GenCon Postmortem 3

Gaming at GenCon: This is apt to be the longest post of the series. I’ll talk about the specific games and the sessions, what I liked, what I didn’t, and why. To sum it up, I played a total of 10 game sessions, for a total of about 25-27 hours of gaming over the course of the weekend.

Monsterhearts (written by Joe McDaldno, run by Joe Beason, 3.5 hours x 1 session): I’ve heard enough buzz about Monsterhearts to be intrigued, but I’ll admit it wasn’t at the top of my list to play, despite having a great deal of respect for the Joe M’s design chops. All the same, when Joe B was getting a game of that going first thing when I came into GoD to play, that’s what I played. Unfortunately, there were only two of us playing, but Cliff ended up being a very compatible co-player, with whom I played in a couple of other games over the weekend. The basic premise of Monsterhearts is teenage monsters and the drama that surrounds them. To put it succinctly, I’ll borrow a quote I saw somewhere: “What if Twilight didn’t suck?” Our particular session had some Buffy overtones, as I played “The Chosen One”, which is a Buffy-esque monster hunter. Cliff was “The Queen”, or perhaps more accurately, the King, as he played a male character, which he twisted slightly to be a mind-dominator bent on world conquest. Memorable scenes include when my character, Victoria, cornered a rival in the girl’s bathroom to try to get information out of her, and ended up starting a fight she very decisively did not win, and the haunted house seduction by the same rival of the other PC in an attempt to win him over to her dark master, but instead falling under his thrall.

The game is very, very tight, with mechanics designed to point the player characters at each other in some fashion, either as friends, lovers and rivals, and at no point does it ever allow you to forget that you’re playing high school kids who just happen to be just the other side of the veil of weird. It left me a little frustrated that our game would only be a one-shot, as I really wanted to continue to pursue my goals, and see where it all went, which is generally a good sign of a good session. It was on my short-list of games to buy, but though IPR (the retailer selling it) brought plenty of copies, it was sold out by the time I made the decision to buy it. Ironically, it turned out that the last copy was bought by my own roommate, Jay.

Dungeon World (written by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel, run by Scott Acker and Matt Boersma, 2 hours x 2 sessions): Dungeon World is the bleeding edge of the new hotness in indie land, which admittedly makes me balk. Still, the opportunity came up twice over the weekend to play, and I’m glad I did. The first session was… well, it didn’t really sell me. It was easily the worst session I played at GenCon, but that doesn’t mean it sucked; It was just the one so-so game in a weekend of consistent awesome. It was still quite fun, but man we were a scattered group. As the session ended, I declared us the Worst Adventuring Group EVER. The GM was also a little disorganized at first, and the scenario wasn’t ideal for the rogue I decided to play (enchanted woods, even more enchanted roads) so I don’t blame the GM. The second session, where I played my Paladin, was a lot more impromptu, and the GM had dynamic pacing down to a science. We actually successfully completed the quest just as the two hours was expiring. Regarding what Dungeon World is, it’s D&D tropes and feel played with a fast, light system based on Apocalypse World.

I found Dungeon World to be less tight than Monsterhearts, but it did a very good job of capturing the feel of Dungeons and Dragons without being all that similar mechanically. The classes are bog-standard D&D classes with the same feel, and the stats are basically exactly what you’d expect going in, but those overlay the fast system which creates complications rather than dead-ends. If you love D&D, but just can’t find the time for it anymore, Dungeon World may be right up your 10’x10’ corridor. It sets up fast, it plays fast, and only requires minimal preparation (though I’d imagine it handles the deep prep that most DMs are use to just fine). I wasn’t able to pick this up at IPR either, as it wasn’t yet commercially available, having recently funded through a Kickstarter campaign. I believe it’s available in PDF, and those who backed already had their books there at the Con.

