Festival of the Larps 2016 con report - part I
We had another successful Festival of the Larps this past weekend, one of my favorite weekends of the year!
I ran my short silly Wodehouse-inspired game, Woodplum House, twice this weekend, and I was pretty happy with both runs. As always, as long as the players are laughing and silly, it's a success, and by that metric I was quite satisfied. I think the Saturday morning run was the highest-energy and most amusing runs ever. They latched on to the "presence haunting the house" plot in a really great way, and somebody even came up with the idea to hold a seance! I like that so much I'm going to write that into the character sheets. It's perfectly in character, suits the fashions of the 1920s time period, and gives great opportunity for humor and silliness.
There were a few challenges this time around. Some of the characters are technically gender-flexible, but had never actually run as anything but their originally conceived of gender, so I saw for the first time how that functioned. Some of course worked a bit better than others. The socialite is just as biting, but I think is more amusing as a lesbian than as a straight man. The raucous American heir from Texas is fine either way, though perhaps a bit weirder as a woman. The only real problem, as usual, was making sure I caught all the pronoun switches in the materials. Particularly for the solving of the mystery, which involves a logic puzzle, this can have important-in game consequences.
As usual, I spent a great deal of my game NPCing the prize pig, who is afflicted at game start with an unnamable porcine ennui. I have gotten quite good at laying on my side, squealing sadly to myself. Due to an unfortunate drop, I also ended up playing Cedric Tweed the valet on Sunday. I prefer the character to have a player, but it was a surprisingly functional role as a GMC-- given that the valet's job is to respond to people's needs and concerns, you can act the character and the game master role quite easily together.
So it required a bit of improvisation and messing about on my part, but I like seeing how I rise to the challenges presented by any given GMing condition. As long as I can keep my players having fun, it's a good test for my game running skills. I think I did okay. :-)
I ran my short silly Wodehouse-inspired game, Woodplum House, twice this weekend, and I was pretty happy with both runs. As always, as long as the players are laughing and silly, it's a success, and by that metric I was quite satisfied. I think the Saturday morning run was the highest-energy and most amusing runs ever. They latched on to the "presence haunting the house" plot in a really great way, and somebody even came up with the idea to hold a seance! I like that so much I'm going to write that into the character sheets. It's perfectly in character, suits the fashions of the 1920s time period, and gives great opportunity for humor and silliness.
There were a few challenges this time around. Some of the characters are technically gender-flexible, but had never actually run as anything but their originally conceived of gender, so I saw for the first time how that functioned. Some of course worked a bit better than others. The socialite is just as biting, but I think is more amusing as a lesbian than as a straight man. The raucous American heir from Texas is fine either way, though perhaps a bit weirder as a woman. The only real problem, as usual, was making sure I caught all the pronoun switches in the materials. Particularly for the solving of the mystery, which involves a logic puzzle, this can have important-in game consequences.
As usual, I spent a great deal of my game NPCing the prize pig, who is afflicted at game start with an unnamable porcine ennui. I have gotten quite good at laying on my side, squealing sadly to myself. Due to an unfortunate drop, I also ended up playing Cedric Tweed the valet on Sunday. I prefer the character to have a player, but it was a surprisingly functional role as a GMC-- given that the valet's job is to respond to people's needs and concerns, you can act the character and the game master role quite easily together.
So it required a bit of improvisation and messing about on my part, but I like seeing how I rise to the challenges presented by any given GMing condition. As long as I can keep my players having fun, it's a good test for my game running skills. I think I did okay. :-)