DaveCon
Last year a group of us from GCC got together in Pittsburgh for a weekend of gaming and fun. We did it again this year, and Lucas and I decided that we think we liked this year even better. It was more relaxed, and we had more real food than last year so I think everyone was in better moods.
Friday night we all arrived at the hotel late and sat around chatting before dividing up into our two evening games: D&D and Deadlands: Hell on Earth. I was in the Deadlands game and I have to say, it was pretty nice to be in a Deadlands game again. I'd never done HOE before -- it was fun, but I think I like the weird west more. Just a personal preference, though. Dave was running for us...poor Dave. We decided that we were going to shanghai the game and leave the plot far behind. Dave is good enough that he had no problem following us, which made it spontaneously fun. We randomly decided to dig a hole in the middle of the city and strongarm people into helping us. It literally went down from there. We ordered pizza around midnight, which used to be par for the course in college and now reminded me that I am old and get heartburn more easily. The game ended around 3 am and Lucas and I didn't get to bed until 3:45 or so.
We were up and at breakfast by like 9ish. I don't remember what else was happening but while it was going on, whatever it was (Spycraft? Maybe?) Mark ran Og for a few of us. Og may be one of my new favorite games. Basically you are a caveman, and consequently you only have a limited vocabulary to communicate with during the game. And by limited, I mean like four to six words. My words were "No, thing, you, food, big." When you're talking to the other cavemen, you can only use those words. Our conversations mostly consisted of things like "No thing! Food thing!" Lucas had "bang" as a word so he did a lot of "Bang big thing!" It was like his battle cry. Dave was an eloquent caveman and could make almost sentences. His character's name was Thog so after we defeated some enemy cavemen he pointed at each of them and went "Thog bang. Thog bang. Thog bang. Thog bang big!" If you don't have the words to say what you want, you have to communicate it through grunts and gestures. You can only draw something if you specifically took training in drawing. It's hilarious to play and very simple. I think I'm going to try to run it for my family this next weekend, because it's light enough that they wouldn't feel like it was actually role-playing, and I think they'd enjoy the language restrictions.
So that happened, and Lucas, Lo, Holly and I played Fluxx while the ROS played a game and other people took naps. Somewhere in there we walked to Wendy's for lunch. Later on we went to a very neat Chinese/Japanese bistro for dinner, where we had excellent food and good conversation about religion and books and marriage and a wide variety of other things. After that it was 8 or 9 at night and we went back to the hotel for the evening games. James was running Exalted while I ran Deliria.
Now, I haven't run a game in probably years. I chose Deliria because the rules are pretty low key. Actually, they're so low key that I was able to run without any, for the most part. I'm not one who likes finely tuned systems and stats and things -- I like role-playing for the stories and the characters, and that's how I ran Deliria.
I thought it went really fantastic.
The players all picked up the clues I wanted them to but then didn't put them together until late in the game, which almost never happens for me because I'm bad at putting plots together for games. The party just clicked -- everyone had come up with really fantastic characters. We had a crazy plane crash survivor girl who thinks she's a fairy (because a fairy told her she was), a frustrated Welsh children's book illustrator who thought this was a dream and that the other characters were all parts of his mind, a writer for Skeptic Magazine who kept psychoanalyzing the events of the game with the illustrator, a world-class violinist who is always in search of the part of the True Song he heard from birth, and a scruffy mid-20s guy who made friends with my cat. Everyone clicked up really well, and together we were able to craft a really fun, really awesome story.
One of the tasks they had to do in the story was to bring this Knight "the saddest thing." Apparently my players are excellent at coming up with sad things.
Anyway, I really enjoyed it and was glad it went so well. And it was done in about 3 hours, so we finished just a bit after midnight. Then Lo, Lucas, Cody, Mark and I sat around talking for a bit and all got to bed around 1, 1:30ish.
This morning we slept in, missed breakfast, and joined everyone around 11. After some derping around we all went to Primanti Brothers for lunch and left from there. Now we're home, and super super tired. But it was a really good weekend, so it was worth all the NaNo catchup and cleaning and unpacking I have to do tomorrow.
