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jducoeurThis past weekend was Intercon D, our local annual LARP convention...
As seems to be my habit recently, I mostly didn't sign up for anything in advance. The only game I had signed up from was V For Victory -- it sounded interesting, and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ladysprite and umbran were floor-GM'ing, so I figured I'd try it out. However, a week out they were desperately short of women (8 shy of their minimum), so the game had to cancel. So I got to the con not signed up for anything, planning on a fairly quiet weekend.
As it happens, I quickly got pulled into The Road to Impunity, a rather good 1920's mobster game. This was a fairly paranoid little game: the boss had just died, and no one was quite sure who was trying to pull what, so the tension of the game is driven heavily by trying to figure out who you can trust. The guy playing the boss' son, the presumptive heir, had decided he wasn't into it, so they had a big hole suddenly in the game. So I jumped in, and had a generally good time.
The game is a little small given how spread-out and short it was: 15 players (2 of whom didn't show), with locales set throughout the hotel, so things slowed from time to time due to the difficulty of finding people -- this was realistic, but caused some problems given that the game started a bit late. Still, I had a lot of fun spending most of the game just negotiating, shoring up my position as the new boss and trying to prevent a gang war.
I also signed up for Elfwhere. I played in the sequel a couple of years ago, and enjoyed that, so I figured it would be a good time. It was interesting to see how the game divides into two very different sets. In Elfwhere II I was one of the Royal Family; in this one I played the wizard Mythrandir, who was powerful but nonetheless a commoner. The different classes turn out to be almost two separate intersecting games, with different plots, goals and even somewhat different mechanics. Talking to the GMs afterwards, this turns out to have been entirely intentional: one of the inspirations for the game was the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs.
Anyway, Mythrandir is a somewhat thinly-written archetypal character. I was initially a bit concerned about how few plots and goals I had, but needn't have worried -- he turns out to be the only broadly-trusted wizard in the game, with the result that I was nearly run ragged trying to keep things from flying apart at the seams.
Unlike Impunity, which had very few people I knew in it (Conor andmr_teem are the only ones I recall), Elfwhere was heavily stocked with friends. I wound up working fairly closely with umbran, and spent a good deal of time helping cristovau, new_man and ladysprite, all of whom were playing high-ranked nobles. So that was a fun opportunity to play a bit with several people I haven't LARPed with before.
Saturday night was the traditional Dance Till You Drop. As usual,ladysprite and I were pretty much the first ones on the floor; things started very slowly this year, not really getting up to speed until after 2am. As a result, I wasn't actually able to dance until the end as I usually do. Around 4am, she and I decided that, while it felt oddly wimpy to give up before the end, we'd both been dancing for four hours, and she had to get to her crash space while she and umbran were still awake enough to drive, so we packed it in.
The dance was fun as always, but I really have to concentrate on getting enough rest beforehand. I've been severely sleep-depped in general lately: the cough is still bothering me, making my sleep even worse than usual. And I slept fairly poorly on Friday: between being in a hotel and not havingmsmemory there, I slept even worse than usual. So I was simply under the weather at the dance: I didn't have as much energy as usual, and my timing was way off. Given how few opportunities I get for good Ballo Dimenio, I need to work on really readying myself when I do get a chance.
I was a horribly lazy spud this convention: I'd planned on helping with both Ops and the Con Suite, and really didn't do much of either. The only real volunteer task I did was to help run the raffle (my traditional role is being traffic manager, deciding the order and speed of the 60-odd raffle items). Oh, well -- having been on the Concom to a greater or lesser degree for seven years now, I'm not going to feel *too* guilty about slacking off a little.
While hanging around on Saturday evening,jikharra introduced me to a couple of games. One was Lightspeed, one of the few "realtime" (non-turn-based) games I've played and the only one that's as much fun as Ice Towers. I'll need to get a set of that (it's Cheapass, so that shouldn't be a problem). The other was IGOR, which is Mike Young's latest. This is a fun, silly card game, improved by a bit of light roleplaying. (Each player is nominally a mad scientist, and the game pretty much demands evil cackling.) I won a set of that in the Con raffle, which was perfect -- it was the one thing I really wanted in the raffle, and the price of the game pretty much matches the amount I spent in raffle tickets. So that was a big win.
Okay, enough for now. I will point people at the website for Intercon E, though. Next year's convention is already open for business, and already has a pretty kickass lineup of games -- indeed, it's the best lineup I've ever seen so early for a con. I think I'll actually have to sign up for games in advance this time...
As seems to be my habit recently, I mostly didn't sign up for anything in advance. The only game I had signed up from was V For Victory -- it sounded interesting, and
ladysprite and umbran were floor-GM'ing, so I figured I'd try it out. However, a week out they were desperately short of women (8 shy of their minimum), so the game had to cancel. So I got to the con not signed up for anything, planning on a fairly quiet weekend.As it happens, I quickly got pulled into The Road to Impunity, a rather good 1920's mobster game. This was a fairly paranoid little game: the boss had just died, and no one was quite sure who was trying to pull what, so the tension of the game is driven heavily by trying to figure out who you can trust. The guy playing the boss' son, the presumptive heir, had decided he wasn't into it, so they had a big hole suddenly in the game. So I jumped in, and had a generally good time.
