Intercon C
Mar. 2nd, 2003 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurWe interrupt our periodic reminiscence of Florida to bring you a few random highlights of the past weekend, from the sleep-dep'ped slurry that passes for my brain. In no particular order:
In general, a damned good weekend of LARP. As usual, I didn't play all the much (I've begun to realize that I actually enjoy writing and GM'ing more than playing), but did a bit of everything.
Played in the run of An Evening With Clarence, a recreation of the very first LARP, originally written and played in 1903. (The theme of Intercon C being "A Century of LARP", we of course had to have a re-run of Clarence.) I played the worst GM in all of creation, Horatio King. I commend reading the various Clarence materials at whim -- it's entirely impossible to spoil this game (since it is one of the worst games ever), and it is deeply, painfully funny.
Our Timeline of the History of LARP, 1903-2003 (collated by me, and written by me, Charley and several other folks) went over quite well. Everyone seemed to think that Buried Alive in a Horse-Drawn Carriage was the best entry. I'll post that online at some point, either on my own site or maybe at The LARPer.
Fortunately for my nerves, Panel: The LARP went over quite well. I wrote this as a guerilla game a couple of years ago, but have never managed to run it before. It's very minimalist, especially for me, with character "sheets" of typically only a couple of paragraphs. But it's only 45 minutes long, and the players ran with the ideas in all kinds of directions I didn't anticipate. By the end of the game, we had several dead bodies, and complete chaos. Really worked quite well for a Sunday-afternoon cooldown game.
And of course, getting to dance all night Saturday was a definite plus.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ladysprite and I were the first ones up on the dance floor (at about 12:45) and the last ones off (at 4:15). I don't even hurt too much today, showing that my morning runs are doing some real good. (Not that a morning run is anywhere near as much exercise as three hours of solid dancing.) I really need to get more opportunities to dance -- while a certain part of me still finds Modern American Wiggle Dance a little silly, there's no denying that it's a hell of a lot of fun...
In general, a damned good weekend of LARP. As usual, I didn't play all the much (I've begun to realize that I actually enjoy writing and GM'ing more than playing), but did a bit of everything.
Played in the run of An Evening With Clarence, a recreation of the very first LARP, originally written and played in 1903. (The theme of Intercon C being "A Century of LARP", we of course had to have a re-run of Clarence.) I played the worst GM in all of creation, Horatio King. I commend reading the various Clarence materials at whim -- it's entirely impossible to spoil this game (since it is one of the worst games ever), and it is deeply, painfully funny.
Our Timeline of the History of LARP, 1903-2003 (collated by me, and written by me, Charley and several other folks) went over quite well. Everyone seemed to think that Buried Alive in a Horse-Drawn Carriage was the best entry. I'll post that online at some point, either on my own site or maybe at The LARPer.
Fortunately for my nerves, Panel: The LARP went over quite well. I wrote this as a guerilla game a couple of years ago, but have never managed to run it before. It's very minimalist, especially for me, with character "sheets" of typically only a couple of paragraphs. But it's only 45 minutes long, and the players ran with the ideas in all kinds of directions I didn't anticipate. By the end of the game, we had several dead bodies, and complete chaos. Really worked quite well for a Sunday-afternoon cooldown game.
And of course, getting to dance all night Saturday was a definite plus.
ladysprite and I were the first ones up on the dance floor (at about 12:45) and the last ones off (at 4:15). I don't even hurt too much today, showing that my morning runs are doing some real good. (Not that a morning run is anywhere near as much exercise as three hours of solid dancing.) I really need to get more opportunities to dance -- while a certain part of me still finds Modern American Wiggle Dance a little silly, there's no denying that it's a hell of a lot of fun...![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
not a joke?
Date: 2003-03-03 08:35 am (UTC)Of course, after reading that material, I'm *still* of that opinion, and it's just that the class of unsuspecting LARPers is larger.
Re: not a joke?
Date: 2003-03-03 07:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-04 07:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-04 07:43 pm (UTC)On the other hand, the game-within-the-game is, in fact, the most horribly dreadful thing I've ever seen -- the writers did a bang-up job of taking a huge number of horror stories and squishing them together into one game. Almost every character sheet exemplifies some dreadful error that one should never make. (Sometimes several -- the William Jennings Bryan sheet is one of the most deliciously awful things I've ever read.)
I definitely hope that they rerun it, and I'd recommend to others that they play. But I do find it hard to drop out of the in-game middle persona. That is, I view this game from at least three vantage points: the actual modern player (who finds this a delightful satire of LARP); the fictional modern player trying to reconstruct the original game (who finds it a seminal, but nonetheless dreadful game); and the GM/writer in the game (who doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks, because he is, of course, always right). It's the middle voice I was writing in above, simply because I'm having way too much fun with the century-of-LARP concept still...
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-05 05:42 am (UTC)I was the tin-can man :)