Worst. Marshal. Ever.
As most of you know, this past weekend was Once Upon a Time in Tombstone, a weekend-long, Western-themed LARP, written by Team Brit, held in Maryland. And I was there! With awesome costumes.
(How the awesome costumes were made is a topic for another post).
Executive summary of the weekend - I had reasonable amount of fun, and met a lot of awesome people, but I also had some real self-loathing lows throughout the weekend. As I gain distance from the event, I think more and more it has to do with how I played my character (and how that character suited me) and less to do with how the game is written. I think I also learned a lot about how I should app for roles in the future.
My character was a young U.S. Marshal, Sierra Jones, who took her inspiration from the uninspired 1959 film The Cattle-Queen of Montana. As her player, my frustrations arose from her morality and her effectiveness. What do I mean by that?
Sierra was also one of the few truly white hat characters in the game, and most of her goals involved upholding law and order. I think in many ways this this hindered me, as it's hard to follow the letter of the law and be effective in a setting where almost everyone is evil or morally ambiguous. I've often said I can do good as well as evil, but as it turns, I can't do lawful good. Now I know this.
I also know that being effective in a game--maybe not "winning," but feeling I've accomplished something--is very important to me. One of my biggest feelings of failure came from the first time I tried to arrest someone. As a U.S. Marshal, I was one of the few characters in game who could arrest characters that were wanted in other states. One of these wanted men was Curly Bill, played by the-smith-e, who was wanted in Montana and Texas, and who I was beginning to suspect of other crimes.
So I did arrest him--at the start of the poker tournament, when he was apart from the rest of his gang, the Cowboys. But things went poorly from there. While he was in jail, I got intimidated by another Cowboy, played by Paul W.--it would have been a cool interaction, except that Paul is like a foot and a half taller than me and very physically imposing, which meant I just ended up feeling uncomfortable as a player as he was backing me around the room. (I probably should have told him this--Paul's a cool guy, and I still remember him from my first Intercon--but I also didn't want to break character).
I think right about then was when Frank James (played by Denis R.) came by and said something snide about my being a female Marshal, which was another sucker punch. I'm kind of glad I didn't have much of anything to do with his character, because I suspect those interactions would have gone much the same way.
Finally, the rest of the gang broke Curly Bill out of prison, and Sierra and a bunch of other characters ended up incapacitated on the floor. *sigh*
A similar thing happened when I tried to arrest Ike Clanton (played by Gaylord T) on Saturday night, after discovering that he was the last member of the Southern Renegades that killed Sierra's fiance. That time I got into a face-off with Johnny Ringo (played by Peter B), and only the intervention of Judge Roy Bean (Lawrence S) defused that situation.
So, yeah. I ended up not only feeling ineffective, but like I was not very in-character--I mean, come on, my character is supposed to be the first female Marshal who's supposedly captured or killed all the members of the gang that killed her fiance. Doesn't she know how to stand up to toughs like this?
It was especially bad because I was surrounded by such amazing role-players--seriously, I think my usual crowd is pretty great, too, but a lot of these players are older than us, and have been around since the Dawn of LARP. These are players who have written some of the classic games we know and love. So, yeah. It's a little intimidating!
Likewise, in retrospect I was not happy with my decision to "unofficially pardon" a bunch of people who had Wanted posters on them. After questioning them, and determining to my satisfaction that they hadn't committed the crime in question (or had committed a lesser crime), I let a few people off the hook. I think, given how shiny lawful good Sierra was, it would have made more sense for her to say something like, "Well, I think you're in the right, but I still have to arrest you, and we'll let the judge sort it out." I mean, come on, in my character back story, Sierra arrested an unconscious Virgil Earp because she thought he might have been implicated in a murder! She's a fucking paladin.
In the end, given the unpleasantness whenever I tried to arrest someone who was truly in the wrong, I ended up arresting a lot of otherwise decent people for stupid petty crimes, because they were the only ones who didn't resist arrest.
Worst. Marshal. Ever.
But if you've seen the pictures from the weekend, you know I wasn't always a marshal. Sometimes I was a saloon girl.
Ah, yes. Let's talk about this saloon girl. She had some useful abilities--especially the ability to get people to "give up the gossip on" other characters. This enabled her to ask for everything someone knew on a given character, including secrets. As my character sheet says, "People will tell things to a pretty girl that they won't tell to a U.S. Marshal."
All well and good. But all of her abilities required Intimate moments, i.e. for her to do her job as a saloon girl.
And this was the most chaste group of outlaws ever.
I never managed to convince anyway to take me up on my offer of "company." I was trying pretty dang hard to woo Curly Bill when he was in jail (someone else arrested him after he broke out the first time), but he wasn't alone and I didn't have the patience to wait around as a saloon girl forever.
