All this prompted me to spare some time to write some impressions. No real feedback or Actual Play type officiousness, I'm afraid, as I'm not really a very savvy player/observer yet, but there may be somethings others find of worth.
First, tragedy: I took a lot of pictures at Nerdly, with the Woman's camera. Unfortunately, soon after I got back, we broke up, and soon after that, she had to go home for the summer. I will probably get the pictures eventually, since both of us are (or at least seem to be) without acrimony, but there you have it. My dreams of even a mock-up Google Earth-enabled Nerdly photo album are temporarily dashed. But so it goes! I cut short this explanation due to the real danger of sounding sorry for myself, which I as of yet fail to be, and turning this into that most dreaded of things: a blog like any other.
There were seven games that I observed enough to have some kind of response to. In chronological order:
- Jungle Speed
- Watership Down via Shadow of Yesterday
- Open Boat
- Inuma
- PTA
- Thou Art But A Warrior
- Seiyuu
Jungle Speed is UNO meets War. The cards have a variety of symbols and colors on them, some of which are devilishly similar to one another. Everyone turns over a card from their stack. Most of the time, everyone immediately turns over another, but if any two player's cards match in some way, whichever of them gets the little wooden chotchke in the middle of the table first gives all his dealt cards to the slower, everyone re-shuffles into stacks and starts over. I've been looking more closely at games played with cards lately, since I've been insisting that Leviathan will be so played. This one looked fun, though imposing for the slow-witted like me.
Jason ran a game of Shadow of Yesterday where we all played rabbits. The first thing that struck me was how beautifully crafted a set-up it was. The characters were cranked up and aimed straight at each other. The result varied between glory and confusion, but that's about the experience I have with any ensemble fiction; I've been reading War and Peace, and either despite or because of each single character being portrayed vividly and in full, it gets plenty confusing as a whole. I think that, just like in architecture, a group that is linked up properly can support its own weight much more than one that is linked haphazardly. My instinctive response to gaming group size nowadays has been "no more than five players, period," and I have reasons for that, but I wonder whether, if there were more sophisticated systems for connecting characters to one another, the problems we seek to avoid by playing in small groups would be solved. I'm hoping to see glimmers of this in Spirit of the Century.
Another thing that struck me was how well the system matched the setting. No doubt a lot of this was due to the work Jason put into making Keys and Secrets and such, but it still seemed like, at base, the system for Conan was the system for...I can't remember any of the characters from Watership Down. It's been too long since I've read it. Anyway, make no mistake: These were some extreme bunnies. They took risks and names alike. Stuff had to get done, and they did not shirk. There were, however, at least two points where I was paralyzed by cuteness. It was made all the more devastating by the fact that 90% of the time, these were people in a tough situation, arguing and fighting and manipulating...and then I called for an Instinct pool refresh, and Jason said maybe my character and his sister groomed each other for a little while. I made very manly squealing noises. I think in part because I could at times think of them as rabbits, I actually came to really, really care about all these tough mothers, which never seems to happen when I play regular adventure-y games. For me, this was not an amusing one-off idea ("Conan Bunnies!"), but an engaging and fascinating world that I want to create/explore.
Idea: Game inspired by Looney Tunes, Kipling's Just So Stories, and simplified afro-cuban mythology, where everyone chooses a character from a fixed list of animals and tells the tale of "How [Main Character] [found/learned/gained/lost] [his/her/the] [quality/object]." Or maybe, via Aesop, "The [Principal Characters Array(0)], the [Principal Characters Array(1)], ... and the [Principal Characters Array(N)]."
Open Boat is a game about Madness, Hunger and Despair. Or, at least, that's what the character sheets say. Back in the day, when I first understood the idea that the questions "What is your game about?" and "What are the names of the principle variables in your game?" should have the same answer, it gave me one of those moments of searing clarity that force re-evaluation of all that came before them. It's a principle that is immensely near and dear to my heart, and that love might be the single factor which most endears me to the Indie RPG thing, and gives me the distaste for D&D that my friend expected from others in the community. But then, there are games that I like that break this standard, so perhaps I'm not as enamored as I think. The worst offender is probably Artesia: Adventures in the Known World. If I were to modify it, I would add a Quest Table or something, with the different levels of dedication you can have towards some goal, each giving you different bonuses towards accomplishing related tasks, penalties for unrelated ones, maybe bindings you get if you fail. Then I'd add rules for how to gain and modify quests, and add a few references to my pretty table in the character-generation rules. Of course, that all might be a bit out-of-genre. The protagonists in the Artesia comics seem pretty blase about their goals...
LAME
Anyway, Open Boat was unfinished, but well-crafted. Jason (who made it) had edible tokens to represent food. M&Ms served as Rations, but when they finally started butchering the dead for their succulent flesh, out came the beef jerky, cut into appropriate numbers of pieces! It was alarming how hungry I got, watching this game. Great fun.
