Blarg, being the spade to the America's Cup
I turned up to the America's Cup GM's and interested people's meeting tonight and there was me and Gary (the organiser of the meeting) We knew of 1 other person who had to bail at the last minute but that's it.
Apparantly there are people who have said they will GM, and apparantly there are people who are willing to write games, and apparantly some who might already have something down in a written form somewhere. But "apparantly" doesn't work in running a gaming convention-styled event...
Now America's Cup is "America's" flagship event. I heard about America's Cup before I even came to Auckland... and to keep the event happening people need to realise a few things.
1) America's Cup is NOT BattleCry or Kapcon or Buckets of Dice or any of the other events run around the country. You can't say "I'll write a game and run it at America's Cup". That's not how it works. It is unique all on it's own in that it runs ONLY FOUR GAMES... and everyone plays THE SAME FOUR GAMES. And all of the GM's RUN THE SAME GAMES!
For this to happen you need a group of willing GM's and writers who are all in from the beginning. And are committed to turning up every meeting and playtesting and replaytesting etc. You can't turn up at the last minute and go "Wahlah, here it is".
2) All of the GM's need to know how to RUN ALL FOUR GAMES THE SAME WAY! So that means all the Gm's need to be in on the creation of the games from the beginning so they can see where the game has come from, where it's going to, know the background of why and who etc so that they can run the game with the same slant as everyone else. Example: A couple of AC ago we had a GM who wrote a game based off the movie of George Orwell’s 1984. The writer dumped it on the GM's almost on the day, they didn't run a game, a couple of the other GM's had never seen the movie, had no background and not everything was written in the game they got handed. They had no idea how it was to run, the background or anything. At least one of the GM's bombed as they didn't know how it was to run, and others were very different from each other. For consistant GMing to happen, all the people involved have to actually be involved from the start, middle and end.
So to make all the GMing consistant and so they all get some buy-in to the games, everyone needs to show up to every meeting. Or as close to everyone as possible. To do this you need to commit one night per week, for every week from now until July when America's Cup happens. No buts, no whys, no excuses. If you can't then you can't be part of the GM team. Don't say you are offering to help if you aren't going to donate this one night a week for the next 3+ months. The rest of us will be depending on you and you will let us down and muck up the jigsaw of games.
3) ALL FOUR GAMES MUST BE UNIQUELY DIFFERENT FROM EACH OTHER! To make this happen you need everyone together on the initial brainstorming and game structure part so that we don't have games using the same style, genre, plot devices, structures etc. And so we can make sure all four games are different in not only the obvious stuff, but in the deeper game structure like player driven vs objective driven, linear vs non-linear (and not the same non-linear) and so on. To make this initial design decisions you need everyone who is written and contributing to any of the four games together at the same time until it's all done. Once this is done, writer(s) can then break off and write stuff individually to flesh out the whole game. To do this we need everyone to turn up every week to the meetings/discussions etc.
Example, last year we had a large team of keen GM's... however only 3 turned up initially and after we came up with 4 awesome concepts for games and fleshed each of them out a bit so they were unique to each other we ended up with only 2 people left to write them all. The two people took a game each and finished writing them with some help from each other when we got together each week for the meetings. We didn't have anyone for the other 2 games and once we had 2 ready to go we had to quickly try and write/come up with 2 more and as we didn't have the GM's turning up to make one of the initial ideas work we had to come up with a 5th idea at the last minute... and it showed. It takes a bit more time and effort to write a systemless game, and set up the game info with everything a GM needs, months in fact. Not having AT LEAST FOUR WRITERS/GM'S FROM THE START ALL THE WAY TO THE END will make America's Cup fail/suck again. And having players bitch and moan about games "aren't playtested", "not fun", "not organised", "different", Horror yet again, oh no not another white room game etc etc is very disheartening to the GM's who just spent one night a week for 4 months working on games.
People keep talking to me about communicating better and letting people know when stuff isn't getting done... well with 2 people turning up and actually showing their hands to do America's Cup, sorry America's Cup isn't going to happen this year. Nobody can be bothered to commit to doing it. There it is... pretty simple.
If you want America's Cup to happen then you need to actually "put your money where your mouth is" and turn up to the bloody meetings every week and do the work. No buts, no excuses... because if you are using those then you obviously aren't committed to making it happen.
Timeline for America's Cup. Planning and writing starts now, game structures and group work needs to be finished by end of March. Actual game (with characters) needs to be finished by end of April. May a game has to be playtested each week. June all the rewriting, tidying up, background fleshed out, spell checking etc needs to be done. And if any of the games in May bombed then all the fixing, rewriting, re-playtesting etc needs to happen here. July America's Cup happens.
I have cancelled things I do or could do on Thursdays so I can turn up every week to help write, rewrite, playtest, rewrite some more and finally GM at America's Cup. And to be frankly honest, I'm actually starting to get tired of turning up every week to help organise events for people who can only bitch and moan and point fingers at things that don't get done the way they want them done... if you don't turn up to actual meetings or working bees or actual club nights and make a difference by doing things for other people sometimes even when it means you don't get to play/go to the movies/have a life then you can't complain. People have to remember when you point a finger at someone, your hand is actually pointing three fingers back at you...
