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.