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I'll Get Something Out Of The Way...
Mar. 13th, 2006 02:34 pm...as people may not want to read my frothing about the Oxford system in anything approaching the detail I do later in this post. For those people, I will offer my opinion (and what would probably be mine alone or in very small minority) in the shortest manner I can.
White City > Tony Live
If you want to stop reading now, by all means do - and so to Thursday night and the karaoke.
Impractical Magic (otherwise known as Elizabeth & I on the very few occasions we have duetted in the past) sat down as the first entry of the evening and sung I Will Love You, about as well as we ever have done, scoring the following:
Voice (Technical merit and volume): 8 8 9
Performance (Audience Clapometer): 8 9 10
Style (Artistic Impression): 9 9 9
Total: 79
Which, ironically, is the same score I got when I immolated the stage back in the first round of the solo competition last year, dispelling any opinions that we don't sound good together. We beat Welsh Dave, we beat everyone else, but most importantly, we beat Stu - and received the shortest, most trite handshake evar as he left. Elizabeth and I are now the proud owners of a large amount of Budweiser gear (including good stuff like bottles of it, glasses, cuff-links and t-shirts), and are rehearsing Come What May for the semi-final this Thursday. If we sing as well as we did last time, we're going to tear the opposition a new asshole - simple as that.
Friday's shadowrunning bank raid left Tiny dropped for the first time since I have been playing him, in the first of a weekend-straddling case of badroll syndrome. After rolling considerably less successes in WFRP than the law of averages states my stats should have allowed me last Monday, I managed not to hear the four LoneStar cops behind me blowing their nose and having a picnic before they shot me repeatedly in the back. Team Guttertrog (Mayhem, Talks and Erik in the guises of Tim, Steve and Pete) had successfully gained entry to the bank with some gratuitous mind control while Tiny watched the outside, and were in the process of knocking it off when the security lock down kicked in and they had to try to fight their way out. They got as far as the main doors to find someone else, wearing a stocking on his face, setting charges to the door, which promptly vanished in a puff of C-lots. Tiny got rescued by another of Tim's NPCs and the whole lot vanished into the night while the rest of the Star were left wondering what the time of day was. Sounds like a failure to me, but Tiny and Talks are now getting on very well as friends, so at least something came out of it.
And so to Saturday...the White City game I had heard so much about and been told I positively had to go and try. Getting on a train at a quarter to eight in the morning was a little steep, but with judicious coffee and pastries I was in Oxford before Saturday began in earnest in time for Nat to make pancakes for all those present while Chris unsuccessfully tried fixing her internet.
The game ran between the hours of about half twelve and sixish, and while it involved and awful lot of faffs, the actual in-time comprised roleplay coming out of people's ears, dynamic descriptions and people playing up to them en masse, and things generally working a lot more like the cross-country pantomime that Alex likes to describe larp as. The definition and performance of characters was excellent - by half-way through the larp I knew exactly where I would find people relative to an encounter, and most likely how they would react, with only a few exceptions. This was not a downside to the system - each response was character- rather than path-based, and the depth with which people portrayed the characters allowed them to lose themselves in it in a far easier and more accessible way than I am used to with TL. Having a strongly defined setting seems to set people free from obligation to avoid stepping on everyone elses toes, because they can learn about the world and precisely what they know before going out and then defaulting to that in dynamic situations. It's a lot safer and more likely to produce good characters, as opposed to good moshes and a couple of good hours fun on a Sunday afternoon.
The best thing about the entire day? The game didn't stop when the larp did. This is a roleplay society who's plots occasionally go live - normally on Saturday afternoons - and were able to continue doing things which affected the plot while sitting in the pub after the game - those who weren't there missed out and will have to catch up. This is the level of required dedication to the cause that I have been rabidly chasing for ages, and it was sitting not a hundred miles from me all this time. To coin an excellent turn of phrase from an IC journal that is actually kept handwritten on games: Well, fuck.
I'll be going back there - Emma will be able to verify just how bouncy I was about it when I called her from Oxford station that evening, and all things considered, I'm still metaphorically bouncing about it now. This weekend's twenty-four hour is in danger of feeling like a cardboard puppet show at the hands of what I experienced two days ago - I have the same feeling I had when I started TL, but with the benefit of knowing what I am looking for rather than just going "Wow! Freeform acting!". My character and costume are already designed, the weapon pattern is going off to Skian Mhor tomorrow, and my history has already been a subject of discussion as to the (albeit pretty remote) possibility of dropping him into one of the upcoming games as an encounter.
