[Dexcon] A thread of AP posts

[Robert Bohl]

I plan on accumulating my AP posts from DexCon in this thread.  Here's the first one.

Overall:

This was the best time I've ever had at a convention, and that is essentially all down to the quality of the gaming.  This time was lacking the deep-of-the-night conversations of past cons (there were remnants), but every game I ran or played in was at least good, and many were great.

Games I ran:

I was the only person at the con running on-the-books Primetime Adventures games, which I was shocked at because I think, right now, PTA is my favorite game.  I came to a realization while running Precinct: Wonderland about how profoundly PTA grooves off the players.  I sort of hit some kind of active listening, passive otherwise state where I let things go without my saying anything for about 20 minutes, it was like an altered state of consciousness brought on by sleep deprivation.  Anyway, the game went so smoothly it was both scary and beautiful.

PTA: The Really Super World: 

This was a mash-up of The Office, The Real World, and superheroes; a fake-reality series about a bunch of b-list superheroes picked to live in the abandoned JLA satellite and have their super-adventures taped to find out what heroes are like when they stop being polite and start being real.  Everyone named person in the game was a published character from Marvel, DC or something before, but all the cast members were new.  This was run Wednesday at 10 pm, which I have decided is my GMing sweet spot.  I miss no games I want to see and there're lots of players looking for a game.

The Fantastic ONE:  Played by my brother, Jay.  Spotlight character, Franklin Richards's brother, who only got the power of invisibility from his mother.  His issue was, "My family is cooler than I will ever be."  He wasn't given an unstable molecules outfit and he was a scrawny slacker of 26 or so.  He'd use his powers, get naked (clothes don't go with him) and spy on women in the bathroom.  His costume was a bathrobe that he had stitched his name into inexpertly.

The Cardinal:  Played by Paka/Judd.  A Robin who had been molested by Batman.  He still wore a Silver-Age style Robin costume with the bikini shorts and winged boots.  He didn't get it sufficiently altered, and was sort of regular-guy schlubby physique-wise, and in his mid to late thirties.  His issue was, "Batman raped me."

The Glassblower:  Played by Someone.  Had the power to melt glass, in his 40s, his issue was about finding a use for his powers.  He had no artistic ability so he couldn't melt them into pretty art.  He wore a Ren Faire costume.

The Fangirl:  Played by Krista Plague Monkey Press.  She had no powers, though she was the granddaughter of The Shadow.  She won a contest to be on the show and had a PDA with all kinds of data about superheroes in it.  Her issue was something about wanting to be of use to superheroes, and she was in love by the end of the episode with the Fantastic ONE.  She had an unusual odor which was played for constant effect.

Backblast:  Played by Nick from Plague Monkey Press.  An aging superhero in his late 40s who had the ability to explode and reform, and former JLA member who was kicked out for sleeping around and his power level not being up to snuff.  I forget what his issue is right now (sorry Nick!).

THE GAME

The game was fucking hilarious.  I was weeping tears at some points.  Jay was totally on as the skeevy slacker who nonetheless wanted to prove himself.  The Cardinal wound up three times having an older man wrap his arm around his shoulder and start off a sentence with, "Son. . . ."  And he had to share the room he was molested in with a series of older guys.  TFO managed to accidentally defeat a Doom-bot and send him into the Phantom Zone (which Phantom Zone square he then picked up and ritualistically humped as a sign of his dominance over Doom).  There was good use of personal sets to recharge pools and for dramatic effect, and pretty much everyone was humming and hilarious.  I did feel that Someone wasn't that into it.  Whenever it was time for him to make a decision, narrate an action, or take over, he got very quiet and we had to wait a long time.  People were doing everything they could to bring him in but it wasn't working.  This was at the time an insoluble problem which went on to nearly tank my second game, but more on that when I have more time to put virtual pen to paper.

