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Nov. 27th, 2002 02:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckThis last weekend was UCon, the local gaming convention. I was too tired to attend on Friday, and ended up only managing one game on Saturday, but I ran my LARP, The Plots of Time on Sunday. Everything seemed to go well.
The Saturday game that Scott and I played in was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer scenario. I played Cordelia, and Scott played Giles. We were the last players to arrive, so Cordelia, Giles and Oz were the only characters left to choose from. The guy who'd taken Buffy offered her to me, but I declined. Cordelia was about all I was up to because I'd woken up feeling pretty sick and kept wanting to stop and take a nap. (My stomach did calm during the game, and I provided much amusement for the GM by sending Scott to get me food without specifying what I wanted.) The scenario focused on us discovering that NSync had made a deal with a demon that required them sacrificing attractive blonde girls to it in exchange for the demon making people obsessed with the group. I got to play Cordelia being insulted when she realized that only blondes were being allowed into the ultra-private back backstage party.
After the game, we did a quick run through the dealer's room. Scott bought the Buffy game and Godlike (a superheroes game set during WWII) from the Underworld booth. I bought a copy of Cynthia Voigt's The Wings of a Falcon and the BBC dramatization of The Hobbit on cassette tape from the Friends of the Ann Arbor Public Library booth.
From there, we went and got some more food in hopes that that would help me feel more energetic. It didn't, so Scott took me home. He decided to skip the afternoon game slot and did our week's grocery shopping and a few other mundane things before heading back to the convention in the evening. I didn't actually end up napping, but I was rather lumpish for the rest of the day.
The LARP went pretty well. We had fewer women than normal (neither LunarGeography nor theshunter could make it, sadly), but we did end up with 16 players (well, 15 and one guy who'd played before but was still willing to fill a spot for us, for which I'm quite grateful). The game went rather differently than it did at GenCon. Scott's theory about that is that we had more people here who are used to my games and their flow while at GenCon we had two extremely experienced players with strong personalities who allied with each other and rather dominated things.
I just find it very sad that I went to the trouble of posting the game background online. It appears that almost nobody bothered to read it. Since there's about a dozen pages of it, nobody had time to read it at the game. Ah, well... I had constructed it so that only two pages were really essential for would-be players.
Scott called the game without letting things quite resolve because it was at a point where we'd have either to rule that almost everybody died or that one player's well thought out (well, kind of) plan for saving the world didn't work. I more or less agree with Scott's decision, but I'm not sure I'd have been able to muster the energy to bully the players into going along with it. Most of them were pretty eager to have their own agendas triumph.
I'm kind of vaguely considering trying to rerun the Vampire LARP scenario that I wrote a few years back. We ran it three times then, but I think there may be enough new people around now to get 20 players. The plots don't need any real tweaking, so it wouldn't be a lot of work for me. Scott has, however, pointed out that there are some rules that he'd need to alter, so that scenario may prove to be too much work.
I really need to decide what I'm going to run at GenCon 2003. I plan to write the new scenario in January and February because my usual working schedule of using June and July will absolutely not work with the baby due to arrive June 7th. We're thinking that we'll steal an idea from the television show Andromeda for our new scenario. We'll have what amounts to a constitutional convention for a bunch of spacefaring powers who are trying to join together with a common government. There should be plenty of room for intrigue.
The bigger question at this point, actually, is whether or not we're going to go to GenCon at all. If the baby arrives on time, it will be about six weeks old when the convention rolls around. I'm probably going to be exhausted, and anywhere we go, we'll be toting baby paraphernalia. I don't see anyone wanting to share a hotel room with us under the circumstances, and I'm a little concerned about my ability to get around while hauling a baby and its stuff given that I usually use an electric scooter (think motorized chair that has a steering column in front) in order to avoid exhausting myself. A woman we know has also suggested that perhaps we might not want to take a child that young somewhere that it'll be exposed to the germs from thousands of people (some of them with dubious hygienic practices). I've sent a message to the woman who runs the GM consortium that we work with asking her opinion and explaining that it's possible that we might have to back out with only a few weeks' notice if things don't go right or if I find that I'm not standing up to the stresses of motherhood as well as I'd hoped. She hasn't answered me yet. I don't know if that's because I don't have the right address for her or because she's not sure what to say or...
