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Dec. 4th, 2004 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckUCon was the weekend before Thanksgiving. Scott took Delia over to the Union on Friday to pick up our registration. The dealers' room was already open, and he let her run in there. (The dealers set up in a circle around the outside of the room, and there are tables all through the middle for events and open gaming.) Then she found the stairs and made Scott go up and down with her until he bundled her up and brought her home.
The next day, all three of us went for a little while. I ended up buying some anime from a dealer who was trying to dump what he had (The Underworld sold anime for a while, but stopped carrying new stuff quite a while back. They've been slowly trying to get rid of their stock and have been hindered by not having full runs of much of anything). Because we've known each other for years (since college) and because Scott and I are long time customers, he gave me an amazing deal on the 10 DVDs I bought. If I'd known the rate he'd give me, I'd probably have bought twice as much. At least. Maybe it's just as well... We can use that money elsewhere.
Scott wanted me to play in something, but there wasn't anything that interested me at a time that made sense. Basically, we didn't get there until a bit after noon. Anything I played in would have to be done by 6, at the absolute latest, if Scott were to have any hope of playing anything, and 6 would have been pushing it. Since I can't handle card games or board games without having a phobic reaction, I'm limited to the table top role playing games and the LARPs, and there wasn't anything starting at 1.
I talked Scott into simply taking my home with my anime swag and letting me stay with Delia while he went back to the convention to play Axis and Allies with his old college roommate. I didn't enjoy spending the afternoon and evening alone, but it wasn't awful by any means. Mostly just dull.
On Sunday, we went in to run our LARP. They'd given us a different space than usual, but it was one that actually worked better for us in many ways. We were at one end of an L-shaped hallway that had doors on both ends of the part of things perpendicular to where we were. As long as nobody opened the doors at the wrong moment, we could let Delia roam. That was especially good because we were badly short on players and had to draft![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
booniverse and her man to play instead of just having them act as baby wranglers. With them, we had 11 players (for a 20 character game), and I thought we could do *something* with that. I told the players that I expected the game to explode early because the buffer characters and plots wouldn't be there, and they felt that they could have fun anyway.
Fortunately, we got 4 late arrivals (three of them an hour into play), so that we had 15 players after all (I usually expect to run with about 15. I set that as my official minimum and try to be sure that there are at least 5 characters I can live without). The mix of characters was a little different than it might have been. All four late arrivals were male and didn't want to play women. I'd already given three or four female players characters I'd written male who could be played female without serious problems, and I wouldn't have done that if all the players had been present when I was first casting. At any rate, that meant that the last four got characters I'd considered disposable when I wrote them but who were playable and male. And a few plots centered on female characters disappeared entirely even though I technically had enough women to cover them.
Delia had a blast, running in and out of the two rooms we had. We'd brought her purple, stuffed dinosaur and her stackable rings, and those ended up scattered up and down the hallway. The players were great about keeping track of where she was and were understanding when Scott or I had to take time to feed her or change a diaper. Scott commented that Delia's presence seemed to force the players to be physically calmer and more careful than they usually are. I suspect that there was also some moderation of language, but we don't generally get a lot of profanity at these games anyway, so it's hard to say. (And, apart from our friends, almost none of the players will swear in front of me.)
Delia didn't really nap that day. She fell asleep on Scott's shoulder during the recap, at a bit after 5, and we put her in her stroller to nap. She probably got about 45 minutes of sleep, waking when we were transferring her from stroller to car seat for the trip home. She also gave us two seriously stinky diapers that day, fitting neatly with the we're-away-from-home-so-of-course-this-happens theory of causality.
There were the usual glitches in play, and we found things that will have to be changed in the rewrite. One character, for example, is supposed to be a reasonably intelligent megalomaniac, but I wrote in a mistake on his part to help pull another character more strongly into play. Helping the other character worked, but the mistake ended up really screwing over the person who played the character who'd made it. (He hired an assassin and let the assassin discover his identity but didn't know the assassin's true identity.) I think he also blamed that bit of set up for killing his character, but I'm not absolutely certain that's the case. I think that one probably comes more from the fact that his opponent thinks fast-- Having to obey the command, "Come with me and don't say anything," (or something like that) does *not* preclude putting a garrote around one's companion's neck.
In case you hadn't guessed, I feel bad about that one. The player in question was someone we've known for a several years through these games, and he always does a good job with whatever we give him. I like to make sure people like that have a really good time so that they keep coming back.
