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Last
month, as my gaming staple most of the time, I kept playing
two-players, long-form Remember Tomorrow in weird places,
outdoors and while traveling. Then, on the last weekend of July, I
went to EtrusCon. Sooner or later I’m going to write in detail
about Remember Tomorrow and the pros and cons of playing it
the way we’re playing it – this time, however, I’m going to
concern myself with writing a convention report instead.
§
I
held very high expectations for this summer-edition EtrusCon, both
because last year’s summer edition had been capital-A-awesome and
because the winter edition was instead considerably underwhelming.
What I got was in fact a mixed bag, partly because of a decline in
attendance (compared to last summer).
Since
EtrusCon is a classic hotel-convention with a very hands-off
organization paradigm (what the one organizer, Simone, actually does
is just to negotiate a discount hotel rate and reserve rooms for
attendees, and that’s it), the obvious upside to it is a
no-time-wasted, play-all-the-time attitude, the implied downside
being that you need to set yourself up for it beforehand, though,
because there is little support provided for organizing tables on the
fly (no “front desk”, no call-to-arms, not even a local, off-line
master copy of the schedule). I was only half-successful with
organizing myself in advance, though, part because of untimeliness
and/or risk-taking on my part (reserving a less-than-ideal timeslot
for a given game in order to be able to play with a given person,
say, plus experimenting with multiple shorter games per time-slot,
being late in the morning as is usual for me, etc.) and part because
of some players being delayed by traffic, or tired early in the
evening, etc. – this resulting in some waste of time re-organizing
tables and, ultimately, a high percentage of aborted games. It’s
good to hear that this was just my own subjective blight, though
(contrary to the last winter edition, when exceedingly low attendance
made this the general norm), while the general ratio of finished
games people had at the convention was high.
An
additional drawback of a hotel-convention is, in the event of
lower-than-ideal attendance (i.e. the hotel being not sold-out),
having to share spaces with other random people. And, well, the
EtrusCon hotel, as it happens, is large enough that it would take
100+ stay-in attendees to sell it out, making this a near-impossible
proposition for the time being: AFAIK, the largest attendancies to
hotel-based role-playing conventions in Italy were recorded by last
year’s summer EtrusCon and some editions of InterNosCon, and barely
exceeded 50 people.
But
enough with the organizer-oriented gibberish! Let’s talk about the
games I played, instead. Asterisks mark games I scheduled and
ran/facilitated myself. I was also supposed to run a game of MegueyBaker’s Psi*Run, but we had to cancel it because of half the
interested players not making it to the hotel in time.
Fables of Camelot* — this is a little, surprisingly well-crafted game
by Sami Koponen with Eero Tuovinen, whose existence I discovered by
sheer happenstance as Eero ran it for me and a random bunch of
Solmukohta-goers in Helsinki, a few months ago. It’s touted as an
introductory role-playing game, good for a convention environment and
also suitable for children – and it’s exactly because I plan on
using it with children that I decided to train myself in running it.
Thus I took it to EtrusCon as a perennial, persistent and
weekend-spanning, multi-installment off-slot filler game that
multiple groups of players could dip into for a round or more.
While
I didn’t get to play all the way to the fall of Camelot (the
system-mandated ending), it was good enough to play three full
quests, with parties ranging in size from six down to three knights.
I think I learned a lot about Fables of Camelot in the
process. Fully confirmed were all of its immediately apparent pros:
explaining the rules is indeed effortless and takes very little time,
heraldic animals are a greatly effective characterization device,
drawing one’s own coat of arms is great fun, consequential
decisions with no predetermined good or bad choice (think Dogs in
the Vineyard) are both an absolute focus of the game and a
transparent process (in that you don’t usually have to point them
out, out-of-character), dice-rolls are both infrequent and tense (and
they take very little time to execute, while channeling a great deal
of attention). I think I learned how to plan “adventures” and
frame scenes appropriately, and I’m pretty sure by now that should
one have access to the full text, with its long lists of example
quests and travel-scenes to pick from, then running the game would be
truly effortless – unfortunately, the book’s only available in
Finnish.
