic person handling the gaming area who had no idea where the 7th Sea GMs were, despite two schedule sessions (one beginner, one not) in that timeslot. Of course, we also had two people who had never played before, and had bought beginning tickets and been given advanced; a little disorganization always helps. So we had three people for advanced, two of whom couldn't play in it, several for beginning, a bunch of people with generic tickets wanting to play, and not one GM.
They rebalanced us into two groups of 6 each, dismissing the extra generics, and supplied us with GMs - it just took a while. (The advanced folks got to play the beginning adventure instead.) Despite that hideous start, the game itself was grand fun; I'm now buying the two main books and will probably buy supplements but must think some about that. I'll definitely play this again, given the chance.
We were sent to an island to investigate some ruins (with an NPC explorer as the party lead). We were promptly captured by natives and put through various tests, then (upon passing the key one, surviving/battling through an ancient artifact) adopted into the tribe. That was the end of the game. Like Dragonquest, a very beginning/intro scenario that introduced the mechanics well, but it was a lot of fun all the same.
Character creation involved poking through a bunch of templates they had (very wide variety!) and picking your favorite. You copied that onto your sheet, and then they gave you a certain number of points to modify it so that it was yours. I really like the character I created; she has strong and weak points, and is interesting.
Sunday, 10:00 - Basari Tournament
No spoilers involved. Board game from Out of the Box publishing. This is an interesting little board game where you try to win on points, themed on gem trading. I enjoyed it enough to buy it; I also lost miserably, since I was just learning it and am not quick on the uptake for strategy. Oh, well. I had fun! I was also out by 11 when it actually ran until 1. Scott and I wandered the con after that, and managed to find the person he was looking for so that he could get GURPS Rogues signed, so that was good.
Warning: there are spoilers in the game section. Most of them probably won't matter to you, because most of these games don't run the same from year to year, but I believe the Dragonquest and 7th Sea games may be the exception, and for all I know the groups could plan to run the same scenarios at other cons later this year even if there will be new ones by Gencon Indy next year. At any rate, I'm using cut-tags per game on it; if you were deep-linked into this, you can go to the day of this post to view the post without the spoilers.
Thursday, 12:30 - Star Trek: Operation Assimilate
This was actually intended to be an adventure called "Back Streets of Rigel VII" but the GM said it scaled poorly to as many players as we had, and asked if we were willing to switch scenarios; we were all cool with that as none of us were playing in the official 'Assimilate' slot later in the weekend.
Unsurprisingly, this involved Borg. Specifically, there was a Romulan installation working on some new energy source, and the Borg had taken over. We went in not knowing about the Borg; our ship then came under attack by the Borg who were in orbit (fortunately not a Borg ship, but a Romulan one they had coopted) and we had to deal with the gorup on the asteroid without any assistance. It was basically a matter of a bit of a shootout - the whole format of the module was "arrive, figure out the Borg are here, decide how to kill, kill." Complicating matters was the energy source, involving a particle that (by Starfleet directive) must be destroyed if it even might exist. We came close to a suicide run with a plasma grenade; the GM had us roll and suggested an alternate course of action.
The suicide run with the plasma grenade would have been more fun, since it would have completely avoided having to play out the shootout. Of course, I was severely disenchanted by then. Offering the ship's counsellor - who favors self-defense when at all possible and is rather lacking in martial skills - as a character option on such a scenario is just mean. (I did manage to telepathically force a Borg to attack another Borg, which felt wrong - I would think they should be immune to that. That aside, the other PCs promptly shot my chosen target before the guy I'd nailed could do anything about the urge to kill his fellows.)
The system didn't impress me overall, either. Right after the game, I was really hyped about the game, simply because it was the first one of the weekend, but the shiny wore off really quickly. It was fun, but it wasn't nearly as good as it could have been nor as many other things were. It wasn't the least-fun of the weekend but isn't an experience I'd repeat.
