Intercon L con report

Back from Intercon L, and although I am utterly exhausted, it was a heck of a lot of fun getting that way. I didn't prepare for the unusual schedule as well as I should have-- I'd stayed late to see the Titus naked tech on Wednesday, and I'd had two days this week when I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep, so I went in with less reserve than I usually did. But even if I couldn't stay up late, I was determined to enjoy this special once-a-year occasion as much as I possibly could. Ahead is my non-spoilery review!

Friday night jhite1230* and I arrived at the con about an hour and a half in advance of games, allowing us to connect with Seamus, who was one of our gracious roommates, socialize a little, and prepare. Jared ran off to meet in their game space for House of the Rising Sun. I socialized a bit and dressed in the hotel room to play Ariadne in Feast of the Minotaur. I must mention again how much I love this dress and how pretty I felt in it. It's a brand-new couture piece I bought on eBay for a fraction of its retail price, made of this luxurious crinkled velvet and washed silk straps in a gorgeous berry color. It's rare that I get a pretty princess role, and I've been feeling like such a frump lately, so I really wanted to look good for this role, and I think I succeeded. Thanks to for taking this picture:

I bought some sea shell necklaces to wear around my neck and maybe like a circlet in my hair, but I decided I looked better without them. Showing cleavage is not my preferred form of sexy dressing, but given the style of the dress I figured what the hell, just this once. Might as well enjoy the one benefit of gaining weight. However, I discovered a dress that's held on only with tied ribbons is not the most stable, and I found myself adjusting it to preserve good taste quite a bit. I should probably look into some body tape for next time I wear it. I decided to wear my beloved Bast sandals with it, and was pleased that they remained comfortable for the entirety of the game. I must have gotten twenty compliments on the look and felt very good.

The game itself was wonderful, but in a very strange way. As I mentioned, when I read my character sheet there was next to nothing in it. Some personality, very little plot. I heard other players found the same in theirs. But when we got into game, it took a little digging and faking it until we made it, but there was quite a bit of plot that existed in the world-- it's just that very little of it got into the character sheets. It helped that it was very strongly based in Greek mythology that, being geeks, we were all pretty familiar with. But I had a wonderful time, particularly interacting with the other excellent larpers, without whom the game would not have worked at all-- it takes active, creating player to dig up plot out of the ether like that. Highlights included offside7* and a new larper named Kelly Morgan as my sisters who gave me dramatic conflict and support at the same time, morethings5* who had a note-perfect transformation partway through the game that would have been awesome if only for the look he gave me at one point, and Alex Pogue as my Theseus who made the romance plot so interesting and fun. There was also a particular twist that I thought was a very clever way to get a crucial element into the game. I got the feeling there were a handful of characters who didn't have enough to do, but for the most part the nebulous plot was available for everyone to seize on to. Still, if it were up to me I think that plot really needs to get put into sheets. I don't know if it was a stylistic choice or if the writers just ran out of time and had to fill the sheets with something. I highly recommend this in its current state, if only on the condition that you are an active, independent player, but I can honestly say this is the most enjoyable game I've ever played for which I would still recommend a total character sheet rewrite.

The other other game I played was as Irene Adler in An Evening Aboard the HMS Eden. I put together a costume I was very pleased with relatively inexpensively, including a thrift store prom dress with a corsety-looking bodice, a gauzy black blouse beneath it to give it sleeves, and a wide Kentucky Derby bonnet with ostrich feathers on it. But I'm sorry to say I was quite disappointed by this game. It had a very fun theme/set dressing, but the writing was, at least in my part of it, pretty lackluster. As I said to some people after the game, all the direction I had was ticky-box goals-- what boiled down to "Okay, go ring that bell over there!" and once you've run over and rung it, you're unsatisfied because there's no reason to have wanted it nor anything interesting that comes of it. Join that club that doesn't do anything, buy a bigger airship that you can't actually use in game, cure this disease that doesn't have any in-game effects so why waste the time, that sort of thing. The only things in my sheet that were like actual plots, the mystery of what was going on with my sister and what the deal with this item I had was, no one seemed to know anything about so I made no progress on them. Not everyone seemed to have unengaging plots, Jared had a pretty good time and a number of people seemed about to stay busy, but I got the impression that around a third to a half the game was in the same situation I was. It was just very amateurish larp-writing, and though the GMs I asked for help didn't really managed to point me in any useful direction, I will give the gentlemen credit for trying really, really hard. I worry I came across as a difficult player, for which I'm sorry, but I think I failed to convey, no, I don't want another ticky-box to check off, I want a plot thread, but given the writing in the game they may not have been able to understand the difference. I will be hesitant to sign up for any game by these authors again.

Last thing I did this weekend was help natbudin*, emp42ress*, and simplewordsmith* run our game Resonance. By this point I was draggy and tired, but fortunately this run of Resonance mostly ran itself. We had a very good group of players who bought fully into the concept and were happy to ride the rails of the story we'd laid out. This game relies heavily on that willingness in order to work. We also implemented a new device in the third act to see if we could convince players to play it out the way we'd intended. In the first run, the third act didn't happen like it was supposed to at all, so we tried a subtle restructuring. It mostly worked if not entirely in the second run, and didn't really work at all in the third. So this time we basically put in a plot hammer. The hammer made it so the players had no choice but to do what we wanted them to. I think the players were fine with it, but seeing it in action I've decided from a writer's standpoint that I do not like the particular technique we chose. It is a kludge, and it's slightly off-tone in my opinion, but I will say that it works and players are okay with it, so ultimately it's an acceptable mechanism. I prefer the subtler one we implemented for the second and third runs, and I'm not really sure why it didn't work, but the fact of the matter is it didn't.

Also, one of my fellow GMs Danielle pointed out how susceptible this game is to becoming derailed by issues of Maslow's heirarchy of needs. We want the players to be thinking of higher-order issues, that's what the story's about, but the game's setting suggests threats to safety and physical well-being that human nature tends to want to attend to first because you can't do anything if you're dead. We need those threats to exist in a vague sense to maintain the atmosphere, but we really need to manage how pressing they are so as not to distract players from the real, emotional issues we want them to explore. We struck a good balance in this run, but I remember how previous runs have been stalled simply by questions of "But will we be safe if we do X?" that resulted in a reluctance to move forward into the unknown.

I left early on Sunday to catch the last show of Titus, which I'm glad I did, but still, I was sorry I couldn't spend more time socializing. Intercon is one of the most important moments of my year, and I love how it surrounds you with creative, interesting people. I was happy to hear that Jared and EB's game House of the Rising Sun ran great, as did The Prince Comes of Age by Kindness, Matt, and Bernie. Congratulations to everyone who brought their artistic labors, and thanks to everyone who helped make this con so wonderful.