Thing : Dundracon Preparations
Type : Game Design, Writing, Making and Organization
Size : Scattered, Smothered, Covered and Chunked
Description :Dundracon is a local convention that takes place during President’s Day weekend in San Ramon. I’m running an official game of Shambles that riffs off The Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai. The game is called The Putrescent Seven. Not only do I need to write up the game and do my normal game prep, I need to revise the assembly of the Awesome GM Box, and pre-pack any standard con supplies in advance (business cards, props, flask, etc).
S.Q.U.I.D. Test : This Thing will not be Done until the following tasks are complete:

1. Watch both the Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai for inspiration
2. A Writeup of The Putrescent Seven from which I can run the full 6 hour scenario
3. Printed character handouts, including name tents with portraits, character sheets, and Shambles cheat-sheets.
4. Compilation of adequate soundtrack to cover the various settings in the scenario
5. Re-assembly of the Awesome GM Box to make it suitable for convention use
6. Gaming and convention supplies packed and ready for the trip

With almost a month to go until the convention, it may seem a little silly to be doing all this now. But there is a method to my madness.

For one thing, I may be almost out of crappy business cards, but I won’t know until I try to pack them. If I am almost out, I want to reorder, preferably some better ones.

Also, I have a tendency to go into games unprepared. I want to knock this one out of the park, especially given that I’m drawing from such excellent source material. If I have the prep done this far in advance, I can tweak it more, or spend a little time making it Better or adding some shine.

Then there’s the Awesome GM Box. I used it this weekend for the first time when running an actual game, and I have some assembly issues. I’d like to resolve those before the Convention. If this requires a re-cut of the box, I want plenty of lead time.

Finally, there’s the whole stress factor. If this is all Done well in advance of the con, it’ll be one less thing to cause me stress in four weeks.

So, off I go. I actually cheated a little, as I spent some time this AM in a coffee shop, making notes on The Putrescent Seven ahead of this post. But that’s not really cheating Kids. That’s working ahead.

If you want to sign up for the game, it runs Saturday at 6 PM, in Room 151, and goes for 6 hours. Obviously it’s for a hard 7 Players – no crash spots.

If you’re an early bird, I’m running an official Shambles game at 8:00pm Friday Night. I’ll likely be running some demos or drop-ins as well. Look for posters, posts, or ask me directly for details.

I’m also running a super-secret Paranoia game in a super-secret room. If you can find me, ask me “What Time Is The Ape Fight?” to find out more.

Kublacon is also a good opportunity to pick up a hard copy of Shambles at the Endgame booth.

Hope to see you there.

This convention was marked by two very different gaming experiences as a GM. But I’ll come to those in a minute. First, let’s talk about everything else.

I was thoroughly uninterested in the dealer’s room as a whole. I don’t know why, I just couldn’t get into it. Maybe it was the people selling spray-painted Nerf guns as steampunk-kitsch. Maybe it was the t-shirt booth where I almost buy a shirt every year, but end up not buying a shirt because either the boothie is a prick or their designs are clearly bootleg. Maybe I was just penny-pinching. I have no idea. But where I usually spend an hour or so in the dealer’s room, this year I was in there maybe 10 minutes total, over 4 days. But, the dealer’s room didn’t lack for dealers, and their shelves were filled with wares, so I suspect this was My Own Damn Fault. It was, however, awesome to see Shambles on the Endgame shelves.

I set out this weekend to do several things that did not happen. I didn’t manage to meet up with many people who I knew would be there. I didn’t run the pick-up games I’d intended (probably a good idea). I didn’t broaden my gaming horizons. I didn’t put up Shambles posters. Some of this was just poor time management on my own part, and some of it just Didn’t Happen. The rest I blame on wine that comes in juice boxes.

I did play in an original Marvel Superheroes game. That was weird and fun, as Marvel was what I cut my teeth on all those years ago. I also got to play in a drop-in game run by a friend, a tradition of sorts at the local conventions. Monday, I was trying (and failing) to sleep off the night before.

Which brings me to the two games I ran. I ran a game Saturday night, at 6, and a game Sunday night at 10.

