The Weekend in Review
Mar. 5th, 2006 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurA quick overview of what happened to me at Intercon F:
Friday: Didn't attend much of the con. Instead, had a quick date with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
msmemory, and then stayed up until 2:30am finishing Shades of Memory. May be the first time I've ever had to bring a printer to a con, something I'd like to avoid in the future.
Saturday: First game up was Jamais Vue, Steve Tihor's take on the Tabula Rasa concept. Quite similar to TR I in overall flavor.hungrytiger and I wound up playing the straight men, almost the only people in the game who had no deep secret agendas. My character was a total naif: the nice guy who sincerely believes that the aliens are here to help us and will make everything better. A lot of fun to play, although I think I may have gotten everyone killed post-game in the way I wound up setting things up.
Then was Lorenzo's Blessing, which can be described as "the late Italian Renaissance in a nutshell". I'll admit that I wasn't wholly looking forward to this: I was overtired, and my politics-heavy plot required more thought than I was really prepared for. But the game proved to be considerable fun, and I had just about the right amount of plot for the game length. I was playing the young Cardinal Cesare Borgia, and had a good time in sibling rivalry with brother Juan (played bylearnedax) and flirting with sister Lucrezia (besslibby).
After a quick dinner withlearnedax, new_man and lakshmi_amman, I headed back to my room to stuff envelopes for Shades of Memory (Tabula Rasa 2.5), my part of the Intercon Z microgame track. In the end, I'm afraid that TR 2.5 proved that my instincts are still good: everything that I had been suspecting might be wrong with the game turned out to be a problem. The game started well, but kind of broke down in the second half. My conclusion (agreed by several of the experienced GMs in the cast) is that the game is *mostly* good, but needs several significant tweaks to really make it hum right. In particular, the game would probably be a bit slow in four hours, and tight in two; in one hour, there simply wasn't enough time for information to percolate around the game. So I'm clearly going to have to rerun this and get it right, sometime later.
I came out of that mildly unhappy (I wasn't surprised, but a failed game is never a good thing); fortunately, the dance party was the cure for all ills. Having intended to just hang out, say hi to folks, dance a little and then go to bed earlyish, I instead danced until a bit after 4am. As previously mentioned, Terrilee runs a consistently great dance, and it was just what I needed.
Sunday: I decided to play in 10 Bad LARPs in 100 Bad Minutes, which was exactly the right choice -- it may be the most perfect Sunday-morning game I've ever been in. A pure exercise in grabbing characters and running with them, it ranges from goofy to insane to frequently chokingly funny, satirizing culture and major game genres. (Including the totally delicious Amnesia: the LARP.) The game not only doesn't require thinking about it, you really can't think about it too much, so it's ideal when I'm this fried.
And thence the usual closing raffle and plugs. Despite (or perhaps because of) limiting myself to 30 seconds for my plug, I got very good response for the official announcement of Girl Genius: Agatha Heterodyne and the Perfect Construct, which will be eating my brain for much of the next year...
Friday: Didn't attend much of the con. Instead, had a quick date with
msmemory, and then stayed up until 2:30am finishing Shades of Memory. May be the first time I've ever had to bring a printer to a con, something I'd like to avoid in the future.Saturday: First game up was Jamais Vue, Steve Tihor's take on the Tabula Rasa concept. Quite similar to TR I in overall flavor.
hungrytiger and I wound up playing the straight men, almost the only people in the game who had no deep secret agendas. My character was a total naif: the nice guy who sincerely believes that the aliens are here to help us and will make everything better. A lot of fun to play, although I think I may have gotten everyone killed post-game in the way I wound up setting things up.Then was Lorenzo's Blessing, which can be described as "the late Italian Renaissance in a nutshell". I'll admit that I wasn't wholly looking forward to this: I was overtired, and my politics-heavy plot required more thought than I was really prepared for. But the game proved to be considerable fun, and I had just about the right amount of plot for the game length. I was playing the young Cardinal Cesare Borgia, and had a good time in sibling rivalry with brother Juan (played by
learnedax) and flirting with sister Lucrezia (besslibby).After a quick dinner with
learnedax, new_man and lakshmi_amman, I headed back to my room to stuff envelopes for Shades of Memory (Tabula Rasa 2.5), my part of the Intercon Z microgame track. In the end, I'm afraid that TR 2.5 proved that my instincts are still good: everything that I had been suspecting might be wrong with the game turned out to be a problem. The game started well, but kind of broke down in the second half. My conclusion (agreed by several of the experienced GMs in the cast) is that the game is *mostly* good, but needs several significant tweaks to really make it hum right. In particular, the game would probably be a bit slow in four hours, and tight in two; in one hour, there simply wasn't enough time for information to percolate around the game. So I'm clearly going to have to rerun this and get it right, sometime later.I came out of that mildly unhappy (I wasn't surprised, but a failed game is never a good thing); fortunately, the dance party was the cure for all ills. Having intended to just hang out, say hi to folks, dance a little and then go to bed earlyish, I instead danced until a bit after 4am. As previously mentioned, Terrilee runs a consistently great dance, and it was just what I needed.
Sunday: I decided to play in 10 Bad LARPs in 100 Bad Minutes, which was exactly the right choice -- it may be the most perfect Sunday-morning game I've ever been in. A pure exercise in grabbing characters and running with them, it ranges from goofy to insane to frequently chokingly funny, satirizing culture and major game genres. (Including the totally delicious Amnesia: the LARP.) The game not only doesn't require thinking about it, you really can't think about it too much, so it's ideal when I'm this fried.
And thence the usual closing raffle and plugs. Despite (or perhaps because of) limiting myself to 30 seconds for my plug, I got very good response for the official announcement of Girl Genius: Agatha Heterodyne and the Perfect Construct, which will be eating my brain for much of the next year...
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10 Bad LARPs
Date: 2006-03-06 02:35 pm (UTC)Mind if I quote you (http://aegames.org/10badlarps.php) on that? :)
Re: 10 Bad LARPs
Date: 2006-03-06 02:51 pm (UTC)Re: 10 Bad LARPs
Date: 2006-03-07 05:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-07 05:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-07 07:00 pm (UTC)(Not sure whether you'd doomed everyone in the post-game, though it didn't look good; I do think things are a bit biased against people in any case, for a number of reasons).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-09 09:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-10 12:45 am (UTC)