Dream a little Dreamation 2008
Jan. 28th, 2008 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHi,
So I went to Dreamation for an extended gaming weekend. It was a pretty good time. Here's what I played:
Thursday Night:
I didn't have any games scheduled, but I got roped into a playtest game of Misspent Youth run by its author Robert Bohl. Misspent Youth is the Science Fiction game of young kids sticking it to the Man (or the Authority in this case). For our game, we decided that we were all on this huge slower-than-light colony ship headed for a distant world. The ship was nearing its destination and so it had artificially birthed some of the frozen embryos it was carrying so it could educate/train us to be good colonists when we arrived. The Authority in this case was played by the computer running the ship, called "The Mission". So the AI manifested as monks (because they live in a Mission you see). The Mission was very uptight and puritanical. It was mostly concerned with us being efficient cogs in a societal machine and not people. One of the key aspects of that was that we all slept in this nutrient gel that fed us, healed us, cleaned us, and screwed with our hormones to sexually repress us (no need for messy sex when the ship has plenty of auto-wombs).
Our team of PCs were the outcast loser kids who were grouped together as the only EVA team on the ship. Because we spent a lot of time outside the ship, we'd grown close to each other and were breaking free of the usual controls imposed on the rest of the crew. So while most poeple had job titles for names, we'd given each other nicknames. I played a girl named Rivet. As in, Rosie the Riveter. My two traits were: Strong like Ox and Smart like Tractor. So we were going to stick it to the man. There were a lot of scenes involving sexually frustrated teenagers and gel which were handled a lot better than such a statement would suggest. Eventually gel went on to become the defacto basis for all tech which was pretty neat. When we wanted to break into a computer, we slapped on a gel hard-drive for example.
But the heart of the game was getting involved in conflicts, losing those conflicts and then choosing to "sell-out" a trait to win through at the cost of your youthful innocence and idealism. In this particular game, the other female character was a beautiful scientific genius who wanted to be respected for her brains, not her looks. But after several stressful incidents with other NPCs, she sold out her "My looks are inconvenient" trait to "I live on my looks" as she decided to go with the flow. It was a pretty powerful turn for her character. Rivet never had to sell out although she did get to have some "dumb genius" moments where she revealed to the other PCs that the ship not only had grav plates, but that it was using them to drive the ship (large plated in front generated a mass in front of the ship for it to "fall towards"). In the end, we broke in and gained control over the grav propulsion system.
It's a pretty fun game and I think it only needs a few more tweaks to be ready for prime time. Hopefully this one will be out for GenCon.
Friday:
I was up bright and early for a playtest session of Mouse Guard: The Boardgame. Mouse Guard is a comic book series that's all about, well...a group of Mice who protect the Mouse Kingdom. It's a pretty good series. This boardgame allowed players to play the main characters from the comic books and go on adventures to explore the Mouse Kingdoms and make it safe. The board is made up of triangular sections showing the Mouse Kingdom and the roads running through it. The tiles are double-sided and the darker side is the Ruined side and the lighter side is the Guarded side. The game is over when all story quests from the quest deck have been completed and the object is for the players to finish the game with more Guarded tiles than Ruin tiles on the board.
Players have a hand of cards which they use to move from tile to tile, search for axes or food (the only two resources), or take on story quests. When you take on a story quest, you usually have to spend resources on your tile and you're generally rewarded by being able to flip the tile to the guarded side. The catch is that every turn you fail to complete the quest, some sort of penalty befalls you. This might be something minor like sending a card to the discard pile or it might be something serious like placing a new Ruin tile on the board (if it goes on too long you'll never be able to flip more than half of them in time).
The game rules state that players take their turn in order from youngest to oldest.
I was playing with an 11 year-old and two 7 year-olds.
I went last. I also got to play Sadie, the pink-cloaked mouse.
The game is rated for 10 and up so we were playing at the bottom edge of the age range. That said, my fellow gamers were pretty well-behaved and focused on the game. Because you have to pick another player to read the story challenges, I often got to read them out.
This game is really hard. Players have to work together because if one person hordes all the food and other people need food to complete their missions, and the food hoarder can't pull any travel cards to get to the guy in trouble and the guy in trouble has a serious penalty...it's really tough. There were a few advanced rules we weren't playing with that allowed for a solo win, but I'm not sure how someone could pull it off.
But we got real, real lucky. At the end of the game we had an equal number of Guarded and Ruin tiles and that was sufficient to win the game (ties go to the PCs). Supposedly this (along with a Mouse Guard RPG) will be rolling out for GenCon and it'll be interesting to see how it develops. I certainly think it's got a lot of potential.
