[Fiasco] Gen Con: The Worst Four Days in Gaming
Originally published at Highmoon's Ponderings. Please leave any comments there.
After trying for almost a week to find a time when we could get together online to play something, Tuesday night we finally managed to do it. Four of us jumped on Skype and ended up playing a short game of Fiasco: a roleplaying game of powerful ambitions and poor impulse control (aka The Coen Brothers RPG, as it has been described sometimes). The game has received some stellar reviews and great word-of-mouth recommendations, so it’s one I’ve been wanting to try out. That it can play out entirely in a couple of hours also made it very attractive to our rag-tag band of busy online gamers. At some point during the last year I learned of a Fiasco playset (think of it as a setting sketch) called Gen Con: The Worst Four Days in Gaming, and that’s the one I proposed we play.
We did . It was awesome. It went a bit slow, since of the four players, two of us had not played Fiasco (Rob and myself) and two had (Rich and JJ). We decided to roll our own characters and connections instead of using the suggested ones provided in the playset. The almost-45-minutes we spent doing this felt like its own little game-within-a-game and we laughed as much as we did once we actually started playing. We played two rounds of scenes. Each player, on their turn, gets to either frame the scene and let the other players choose the outcome, or lets the other players set the scene and he chooses the outcome. We had a good mix of the two options, which created some funny moments. Whoever chooses an outcome for the scene, picks either a white die (things turn out well) or a black die (things turn out poorly) from a dice pool rolled at the start of play. When we finished, there was only one white die on the table, the rest having been chosen to be poor resolutions to the scenes in question, all simply because poor resolutions make for funny moments and problems for the characters. And really, that’s what this is all about, making the characters’ lives hell for our amusement.
The Gen Con playset turns out some bizarre situations that oddly enough feel like they’d be right at home in the real Gen Con! I think it captures the weirdness of Gen Con well, while adding the slapstick crime element to the mix in a perfect fashion. Seriously, you’ve probably never thought of Gen Con this way, but it isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibilities that some of the stories that can emerge from this playset could really happen during the best four days in gaming. I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse, to be honest.
I could write a recap of the events that transpired but that’d be like telling you about my character and our adventure: it’s only interesting if you were there. I can, however, offer you a glimpse of the madness that went on.
Read the rest of this entry »