Apparantly there are people who have said they will GM, and apparantly there are people who are willing to write games, and apparantly some who might already have something down in a written form somewhere. But "apparantly" doesn't work in running a gaming convention-styled event...
Now America's Cup is "America's" flagship event. I heard about America's Cup before I even came to Auckland... and to keep the event happening people need to realise a few things.
1) America's Cup is NOT BattleCry or Kapcon or Buckets of Dice or any of the other events run around the country. You can't say "I'll write a game and run it at America's Cup". That's not how it works. It is unique all on it's own in that it runs ONLY FOUR GAMES... and everyone plays THE SAME FOUR GAMES. And all of the GM's RUN THE SAME GAMES!
For this to happen you need a group of willing GM's and writers who are all in from the beginning. And are committed to turning up every meeting and playtesting and replaytesting etc. You can't turn up at the last minute and go "Wahlah, here it is".
2) All of the GM's need to know how to RUN ALL FOUR GAMES THE SAME WAY! So that means all the Gm's need to be in on the creation of the games from the beginning so they can see where the game has come from, where it's going to, know the background of why and who etc so that they can run the game with the same slant as everyone else. Example: A couple of AC ago we had a GM who wrote a game based off the movie of George Orwell’s 1984. The writer dumped it on the GM's almost on the day, they didn't run a game, a couple of the other GM's had never seen the movie, had no background and not everything was written in the game they got handed. They had no idea how it was to run, the background or anything. At least one of the GM's bombed as they didn't know how it was to run, and others were very different from each other. For consistant GMing to happen, all the people involved have to actually be involved from the start, middle and end.
So to make all the GMing consistant and so they all get some buy-in to the games, everyone needs to show up to every meeting. Or as close to everyone as possible. To do this you need to commit one night per week, for every week from now until July when America's Cup happens. No buts, no whys, no excuses. If you can't then you can't be part of the GM team. Don't say you are offering to help if you aren't going to donate this one night a week for the next 3+ months. The rest of us will be depending on you and you will let us down and muck up the jigsaw of games.
3) ALL FOUR GAMES MUST BE UNIQUELY DIFFERENT FROM EACH OTHER! To make this happen you need everyone together on the initial brainstorming and game structure part so that we don't have games using the same style, genre, plot devices, structures etc. And so we can make sure all four games are different in not only the obvious stuff, but in the deeper game structure like player driven vs objective driven, linear vs non-linear (and not the same non-linear) and so on. To make this initial design decisions you need everyone who is written and contributing to any of the four games together at the same time until it's all done. Once this is done, writer(s) can then break off and write stuff individually to flesh out the whole game. To do this we need everyone to turn up every week to the meetings/discussions etc.
Example, last year we had a large team of keen GM's... however only 3 turned up initially and after we came up with 4 awesome concepts for games and fleshed each of them out a bit so they were unique to each other we ended up with only 2 people left to write them all. The two people took a game each and finished writing them with some help from each other when we got together each week for the meetings. We didn't have anyone for the other 2 games and once we had 2 ready to go we had to quickly try and write/come up with 2 more and as we didn't have the GM's turning up to make one of the initial ideas work we had to come up with a 5th idea at the last minute... and it showed. It takes a bit more time and effort to write a systemless game, and set up the game info with everything a GM needs, months in fact. Not having AT LEAST FOUR WRITERS/GM'S FROM THE START ALL THE WAY TO THE END will make America's Cup fail/suck again. And having players bitch and moan about games "aren't playtested", "not fun", "not organised", "different", Horror yet again, oh no not another white room game etc etc is very disheartening to the GM's who just spent one night a week for 4 months working on games.
People keep talking to me about communicating better and letting people know when stuff isn't getting done... well with 2 people turning up and actually showing their hands to do America's Cup, sorry America's Cup isn't going to happen this year. Nobody can be bothered to commit to doing it. There it is... pretty simple.
If you want America's Cup to happen then you need to actually "put your money where your mouth is" and turn up to the bloody meetings every week and do the work. No buts, no excuses... because if you are using those then you obviously aren't committed to making it happen.
Timeline for America's Cup. Planning and writing starts now, game structures and group work needs to be finished by end of March. Actual game (with characters) needs to be finished by end of April. May a game has to be playtested each week. June all the rewriting, tidying up, background fleshed out, spell checking etc needs to be done. And if any of the games in May bombed then all the fixing, rewriting, re-playtesting etc needs to happen here. July America's Cup happens.
I have cancelled things I do or could do on Thursdays so I can turn up every week to help write, rewrite, playtest, rewrite some more and finally GM at America's Cup. And to be frankly honest, I'm actually starting to get tired of turning up every week to help organise events for people who can only bitch and moan and point fingers at things that don't get done the way they want them done... if you don't turn up to actual meetings or working bees or actual club nights and make a difference by doing things for other people sometimes even when it means you don't get to play/go to the movies/have a life then you can't complain. People have to remember when you point a finger at someone, your hand is actually pointing three fingers back at you...