I find it a little difficult to explain and justify my excitement over Inuma. Daniel once said of Burning Empires that the highest praise he could give it in our consumerist culture is that he was planning to pay 50 dollars to get it. At a late stage in the game, Clinton said that he was planning to sell Inuma for more than that, and I was mildly upset I couldn't pay him for it right then and there. I think that one of the reason that Burning Empires is such a dear part of my library and others is the shape and craft of it, the feel of completeness and...well, professionalism, I suppose. I forget who originally said that it's less a book than an artifact. Well, Inuma, in it's final stage, will be much, much more artifact than book. It will be pretty beads and hand-painted blocks of wood and stitched-leather pamphlets in a padded box, hopefully one with "INUMA" enigmatically carved on the lid, Jumanji-style.
First, Inuma is not a roleplaying game. That is, there are (wonderful!) rules for collaboratively creating worlds, and then there are other rules for playing in those worlds. However, the method of world creation gives you setting information such that you could very easily play that setting with any game system you wanted. Further, you don't even have to play in it. Clinton imagines writer's circles writing semi-overlapping short stories, or other possibilities which I don't fully remember. For any moment in time and group of people, there is a gate to fantastic unknown world lying in wait for YOU to discover.
The How: The first part of setting creation, making the world itself, is a matter of making several lists. Everyone at the table has to provide one entry for each list, but no more than two (I think). If I remember rightly, the first list was Inspirations, the fiction or music or places that inspire the world, then general elements common to multiple inspirations, then specific elements present, somewhere, in the world, then thematic elements (Individual v. Society, etc). Then, character cards are handed out. There are three kinds of characters. All characters have a [Name], a [Descriptor], and a [title, job, position]. Protagonists also have a [Thing they're responsible for], Antagonists have a [Selfish goal], and Anchors have a [Place that they live in]. First, everyone's given anchor cards. You can fill in any one of the traits on the card, then pass it to the next person around the table, who fills in another, etcetera until they're filled out. Then everyone gets Antagonist cards, then another round of Anchors, then Protagonists. The result of all this, as an observer, was one of the more vivid fantasy settings I have known. I felt like I knew it in my bones.
Like I said, willing to pay non-trivial money to get it.
PS: Once again, though I'm glossing over it, the system (which uses the beads and blocks) is actually quite rad. I just couldn't formulate a more complex reaction than "Yay colors!" and it deserved either better or not at all.
I played a bang-up game of PTA with Remi Treuer, Tony Lower-Basch, and Joshua A.C. Newman, all Famous Published people. Also there were me and other normal people. As it turned out, though, we were all secretly PTA gods. Those of us (not it!) who had played it before several times called it one of the best they had ever seen.
My character could beat up all their characters, but was in most all other respects inferior to them. This and other things I noticed he had in common with essentially every other character I've ever made in roleplaying. I wrote a list of these common traits, in the form of in-character statements, on the back of my character sheet, along with a sketch of a plot-significant locket. Actually, I wish I had kept that piece of paper. I spent all the ten minutes between the game ending and being asleep thinking about it. I want to say (though I could be surprised) that everyone has some level of fixed, unchanging structure that all of their characters are lie atop, in play if not in creation. It reminded me of the feeling I get when I play Bioware games: There may be many moral paths that the game supports, but there are some that I find it impossible to choose, and some that are clearly the "correct" ones, for me.
Anyway, it (the game, not my introspection) was an exhilarating experience. A fair amount's already been said about this one elsewhere, mostly about how fantastic and not-suitable-for-all-ages it was, so I'm going to demur. I will say that since the phase where we tried to figure out what fictional setting we were going to play in started with me saying "Barbarella!" seriously enough that I was expecting to be embarrassed by everyone's reactions, it was truly moving to see what resulted from everyone accepting that and building on it. It was a fantastic story. I would have bought at least the first season on DVD.
Someone called out in the dining area, "Who wants to help playtest our adaptation of Polaris to the fall of the Spanish Islamic Republics?" I nearly fell over getting out of my seat. The other volunteer turned out to be Travis, who had been in my PTA game, and who had sent me an email, I think a year ago, to see if I wanted to play Polaris. Small world!
I was made a Mistaken, and the roles didn't really rotate, the author wanting to test other parts of the system. It was a very strange experience to be in the position of an adversarial GM type guy for essentially the whole game. I don't think I'm very good at it. With all my shameful GM memories, it's my instinct to flee such 'heavy-handedness'. Despite which, the game was rollicking tragic fun. Travis was even more awesome than he had been in PTA. I'm really excited about the game itself, though. It's a period I love, and the system adds an element of pacing that seems, from reading only, like it might be lacking in base Polaris.
