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Gamex Part II.
I had a plan to get to the con early on Saturday morning, sign up for some open slots of full games, and play something in the morning slot. But the night before, I had to take NyQuil to get myself to sleep, and that knocked me out a bit. When I came to consciousness, it was ten to ten; I drifted back off to sleep. A few hours later, I woke up a bit more refreshed. I puttered around the house, got some food and did some dishes, and headed back to the Radisson. I was a little bit later than I intended, but there was still time for a little shopping.
Shopping. After browsing around, I headed to the Indie Press Revolution booth to pick up Spirit of the Century (welcome, Google Alert user![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
drivingblind!) and Primetime Adventures. I'd been meaning to pick up these and a few other games, but it's easier to resist the urge to spend when I'm sitting behind a computer screen. And no gaming store anywhere near Southern California carries IPR stuff.
I was going to buy some dice, when I was called by name. I looked up, and I saw my sister's fiancé. He was there for RPGs too, though he was interested in the other games. Wizards of the Coast had a whole lot of demo games to preview their upcoming Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition. I'd hovered over a game on Friday, and was thoroughly unimpressed. I've really sworn off tactically minded RPGs. If I want that kind of experience, I'll play a videogame or a boardgame.
Still, it was a pleasant surprise to see him, and I managed to get him to buy Agon. But after all that, I had to head off to my next game.
Saturday, 3:00. One Can Have Her (bloodthorn). One Can Have Her is an odd little game. It's got a noir theme, every player creates a character based on lists of attributes. There is a list of appropriate occupations (nightclub singer, gangster, doctor) and a list of appropriate personalities (idealistic, greedy, depressed). And you put those together for your character. There's a list of crimes and a list of victims, and you put them together to create his past. There's a list of life dreams. There's a list of ways he may be related to the femme fatale. There's even a list of names; your character has to be from that list.
Then the GM creates the femme fatale, who will be a part of this disparate characters' lives. I was struck by the way that noir misogyny is hardcoded into the game. The femme fatale is literally defined by the relationships that the characters have with her. And the characters can only be men. She is the only woman in the game allowed to have underworld connections. All other women must be either victims or innocents. It's part of the tone and setting, I guess, but I don't know how I feel about it.
I played Holly, a greedy politician who had blackmailed a celebrity. Specifically, he was blackmailing a popular film star because of his ongoing relationship with an underage girl. Holly knew the femme fatale from charity events, and he dreamed of power. The other characters were a paranoid cop who had murdered a child, a hardboiled federal agent who was selling drugs to his own brother, and a depressed war veteran who had stolen something of great value, but couldn't find a fence.
With four characters, we ended up with three stories. While Jesse did a good job having connections between all of the different narratives, the cop and the federal agent ended up merging into one powerhouse of a story. Holly's story was a roller coaster. My first scene was with the femme fatale in my office, where things went pretty normally; but when Holly met with the actor, a real two-faced character became clear. So I kept bouncing between these scenes where Holly was polite, politic, and persuasive, and scenes where he was cruel, callous, and conniving. Eventually, the heat was turned up for him, and he hectored the actor into "getting rid of" the girl. I had foolishly not been specific enough in my request, and so a few scenes later, the girl turned up dead.
The veteran, in contrast, had a much calmer story. In another classic noir trope, nothing went right for him. Nothing. He just kept trudging along, getting beat up by life. I think that his story needed a little time to play out. (Holly's too, really. The vet kept losing, but Holly kept "winning." They were due for a change in fortune.) But the cop and the fed had driven their stories to such a beautiful self-destructive finish that we ended the game.
Dinner. I met up with some more of the Nerd SoCal group and because the sky bar had not yet opened, we had dinner and drinks in the lobby bar. After I was done, I realized I had not yet bought the dice I'd meant to earlier. I went to the dealer room, but it had been closed. Instead, I headed over to my evening game.
Saturday, 8:00. InSpectres (Morgan Ellis). I was a little leery signing up in the afternoon. There was only one pre-registered player, and I was the first day-of signup. But as the day went on, I learned that a lot of other folks were going to be joining the game, includingbanfennid and immortalthief, so I didn't have to worry about the game being canceled.
InSpectres was definitely my favorite game of the con; I played it twice (the second session occurred on Sunday). It was really an amazing game. There's so little to it. A tiny bit of character creation, a little bit of rules, a few cubic dice, and then—and this is not merely a cliché—hilarity ensues.
The game is written to mimic Ghostbusters, paranormal investigators comedically solving supernatural mysteries. They rarely get things right, but they always, as Morgan said, "fail forward." The story just keeps moving and everything works fine.
Really, though, it's a sitcom generator. You create wacky characters, then you give them a pretense for working together. Then they go out and do wacky things that may or may not have anything to do with their ostensible job. On Friday, I'd heard Morgan talk about using InSpectres to run a Futurama-like world—package delivery in the thirty-first century. It would totally work.
In this game—InSpectres Lackawanna—I played Olaf "Big O" Montpierre, a 6'10" albino and former wine critic. Other characters included Marian "The Librarian," a former librarian; Bob, the silent partner in our InSpectres franchise (thus, "Silent Bob"); Victor "Vulture Anthrax" Adams, a former punk drummer; our resident techhead "Einy"; and Frank. Just Frank.