Oh. Fuck. Yes. Where have you been all my life...
Saturday night and Sunday morning involved my first lie in for something like six weeks, and I took full advantage of the eleven hours sleep it granted me to be up in time to enjoy the Grand Prix awake and alert. The new rule changes (mainly dropping engine configuration from V10 to V8 and scrubbing off about two hundred horsepower, with the exception of letting STR get away with detuning rather than changing theirs) work well, and seem to improve reliability somewhat. Out of twenty-two cars starting the race, eighteen managed to finish it - a cause of some surprise and no little impressedness. There was racing up until the final flag, a marked lack of team orders, and Jensen finally has a competetive car under him and needs more good results like his fourth here to build his confidence before trying to win a race some time this season.
Overall, a good way to spend Sunday morning.
Sunday evening involved our running WFRP in an attempt to get as many present as possible, and I was struck with my second evening of crap rolls as Pieter in as many weeks. Of something like forty or so checks we made all night, I managed to pass about six. My obvious disappointment at this, while surrounded by Tim's curiously never-failing dice and everyone in general's overt ability to do everything I did better than me, threatened to boil over more than once, as I found my combat beast being all but useless in a fight once again. I was the last person to break my bonds when hogtied, only able to dispatch one runt mutant while Felix dealt with three, then contributed to the big fight by being slapped bandy by the big minionion while Felix shot and skewered the evil sorceror. Once I got free, I managed to disasterously punctuate my two gloriously successful rolls to hit the minionion by killing him in two massive stabs and promptly dropping six hundred pounds of mutant onto Felix's head, then losing patience with everyone's faffing and trying to get people moving by burning the evil castle down, not realising I had left two of the party behind inside. Cue going back in there, recovering them from where they had collapsed overcome, and looking something between awfully sheepish and awfully exasperated all the way down the hill the castle was on. Pieter is once again sulking that he's more of a waste of space than use, and I despair as to what I should be trying to do to make him different - my rolls negate my stats and I am left not being as intelligent as some, fast as others, strong as others still or able to take a beating. In short, there is nothing that Pieter can do that someone else in the party cannot do better.
Being something other than the weak link would be nice for an evening, if only one evening. Still, at least Emma returned this morning and I was able to meet her at the station. Such things are even nicer off the back of doing craply at your job the previous day.
White City > Tony Live
If you want to stop reading now, by all means do - and so to Thursday night and the karaoke.
Impractical Magic (otherwise known as Elizabeth & I on the very few occasions we have duetted in the past) sat down as the first entry of the evening and sung I Will Love You, about as well as we ever have done, scoring the following:
Voice (Technical merit and volume): 8 8 9
Performance (Audience Clapometer): 8 9 10
Style (Artistic Impression): 9 9 9
Total: 79
Which, ironically, is the same score I got when I immolated the stage back in the first round of the solo competition last year, dispelling any opinions that we don't sound good together. We beat Welsh Dave, we beat everyone else, but most importantly, we beat Stu - and received the shortest, most trite handshake evar as he left. Elizabeth and I are now the proud owners of a large amount of Budweiser gear (including good stuff like bottles of it, glasses, cuff-links and t-shirts), and are rehearsing Come What May for the semi-final this Thursday. If we sing as well as we did last time, we're going to tear the opposition a new asshole - simple as that.
Friday's shadowrunning bank raid left Tiny dropped for the first time since I have been playing him, in the first of a weekend-straddling case of badroll syndrome. After rolling considerably less successes in WFRP than the law of averages states my stats should have allowed me last Monday, I managed not to hear the four LoneStar cops behind me blowing their nose and having a picnic before they shot me repeatedly in the back. Team Guttertrog (Mayhem, Talks and Erik in the guises of Tim, Steve and Pete) had successfully gained entry to the bank with some gratuitous mind control while Tiny watched the outside, and were in the process of knocking it off when the security lock down kicked in and they had to try to fight their way out. They got as far as the main doors to find someone else, wearing a stocking on his face, setting charges to the door, which promptly vanished in a puff of C-lots. Tiny got rescued by another of Tim's NPCs and the whole lot vanished into the night while the rest of the Star were left wondering what the time of day was. Sounds like a failure to me, but Tiny and Talks are now getting on very well as friends, so at least something came out of it.
