Spiky Bits of Ego

A funny realization came to me this morning regarding why I was so especially frustrated about the band reunion not involving any actual playing and the idea of playing music at the picnic falling apart. I'm still correct in saying that I don't need an audience of strangers (though it would be fun to perform once in a while). However, part of me wants to show the old friends I've previously played music with that I've gotten a lot better over the last year or so. On some level, I still see myself as the junior partner I was when I was starting out and still have something to prove to people who know me from that time period. I suppose there's a part of all of us that just never entirely grows up and continues to color our choices in life.

Musical Direction Thoughts

Jason and I haven't been doing much lately (though I have located another guitar player for us to try), but we did get together this past weekend to play. Not much of note to say about it, other than that the main thing we were doing was trying to get musically reacquainted, and I finally got to actually use my new bass amplifier. My guitar playing continues to improve, to the point where I'm considering investing in some better guitar equipment if I'm going to continue to spend this much time playing the instrument.

There was a possibility of some friends getting together to play at a mutual friend's picnic that weekend, but everybody except me seemed to lose enthusiasm and/or confidence as the actual date approached, and it fell through. I had focused most of my practicing for almost a month on the particular songs we'd chosen for that event. Very frustrating, but Jason and I should be able to use two of those songs for our project, so the time wasn't entirely wasted. I'm still far more interested in playing as part of a group than performing by myself, but I can really see why some people end up playing solo when it's so hard to get people on the same page.

I'd hoped to get something musically operational together with people I already knew because the idea was more to play music with people I enjoy as a social event than to form a musically successful band, but since that hasn't worked out I suspect I'm going to have to look further afield for people (thus, the guitar player I found on a message board from a local music store). If he doesn't work out, I'm not sure exactly what we're going to do, but I think a change is necessary. The most likely possibility is that we'll try recording some original material with the two of us and see how much fun we can have doing that. Life has a way of taking you where you need to go (which almost always isn't where you wanted to go), so I'm trying to stay open to possibilities at this point.

That Post-Con Charge

As usual, I came out of DexCon with some inspiration to do new material. I surprised myself by sitting down to put some of the new ideas into a form I could save, and typed out four pages of rough ideas for four different scenarios before I slowed down. Looks like I won't have any trouble getting material together for next year.

I had a little time today and put some more focused effort in on my idea for Paranoia. One of the advantages of writing for this setting is that there's a standard format for adventures, and I still haven't written so much Paranoia that I feel a need to break out of that format yet. There's the mission briefing, the trip to PLC for equipment, the trip to R&D for experimental equipment, and then the actual mission can be relatively brief and simple, since most of the complications come from the character interactions. The climax should be wacky, chaotic, and destructive, then it's back to the briefing room for an epilogue.

Most of the real prep work for this one is going to be in character creation (to make sure we get the complex character interactions during actual play) and a couple of forms that I'll have to generate myself to suit one running joke. I like to have a working title, but one hasn't come to me yet for this one, though there is a particular word I want to include in it.

I've been looking forward to revisiting Paranoia for a while. It's a classic that a lot of convention GMs don't seem to tackle for one reason or another, but players always sign up for it when it's available. The writing of it is already fun.

DexCon - Sunday

After checking out of the hotel, I spent some dealers' room time, picking up copies of Zombies!!! from Twilight Creations and "The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen" from Magnum Opus Press. I hesitated about picking up Baron Munchausen because, as much as I enjoy the game myself from my experiences at conventions, I'm not sure that anyone I know locally will be willing to play it. Still, I decided to give them the benefit of a doubt after thinking of a few people who might be willing to at least try it.

My final session of the con was another run of "Clerks 1 1/2", with three players this time. A married couple played Jay and Silent Bob, the third player took Randal Graves, and I NPC'd Dante Hicks when we needed him. It seemed a little strange to have a woman playing Silent Bob, but she nailed it, giving me my biggest single laugh of the session by coming up behind "Jay" in character in a scene best not described in detail but entirely appropriate to the style of a Kevin Smith movie. In the end, Jay and Silent Bob lost pretty much everything they had but reaffirmed their friendship in a big way, while Randal had the best three days of his life in the company of two comely female demons before disappearing entirely from the face of the earth, never to be seen again. Yes, it breaks continuity, but it was funny and made perfect sense for the character. I've had a lot of success with Sorcerer for three years in a row now, and since preparation for it is minimal, it's likely I'll do another one for next year if I can come up with the right idea.