[Robert Bohl]

In case you haven't noticed yet, when I say "Somebody" played a character, it's someone I'm going to criticize and I don't wish to insult them.  If I can't remember someone's name, I'll just say that.

Primetime Adventures, Night Shift

Night Shift was a troubled "show" with great potential, but more on that later.  I happen to have setting notes on this one, so I'll just vomit them forth:

* Manhattan
* Magical EMTs/Ghostbusters/Covert/MIB
* HBO/FX
* Characters are specialists rather than generalists
* Working for the Department of Homeland Security, NYC's budget from DHS wasn't cut, it was folded into this program.
* There will be blood, gore and cursing.
* Human-focused magic, possession and calling on powers, no Buffy-style demons sitting in bars.
* Like Buffy, only seriouser.  Funny, but dramatic.
* A shadow history.

So basically what we had were a bunch of non-magical people (plus one magical one) investigating magical disasters and crimes.  They worked out of a firehouse.

THE CAST

Merle Hibbert:  Played by Bob.  He's an agency veteran mystic, but more in the sense of John Constantine: he knows a lot of shit but doesn't really do magic except for reading the occasional spell out of a book.  His issue was that he was living in the past.  He's a mentor figure, and played by Tommy Lee Jones.

Casey:  Played by Somebody.  Black, scrawny, dreadlocks and glasses.  His issue was the temptations of power, and he was the one who could do real magic.  He was a street criminal and given the option of going to jail or joining the Night Shift.  The screen presence 1 guy.

Corp. Art Stevens:  Played by Fred.  He's a big, thick, slow all-American military guy acted by Jake Busey.  Some notes from Fred's character sheet:  Military guy, fresh into group, a bit "thick," stickler for his procedure (though his own procedure, not necessarily established-by-the-bosses-procedure), unnecessary force.  His issue was personal order vs. a world in chaos.

Joey McRae:  Played by Paul.  The SP 3 character for the game.  He's the techie, the driver, the library guy.  He's in his early 20s, white, tall and lanky and his issue was Impressing my boss.

THE GAME

Okay, so this was my worst game of the convention, and it was still pretty good.  It was basically all down to one player.  During character creation, Somebody never added anything, except to negate ideas (such as that the PCs were working for the Illuminati).  He had a really hard time making decisions and would lock down, then scowl and snarl when we pushed him a little for a decision.  We had everyone's characters created, except for SP story arc and personal sets before he even had an Issue.  We tried to make suggestions, he'd snap.  We asked if he wasn't feeling the concept, he said he wasn't, but he didn't want us to come up with a new one.  He said he hated TV and never watched it.  He was annoyed at people making references to TV shows and movies that he didn't know, and he thought the basic concept of the game was flawed, that TV and RPGs were mutually exclusive, and you couldn't RP a TV show.

Why.  Did.  You.  Sign.  Up.  For.  A.  Game.  Called.  Primetime.  Adventures?!

But no, I was polite.  I was kind.  I was fucking bending over backwards to please.  I gave this guy as much as I could and not only didn't he take it, he got angry about it.  I finally said, "We have to start playing, it's an hour and a half in.  Until you can decide on a character name, they're all going to give you a nickname in-game."  This pissed him off so he chose "Joe."  We soon noticed there was already a Joe, so he chose Casey.

I really don't understand why this person chose this game, and why when he saw it wasn't going to work for him.  Every time narration came to him, he stopped dead.  This was different from The Really Super World's freeze-guy.  That guy I felt bad for.  This one's hostility got on my nerves.  Someone else had him in another game and said he was alright--not great but not terrible either--so maybe it wasn't the game for him, but couldn't he tell that to start with?  His demeanor infected the rest of the table.  Bob told me that by the end of it he wasn't having fun anymore, because Somebody was sucking the energy out of the room.