And so to Saturday...the White City game I had heard so much about and been told I positively had to go and try. Getting on a train at a quarter to eight in the morning was a little steep, but with judicious coffee and pastries I was in Oxford before Saturday began in earnest in time for Nat to make pancakes for all those present while Chris unsuccessfully tried fixing her internet.
The game ran between the hours of about half twelve and sixish, and while it involved and awful lot of faffs, the actual in-time comprised roleplay coming out of people's ears, dynamic descriptions and people playing up to them en masse, and things generally working a lot more like the cross-country pantomime that Alex likes to describe larp as. The definition and performance of characters was excellent - by half-way through the larp I knew exactly where I would find people relative to an encounter, and most likely how they would react, with only a few exceptions. This was not a downside to the system - each response was character- rather than path-based, and the depth with which people portrayed the characters allowed them to lose themselves in it in a far easier and more accessible way than I am used to with TL. Having a strongly defined setting seems to set people free from obligation to avoid stepping on everyone elses toes, because they can learn about the world and precisely what they know before going out and then defaulting to that in dynamic situations. It's a lot safer and more likely to produce good characters, as opposed to good moshes and a couple of good hours fun on a Sunday afternoon.
The best thing about the entire day? The game didn't stop when the larp did. This is a roleplay society who's plots occasionally go live - normally on Saturday afternoons - and were able to continue doing things which affected the plot while sitting in the pub after the game - those who weren't there missed out and will have to catch up. This is the level of required dedication to the cause that I have been rabidly chasing for ages, and it was sitting not a hundred miles from me all this time. To coin an excellent turn of phrase from an IC journal that is actually kept handwritten on games: Well, fuck.
I'll be going back there - Emma will be able to verify just how bouncy I was about it when I called her from Oxford station that evening, and all things considered, I'm still metaphorically bouncing about it now. This weekend's twenty-four hour is in danger of feeling like a cardboard puppet show at the hands of what I experienced two days ago - I have the same feeling I had when I started TL, but with the benefit of knowing what I am looking for rather than just going "Wow! Freeform acting!". My character and costume are already designed, the weapon pattern is going off to Skian Mhor tomorrow, and my history has already been a subject of discussion as to the (albeit pretty remote) possibility of dropping him into one of the upcoming games as an encounter.
Oh. Fuck. Yes. Where have you been all my life...
Saturday night and Sunday morning involved my first lie in for something like six weeks, and I took full advantage of the eleven hours sleep it granted me to be up in time to enjoy the Grand Prix awake and alert. The new rule changes (mainly dropping engine configuration from V10 to V8 and scrubbing off about two hundred horsepower, with the exception of letting STR get away with detuning rather than changing theirs) work well, and seem to improve reliability somewhat. Out of twenty-two cars starting the race, eighteen managed to finish it - a cause of some surprise and no little impressedness. There was racing up until the final flag, a marked lack of team orders, and Jensen finally has a competetive car under him and needs more good results like his fourth here to build his confidence before trying to win a race some time this season.
Overall, a good way to spend Sunday morning.
Sunday evening involved our running WFRP in an attempt to get as many present as possible, and I was struck with my second evening of crap rolls as Pieter in as many weeks. Of something like forty or so checks we made all night, I managed to pass about six. My obvious disappointment at this, while surrounded by Tim's curiously never-failing dice and everyone in general's overt ability to do everything I did better than me, threatened to boil over more than once, as I found my combat beast being all but useless in a fight once again. I was the last person to break my bonds when hogtied, only able to dispatch one runt mutant while Felix dealt with three, then contributed to the big fight by being slapped bandy by the big minionion while Felix shot and skewered the evil sorceror. Once I got free, I managed to disasterously punctuate my two gloriously successful rolls to hit the minionion by killing him in two massive stabs and promptly dropping six hundred pounds of mutant onto Felix's head, then losing patience with everyone's faffing and trying to get people moving by burning the evil castle down, not realising I had left two of the party behind inside. Cue going back in there, recovering them from where they had collapsed overcome, and looking something between awfully sheepish and awfully exasperated all the way down the hill the castle was on. Pieter is once again sulking that he's more of a waste of space than use, and I despair as to what I should be trying to do to make him different - my rolls negate my stats and I am left not being as intelligent as some, fast as others, strong as others still or able to take a beating. In short, there is nothing that Pieter can do that someone else in the party cannot do better.
Being something other than the weak link would be nice for an evening, if only one evening. Still, at least Emma returned this morning and I was able to meet her at the station. Such things are even nicer off the back of doing craply at your job the previous day.
