Origins!
So we went to Origins, and I played a lot of games while Amber volunteered many hours. It was all good, in general.
Specific breakdown of my time there:
Wednesday
Delivered kids to babysitters, drove to Columbus, arrived in time for Amber's volunteering. I sweated a bit while talking to Special Services, fearing that they wouldn't accept my Media Center job as valid for the Educator's Hall Pass. But one of the two people at the registration said it was okay, so I didn't have to pay the terribly high onsite registration fee.
Then I spent a few hours going through the event registration line three times, getting into any interesting games that I could. This took extra long because of big crowds of people trying to sign up early and because the computers weren't working right. Some of the stuff was all full up, but others I was able to get into, and by the end of the con I was pleased with what I had paid.
First Game of the con was Continuum, which I've been trying to play for about a decade now. Continuum manages to have an internally consistent theory of time travel, but still be playable as a roleplaying game. That's a pretty amazing feat, in and of itself. There's a nigh-mythical sister game (Narcissit) that presents a different, contradictory and equally playable theory of time travel that functions in the same setting, making the feat even more impressive.
The scenario itself was very well designed as an introduction to the game, as it was entirely about your characters learning to think like time travellers rather than normal people. But there were a few flaws as presented: we spent the first hour of play making characters, then never used anything off my character sheet and minimal stuff from my sheet. So why not have pregen characters that tie into the adventure, like nearly everyone else at the con? Also a bit of NPCs hinting at puzzles and talking for the GM and refusing to answer questions for mysterious reasons that might get really annoying if sustained for a campaign, but were pretty minor in this instance.
Verdict: B+ A game I want to own, maybe play.
Thursday
With Great Power...: Sidekicks. I managed to play a thoroughly mundane (and somewhat dimwitted) investigative journalist in a superhero game. I think this is pretty cool, as it seems like the Lois Lane type character is as much a protagonist of some superhero stories as anyone with superpowers, and so deserves PC status just like anyone else. Lois Lane was gender swapped in this case, but the superheroes of the city all turned out to be superheroines with romantic interest in said journalist, so there you are. And With Great Power is the sort of superhero game where not having a single superpower on your sheet doesn't mean you're incapable of affecting the game, so I wasn't handicapped for playing a non-powered character at all.
Somehow, I felt more confused by the rules of With Great Power the second time playing than I did the first time. It wasn't con fatigue, either, as Thursday was early in the con and the previous game two years ago was the very end of the con. Anyway, the game was a lot of fun but I begin to see some flaws lurking beneath the surface of the game: noncombat scenes need something to get them more focused on the fiction and detail, among other things.
Verdict: C+ or maybe B-. Fun to play, but the game seems somewhat imperfect, and I seem to always pick the wrong trait to focus my character on.
Unknown Armies: Choking the Messenger
As I explained to the GM of this game: the protocol is "I look through the Origins events, and try to sign up for every single Unknown Armies game in there". This is the only game I got into legitimately, though thanks to Amber's assistance the GM of the other Unknown Armies game stopped by while I was playing this UA game and told me he could squeeze me into his other game. Score!
Anyway, in this game I again played an investigative journalist. Was this some sort of theme for the day? I tried to make him very different from the previous reporter, with some success. The scenario involved the PCs being witnessing a Senator's mysterious death and supposed to be investigating it. But we all wound up going off in different directions instead of working together, so it became very chaotic very quickly. And in the end my guy wound up accusing two of the other PCs of conspiracy and murder in the Washington Post, and lost an ear to a rogue sniper. My PC never found out much of the truth, but the other PCs did.
I think the secrets they did find (a cliomancer assassin and a loose nanotech virus) could have been fleshed out better, but I had a lot of fun. And somehow this scenario scored pretty low on the "percentage of character sheet used" rating... you'd think more of the character's psychological stimuli would figure into the game somehow.
Verdict: B Unknown Armies = Good. My PC was fun to play, but wound up mostly irrelevant by the end of the game.
And then some Dread. Some sort of post-apocalyptic game. But it seemed to me that there wasn't much plot to the game, nor much atmosphere. Most pulls were just to kill monsters without any accompanying narration, or to find very minor bits of equipment or information. Not compelling stuff, as far as I was concerned. My character was a fake doctor, though that never came up because everyone went for pulls rather than injuries. And this game also scored low on the "percentage of character sheet used", and I have no idea how I could have answered the sheet's questions such that it would have been more relevant. I wonder how the designers were imagining the stuff on there would be used.
