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Nov. 13th, 2016 10:12 amMy game went well yesterday. The pronouns got kind of confused, but, eh, whatever. Misgendering someone’s character is nowhere near as bad as misgendering them, at least not in a four hour convention game where they didn’t create the character. If they’d created the characters, that would be different because the players might have some investment.
We had one man playing a male character, and one woman playing a female character. Then there was a woman playing a character of undefined gender ('other' covers a lot of territory, and the player didn’t specify). The final player was a guy who looked at his character, which I’d tried to write gender neutral but tended to think of as male, and decided that the character read female. Later on, the character shape shifted into male human form in order to impersonate a dead assassin.
I ended up doing a lot more making stuff up than I had planned to. A lot of things I had been going to do just didn’t feel right with this group and the things they did. I only ran about ten minutes over my time slot (there was an hour until the next game scheduled in there), and I let the player characters take down the bad guys without any twists because it was the very end of our time slot. If it had been a game I expected to continue or if the players had been unwise about how they went about things, I’d have had at least one person get away, but the players were pretty sensible about their tactics and about what they could do.
I played in a Chill game from 8:00 until a bit after midnight. Chill is a horror game, but the horrors tend to be on a smaller scale than in Call of Cthulhu, and the player characters are actually part of an organization dedicated to fighting such things. My character was a young, former soldier with combat experience in the Middle East. Her impetus for getting involved with the organization was the organization saving her girlfriend from a werewolf that my character, who had been expecting coyotes, couldn’t kill.
I was the only woman at the table apart from the GM, but it was a reasonable group of guys. I didn’t really look closely at the advantages and disadvantages when I picked the character, and I discovered once I did that the character had a honking big disadvantage in terms of not being able to talk clearly. The explanation said it could be shyness, could be a stutter or a lisp, or anything else that made spoken communications something I wasn’t comfortable with or good at. I did a lot of hand gestures and holding up the items that I thought were important in order to draw attention to them. I didn’t speak in complete sentences unless they were very, very short and most just tried to pick the important words. Sometimes the other players got what I was getting at, and sometimes they didn’t.
We were trying to locate and stop a revenant. The GM hinted heavily (at least, I thought it was heavily) that we would need dirt from its grave in order to kill it. She actually said, when we found the grave, that the dirt 'might be useful.' And the revenant left dirty hand prints on everything it touched and kept stopping to shower without managing to get rid of the dirt. My character had a rifle and a very high skill with it. I ended up pulling out all of my bullets and smearing a little bit of grave dirt on each of them. None of the other characters did, so I was the only one who could do more than knock the thing back.
But we’d cornered it in a bathroom, and one of the other characters could draw a line that magic and monsters couldn’t cross, so we were able to stand back and take our time. A couple of characters who lacked weapons tried throwing handfuls of dirt and then were surprised that throwing loose dirt was actually difficult (some of that was dice, but…). Then the martial artist smeared dirt on his hands and arms and went into the bathroom and rolled a critical success on his attack. He didn’t kill it, but he got it down for long enough that I could put a bullet through the heart, and the law enforcement types could put cuffs on it. That shut it down. We then took it back to the grave site and burned the body. Some characters just wanted to bury it again, but I was very opposed to that.
I got back to the room about 12:30, and, naturally, I had a hot flash. Scott and Cordelia were both already asleep, and I didn’t want to risk waking them, so I just got ready for bed and used a damp towel to try to cool off a little. I didn’t end up sleeping all that well. The bed isn’t terrible. Lying on it doesn’t hurt. It’s just that, when I stand up, my back is very stiff and painful, and my knees and hips ache.
We got carryout Chinese food last night. Scott nearly poisoned himself by trusting that the online menu was accurate. He ordered a dish containing several different types of meat. The online menu did not mention beef, just pork and chicken and shrimp, but I was dubious when I saw the dish. The paper menu Scott ended up with said there was beef. Scott didn’t end up getting sick (which surprises me because he did eat some of the dish), so we got hugely lucky. We threw out half of the food because Scott wasn’t willing to try to keep it and take it home (or to eat it cold in the morning).
I’m trying to scavenge a decent breakfast. I don’t want to spend $15 on the hotel’s breakfast buffet given that it would basically be bacon, a little fruit, and a ton of carbs. If I could eat eggs, it would be different, but I can’t. I’ve gotten about half of my stuff packed. What’s left is all the small things that I’ll have to find. I think everything that’s left is by the sink, but I’ll need to look around a bit.
Cordelia has asked Scott to take her home some time between checkout and when he runs at 4. I think that it’s a reasonable thing to ask given that there’s nothing else he can do in that time because how things are scheduled, but it’ll take at least half an hour.
I have about 1500 words of my Yuletide fic done. This is just one section out of several that I have planned, but I think this bit could stand alone perfectly well if I don’t finish anything else, and that’s something of a relief. I need to tweak things a little because there’s a character who uses a few different names in canon. I’m used to using one, but my POV character would likely default to the other. Or maybe she wouldn’t. I need to review that specific bit of canon.
I’m glad we have a couple of hours before checkout because I just slopped tea all over my chest. I’ve only got the one bra that’s clean, and I already packed the spare shirt that I brought. I can dig that out because Scott hasn’t taken that bag to the car yet, but I don’t want to shove the wet shirt into the bag or to put the wet bra back on.
