Had a great time this weekend at Dreamation 2012. As always, the Double Exposure staff put on a great convention. The players are always top-notch and this year was no different.
Thursday
I started off the con playing Monsterhearts, MC’d by Brendan Conway. The game is built on the Apocalypse World chasis and sinks its fangs deep into the genre of teenage supernatural melodrama. We crafted a surprisingly tight story of a wish-made-flesh, and the unnatural forces the force of that wish had released upon the world. I played the brainy girl from the wrong side of the tracks who had finally figured out how to make magic work. As often happens in convention games, the events of the story escalated quickly until we had people vanishing in front of witnesses and a high school kid devouring the flesh of his enemies in the mall parking lot. However, we tied everything up by convincing the NPC whose original wish had unleashed the occult forces to “wish that today had never happened.” We woke up with complete memories of the day, but with nothing having yet happened. It felt very much like a story set two or three episodes into a TV series. It would serve to foreshadow coming events, and dramatize just how far these characters could go. It was a great game, certainly the one I enjoyed most on the player’s side of the table.
Friday
I started off the day running Time & Temp. I had neither run nor played the game before, but a few months ago I had an idea for a Shakespearean time traveling adventure, and the light tone of Time & Temp seemed a good fit. As it turned out, virtually everyone signed up strictly to play Time & Temp, and my quickly dashed off event description was all but ignored. Which was fine, because the game was a blast to play.
I had brought pre-gen characters to the table. Most of them had some sort of humorous Shakespearean connection. There was a survivor of the futuristic nuclear wastelands of Scottland named MacDyff. There was the fourth daughter of King Lear. And, since boys played the women’s parts in Shakespeare’s day, there was a female Elvis impersonator.
I was fortunate that nearly all the players were familiar with the game, and extremely energetic and creative. We laughed a lot, and they saved Shakespeare’s reputation as the world’s greatest playwright.
After a quick lunch at the cafe in the convention center, I played Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, facilitated by Connie Allison. The game was quite a surprise, and nothing at all what I expected. Admittedly, I knew very little and went into the event wanting to learn about the game. I had not realized that the game centered on crafting a written story line-by-line with no room for character play or dialogue. My pilgrim was Cunning Cord. I got into trouble by making things too complex, and helped people by tying impossible knots. We ended up ending the war between the forest and the ocean, but I really had no investment in my character, or the others.
One curious thing happened during the game. I had essentially become secretary, writing down the sentences that the group came up with. We were about half way through the game, and I think that much of the group was beginning to understand that gameplay was going to consist of yo-yoing from being in trouble to being out of trouble until we checked off all the words from the required list. Since I was writing down the sentences, I started to alliterate them. It started as an off-hand comment from another player, but soon took on a life of its own. One of my sentences was “Pilgrim Perfect Penguin pestered the people’s poor parenting procedures, properly putting himself into a positive posture.” In retrospect, I think I was rebelling against the constraints the game was making on me. Since we could have no creative input apart from writing the single, solitary sentence, I was going to pour my energy into stretching that form. Or something. I’m still not sure why I did that.
There was much laughter and I certainly enjoyed the session. The game itself was very thought-provoking, and interesting. I hesitate to say that “I had fun.”
After a disappointing meal from the burrito place (we need to remember to not go there next time), I ran my second session of Time & Temp. This time, the players were not already familiar with the game. My own unfamiliarity became a more glaring flaw, and the game did not quite gel as well as the earlier session. The players missed wiping out all of reality as if it never had been by a single die roll. The all claim to have had fun, and so did I. I guess I just felt that I had let them down.
Saturday
Saturday morning I ran my newest Mouse Guard scenario, “Drought.” It’s a great little setup where a family of weasels have taken a whole village hostage by seizing a dam during a drought. The first session had a nice mix of veteran players and newbies. About an hour and half into the session, the started interrogating one of the town mice about what was going on, and I thought I’d throw in a brief, little scripted conflict for the argument as a way to show the game off to the new players and prepare them for the big fight. Both sides rolled amazingly well on their disposition rolls and we played out this argument for over an hour! It was fun, but it would have been more fun to use a simple versus test for the argument and not be so rushed with the fight with the weasels. But all in all, certainly a good session!
After some rushed, but much-needed takeout from the pizza joint across the street, I played the new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game from Margaret Weis Productions, run by Michael O’Sullivan. The introductory scenario, a supervillain breakout from the Raft, was nothing to write home about. But Mike ran the game with energy and enthusiasm and I got to play Captain America, so how could I complain? The scenario gave a decent overview of the game system. It has fused together the best bits of many different game systems, and would have blown my mind had I encountered it in 2000. I’ll probably pick up a copy for research.
After Saturday night’s traditional dinner with our friend Bill, I ran Mouse Guard again. This time, the group was all pretty well new. And my dice were hot, and the weasels dined well on the tails and ears of several guardsmice. The game was fun, particularly due to the embellishments of my friend Philip, who portrayed the arrogant teenage tenderpaw Sloan. During the game, he wrote a series of diary entries that painted her as the sole competent member of the patrol. We laughed a lot.
Sunday
Sunday morning I playtested a game in development called Becoming. I knew nothing about it, except for the event description that indicated a thematic hero’s journey, and some sort of group GM role. It’s a strictly four person game with one player portraying the hero, and the other three portraying the hero’s fear, doubt, and pain (called “the Chorus”). The hero has a number of virtues, rated in dice. The Chorus has poker chips. In every scene, one member of the chorus lays out an obstacle and puts in chips to set the difficulty that the hero’s die roll must beat. But, the hero can bargain with the other members of the chorus to help him, in exchange for advantages over their fellow chorus members. At the end, victory points for a chips, dice, virtues, and numerous other factors are tallied to determine which single player wins.
The heart of the game is in the horse-trading. The bargains struck are binding, and they serve for a lot of hard-headed figuring of probabilities and making deals, and shifting alliances. Which is all fine and good for the type of game Becoming actually is at this point in its development. It’s just not the game I thought it was. The fiction is utterly irrelevant to game play. The group got so caught up in the horse-trading that we often had started into the next round of bargains before we remembered to go back and establish how the previous scene had ended.
Personally, I didn’t enjoy the game. But I hope that I was able to offer the designer some things to think about as he continues to develop it.
All told, the convention was an incredible time, and a strong reminder of why I do this stuff. Now, if I can only hold onto that reminder as I return to my regularly-scheduled game-fasting, I might be able to really start on designing a game.