Thursday, 5:00 - Graveyard Grins (Revelations)
Scott and I both played in this one. It's a horror game, unsurprisingly; I'd actually played this system last year at Gencon and not realized this was the same system again this year when signing up. I realized as soon as we sat down at the table as several of the available characters were quite familiar to me. I latched on to the same one I played last time, which in retrospect was a mistake; trying something new would have been cooler.
I wouldn't have signed up for this at all if I'd realized the system involved, as I tried it and found it fun but not spectacular last year. This year's offering I was less impressed with than that, even, although it was still okay. This is the "heroes beat it back" style of horror rather than the "doomed man" type (although I'm sure you could still turn it into the latter with the right/wrong decisions...). I think this one could have been an outright fizzle for me, except that everyone was having so much fun it was sort of contagious, and the quotes were excellent, and that kept me in a good enough mood to really enjoy the good points and let go of the moments I wasn't as much into the game.
A very cool scenario premise, however. The basic theory of either the system or at least this series of games (not sure which) is that you are part of a supernatural troubleshooting team, trying to take out the bad guys and keep the normals from having to find out about them. Our team leader was a half-angel, son of an angel and a human; I was a mortal monster-hunter with a love for guns; the team leader's girlfriend was the daughter of a vampire and a human (needless to say an odd match there!). Scott played Lily, the vampire-child in question.
It opened with us botching a catch (we were guaranteed to botch it) and being seen chasing a limo down the street in a van. Our superiors weren't amused. (We were in the middle of doing this when the scenario opened: I think it was to underline the nature of the characters, which it did well.)
They didn't punish us, though, because they had something else that needed us more. Graves were being robbed in very old cemeteries - they wanted us to investigate as it could get ugly. So we went and poked around, got attacked by nasty things, etc. At first, our research and understanding suggested someone was demon-summoning and turning them loose without controls; then we got distracted when we were jumped by zombies or ghouls of some sort, risen from the graves.
Eventually, we tracked down more information and realized they weren't demon-summoning, but raising the dead, with a spell that could have "side effects" if the people raised were magically gifted. Of course, they all were....
So we nabbed an invite to a party being held by a guy whose relative was raised (our team lead had some associations with that group I think). And promptly realized he was the mage doing the raisings, his party was full of vampires (about 15; plenty of humans about too), and the pictures on his walls (and even his pen) were power-imbued and evil.
This led to punch spiked with laxative (after killing the bathrooms on the same floor; to get the humans out of the line of fire) and a massive firefight. Toward the end of it, one of our people (wearing a suit of armor) fell out a window and the team lead produced wings and dove out to catch him. Alas, there was a cop about. The team lead knocked the cop out and they fled. Pity the patrol car had a camera.... The rest of us made a cleaner get-away, so mostly just the team lead got yelled at. :)
Thursday, 9:30 - D&D Skill-Based
I was curious about what this person thought they had done differently with the D&D system and, after much debating, signed up to find out. Scott was sensibly back at the hotel sleeping, which is really where I should have been. This was good enough that I wasn't wanting to be rude and walk out in the middle, but it wasn't very impressive and I rather wish I hadn't gone. The sleep would have been more valuable.
The GM was a bit "fumbly" - no GM screen and had to refer to the NPCs sheets and his notes a fair bit, but had them in manila folders, so couldn't easily access them (I presume, had he had a GM screen, he might have set them out where he could more easily put his hands on what he needed).
I didn't really see the advantages of his system over the third edition game. It was definitely different; it didn't seem horrible; but I didn't really see the advantages. I mean, you could do the same thing with several other existing systems already anyway....
The scenario wasn't all that impressive, eitehr. It started out with our Paladin having repetetive dreams of being bound at ankles and wrists on her back on the floor, and sacrificial knives being stuck through her hands and feet. After some consultation with her superiors in the force, they traced the issue to this specific area (a town) on the border of the war with the dark lord of the undead, and our team was sent there.