Anyway, I've shat on the situation for 4 (3 really) paragraphs, but there was a lot of fun to be had here.  The Firehouse crew went to investigate a sacrifice that was introduced to the audience for you to think that a 13 year old girl was going to be killed.  Awesome player narration turned that into her leading the sacrifice.  Hallucinogenic magic (literally) mushroom paste in little vials that let you see fairy-land, a Poland Spring cooler full of holy water, a Nephilim named HalfDemon333 (well, that was his eBay name anyway) was at the head of the drug operation, a possessed knife caused a fight between the demon imprisoned in Merle and the one in the knife, one that the audience saw in the form of two people staring at each other while their demonic shadows did battle.  (Horrible run-on sentence, I know.)  Joey's issue is resolved when he does a metric fuckton of cool shit and Merle still doesn't notice, so he decides Merle isn't worth impressing.

This could've been a great game.  Instead it was just barely good.  I really wish I could understand the guy's motivations.

(PS:  Feel free to comment, this thread need not remain pristinely my commentary (that is unless I scared you away with the voluminosity of my postage.))

[Robert Bohl]

So, what did I learn from Night Shift?  I learned to be very explicit with my pre-game chatter.  "If you don't like TV and can't say to yourself, 'If TV were done a certain way it could be really cool,' then this probably isn't the game for you.  If you get nervous when you get put into the GM's chair, asked to narrate and take control of the world, you will not enjoy this game and, as a result, neither will anyone else.  Please, try another game, I know that GAMENAMECENSORED is looking for players right now and it would be really cool for them to have some more."

Of course, when you're sitting at a table with people like Shawn DeArment (?), Daniel the TV Writer, Rob Donahue, Mel White (brother to), Ganakagok's Bill White and Dave the PhD Communications guy, the above is laughably supurfluous.  This is the mightiest single table of players I have ever had the pleasure of facing.  Not that I haven't had equally good experiences and played with some amazing players before, but there's always someone bringing down the curve.  On a ten-point scale, everyone there was at least a 7.

Precinct:  Wonderland

As Rob Donahue has said, this was Top Ten, in Fairyland.  We were playing cops who patrol Fairyland.  There are other nations, the nation of Cartoons, Video Games, Slasher Movies, and so on, in the world of Imagination.  These people know about the real world, and some people even write novels about it.  Here are setting notes:

* Police procedural
* The Scarecrow is mayor
* Potential for darker characters
* Not Clive Barker's darkness, Hans Christian Andersen's darkness
* No child endangerment
* Pop culture is polluting folk culture
* Smart humor, serious characters
* No laugh-track.
* Sugar = meth, faerie dust = cocaine, syrup = booze
* Wolves and rats are gangbangers

THE CAST (everyone took their character sheets so I'm going off memory)

Pinocchio:  Played by Shawn.  Pinocchio never turned into a real boy.  Instead, he's a fairy dust junkie who needs to take it in order not to become a real boy, and to dull the pain of watching Gepetto die slowly.  The Blue Fairy was his 'dust dealer.  Pin-head was acting as an informant for The Man as well as hustling for his hit.  He still wore the old sailor costume (between this and The Cardinal we're starting to see a theme).  His issue was a Peter Pan complex.

Gretel:  Played by Daniel.  Gretel was a big deal when she and her brother took down the witch, and everyone assumed she was meant to be a cop.  She rose quickly in the ranks but she secretly doesn't think of herself as brave (Issue alert), and is very concerned about her brother, who's a junkie on the street and can't deal with the horrors they saw in the witch's place.  She's now the shift lieutenant.

Bhima:  Played by Rob Donahue.  Bhima is an enormous demigod who is incredibly strong but dim-witted, sort of like an Indian Thor or Hercules.  His issue was small god, big city (I think).  He wanted to get away from being a god and just be a normal guy, fit in.  Only he is ginormous and doesn't get modernity very well.  He's a detective partnered with Joe Flatfoot, and was SP 1 for this game.

