Intercon signups

[hazliya]

Okay, so here's my list so far. Nothing's jumped out at me yet as far as "ZOMG must play!" so I'm rather apathetic in my choices right now.

Friday night:
Already played in Story Wars. Tam Lim looks interesting, and I'm a sucker for Grimm tales. Also, Redemption looks promising.

Saturday Morning:
I'm guessing Limbo for this one. I've already played in Supervillain, and the others just don't jump out at me.

Saturday Afternoon:
I get the feeling that I'll be playing in Life at the Securemarket. Dog talks it up a storm, and a game's bound to be fun if the writer's that into it. =) I'd like to see what he came up with.

Saturday Evening:
Running Leash. HOLY CRAP SO MANY PEOPLE WANT TO PLAY IN MY GAME. It makes me so happy. ;_; If you do want to play in it, I'd suggest signing up in the first round, because I know of at least 50 people who have explicitly said that they want to sign up.

Sunday:
Ehh, thinking of just chilling. No games really jump out at me. AND I like my sleep.

Anything anyone want to sway me on? I'll likely sign up for games that I know other people I know and like will be playing in.

Comments

[elenuial.livejournal.com]

Saturday Afternoon:
I get the feeling that I'll be playing in Life at the Securemarket. Dog talks it up a storm, and a game's bound to be fun if the writer's that into it. =)

Without making comment on this specific game or Dog's ability to write a game, your rationalization just isn't true. There's lots of crappy material that the creator absolutely loves. Look at fanfic (or plenty of professionally created works).

[hazliya.livejournal.com]

Really? I thought that the main reason my games were any fun to play was because I was into creating them.

[elenuial.livejournal.com]

It's necessary, but not sufficient.

[darkoni]

Being into creating something is an important part of it, but it doesn't mean someone knows how to construct a game. They could still suck at it, but their enthusiasm could carry the game anyway.

Life at the Securemart does have a good blurb, however. I see enthusiasm in that and it makes me think of Ash from Evil Dead. It's currently one of my backup choices for that slot as a result.

Mostly, I tend to trust the writers. If I've played in a game written by them before and liked it, I find I'm more likely to like a future game written by them, whatever the concept is. That sways my decision often.

I don't think I've played in a game written by Dog before, so it moves down on my priority as a result. I've tried a lot of games at Intercons before whose concepts sounded cool, but whose execution wasn't.

[mindways]

Mostly, I tend to trust the writers. If I've played in a game written by them before and liked it, I find I'm more likely to like a future game written by them, whatever the concept is. That sways my decision often.

I feel similarly... though I tend to think of "GMs" more than "writers".

(They're the same much of the time, so the distinction is often moot.)

[darkoni]

As someone who has written games and also GMd games that I have not written, I find the distinction important. Writing is the design, while GMing is bringing that design to life. In general, the least amount of GMing needed is best. If you can write the game to run itself, you're golden.

It's very rarely the case. I know I tend to write games that require answers from the GMs now and then. Tis No Deceit is probably the least GM intensive game I've written, since it mostly runs itself. I mostly get to follow people around and watch them interact and sing in that one.

[mindways]

As someone who has written games and also GMd games that I have not written, I find the distinction important. Writing is the design, while GMing is bringing that design to life.

Very true!

I've played in games which were well-written but poorly GMed, and vice-versa. Overall, my impression is that good GMing is better able to make up for dubious writing than the other way around? (I mean, ideally you've got both, but... :).

In general, the least amount of GMing needed is best. If you can write the game to run itself, you're golden.

I mostly agree with this - lowering the amount of required GMing means GMs are less likely to be bottlenecks, are less likely to accidentally contradict each other, are less likely to make bad on-the-fly judgement calls, and other such problems. And having to go to a GM is a metagame thing which can yank players out of their character's headspace.

But... I kind of disagree, too. For some types of LARPs, lowering the amount of required GMing beyond a certain point necessitates restricting (via scenario, motivation, capability or mechanics) opportunities for player creativity, simply because certain forms of player creativity require GM adjudication. Some fantastic LARPs I've been in were great specifically because the GMs not only let players do the damnedest things, but took those things and ran with them like the blazes.

[darkoni]

I do agree that a well GMed game can help overcome poor writing, but only to a point. If that GM creativity had gone into writing in the first place, you wouldn't need to overcome the writing.

As for lesser GM requirements, I must disagree that writing a game to need less GM interaction will limit creativity on players. If most mechanics and questions can be self-resolved, then the GMs have even more time for players that think outside the box and want to run with something new and interesting. GMs that are too overloaded won't always have the time to do that.

[mindways]

Very much agreed on the latter point! I don't think I phrased my minor disagreement above particularly well.

But: it is late enough I don't think I'll do any better if I try again. :)

[elenuial.livejournal.com]

I further distinguish design from writing from GMing. Design is more than just the mechanics of how players interact with the world and each other; it's also design of the narrative architecture with an eye for how it will affect the experience-of-play (as well as some pre-production planning, though production issues traditionally fall into the laps of the GMs). For example, in "Martha Stewart's," I did some design, but absolutely no writing, and quite a bit of GMing.