Fiasco (written by Jason Morningstar, facilitated by Steve Segedy, 2 hours x 1 session): I’ll admit that I would have been okay if I didn’t play Fiasco. It is the most attractive game, thematically, that Jason has produced, but given the very loose influence by the mechanics on the narrative that I’ve seen and heard of from his games, I was ready to pass. Still, when there was a packed room, and Steve offered to facilitate a game of Fiasco, I decided to give it a shot, and I’m very glad I did. The game started out complicated (as usual) but nothing outrageous, with a bunch of office-workers in an uncaring corporate environment. It quickly went completely batshit. My character, “that Tammy girl”, the hot new temp, was probably the only one that wasn’t certifiably insane. After some stalkerish co-ordination, things went completely south with blackmail, cyber-theft, firebombs, torture and interrogation, crazed gunmen and eventually the bombed out wreckage of the building. Tammy was the most sympathetic character, with the rest of the players showing a cheerful self-loathing for their own characters, but in the end, the character we all hated worst (including the guy playing him) the stalker security guard with a gas-mask fetish ended up with everything, the money, and the soul-dead girl on his arm. It was great.

Fiasco isn’t the sort of game you play when you want straightforward adventures. Think something like Tarantino or the Coen Brothers; complicated, messy, and the good guys (if there were any to begin with) aren’t the ones walking away with a smile at the end. It’s a GM-less game, and while the mechanics have almost NO control over what happens in the game, they really, really drive play in surprising ways. Play revolves around scenarios called “Playsets” which can be anything from a bank heist, to a bunch of folks trapped in a car together on a road trip. I did buy this, and even managed to corner Jason and get it autographed. It’s definitely the sort of game I’d play again.

3:16 (written by Gregor Hutton, ran by me, 2 hours x 1 session): 3:16 is the only game I played at GenCon that I’d played before. I had to buy a new copy, as I’ve not been able to find my original copy for a long time. I ran this Saturday night for what was easily the biggest group I’ve had in many and many a year, 6 players. 3:16 works well for smaller groups, but I think, contrary to some opinions, that it really sings with a larger group. I know I enjoyed this session a lot more than others I’ve ran in the last few years, though some of that, I’m sure, comes from the glow imparted by GenCon. The inter-player dynamic made it so that I felt like I was carrying a lot less of the game than when I’ve had to run it for 2-3 players. And man, did we have a colorful cast. My players were: Matt Jackson, Bryan Meadows, Jay “MadJay” Brown, Kayne Newell, Brennen Reece and Bridget Westerman. We went through character generation pretty quickly, and it fell out that Bridget was the only one who didn’t try to max out Fighting Ability (she actually went the other way, 7 NFA/3FA), so she made Sergeant. Out of the 3 people with 8 Fighting Ability, Bryan won the roll-off, making him the Corporal. From there, I went into some descriptive roleplay in the troop bay, before introducing the hard-ass lieutenant, and preparing to get them planet-side. I once again used the crazy pilot and the roll to maintain the contents of your stomach that I stole shamelessly from John Harper’s game back in 2008, and they hit the planet and we got rolling. We only got in one combat, and I think there was some confusion about the alien ability I’d rolled, which basically made attacks at Far Range completely impossible. I kept rolling really well (5s, 6s, and 7s against my AA of 7, meaning I succeeded and got high initiative most times). They were getting slammed by my little 5 token encounter, and had to use the cancel move twice to avoid forcing anyone to use armor or die. Eventually they got in close enough and started laying down the harm. Unfortunately, immediately following the combat encounter, Bridget had to go, as she was an exhibitor, and thus had to get up earlier than some. We took that as a cue to call it quits for the night, and never did manage to get everyone back together and free to continue the mission. Still, it was great fun.

3:16 is definitely one of my go-to games. Immediately following GenCon ’08, when I was first introduced to it, I bragged to my home group that I could explain the game, prepare a mission, and run them through a complete mission in two hours. Then I proved it. Since then, it has provided several sessions of low-prep fun. Even feeling like my GM mojo had atrophied over the years of relative disuse, I remain confident I can deliver the fun with 3:16. It is a space-marine game in similar vein to Aliens and Starship Troopers, and can be played very satirically, or very straight and still be good. If you like violence and space marines and are willing to try something new, you should definitely go give Gregor your money.