In the afternoon, I had a fairly short Burning Wheel session. Originally, this was supposed to be the Watership Down/Dune crossover using Burning Wheel rules (can I say how cool that sounds?), but the GM couldn't get it all together in time. So we had a more Three Musketeers game. I played the elder daughter of the Spanish ambassador who was a complete hellion in social conflicts (although she punked out against her drunk, domineering father). It was a very short game. The GM decided to dispense with the detailed combat system which may have been a mistake. It's a bit of a pain and the rock-paper-scissors nature of BW combat rewards a bit of study which you don't get at a con game, but it's hard to be a Musketeer game without lots of dazzling swordplay.
In the end, my character got to go dancing at the palace ball and was well-poised to become the wife of the new Captain of the Musketeers. All without a huge amount of effort on my part. A win, but not a terribly memorable game.
In the evening, I crashed a Jeepform game of Upgrade!. Jeepform is best described as the Scandinavian-style LARP. It focuses a great deal on the inner workings of the characters, makes almost no use of any mechanics in favor of a more improv-flavored approach and is generally has this High Art reputation in the states. One of the leading advocates of Jeepform, Tobias Wrigstad made the flight over the pond to help spread the gospel. I was curious to see this all in motion, but the game was full up so I asked if I could sit in on the session. They said sure, but they also encouraged me to jump in and help out from time to time.
Upgrade! is the name of a reality TV-game where couples swap partners, go off to a tropical island for a month and then choose to stay with their original parters or "Upgrade" to the person they dated on the island (and if they Upgrade they get fabulous cash and prizes). It's obviously a play on shows like Temptation Island and stuff. So we had three couples, and Tobias and Emily acted as the co-hosts. I sat in on the side.
The game itself was the last episode. The PCs were all together on the stage watching a huge screen where "clips" of the show would play out. Of course, when clips came up, the players involved would jump up and play out the scene. Additionally, players could cut in and run scenes that ran in the "past" or the "future" -- side scenes that would play out to the left or right of the main clip respectively. Players could also step out to do monologues. Finally, the game took a few breaks to have "producer meetings" where players acted as the producers and got to dish on the show and suggest what needed to change or be emphasized.
I could go on for awhile about all the crazy stuff that went on. It got off to a pretty good start and kept rolling right along. I put in a few suggestions and ran in to help out with a couple of scenes, but mostly left it up to the "real" PCs to do stuff. Then, at the first producers meeting, questions were raised about the orientation of one of the characters.
"I think he's gay."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, I think we should smoke him out see if it's true or not."
"How would be do that? Introduce some sort of bisexual joker?"
*everyone looks at me*
"Yeah, a bisexual joker might be just the thing we need."
Enter Carlos, the resort's masseuse, crazy bisexual joker, and ah, "medical dispenser". Several fun scenes with him, including a very special game of Twister.
The game was a lot of fun. I'd say that Jeepform isn't terribly different from a LARP except in its willingness to jump around in time and the ability of other players to influence how you portray "your" character. Probably the best game of the con for me.
Saturday:
On Saturday morning, I got into a game of Artesia. This RPG is based off the comic of the same name. It's a great comic, but I wasn't terribly impressed with the RPG. But since it was only my impression, I thought it'd be fun to play a game and see how it worked out.
This game was problematic. The GM spent way too much time trying to explain the (incredibly detailed) world of Artesia and there was too much futzing around for what seemed like a simple RPG system (roll a d10 + stat + skill and beat an 18). The other problem was that he based the game heavily off of The Usual Suspects. Which is a great game, but the only question is "who's the last man standing?" and it locks people into re-doing the movie not just seeing what happens. In particular, one of the players (who got the Kyser Soze analog) was totally throwing out lots of pre-plotting ideas and just totally driving me nuts. Although it did make me wonder if sometimes I'm too forward with ideas when I'm doing games. A bit of self-reflection there.
Um, oh my guy was a girl named Alexus who was a scout. She really just wanted to blow town and get out of there, but she was roped into the heist and later, when the demi-god came after the goods, she allied herself with him to kill the others and deliver their souls in exchange for her own. This worked out, although in the process she became an avatar for the demi-god and then later turned into the deformed fortune teller who reassured one of the other PCs that he was indeed "the last man standing". Overall, this was probably the weakest game I played at the con, although it's caused me to think about how I play a bit so perhaps it's value lies in other arenas besides "fun".