The whole area was nastily blighted, and the high priest in the town was fleeing (the people were already mostly gone, and he was going with the last group) before the darkness he couldn't figure out how to stop. We asked him for any information he might have on unusual events that might have triggered this. He didn't have any, but ranted about another high priest of the same god who had taken his followers off into the forest to purify themselves away from the sins of the city (he seemed to feel that perhaps we had been sent by this person to further criticize him).
Since he was useless, we set off to find the other high priest and encountered him on the road, beset by werewolves, whom we chased off (being not familiar with them from our own land; but the people we had spoken to feared them). He then took us back to his compound, along with one of the werewolves who had been knocked unconscious and became a captive.
Long story short, the compound high priest and his senior priests were working together to further the darkness, trying to open a gate to Hell for an evil deity to pass through, in a set of underground tunnels beneath the complex (created by stoneshaping) in the shape of a pentagram. The werewolf was to be the last sacrifice, but we snuck around, found blood in his house and a secret tunnel, and worked out the secrets of the place.
I think I guessed where it was going about 1 hour into the 4-hour session. It was telegraphed so hard that all the time spent where our characters went on in their trust felt like a total waste of time, like sitting through a movie when someone has already told you enough of the ending that it all feels predictable. Feh.
The one concept I did like was elves being telepathic with each other, as the explanation of how they can be so fiercely individualistic and yet so coordinated in battle.
He gave the rules free to the best roleplayer of the session, offered them to the rest of us for $4. I have never before been grateful (indifferent, yes, but grateful?) to not be selected as the best roleplayer in a game where such a thing was being considered....
Friday, 12:30 - From Deepest Africa (Fudge)
I've played in Fudge games before. The system neither deeply impresses me, nor annoys me; it works okay and I'm willing to play under it if that's what the GM wants to use, but that's about it. I signed up for this game with the knowledge that I might not enjoy it so much; it was a pulp-fiction-themed game, and I have always disliked pulp fiction. However, I also hated Zelazny's writing and love playing in the Amber setting, so I figured giving it a chance (after grouching about it for so long without trying to play it) was a good idea.
The game suffered, since I was up at 6:30 after a late night the night before. I napped for an hour and a half or so prior to the game and was not entirely awake for the first two hours. That wasn't really a loss, though. Mostly-asleep or mostly-awake, I did not find this game nearly as engaging at the others. I was interested in it only for the sake of "winning" it, not the roleplay or the setting or the (heavily dropped) significant names (of historical and literary figures alike). Some of which I missed. Others would react and I would just blink, having no idea who the person was. I didn't care enough to ask, either.
However, I'm really not sure how much of it was the pulp setting and how much was what I found to be a poor job of GM'ing. Either way, my lack of interest in the game for the plot or the setting or the characters means I shan't repeat this experiment. But the game definitely had other problems than being something that (as it turns out) doesn't interest me as much as I thought it didn't interest me....
The GM wasn't good at involving players with quieter voices, or uncertain players (I was actually one of the former, not the latter, for once). He tended not to be able to hear (understandably, the room was quite loud), but also only rarely looked around the table to see if anyone else was trying to get his attention. Loud voices drew his attention, and not much else. At one point, I kept trying to say something, and finally the guy sitting between me and the GM signalled the GM (I can't recall if he waved, said something, or tapped him on the shoulder). That really shouldn't have been necessary, IMO....
The characters also weren't well-balanced. We had a fairly large group, but the presence of a lord (Allan, I've forgotten the last name) with an elephant gun, Nicola Tesla, and Sherlock Holmes, made the rest of us frequently superfluous. Wyatt Earp got to drive the carriage, and me-as-Nellie-Bly got to interview the servants early in the game, but it basically felt like we had too many over-skilled characters, such that the loud ones with diversified characters could take over almost anything. (We had Houdini, whose main contribution that I can recall was to constantly accuse anyone talking about supernatural stuff of being deluded or the like; and despite this excellent following of character, the GM never rewarded him for good roleplay, either. We also had a hedge witch who tried to use her powers on anything, I suspect because she wasn't capable of anything else, just at a guess.)
