Dreamation 2009

My second time at Dreamation was even more fun than the first. Doing a good job of scheduling in advance really helped!

Now, the con's still going on as i type this, but i couldn't make it back for Saturday or Sunday this year. Maybe for the next one - Dexcon - i should look into taking the bus; the registration fee pales in comparison to the travel expenses. The trip is pretty harrowing for me, too - i absolutely have no idea how so many people are able to hike out of the Poconos to New York every day for work!

I've been on a SciFi fling this year, so i approached the con with that in mind, and tried to sign up for a whole bunch of SciFi games. Luckily, they were in abundance, mabye even the majority, this year: Sign in Stranger (which i'm really looking forward to), Shock: (which seems to be played at every con, though not by me... yet), 3:16 (which i'm not so sure about), Geiger Counter, Freemarket (which i failed to get into), and many more. There were also some nice SF wargames - today's double-length Babylon 5 scenario in particular - that looked appealing.

The ones i actually signed up for were Adam Dray's Verge, which i've been looking forward to getting to play for at least a year now, Mendel's Homeworld Project, which seems interesting & very different, and Covenant, which isn't really scifi, but is close enough.

I have a terrible memory for names, so writing con reports is really tricky for me. So, i think i'll be sticking to my impressions of the games themselves, and not the players, so much. That said, i do want to point out a couple things. I'm a terrible, terrible roleplayer, so i'm always really impressed by good roleplay around a table - and that Verge game was full of excellence. I was especially impressed by Adam's portrayal of the various characters he manoeuvered as GM, and the smooth compelling exchanges between his NPCs and the scheming Dr. Pierce, as played by Verge's #1 (or is that #2?) playtester, whose name predictably escapes me at the moment... (Ah, it's Jon Eisenstein - how could i forget such an awesome name?) The other two players in the game, Mel White (did i get the right brother?) and Gina, weren't slacking off none either!

All this just convinces me that i have to find a way to get more roleplaying experience, somehow! I really wasn't carrying my weight in the game, last night. Would a steady weekly group be too much to ask for? ;)

Anyway, on to the games...

Covenant is a game of failed conspiracies turing on themselves, and we (the game made it to 4 players at the last moment, luckily, but the only one i remember is Mendel, probably due to his internet presence) felt that nicely in the scenario played. The setup, complete with a nice set of pregens, paired a conspiracy aiming to bring about the apocalypse and/or a new Christian American hegemony with a "stolen" backpack nuke. Sounds fun, eh? And so it was! We played out all the scenes you'd expect from a spy thriller - espionage intrigue, a car chase, the quiet confrontation, the cold execution, a couple gun-fights, and all the betrayals you could ever hope for. Oh, and then we (well, Mendel in particular) brought it to a close with nuclear armageddon, though the backpack nuke proved to be only the focal piece of a clever Xanatos gambit run by Mendel's character's faction of the conspiracy. The story (partial) resolutions of the three PCs was interesting: Mendel's character, the NSA agent, followed through on the (his?) plan unwaveringly, the lobbyist blew away his connection to the conspiracy, then washed his hands of it and took off for Hawaii with "the news girl", while my character betrayed his faction, then defied the conspiracy due to loyalty to ho his friends (who was shot down by the NSA agent) and family (who he rescued at the last minute). Pretty nifty.

I do like how the game sets up the play by interweaving the characters (PCs & NPCs) and organizations, and incorporating those relationships into the sharacter sheet in useful ways. The dice mechanic  - a pool of dice taking turns to roll traits into, a la Dogs w/o Raise & See - seems to work nicely, and works with the flow of narration, something that i always find important to play. I don't really understand the Truism economy, although i assume that they are supposed to act something like BW beleifs to drive, and contextualize, dramatic play.

Mendel Schmiedekamp's Homeworld Project is based on an interesting concept that i do not begin to pretend to fully understand. More of a long-form RPG than either Covenant or Verge, Homeworld Project, it seems to me, is all about building up a setting through play. I have i feeling i have to read the rules a few times before i get the game's intentions, but i can give a few impressions. I like the way the moving parts of the game - the characters, essentially - are all naturally interliked by the character creation process. A major character (all PCs i think) is made from 4 "Nature & Demeanor" style descriptors and a few very fiction-rich resource traits/attributes called "Grains", which are expended to modify the success or consequences of actions in the fiction. Now, each grain chosen by a player creates a "Reflection", which is mechanically just like a Grain, but which comes under the GM's control and serves as his resource for providing the player's characters with adversity. This is handled through "Manifests" - minor characters (whether people, ships, or motivated objects) which are 'spawned' by a Reflection (or a Grain; PCs can bring helpers into play very easily). The conflict mechanic simply involves rolling a die (d12!) for the acting character against the die of the defending character, and taking the difference in Consequence, a sort of labeled, fiction-rich hitpoints. Major characters (and major ships) all seem to have 25 of these hits, while minor characters have less. There are no group actions and no turns: as far as i can tell, whichever player (including the GM) wants to go, goes. I imagine once you've rolled once, someone else has first dibs on going for the next roll, but they never have to roll. Characters can help each other out by jumping in to take the place of a character who starts taking Consequence. Now there is some complexity here: die rolls can get 'stuck', stepping up or down instead of rolling. The range starts very high (11s) and very low (2s), but as more 12s and 1s are rolled, the range band contracts until the two bars meet, ending the "Chapter", and forcing some resolution to the sequence of action. Additionally, Grain points ("Layers") can be spent to affect the outcome of any of their die rolls, if they possess a descriptor appropriate to the actions being undertaken. (All of the descriptors are fixed and described in the rules, which makes this pretty straightforward.) Manifests, Grains, and, presumably, PCs can all be removed from, or added to, play based on the flow of this layer economy. In many ways this is the point of play - building a world.

What seems to have lost me in actually playing the game was mostly a lack of direction: unlike most games i've played recently (which have, at least, a strong Narr bent) Homeworld Project doesn't seem to have a BW Belief analog to drive the PC into action, and it seems i've come to rely heavily on such a crutch to find a character's direction! The other part of my problem getting into the game might have been my choice of of a rather alien PC - the default setting for the game is rather trippy (Astral Space) and meta (a game of dream-like world building playing worldbuilding dreamers) to begin with, and choosing a rather strange character only confounded the problems i always have of defining a constrained space of action within the fiction.  Suffice to say i had a very hard time getting into the fiction, but i don't think it is entirely (or even mostly) the game's fault.

Finally, i got to play the latest version of Adam Dray's Verge. This is a game where the relationship map is the character sheet, evolving through play organically. Naturally, this works wonderfully to create drama, although it can easily get a bit zany at times, with so many strange creations linked together. I imagine, however, that with a trusting group commited to serious play you could easily create powerful, meaningful stories using this system.

I already talked about the roleplay a little, so let me see what i can say about the system. I like having the chips - used to maipulate the board - and the dice - used to win conflicts & narration rights - be separate resources, although you do need to spend chips to get extra dice. I really think that a player needs to own their character's relationships (just the lines going out, though), so you can bring those things in readily when dealing with the object of a relationship.

I wonder, what would allowing player to bid for activations during a conflict would do to the game's economy?

The game certainly still needs tweaking, but i definately had a lot of fun playing Verge this go round, and hope to get to play it again!

And that was my Dreamation! I will probably be going to ECC next Saturday, for some miniatures gaming action, but after that its a long wait 'till Dexcon in the summer. I really hope i'll be able to go this year.