Dog Eat Dog (written by Liam Burke, facilitated by Liam Burke, 2 hours x 1 session): Dog Eat Dog continues the theme of games that I wasn’t sold on before I played them. It was another last-minute game that came up, and I just went with. That was a thing with me at GenCon: I had games I preferred to play, but I wasn’t going to go in being all picky, like I might normally be, because this was GenCon, and part of the point was to try new games. If I ended up not liking them, then it’d only be a couple hours lost, and I’d never have to play them again. So, I sat down to Dog Eat Dog with trepidation. That trepidation was brought on by the theme: islanders dealing with an occupying force, and the pressures to assimilate or keep your cultural heritage. As we created our scenario, it didn’t get any better, as we turned out to be atheist cannibals. Luckily, no one really used this as an opportunity to knock religion in general. Our occupiers were nomadic boat people, with religious polygamy and massive fertility. The game started out fairly light, but as it advanced, it got more serious and darker as it went. What was interesting to me in particular was my own character’s transformation. I started with a artist who rebelled in peaceful fashion by painting tribal symbols on the occupiers walls. I ended with a culture-warrior who spearheaded a purge of occupier sympathizers in our own village, then used their mangled bodies to create a tableau mocking the religious iconography of the occupiers. Basically, I went from hippie activist to terrorist in a two hour session, and every single step felt justified.

The game itself is reminiscent, to me, of Fiasco in that the mechanics of the game have little to no effect on what your character does, or whether or not it succeeds. All action in the game is pretty much narrated or negotiated, and at the end of each turn, the player of the occupiers judges everyone at the table based on an evolving set of rules which are actually generated by the natives as play progresses. The main mechanic is a set of tokens that change hands as the players obey rules, or disobey them, ending when the occupier runs out of tokens, or all of the native players do (running out of tokens as a native ends in “running amok” and some spectacular death) I bought this game, and while it’s unlikely to be in my list of go-to games, I can definitely see potential… I even suggested that Liam consider Red Dawn as a possible scenario.

Monster of the Week (written by Michael Sands, run by Joe Beason, 4 hours x 1 session): This was one of the games I was actually all the way interested in prior to getting the opportunity to play. Think Scooby Doo, Supernatural and Buffy. Basically, you play a team of people who hunt down and take care of supernatural threats, whether they’re wreaking localized mayhem, or trying to rule the world. Our session, being a one-shot, was world-scale terror on a local level. The one fly in the ointment was the Luchador. Seriously? I can’t even really blame the player, because while he did in fact overplay it, I think that the idea of a Luchador sort of encourages it. Still, it wasn’t incredibly annoying, it just felt off to me. I played “The Expert” which makes me think of Giles, or Nigel, or whatever the hell his name was from Buffy, or Bobby Singer from Supernatural. He’s got some decent ass-kicking skills, but he’s mostly useful for what he knows or can find out. Our scenario involved spirit spiders and a spider god trying to complete a ritual to bring itself into the world where it would reign supreme forever. We failed to save the second girl, but we did manage to showcase our individual badassity before rushing off to find the dude before he sacrificed his own wife to complete the ritual. On the way, I revealed some of my dark past to show that I knew a devil’s bargain of a counter-ritual that would stop the spider god, if all else failed. We resolved to make my knowledge academic, and almost managed to stop the ritual-master before he tried to complete the ritual by taking his own life. I managed to stop him just long enough with healing magic just long enough for my cohorts to kill him to death. It was a crazy, fast-paced session (at least in retrospect; I do kind of recall wishing that things would move along a time or two) and it was a lot of fun.

The game itself was a pretty standard Apocalypse World hack from all I could tell, but it was geared to be more cooperative than some. The archetypes are evocative, and the session was good, but that’s really all I can say about it. I didn’t see it for sale, and didn’t really seek it out, despite having a good time playing it.

Technoir (written by Jeremy Keller, run by Mark DiPasquale, 2 hours x 1 session): I’d seen this game on the board several times, and I’d heard a tiny bit about it, but I didn’t really know much. When I saw it available, I jumped at the chance, despite my lack of foreknowledge. It really did feel a lot like Shadowrun, minus the magic, and while character generation was reasonably quick, the poring over the options took notably longer than I like for a ConGame, especially in a 2-hour slot; It literally took an hour just to get characters made, and I still had resources to spend. Still, in that remaining hour, the GM managed to throw us right into the mix, which I think speaks well of the fluidity of the mechanics. The shining moment for me was when the helicopter I was on was boarded, and I took the guy trying to be all fancy and swing under the belly to come in the opposite door, and continue his momentum right on through to where the rest of his team was waiting. Then our pilot pulled some fancy “Crazy Ivan” style maneuvering and blows the shit out of the belly of the other chopper. It was fun.