I must say that my last couple of convention experiences have been particularly good, and again I had that special recharge of ideas that keeps me going. I have enough new ideas to keep me going for at least another two years, and enjoyed reconnecting with some people I haven't seen in a while.

DexCon - Saturday

I slept in on Saturday, so no Saturday morning session for me. Saturday afternoon was my GURPS Banestorm session that drew a full house of six players plus four alternates, so needless to say I'll be offering this one again next year. The fantasy material does seem to draw better than my usual preference of horror. Five of my six players were new to me, and the sixth was one I hadn't seen in quite a few years. I really enjoy and appreciate my regulars, but it's also nice to have some new blood to shake things up now and again.

I hadn't been able to schedule a playtest in advance for this story ("Tiger by the Tail"), which involved a lot of the characters being at cross purposes, so I wasn't entirely sure how the dynamic would work out, but it did work out pretty much as planned, with one actual character death and a lot of misunderstandings and manipulations. The tricky part turned out to be having a very young player who was not only new to GURPS, but also didn't quite understand his character's relatively complex role in the situation and was having a hard time taking appropriate action as a result. The other, more minor difficulty was that the bruiser of the group had an aspect to his character that didn't work out as threateningly as I'd hoped. I might need to work on that, and possibly have more for the group to do on the journey. I'd purposely kept that part simple because I wanted the focus to be on the interpersonal situations as opposed to figuring out how to fight a monster, but it might help if there was something slightly more involved to deal with along the way.

Three of the players from that session who were new to me must have enjoyed themselves because they all signed up for my Saturday night GURPS Cabal session ("Lives in the Balance"). I was delighted, because up until that point I'd had no players signed up for that one. And shortly after that group signed up, so did some other people. I ultimately ended up having to turn a player away from that session as well. Quite a difference from having no players at all! Even better, one of the Cabal players was another that I hadn't seen in the last few years, and particularly enjoyed having before. The whole Cabal group was very strong in terms of roleplaying, which left us pressed for time at the end of that session, since the final scene got started a bit later than I'd intended.

There were several really fun bits in this session, too long to detail here. The important things to note are, as usual, the surprises that some of the players brought to the table. For one thing, the new character of the group (a Chinese expert on the manipulation of chi energy) was written in a very straightforward manner, but the player brought a wonderfully wry sense of humor to it (as well as some ambiguity about his real origins) that I'll try to maintain if I ever bring the character back as an NPC, which seems fairly likely. The other major development, which I'll almost certainly keep in the official continuity, was one of the female characters making a startling agreement that I can't include here for risk of spoiling a future session. The player expressed concern that she'd ruined the character by doing so. My reply was "I haven't lost a character; I've gained a storyline". I already have a good idea for the very next Cabal scenario, but now I have another one of the scenario after that! There's a lesson to be learned there. Each time someone thought they'd irreparably damaged a character by making a dramatic decision, they had in fact opened up an exciting new possibility for that character! This is a shining example of the advantage roleplaying has over fiction in my eyes. The interaction with the players often produces Big Fun results that I'd never have written myself.

I finished out Saturday night by participating in the poker tournament and being the very first player eliminated. I tried a more daring strategy than I usually do, and ran into triple queens and triple sixes respectively, concealed by the other player having a pocket pair and flopping the third card in each case. It didn't leave me with many chips, so I went all in with a hand of queen/jack suited, only to have the opposing player pair his king on the flop, and I was done. Granted, I had some bad luck, but have to admit that I made far too many mistakes. I have to do better next year if I play, because you can't be worse than first out!

I took advantage of my early departure to spend some time with Mike Miller and Michelle Mishko in the board game room, then with a fellow Steve Jackson Games rep that I'd only met in passing previously, so it worked out well, all things considered.

DexCon - Friday

Once again, I find myself reminded why I enjoy doing this so much.