Also, some of the players were abusive of the IC/OOC line and the GM not only didn't care, he rewarded it. For example (the one that really irked me, although it happened in other cases too, whenever the party was divided), Tesla, Holmes, Watson and someone else went to the library to research the artifact we were trying to track down, that had been stolen. I could have done research, but since they were all doing that, while they were so doing, went off to interview the servants as that was a particular skill of mine. I explicitly stated, "while they're in the library" to indicate my time frame. I started with the upstairs maid, but as soon as she said something they wanted followed up on, Tesla and Holmes started asking follow-up questions. (Not suggesting them to me OOC - asking them, IC.) And the GM answered them. IC, they would have had to have been bellowing back and forth (and we would have had to have been bellowing our interview), or else I took the upstairs maid into the library while it was full of strange men (all of whom were busy with their books and would presumably not have welcomed an interruption if we were being strictly IC) while I was questioning her.
I was more than a little annoyed. Thanks for taking one of the few times that really fits my character and refusing to let me have it, and thank you for breaking suspension of disbelief and IC reality so sharply.
The last half or so was a running firefight, and it was run so we couldn't win (deliberately so, from the way it was handled). We caught up for round 2 at a building (presumably this is why we weren't let to win earlier) and finally just burned the building down (then had to run in and get the artifact, as we realized it might go out an escape tunnel otherwise).
This was so not fun. Some of it was the massive GM incompetence (or style mismatch, but I honestly don't believe that severe abuse of the IC/OOC line and ignoring of players who aren't loud is not a legitimate "style" at all). Some of it was the lack of interest in the whole game. By the end, I wanted to either win or die, just so it would be over. I don't think I was the only one, either, as everyone cheered on Tesla when he just started lighting anything that he could on fire. I think we were pretty much all tired of the game by that point.
Friday, 5:00 - Take Two Aspirin and call me at the Apocalypse (Amber)
I quite like playing in the Amber setting, and with very little clue what I was getting into, looked forward to this. It used a modified version of the Diceless RPG rules, which worked well. All the pregen characters were book/canon characters, which was kind of cool. Three people (me included) tried to pounce on Sand; I ended up as Coral. The game was set between the two series, a year after Random became King of Amber.
Coral was a blast to play - this was before the others knew of her Amber heritage, although they learned it in this game. (She needed to get the Princes to act on something, so went up to Caine and told him several things that she could in no way have known had she not had Pattern. She was white as a sheet: Caine was not her first choice. He was, however, the one who was still around.) Of course, we focussed on the wrong thing....
Dalt was attacking Amber. This was actually a way to bring his character in. It was bad for a couple reasons. First, Dalt's player sat for an hour of the game doing nothing because he wasn't there yet and things were moving according to scenario definitions. I'd have asked for $3 from the folks running the game and walked off. He was peripheral for the subsequent hour, getting much less play time and information than the rest of us, too.
Secondly, this wasn't the plot, but we all focussed on it. I mean, Coral focussed on the main plot briefly, but concluded she couldn't do anything about it and the elders were working on it (which was true). (The main plot involved a plague loosed during the anniversary celebration of Random's rule. It was a gift - ostensibly from Begma, Coral's kingdom - that turned to a cloud of dust and dissipated, infecting the castle and city. It seemed to strike people and make pieces of them fade; it affected the royal family but had a much stronger effect on mere Amber citizens, or Shadow denizens.)
But after that we figured (at least I did) that it was probably a subplot of Dalt's invasion and we needed to stop him (and we could see how to). As it turned out, fixing the plague required time travel...and while the elders were working on it, they'd all been alive in the time when it needed to be fixed, and therefore could not go. They needed us. They realized this and trumped all of us in....
...but that part of the plot only "triggered" when one of the PCs would enter the Pattern room, where they were working. There was no set time at which it would trigger if the PCs had not yet gone there. Delwin & Sand were the first to enter the Pattern room, looking to talk to the elders, at about 15 minutes before the end of our session. So we got the entire resolution and nature of the main plot as a couple quick cut-scenes and a summary.
