Go Play '07
I went to my first RPG con this weekend with lpsmith. It was seven blocks away so it seemed like I didn't have much of an excuse, even if I didn't really know anyone there or anything.

We got there a little late; I figured that even though officially signups were at 8, we could get there at 9 when the games started and find something. In retrospect that was dumb, since I'm kind of picky about what I'm looking for and this was for indie RPGs, which in practice means there's a lot of narrativist stuff and family drama/personal introspection stuff, none of which I'm big on.


Blood and Bronze: So it ended up that for the first slot we weren't playing an RPG at all -- we were playing the boardgame Blood and Bronze with its creator. It's vaguely like Risk or Diplomacy with a Greek theme: each player represents a particular Greek city (with associated king, hero, deity and army), and you battle it out in the aforementioned four arenas. The best part about it is the theming -- the sheets give you some information about your king and so on (I was Thebes, and had Oedipus, Hercules, and Hermes) and it is strongly encouraged to use this for smack-talk when declaring war or calling for allies. Since we were playing with the designer we got to see the posh version of the game, which is excellent. The props include a bronze bowl full of pennies painted red on one side (blood and bronze, right) and when you declare a war, you take a token and hurl it into the bowl, getting a noise like the bell to start a boxing round. There's also a nice thing where you write down your events as they take place and read out the narrative of your city at the end of the game.

The thing that was not so great was the mechanics, unfortunately. We only played the one game so I may have totally misunderstood, but I think the game suffered badly from being so deterministic. Unlike Risk, there's no die-rolling, and unlike Diplomacy, there's no secret declaration of actions -- you just say "hey, I'm attacking you with 11 points and you have 7 points", and then you each try to argue the other players into allying (there are rules which modify this, and a non-binding diplomacy phase at the beginning), but since all the numbers are visible it is usually obvious whether there is any point to allying with someone or not. There was a nice idea laid on top of this where the thing you're fighting for is to be "without peer" in three of the four categories, and a, say, hero without peer cannot be defeated in battle (it's vaguely like the safeties in Mille Bornes), but it doesn't feel to me like it's completely integrated with the rest of the mechanics (there's a totally separate system of rewards and penalties when a peerless battle is fought, and it feels like it messes up the allying).

But the flavor was, like I said, good. I got the vibe that the creator intended there to be even more roleplaying than we did -- at some point lpsmith was trying to get him as an ally, and he said "what will you offer me? how about your king's daughter?" and Lucian kind of blinked at that (characters don't exist in the rules at all and have no mechanical effect). This was a bit of a step up from our usual "You Spartans fight like old women!" diplomatic tactics and it's possible if we were playing like that, the mechanics would have worked better.


Spirit of Serenity: We continued to be fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants in terms of game signups, and it looked like we weren't going to be able to get a game in for the second session, but jhkim said "uh, I guess I could run something" and I promptly grabbed his arm and twisted. This was especially the case when he offered to run a Spirit of the Century game, which was one of the systems I was particularly hoping to try out here. The particular thing he ended up running was a setting variant in the Firefly 'verse -- instead of a team of freelance mercenary-types, we were a team of Companions.

Play turned out to match my image of what a typical con game is like. There were six of us: I wasn't quite sure who knew who previously, but I'm pretty sure the other four guys were either two sets of two friends or four friends. In the group on the mud we've been playing together for ages and have a pretty good idea of the "house style"; in this game with no prior shared experience we kept bumping into house style conflicts. There was one point where two guys stepped away from the main table and started plotting. The rest of us (including the GM) looked at each other kinda funny -- who exactly do they need to keep secrets from? -- but what the hell. Or there was this one guy who kept coming up with elaborate plans that seemed totally useless to me*. In our usual group I'd just step out of character for a sec and ask him/the GM "c'mon, do we really need to do this?", but here it didn't seem worth getting into.

*Although speaking of bad plans, there was a point where I said "ok, while they're all looking at Galvin, I pull a gun on the informant and drag him out the back door". But then everyone looked at me in horror and I said "uh, ok, or not."