The last thing I did while I was there was watch a group play Seiyuu, an extensive hack for PTA that adds a lot of things that, from playing one game only, seem to be absent. Namely: A mechanic for designing a show, and one for saying "We've played this show enough, lets make a new one." Plus, you all play japanese voice-actors, and the shows are all anime, and inherently non-lame anime at that. Basically, it's a bit like Inuma; There are lists of plot elements, stylistic animation elements, etc. Everyone makes one suggestion for each list, then everyone ranks the suggestions one to five, and the highest scoring three (I think) become part of the show. I found that completely fascinating. To return once again to Burning Empires as an example, I think that collaborative setting creation with mechanical underpinnings is one of the great uncharted territories in roleplaying right now. I'm worried that this will make me want to include it in Leviathan 'just because'.
Several non-game things I wanted to chronicle:
- The weather
- The Globe and Laurel
- Improv Workshops
I came to the park on Friday with the erroneous assumption that Dinner that day was one of the meals the camp was providing. Several people mentioned places they had gotten food from. Chinese places, McDonalds. While I was aimlessly driving around Triangle, I happened upon one of the more astounding establishments I've ever frequented. The Globe and Laurel is clearly run by and for retired officers. Not only was it full of them, but the staff is dressed in livery, and calmly addresses everyone "Sir" (I don't think I saw any female customers), and even serve crusty, brown military bread. At one point, one man at the larger table joking suggested that someone once asked an absent friend "[Name], what is best in life?" And god-damn if the entire restaurant didn't finish that quote! "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!" Raucous laughter. Cries of "love that film" and "woo! Arnie!" I distinctly remember thinking: "This is a good omen for the weekend."
All meals come with soup and salad, and the french onion soup was, if not to die, at least to kill for. The rest of the food was also fantastic (except for the bread, which was, as I implied, more notable for its nostalgic qualities), they had a great selection of longnecks (though the local brew I chose to sample was a bit weak), and the decor! It is not hyperbole to suggest that every inch of space was covered with memorabilia; Medals, newspaper clippings, photos, campaign ribbons...my table was lucite covering a museum-quality display of an airman who was a famous cartoonist during World War 2 and the Korean conflict. You couldn't get away from it, but for me at least, it still managed to be civil to the eye, so to speak. Not garish.
The point being: If there is another Nerdly in my future, I must go to this place again. Hopefully not alone, this time.
Finally, Remi and Jason favored us with improv workshops. I see now that at least some of their being astounding human beings is due to their attending the real thing. This was probably, no insult to anyone else, the most entertaining portion of my weekend. It was also the most challenging and frustratingly difficult. These two factors combine to make me really, really want to do it more. I feel as if it would help more than 'my game'; My confidence is not the greatest, and I think it could do with the tiniest boosting. Between improv and public speaking, I know which would be a more fun form of self-help.
Example: As people gathered at the end of the weekend to hang out, I got antsy. I left camp without saying goodbye to any of the fantastic people I had met, without telling them that they were fantastic. I drove back home, getting (again!) lost in the DC mess. Nerdly was on the same weekend as Reality, St. Johns' annual violent and debauched mega-party. (Aside I can't help but want to share: The Wikipedia talk page for St. Johns contains an extensive debate over the likely existence of Reality) I arrived on campus just as people were scattering from the recently-ended Spartan Madball game. I had gone from one group-that-seemed-to-know-eachother-and-not-me to another. Also, I might have been dehydrated. I was irritable, mistrustful of people's efforts to include me. I doubted their sincerity when they expressed friendship. They're nice people, I thought, that's their instinctive response, that's what they want to say and think about everyone. No bitterness towards them, but I know there's no genuine basis for their friendship because, experience tells me, I'm not a readily likeable person.
The other reason I got started writing this post was that also yesterday (now a very vague term), I got an email from Jason saying that he and Remi had been talking about me, and how they wanted to see me around the discussions and forums more. 'Become our internet friend' is how Jason, ever-equipped with quips, put it.
I was only a little stunned, just like I'm only a little choked up now.
I'm friend to, by my lifetime averages, a lot of people, but it's not work to have lots of friends; I'm friends with all of them, because with I find it easy to be. It's easy to be around them and listen to what they have to say and be alternately saddened and joy-ed when they are, and to express myself openly and honestly to them. The internet, forums especially, at times feels like a combination of an empty room and an immense succession of parties, groups which you start out as an outsider to (I think that's why I have taken to blogging; I don't have to worry about anyone reading it, except for myself and potential employers googling my name). I (can't you tell?) have never been up on parties much, but friends are something that I can get firmly behind. I know that I can be a friend, and I'm extremely proud of it. Jason's reminded me that we're all here to help one another, even on the Internet, and I know I can be his friend, and I'm proud of that too.
Also Remi, Travis, and all the other people who I met whose names, due to limits of my own faculties, I have no real chance of remembering. I didn't see any spoilers at Nerdly harshing the vibe. You're all good folk.
Anyway, I think improv would help.
-Nick