DexCon was at a new location this year, which turned out to be an improvement in several respects. The hotel staff was especially friendly and helpful, and access to reasonably affordable and quickly available food was far easier than the previous location. However, the new location also had a lot more people from outside the convention wandering through the area, resulting in a fair amount of unintentional "freaking the mundanes". I could tell that some of the hotel staff was not previously acquainted with the gaming community by watching reactions to some of the costumes and unusual conversations going on around them. The former hotel staff had come to know us, and usually just reacted with smirks and the occasional eye roll, while some of the new hotel staff would sometimes actually turn and watch some of the more extreme costumes as the people wearing them passed by.

One of my favorite moments was when an argument broke out in a LARP in an area near the main lobby. I could immediately tell by some of the archaic language that it was coming from a LARP, so the sound was barely a blip on my personal radar, but then I saw two security guards rushing to the stairs to investigate, only then realizing that the two people involved were engaged in some kind of mock duel and not the real thing. I'm sure they were informed that something like that might happen, but you know they had to check the situation out to be sure in order to do their jobs, so I'm not making fun of them for doing so. It was just funny to see it happen.

I arrived in time to play in Andrew Morris' Pareidolix session, "Psychic Underground". Virtually everything except the initial setting description was collectively created on the fly, as usual for Pareidolix, and yet it all ultimately came together for a very satisfying story. There were five of us playing, and I was by far the oldest player at the table while playing the youngest character. My character concept was more of a follower than a protagonist from the outset, which was intentional on my part, but I think some of the others were concerned that the character would be too passive. The reason for my choice was that the first two players to describe their characters had chosen especially forceful personalities that were likely to come into conflict with each other, and I thought it would be more interesting to make myself a valuable bone of contention between them than to be another strong point of view, which turned out to be correct.

Andrew's Pareidolix system definitely influenced my own Fluid system, but seeing it again after having run some Fluid showed where he has solved some problems that I haven't, to be honest. Fluid may work better for a long term game, but Andrew said he has rules for Pareidolix for multi-session play, though I haven't seen them yet. I'll have to look at them, and if he does the job better, I may just give up on Fluid and use his system. Why reinvent the wheel when every session I've played of Andrew's has done what I set out to do?

My scheduled In Nomine session for Friday night folded for lack of players, attracting exactly zero. Unfortunately, the change in location also meant some shift in the composition of the player population, and in this case may have meant that it's going to take some work on my part to build up a new audience for In Nomine at DexCon.

And so I signed up for a Call of Cthulhu session, which I was quite looking forward to because this is a game I sometimes run, and only rarely get to play. I also know and like one of the other players already signed up for it, and trusted her taste in games, so I thought it was likely to be good. From what I was able to gather, this particular scenario was written by someone who does it at least semi-professionally, but I was seriously unimpressed by both the scenario itself and the GM. There was nothing especially creepy or engaging about the story or characters apart from a disturbing creature turning up in the last half hour of play, and no real zip to the GM's presentation. Meh. The best parts for me were interacting with two of the other players, including the one I knew.

My midnight Sorcerer game (Clerks 1 1/2) had two players, which was still enough to run it, and they chose to play Jay and Silent Bob. One of the most pleasant surprises about the Clerks sessions has been the consistent quality of the players. The performances for all three of the Clerks sessions (playtest plus the two DexCon sessions) have been good to great across the board, without a weak player in the bunch, and the endings have felt right for the source material every time. Very encouraging. I had to do some tweaking because the idea is that Randall will probably be the first character to get a demon, but it all worked out well enough. It's interesting to note that players in general prefer to play Jay and Silent Bob (particularly Silent Bob) to Randall and Dante. In spite of the late hour, both of the players hung around for an extended and very interesting conversation afterward about the Askewniverse and storytelling in general, which then drifted into storytelling style in anime. I'm no expert on anime, but have absorbed enough from my wife by talking to her about it to keep up with the conversation.

DexCon Next Weekend

My mind has been very much on music lately, but it's time to shift gears and get ready for next week's DexCon. I took a little time a couple of weeks ago to get organized, so there's really very little prep work for me to do at this point, apart from getting reaquainted with the material before I go.

As it turns out, I'm going to run "Clerks 1 1/2" not once, but twice, which is fine.

I'm looking forward to seeing all of the people that I rarely see outside of conventions. Since I didn't do a spring convention this year, it feels as though it's been forever since I've been to one. I expect to post con details later, but it'll probably be another week and a half before I have the chance.