10 Montages Until GenCon #4: Guns Reloading

Yeah, you know you have done it at least once any time you have played a gun-toting character. I don't mean takin' down the enemy with either one or a hail of bullets. I don't mean pistol whipping a 1-hit mook into submission. I don't even mean fanning out your six shooter. I'm talking about that moment the director of the game looks at you, asks you, "what do you do?", and you just stare that director back in the eye, proudly announce, "CHICK-CHICK", make the motion of locking and loading whatever implement of death your character is wielding, and announce your witty dialog. For all of you that relish this moment at the beginning of each action scene, this montage is for you:

10 Montages Until GenCon: Montage #5:Private William Hudson Supercut

Aliens (the second Alien movie) by far was the only real HiBRiD-style movie of the franchise, as especially epitomized by John Paxton's character:

Taking this montage into consideration,  and after seeing Prometheus, I am convinced that the only thing that can save the franchise is Dwayne Johnson or a clone of Private William Hudson's character!!!

GenCon Indy 2013 Musings-Part Two: 2013 Takeaways

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!!!!