And, again, there is a sweetness for me in three days of being called Tahm. I hope they never stop.
But seriously, if anyone ever wants to play Og, I will play that game forever with you.
Friday night we all arrived at the hotel late and sat around chatting before dividing up into our two evening games: D&D and Deadlands: Hell on Earth. I was in the Deadlands game and I have to say, it was pretty nice to be in a Deadlands game again. I'd never done HOE before -- it was fun, but I think I like the weird west more. Just a personal preference, though. Dave was running for us...poor Dave. We decided that we were going to shanghai the game and leave the plot far behind. Dave is good enough that he had no problem following us, which made it spontaneously fun. We randomly decided to dig a hole in the middle of the city and strongarm people into helping us. It literally went down from there. We ordered pizza around midnight, which used to be par for the course in college and now reminded me that I am old and get heartburn more easily. The game ended around 3 am and Lucas and I didn't get to bed until 3:45 or so.
We were up and at breakfast by like 9ish. I don't remember what else was happening but while it was going on, whatever it was (Spycraft? Maybe?) Mark ran Og for a few of us. Og may be one of my new favorite games. Basically you are a caveman, and consequently you only have a limited vocabulary to communicate with during the game. And by limited, I mean like four to six words. My words were "No, thing, you, food, big." When you're talking to the other cavemen, you can only use those words. Our conversations mostly consisted of things like "No thing! Food thing!" Lucas had "bang" as a word so he did a lot of "Bang big thing!" It was like his battle cry. Dave was an eloquent caveman and could make almost sentences. His character's name was Thog so after we defeated some enemy cavemen he pointed at each of them and went "Thog bang. Thog bang. Thog bang. Thog bang big!" If you don't have the words to say what you want, you have to communicate it through grunts and gestures. You can only draw something if you specifically took training in drawing. It's hilarious to play and very simple. I think I'm going to try to run it for my family this next weekend, because it's light enough that they wouldn't feel like it was actually role-playing, and I think they'd enjoy the language restrictions.
So that happened, and Lucas, Lo, Holly and I played Fluxx while the ROS played a game and other people took naps. Somewhere in there we walked to Wendy's for lunch. Later on we went to a very neat Chinese/Japanese bistro for dinner, where we had excellent food and good conversation about religion and books and marriage and a wide variety of other things. After that it was 8 or 9 at night and we went back to the hotel for the evening games. James was running Exalted while I ran Deliria.
Now, I haven't run a game in probably years. I chose Deliria because the rules are pretty low key. Actually, they're so low key that I was able to run without any, for the most part. I'm not one who likes finely tuned systems and stats and things -- I like role-playing for the stories and the characters, and that's how I ran Deliria.
I thought it went really fantastic.
The players all picked up the clues I wanted them to but then didn't put them together until late in the game, which almost never happens for me because I'm bad at putting plots together for games. The party just clicked -- everyone had come up with really fantastic characters. We had a crazy plane crash survivor girl who thinks she's a fairy (because a fairy told her she was), a frustrated Welsh children's book illustrator who thought this was a dream and that the other characters were all parts of his mind, a writer for Skeptic Magazine who kept psychoanalyzing the events of the game with the illustrator, a world-class violinist who is always in search of the part of the True Song he heard from birth, and a scruffy mid-20s guy who made friends with my cat. Everyone clicked up really well, and together we were able to craft a really fun, really awesome story.
One of the tasks they had to do in the story was to bring this Knight "the saddest thing." Apparently my players are excellent at coming up with sad things.
Anyway, I really enjoyed it and was glad it went so well. And it was done in about 3 hours, so we finished just a bit after midnight. Then Lo, Lucas, Cody, Mark and I sat around talking for a bit and all got to bed around 1, 1:30ish.
This morning we slept in, missed breakfast, and joined everyone around 11. After some derping around we all went to Primanti Brothers for lunch and left from there. Now we're home, and super super tired. But it was a really good weekend, so it was worth all the NaNo catchup and cleaning and unpacking I have to do tomorrow.
And, again, there is a sweetness for me in three days of being called Tahm. I hope they never stop.
But seriously, if anyone ever wants to play Og, I will play that game forever with you.