On the whole, I don't mind that; I quite enjoyed the battle scenes and the game we did have. But being told we skipped the whole main plot sort of rankled, especially when a better scenario setup could have cut the side-tracking off at some point. It didn't seem well-designed for a convention scenario.... I mean, a lot of side-tracking in a regular game works, you just come back and finish next week. Con games are not so forgiving and this one would've been easy to clean up so that it worked, just by having them trump us anyway at some point. But it was fun anyway.
Friday, 9:30 - Beneath the Idol: Kali Ma!
Argh. This game said "Bring your steady hand." That was the only clue that the action resolution involved jenga. Kid you not. Pull a block from a jenga stack whenever your action is in question. (You could choose not to pull, and automatically fail; you could push the stack over, and succeed but die in the process; or you could pull. If you pulled and the tower fell, you failed and died. If you pulled without toppling it, you succeeded and lived.)
I wouldn't have signed up for it if I had realized that. I don't have the world's best hand-eye coordination and am not especially fond of jenga without having it tie to my character's life. Still, there was a plus side - the character creation was really need. They didn't have any points-based stuff - instead, your "sheet" was a series of leading questions that were handed to you. Your answers created your character. (Questions such as, "You have a criminal past that your teammates don't know about; what did you do, and what physical mark or scar has it left oyu with?") That was really, really cool.
I ended up playing a 15-year-old girl, a bit impulsive and quite athletic. Scott was also present, playing a sailor. And despite the mechanic, the game was fun; the scenario rocked, and the GM was very good at running it and telling stories. But I'll watch out for the "steady hand" line at future cons, and avoid it.
We started out in a boat, part of a diving team exploring an underwater ruin in shifts. Needless to say, our teammates (on another boat and below the water) were missing in the first scene. We actually had to dive to solve it, but the first half was above water, as we figured that out and gave in to the inevitable. I was - not to my surprise - the first one dead and the only one to die above water, going at the two-hour mark. (I died to preserve a boat that they abandoned very shortly, allowing it to be destroyed. What a waste...except at least it was destroyed when they weren't still on it.)
As a sign of how good the story and GM were, I enjoyed the following two hours very much, and all I was doing was watching. There was an underwater sacred space, with a statue guarding an urn that contained the remains of a deeply evil child (I think). All our teammates had been turned into zombies and were found in the cave, bowing in homage to the statue - or the child. The statue had been meant to guard the urn but had been off-set when the land sank beneath the waves, so that eventually the influence seeped out and summoned others (our teams). They took the urn back to the underwater space, and used a welding torch to burn out its contents, poisoning all the air except what was in their suits but ending the threat.
I thought more people would die than did, but only two did - the other died when they dealt with the zombie teammates. I had realized just in time and pushed; he didn't. The other four (including Scott) all survived. I wonder if Scott had fun, as his character was very little active due to a combination of character and scenario.
Saturday, 8:00 - Dragonquest
Scott was in this also; a neat system but not one I feel the need to own. This was very much an introductory adventure, with character creation and all. The first half was a snapshot of a festival day in our village, including contests; my character won two of them.
Then, the baron's men came into town and passed over to his manor house, badly bloodied. They'd been fighting nasties not normally found in the area. Eventually they came back to get quite drunk at the celebration, and the baron and most of his family came down.
Then his wife ran down, white-faced, told him something, and he turned white and led his soldiers back toward his manor at a run. We followed. They were trying to break the door down; we ducked around back, found a secret entrance, forced it, and found our way through the house. We had to battle the nasties that were in the house, and in the Great Hall they had a chest (taken from the Baron) and a bag that moved (and we remembered the baron had a daughter...). We fought them off and saved the day.
Really simplistic, but fun as such things go and well-suited to introducing new players to the system, at least. I enjoyed it and may play again some con.
Saturday, 12:30 - Courting Murder: Deryni Threat 1
I adore Katherine Kurtz's Deryni series and setting. So this sounded quite fun. It was listed as an RPG. It turned out to be a LARP. Had it been listed as a LARP, correctly, I would not have signed up. I don't like the things.