In the end, most of the PCs were killed by mutant wolves or eaten by cannibal Mormon children. Actually, we had a cascade of deaths with the Mormon kids: we had like four guys alive, then one crashed trying to kill a cannibal. So as we rebuilt the tower back up to the appropriate height, another PC messed up and crashed the tower. And another. So finally I was the only one left alive, and had to rebuild the tower myself. I managed to rebuild it safely, but then had to make like seven pulls from the Jenga tower to escape the Mormons alive. And of course I crashed as I was laying down the very last block.
Verdict: C The last portion, where I was the only PC left alive, was tense. But I was basically playing Jenga after listening to a fairly dull story for three hours.
Did I play any Are You a Werewolf? that night? I don't recall, but I did play a decent amount over the course of the con. I think this is the night we stayed late and broke into Sean's car to get into the hotel... so yeah, there was some werewolf action here. One really good game where I did quite good as a wolf.
Friday
Friday I was supposed to play Tenra Bansho Zero, a ridiculously over-the-top Japanese fantasy game being released in English. But no one else showed up for the game, possibly because Origins had edited down the event description to be really lame sounding in the registration book. So I talked with the GM about the game and such, played out a brief scene to get a feel for it, and moved on. Verdict: Incomplete
Friday then meant wandering around the con, looking for stuff to do, realizing too late that I could have made it to some other stuff I had wanted to see, and possibly meeting other people finally showing up for the con? By this point my memories are jumbled and confusing, and I'm relying on my preplanned list of events to keep things organized in my memory.
Unknown Armies: Buried Secrets in the evening, which was the full game that Amber managed to get me into. And I'm glad she did, as it was one of the best games I played. Most of the PCs were New York state senators or their spouses (or in one case, the senator's lover), who started freaking out at minor things, dealing with surprising tragedies in their past and trying to figure out what that creepy guy with the scrapbook was up to. And in the end, we had a difficult moral choice to make, which always pleases me. My own PC was an event organizer at a high end conference center who just wanted to keep thing sunder control whenever people started freaking out. Then he started receiving cellphone calls from his dead brother, and things went south.
Verdict: A Todd Furler's games continue to please, year after year.
Then we went off to a late dinner, and some more Werewolf.
Saturday
Saturday was largely spent exploring the con, as my only event for the day was Ganakagok, which was the real surprise hit of the con. Amber had previously played Ganakagok while I was playing With Great Power... now I think I should have joined that table instead. Oh well, that's just one of many things I could have handled better over the course of the weekend.
Anyway, in Ganakagok, you play Inuit-like tribesmen in a frozen arctic that has never seen the sun. But dawn is coming, and it will change your civilization forever. So the game is all about what you hope the dawn will bring and what you fear the dawn will bring.
The game was slightly rushed, because of the large group (seven people) and the con setting, so each PC only got one conflict scene to focus on them, but most PCs showed up in other scenes. My character wound up with the last scene of all, so his conflict drew in everything previously done in the game and piled it into one epic conflict.
Ganakagok has a lot of neat things I like a lot out of indie games, including a neat little dice minigame for conflict resolution, a customized Tarot-like card deck used for inspiring scenes and determining stakes, and drawing and modifying a big relationship map as part of play.
My own PC turned out to be a ton of fun to play, as he became defined as a "temperamental Throat-Singer". "Temperamental" was fun to play, as he would one minute barge in all yelling at people and pushing and shoving to get his way, then the next minute be embarrassed or confused or afraid or the like. He wasn't very smart, either, and had a fear of the tribe spending too much time debating and not enough time acting (also fun to play out). He also was a gigantic hypocrite, and as another PC noted "you're very hard to argue in favor of". In the end, I managed to use every single thing on my sheet, and won my final conflict with just enough points to get a happy ending for me, the village and the island all. My happy ending involved exiling my wife and another female PC from the village for the crime of infidelity (infidelitous males like myself could stay, of course).
It sounds like "Inuits who prophesied the coming dawn" would be a narrow niche for PCs, but when you start considering the variety in their society, you could fulfill a variety of jobs in the tribe, and will have different descriptors and relationships, giving plenty of potential character variety.
Verdict: A+ It's kinda hard to explain what make Ganakagok so cool, but it did what it set out to do very well. This was the game I was least certain about going into the con, but most pleased with afterward.
One disappointing game of Werewolf later, it was time to drag Amber away from Midnight Paranoia and off to bed.
Sunday
Sunday involved playing a card game called Cutthroat Caverns, which was a lot of fun, and Redneck Life, which was less fun. But no genuine RPGs on Sunday. Just wandering the con, playing games and socializing.
So that was my convention, more or less. I mostly focused on games, because the rest is sort of a vague blur in my mind. Con time is a weird thing, as the con seemed extraordinarily long and also really, really short.
