Lessons Learned
Mar. 5th, 2007 08:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Every LARP-running experience features some lessons to learn. This one was no exception. The lessons included:
- If someone says they really, really, really want to play a Jaegermonster, let them. The Jaegers in both runs were *extraordinary*, a major highlight of the game. (The trio in the second run were reportedly novice LARPers, and were better than most veterans I know.)
- Do not try to move eight-foot-long tables of uncertain stability by yourself. Especially, do not do so by shoving them. Dropping the end of a table on the arch of your foot is not an ideal way to start a day of GM'ing. (Ow, ow, ow...)
- Dumb casting luck can strike twice. I never thought I'd have a re-run of the Ozma case, but it did almost repeat. The player who was going to play my favorite character of the game (a high-angst, high-romance character with a 15 page character sheet) had to drop on the evening before game run. I almost just ran without the character, but
dervishspin stepped up to the challenge. From getting that 15-page sheet 11 hours before the game and knowing nothing about the comic, she came in the next morning, costumed just right, and *nailed* the role. It was a delight to watch.
- Rocket-powered golf clubs do *not* make a wise demonstration example for Spark mechanics. The universe is listening, and has a wicked sense of humor.
- Mostly, I determined that not only are adaptation games a bit harder than normal ones, adapting an ongoing, non-episodic story is quite a bit harder still. Oz might have been using other peoples' characters, but at least we had the entire L. Frank Baum corpus in front of us, and knew exactly how much freedom we had to embroider. (Quite a bit, given how internally inconsistent Oz is to start with.)
But you have to fit a Girl Genius game inside an ongoing story, one where only the Foglios really understand the details. Worse, all evidence is that they *do* know many of those details, and just haven't told us yet. So I had to start with three months of simply evaluating everything that we knew, to figure out where my opportunities to invent were. And it's still likely that at least 80% of the guesswork in the story is just plain dead-wrong. (Although I still hold out hope that my Skifander backstory is at least partly correct -- that was pulling together lots of hints, so I think it's plausible.)
Skifander
Date: 2007-03-05 01:59 pm (UTC)Spawning an instant fascination.
Date: 2007-03-05 02:09 pm (UTC)Re: Spawning an instant fascination.
Date: 2007-03-05 02:21 pm (UTC)Re: Spawning an instant fascination.
Date: 2007-03-05 02:34 pm (UTC)Details
Date: 2007-03-05 02:48 pm (UTC)Yeah, I love the hints that keep cropping up, where you can't tell whether they're true or not. For example, I think the mechanical Lucrezia is herself from the future; but then why was Lucrezia-in-Agatha so surprised to hear Klaus had taken over?
And then there's the one that got dropped last Wednesday: "She made the Baron drink the Jägerdraught!" We know that's not true; but does the Jägerdraught actually exist? It could be a real brew that turns humans into Jägers; it could be a folktale that people in Mechanicsburg use to scare their children. Or it could be both: some ancient Heterodyne created Jägers the normal way (well, normal for a Spark, anyway), and later the folktale sprang up and some other Heterodyne thought, "Hey, great idea!".
Re: Details
Date: 2007-03-05 05:23 pm (UTC)Re: Details
Date: 2007-03-05 06:40 pm (UTC)Mmm, the question is whether they need breeding programs. Can a Spark create a construct that will reproduce its own kind? If so, then the original Jägers could have been constructed in the lab. They might have taken a while to produce a large enough population to use in battle, but there would've been other uses for them earlier. (It helps that, according to some hints, Jägers are apparently very long-lived; one of the wild ones mentions hunting with the Heterodynes about 200 years ago.)
Except one: he always wears a hat.
Maybe Phil's a hybrid (or adopted, for that matter). Or maybe most Jägerkin are hybrids, and the blood thins out over the generations—that would explain why their appearance varies so widely. (Note that Phil's grandfather looks a lot more human than most Jägerkin.)
Here's a hypothesis. Hundreds or thousands of years ago, an early Heterodyne created the Jäger generals. They're big and tough, and don't grow old; but they're hideously difficult to create in the first place. So, they were created fertile, so that they could make more Jägers the usual way. Their half-human children turned out to be less, er, Jägerlich than they were, but still useful. Today, there are thousands of Jägerkin, all of them descended from the original generals. Those that have too much human blood are indistinguishable from human, and don't get conscripted into the Jägermacht. Hence Phil.
One problem with this: it doesn't explain the reference to "the ancient contract". Perhaps some other spark created the generals, and a Heterodyne suborned them—perhaps by offering them the ability to reproduce.
Re: Details
Date: 2007-03-05 07:28 pm (UTC)(Surprised the GGgame team didn't know this, actually, but then, not everyone follows the yahoo group and Kaja's blog).
Re: Details
Date: 2007-03-05 10:39 pm (UTC)Worth noting for next time, though. A pity, because it *completely* violates the Jaeger Cosmogony (probably my favorite piece of writing in the game), but for the second pass it may be worth going through the Yahoo archives and seeing where the violations are. And aside from loving the Cosmogony, there's nothing terribly sacred about the Jaeger history and plot that I made up for the game -- it was a weak plot, mainly for Jenka's benefit, and could easily enough be changed.
Out of curiosity: have they ever said anything about the hats? I wrote a ridiculously intricate backstory, inspired solely by that ongoing joke...
Re: Details
Date: 2007-03-05 10:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 02:50 pm (UTC)"TOUSes? I don't think they exi--" POW! "Ow!"
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 03:08 pm (UTC)I am a little surprised. Duzzen eferybudy rilly, rilly vant to pleh a Jæger?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 03:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 04:07 pm (UTC)Spleen
Date: 2007-03-05 06:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 05:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 10:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 05:43 pm (UTC)(Really, REALLY, not interested in the comic - would happily read a sub-plot with a character based upon you. From what little I know of the tale, a character just like you would fit in there like syrup goes with pancakes.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 10:44 pm (UTC)Oh, sure -- actually, I promised I would when I asked permission, so as far as I'm concerned it's a contractual obligation. (Indeed, one of the tasks I need to do before opening up the wiki is writing the appropriate copyright disclaimers.) Whether they actually bother to *read* any of it I doubt (it's something like 250 pages of material at the level of average-grade fanfic), but I suspect they'll at least enjoy the costume pictures.
(Really, REALLY, not interested in the comic - would happily read a sub-plot with a character based upon you. From what little I know of the tale, a character just like you would fit in there like syrup goes with pancakes.)
In all likelihood, yes. ("BWAHAHAHA! With my intricate plots and incomprehensible character webs, I shall melt your brains!")
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 07:31 pm (UTC)Hopefully, the game will get cleaned up and re-run at some point (and...maybe boxed and lent out?)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 10:50 pm (UTC)Fairly likely. One of the reasons for the cleanup over the next couple of weeks is to get at least the current state moderately "boxed". I don't do genuine physical boxing -- for me, "boxing" a game means getting all the text to the point where someone else could put it together and run it without an excess of pain.
That said, the actual cleanup isn't happening soon. Right now, I'm focused on coming up with a comprehensive list of what needs to be fixed; I'll actually do a rewrite when and if I find motivation...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 11:00 pm (UTC)Quite understandable that you're not working on it right away, really -- first, it's pretty draining to finish a game (much less then run it twice), and I know we always want a break afterwards, and second, I have it on very good authority that you've also got another project you want to put some attention into.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-06 03:03 am (UTC)Eventually. There's a complex chain of causation here, and there are three steps (none of them small) before I can start on it. I need to get serious about the predecessor projects soon if I'm going to be able to start on that by the end of the year...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 02:40 am (UTC)