First of all, I want to note that Origins' event reg system is crap, and that's having some effects on the kind of gaming I like. For example, this year the event reg system went up...and promptly crashed...and then went up again, but a full third to half of the events (including all of the IGDN ones) weren't there. They did eventually get added in, yes, but that means we lost out on those initial few hours, and who knows how many people said "screw it, I'll just use generics" in disgust?
Also (and this is deeply stupid), you can't search the database by game title. You can search by the name of the game session, but that means that if you were to log on and see if, for example, anyone was running Chill, you wouldn't see anything. You would have to search "High Tide" or "Cold Dark Earth", and why would you know the session titles?
The effect that this is having is that folks who are doing the kind of gaming I enjoy (that is, not D&D, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu or the other big-name games) are doing it at Games on Demand. Let's be clear, I love GoD and what they do, but it leads to a problem where the only way to get players for your indie game is to run it there, which means all the indie players wind up there, which just perpetuates the issue, and that room will sooner or later run out of space. If Origins events was a little more competent, I'd say they'll increase the space, but eh?
But in any case, I got to play more games this year than I usually do, so let's talk about them.
Thursday: Overlight. I backed Overlight on Kickstarter because I liked the art, which is rare for me. Kai was interested to play it, so we signed up for a session together. I'm happy to report that the game is a lot of fun. It's your basic fantasy game inasmuch as there's a bunch of history, things got borked, there are different races, etc., but I found the history and the races interesting and compelling, which is pretty uncommon for me. Also the system is interesting (usually you wind up rolling three dice for a stat, three for a skill, plus a d4 that does good things if it comes up 4), and intuitive enough that both Kai and I picked it up pretty quickly.
As for the GM: The game was well-run. I felt like he listened to the players and got enthused by what we did and how we interacted, and he backed off and let us roleplay a bit. He was a little too quick to suggest things for Kai to do, which is something a lot of adults do to younger players, but he was nice and attentive about it, which is better than it could be. My Grade: B+
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| Kai's character did not actually have tentacle fingers. |
Friday: Bedlam Hall. I...backed this game on Kickstarter, too. It's PbtA and kind of Addams-family/gothic inspired, dark humor with very Downton Abbey sensibilities, so Michelle and I signed up to play. I hadn't had a chance to read the game first, which is a shame, but I read through it while playing, which should be a bit of a warning sign.
Bedlam Hall commits to its premise - it constantly apologizes that you've chosen to play or read it, reminds you what a horrible choice that is, and tells you about all the weird and terrible things that happen. That's fine. I've read a lot of PbtA games and I'm reading more all the time (as I'm writing my own), so what different games choose to include and what they don't is interesting to me. Bedlam Hall doesn't focus quite as heavily on the "this is a conversation" aspect of PbtA, nor does it make the players' agenda or principles clear up front (at least not that I saw, but again I didn't read it real carefully).
However, none of that matter in this particular case because the GM wasn't prepared to run a PbtA game. He was very much attempting to run it like he was introducing new players to a trad game - instead of the characters being the established house staff, we were all on our first day. That meant that we didn't get to answer the questions that rooted us in the house and with the family:
Which means that the GM was coming up with all of this stuff for us, which just further pushed us out of the moment. Add that to the fact that we were given no chance to establish our characters; the second any of us got together and started to roleplay, the GM jumped in with an NPC to start the next "plot point" or whatever. And the whole notion of "moves" was hard for him; more than once he treated them like actions in a standard RPG, which means he didn't engage what they were supposed to do, and made our choices invalid by doing whatever came into his head and running the game like it was, well, D&D. He seemed to like performing for us and doing silly voices, but gave us very little chance to be part of the story. He admitted that he was not familiar with the game, this particular scenario, or PbtA in general, and apologized for that, so that was good, at least. My Grade: D
Also Friday: Numenera: Hey, one for which I didn't back the Kickstarter! Michelle wanted to play this, so we signed up for a late-night session (look, for me 8PM-midnight is "late night"). We had a full table, so that was cool. The game itself was a lot of fun and I like the system; I like any system that's forgiving of the players and gives them resources to manage in order to succeed. I felt like in general there wasn't a lot of threat, but it could be that it was a simple scenario for beginning players, which would have been appropriate. In general, though, it's a game that encourages players to buff each other and share resources, which, again, very much my jam.