The game is a little small given how spread-out and short it was: 15 players (2 of whom didn't show), with locales set throughout the hotel, so things slowed from time to time due to the difficulty of finding people -- this was realistic, but caused some problems given that the game started a bit late. Still, I had a lot of fun spending most of the game just negotiating, shoring up my position as the new boss and trying to prevent a gang war.
I also signed up for Elfwhere. I played in the sequel a couple of years ago, and enjoyed that, so I figured it would be a good time. It was interesting to see how the game divides into two very different sets. In Elfwhere II I was one of the Royal Family; in this one I played the wizard Mythrandir, who was powerful but nonetheless a commoner. The different classes turn out to be almost two separate intersecting games, with different plots, goals and even somewhat different mechanics. Talking to the GMs afterwards, this turns out to have been entirely intentional: one of the inspirations for the game was the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs.
Anyway, Mythrandir is a somewhat thinly-written archetypal character. I was initially a bit concerned about how few plots and goals I had, but needn't have worried -- he turns out to be the only broadly-trusted wizard in the game, with the result that I was nearly run ragged trying to keep things from flying apart at the seams.
Unlike Impunity, which had very few people I knew in it (Conor and
mr_teem are the only ones I recall), Elfwhere was heavily stocked with friends. I wound up working fairly closely with umbran, and spent a good deal of time helping cristovau, new_man and ladysprite, all of whom were playing high-ranked nobles. So that was a fun opportunity to play a bit with several people I haven't LARPed with before.Saturday night was the traditional Dance Till You Drop. As usual,
ladysprite and I were pretty much the first ones on the floor; things started very slowly this year, not really getting up to speed until after 2am. As a result, I wasn't actually able to dance until the end as I usually do. Around 4am, she and I decided that, while it felt oddly wimpy to give up before the end, we'd both been dancing for four hours, and she had to get to her crash space while she and umbran were still awake enough to drive, so we packed it in.The dance was fun as always, but I really have to concentrate on getting enough rest beforehand. I've been severely sleep-depped in general lately: the cough is still bothering me, making my sleep even worse than usual. And I slept fairly poorly on Friday: between being in a hotel and not having
msmemory there, I slept even worse than usual. So I was simply under the weather at the dance: I didn't have as much energy as usual, and my timing was way off. Given how few opportunities I get for good Ballo Dimenio, I need to work on really readying myself when I do get a chance.I was a horribly lazy spud this convention: I'd planned on helping with both Ops and the Con Suite, and really didn't do much of either. The only real volunteer task I did was to help run the raffle (my traditional role is being traffic manager, deciding the order and speed of the 60-odd raffle items). Oh, well -- having been on the Concom to a greater or lesser degree for seven years now, I'm not going to feel *too* guilty about slacking off a little.
While hanging around on Saturday evening,
jikharra introduced me to a couple of games. One was Lightspeed, one of the few "realtime" (non-turn-based) games I've played and the only one that's as much fun as Ice Towers. I'll need to get a set of that (it's Cheapass, so that shouldn't be a problem). The other was IGOR, which is Mike Young's latest. This is a fun, silly card game, improved by a bit of light roleplaying. (Each player is nominally a mad scientist, and the game pretty much demands evil cackling.) I won a set of that in the Con raffle, which was perfect -- it was the one thing I really wanted in the raffle, and the price of the game pretty much matches the amount I spent in raffle tickets. So that was a big win.Okay, enough for now. I will point people at the website for Intercon E, though. Next year's convention is already open for business, and already has a pretty kickass lineup of games -- indeed, it's the best lineup I've ever seen so early for a con. I think I'll actually have to sign up for games in advance this time...
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Uncle Bernie sez
Date: 2004-03-16 01:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
And, the rest of ConCom expected me to die in that game to have that tradition, too. So, I guess that worked out, too.
Some advice...
Date: 2004-03-20 12:52 pm (UTC)I would ask for advice from people I trust for good beginner games...and while technically I am not a beginner, the last time I LARPed was whent he SCA and LARP was still one entity in many cases...
Hmmmm, come to think of it, the last time was probably when we were still dating back when (in fact you went with me.. when I was stung by the fifty+ yellow jackets)... sixty billion years ago when I was 15/16 years old. EGADS. Im a crone.
Re: Some advice...
Date: 2004-03-21 09:17 am (UTC)Sure -- that was The Game, right? The thing that was sort of of the official LARP of what would become Stonemarche?
EGADS. Im a crone.
Nah -- just well-seasoned like the rest of us...
Anyway: keep in mind that my own LARP background is a tad tunnel-visioned. I pretty much only do "theater-style one-shots", to use the jargon of the LARP field. That is, I generally do short-term games (4 to 48 hours), mostly with combat and other effects simulated by one system or another. There are a *lot* of other options out there -- both games that are more immersive in their mechanics (mostly, but not entirely fantasy games), and lots of campaign games that are always ongoing.
That said, I'll be happy to try to help with the theater-style stuff. The problem with one-shots is that it's all guesswork -- most games run only once, so it's hard to know which ones are good. But I've been doing this long enough to be able to make reasonably educated guesses about what sounds appropriate: if you do several games over the course of a weekend, most of them should be reasonably good.
When the time comes, we should talk about your tastes and style. Different games suit different people. Some are clearly not ideal for beginners (for example, "A Chrysanthemum in Winter" sounds like it'll be very much an advanced roleplaying game), but most should do okay...