With LARPs, the skills necessary for good design and good writing overlap a lot to the point where someone can only consciously be writing and the design falls into place as an artifact of that, like hazliya did with "Martha Stewart's", but they're still distinct enough that it's worth the different categories to me.

[darkoni]

Okay, I see what you are saying. It's not something I encounter as much, mostly because for me, design and writing go together. I need to actually start writing, so I can see the picture of what the game should be. I can try to design ahead of time, but it's never as clear until I begin the writing.

[zrealm.livejournal.com]

I think i rather violently learned this lesson recently :(

Not entirely relevant, but possibly useful

[endlessgame.livejournal.com]

http://www.theageofcorporations.com/stories/securemarket.html

Re: Not entirely relevant, but possibly useful

[elenuial.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he and I have talked about the novel before.

[londo.livejournal.com]

I'll see you at Limbo, assuming we both get up in the morning.

I *also* have interest in Leash, half because it looks good, and half because nothing else currently in that slot looks like a game I want to play. Not a statement I ever thought I'd utter about the Saturday evening slot, but there you have it.

[hazliya.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean.

[elenuial.livejournal.com]

Ah. Now your Twitter makes sense.

[londo.livejournal.com]

My disinterest in Saturday evening isn't much the 18+ thing (though I respect/fear Gordon's game enough that I'd only try playing it if I felt free to bail at any time), but rather the fact that... not many of those games look terribly interesting.

I'll concur with Darkoni's statement above - intercon blurbs get awful formulaic sometimes, and can sometimes be shortened to "This is a four-hour Intercon larp. What could possibly go wrong?" without loss of information, except maybe what sort of costumes people will be wearing.

[buddhagrrl.livejournal.com]

That's frighteningly accurate. At first I laughed, then I was like, no, it's true. :-/

[londo.livejournal.com]

F was a particularly bad year for this, IIRC.

[mindways]

Heh. Very true.

You can sometimes glean a bit of the (intended) nature of the LARP from the way the blurb's written - comedic? Dark? Heroic? - but I do like it when GMs include more explicit information about the sort of game.

This can be the themes the game's exploring, that it's a reinterpretation of some particular (commonly known) tale, explicit genre-of-play (comedic, horror, etc), mechanics information (light rules? RTLB? Wargame element?), types of PCs that will/won't exist, and many other LARP descriptors that the setting/premise may not illuminate at all, but which tend to be far more relevant to "will I enjoy this game?" than, as you say, the sort of costumes people will be wearing.

[londo.livejournal.com]

My favorite blurbfail is one that I'm partially responsible for: this one (http://www.interactiveliterature.org/D/Schedule.php?action=25&EventId=26). We had players drop because they figured the game was too serious for them.

We were perhaps insufficiently obvious about the fact that we'd written "Rock, Paper, Scissors: The LARP."

[elenuial.livejournal.com]

Yes! Yes yes!

[elenuial.livejournal.com]

Like I said on Twitter, game blurbs are almost universally terrible, and pre-Intercon I always assume I'm going to have a miserable time (which has yet to be true). There's no real information except for maybe setting, as you say.

What is the mechanical genre of the game? How much agency do you have? What will it feel like to play the game?

There's other useful information, too. But games are more than setting! (Also, smashing together genres does not a good game make; I'm waiting for the "Faeries IN SPACE!!!" game.)

Also, like I said in Twitter, I find a high correlation between quality of blurb and quality of game--especially after factoring out quality of player base.

[darkoni]

If I didn't already have too many games to write, I'd probably add Faeries IN SPACE!!! to the list, just to prove it could work. Man, I might have to actually do that now. It's just going to stick in my head.

[elenuial.livejournal.com]

I wholeheartedly endorse this idea. :)

I'm just kinda implicitly saying that certain tropes make for a popular game without any regard to how good the game actually is. Faeries are one of them. Steampunk/Victorian settings are another (there are others, of course). It's a popular meme with LARP designers to think (for example), "Hey, Steampunk is cool. What could I add to make Steampunk cooler? I know! FAERIES!!!"

And thus the automatically popular Steampunk Faeries game is born.

However, just because someone has a concept/hook bound to attract interest doesn't make for a non-crappy game--and in fact, I can point fingers at quite a few games that ride the coattails of their hook and awesome player base to pre-supposed greatness despite not actually being any good at all.

Plus, that method of concept generation on its own makes for conceptually shallow games. You have to dig deeper than that to really hit at something nuanced and interesting.

[darkoni]

I have to agree with you there. Smashing concepts together does not mean a game can work. It depends on how you design it. Sassy Pirate Wenches is an example of a game I wrote that did not work well. I came in on the game later, but I always felt like I was trying to write square peg characters into round plot holes. I jammed them in there, but it never fit as well as it should have.

That being said, I do like to take terrible ideas and try to craft some logic behind them to make them work. If you can create an internal logic for why something is the way it is, then you can do it. But you need to create that reason to provide the deeper meaning.

Now that I think about it, I've used the Faeries in Space concept in a larp already as an internal logic for something else.

[darkoni]

We used to run games on Saturday night, but I found after running Story Wars on Friday night last year that I prefer running then. My game is done and I can spend the rest of the weekend playing.

[zombie-dog.livejournal.com]

Reading this entire conversation thread after the fact is a little bit surreal.