The Saturday game that Scott and I played in was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer scenario. I played Cordelia, and Scott played Giles. We were the last players to arrive, so Cordelia, Giles and Oz were the only characters left to choose from. The guy who'd taken Buffy offered her to me, but I declined. Cordelia was about all I was up to because I'd woken up feeling pretty sick and kept wanting to stop and take a nap. (My stomach did calm during the game, and I provided much amusement for the GM by sending Scott to get me food without specifying what I wanted.) The scenario focused on us discovering that NSync had made a deal with a demon that required them sacrificing attractive blonde girls to it in exchange for the demon making people obsessed with the group. I got to play Cordelia being insulted when she realized that only blondes were being allowed into the ultra-private back backstage party.
After the game, we did a quick run through the dealer's room. Scott bought the Buffy game and Godlike (a superheroes game set during WWII) from the Underworld booth. I bought a copy of Cynthia Voigt's The Wings of a Falcon and the BBC dramatization of The Hobbit on cassette tape from the Friends of the Ann Arbor Public Library booth.
From there, we went and got some more food in hopes that that would help me feel more energetic. It didn't, so Scott took me home. He decided to skip the afternoon game slot and did our week's grocery shopping and a few other mundane things before heading back to the convention in the evening. I didn't actually end up napping, but I was rather lumpish for the rest of the day.
The LARP went pretty well. We had fewer women than normal (neither LunarGeography nor theshunter could make it, sadly), but we did end up with 16 players (well, 15 and one guy who'd played before but was still willing to fill a spot for us, for which I'm quite grateful). The game went rather differently than it did at GenCon. Scott's theory about that is that we had more people here who are used to my games and their flow while at GenCon we had two extremely experienced players with strong personalities who allied with each other and rather dominated things.
I just find it very sad that I went to the trouble of posting the game background online. It appears that almost nobody bothered to read it. Since there's about a dozen pages of it, nobody had time to read it at the game. Ah, well... I had constructed it so that only two pages were really essential for would-be players.
Scott called the game without letting things quite resolve because it was at a point where we'd have either to rule that almost everybody died or that one player's well thought out (well, kind of) plan for saving the world didn't work. I more or less agree with Scott's decision, but I'm not sure I'd have been able to muster the energy to bully the players into going along with it. Most of them were pretty eager to have their own agendas triumph.
I'm kind of vaguely considering trying to rerun the Vampire LARP scenario that I wrote a few years back. We ran it three times then, but I think there may be enough new people around now to get 20 players. The plots don't need any real tweaking, so it wouldn't be a lot of work for me. Scott has, however, pointed out that there are some rules that he'd need to alter, so that scenario may prove to be too much work.
I really need to decide what I'm going to run at GenCon 2003. I plan to write the new scenario in January and February because my usual working schedule of using June and July will absolutely not work with the baby due to arrive June 7th. We're thinking that we'll steal an idea from the television show Andromeda for our new scenario. We'll have what amounts to a constitutional convention for a bunch of spacefaring powers who are trying to join together with a common government. There should be plenty of room for intrigue.
The bigger question at this point, actually, is whether or not we're going to go to GenCon at all. If the baby arrives on time, it will be about six weeks old when the convention rolls around. I'm probably going to be exhausted, and anywhere we go, we'll be toting baby paraphernalia. I don't see anyone wanting to share a hotel room with us under the circumstances, and I'm a little concerned about my ability to get around while hauling a baby and its stuff given that I usually use an electric scooter (think motorized chair that has a steering column in front) in order to avoid exhausting myself. A woman we know has also suggested that perhaps we might not want to take a child that young somewhere that it'll be exposed to the germs from thousands of people (some of them with dubious hygienic practices). I've sent a message to the woman who runs the GM consortium that we work with asking her opinion and explaining that it's possible that we might have to back out with only a few weeks' notice if things don't go right or if I find that I'm not standing up to the stresses of motherhood as well as I'd hoped. She hasn't answered me yet. I don't know if that's because I don't have the right address for her or because she's not sure what to say or...
