jducoeur

That unique form of ennui'ed procrastination known as Writer's Block is sort of like taking a long bath in a vat of boiling acid -- it feels so good when you stop.

For months now, I've been staring at the Girl Genius game and getting more frustrated: lots of good characters there, lots of funny potential bits, but there wasn't a game there. A good LARP (at least, one of mine) needs some sort of *story* being told, not just a bunch of random events, and the pieces just weren't cohering. The ideas were floating around in my head, but without some sort of direction I couldn't really write them down usefully.

And then, today, it came to me. I'd had almost all the jigsaw pieces already, but I got the one apparently-unrelated element that connected them. In the course of less than an hour, the overall plot of the story suddenly pulled together. Finally, after staring at the screen for six months, I now know why all of these characters need to be right here, right now. (Not to mention 2-4 more characters abruptly entering from stage left to add themselves to the story. I'm going to be looking for a small group of players interested in taking a bunch of fun but unexpected characters.)

Vast amounts to do yet, of course -- I haven't even begun to write, and probably won't for a fair while yet. But now I know where the game is going, and it's starting to look like fun, with humor, plot and no small amount of angst suddenly added to the mix.

It feels lovely to towel off the acid, and get back to work.

(BTW -- tpau, when are we doing game signups? I probably want to send out character questionnaires the instant the game fills. I want to cast as early as I can manage, to give people time to costume...)

A quick overview of what happened to me at Intercon F:

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...

1) Yes, the Intercon dance party really is that much better than all other dance parties, at least for my tastes. (The Celebration dance is the only other one I can recall in that ballpark.)

2) The devadashi interpretative-dance version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" was probably the highlight of the weekend. You don't see divine inspiration all that often, so it's worth appreciating when you do...

There -- I've just sent out all of the pregame information for Shades of Memory, aka "Tabula Rasa 2.5". That was a pretty good weekend project.

I have to say, most people don't quite get how the "all-amnesia" thing works, at least in the TR series -- I keep getting folks wondering how it is that I'm spending so much time writing an amnesia game. The general expectation is that such a game involves a lot less text than most games. Far from it.

In fact, the TR games take quite a bit more writing than an ordinary LARP. Not only do they require almost all of the paper required by a normal LARP (for GM reference, even if it isn't being given to the players), but it usually involves considerably more complex character sheets than most (since the scenarios are invariably complex and messy, with a lot of apparent contradiction). And getting information into the game always requires a lot of extra writing, because the TR games are about "ambient information" -- instead of having everything written into the character sheets, much of the information comes into the game through more indirect means. There's some second-person-singular involved, as usual, but there's a lot more in the documents, items, letters and such floating around.

It's a lot of fun, and one of the better writing exercises I know -- the TR games always require me to think through the story in more depth, and with more texture, than a normal game. But man -- there's a lot left to write before Saturday...

There are few things more satisfying than the feeling that one's creation is starting to gel properly -- in this case, that Shades of Memory, my micro-LARP for Intercon Z, is beginning to look like it might actually work. (Doing an all-amnesia game in 50 minutes is, to say the least, kind of experimental.)

Still and all, I wish that these things would begin to gel sooner than two weeks before runtime. There's a lot to write in those two weeks. Thank god it's only a dozen characters...

Roight. Having spent much of the past couple of weeks agonizing over not having enough plot for Shades of Memory, I finally remembered JMS' maxim on the subject. Loosely paraphrased, it recall it as, "Look at each character. What do they want? What will they do to get it? What will others do to prevent them from getting it? Answer that, and plot will take care of itself."

Just the right tool for loosening up the mental muscles and getting past writers block...

Having caught up with our current TV series, as previously mentioned msmemory and I are plowing through some of the backlog. A surprise delight turns out to be the miniseries Regency House Party.
( Capsule Summary: A High-Stakes LARP with a *heck* of a budget )

#12: When you need to test out a database design system, and need a complex schema to do it with, you've got one ready-made in your head. (Let's see -- start with the Game table, then add the Character and Item tables, then Factions, then Players, then...)

We 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. 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...