The tone was set when out client tried to call the company and Vulture Anthrax picked up the phone in a hallucinatory daze. Then Silent Bob took the phone away from him, but wouldn't speak into it. Then Big O stood behind Silent Bob and shouted over his shoulder and into the phone, narrating Bob's gestures and general body language.
Soon we were investigating the preternatural pest that was keeping our client from turning a pizza restaurant into a tanning salon. Obviously, as an albino wine critic, Big O had strong feelings about this. Luckily, his ties to the anti-tanning activist community (he's a member of MelaNoWay!) provided useful information.
Vulture Anthrax preemptively showered the tanning beds with bullets, releasing the souls of thousands of albino ghost tans. Or something. Maybe it was the ghosts that were getting tan. Things were pretty crazy. Also, there was a giant ghost spider inside with the face of a little girl, who turned out to be the sister of Frank, who had died in a tanning accident in Schenectady.
In our second case, we had to get in our decades-old North Korean helicopter to fly to Amish country to investigate a strange smell. This was complicated by the fact that Silent Bob turned out to be secretly Amish, while Einy viciously hated the Amish and had a plan to destroy them. We helped Brother Tang (who had been a punk guitarist with Vulture Anthrax before conversion) after some tense contract negotiation. And when the vampire cows began attacking the village (oh yeah, there were vampire cows too), Big O turned them away with a papally blessed cowbell. The cowbell, sadly, created a fever among the villagefolk. After some bovine vampire slaying, Vulture Anthrax, Tang and Big O played "Don't Fear the Reaper" to relieve the fever.
Somewhere along the way, Vulture Anthrax was promoted from dogsbody to vice-president of FUCK YEAH!
After hours. I headed pretty much directly home. Others were going to play a midnight fame of Don't Rest Your Head, but I had preregistered for a 10 a.m. game, and I didn't want to miss it.
ThuNYTX: 8:45.
Shopping. After browsing around, I headed to the Indie Press Revolution booth to pick up Spirit of the Century (welcome, Google Alert user
drivingblind!) and Primetime Adventures. I'd been meaning to pick up these and a few other games, but it's easier to resist the urge to spend when I'm sitting behind a computer screen. And no gaming store anywhere near Southern California carries IPR stuff.I was going to buy some dice, when I was called by name. I looked up, and I saw my sister's fiancé. He was there for RPGs too, though he was interested in the other games. Wizards of the Coast had a whole lot of demo games to preview their upcoming Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition. I'd hovered over a game on Friday, and was thoroughly unimpressed. I've really sworn off tactically minded RPGs. If I want that kind of experience, I'll play a videogame or a boardgame.
Still, it was a pleasant surprise to see him, and I managed to get him to buy Agon. But after all that, I had to head off to my next game.
Saturday, 3:00. One Can Have Her (
bloodthorn). One Can Have Her is an odd little game. It's got a noir theme, every player creates a character based on lists of attributes. There is a list of appropriate occupations (nightclub singer, gangster, doctor) and a list of appropriate personalities (idealistic, greedy, depressed). And you put those together for your character. There's a list of crimes and a list of victims, and you put them together to create his past. There's a list of life dreams. There's a list of ways he may be related to the femme fatale. There's even a list of names; your character has to be from that list.Then the GM creates the femme fatale, who will be a part of this disparate characters' lives. I was struck by the way that noir misogyny is hardcoded into the game. The femme fatale is literally defined by the relationships that the characters have with her. And the characters can only be men. She is the only woman in the game allowed to have underworld connections. All other women must be either victims or innocents. It's part of the tone and setting, I guess, but I don't know how I feel about it.
I played Holly, a greedy politician who had blackmailed a celebrity. Specifically, he was blackmailing a popular film star because of his ongoing relationship with an underage girl. Holly knew the femme fatale from charity events, and he dreamed of power. The other characters were a paranoid cop who had murdered a child, a hardboiled federal agent who was selling drugs to his own brother, and a depressed war veteran who had stolen something of great value, but couldn't find a fence.
With four characters, we ended up with three stories. While Jesse did a good job having connections between all of the different narratives, the cop and the federal agent ended up merging into one powerhouse of a story. Holly's story was a roller coaster. My first scene was with the femme fatale in my office, where things went pretty normally; but when Holly met with the actor, a real two-faced character became clear. So I kept bouncing between these scenes where Holly was polite, politic, and persuasive, and scenes where he was cruel, callous, and conniving. Eventually, the heat was turned up for him, and he hectored the actor into "getting rid of" the girl. I had foolishly not been specific enough in my request, and so a few scenes later, the girl turned up dead.
The veteran, in contrast, had a much calmer story. In another classic noir trope, nothing went right for him. Nothing. He just kept trudging along, getting beat up by life. I think that his story needed a little time to play out. (Holly's too, really. The vet kept losing, but Holly kept "winning." They were due for a change in fortune.) But the cop and the fed had driven their stories to such a beautiful self-destructive finish that we ended the game.