In the afternoon, I was in a game of Primetime Adventures (PTA). This is the game that tries to create good television. I'm hoping to use this as the ruleset for a game I'd like to run for Annie so I was anxious to play through a session and see how it worked "on the table".
Unfortunately, I'd heard some grumbling from players in a previous run of the game that the pre-game set-up had gone on forever. In PTA, you need to create a show, but for a con game, I would've come in with more of a pre-set premise and had people work with that. Here, the only guide was "Sci-Fi" and the GM was kinda crunchy-hippie and like "but if Sci-Fi isn't what you want, I'm cool with that" and I groaned inwardly. Luckily, my group got their act together pretty quickly and came up with:
Cold Sleep -- a group of astronauts have been in suspended animation for thousands of years as their ship travels out to a mysterious Dyson Sphere. The astronauts have just been thawed out and will soon arrive at the sphere, but alien music sings to them in their VR dreams.
We played the pilot episode. And I was the Ship's A.I. Marie (after Marie Curie). In the pilot we introduced the Captain's big problem -- one of the sleep pod clusters malfunctioned and the Captain's wife (the ship's psychologist) was dead (in reality, not dead, but converted to an alien mental construct, but no one knows that). We had the last Jesuit priest confronting the faithless xeno-linguist and the much put-upon Janitor showing up his betters. Again, it would take me pages to explain the whole thing, but overall the actual play was pretty interesting. At the very least, I feel more comfortable about running PTA and helping people get scenes well-framed and pushing issues/conflicts.
Finally, on Saturday evening, I joined up with a playtest game of Giants by Jeff Lower. It's a game where, um, you play a giant. You're a big, honkin' giant and you've got this community that loves and/or fears you and you wander around and do giant-y stuff. You also get together with your other giant buddies to save the world from big stuff.
I played Delphina, the sea giantess. The cool thing about this game is that everyone pitches in to draw a map of the campaign world. So I had my community on Skull island and later I put in Neo-Rhodes and Happy Valley (both places to be ravaged by giants, of course). But dominating our maps were two huge volcanoes. We decided that both of these were about to come to life and cause trouble so we had to do something about it.
We bummed around for awhile and I was totally bamboozled by the evil leader of one of the fire cults. Then I climbed up to the flying city and got them to build me a device to let me talk to the sun about why he was awakening one of the volcanoes. In the end, the smaller volcano came to life and all the giants pitched in to defeat it.
This game still needs some work, but the map-making and the premise it just so good that even now, it's still a pretty good game. It'll be interesting to see how he works out the issues and what the final product looks like.
That was it. On Sunday morning I drove us all home (since I had 5 hours of sleep and everyone else had less). I am pleased/amused to note that with the one exception of Carlos, every one of my characters was female. Which means I've more than fulfilled my "experimental gender-bending" quota and can go back to playing scruffy guys for awhile. :)
I also picked up a mess of Morrow Project stuff, which was my big buy for the con and I drooled over the Warhammer 40K RPG book (gorgeous!) but declined to purchase (my resolve here is probably going to be real weak though).
I think I had a much better time at this con this year than I did last year. I'm certainly considering going back again next year. The indie-gamers I hang with seem to be getting into an "old school" mode where they run classic games like "red box" D&D with only a few (or no) rule tweaks. That's got me thinking about running a classic Traveller game or something similar.
But I'm glad that my upcoming weekends aren't nearly as packed as they have been so far this year.
later
Tom
So I went to Dreamation for an extended gaming weekend. It was a pretty good time. Here's what I played:
Thursday Night:
I didn't have any games scheduled, but I got roped into a playtest game of Misspent Youth run by its author Robert Bohl. Misspent Youth is the Science Fiction game of young kids sticking it to the Man (or the Authority in this case). For our game, we decided that we were all on this huge slower-than-light colony ship headed for a distant world. The ship was nearing its destination and so it had artificially birthed some of the frozen embryos it was carrying so it could educate/train us to be good colonists when we arrived. The Authority in this case was played by the computer running the ship, called "The Mission". So the AI manifested as monks (because they live in a Mission you see). The Mission was very uptight and puritanical. It was mostly concerned with us being efficient cogs in a societal machine and not people. One of the key aspects of that was that we all slept in this nutrient gel that fed us, healed us, cleaned us, and screwed with our hormones to sexually repress us (no need for messy sex when the ship has plenty of auto-wombs).