Joe Flatfoot:  Played by Mel White.  Joe is a cop.  A cartoon cop, see.  He's got a history with mooks from the wrong side of the tracks.  He's very prone to puns.  He's an SP 1 character too, and unfortunately I don't remember enough about him.  Also, I suck.  Joe was great fun and added a lot, including more than a few pained groans.

Henry Jewishlastname:  Played by Dave the PhD Communications Guy.  I might even have the first name wrong, because again I suck horribly.  This character was great.  As a boy he fell through a wardrobe and wound up in the land of Imagination.  He's been pining for the Real World ever since, and his unique take on things (such as comprehending physics and psychology) make him a freaky-good detective.  His issue was not fitting in to this world, and this was his spotlight episode.

Frank Bacon:  Played by Bill White.  Holy shit.  The Third Little Pig, grown up angry and bitter and wracked by his Issues over survivor guilt.  Imagine Andy Sipowicz rendered in photorealistic CGI as a semi-anthropomorphic pig.  Frank is a hard, brutal cop with a bit of a suicidal tendency.  He's on the sauce (BBQ) and loves apples a little too much, almost as much as his mint-leaf cigars (this didn't register with me until halfway through the game).  This was an amazing fucking character.  I really wish we could've played his spotlight episode too.  Henry and Frank were partners, and Frank's tactics got them into trouble in his very first scene.

THE GAME

Goddamn this was a good game.  This game actually had fairly heavy plot, and at some point I fucked up and started playing it like it was D&D, not letting them in on my "big secret" I wanted to surprise them with.  I still kept part of it hidden, because I figured some people might actually enjoy the surprise.  Brief on the plot:  Frank goes too far in the first scene and beats on the wolf who acted as a Clapper, a guy who keeps the chained-up fairies alive so they can continue to be shaken for 'dust.  Wolf-rights activists get Frank's ass in a sling and he winds up eventually suspended.  The fairies are gone, have been flushed down the toilet.  The wolves want Henry to know this, and use Pinocchio to lead the cops to the sewers, where hundreds of dead fairies have been flushed.  Pinocchio desperately tries to clap to reawaken them, but can't, because a junkie's love is not real.  Plot, plot, plot, great shit, great shit, great shit, we come to the final scene, where Aurelius Lupus, a human from the Real World played by Patrick Bauchau offers Henry the wardrobe he needs to get back home.  Henry as a cop is a pain in the balls for Aurelius, who can no longer use his unique Real World brain on these gullible fairy-folk.

Cut to a wonderful scene where Henry has a scene with each of the Cast, who each find an amazingly incisive way to address his Issue, and even alternate between yes-go and no-stay in their unwitting advice.  In the end, Henry doesn't go, but he keeps the wardrobe.

[Rob Donoghue]

Patrick Bachau! Ah ha!

What's sad is I would have known him as Sydney, from The Pretender.

And yeah, that game pretty damn well rocked, and we forgive you the D&D thing. :)

-Rob D.

[Robert Bohl]

Hey, I copped to the D&D thing, which instantly saved me.  Right?

By the way, I'm sorry I've been misspelling your last name.  I'll try to avoid doing so in the future and fix it in the rpg.net post where I can.

[Rob Donoghue]

Hey, I copped to the D&D thing, which instantly saved me.  Right?

In fact, it totally did. It wasn't even that big a problem to begin with, but coppign too it completely removed any concerns.

And as to the spelling, s'cool.  It's an uncommon spelling in a world where the famous guys spells it differently, so I don't sweat it, but thank you. :)

-Rob D.

[Bill_White]

Rob -- I thought having Aurelius Lupus show up at the end to tempt Harry with the wardrobe back to the real world was beautiful.  And, having never played PTA before, I appreciated the clarity and concision of your rules explanation.  A top-notch game.  My favorite part of playing Frank Bacon was getting to go "Wee wee wee! Wee wee wee!" as I was punching the Clapper with my piggy little feet.  And you totally pushed me to do it.

