MLwM: Master-Lord-Baron's submarine. In a Lake.

[DevP]

This game also took place at VeriCon, and was an anomoly in some ways. It was also really impressive. (One of the con's guests, Ted Wadsworth, played in it and had a great time.) So...

Firstly, there was some undercurrent of humor throughout. We named the Master "Master-Lord-Baron", and he was clearly somewhat incompetent. So Horror came into play, but so did a bit of slapstick. Why? Firstly, my GMing style: it's unpolished, but moreover it often jumps to humor as a comfort measure. Plus I was trying frequently to introduce Uncomfortable Things while not going over the line. But more than anything, I'm an instinctually Vanilla person, and as much as I love MLwM I should find someone else to run it even better than I.

Other notable things: 8 MINIONS. You think that's amazing? How about playing the game from character creation to instructions to start to finish in 2.5 HOURS? Seriously. I was framing that thing fast like a jackrabbit on a metaphor.

A side-effect of having 8 players is that I absolutely could not give everyone the screen-time some of them deserved: there was just now way of even tracking everyone's various plot hooks in the time alotted. (One poor minion didn't even get to pursue any individual Connections, despite wanting to. My regrets here.) At least, the players seemed to understand the limitations, and nonetheless liked the coolness of the "hooks".

I also (perhaps for the purpose of speed) started combining Overtures with Villainy scenes. Naturally, some Villainous tasks involed the players' Connections, and I let them do both things more or less at once. (It made sense in context, the rolls happened, the Love was dealt.) I also allowed the explicit Overtures to be declared, and those went interestingly.

Lots of player-vs-player did happen. In part by design - I made two players' connections the same person, and I enabled the killing of a minion's Connection by a different minion - but in part by character choice. This was largely fun, but the problem still came up of player-versus-player conflict. Why did this come up? Because I didn't make it clear that minions killing each other off is not in the genre. I said it as a suggestion, but I should have made that a very clear rule - Genre Expectations are as much rules as Task Numbers! Remember that!

So if I just laid that out more clearly, that wouldn't have come up, but I nonetheless was able to roll with incoming action in a genre-relevant way, and it was all good.

8 people, two-and-a-half hours, and lots of people (including a woman who'd never roleplayed before!) who enjoyed it. Wow.