Our team of PCs were the outcast loser kids who were grouped together as the only EVA team on the ship. Because we spent a lot of time outside the ship, we'd grown close to each other and were breaking free of the usual controls imposed on the rest of the crew. So while most poeple had job titles for names, we'd given each other nicknames. I played a girl named Rivet. As in, Rosie the Riveter. My two traits were: Strong like Ox and Smart like Tractor. So we were going to stick it to the man. There were a lot of scenes involving sexually frustrated teenagers and gel which were handled a lot better than such a statement would suggest. Eventually gel went on to become the defacto basis for all tech which was pretty neat. When we wanted to break into a computer, we slapped on a gel hard-drive for example.
But the heart of the game was getting involved in conflicts, losing those conflicts and then choosing to "sell-out" a trait to win through at the cost of your youthful innocence and idealism. In this particular game, the other female character was a beautiful scientific genius who wanted to be respected for her brains, not her looks. But after several stressful incidents with other NPCs, she sold out her "My looks are inconvenient" trait to "I live on my looks" as she decided to go with the flow. It was a pretty powerful turn for her character. Rivet never had to sell out although she did get to have some "dumb genius" moments where she revealed to the other PCs that the ship not only had grav plates, but that it was using them to drive the ship (large plated in front generated a mass in front of the ship for it to "fall towards"). In the end, we broke in and gained control over the grav propulsion system.
It's a pretty fun game and I think it only needs a few more tweaks to be ready for prime time. Hopefully this one will be out for GenCon.
Friday:
I was up bright and early for a playtest session of Mouse Guard: The Boardgame. Mouse Guard is a comic book series that's all about, well...a group of Mice who protect the Mouse Kingdom. It's a pretty good series. This boardgame allowed players to play the main characters from the comic books and go on adventures to explore the Mouse Kingdoms and make it safe. The board is made up of triangular sections showing the Mouse Kingdom and the roads running through it. The tiles are double-sided and the darker side is the Ruined side and the lighter side is the Guarded side. The game is over when all story quests from the quest deck have been completed and the object is for the players to finish the game with more Guarded tiles than Ruin tiles on the board.
Players have a hand of cards which they use to move from tile to tile, search for axes or food (the only two resources), or take on story quests. When you take on a story quest, you usually have to spend resources on your tile and you're generally rewarded by being able to flip the tile to the guarded side. The catch is that every turn you fail to complete the quest, some sort of penalty befalls you. This might be something minor like sending a card to the discard pile or it might be something serious like placing a new Ruin tile on the board (if it goes on too long you'll never be able to flip more than half of them in time).
The game rules state that players take their turn in order from youngest to oldest.
I was playing with an 11 year-old and two 7 year-olds.
I went last. I also got to play Sadie, the pink-cloaked mouse.
The game is rated for 10 and up so we were playing at the bottom edge of the age range. That said, my fellow gamers were pretty well-behaved and focused on the game. Because you have to pick another player to read the story challenges, I often got to read them out.
This game is really hard. Players have to work together because if one person hordes all the food and other people need food to complete their missions, and the food hoarder can't pull any travel cards to get to the guy in trouble and the guy in trouble has a serious penalty...it's really tough. There were a few advanced rules we weren't playing with that allowed for a solo win, but I'm not sure how someone could pull it off.
But we got real, real lucky. At the end of the game we had an equal number of Guarded and Ruin tiles and that was sufficient to win the game (ties go to the PCs). Supposedly this (along with a Mouse Guard RPG) will be rolling out for GenCon and it'll be interesting to see how it develops. I certainly think it's got a lot of potential.
In the afternoon, I had a fairly short Burning Wheel session. Originally, this was supposed to be the Watership Down/Dune crossover using Burning Wheel rules (can I say how cool that sounds?), but the GM couldn't get it all together in time. So we had a more Three Musketeers game. I played the elder daughter of the Spanish ambassador who was a complete hellion in social conflicts (although she punked out against her drunk, domineering father). It was a very short game. The GM decided to dispense with the detailed combat system which may have been a mistake. It's a bit of a pain and the rock-paper-scissors nature of BW combat rewards a bit of study which you don't get at a con game, but it's hard to be a Musketeer game without lots of dazzling swordplay.
In the end, my character got to go dancing at the palace ball and was well-poised to become the wife of the new Captain of the Musketeers. All without a huge amount of effort on my part. A win, but not a terribly memorable game.
