Friday, August 23, 2013

GenCon '13: Is it Satyrday Yet?

The Fireworks: Did you hear that I like to run games?

Well, I happened to run only eight of those this year. A measly 26 hours worth of labor at that. But these substitutions for having any real life seems to make up for everything else missing elsewhere in my life. Let's talk about these sessions for a bit.

I used T&T to get the blood flowing on Thursday night. Had a pretty good handful of players, three, jumping in to play "The Sorceress and the Chimera." A kid, below the age of not being protected by privacy traditions, if not actual laws, in Western culture, flattered me by figuring out the math that I was playing with. Yes the 8th grader might have not been doing calculus but she did make the gamer "geeks" around her look like posers. I am sure it's Obama's fault.

Smart kid, her dad, and guy nice enough to show up.

The late-night game "Bigger Than a Breadbox" for my Crawlspace 13 game went off well. Not only did I have a full table, I had my sister Caed Phaser, Robin Fenner, there. Zach is a DJ and one of the hosts of Rockin' Comics, both the podcast and a website domain. He brought a friend, Rob, who I am going to make a friend. Then a couple other players showed up while one of them happened to be distractingly beautiful. I had to remind myself not to stare at her more than anybody else. She would actually play with my avoiding gaze showing me how neurotic that I was being. After a few minutes, after I established that everyone there was important (TALK ABOUT A MASTER OF BRETCH, Dr. Nik). Then I got more casual.
Oddly enough, that looker was only going to be around for an hour before flitting elsewhere. The game ran 40 minutes over, the looker stayed for the whole BBQ and I was running around asking "What did I miss?" to the players. Even more stranger I did not need to rewrite my plot, because the players never went off the script that I had in head.
These players were so into their roles that even when they were hiding underneath tables, which I did not tell them to do, they'd stay in character as everyone else would hear the tones of the dialog going on, though nobody knew what was being said exactly. The players above the table would suddenly burst into a new scene.  For the second time in this rendition of Crawlspace's lifespan, I had to deal with tabletop role-players suddenly becoming actors.Once again, I was a GM looking at the unleashed results of Stanislavsky-influenced methods in his story, I kind of feel like Frankenstein when this happens. I think that I kept up admirably.
The next day I found out that the looker from Doug Jean, Zach, and Rob, that the rather stunning role-player was actually a working actress by the name of Jordan Trovillion. Well I am about to take a sudden interest in Tom Cruise films. Hopefully, Crawlspace 13 will be graced with her presence again. She can even show up at a Old Home Eve if she really has to.

On Friday I started out with my single entry for Spacers (TM), which is currently in transition, called "Attack Of the Androids." The three players that I had adapted better than most when they realized that I had baited and switched them. Instead of a battle against androids they got the moral and ethical considerations of their actions when dealing with fully articulated artificial intelligence. I really want to keep in touch with these three players. The evening's offering of T&T had another three players with "The Temple of Pan." I think I sucked as a GM, the players flatteringly added a lot to the story and showed themselves so awesome adventure gamers. I made a break through in a certain "bronze-age" work that I have been at for some time. And lest I forget, the quote "Is it Satyrday yet?"  came up at 11:30pm. No one showed up for my "Hopelessly Lost" scenario for Crawlspace 13 except a fellow from Philly named Mark. I, despite being worried about not having any players for a midnight game, told the young man, that he was invited back the next next night.

Saturday was an unexpected bag of fixings to say the least. My early evening T&T game "Who's that Demigod? " had five players show up with the their their preregistered tickets. Another showed up with his friend's ticket. Yet another three showed up with generics asking for admittance to my game. And I while I had three people that knew how to play the T&T game, I had three with pre-registered tickets that were sampling the game having never played it before. I Was a little stressed. But with well-worked GM techniques and three folk dropping out of the game from texts from close family or friends, I think I did marginally well. Only one person showed up for Glow's "Out of the Bubble" with which I tossed him over to Peryton's Qalidar scenario going on at the same time. I had a bit of a party that I'll talk about later.  Mark showed up for the Crawlspace 13 midnight session, and I cheated at the cards to make sure that he'd be significant character in the story. And though I was suffering from late players and a bit of Godzilla gut, not any ill effects from my three hour hard-drinking party minutes before, there was a decent scenario to be had.

The reader should note that all my impressions are subjective.

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