Minimum spoilers below about the games I was in.
Friday 6pm. Badger McInnes's The Mystery of Flight 101 (Call of Cthulhu). Scheduled for 6 hours.
August 16th, 1942. The U.S. Naval Blimp L-8, on routine patrol mission off the coast of California, disappears for 3 hours, then is sighted flying over the beaches south of San Francisco. Why was radio contact lost? And what happened to the crew? Your orders are to find out what happened.
An interesting game. Events were actually based on historical events in the Bay Area. Spoiler Link Here. Badger found pictures from the actual incident and people too. I really enjoyed the game.I think the players were too smart for our own good. At one point, we had the opportunity to explore a specific area, but we concluded that it was unnecessary and bypassed a chance for excellent role-playing. My character was claustrophobic and in two instances was able to avoid entering specific areas. The other players thought I was just playing it safe -- no I was claustrophobic and didn't want to expose my weakness to my fellow men in uniform unless I had to. I actually was trying to figure out how I was going to play out my claustrophobia when the party changed their mind and didn't enter the enclosed space. It was a tremendous relief for my character, but I lost my chance for playing out a dilemma of either following my orders or my fear.
We triumphantly finished the game 2 hours early, but I think it was because we actually skipped that one area. Two characters died as heroes and got medals posthumously.
Sat 9am. Sean Jennings's Seppuku is Always An Option (Legend of the Five Rings). Scheduled for 6 hours.
Doji Norichi and his faithful retainers discover a plot against his father - a daimio in the Crane Clan. Can the second son prove his worth and honor?
I've only played L5R twice before and both times run by Travis Smalley. I wanted to try out L5R with a different GM and see how it would be run differently. One key element in L5R is Jade and Taint. Think of Taint as a corruption that turns you evil, Jade as a magical gemstone that can absorb or battle Taint. This game did not touch on this subject at all.This game had an interesting structure. We actually had a big battle in the middle of the game. There was a big surprise soon after which I really enjoyed. We started to run late, so the GM sped up some of the final battle scenes and he actually just narrated the last boss battle and we wound up finishing 1 hour early. Because we had a big battle in the middle of the game, I didn't mind missing the last fight, but skipping things and then finishing an hour early felt wrong. Though if we did do the combat, we would have run over our allotted time.
One bad thing was that we started with 7 players (the GM let an extra person play) and by the time of the boss battle, 3 players had already left the table to do other things. One character decided to stay in the village while the rest of the party went to search the hills. A combination of perceived tight timing and circumstance made it so that one character only arrived after the big battle. So, he was a spectator with nothing to do for at least an hour -- waiting for his big moment that never came. That player didn't return after a short break. I didn't blame him for leaving, but who's fault is it? The GM's for not giving him something to do in the village or the player for splitting up from the party? Or the GM for not hinting that the character should stay with the group?
I think flagging energy did the game in. Throughout the game, people kept on answering their phones -- while in the room. Hey, I can hear you when you're 15 feet away talking into your phone -- why don't you go into the hallway instead, you Bozo? One telling detail was that the GM said that exploring the characters' reaction to the big surprise was what he was really interested in, so once that was resolved, the GM didn't seem that engaged either. I think a lack of awareness of the players' level of engagement with the game made it a bad experience for the people who left the game.
No characters died, but 3 players disappeared.
Sat 5pm. Morgan Hua's The Carnival Magic — A Mysterious Cruise Ship. (Dread). Scheduled for 6 hours.
The Carnival Magic, a cruise ship, disappears on its maiden voyage in the midst of the Bermuda Triangle and reappears a week later in the midst of a hurricane. It had broadcast a mayday signal that was kept from the public. Your elite team is sent in to investigate.
I had run this at BigBadCon and it took 6 hours. This time I remembered a few things I forgot to throw at the players the first time I ran it. There was even some player vs player combat. The players actually covered more ground than than at BigBadCon. But they finished the game in 4-1/2 hours. What the heck? How did that happen?Let's go over the game timeline in order to figure out what happened
I ate dinner at 4pm and started to set up things for the game. I moved some furniture around and then discovered I had forgotten to bring the insanity and reward tokens, so I started making substitute ones out of paper.
At first I thought about asking people to turn off their phones, but then it was Dread and having a phone ring while someone was drawing would have been great, so I decided not to do the phone speech. Unfortunately, nobody's phone rang during the game, or at least they were on vibrate.
By 4:45pm, I had 6 people wait listing my game. I was told that two people had their names crossed out on the list downstairs, but how do you know it is official? I did know that Gil was playing in an earlier game that conflicted with mine (one of Dovi's Star Wars games -- if I wasn't GMing, I would be trying to get into that game too), so I had one confirmation. But I didn't want to be in the situation of dropping someone and then finding out that they were showing up. By 5pm the 4 confirmed players had already arrived early. Most games waited 15 minutes to start. Since I had 6 extra people and only one potential no show, I made a decision to admit the first two on the wait list and if that one person did show up, I would admit that person as an extra. I didn't want people to hang around 15 minutes for no reason at all. So, I started the game at 5pm sharp.