In the evening, I crashed a Jeepform game of Upgrade!. Jeepform is best described as the Scandinavian-style LARP. It focuses a great deal on the inner workings of the characters, makes almost no use of any mechanics in favor of a more improv-flavored approach and is generally has this High Art reputation in the states. One of the leading advocates of Jeepform, Tobias Wrigstad made the flight over the pond to help spread the gospel. I was curious to see this all in motion, but the game was full up so I asked if I could sit in on the session. They said sure, but they also encouraged me to jump in and help out from time to time.
Upgrade! is the name of a reality TV-game where couples swap partners, go off to a tropical island for a month and then choose to stay with their original parters or "Upgrade" to the person they dated on the island (and if they Upgrade they get fabulous cash and prizes). It's obviously a play on shows like Temptation Island and stuff. So we had three couples, and Tobias and Emily acted as the co-hosts. I sat in on the side.
The game itself was the last episode. The PCs were all together on the stage watching a huge screen where "clips" of the show would play out. Of course, when clips came up, the players involved would jump up and play out the scene. Additionally, players could cut in and run scenes that ran in the "past" or the "future" -- side scenes that would play out to the left or right of the main clip respectively. Players could also step out to do monologues. Finally, the game took a few breaks to have "producer meetings" where players acted as the producers and got to dish on the show and suggest what needed to change or be emphasized.
I could go on for awhile about all the crazy stuff that went on. It got off to a pretty good start and kept rolling right along. I put in a few suggestions and ran in to help out with a couple of scenes, but mostly left it up to the "real" PCs to do stuff. Then, at the first producers meeting, questions were raised about the orientation of one of the characters.
"I think he's gay."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, I think we should smoke him out see if it's true or not."
"How would be do that? Introduce some sort of bisexual joker?"
*everyone looks at me*
"Yeah, a bisexual joker might be just the thing we need."
Enter Carlos, the resort's masseuse, crazy bisexual joker, and ah, "medical dispenser". Several fun scenes with him, including a very special game of Twister.
The game was a lot of fun. I'd say that Jeepform isn't terribly different from a LARP except in its willingness to jump around in time and the ability of other players to influence how you portray "your" character. Probably the best game of the con for me.
Saturday:
On Saturday morning, I got into a game of Artesia. This RPG is based off the comic of the same name. It's a great comic, but I wasn't terribly impressed with the RPG. But since it was only my impression, I thought it'd be fun to play a game and see how it worked out.
This game was problematic. The GM spent way too much time trying to explain the (incredibly detailed) world of Artesia and there was too much futzing around for what seemed like a simple RPG system (roll a d10 + stat + skill and beat an 18). The other problem was that he based the game heavily off of The Usual Suspects. Which is a great game, but the only question is "who's the last man standing?" and it locks people into re-doing the movie not just seeing what happens. In particular, one of the players (who got the Kyser Soze analog) was totally throwing out lots of pre-plotting ideas and just totally driving me nuts. Although it did make me wonder if sometimes I'm too forward with ideas when I'm doing games. A bit of self-reflection there.
Um, oh my guy was a girl named Alexus who was a scout. She really just wanted to blow town and get out of there, but she was roped into the heist and later, when the demi-god came after the goods, she allied herself with him to kill the others and deliver their souls in exchange for her own. This worked out, although in the process she became an avatar for the demi-god and then later turned into the deformed fortune teller who reassured one of the other PCs that he was indeed "the last man standing". Overall, this was probably the weakest game I played at the con, although it's caused me to think about how I play a bit so perhaps it's value lies in other arenas besides "fun".
In the afternoon, I was in a game of Primetime Adventures (PTA). This is the game that tries to create good television. I'm hoping to use this as the ruleset for a game I'd like to run for Annie so I was anxious to play through a session and see how it worked "on the table".
Unfortunately, I'd heard some grumbling from players in a previous run of the game that the pre-game set-up had gone on forever. In PTA, you need to create a show, but for a con game, I would've come in with more of a pre-set premise and had people work with that. Here, the only guide was "Sci-Fi" and the GM was kinda crunchy-hippie and like "but if Sci-Fi isn't what you want, I'm cool with that" and I groaned inwardly. Luckily, my group got their act together pretty quickly and came up with:
Cold Sleep -- a group of astronauts have been in suspended animation for thousands of years as their ship travels out to a mysterious Dyson Sphere. The astronauts have just been thawed out and will soon arrive at the sphere, but alien music sings to them in their VR dreams.