What
I didn’t expect, though, was that the game could grow to such a
quiet solemnity as we experienced in the Grail quest: I’m deeply
impressed. Sure, should I look for a shortcoming to point out, this
is not a game of very nuanced and complex characters – but is its
reference literature? It’s all about broad strokes and
large-picture plots, and emerging commentary which satisfies from a
metaplay vantage point, not about the psychological finesse of
fictional characters in the resulting fiction. Now I’m thinking
I’ll reserve a full time-slot for Fables of Camelot at some
upcoming convention, possibly GnoccoCon, to play all the way to the
endgame: it should be feasible enough a feat.
SeaDracula — it’s really odd how I’ve been having the handbook
for this game in my possession since it still sported a (1$)
price-tag, but had never tried it out before! I remember thinking, at
the time, that something about the text didn’t “click” for me
and I’d rather look up somebody who could teach me how to play by
example. Well, how changed I am since then, for now the text speaks
so clearly to me! Know that the game was great fun, ran shorter than
I expected it to (which is a plus!) and is totally appropriate for
parties – almost a party-game, yeah, though maybe a tad too complex
in the setup for a “casual gamer” audience. I’m gonna play this
again, soon and often. ♥
Tactical
Ops (playtest) — having left one time-slot open in my schedule,
I found myself with a random party of six people (my old friend
Alfredo being in the mix), among them my friend Patrick who rather
enthusiastically pitched a playtest session of Tactical Ops, a
design-in-progress by Alessandro “Hasimir” Piroddi (who wasn’t
there). While I wasn’t particularly grabbed by the premise of the
game, some were, and being a curious fellow I tagged along.
Small-squad tactics for dangerous missions is, if we read it to mean
military/commando operations, the single most overdone thing in the
history of role-playing games (I’m of course conflating most
flavors of D&D into this) – but, on the other hand, I thought
the description could also apply to caper/heist movies (a vague itch
I still have to scratch). In fact, the playtest document Patrick had
with him came (as far and I can tell) with absolutely no example
situation, mission or backdrop included besides the core premise. We
soon enough agreed on a twenty-minutes-into-the-future prison break
scenario, then proceeded to create our characters: a much lengthier
process than was immediately apparent by glancing at the character
sheets. I didn’t keep track of the time, really, but I figure we
spent a minimum of two hours doing pre-play setup.
So,
here’s my shout out to Alessandro, the designer: while not a faulty
design choice per se (one can sure invest a much longer time
preparing for a multi-session campaign), such a long setup process is
unacceptable in a convention environment! If you want to have your
game playtested at public events (or, well, out-of-house playtested
at all, I might add), may I suggest you release a fast-play package,
consisting of one or more example missions with pre-made characters?
If I were you, I’d make it my first priority at the moment.
During
the prep phase, our motley group seemed to easily agree on things –
everybody generally cheered at ideas being thrown around, making the
brainstorming/pitch a breeze. But! I think the character creation
process – with its attributes and skill groups and skills and
specialties to rate, plus advantages and motivational links to “buy”
– looked deceptively familiar to all of us, which either got
us to pay attention to the wrong things or to not pay attention at
all. We should have been paying attention to what each other
player was picking out of the available choices! In hindsight,
that’s pretty obvious, but in the heat of the moment we just
self-tagged with role-definitions (“hacker”, “doctor”,
“gearhead”, “muscles”, “face”, “infiltrator”) and
hurried up to each fill up one’s own character sheet, in
isolation. Had I payed attention, I would have noticed that the
“infiltrator” was duplicating part of the “face”-guy’s and
(IIRC) “muscles”-guy’s skillsets, not maxing up the
athletics/movement skills I incorrectly assumed he were (a skillset
nobody focused on at all); that while I was hyper-specializing my
hacker guy to be exactly that, some others were spreading their
skillpoints wider, for example to be ready for violence in case of a
major shit-up; that the “gearhead” was a specialist in
jury-rigging veichles which no character was good at operating
anyway, and so on. It is thus my humble opinion that as a “team”
we were already fucked, whatever the mission. Not that we were going
to find out, anyway…
Having
gone through all of the preparations, and of course some more
necessary rules-briefing as well, we went then into the first actual
scene of the game knowing we weren’t going to play the mission to
its end anyway, because of our real-life time constraints. This being
not what we had been assuming initially (before
prep) I daresay we were now in maybe the worst possible
collective mood for role-playing: the noncommittal, half-assed one.