Also as I imagine is typical for con games, it felt like we were going agonizingly slow in terms of "solving the mystery", and the spotlight was pretty shaky moving around (partly as a result of the aforementioned dumb plan stuff, although maybe I'm just griping; there was a really obvious location we didn't head to until late in the session because we were distracted by various people's side-plans). It felt like lpsmith in particular got kind of shafted by lack of spotlight, but I guess he did get to hack the computer in a few important places and get some vital plot tidbits (he was playing Lalu, the engineer; I was Pearl, the security chief). Things were quite rushed but we did get 90% of the plot exposed and came to some resolution by the end, so I think we were basically ok, although I don't know how much the GM cut things down to make us get there in time.

Now, system: pretty good! The basics of SotC is that you have skills at various levels and you add on 4d3-8 (there are special +1/0/-1/+1/0/-1 dice for this, of course). Then you have aspects, which are things like "Grease Monkey" or "Secret Crush on Lilly" or "A Few Good Men". If you don't like a roll and have a relevant aspect, you can spend a token to reroll or get a bonus; or you can spend a token and use the aspect to declare something about the scene. If the GM uses your aspect to get you into trouble, you get a token. This is simple but it's totally fun -- the character's skills were high enough that things were usually ok, and when they weren't the aspects provided color for a way we could get out of trouble. Beyond basic skill checks, we had one extended combat at the end, an interrogation (social combat works the same as physical combat, with a pool of hit points and attack/defense skills). This didn't work so well, but like I mentioned, things were a little rushed at the end and it was an unusual situation anyway (two of us against a guy alone in a hospital bed -- not really a fair fight). I like what I see so far, and I'm eager to play more with the system (I think SotC may totally hit my sweet spot in terms of having a lot of character freedom to improvise things, but having enough mechanics to still feel like a game: just like Nobilis, actually).


1001 Nights: You will be surprised to hear that we had to talk somebody into running something for us in the third slot as well. It turned out to be the Blood and Bronze guy, in fact, but this time we were playing 1001 Nights. Like I said earlier, I am not really big on narrativist or very-freeform games, so it was a surprise that I really liked this one. The game is short enough that you can just follow the link and read it, but the short version is you're all courtiers of the Sultan, and you take turns telling stories in which the other courtiers take on roles of the characters. The person telling the story is the GM and has the usual authorial powers, but the characters (at least how we played) have a great deal of power of assertion as well: "I'll take these jewels to the Court Magician! He will brew me a sleeping potion to give to the advisor!" (when no such Court Magician had been mentioned, but then the GM says "absolutely!" and drafts a player to be the Court Magician).

In addition, everyone except the GM (whether they have a role in the story or not) can make "I wonder" declarations: "I wonder if the sleeping potion will be given to the wrong person?" "I wonder if the Court Magician is a traitor?". These are essentially suggestions for ways the story can go; if they come up in the story, whether proved or disproved, the person making the suggestion is rewarded (it doesn't matter whether the Court Magician is a traitor or not, just that the state of his loyalty is displayed).

At the end of each story, you have a scene with the courtiers -- people have been accumulating dice during the story, and they allocate these to Safety, Freedom, or Ambition, and roll them to see how far along these paths their courtier advances, then narrate a brief scene explaining what happens to their courtier ("A rich noble of the court is pleased by my portrayal of the wise vizier and considers, perhaps, the advisability of taking a beautiful young musician for a bride."). Then another courtier/player begins a story, and play continues. When someone loses all their safety, or achieves freedom or their ambition, the game ends.

I haven't mentioned the character creation system, but it's somehow totally awesome. You start with a name and an archetype and it steps you through this setting-appropriate development system which fleshes it out into a full character where you can say exactly what your ambition is. I don't get exactly why it works so well, but I'd seriously consider importing it to other systems if I could get a better handle on it.


So, yeah, I had a good time. If I go to another of these, though, I'll have to plan things better; it felt too much like the games I was in were ones that people were only running because I was standing around looking lost and sad and that is a little discomfiting.