I just barely finished the LARP preparations before UCon. In fact, there were still a few things I wanted to do that I didn't get around to. We fudged to cover for those that actually mattered during the game, but most of them were either for unlikely contingencies or extra flourishes that would have been nice but that didn't matter much.
The next day, all three of us went for a little while. I ended up buying some anime from a dealer who was trying to dump what he had (The Underworld sold anime for a while, but stopped carrying new stuff quite a while back. They've been slowly trying to get rid of their stock and have been hindered by not having full runs of much of anything). Because we've known each other for years (since college) and because Scott and I are long time customers, he gave me an amazing deal on the 10 DVDs I bought. If I'd known the rate he'd give me, I'd probably have bought twice as much. At least. Maybe it's just as well... We can use that money elsewhere.
Scott wanted me to play in something, but there wasn't anything that interested me at a time that made sense. Basically, we didn't get there until a bit after noon. Anything I played in would have to be done by 6, at the absolute latest, if Scott were to have any hope of playing anything, and 6 would have been pushing it. Since I can't handle card games or board games without having a phobic reaction, I'm limited to the table top role playing games and the LARPs, and there wasn't anything starting at 1.
I talked Scott into simply taking my home with my anime swag and letting me stay with Delia while he went back to the convention to play Axis and Allies with his old college roommate. I didn't enjoy spending the afternoon and evening alone, but it wasn't awful by any means. Mostly just dull.
On Sunday, we went in to run our LARP. They'd given us a different space than usual, but it was one that actually worked better for us in many ways. We were at one end of an L-shaped hallway that had doors on both ends of the part of things perpendicular to where we were. As long as nobody opened the doors at the wrong moment, we could let Delia roam. That was especially good because we were badly short on players and had to draft
booniverse and her man to play instead of just having them act as baby wranglers. With them, we had 11 players (for a 20 character game), and I thought we could do *something* with that. I told the players that I expected the game to explode early because the buffer characters and plots wouldn't be there, and they felt that they could have fun anyway. Fortunately, we got 4 late arrivals (three of them an hour into play), so that we had 15 players after all (I usually expect to run with about 15. I set that as my official minimum and try to be sure that there are at least 5 characters I can live without). The mix of characters was a little different than it might have been. All four late arrivals were male and didn't want to play women. I'd already given three or four female players characters I'd written male who could be played female without serious problems, and I wouldn't have done that if all the players had been present when I was first casting. At any rate, that meant that the last four got characters I'd considered disposable when I wrote them but who were playable and male. And a few plots centered on female characters disappeared entirely even though I technically had enough women to cover them.
Delia had a blast, running in and out of the two rooms we had. We'd brought her purple, stuffed dinosaur and her stackable rings, and those ended up scattered up and down the hallway. The players were great about keeping track of where she was and were understanding when Scott or I had to take time to feed her or change a diaper. Scott commented that Delia's presence seemed to force the players to be physically calmer and more careful than they usually are. I suspect that there was also some moderation of language, but we don't generally get a lot of profanity at these games anyway, so it's hard to say. (And, apart from our friends, almost none of the players will swear in front of me.)
Delia didn't really nap that day. She fell asleep on Scott's shoulder during the recap, at a bit after 5, and we put her in her stroller to nap. She probably got about 45 minutes of sleep, waking when we were transferring her from stroller to car seat for the trip home. She also gave us two seriously stinky diapers that day, fitting neatly with the we're-away-from-home-so-of-course-this-happens theory of causality.
There were the usual glitches in play, and we found things that will have to be changed in the rewrite. One character, for example, is supposed to be a reasonably intelligent megalomaniac, but I wrote in a mistake on his part to help pull another character more strongly into play. Helping the other character worked, but the mistake ended up really screwing over the person who played the character who'd made it. (He hired an assassin and let the assassin discover his identity but didn't know the assassin's true identity.) I think he also blamed that bit of set up for killing his character, but I'm not absolutely certain that's the case. I think that one probably comes more from the fact that his opponent thinks fast-- Having to obey the command, "Come with me and don't say anything," (or something like that) does *not* preclude putting a garrote around one's companion's neck.
In case you hadn't guessed, I feel bad about that one. The player in question was someone we've known for a several years through these games, and he always does a good job with whatever we give him. I like to make sure people like that have a really good time so that they keep coming back.
I just barely finished the LARP preparations before UCon. In fact, there were still a few things I wanted to do that I didn't get around to. We fudged to cover for those that actually mattered during the game, but most of them were either for unlikely contingencies or extra flourishes that would have been nice but that didn't matter much.