And that’s when our group’s collective ability to agree on things
– this basic foundation of role-playing – began to falter. Having
framed a first scene, we started dabbling in the game’s central
authority/credibility system of stating “facts”, but I don’t
believe we had fully understood it, let alone grasped its subtleties,
as we launched into a conflict. Of the conflict, we played a single
round at most, struggling with the fact that – in our lack of
experience with the system – we had not properly set the parameters
of it to match the developing fiction, nor had we picked mechanical
categories for our actions that significantly reflected our
combinations of fictional intents while giving us a chance to hit the
difficulty treshold, no. Very quickly, our game devolved into a
debriefing session of the sort which consists in micro-analyzing
small bits of the game without having seen the full picture – which
was absolutely pointless, the designer not being there and nobody
being apparently committed to write a playtest report.
To
those who asked my opinion on Tactical Ops as a design, the
only honest anwer I could give was: I’ve seen too little of it to
form any opinion whatsoever, sorry.
The City of Fire and Coin (Swords Without Master)* — here’s another
game which went quite poorly, but not for any defect of design. I had
assembled a team of people I love and I know are in love with the
(pulp/fantasy) genre – Ariele, Lapo & Tazio – and they took
to the game with all of the glee I expected; still, everybody was
apparently exhausted by the too much play they’d already had (or
maybe with too much food and drink?) and soon my friends’ focus
waned. Thus to my great displeasure we had to call it quits, having
only played out the first Perilous Phase.
This
was to be considered a playtest, not of the game-design, but of the
technique of exposition (the way of “teaching” the game) embodied
in The City of Fire and Coin, a learn-while-you-play tutorial
written in a hybrid rulebook/gamebook style somewhat comparable to
the “red box” Basic D&D set of the Eighties. While appearing
well-devised on first sight, such tutorial proved way too verbose to
read – and translate to Italian on the fly – while playing:
sitting through the long passages of read-aloud instructions
encouraged Rogue players, as a reaction, to hog the spotlight longer
and go for longer talking times in the first Perilous Phase, which
proved to be an interest-killer in the end, as the scene (as framed
by a read-aloud box in the text itself) consisted of a street brawl
with little context or emotional attachment to it. I suspect, despite
an apparent interest the players showed in depicting action stunts,
that had they made short work of that first Storm instead we would
therefore have retained interest in the game well into the following
phases.
All
things considered, I walked away with a strong commitment to try
again as soon as possible – which in fact happened already as of
the time I’m writing this report! I won’t discuss my second game
here, though, as it will become material for a follow-up post.
Ganakagok*
— I’ve been in love with Ganakagok at least since the one
full game of it I had a couple years ago. I’m well aware of the
polemics surrounding the game’s subject-matter (Bill White was
exeedingly naïve in his exotical treatment of elements from living
cultures, and consequent blatant misuse of the word “Inuit”,
which is something he himself later acknowledged) and my own
ambivalence about the affair means I’ve had to develop my own
language for explaining the game’s world as fantasy and only
referencing real-world cultures in what I’m convinced (as a culture
historian) to be a completely respectful way – but that’s part
and parcel of dealing with fantasy fiction as a genre, anyway, and
come on: instances of fantasy fiction which break out of too
oft-repeated, paradigmatic, stupid molds are as needed and welcome as
they can be (in gaming especially)! My love of Ganakagok,
anyway, is first and foremost a love of its mechanics: suggestive
card-reading coupled with some moderately complex resource management
(and resource-tracking, which makes actions full of consequences,
some of them unintended): it is by far the one title which had
greater influence on my own design-in-progress, I reietti di Eden.