Saturday’s game was a Shambles game, about eating partying teenagers in the woods.
Sunday’s game was a custom horror game about a disoriented military unit, dealing with mature themes.
Saturday’s game started at 6:00pm, and was slated for 6 hours.
Sunday’s game started at 10:00pm, and was slated for 6 hours.
Saturday’s game, 6 people signed up to play. I had 14 people show up at game time.
Sunday’s game, 6 people signed up to play. Only 3 turned up at game time. We scrounged from semi-known quantities to find the other 3.
Saturday’s game started on time and ran 7 1/2 hours, until about 1:30am.
Sunday’s game started half an hour late, and optimistically ran 5 hours until about 3:30 or so.
I had run Saturday’s game twice before.
I had run Sunday’s game twice before.
Saturday’s game required character sheets, a cocktail-napkin’s worth of notes and some blank paper.
Sunday’s game required several pages of notes, 24 personalized note cards per player, a map, 8+ NPC character sheets, and about two dozen props, some of them hand-assembled.
Everyone left Saturday’s game in high spirits, having had a great time.
Everyone left Sunday’s game in high spirits, having had a great time.
Saturday’s game was wildly successful.
Sunday’s game felt like an unmitigated disaster.

I’ve been reflecting on these two games and how they went ever since the con. I’ll probably have a post about it later this week.

All in all, it was a Good Weekend, even if few things went according to plan.

My experience running Paranoia told me that people expect ZAP style games, with heavy clone deaths.  And to that end, that’s what I delivered (there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here).  If players didn’t end the session having to deal with deep debt and genetic drift, I believed I had done something wrong.  A typical scenario averaged 32 player deaths.

Over time, I’d read a few statements from various people indicating that Straight style Paranoia was heavily underutilized, if not outright ignored.  I knew there was a lot of Grim to be had in that setting, but I hadn’t ever actually tried it.  This past weekend at Kublacon, I decided to give straight Paranoia a chance.

I started with 30 or so auto-generated characters, and I skimmed them looking for characters with both interesting mutant powers, and at least one competent skill.  From these, I created extensive character backgrounds that led them to where they were now.  I was attempting to paint a more Brazil-like Alpha Complex – I wanted things to be absurd, and funny at times, but with an overarching sense of danger and forboding.  Eight characters came out the other side of this process, each with a wide range of fears, plot hooks and subtexts.  I felt like I had some very interesting characters, though I hadn’t figured out quite what to do with them yet.

In the end, I sent them on a fairly straight-forward escort mission.  The Troubleshooters had to accompany a highly-visible entertainer to his debut performance.  When they arrived at his dressing room, he and his assistant had been assassinated with weapons assigned to the Troubleshooters.  Oh, and a squad of Vulture Squadron Troopers were en route to assist in the escort.  It was a fairly basic ‘Get away, find out who did it, clear your name’ plot.

Before the session started, I made it clear that this was going to be a different kind of Paranoia game than what people may be used to, and I set the stage.  In this Alpha Complex, you don’t kill people.  You never have.  Violence is something visited upon other citizens by IntSec goons in riot gear.  Sometimes things get blown up but, those were treasonous acts done by terrorists.  You’re an accountant, who for some unknown reason got assigned the task of escorting this famous guy someplace.

Looking at the players who showed up, I had eight people.  Four had gotten into the game officially, four were hoping to crash.  I knew four of them pretty well from other game groups (three of them were crashing).  Of the rest, I only recognized one.  I had been in a game with him earlier in the weekend (a Paranoia game, as it turns out).  I had a feeling that if anyone there would ignore the preface and buck the Straight setting, it would be him.

Seven hours later (at 3:00am) one player had dropped out because he couldn’t stay awake.  Everyone was drowsy, but there was still a lot of plot left to go.  However, in the interest of saving people’s internal organs, we wrapped up with narrative.  The game had a suitable level of tension, as the players really were intent on keeping their clone alive, and as they immersed themselves in the plot points and seriousness of the setup.

Player Deaths : 1

Only one player had gotten to his second clone, and it was the player I expected (the one I recognized from earlier in the weekend).  Rather than get into the Straight plot, he set about playing as he was no doubt accustomed to playing Paranoia – with no regard for his own life or the lives of his teammates.  The other players realized he was a jeopardy to their ability to lay low and clear their names, and so his second clone spent most of its life gagged and bound in a trash processing facility in a subsector.  As frustrating as this was for the player personally (it clearly was), I was disinclined to throw him a bone when everyone else had so clearly laid the smack down.  It also bothered me personally that his previous clone died from lethal radiation exposure (R&D Equipment), and his response to this was to clothe himself in a dead man’s bloody suit, and attempt to drag his dying body (that was losing hair, teeth, fingernails and more) to the stage so he could, as near as I could tell, attempt to lecture people to sleep.