Specific breakdown of my time there:
Wednesday
Delivered kids to babysitters, drove to Columbus, arrived in time for Amber's volunteering. I sweated a bit while talking to Special Services, fearing that they wouldn't accept my Media Center job as valid for the Educator's Hall Pass. But one of the two people at the registration said it was okay, so I didn't have to pay the terribly high onsite registration fee.
Then I spent a few hours going through the event registration line three times, getting into any interesting games that I could. This took extra long because of big crowds of people trying to sign up early and because the computers weren't working right. Some of the stuff was all full up, but others I was able to get into, and by the end of the con I was pleased with what I had paid.
First Game of the con was Continuum, which I've been trying to play for about a decade now. Continuum manages to have an internally consistent theory of time travel, but still be playable as a roleplaying game. That's a pretty amazing feat, in and of itself. There's a nigh-mythical sister game (Narcissit) that presents a different, contradictory and equally playable theory of time travel that functions in the same setting, making the feat even more impressive.
The scenario itself was very well designed as an introduction to the game, as it was entirely about your characters learning to think like time travellers rather than normal people. But there were a few flaws as presented: we spent the first hour of play making characters, then never used anything off my character sheet and minimal stuff from my sheet. So why not have pregen characters that tie into the adventure, like nearly everyone else at the con? Also a bit of NPCs hinting at puzzles and talking for the GM and refusing to answer questions for mysterious reasons that might get really annoying if sustained for a campaign, but were pretty minor in this instance.
Verdict: B+ A game I want to own, maybe play.
Thursday
With Great Power...: Sidekicks. I managed to play a thoroughly mundane (and somewhat dimwitted) investigative journalist in a superhero game. I think this is pretty cool, as it seems like the Lois Lane type character is as much a protagonist of some superhero stories as anyone with superpowers, and so deserves PC status just like anyone else. Lois Lane was gender swapped in this case, but the superheroes of the city all turned out to be superheroines with romantic interest in said journalist, so there you are. And With Great Power is the sort of superhero game where not having a single superpower on your sheet doesn't mean you're incapable of affecting the game, so I wasn't handicapped for playing a non-powered character at all.
Somehow, I felt more confused by the rules of With Great Power the second time playing than I did the first time. It wasn't con fatigue, either, as Thursday was early in the con and the previous game two years ago was the very end of the con. Anyway, the game was a lot of fun but I begin to see some flaws lurking beneath the surface of the game: noncombat scenes need something to get them more focused on the fiction and detail, among other things.
Verdict: C+ or maybe B-. Fun to play, but the game seems somewhat imperfect, and I seem to always pick the wrong trait to focus my character on.
Unknown Armies: Choking the Messenger
As I explained to the GM of this game: the protocol is "I look through the Origins events, and try to sign up for every single Unknown Armies game in there". This is the only game I got into legitimately, though thanks to Amber's assistance the GM of the other Unknown Armies game stopped by while I was playing this UA game and told me he could squeeze me into his other game. Score!
Anyway, in this game I again played an investigative journalist. Was this some sort of theme for the day? I tried to make him very different from the previous reporter, with some success. The scenario involved the PCs being witnessing a Senator's mysterious death and supposed to be investigating it. But we all wound up going off in different directions instead of working together, so it became very chaotic very quickly. And in the end my guy wound up accusing two of the other PCs of conspiracy and murder in the Washington Post, and lost an ear to a rogue sniper. My PC never found out much of the truth, but the other PCs did.
I think the secrets they did find (a cliomancer assassin and a loose nanotech virus) could have been fleshed out better, but I had a lot of fun. And somehow this scenario scored pretty low on the "percentage of character sheet used" rating... you'd think more of the character's psychological stimuli would figure into the game somehow.
Verdict: B Unknown Armies = Good. My PC was fun to play, but wound up mostly irrelevant by the end of the game.
And then some Dread. Some sort of post-apocalyptic game. But it seemed to me that there wasn't much plot to the game, nor much atmosphere. Most pulls were just to kill monsters without any accompanying narration, or to find very minor bits of equipment or information. Not compelling stuff, as far as I was concerned. My character was a fake doctor, though that never came up because everyone went for pulls rather than injuries. And this game also scored low on the "percentage of character sheet used", and I have no idea how I could have answered the sheet's questions such that it would have been more relevant. I wonder how the designers were imagining the stuff on there would be used.