[Robert Bohl]

Yeah Bill, I totally forgot about the "Wee wee wee!" thing.  I'm not even sure everyone heard it.

I honed my PTA-'splainin-skills in a couple of games before the con that got my juices flowing.  Ultimately I decided you have to pitch the writer/actor, writer's room/set angle, do a sample conflict THAT HAS NO CONTENT TO IT (so as not to play the game before you play the game), and also do the schpiel about "if you don't like this, you won't like that," which only became clearly necessary to me thanks to "I don't like TV" guy.

[Judd]

Wow, Rob, those shows sound hawt.

Could you mention a scene in each where the fan mail really flew around or a time when the fan mail really piled up and didn't flow?

[Rob Donoghue]

My favorite part of playing Frank Bacon was getting to go "Wee wee wee! Wee wee wee!" as I was punching the Clapper with my piggy little feet.  And you totally pushed me to do it.

The only reason that may not have been the _best_ image in the game is because he wasn't drinking the sauce.  While the whole game rocked, Frank is totally the part that stood out most for me.  Just too awesome.

-Rob D.

[Robert Bohl]

Could you mention a scene in each where the fan mail really flew around or a time when the fan mail really piled up and didn't flow?

I can't think of a single such action or scene, but I do know that th fanmail flow was proportional to the goodness of the game.  in Precinct: Wonderland stuff was flowing like crazy and in Night Shift there was about 10 unspent fanmail in the pool at the end.

[Matt Wilson]

Awesomeness.

I haven't ever GM'ed or in fact played in a sign-up game at a con. Would it be out of line to tell the "somebody" that she or he is obviously in the wrong place and is hurting everyone else's fun by staying? I'd be like, go find something you'll like and quick. Especially the "I hate TV" whiny guy.

But again, awesomeness on all the cool shows.

[Robert Bohl]

haven't ever GM'ed or in fact played in a sign-up game at a con. Would it be out of line to tell the "somebody" that she or he is obviously in the wrong place and is hurting everyone else's fun by staying? I'd be like, go find something you'll like and quick. Especially the "I hate TV" whiny guy.

Matt,

Yeah, the two downer Somebodies were a real issue.  The problem was figuring out when to say, "You're obviously not having fun, you should find something you'd have fun with."  You do it too early and maybe you're asking someone to leave (because no matter how you word it, that's how it's going to be interpreted once the sounds get into the skull) who might click later on.  You do it too late and there's no point in doing it.  That's why I decided to add the "If you don't like TV and narrating, you probably won't like this game" bit to my pre-game schpiel.

[Robert Bohl]

A note about the "I'm playing D&D" moment, because I think it has interesting game play wrinkles that are good to talk about:

At some point a few scenes in I had a great plot occur to me. I decided that the Big Bad wanted the Freaky Good Cop to get close to him so he could offer the hero a way home, and thereby take out the competition. However, I made the mistake of not telling anyone about this, and trying to keep it quiet. I narrated scenes with Shawn (Pinocchio) that made it clear that the wolves wanted the cops to know they were responsible, and wanted a particular cop to find the drowned faeries. They wanted that because Aurelius wanted to offer Henry a way home.

Now as good PTA players do, these guys all had ideas as to what the initial incident--the wolves showing their hand to Pinocchio--meant. Some thought, for example, that the wolves were trying to get the cops to go after drug rivals.

In PTA, you need to let your players know when you have cool ideas. It's in some ways a limitation, as you can't surprise them with something down the line. But in many more ways, it's not a limitation at all, as your cool ideas may be pale compared to those. Anyway, the one way in which it is a problem is that the pleasure of an uncovered mystery is lost. I still tried to keep the "wow" reveal of the cabinet by saying, "I've been playing this like D&D here. I have an idea for the final scene, so I want you to know that the wolves want Henry to find the one who did this, because the leader is going to tempt him with something." That was enough that at that point most of the people even figured out what the reveal was going to be.