[Roach] With beers at SteveCon

[Graham W]

At SteveCon, we had a go at the Roach. So there's four of us, in a pub: me, Adam and...God, I'm terrible at names...I know everyone was Biblical except for me...um...John and Mark, perhaps?

So we make characters, pints in hand. We name all our characters after beers: Professor Greene (after Greene King), Professor McGuinness, Professor Abbot and Professor Bishop (after Bishop's Finger). Interesting that I can remember all the names of the beers but not the names of the players.

First thing to note: the reasons we give for our strong positive and strong negative relationships are remarkably low-key. One of them is "He likes Byron" and another is "He can't string an English sentence together". This works surprisingly well.

Before the game, John offers to buy another round. I say "Could I get a lime soda, please"? He looks disparaging and says "If you really want". I take the hint and order another pint of Abbot.

And so the game starts. In Adam's first scene, he attempts to persuade the Chancellor to make him the Senate Chair. I narrate myself into the scene to vote against. Nevertheless, Adam wins.

It's noticeable, in fact, that many of the conflicts are genuinely academic jostling: getting funding for the Sports Department, who will be Senate Chair. This low-key play works very well. There's not much horror, save for the time my character spots a missing minus sign in Professor McGuinness' proof (mathematicians and physicists will relate to the soul-destroying terror here).

Around this time, someone tries the Reverend James, which is not a nice beer. We don't have it again.

One side-effect of the low-key play is that nothing much happens to Regina Sutton. Someone tries to persuade her to take part in an anthropological study of sexuality with the Chaplain, but it doesn't happen. At the end she cops off with John's character.

We have a bit of a pause from beer drinking near the end, realising we've got an evening to get through yet. By now, it's clear that the beers to go for are Greene King IPA and Abbot.

There's a lot of fun with Senate rules. It's quite common for someone to invoke "Rule 117" and make it up on the spot. Adam invokes one rule to insist we all bow to the sun at the start of the meeting (a Roach command). John's character, meanwhile, kills a young lecturer. I forget why, but the conflict is memorable because it was over whether anyone noticed his death. They didn't, so he was sat back up in his chair for the rest of the meeting.

Towards the end, the scenes are set up much more quickly: John throws down his Roach card, says "Well, I'm going to start a fight with you on the college steps", and we move quickly to rolling dice, without much improvisation. This isn't better or worse, particularly, but it's noticeable.

Everyone's Roached, at the end, and, for what it's worth, I'm voted the winner. At the end, Pemberton is still standing and it's mostly been a game about academic reputation. Rather low-key and rather good.

Graham

[Jason Morningstar]

Hey Graham!

Did the low-key thing just sort of happen, or was everyone on board from the start? 

How many Events did you play through?

Were you all drunk as lords by the end? 

[Graham W]

Did the low-key thing just sort of happen, or was everyone on board from the start?

It just happened. But it was partly in the way Adam presented the game, I think: as an academic satire which verged on horror, rather than as a horror game.

How many Events did you play through?

Six! Because that's how many there are in the game. Look it up!

Were you all drunk as lords by the end?

No, we paced ourselves nicely, because it was the afternoon. We made up for it during our evening game: a 1970s cop show themed My Life With Master, which we called "My Life On Mars".

Graham