The
game I ran at EtrusCon wasn’t stellar, maybe, but I felt it was
good enough. We couldn’t play it to a proper ending, sadly, but we
were so close. I was, in fact, disappointed to learn that what
had been a half-full glass to me was instead a half-empty one to my
fellow players (my dear Barbara and Daniele Lostia of Piombo fame). I’m not sure, of course, whether it is at all possible, or
recommended, to play a game of Ganakagok with only two non-GM
players present: maybe we had set ourselves up for a failure since
the very onset?
One
critique from Daniele which I think is especially poignant is that we
had prepped so many elements in the immediate pre-game setup
(world/village creation) which didn’t actually get reincorporated.
In the moment I couldn’t but agree, but now, with a clearer head, I
see the glass as half-full again: sure, we had more prepped elements
available than we actually needed to use, as a side-effect of prep
being a very organic process, but we did use some of those
elements, and built and expanded on the ones we picked (also an
organic process, as we focused on the ones we most needed in the
moment), which obviously constrained and strongly directed our play –
while on the other hand all those unused elements, while never
incorporated in the actual scenes, still existed as a backdrop which
informed play, and we never forgot nor invalidated them. Prep, in
other words, always informs play, even when pieces of prepped content
don’t actively come out during it.
On
an unrelated note: next time I play Ganakagok,
I’m considering dropping the Body/Face/Mind/Soul section of the
character sheets entirely, using instead a fixed value of “3” in
lieu of those scores for all purposes. Besides scores of “2”
being a bit too punishing to be fun, my point is that your average
player-character is only expected to be in the spotlight once or
twice. Having four different “arenas of conflict” with different
(and hugely important) ratings attached, then, needlessly punishes a
player for open-mindedness, as the obvious optimal strategy would be
to set one of your arenas at “4” and maneveur so that your own
spotlight scene(s) focus on that: a boring exercise in
predictability, rather than in storytelling. Gifts and Burdens should
fully suffice to make characters distinct in competence, instead,
especially as character Identity is also a trait with mechanical
usefulness attached.
Overall,
EtrusCon was an extremely diversity-rich environment, with happy and
satisfied people enthusiastically playing things as diverse as
OD&D/Lamentations of the Flame Princess and abstract
board-games, Joe Mcdaldno’s Monsterhearts (which is an
Apocalypse World-based rpg about the coming of age of
metaphorically-monstrous teenagers) and Paolo Guccione’s homebrew
game of tabletop battles between Go Nagai’s giant robots which is
an adaptation of old Chaosium Basic Role-Playing (!). Tazio Bettin,
Iacopo Frigerio, Davide Losito, Matteo Turini, Marco Valtriani all ran playtest sessions of
their own designs besides the numerous foreign games played.
Some
games, of course, struck me as more interesting than others; some I
heartfeltly avoided, and when invited to play I declined. In the
light of which, I can’t help but turn and look back over my own
shoulder, realizing that an 18-years-old me – for example – would
have merrily sat down at the BRP Mecha table (calling dibs on
Getter Robot, probably) while not even paying a thought to the
Lamentations table which these days, instead, I was very much
tempted to join. And the reasons I didn’t choose to play
LotFP in the end, those are the complete opposite of why I wouldn’t
have joined an OD&D table if you asked me when I was, say, 25.
All of the above is part due to how changed the landscape of
role-playing is since previous times, sure, and part because of how
changed I am myself.
Thus,
the single most important thing I got from EtrusCon is not merely an
appreciation of diversity within a small but fluid scene: it’s an
enhanced understanding of my own tastes concerning role-playing games
– of what I like and dislike and what I really look for and what
I’m actually in it for – and of how mutable those preferences
are.
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