That would have been my loss. This game was a lot of fun.
Basically, the setting was not hers but an original one, but the Deryni abilities and the tense relation between them and "normal" humans were replicated. Each of us had goals and interests on our character sheet; some of us were willing to kill. (Killing produced ghosts, temporarily, so you had to make sure that the person you killed didn't know who did it or you would be given away.)
I flubbed my goal of winning the man my character loved, but improved the lot of Deryni in the kingdom (along with a good many others who also had and worked toward that goal!), which was another goal of mine, probably the main one despite the character's distraction over the prince. She was debating whether she should marry the King to be able to influence him in regards the Deryni, despite the fact that she didn't love him and was nervous of having to hide her abilities. He married someone else and she still got what she wanted - score!
Two NPCs were killed, and one PC. The PC was offed by his daughters by means of a roof falling through.... Ooopsy. :)
I'll probably play in one or more of these next year. I very nearly acquired generics so that I could play in the one they were running at 9:30, but I'd told Scott I'd come back to the hotel after my last game ended at 9, plus I knew I really wasn't up to a third late night. I still wish I had played in it, but I don't think it would've gone well if I had, honestly.
Saturday, 5:00 - 7th Sea
The triumph of stubbornness. This is another "try what you think you don't like" game, as swashbuckling stuff has never really interested me.
utsuri told me back when it came out how cool the game was, and I tried to get into it at Gencon last year. And failed. They were full. This year was hard - most "beginning" sessions were full, but I got this one.This game started off badly, but not in the game sense. At 5:10, we still had no GM, only an apologetic person handling the gaming area who had no idea where the 7th Sea GMs were, despite two schedule sessions (one beginner, one not) in that timeslot. Of course, we also had two people who had never played before, and had bought beginning tickets and been given advanced; a little disorganization always helps. So we had three people for advanced, two of whom couldn't play in it, several for beginning, a bunch of people with generic tickets wanting to play, and not one GM.
They rebalanced us into two groups of 6 each, dismissing the extra generics, and supplied us with GMs - it just took a while. (The advanced folks got to play the beginning adventure instead.) Despite that hideous start, the game itself was grand fun; I'm now buying the two main books and will probably buy supplements but must think some about that. I'll definitely play this again, given the chance.
We were sent to an island to investigate some ruins (with an NPC explorer as the party lead). We were promptly captured by natives and put through various tests, then (upon passing the key one, surviving/battling through an ancient artifact) adopted into the tribe. That was the end of the game. Like Dragonquest, a very beginning/intro scenario that introduced the mechanics well, but it was a lot of fun all the same.
Character creation involved poking through a bunch of templates they had (very wide variety!) and picking your favorite. You copied that onto your sheet, and then they gave you a certain number of points to modify it so that it was yours. I really like the character I created; she has strong and weak points, and is interesting.
Sunday, 10:00 - Basari Tournament
No spoilers involved. Board game from Out of the Box publishing. This is an interesting little board game where you try to win on points, themed on gem trading. I enjoyed it enough to buy it; I also lost miserably, since I was just learning it and am not quick on the uptake for strategy. Oh, well. I had fun! I was also out by 11 when it actually ran until 1. Scott and I wandered the con after that, and managed to find the person he was looking for so that he could get GURPS Rogues signed, so that was good.
Huh?
Sounds like you had a good time, though. That part I can understand.
Re: Huh?
Fudge is a gaming system, like GURPS or D&D (except vastly simplified). 'Amber setting' means a setting based off of Roger Zelazny's Amber novels (the first of which is Nine Princes in Amber I believe, and a series I never finished; Zelazny's writing style drives me buggy but his world is great for roleplay). And "LARP" is a "live action roleplay", the sort where you walk around pretending to be your character (at least until the point where someone would get hurt because of it) as opposed to sitting around a table or at a computer, talking or typing about your character.
Re: LARP