After the tower fell the first time, I generally have a break for people to get some food. This happened at about 1-1/2 hours into the game. Most games take a 1/2 hour break for food. But nobody wanted to take a break, so we continued with the game.
So, the lack of a 15 minute cut-off and a 30 minute food break might have accounted for the shortened game time.
At the 3-1/2 hour mark, a major part of the game was completed and the tower had just collapsed, so pulling had become easier again. There was just one major encounter left, but there was no way to build the tension up to where it was at the 3-1/2 hour mark without a giant lull. It would have been anticlimactic and artificial to just throw things at them to try to unsteady the tower. I can also feel the tension in the room completely deflate with the newly built tower. So, I let the game play out naturally. I also felt tired, maybe due to the sudden cliff from the adrenaline rush from the previous tower collapse. Maybe I should have called for a short break at this time instead of continuing right after the the tower was rebuilt. It would have given me time to think about what else to throw at the players.
So, what is better? A game that fits the allotted time slot, but maybe emotionally unsatisfying or a tightly paced game that ends earlier than scheduled? The problem is that these games aren't like movies where every game is the same. So, their nature is not as predictable as we would like. From my experience, I do like to finish games completely vs having the ending be narrated.
The tower fell 3 times, 4 characters died and 1 player left the game. A few hours into the game, three characters were drawing on each other before the tower collapsed. One of the players wanted to leave the game, so he actually collapsed the tower to kill another character before leaving -- which was actually ok since this game was designed for quick character generation and we had more than enough players.
Sun 10am. Sheila Mitchell's An Illegitimate Glitch (Unhallowed Metropolis) Scheduled for 6 hours.
After his entire family was brutally slain in an animate(zombie) attack, Lord Henry Piermont was obsessed with finding any illegitimate children from his family line. The only problem is the child he found has gone missing from the orphanage where he had been placed. Lord Piermont has gathered a team together not knowing where the trail may lead.
Sheila, the GM, was in my Dread game and was also going to play later in Duane and Will's Unknown Armies game. I love the setting for Unhallowed Metropolis. The game was revised in 2011 and the mechanics are much better.Unhallowed Metropolis is London shrouded in smog and steampunked up. Zombies roam the streets and the Deathwatch slaughter those who roam the streets if there's an undead breakout. The rain is acidic, so characters wear rubber pants and gas masks.
I think I forgot to mention that Sheila played Dread with one arm in a sling. I was a rat bastard and put the tower in the exact center of a large round table -- to make it harder for everyone to reach, but that made it really difficult for her. She was a pro and was only one pull short of gaining a Reward token (she did 5 in a row to save party members which was pretty amazing.) Unfortunately in Dread, one pull short means you didn't make it.
In this game I played a half-human/half-vampire Slayer that was more kick-ass than Blade because this character thought range weapons were for wussies. Jack was in this game and he played a Doctor with no combat skills. At one point, Jack said, "I wished I picked your character." Well, the character's name was Morgan and I was named Morgan and I happened to wear a Dracula T-Shirt that day and I made AWESOME rolls through out the game. I was so bad-ass that when we ran into a vampire on a pile of bodies looking down on us as fresh meat, I fed him a stake before he blinked. No Blade for you Jack, maybe next time. But Jack and I both got the Kubla prizes: me for slicing and dicing and Jack for role-playing -- hey what else can you do when you have no combat skills. :-)
The game ended 1/2 hour early and no characters died and nobody left the table.
Sun 6pm. Duane O’Brien and Will Robot's The Island Of Misfortune (Unknown Armies). Scheduled for 6 hours.
You couldn’t have been more excited when you were selected to compete on a reality survival show. Now you’re just praying you can make it out alive. This Unknown Armies game is a horror game for mature audiences. Characters will die. It’s not going to be pretty. Two GMs to keep the table hopping. Characters will not be mages.
The best game I've played in at KublaCon 2012. I heard that Duane and Will's Putrescent Seven was a very, very good game, so I was very happy to get into this game even though there was a chance I would be offed before the game ended.I've never seen duel GMs before. Duane and Will worked really well together. One can continue to run the table when another is outside working with characters who have split off from the party. They can also confer and make balanced decisions when unexpected things happen. Two heads are definitely better than one. There were a fair number of breaks when Duane and Will had to confer when we threw them for a loop.