There was one benefit to this guise, however. I took Matt's advice to start in this guise, so that I would have some time "undercover" when none of the players knew I was the Marshal. People are not always great at avoiding meta-gaming, after all. One of the first things I did Friday night was walk up to Curly Bill and Johnny Ringo and ask them, casually, what brought them to Tombstone. The answer was very revealing: "The Mayor." They further clarified they had been asked to blockade Earp's Emporium. So I knew the mayor was corrupt from the very start of the game, which was one of my investigations. Little good it did me.
Now, for the good. One of the most rewarding parts of the game for me was my interaction with the other Marshal, Rooster Cogburn (played by Jim G.) and Ellen Harmon (played by Bridget M.). At one point we teamed up to take on a bunch of Frank James' henchmen, which was probably about as effective as I was all game. I also enjoyed my struggle to get Cogburn to accept me as a Marshal, and to get him to take on Ellen as a Deputy Marshal.
That led to one of my favorite interactions in the game, when I walked up him and said, "I have a proposition." (about Ellen becoming a Deputy). To this he replied, "Now, I have a policy about not getting romantically involved with other marshals..."
As I mentioned before, the quality of RP in this game was top-shelf. I was truly in awe of the performances here. A couple that really stood out to me were Dig's John Paden and Sean B's Doc Holliday. If I ever rewatch Silverado or Tombstone, I will see it with those players in mind.
To sum up what I should have done differently:
- I should have apped for a less squeaky clean character
- Given the same character, I should have arrested more people, and done less unofficial pardoning
- I should have been more aware of my abilities, and used them more. Flipping through them after the game, I realized I had only used like two or three of them.
- I should have competed in some of the competitions. My character had a goal to "prove that you're just as good as any man," and heck, she was in terms of abilities. She should have used those opportunities to prove it.
The only things that I could see the game doing differently:
- The whole legal process for out-of-state (or out-of-country) crimes was not well understood, which led to some frustration. Sure, I could arrest someone who was wanted in Texas, but could they be tried here? I guess I should have asked Tony, but he was a bit tied up.
- I wish my saloon girl had abilities that weren't Intimate!
So overall, I have to thank Tony, Heidi, A.J. and Brian for flying over here and putting this all together for us - amazing work and organization. They were only moderately frazzled on Friday, which I'd say is pretty good.
I think the favorite thing about the weekend, though, was meeting awesome new people and seeing awesome frockery. On that note:
- I want Dig and Gail of the Chicago LARP community to be my new BFFs. As the lawyer Jane Clum, Gail had a new frock for every game session, all of them perfectly period-appropriate and trimmed to Victorian excess. We spent a long time talking to them after the game, learning about Fete Fatale and the Whateley's games. (Matt and I are hoping we can go out for the next one, in October 2012). I was most amused to learn that in the run of Clockwork Cafe coming up this weekend in Chicago, the two of them will be playing the characters Matt and I played in that game :) (It's a good role for a married couple to play, because one of them starts knowing certain secrets about the other).
- I sat next to Paul W. at the dead dog, and spent a while talking to him about the history of LARPing. I learned that he was one of the original writers of 1897, and I discussed my character in that game, the Tsarina Alexandra, with him.
- At one point I was introducing myself to someone from the DC LARP community in front of Brian, and he said, "I'm always surprised when you folks don't know each other." I retorted with, "Now, now, not all Americans know each other." "But it's such a small country!" he joked. "No, it's the Big Country," Matt corrected him. "You should know that!"
- Also excited to know that Brian plans to bid The Council of Fenas Drunin, his Middle Earth politics game, for Saturday morning at Intercon!
- A.J. was discussing whether Team Brit would run another weekend-long game next November. Some of the possibilities raised were The King's Musketeers and Sharp and Sensibility, (a Regency-era game). "I saw mention of that and wondered: is that Sharpe as in Sharpe's Rifles?" I asked. "No, it's as in Becky Sharp. We dropped the 'e,' because as it turns out, Bernard Cornwell is a litigious bastard, but William Thackeray hasn't sued anyone for hundreds of years."
- Also had a very Small World moment with A.J., when I mentioned the only place in England I'd visited was Ely, for a contradance event. "Ely?" he said. "E-L-Y? In the fens, in Cambridgeshire?" I assured him yes, yes, and yes. "I grew up there." He asked where my event was, and I told him "Oh, that school that used to be a monastery." "Kings' School," he said. "Yeah. I went there for ten years." So apparently I ate meals in the monastic barn where he had for ten years. Wow.
Finally, I wanted to announce that I heard from Stephen K. that they are only 8 people from being able to run Secrets of the Necronomicon. If you:
- have been wanting to play in a weekend-long game of Lovecraftian hijinks, and
- won't be eyeballs-deep in Skyrim the weekend of November 11th-13th, and
- are in the vicinity of Troy, NY...