Regarding the game itself, I was a little iffy about the condition-based damage at first, as damaging others in more than a fleeting fashion requires you to give up some of your effectiveness, and the only way to get it back is to get some non-fleeting damage of your own. But as I noticed the mechanic in play, I realized it’s a closed system economy, with the GM getting resources from the players, and the players getting them back from the GM. If you want to lay down some serious asskicking, you’ve got to take some punishment first. I also like the general flexibility of the equipment system, and I went ahead and bought the game based largely on feel, and the initial impression of the game.

Lacuna (written by Jared Sorensen, run by Mikael Andersson, 2 hours x 1 session): I’ve been wanting to play Lacuna for years, so when I saw it on the board with open slots, I leapt at the chance. It was also nice to discover that Mikael was running it, as we’d known each other casually online for years. Lacuna is a very surreal game, where you play agents who enter the dreaming mind of a deranged subject to track down and destroy the “hostile personality” that’s causing them to be less than productive members of society. It’s completely normal to get conflicting orders from “Control”, bizarre landscapes and random (or are they?) occurrances. It was doubly surreal because myself and another player dropped into the middle of a game that was already 2 hours old. We took on the roles of existing agents, but weren’t told what we’d missed. I won’t say that this is standard for Lacuna, but it’s the sort of thing you just take in stride with all of the other weirdness. We managed to eventually track down the HP, but due to some very… entangled agendas, it was unclear exactly what we were supposed to do. We eventually, err, succeeded, but it was very odd the whole time. My portrayal (apparently very, very different from the last player’s portrayal) was very terse, mission-oriented and… kind of a complete bad-ass asshole. Highlights include when I blew the brains out of the information booth attendant when she randomly attacked one of the other agents, without a word or expression, then when I leapt into a speeding vehicle and brought it to a screeching halt. Quite entertaining, and I’m very glad I got the opportunity to play.

As previously mentioned, I’ve been wanting to play Lacuna for years. I got a copy of the previous version sent to me years ago in Iraq, but though I’d read through it, I’d never played it and forgotten much of what I’d read, so it really wasn’t much less confusing for me as it was for the other players. The game runs off central mechanic based around heartbeats per minute, where every action you do increases your BPM through target and up to and over a maximum, at which point, things kind of start getting dangerous, and you could end up dying. You requisition stuff, matrix-style, from Control, and there’s almost always some sense of pressure, even when things are standing still. This game isn’t currently available for sale, so I wasn’t able to purchase it, though I definitely would have if it were.

Legend of the 5 Rings hack for Apocalypse World (hacked and run by Brennan Taylor, 3+ hours x 1 session): This was the very last game of the Con, played at the Embassy Suites. I enjoyed the set-up, but for whatever reason, I ended up feeling very passive and overlooked during play. I *did* enjoy the game, don’t get me wrong, but I know I got passed over for a scene, and I felt oddly reticent to push myself forward, which isn’t a normal thing for me. I’m normally very bold, and often have to make a point to rein myself in so I don’t trample on other players. This game, that wasn’t there. Plus, as it turned out, rather than being a ronin badass duelist, I ended up being a ronin-badass war leader, so I literally walked away from about half of my bennies when we went into the imperial city for the showdown with the possessed emperor. While I know little to nothing about Legend of the 5 Rings, the conclusion was satisfying enough, and felt very genre, with two characters dying, one character maimed trying to protect the newly cleansed emperor, and two formerly bitter rivals conspiring to take the throne. (I was one of the deaths; I failed a roll when we were trying to contain the emperor long enough for the evil spirit to be purged from him) This game ran until 1 am on Monday, and was instrumental in me getting basically no sleep before returning home. Still, I don’t regret it, not a bit.

On Apocalypse World: As mentioned a few times in the preceding paragraphs, hacking Apocalypse World is the new trendy thing. Monsterhearts, Dungeon World, Monster of the Week, and the L5R game were all hacked from Apocalypse World. The funny thing for me is that I played basically every well-known AW hack (except the Regiment, which was a WW2 hack) during GenCon, but I never played Apocalypse World. The system is slick, and manages to move very quickly and impact play without getting in the way.