I haven’t been able to brew tea that’s strong enough for me to taste it. I gave the second mug extra time to steep, but that didn’t help. I’m hoping that two mugs of weak tea will give me enough caffeine to avoid a headache from that. Of course, I’m likely to get a headache from poor sleep. I don’t know.
We had one man playing a male character, and one woman playing a female character. Then there was a woman playing a character of undefined gender ('other' covers a lot of territory, and the player didn’t specify). The final player was a guy who looked at his character, which I’d tried to write gender neutral but tended to think of as male, and decided that the character read female. Later on, the character shape shifted into male human form in order to impersonate a dead assassin.
I ended up doing a lot more making stuff up than I had planned to. A lot of things I had been going to do just didn’t feel right with this group and the things they did. I only ran about ten minutes over my time slot (there was an hour until the next game scheduled in there), and I let the player characters take down the bad guys without any twists because it was the very end of our time slot. If it had been a game I expected to continue or if the players had been unwise about how they went about things, I’d have had at least one person get away, but the players were pretty sensible about their tactics and about what they could do.
I played in a Chill game from 8:00 until a bit after midnight. Chill is a horror game, but the horrors tend to be on a smaller scale than in Call of Cthulhu, and the player characters are actually part of an organization dedicated to fighting such things. My character was a young, former soldier with combat experience in the Middle East. Her impetus for getting involved with the organization was the organization saving her girlfriend from a werewolf that my character, who had been expecting coyotes, couldn’t kill.
I was the only woman at the table apart from the GM, but it was a reasonable group of guys. I didn’t really look closely at the advantages and disadvantages when I picked the character, and I discovered once I did that the character had a honking big disadvantage in terms of not being able to talk clearly. The explanation said it could be shyness, could be a stutter or a lisp, or anything else that made spoken communications something I wasn’t comfortable with or good at. I did a lot of hand gestures and holding up the items that I thought were important in order to draw attention to them. I didn’t speak in complete sentences unless they were very, very short and most just tried to pick the important words. Sometimes the other players got what I was getting at, and sometimes they didn’t.
We were trying to locate and stop a revenant. The GM hinted heavily (at least, I thought it was heavily) that we would need dirt from its grave in order to kill it. She actually said, when we found the grave, that the dirt 'might be useful.' And the revenant left dirty hand prints on everything it touched and kept stopping to shower without managing to get rid of the dirt. My character had a rifle and a very high skill with it. I ended up pulling out all of my bullets and smearing a little bit of grave dirt on each of them. None of the other characters did, so I was the only one who could do more than knock the thing back.
But we’d cornered it in a bathroom, and one of the other characters could draw a line that magic and monsters couldn’t cross, so we were able to stand back and take our time. A couple of characters who lacked weapons tried throwing handfuls of dirt and then were surprised that throwing loose dirt was actually difficult (some of that was dice, but…). Then the martial artist smeared dirt on his hands and arms and went into the bathroom and rolled a critical success on his attack. He didn’t kill it, but he got it down for long enough that I could put a bullet through the heart, and the law enforcement types could put cuffs on it. That shut it down. We then took it back to the grave site and burned the body. Some characters just wanted to bury it again, but I was very opposed to that.
I got back to the room about 12:30, and, naturally, I had a hot flash. Scott and Cordelia were both already asleep, and I didn’t want to risk waking them, so I just got ready for bed and used a damp towel to try to cool off a little. I didn’t end up sleeping all that well. The bed isn’t terrible. Lying on it doesn’t hurt. It’s just that, when I stand up, my back is very stiff and painful, and my knees and hips ache.
We got carryout Chinese food last night. Scott nearly poisoned himself by trusting that the online menu was accurate. He ordered a dish containing several different types of meat. The online menu did not mention beef, just pork and chicken and shrimp, but I was dubious when I saw the dish. The paper menu Scott ended up with said there was beef. Scott didn’t end up getting sick (which surprises me because he did eat some of the dish), so we got hugely lucky. We threw out half of the food because Scott wasn’t willing to try to keep it and take it home (or to eat it cold in the morning).
I’m trying to scavenge a decent breakfast. I don’t want to spend $15 on the hotel’s breakfast buffet given that it would basically be bacon, a little fruit, and a ton of carbs. If I could eat eggs, it would be different, but I can’t. I’ve gotten about half of my stuff packed. What’s left is all the small things that I’ll have to find. I think everything that’s left is by the sink, but I’ll need to look around a bit.
Cordelia has asked Scott to take her home some time between checkout and when he runs at 4. I think that it’s a reasonable thing to ask given that there’s nothing else he can do in that time because how things are scheduled, but it’ll take at least half an hour.
I have about 1500 words of my Yuletide fic done. This is just one section out of several that I have planned, but I think this bit could stand alone perfectly well if I don’t finish anything else, and that’s something of a relief. I need to tweak things a little because there’s a character who uses a few different names in canon. I’m used to using one, but my POV character would likely default to the other. Or maybe she wouldn’t. I need to review that specific bit of canon.
I’m glad we have a couple of hours before checkout because I just slopped tea all over my chest. I’ve only got the one bra that’s clean, and I already packed the spare shirt that I brought. I can dig that out because Scott hasn’t taken that bag to the car yet, but I don’t want to shove the wet shirt into the bag or to put the wet bra back on.
I haven’t been able to brew tea that’s strong enough for me to taste it. I gave the second mug extra time to steep, but that didn’t help. I’m hoping that two mugs of weak tea will give me enough caffeine to avoid a headache from that. Of course, I’m likely to get a headache from poor sleep. I don’t know.