... hie thyself yonder and signup.
(How the awesome costumes were made is a topic for another post).
Executive summary of the weekend - I had reasonable amount of fun, and met a lot of awesome people, but I also had some real self-loathing lows throughout the weekend. As I gain distance from the event, I think more and more it has to do with how I played my character (and how that character suited me) and less to do with how the game is written. I think I also learned a lot about how I should app for roles in the future.
My character was a young U.S. Marshal, Sierra Jones, who took her inspiration from the uninspired 1959 film The Cattle-Queen of Montana. As her player, my frustrations arose from her morality and her effectiveness. What do I mean by that?
Sierra was also one of the few truly white hat characters in the game, and most of her goals involved upholding law and order. I think in many ways this this hindered me, as it's hard to follow the letter of the law and be effective in a setting where almost everyone is evil or morally ambiguous. I've often said I can do good as well as evil, but as it turns, I can't do lawful good. Now I know this.
I also know that being effective in a game--maybe not "winning," but feeling I've accomplished something--is very important to me. One of my biggest feelings of failure came from the first time I tried to arrest someone. As a U.S. Marshal, I was one of the few characters in game who could arrest characters that were wanted in other states. One of these wanted men was Curly Bill, played by the-smith-e, who was wanted in Montana and Texas, and who I was beginning to suspect of other crimes.
So I did arrest him--at the start of the poker tournament, when he was apart from the rest of his gang, the Cowboys. But things went poorly from there. While he was in jail, I got intimidated by another Cowboy, played by Paul W.--it would have been a cool interaction, except that Paul is like a foot and a half taller than me and very physically imposing, which meant I just ended up feeling uncomfortable as a player as he was backing me around the room. (I probably should have told him this--Paul's a cool guy, and I still remember him from my first Intercon--but I also didn't want to break character).
I think right about then was when Frank James (played by Denis R.) came by and said something snide about my being a female Marshal, which was another sucker punch. I'm kind of glad I didn't have much of anything to do with his character, because I suspect those interactions would have gone much the same way.
Finally, the rest of the gang broke Curly Bill out of prison, and Sierra and a bunch of other characters ended up incapacitated on the floor. *sigh*
A similar thing happened when I tried to arrest Ike Clanton (played by Gaylord T) on Saturday night, after discovering that he was the last member of the Southern Renegades that killed Sierra's fiance. That time I got into a face-off with Johnny Ringo (played by Peter B), and only the intervention of Judge Roy Bean (Lawrence S) defused that situation.
So, yeah. I ended up not only feeling ineffective, but like I was not very in-character--I mean, come on, my character is supposed to be the first female Marshal who's supposedly captured or killed all the members of the gang that killed her fiance. Doesn't she know how to stand up to toughs like this?
It was especially bad because I was surrounded by such amazing role-players--seriously, I think my usual crowd is pretty great, too, but a lot of these players are older than us, and have been around since the Dawn of LARP. These are players who have written some of the classic games we know and love. So, yeah. It's a little intimidating!
Likewise, in retrospect I was not happy with my decision to "unofficially pardon" a bunch of people who had Wanted posters on them. After questioning them, and determining to my satisfaction that they hadn't committed the crime in question (or had committed a lesser crime), I let a few people off the hook. I think, given how shiny lawful good Sierra was, it would have made more sense for her to say something like, "Well, I think you're in the right, but I still have to arrest you, and we'll let the judge sort it out." I mean, come on, in my character back story, Sierra arrested an unconscious Virgil Earp because she thought he might have been implicated in a murder! She's a fucking paladin.
In the end, given the unpleasantness whenever I tried to arrest someone who was truly in the wrong, I ended up arresting a lot of otherwise decent people for stupid petty crimes, because they were the only ones who didn't resist arrest.
Worst. Marshal. Ever.
But if you've seen the pictures from the weekend, you know I wasn't always a marshal. Sometimes I was a saloon girl.
Ah, yes. Let's talk about this saloon girl. She had some useful abilities--especially the ability to get people to "give up the gossip on" other characters. This enabled her to ask for everything someone knew on a given character, including secrets. As my character sheet says, "People will tell things to a pretty girl that they won't tell to a U.S. Marshal."
All well and good. But all of her abilities required Intimate moments, i.e. for her to do her job as a saloon girl.
And this was the most chaste group of outlaws ever.
I never managed to convince anyway to take me up on my offer of "company." I was trying pretty dang hard to woo Curly Bill when he was in jail (someone else arrested him after he broke out the first time), but he wasn't alone and I didn't have the patience to wait around as a saloon girl forever.