As for the GM: Overall I thought he did really well. A little too over-reliant on reading shit off a page, but the real complaint I had was that he would ask what we wanted to do, half-listen to the answer, and then narrate for a full minute. This was actually something that the Bedlam Hall GM did, too, and you'll see this complaint again for the Saturday game. And like, I get it; you're pressed for time, you know what's going to happen next, you want to get into the plot.
But like...the players aren't here to watch you dance or listen to you talk. We're here to roleplay and be awesome, and that means you need to listen to us so you can respond to what we do. This is old, old, old, GMing advice, but you must be prepared to scrap your carefully-prepared plans in order for us to be awesome, or at least be able to fake that that's what you did.
Anyway, like I said, the game was fun and it definitely got on my list to buy (this was apparently a sneak-peek of the new edition, so I'll wait until that's out), and I'm being harsh but the GM was actually pretty good. My Grade: B-
Saturday: Trail of Cthulhu. This was the only game I played over the weekend that I was really familiar with; I ran it a few times and I've overall pretty solid on the Gumshoe system. I didn't notice when we (Michelle & I) signed up that it was based on a product called Cthulhu City, which takes the game and puts a Dark City kind of spin on it, but I'd have signed up anyway. The characters were pretty cool, and all of them had a couple of questions on the back about the strangeness of Arkham and how they'd encountered it; you chose one answer from an array of four for two questions.
The red flag, though, was that the GM didn't ask what we'd chosen. Here's a fact about GMing: If the GM doesn't know, it doesn't happen in-game. If the GM doesn't ask, it doesn't matter. So we all had these cool character bits that were actually pretty important, but they made no difference to the plot.
There were some tweaks to the system that I thought were pretty interesting, but honestly I remember very, very little about the game and I was falling asleep through a lot of it. That's bad. Now, some of that was because the group (4 players total) split up a bit (along gender lines ha ha, which turned out to be a problem), and the fella I was paired with was about as interesting as a wet sock; I tried to roleplay and he was giving me nothing back. But the larger issue was, again, the GM just kind of ignoring what the players did to keep the session going along its rails, and while he listened to me and the other guy, he all but completely ignored Michelle and the other woman at the table. (This, guys, is the sort of thing that women tell us happens but that we don't notice until we look for it, so look for it.)
Overall the game felt like it was an hour longer than it actually was, and the payoff at the end where Michelle's character sacrificed herself didn't have much impact because we'd never gotten to interact. My Grade: D
Sunday: Rockerboys & Vending Machines. You heard me. This is a hack of John Harper's Lasers & Feelings, run by Phil Vecchione of Encoded Designs and Gnome Stew. It's a cyberpunk game where you're playing a team of mercs/runners/whatever, and it's focused on the flash and the neon and the job. Michelle, Kai and I all signed up because we figured it would be a nice, light game for Sunday morning, and we were not wrong.
I remember more about this game than anything else I played all weekend. Granted, it's the kind of game that's built on player input, and so that helps, but Phil slowed it down, let us play with each other, let us talk, asked us what were doing and listened to the answer, and fit the events of the session around that, rather than trying to shoehorn our actions into his idea of what the session was. At the end of it all, we stole the Ultimate Meme from a corporation, defeated a rogue AI named Mark Anthony, and escaped (my character was an AI named MASHUP; I provided the soundtrack for my team looking awesome).
High praise: Kai was engaged enough that they asked everyone for a description so they could draw the characters later. My Grade: A
Stuff I Bought: Check it out!
Smaller haul than most years, because I'm strapped for money this year. I'm planning on buying more at GenCon, finances permitting, but I couldn't pass up a least a couple of purchases from the IGDN booth (gotta support my peeps), and the other two books were things I found at IPR that looked cooled. The board game is a legacy game about building a village that I showed to Michelle and she got bouncy, so that was that.
Overall, Origins was a good time. I know it looks like I complain about GMs a lot, and I do, but that's because I'm interested to watch other GMs work, so even when it's not awesome, it's still interesting. Plus the con was bookended with fun games, so overall it's a win.