Dinner. I met up with some more of the Nerd SoCal group and because the sky bar had not yet opened, we had dinner and drinks in the lobby bar. After I was done, I realized I had not yet bought the dice I'd meant to earlier. I went to the dealer room, but it had been closed. Instead, I headed over to my evening game.
Saturday, 8:00. InSpectres (Morgan Ellis). I was a little leery signing up in the afternoon. There was only one pre-registered player, and I was the first day-of signup. But as the day went on, I learned that a lot of other folks were going to be joining the game, including
banfennid and immortalthief, so I didn't have to worry about the game being canceled.InSpectres was definitely my favorite game of the con; I played it twice (the second session occurred on Sunday). It was really an amazing game. There's so little to it. A tiny bit of character creation, a little bit of rules, a few cubic dice, and then—and this is not merely a cliché—hilarity ensues.
The game is written to mimic Ghostbusters, paranormal investigators comedically solving supernatural mysteries. They rarely get things right, but they always, as Morgan said, "fail forward." The story just keeps moving and everything works fine.
Really, though, it's a sitcom generator. You create wacky characters, then you give them a pretense for working together. Then they go out and do wacky things that may or may not have anything to do with their ostensible job. On Friday, I'd heard Morgan talk about using InSpectres to run a Futurama-like world—package delivery in the thirty-first century. It would totally work.
In this game—InSpectres Lackawanna—I played Olaf "Big O" Montpierre, a 6'10" albino and former wine critic. Other characters included Marian "The Librarian," a former librarian; Bob, the silent partner in our InSpectres franchise (thus, "Silent Bob"); Victor "Vulture Anthrax" Adams, a former punk drummer; our resident techhead "Einy"; and Frank. Just Frank.
The tone was set when out client tried to call the company and Vulture Anthrax picked up the phone in a hallucinatory daze. Then Silent Bob took the phone away from him, but wouldn't speak into it. Then Big O stood behind Silent Bob and shouted over his shoulder and into the phone, narrating Bob's gestures and general body language.
Soon we were investigating the preternatural pest that was keeping our client from turning a pizza restaurant into a tanning salon. Obviously, as an albino wine critic, Big O had strong feelings about this. Luckily, his ties to the anti-tanning activist community (he's a member of MelaNoWay!) provided useful information.
Vulture Anthrax preemptively showered the tanning beds with bullets, releasing the souls of thousands of albino ghost tans. Or something. Maybe it was the ghosts that were getting tan. Things were pretty crazy. Also, there was a giant ghost spider inside with the face of a little girl, who turned out to be the sister of Frank, who had died in a tanning accident in Schenectady.
In our second case, we had to get in our decades-old North Korean helicopter to fly to Amish country to investigate a strange smell. This was complicated by the fact that Silent Bob turned out to be secretly Amish, while Einy viciously hated the Amish and had a plan to destroy them. We helped Brother Tang (who had been a punk guitarist with Vulture Anthrax before conversion) after some tense contract negotiation. And when the vampire cows began attacking the village (oh yeah, there were vampire cows too), Big O turned them away with a papally blessed cowbell. The cowbell, sadly, created a fever among the villagefolk. After some bovine vampire slaying, Vulture Anthrax, Tang and Big O played "Don't Fear the Reaper" to relieve the fever.
Somewhere along the way, Vulture Anthrax was promoted from dogsbody to vice-president of FUCK YEAH!
After hours. I headed pretty much directly home. Others were going to play a midnight fame of Don't Rest Your Head, but I had preregistered for a 10 a.m. game, and I didn't want to miss it.
ThuNYTX: 8:45.
no subject
no subject
I really like the way the system works, and I do enjoy making characters.
no subject
FYI, Jesse's LJ is
no subject
From that point of view the Femme Fatale is not a "real" woman. She's an idea and our ideas about things very rarely reflect the reality of them. In fact that's what I like about the game's end condition. I think the game would be misogynistic if the end condition were more literal to the title in which one of the men, "got the girl." But that's not the end condition. "Winning" One Can Have Her means you get to decide her fate.
To me that's the point that she ceases to be an idea as seen by the men in her life and we, as audience members, get to see a glimpse of who she REALLY is independent of the men.
no subject
This worldview is very clearly present in noir, which is also, of course, very expressionistic. But that doesn't absolve either from the way it portrays women, especially if that absolution involves completely discounting women from the story. I don't know to what extent the rules text of One Can Have Her addresses these issues, but I was struck by the way that the designer was so keenly aware of these misogynistic tropes that he took the time to codify it into the game explicitly.Please correct me if I'm misremebering how you described the game, but isn't this only sometimes the case? The "goal" of the player is to have their character be the last man standing, and the privilege that victory brings is narrating the outcome of the femme fatale. What's implicit in that is that the character gets to use the femme fatale to achieve his goal, and her existence then remains tied to the male character.
Having the GM narrate a future for the femme fatale seems to be presented as a suboptimal choice for the players, and for the game. And still, the agency of the woman is dependent entirely on the actions (specifically the self-destruction) of the men. Only if the men remove each other from her life can she be her own person.