Though the game description sounds like a meat-grinder-fest, The game gave characters very tough moral decisions. We had an excellent group of players. I think when the first character died two hours into the game, my role-playing went into high gear because at that time I decided that the criteria for being whacked was the quality of your role-playing. Play for the cameras or you're off the show.
There were a lot of very good moments and twists and turns, but I don't want to put spoilers here as Duane and Will will run this several more times. Again, my die rolls were on fire and I made many critical rolls.
In the end all but one character survived (it could have easily been a TPK). 7 characters died, one player left the table. And the game ran 2-1/2 hours over the scheduled time. I didn't leave until after 3am. Thank God for Kubla candy girls -- I needed that extra sugar pick me up after midnight.
Mon 9am. Richard Ashley's The Man in the Ceramsteel Mask (Fading Suns). Scheduled for 6 hours.
Find the missing noble before it’s too late! A “whodunit” for the Fading Suns world.
Richard was one of the contributors to Fading Suns. I had arrived early since it took me a while to calm down from Duane and Will's game and I woke early and decide to just get some breakfast before Richard's game and then not finding any, so I just decided to lay down on the couch, try to nap, and wait for the game to start.The bad news was that only 4 of 6 seats were filled. At 9:00am I was the only player and Richard arrived 1/2 hour early since he had to check out of his room. But since Richard was a contributor, I got to ask him many questions about the world and he had answers for all of them and in detail. He was running the same game twice in order to promote the upcoming v2.5 of Fading Suns.
At first, I was skeptical as he starts telling me about the world and it sounded like a mish-mash of Star Gate, Dune, Babylon 5, Star Trek, Star Wars, Feudal Societies, Fallen Empires, Hyperion, Blade Runner, etc. Then he starts telling me how this all works and that was where the magic comes in. The rationale for all of this really works and they had to create some really interesting stuff to glue it all together. The world building lets you put together a mish-mash of whatever Sci-Fi world you like into one city.
In this world, one of the major religions decreed that technology was evil, so the poor lived feudal lives while the rich, who can afford to be absolved used high-tech. The rich are nobles and the poor are either serfs, servants, or freemen. A printed or xeroxed piece of paper carries the taint of evil, so books are hand copied by Monks instead. Since technology is evil, most of the available weapons are hand-to-hand weapons like swords. The rich carry guns, but each bullet may cost a poor person a year's food. But personal shields are also available that will stop high-energy and kinetic attacks, but not slow weapons as in Dune. The shields have limited charges, but can be recharged. So, in personal combat, a shield can save you from guns, but not a knife. But armies can still kill you as their rapid gun fire will quickly drain your shield and then kill you.
There are jump gates like Star Gate and Babylon 5, but they are ok to use since the creator of the religion died jumping through one of the gates and blessed all of the gates with particles of his blood and body.
The city we were in had 8 major towers several thousand stories high. Each tower was several acres in cross-section. There was one air purifier in each cardinal directions, but only the North air purifier still worked. Terra-forming increased the oxygen levels so that you can breath at the higher altitudes. The richest people live at the top of the Northern-most tower. The poor burn wood and coal in stoves, polluting the air. There are walkways between buildings and towers and the rich ride in aircars. At the bottom of the North tower is an artist colony, where the rich go slumming, whereas the real slum where no one wants to go is the bottom of the Southern-most tower where it's full of rusted out cars, pollution, humidity, and crime -- like parts of the 5th Element. The city is broken into 9 sections, not just uptown and downtown (a 2D reference), but in a 3D sense. Upper parts of several towers make Uptown (or High-town). Mid-town is slices of the middle of several buildings. And the bottom is the Undertown. Since technology is evil, new cathedrals, built of stone, are sometimes found on top of a Tower -- picture Notre Dame on top of the World Trade Center.
At 9:10am, I was 1 of 2 players. I picked a deacon that whose whole body was horribly scarred from a bio-bomb that wiped out his village. The other player couldn't decide between a dilettante-fop and an easily distracted psychic. He really thought the fop would be fun to play but useless. I urged him to play the fop. He picked the psychic, then proceeded to be useless. I had to drag his character wherever we went and I had to lie to him in order to get him to go anywhere and I had to repeat what had been told to me repeatedly -- even though his character was in the room -- since he spent most of his time staring at the wallpaper. I was ready to kill his character after an hour of playing.
During the lunch break, I chatted with the GM about my frustration and when the player returned we were able to convince the player that a high ponder stat meant that he was more like Sherlock Holmes where he sees details and delves into their significance, and not space out like a drugged out flower child. At that point, it got much better and the story actually started to take off and the GM started to do different voices for various NPCs and there was action, sex, violence, comedy, poetry readings, illegal tech, and we actually found the missing noble and the person who was responsible.
No characters died, no players left the table (though I was close), and we actually finished 1 hour over the scheduled time because we spent probably 3 hours talking about the world.
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