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This weekend was perhaps my favourite non-family weekend of the year: Big Bad Con. Three days of epic role playing with creative GMs and players who all want nothing but to commit to their characters and their stories. Interesting, fascinating indie games get run here and spark creativity to produce more fascinating indie games for the next year. It's a safe place to be yourself, to try experiments with gaming and to find people who care more about role than roll. Every year that I attend I wish that it could run more than once a year. While it taxes my introversion something fierce, the con more than makes up for that by inspiring me to new heights and filling me with a great joy that I can't get anywhere else.
Yes, it *is* worth that much flowery prose.
My first game of the con was one of those experimental games I mentioned: Thank you Kindly. The game was open to anyone who wanted to get into it and was a sort of snowball arrangement. You broke up into groups of two. One person would set the stage using a preset list of backdrops. The other would enter a character into the scene, describing them and your immediate impressions of them. And then you committed to about ten minutes of dialogue, after which you and your partner would pause and discuss which of you in the scene took on the attributes of Little Red Riding Hood and which of you took on those of the Big Bad Wolf. It was a fascinating exercise both for subverting expectations and also for getting to the core of a fairy tale that provides a narrative context for your own tale.
Second up was a game run by a dear friend of mine, which is a genius reskinning of Monsterhearts into teenage superheroes at a school for 'gifted youths'. I'm trying to convince him to push it out to the web so other people can share in it.
Saturday, I got to play The Burning Wheel, which is a game that's always fascinated me but which I've never actually read nor played. It's an extremely crunchy game, but the difference between it and boring, rule-heavy games is that Burning Wheel's rules all lock together in interesting and fun ways. For instance, I think we didn't even get into one real combat, but the thrilling denouement of the game involved using the rules for oration combat wherein our priest stood against the leader of a poisonous death cult and swayed the village to turn back to the true god. I really like how thoughtful and interlocked this game is. I need to read it now!
That evening it was my turn on the chopping block. I ran a game of Hillfolk called 'That Spring, Before the War'. Hillfolk is a game that's played almost entirely via scenes called by the players and most scenes are 'dramatic scenes', which means that your character has something that they want (generally emotionally) from another character and that other character is probably not disposed to provide it. It turns into an emotional game wherein everything revolves around each characters' emotional desires... or to put it into better context, it's the game you could play Breaking Bad in. Or Shameless. Or the Sopranos. And so on and so forth.
The premise of this game was that each player was a senior in high school, just months from a time of great freedom, anxiety and discovery: graduation. But a cold shadow hangs over the characters: a war in which their nation (or in the case of the direction the players took it, their world) was soon to become embroiled. With the possibility of military service, death and loss haunting their future, what choices would they make? What would they choose to keep and what would they give up on?
Despite me making a mistake at the beginning of the game, it was a rousing success. I got several of the greatest compliments a GM can receive: the players lingered after the game, wanting to talk about it; the next day one of the players couldn't stop talking about it to friends; and someone told me that he was still decompressing from the game on Monday. I was just over the moon to hear about those things.
The mistake that I made... well, at the beginning of the game while creating characters, one of the last steps in the process is to use a big sheet of paper to draw connections from your character to two others and explain your relationship to them and what you want from them emotionally. I, being a dim bulb, instead had the players draw a connection to each other character at the table. As those of you who can do math in your heads will quickly realise, this means that the number of connections that you have to draw goes up exponentially with each new player... and I had six.
Fortunately, though it took an hour just to do the character connections, something good came out of it! The characters started off so well defined to one another that a lot of really interesting play and character interaction came out of it. While I don't think I'd do an exponential connection graph at another con game, where time is a factor, I might do it if I ever run a campaign of Hillfolk.
Sunday was a most excellent game of Changeling: The Lost... which was made even better by a GM who was prepared for *everything*. She had dossiers written up about each of our characters, a soundtrack queued up, and knew exactly what was happening behind the scenes every step of the way. The game was a series of twists and turns that led to a twist that nobody saw coming but which was obvious in hindsight.
And lastly, I played in a game of Kaleidoscope, which is a mod of the wonderful world-building game Microscope. Rather than building an epic sweep of time as you would in Microscope, in Kaleidoscope the players are all people who have just watched a weird and possibly terrible foreign movie. You build up the timeline of the movie through the rules of Microscope (ie, lots of index cards) as you talk about each protagonist and each segment of running time. You're encouraged to be as pseudo-intellectual as you can be, speaking in the style of an over-educated and under-appreciated movie critic while discussing this film. I've played this game twice now and each time it's been an absolute blast. It was the greatest way to wind down from the con that I can think of.
