Back in the mood

[the_benj]

Largely cross-post from the Sutekh Forums, as a stimulating measure to get me posting again.

SydCon

I went.

I played:

The Wheel Never Stops Turnin'
A Serenity/Firefly game, set 18 months after the film. It was okay. Some of us hammed it up playing the crew of Serenity (my sister as Mal, me as Jayne), but most of the players didn't really get into that, which is a shame as that's really the ONLY strength of playing established characters, in my opinion. Oh well.

The Eighth Sea
Time-travelling steampunk swashbuckling! Pretty good fun (changing clockwork Abraham Lincoln into clockwork John Wilkes Booth, to ensure that Lincoln IS assassinated = gold), with some interesting mechanics, like some neat stuff with tokens that let you mess with the difficulty of OTHER people's actions and a difficulty scale that went up when you succeed, down when you fail, which added an intriguing strategy to the game.
Got to play this after The Price of Freedom fell through, because there were only two of us. Next door, The Eighth Sea needed two players, so this worked out fine.

Radiance
sim_james's sci-fi thing. One of up to six (I believe he actually ran only four or five) tabletop sessions, which then came together in the last session as a freeform. Interesting concept. I think the implementation worked okay, but I (and a number of others, I believe) definitely felt that more information was needed. Freeforms without written goals can work fine, but you really need a good grounding in the character you're playing to wing that kind of stuff. With only about a paragraph about my characters, I just didn't.
I didn't enjoy my character all that much, but I DID think that having the first session as a tabletop afforded a fantastic opportunity to get to know the rest of one's faction, so that you can actually feel like you know these people when you rock up to the freeform with them, rather than the somewhat awkward "Hi, who are you? Oh, you're my dearest friend/wife/father! Good to meet you!" that one normally gets in freeforms. I'd be very happy to try it out again (James is thinking of doing another one, with some of the kinks ironed out I hope.
Definitely needs more GMs for the freeform session. James spent huge amounts of time surrounded by players waiting for his attention.

The Queen of Love and Beauty
lotusvine's A Song of Ice and Fire prequel freeform. I'm a pretty big fan of the books, so I was keen to see this go well. Overall, I think it did. I ran around as young and idealistic Eddard Stark trying to keep my best friend/foster brother Robert from getting himself into too much trouble, while also trying to mend relations between my family and the Dayne's, so I could ask for young Lady Dayne's hand. My romantic overtures went remarkably well, with all looking roses until it all turned to ashes, literally in the last thirty seconds of the game, when the Princess (my beloved's best friend) declared feud on my House.
Which was all very heart-wrenching, but perfect for the setting.
The whole game ran unusually smoothly, with the only real play interruptions being asked to take our seats to watch each round of jousts, which fitted in quite perfectly, so it all flowed well.
The jousting was done really well, I thought (stick-horses notwithstanding), with all the competitors going out of the room and doing their card drawing in secret, thus figuring out who would win the joust before they came before the crowds, so when they emerged on their steeds they could go straight into acting out the joust, leaving the audience in suspense until the telling moment, which was so much better than the usual anticlimactic rigmarole of players standing there drawing cards. Very nice.

Tomb of the Lost God
I was signed up for this, but ended up crying off sick and going home. I hear it was fairly good fun, until the world was destroyed anyway. Smile

Signal to Noise
The latest A Colder War offering (or, as it might better be known "Shouting in SPACE!!"), set some 200 years after the previous game, thus bringing in an (almost) all-new cast of characters.
I played "Yin", one of two alien rock-beings/statues, under intensive scientific study. I spent three hours trying to broach communications with odd, meaty beings, through an increasingly complex variety of means. A very good fun thought experiment. I'm glad they gave "Yin" and "Yang" to glissom and I, as I think we had a lot of fun with it and it could all too easily have been played abusively, with the players making "intuitive leaps" that would have shortcut the whole process, which would have missed the whole point, I think.
Eventually Arthur decided to blow us (and most of the planet) up, after foolishly asking whether we'd kill the human race if our Overlords told us to (naturally the answer was yes, it just wasn't the right question).

I had a good time. My experience is continuing to show that while, yes, con games are quite hit or miss, they're a good opportunity to try new things (eg The Eighth Sea and Radiance).
Plus, they're still the most reliable venue for freeforms (the Camarilla SO doesn't count), as they're a handy way of getting 20-30 players together. If people ran interesting freeforms outside the con circuit, I'd play them, but they mostly don't.

Apart from that, life not too bad. Ran the first session of Worlds Apart in more than a month, which was good. I was really stressed about it earlier, but it turned out pretty well I think.
Invading other people's lives via dream sequence = fun!

Yesterday, regency_rhi and I drove up to the mountains to play the inaugural session of Mark's new Ravenloft campaign with Felicity and sad_frog. It was a good time. We spent a fair bit of time talking crap and joking around, but still managed to brazen our way through Mark's planned adventure in a single sitting, which wrapped the plot up well as a standa-alone story but leaves us well set-off on our journey to deliver a message of great importance (but little interest; census data or some such, which I think is a neat way of demistifying a Macguffin) for the temple of the Morning Lord.
I look forward to further adventures of those three halflings (and one creepy, black-clad, shovel-wielding wizard).

Work's going fine. I'm now partaking of the (fairly; it started a couple of months ago) new 19-day month program, so I have a rostered day off this coming Thursday. Sweet, sweet RDO.

Okay, time for bed. In honour of spring, we have just switched back to our cotton sheets. Back in the cupboard, flannel sheets!