In the end, most of the PCs were killed by mutant wolves or eaten by cannibal Mormon children. Actually, we had a cascade of deaths with the Mormon kids: we had like four guys alive, then one crashed trying to kill a cannibal. So as we rebuilt the tower back up to the appropriate height, another PC messed up and crashed the tower. And another. So finally I was the only one left alive, and had to rebuild the tower myself. I managed to rebuild it safely, but then had to make like seven pulls from the Jenga tower to escape the Mormons alive. And of course I crashed as I was laying down the very last block.
Verdict: C The last portion, where I was the only PC left alive, was tense. But I was basically playing Jenga after listening to a fairly dull story for three hours.
Did I play any Are You a Werewolf? that night? I don't recall, but I did play a decent amount over the course of the con. I think this is the night we stayed late and broke into Sean's car to get into the hotel... so yeah, there was some werewolf action here. One really good game where I did quite good as a wolf.
Friday
Friday I was supposed to play Tenra Bansho Zero, a ridiculously over-the-top Japanese fantasy game being released in English. But no one else showed up for the game, possibly because Origins had edited down the event description to be really lame sounding in the registration book. So I talked with the GM about the game and such, played out a brief scene to get a feel for it, and moved on. Verdict: Incomplete
Friday then meant wandering around the con, looking for stuff to do, realizing too late that I could have made it to some other stuff I had wanted to see, and possibly meeting other people finally showing up for the con? By this point my memories are jumbled and confusing, and I'm relying on my preplanned list of events to keep things organized in my memory.
Unknown Armies: Buried Secrets in the evening, which was the full game that Amber managed to get me into. And I'm glad she did, as it was one of the best games I played. Most of the PCs were New York state senators or their spouses (or in one case, the senator's lover), who started freaking out at minor things, dealing with surprising tragedies in their past and trying to figure out what that creepy guy with the scrapbook was up to. And in the end, we had a difficult moral choice to make, which always pleases me. My own PC was an event organizer at a high end conference center who just wanted to keep thing sunder control whenever people started freaking out. Then he started receiving cellphone calls from his dead brother, and things went south.
Verdict: A Todd Furler's games continue to please, year after year.
Then we went off to a late dinner, and some more Werewolf.
Saturday
Saturday was largely spent exploring the con, as my only event for the day was Ganakagok, which was the real surprise hit of the con. Amber had previously played Ganakagok while I was playing With Great Power... now I think I should have joined that table instead. Oh well, that's just one of many things I could have handled better over the course of the weekend.
Anyway, in Ganakagok, you play Inuit-like tribesmen in a frozen arctic that has never seen the sun. But dawn is coming, and it will change your civilization forever. So the game is all about what you hope the dawn will bring and what you fear the dawn will bring.
The game was slightly rushed, because of the large group (seven people) and the con setting, so each PC only got one conflict scene to focus on them, but most PCs showed up in other scenes. My character wound up with the last scene of all, so his conflict drew in everything previously done in the game and piled it into one epic conflict.
Ganakagok has a lot of neat things I like a lot out of indie games, including a neat little dice minigame for conflict resolution, a customized Tarot-like card deck used for inspiring scenes and determining stakes, and drawing and modifying a big relationship map as part of play.
My own PC turned out to be a ton of fun to play, as he became defined as a "temperamental Throat-Singer". "Temperamental" was fun to play, as he would one minute barge in all yelling at people and pushing and shoving to get his way, then the next minute be embarrassed or confused or afraid or the like. He wasn't very smart, either, and had a fear of the tribe spending too much time debating and not enough time acting (also fun to play out). He also was a gigantic hypocrite, and as another PC noted "you're very hard to argue in favor of". In the end, I managed to use every single thing on my sheet, and won my final conflict with just enough points to get a happy ending for me, the village and the island all. My happy ending involved exiling my wife and another female PC from the village for the crime of infidelity (infidelitous males like myself could stay, of course).
It sounds like "Inuits who prophesied the coming dawn" would be a narrow niche for PCs, but when you start considering the variety in their society, you could fulfill a variety of jobs in the tribe, and will have different descriptors and relationships, giving plenty of potential character variety.
Verdict: A+ It's kinda hard to explain what make Ganakagok so cool, but it did what it set out to do very well. This was the game I was least certain about going into the con, but most pleased with afterward.
One disappointing game of Werewolf later, it was time to drag Amber away from Midnight Paranoia and off to bed.
Sunday
Sunday involved playing a card game called Cutthroat Caverns, which was a lot of fun, and Redneck Life, which was less fun. But no genuine RPGs on Sunday. Just wandering the con, playing games and socializing.
So that was my convention, more or less. I mostly focused on games, because the rest is sort of a vague blur in my mind. Con time is a weird thing, as the con seemed extraordinarily long and also really, really short.