KapCon XXIX - Games I Played
KapCon Games are unlike most things we do and consume, in that they are a fairly big, and fairly blind, gamble at the best of times. Few specific scenarios have any kind of meaningful cultural or market footprint before you select whether you want to play them at a convention. Even if they did, anyone who's run a scenario more than once knows that each different group has their own priorities, their own personality mix, their own experiences. One of the goals for good scenario design is that either the scenario eventually guides those choices back to a narrow range of story options, or that it is robust enough that all deviations are going to be within a certain range of parameters. That makes it a big roll of the dice, but that's a result only the GM sees, because only they are "quantum" across the different runs of the game. Games exist in a state of potentia and the act of measuring what's happening determines what's happening.
When deciding to play a scenario you don't have word of mouth and you don't know what dynamic will take place at the table because you don't know who else will play, so your decision is made on the basis of the advertising blurb, including key parameters such as game system, and the name of the GM. I've posted elsewhere and at length about how terrible most game blurbs are, because they fail to intelligibly convey the expected experience at the table. Even such seemingly-informative fields like "Genre: Fantasy" sweeps up a pretty big range of possibilities. Are we Elric, Wheel of Time, Chronicles of Amber, Xanth? The basic problem is that almost all GMs opt for flavour when advertising their game rather than really trying to convey hard and useful information - it's the old advertising game. Make it sound sexy, any kind of sexy, and people will go for it. I don't feel like calling out anyone this year - again, been there, done that!
So ultimately, you're making some kind of interpretive decision about genre and tone from something that would be a great extract for a NCEA module on interpreting the language of advertising. All kinds of things are coded and doubly-coded for the initiated, but you can often make some huge generalisations and muddle through. Assuming I've done this correctly, the games on offer are distinctly unevenly spread across genre and tone each year, though the mix changes. This year if you wanted to play a game set in approximately modern times, you had a pretty good selection. If you wanted to play a game set in the near future... your choices were a Shadowrun scenario, a Dystopia 23 (whatever that is!) and a Sprawl scenario, so I hope your near-future aspirations were also Cyberpunk. If you wanted a Comedy of any flavour, you had a bit more choice, and "Fantasy" of some description dominated this year.
GM track record is probably the most reliable way of doing it - provided you know who any of these people are. And there's nobody to really ask about anyone, and nobody who'd give you a straight answer if you did, probably. I've got my theories, of course. The cult of Named GMs is largely a thing of the past, I think, but there are still stalwarts kicking around offering the things they offer with a certain level of consistency. Idiot will offer some Delta Green, Luke will offer a pile of games whose genre and tone is always a mystery to me from the blurb, Jamie will offer a game about interpersonal relationships, Grant is your guy for Shadowrun - I have my niche as the detective guy. So there's that.
Looking at what to play this year I was deeply uninterested in the offerings on the basis of my best guess of genre. I signed up for games with GMs I knew after I'd had a chat with other players at the convention to get a sense where players I wanted to play with were going. It's a basically cowardly risk-averse modus operandi made possible by having guaranteed entry to a game via GM pick and being fairly confident that my friends will be in a similar boat.
Wake for the Lost
Basically the only Science Fiction game on offer. I want to offer a hard SF game in 2021, but that seems a lot harder than writing the kind of thing I always do and hence know well.
I played "Ava 6", the Synthetic(tm) for a space ship in the Aliens universe sent to explore some mega-structures in space around a world humanity hoped to colonise. The crew's mission parameters were pretty much "play it safe" and the two characters whose specific and personal missions had the potential to upset the applecart of paranoia were very passive and unable to make a real impact on the game. We cautiously avoided anything that looked like real danger or drama, which was an exercise in kind of wallowing in paranoia. I enjoyed playing it completely deadpan while trying to say things that were factually correct and helpful, but open to misinterpretation as potentially hostile.
The thing that I said to Conan afterwards though, is that casting the characters may need a bit more attention. In particular, had either the Scientist or the Sheriff been given to a player with an eye for dramatic monkey-wrenching, the game could have gone very differently. Conan won best GM, so I guess overall the consensus was that this and its twin game were good. :)
By the Will of the Gods
The GM pitched this to me as "X-File in Ancient Rome", which is the kind of pithy sell that just has to hook you in, and actually made me interested, whereas I couldn't see what was cool about the game from the blurb alone.
The scenario was adapted for a PbtA engine from a conventional RPG, and I don't think it was particularly tailored to the specific characters being offered. It was pretty similar to a Weird Wars Rome or Chthulhu Invictus scenario, which was fairly straightforward. Go somewhere, kill the monster. I don't think we did a great job investigating the situation, or in bringing out uniquely Roman cultural aeshetic for the game. I think while the PbtA engine is seductively easy to run, a bit more exposition on the character sheets may have helped with that. It's one of those gaming experiences that was pretty enjoyable in the moment, but afterwards I felt a bit of lost potential.
One other slightly interesting aspect to the game was the presence of a player verging on emerging from Adventure Squad. It's a little difficult for these youths to grab the spotlight, so it's something that us older hands are going to need to really sharpen up on. Helping others get spotlight and setting up other characters for cool moments is something we should all be doing anyway, but the impetus is less when there's a rough parity of basic presence. I've often said that the standard of GMing at KapCon is generally pretty high (my grumpiness notwithstanding) but in a lot of ways we need a broader level of high skills as players, and the presence of emerging gamers makes that more important. Building up a young player to have a good time is an effort that will pay dividends for decades - we're seeing this in the way the ultimate community composition has changed with the various youth programmes. I did nothing to help our young player, because it wasn't really a problem I'd thought about or anticipated and in the moment it didn't spontaneously occur to me. It's not that she was dead weight, or needed rescuing as such, but a slighy amount more conscious inclusion may have been good. I've had no feedback from the player or the GM on that - so this is just me spitballing.