We played the pilot episode. And I was the Ship's A.I. Marie (after Marie Curie). In the pilot we introduced the Captain's big problem -- one of the sleep pod clusters malfunctioned and the Captain's wife (the ship's psychologist) was dead (in reality, not dead, but converted to an alien mental construct, but no one knows that). We had the last Jesuit priest confronting the faithless xeno-linguist and the much put-upon Janitor showing up his betters. Again, it would take me pages to explain the whole thing, but overall the actual play was pretty interesting. At the very least, I feel more comfortable about running PTA and helping people get scenes well-framed and pushing issues/conflicts.
Finally, on Saturday evening, I joined up with a playtest game of Giants by Jeff Lower. It's a game where, um, you play a giant. You're a big, honkin' giant and you've got this community that loves and/or fears you and you wander around and do giant-y stuff. You also get together with your other giant buddies to save the world from big stuff.
I played Delphina, the sea giantess. The cool thing about this game is that everyone pitches in to draw a map of the campaign world. So I had my community on Skull island and later I put in Neo-Rhodes and Happy Valley (both places to be ravaged by giants, of course). But dominating our maps were two huge volcanoes. We decided that both of these were about to come to life and cause trouble so we had to do something about it.
We bummed around for awhile and I was totally bamboozled by the evil leader of one of the fire cults. Then I climbed up to the flying city and got them to build me a device to let me talk to the sun about why he was awakening one of the volcanoes. In the end, the smaller volcano came to life and all the giants pitched in to defeat it.
This game still needs some work, but the map-making and the premise it just so good that even now, it's still a pretty good game. It'll be interesting to see how he works out the issues and what the final product looks like.
That was it. On Sunday morning I drove us all home (since I had 5 hours of sleep and everyone else had less). I am pleased/amused to note that with the one exception of Carlos, every one of my characters was female. Which means I've more than fulfilled my "experimental gender-bending" quota and can go back to playing scruffy guys for awhile. :)
I also picked up a mess of Morrow Project stuff, which was my big buy for the con and I drooled over the Warhammer 40K RPG book (gorgeous!) but declined to purchase (my resolve here is probably going to be real weak though).
I think I had a much better time at this con this year than I did last year. I'm certainly considering going back again next year. The indie-gamers I hang with seem to be getting into an "old school" mode where they run classic games like "red box" D&D with only a few (or no) rule tweaks. That's got me thinking about running a classic Traveller game or something similar.
But I'm glad that my upcoming weekends aren't nearly as packed as they have been so far this year.
later
Tom
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Date: 2008-01-28 08:22 pm (UTC)Hey, Tom! Glad you got to try PTA. I haven't overlooked your email asking about the game - I just hadn't had a chance to get to it. In the meantime, you may get something out of my 20x20 post reflecting on PTA from when Dungeon Majesty was in full swing.
Here's my one real thought on running the game. (It runs counter to what seems to be the conventional internet wisdom on PTA, so feel free to disagree or ignore.) The AP posts I've seen on PTA at the Forge & Story Games have enshrined the idea that it's best played as a zany collaborative improv, where nothing gets decided until you sit down at the table.
That may work, and it's definitely neat when a game comes together out of nothing, but I note that most (all?) of those posts describe one-shots rather than complete series. I'm not sure I'd want to invest seven sessions into whatever the group happened to come up with in, say, twenty minutes of brainstorming on the first night.
At any rate, that's not how we ran Dungeon Majesty. DM was much more like a regular* game in that I pitched the original show idea to the players and got their buy-in. They had input, certainly, and they invented their characters, but I had a gestalt in mind from the start. Once we started playing, I did prep for each episode. I didn't know how each episode would go and I had to do a lot of tap-dancing on the fly, but planned the opening scenes pretty closely and I had twists and bangs and funny lines ready for the scenes that followed. (The screen presence arcs and the "next week on" scenes were great inspiration for my plotting.)
*where "regular" means "You know, regular for us. Not old school D&D or 90s railroading, but not Polaris or some Scandinavian LARP either. Regular! I know it when I see it..."
After the opening of each episode, the players framed all scenes and narrated all the outcomes they won, and we never fudged the dice, so they still had a lot of narrative power, and I had to be very flexible in my prep. It wasn't like I could railroad things even if I'd wanted to. But it wasn't all being spun out of thin air either.
I think some people in the indie scene might think we were playing PTA "wrong" (this even comes out in some of the comments to that old 20x20 post), but Dungeon Majesty was a hell of a lot of fun. I wouldn't have done it any differently.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-28 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-28 08:32 pm (UTC)Hey Rob,
I'm thinking that one solution might be to have me run the "plot" scenes and let the players work through the "character" scenes. This way there's more of a unifying flow to the overall story, but we spend more time on dealing with the people and their issues.
later
Tom