There was one benefit to this guise, however. I took Matt's advice to start in this guise, so that I would have some time "undercover" when none of the players knew I was the Marshal. People are not always great at avoiding meta-gaming, after all. One of the first things I did Friday night was walk up to Curly Bill and Johnny Ringo and ask them, casually, what brought them to Tombstone. The answer was very revealing: "The Mayor." They further clarified they had been asked to blockade Earp's Emporium. So I knew the mayor was corrupt from the very start of the game, which was one of my investigations. Little good it did me.
Now, for the good. One of the most rewarding parts of the game for me was my interaction with the other Marshal, Rooster Cogburn (played by Jim G.) and Ellen Harmon (played by Bridget M.). At one point we teamed up to take on a bunch of Frank James' henchmen, which was probably about as effective as I was all game. I also enjoyed my struggle to get Cogburn to accept me as a Marshal, and to get him to take on Ellen as a Deputy Marshal.
That led to one of my favorite interactions in the game, when I walked up him and said, "I have a proposition." (about Ellen becoming a Deputy). To this he replied, "Now, I have a policy about not getting romantically involved with other marshals..."
As I mentioned before, the quality of RP in this game was top-shelf. I was truly in awe of the performances here. A couple that really stood out to me were Dig's John Paden and Sean B's Doc Holliday. If I ever rewatch Silverado or Tombstone, I will see it with those players in mind.
To sum up what I should have done differently:
- I should have apped for a less squeaky clean character
- Given the same character, I should have arrested more people, and done less unofficial pardoning
- I should have been more aware of my abilities, and used them more. Flipping through them after the game, I realized I had only used like two or three of them.
- I should have competed in some of the competitions. My character had a goal to "prove that you're just as good as any man," and heck, she was in terms of abilities. She should have used those opportunities to prove it.
The only things that I could see the game doing differently:
- The whole legal process for out-of-state (or out-of-country) crimes was not well understood, which led to some frustration. Sure, I could arrest someone who was wanted in Texas, but could they be tried here? I guess I should have asked Tony, but he was a bit tied up.
- I wish my saloon girl had abilities that weren't Intimate!
So overall, I have to thank Tony, Heidi, A.J. and Brian for flying over here and putting this all together for us - amazing work and organization. They were only moderately frazzled on Friday, which I'd say is pretty good.
I think the favorite thing about the weekend, though, was meeting awesome new people and seeing awesome frockery. On that note:
- I want Dig and Gail of the Chicago LARP community to be my new BFFs. As the lawyer Jane Clum, Gail had a new frock for every game session, all of them perfectly period-appropriate and trimmed to Victorian excess. We spent a long time talking to them after the game, learning about Fete Fatale and the Whateley's games. (Matt and I are hoping we can go out for the next one, in October 2012). I was most amused to learn that in the run of Clockwork Cafe coming up this weekend in Chicago, the two of them will be playing the characters Matt and I played in that game :) (It's a good role for a married couple to play, because one of them starts knowing certain secrets about the other).
- I sat next to Paul W. at the dead dog, and spent a while talking to him about the history of LARPing. I learned that he was one of the original writers of 1897, and I discussed my character in that game, the Tsarina Alexandra, with him.
- At one point I was introducing myself to someone from the DC LARP community in front of Brian, and he said, "I'm always surprised when you folks don't know each other." I retorted with, "Now, now, not all Americans know each other." "But it's such a small country!" he joked. "No, it's the Big Country," Matt corrected him. "You should know that!"
- Also excited to know that Brian plans to bid The Council of Fenas Drunin, his Middle Earth politics game, for Saturday morning at Intercon!
- A.J. was discussing whether Team Brit would run another weekend-long game next November. Some of the possibilities raised were The King's Musketeers and Sharp and Sensibility, (a Regency-era game). "I saw mention of that and wondered: is that Sharpe as in Sharpe's Rifles?" I asked. "No, it's as in Becky Sharp. We dropped the 'e,' because as it turns out, Bernard Cornwell is a litigious bastard, but William Thackeray hasn't sued anyone for hundreds of years."
- Also had a very Small World moment with A.J., when I mentioned the only place in England I'd visited was Ely, for a contradance event. "Ely?" he said. "E-L-Y? In the fens, in Cambridgeshire?" I assured him yes, yes, and yes. "I grew up there." He asked where my event was, and I told him "Oh, that school that used to be a monastery." "Kings' School," he said. "Yeah. I went there for ten years." So apparently I ate meals in the monastic barn where he had for ten years. Wow.
Finally, I wanted to announce that I heard from Stephen K. that they are only 8 people from being able to run Secrets of the Necronomicon. If you:
- have been wanting to play in a weekend-long game of Lovecraftian hijinks, and
- won't be eyeballs-deep in Skyrim the weekend of November 11th-13th, and
- are in the vicinity of Troy, NY...
... hie thyself yonder and signup.