Sadly, it's a year till the next Big Bad Con. But barring emergencies (and needing to take cookies to grandmother's house), I'll be there again in 2016.
Yes, it *is* worth that much flowery prose.
My first game of the con was one of those experimental games I mentioned: Thank you Kindly. The game was open to anyone who wanted to get into it and was a sort of snowball arrangement. You broke up into groups of two. One person would set the stage using a preset list of backdrops. The other would enter a character into the scene, describing them and your immediate impressions of them. And then you committed to about ten minutes of dialogue, after which you and your partner would pause and discuss which of you in the scene took on the attributes of Little Red Riding Hood and which of you took on those of the Big Bad Wolf. It was a fascinating exercise both for subverting expectations and also for getting to the core of a fairy tale that provides a narrative context for your own tale.
Second up was a game run by a dear friend of mine, which is a genius reskinning of Monsterhearts into teenage superheroes at a school for 'gifted youths'. I'm trying to convince him to push it out to the web so other people can share in it.
Saturday, I got to play The Burning Wheel, which is a game that's always fascinated me but which I've never actually read nor played. It's an extremely crunchy game, but the difference between it and boring, rule-heavy games is that Burning Wheel's rules all lock together in interesting and fun ways. For instance, I think we didn't even get into one real combat, but the thrilling denouement of the game involved using the rules for oration combat wherein our priest stood against the leader of a poisonous death cult and swayed the village to turn back to the true god. I really like how thoughtful and interlocked this game is. I need to read it now!
That evening it was my turn on the chopping block. I ran a game of Hillfolk called 'That Spring, Before the War'. Hillfolk is a game that's played almost entirely via scenes called by the players and most scenes are 'dramatic scenes', which means that your character has something that they want (generally emotionally) from another character and that other character is probably not disposed to provide it. It turns into an emotional game wherein everything revolves around each characters' emotional desires... or to put it into better context, it's the game you could play Breaking Bad in. Or Shameless. Or the Sopranos. And so on and so forth.
The premise of this game was that each player was a senior in high school, just months from a time of great freedom, anxiety and discovery: graduation. But a cold shadow hangs over the characters: a war in which their nation (or in the case of the direction the players took it, their world) was soon to become embroiled. With the possibility of military service, death and loss haunting their future, what choices would they make? What would they choose to keep and what would they give up on?
Despite me making a mistake at the beginning of the game, it was a rousing success. I got several of the greatest compliments a GM can receive: the players lingered after the game, wanting to talk about it; the next day one of the players couldn't stop talking about it to friends; and someone told me that he was still decompressing from the game on Monday. I was just over the moon to hear about those things.
The mistake that I made... well, at the beginning of the game while creating characters, one of the last steps in the process is to use a big sheet of paper to draw connections from your character to two others and explain your relationship to them and what you want from them emotionally. I, being a dim bulb, instead had the players draw a connection to each other character at the table. As those of you who can do math in your heads will quickly realise, this means that the number of connections that you have to draw goes up exponentially with each new player... and I had six.
Fortunately, though it took an hour just to do the character connections, something good came out of it! The characters started off so well defined to one another that a lot of really interesting play and character interaction came out of it. While I don't think I'd do an exponential connection graph at another con game, where time is a factor, I might do it if I ever run a campaign of Hillfolk.
Sunday was a most excellent game of Changeling: The Lost... which was made even better by a GM who was prepared for *everything*. She had dossiers written up about each of our characters, a soundtrack queued up, and knew exactly what was happening behind the scenes every step of the way. The game was a series of twists and turns that led to a twist that nobody saw coming but which was obvious in hindsight.
And lastly, I played in a game of Kaleidoscope, which is a mod of the wonderful world-building game Microscope. Rather than building an epic sweep of time as you would in Microscope, in Kaleidoscope the players are all people who have just watched a weird and possibly terrible foreign movie. You build up the timeline of the movie through the rules of Microscope (ie, lots of index cards) as you talk about each protagonist and each segment of running time. You're encouraged to be as pseudo-intellectual as you can be, speaking in the style of an over-educated and under-appreciated movie critic while discussing this film. I've played this game twice now and each time it's been an absolute blast. It was the greatest way to wind down from the con that I can think of.
Sadly, it's a year till the next Big Bad Con. But barring emergencies (and needing to take cookies to grandmother's house), I'll be there again in 2016.
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