Hamish's Bond Spy Game
I finished my KapCon play-testing a two-player asymetric story game loosely Powered by the Apocalypse. I'll save my detailed comments for the playtest response sheet in due course. The game is pretty fun, and more or less does replicate the narrative shape of a Bond film.
When deciding to play a scenario you don't have word of mouth and you don't know what dynamic will take place at the table because you don't know who else will play, so your decision is made on the basis of the advertising blurb, including key parameters such as game system, and the name of the GM. I've posted elsewhere and at length about how terrible most game blurbs are, because they fail to intelligibly convey the expected experience at the table. Even such seemingly-informative fields like "Genre: Fantasy" sweeps up a pretty big range of possibilities. Are we Elric, Wheel of Time, Chronicles of Amber, Xanth? The basic problem is that almost all GMs opt for flavour when advertising their game rather than really trying to convey hard and useful information - it's the old advertising game. Make it sound sexy, any kind of sexy, and people will go for it. I don't feel like calling out anyone this year - again, been there, done that!
So ultimately, you're making some kind of interpretive decision about genre and tone from something that would be a great extract for a NCEA module on interpreting the language of advertising. All kinds of things are coded and doubly-coded for the initiated, but you can often make some huge generalisations and muddle through. Assuming I've done this correctly, the games on offer are distinctly unevenly spread across genre and tone each year, though the mix changes. This year if you wanted to play a game set in approximately modern times, you had a pretty good selection. If you wanted to play a game set in the near future... your choices were a Shadowrun scenario, a Dystopia 23 (whatever that is!) and a Sprawl scenario, so I hope your near-future aspirations were also Cyberpunk. If you wanted a Comedy of any flavour, you had a bit more choice, and "Fantasy" of some description dominated this year.
GM track record is probably the most reliable way of doing it - provided you know who any of these people are. And there's nobody to really ask about anyone, and nobody who'd give you a straight answer if you did, probably. I've got my theories, of course. The cult of Named GMs is largely a thing of the past, I think, but there are still stalwarts kicking around offering the things they offer with a certain level of consistency. Idiot will offer some Delta Green, Luke will offer a pile of games whose genre and tone is always a mystery to me from the blurb, Jamie will offer a game about interpersonal relationships, Grant is your guy for Shadowrun - I have my niche as the detective guy. So there's that.
Looking at what to play this year I was deeply uninterested in the offerings on the basis of my best guess of genre. I signed up for games with GMs I knew after I'd had a chat with other players at the convention to get a sense where players I wanted to play with were going. It's a basically cowardly risk-averse modus operandi made possible by having guaranteed entry to a game via GM pick and being fairly confident that my friends will be in a similar boat.
Wake for the Lost
Basically the only Science Fiction game on offer. I want to offer a hard SF game in 2021, but that seems a lot harder than writing the kind of thing I always do and hence know well.
I played "Ava 6", the Synthetic(tm) for a space ship in the Aliens universe sent to explore some mega-structures in space around a world humanity hoped to colonise. The crew's mission parameters were pretty much "play it safe" and the two characters whose specific and personal missions had the potential to upset the applecart of paranoia were very passive and unable to make a real impact on the game. We cautiously avoided anything that looked like real danger or drama, which was an exercise in kind of wallowing in paranoia. I enjoyed playing it completely deadpan while trying to say things that were factually correct and helpful, but open to misinterpretation as potentially hostile.
The thing that I said to Conan afterwards though, is that casting the characters may need a bit more attention. In particular, had either the Scientist or the Sheriff been given to a player with an eye for dramatic monkey-wrenching, the game could have gone very differently. Conan won best GM, so I guess overall the consensus was that this and its twin game were good. :)
By the Will of the Gods
The GM pitched this to me as "X-File in Ancient Rome", which is the kind of pithy sell that just has to hook you in, and actually made me interested, whereas I couldn't see what was cool about the game from the blurb alone.
The scenario was adapted for a PbtA engine from a conventional RPG, and I don't think it was particularly tailored to the specific characters being offered. It was pretty similar to a Weird Wars Rome or Chthulhu Invictus scenario, which was fairly straightforward. Go somewhere, kill the monster. I don't think we did a great job investigating the situation, or in bringing out uniquely Roman cultural aeshetic for the game. I think while the PbtA engine is seductively easy to run, a bit more exposition on the character sheets may have helped with that. It's one of those gaming experiences that was pretty enjoyable in the moment, but afterwards I felt a bit of lost potential.
One other slightly interesting aspect to the game was the presence of a player verging on emerging from Adventure Squad. It's a little difficult for these youths to grab the spotlight, so it's something that us older hands are going to need to really sharpen up on. Helping others get spotlight and setting up other characters for cool moments is something we should all be doing anyway, but the impetus is less when there's a rough parity of basic presence. I've often said that the standard of GMing at KapCon is generally pretty high (my grumpiness notwithstanding) but in a lot of ways we need a broader level of high skills as players, and the presence of emerging gamers makes that more important. Building up a young player to have a good time is an effort that will pay dividends for decades - we're seeing this in the way the ultimate community composition has changed with the various youth programmes. I did nothing to help our young player, because it wasn't really a problem I'd thought about or anticipated and in the moment it didn't spontaneously occur to me. It's not that she was dead weight, or needed rescuing as such, but a slighy amount more conscious inclusion may have been good. I've had no feedback from the player or the GM on that - so this is just me spitballing.
Hamish's Bond Spy Game
I finished my KapCon play-testing a two-player asymetric story game loosely Powered by the Apocalypse. I'll save my detailed comments for the playtest response sheet in due course. The game is pretty fun, and more or less does replicate the narrative shape of a Bond film.