Takeaway 1: Team Directing
Four cons and 8 years ago, I started embedding myself
as a “ringer” in the game in an effort to help players new to the game get the
hang of using Ite’ and the game system in general and to give my friend (and
now second unit director) Matt Chimienti a chance to GM at a big con. This one
little change really made a difference and brought new players into the game
spirit. It also resulted in the first set of players returning to my games con
after con. We continued to do this, with Matt and I switching off the role of
“embedded player” and director, which as a result has resulted in multiple
groups of returning players! (Thank you to all of you, by the way; it is always
GREAT seeing familiar faces and giving you a great con experience…kinda feels
like a family…)
While this worked
great, we noticed that with two games a day relatively close together, we were
not getting time to enjoy the con, eat meals, and just recuperate in general to
provide the best game we could.
So, this year, in
addition to the new timing (see Part One), we changed things up a bit. Matt
directed the first half of the game (and I tagged him as the Second Unit
Director) while I ran the final big finale action scene. We ended up running 5
games with no fewer than 6 players per game; 2 of them filled up to the
capacity of 12! We had all levels of experience with the game with 2 of the
sessions consisting of all new players and three of the games had players from
games past.
The end result turned
out splendidly. Matt and I found ourselves much more refreshed for each game,
much less pressed for time, and way more ready to take things over the top!
With the feedback we received, I think many of the players will agree it was a
very good change.
Takeaway 2: Johnny
Parkour: Intended Results
Matt and I wanted to
have our own pregen this year rather than playing one of the leftovers as we
have in the past, so we created a new character, Johnny Parkour. We gave him
two different sets of skills, one reflecting my professional knowledge set (Biochemistry/Pharmacy)
and one with Matt’s (Political Science/Law) so as to enable us to inject our
own personal knowledge into the character.
We then gave him some
extreme freerunning parkour skills so we could really demonstrate and push the
system for the benefit of new players.
Finally, we gave Johnny
the Presence: Obscurity aspect. This aspect makes it so that the baddies and
minions ignored him completely. This freed him up to lead from an embedded
position and to complete tasks the rest of the characters didn’t find
interesting. For instance, to move the first action scene along, he always went
to the cockpit to draw the action there. If the party wanted to fight in the
arena, he would rescue the mission objective NPC; if the party wanted to rescue
the mission objective NPC, he would distract the baddies until the party could
get into position to open up their own special brand of whup@SS!
The character worked
really well as intended. Matt’s descriptions of how the union laws resulted in
bad foley, editing, and camera work resulted in keeping the use of Ite’
consistent with the Genre and really helped build the atmosphere with the
players. My own descriptions of the biological consequences of the venom and
anatomically graphic death scenes resulted in the players really feeling the
dangers of being buried knee-deep in poisonous vipers as well as led the
players to taking delight in their own descriptions of rather graphic methods
of dispatching the snakes.
Takeaway 3: Johnny
Parkour: Unintended Results
This being said, there
were also several other surprising results.
The first unintended result was
that because Johnny’s actions were so reckless and larger than life, I could
focus on developing a throwaway personality characteristic of the other
main NPC. Odin Johaansen. While Odin was originally just a “I want to save my sister” type of
character, there were several games where I was able to take a few actions to
really role-play the love he had for his sister. This played well with the
group and actually glued the two NPCs for the players, giving some purpose and
conclusion to the game. No one complained it was sappy or over the top, so I
think it was a great way to end those games. It almost brought me to tears once
or twice as well. What can I say; sibling love is much more challenging and
satisfying to bring to a table than sibling rivalry, which is nothing more than
a trite trope.
The second surprise result came
as a result of the both of us playing the same character differently. Johnny’s
actions were crazy and high profile when I played him at the
beginning of the game session (I
played him with an annoying accent, impulsive demeanor, and a complete
disregard for logical action). Once we switched chairs (from embedded player to
director) however, his actions were much less so
as Matt played him at the end of the game. By the third game, we noticed that this
created an almost synergistic effect on what we wanted to accomplish. Johnny
would get the players ridiculously pumped for the first scene, I would just run
him along the trees to pull the characters to the forefront in the second
scene, and by the third scene, he would fade into the background, which allowed
the players to really shine. This worked so well that we will
carry Johnny forward to GenCon 2015!!!!
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