I digress.  Let’s talk about the other players, the ones who stuck around.  When queried for feedback, they all indicated they’d had a great time, and that it was a very different kind of Paranoia.  As a GM and game designer, the experience taught me many things, but most of all it taught me that Straight Paranoia Can Work.  I intend to try it again, with one caveat : Next time, the game description will be more explicit about the fact that the game is straight.  I may even list it as a straight horror game, depending on the scenario I put together.

If you’ve gamed at a convention before, you know that the people who show up to play range from all over the map.  I have met some amazing gamers at conventions, but for every one of them I’ve met a lousy player with whom I would not share the table again.  Everyone has been in a game with That Guy – and sometimes I’m sure I’ve been That Guy in someone else’s game.  People expect Paranoia to be absurd – and as Paranoia GMs, we’ve enforced if not built that expectation.  But there is a whole lot of potential in running Straight Paranoia.  Just make sure the players know what to expect.

Here’s the description I submitted:

A Fistfull Of Plasticreds

IntSec on one side of the Sector, R&D on the other, and you right in the middle. There’s Plasticreds to be made in a Sector like this.

A clone’s life in these parts often depends on a mere scrap of information.

Don’t worry, you won’t find any spoilers here about the game. But if you’re looking for information about the game, here’s what I can tell you:

1. It will be Zap to Zap/Classic. There will most certainly be madcap humor and a significant body count, but unlike previous games, you’re going to be rolling for damage and hit location;
2. If you read this post, and come to play, you can get a reward if you pull me aside and say but one word: “Quailish”
3. Anyone who actually comes in costume will get a prize. “Costume” is loosely defined in this case.

Hope to see you there. Sorry I don’t get much time to update here. But I will be there.

However, Will from Wargolem Games sood in the gap, covering my Sunday Paranoia game, and both he and Badger made sure that the tables were kept full of Shambles demo copies.

It was a bummer to miss the con, but the full release will still happen at KublaCon later this year.

I offered them two games, Shambles and ParanoiaXP. They chose ParanoiaXP. Ah me.

But sod it. I love running Paranoia (my game is Sunday, 10am.) And I can spend the rest of the weekend doing what I want.

Mainly, gaming, running Shambles demos, and schmoozing.

I’ll be distributing printed versions of the Shambles Prerelease Demo all around the con. I’ll only have about a hundred or so, so get in line. As a special bonus to Con Attendes, the Shambles Prerelease Demo will containt a DVD with Night of the Living Dead (A decent burn of it too), and a song by Zom Waites called Floyd The Mailman.

Hope to see you there. Look for the guy in the Sneak Attack lab coat that looks like this:

_{(Photo courtesty of Nadja Robot)}

I went to a gamer geek con last weekend, and played in a couple new things. One was Traveller, which was cool. One was (I swore I would never do this) a d20 D&D Game.

Now. I know I have been fairly outspoken against d20, and D&D in general. But one of the guys from the Traveller game was running a pickup game, and he was pretty darn cool, so I decided to jump in.

I wound up sitting with him, a 14 yr old guy who had been playing it for 5 years and knew the rules backwards and forwards, a gal I think was his sister who played but not as much, and another gal who played a bit. The guy was kinda the typical Timmy Power Gamer type I really hate sitting down at the table with. But, he became a source of entertainment.

For starters, I asked for something simple. A big guy with an Axe. Don’t care about the other stuff, just gimmie something to swing. And an Ogre Slaying Knife that’s +9 against Ogres.

That accomplished, I took a look around the table, and decided that what this game needed, was to be crashed. What this means, in my own terms, is that when sitting down with serious players (like my friend the 14 yr old thievy type next to me), the only right and proper thing to do is to attempt to set them on their ears. It may not be a popular, point of view, but it’s mine.

So it was, that Shirley, the Transvestitie Ogre Slayer was born.

Not that the game ended up needing much adjustment. It was funny enough watching twink-boy do thinks like nearly kill a ballerina, poison himself, and say things like “Oh this will be a cinch” before rolling horrendously bad on a check. Which was funny because Shirley was trying to tell him to duck. Because she was chucking a spear at the guy behind him. Which would have hit except that he failed hearing me, and dodging the spear.

All in all, much fun was had, and Shirley could well be the only character at the con who got the proverbial One Wish From God, and redeemed it on a better dress.

The lesson here is: When you don’t know what else to do, put on a dress.