Because I’m not going to make posts about every game. >.>

I already talked briefly about the Drama System hack we played (Colony Wars) on Saturday evening.  Since I’ve given up on chronological order:  in Colony Wars, I took the most chances.  I burst right out of the gate playing a frustrated asshole who wanted respect, not bureaucratic flim-flam.  I of course aimed that scene at my husband, since I haven’t quite reached the Gamer Confidence level required to toss character sheets at people I’ve just met.  The experience made me shaky, but that usually means I’m stretching.  I did apologize to my husband about five times because, me.

I would play Dungeon World again in a hot minute.  Great group of gamers (really, everyone I gamed with all weekend was awesome), imaginative group, and a GM who really knew how to take a nugget of an idea and run with it.  The entire thing felt like we segued from one awesome heavy metal album cover to the next.  My ranger rode a halfling-made (therefore, awesome) thatched roof down the side of a collapsing stone spire into a sunless sea.  In Xanadu did rune-slavers steal halflings, and it was a blast kicking ass and resisting mind control.

Let me put it this way:  I would gladly run Dungeon World, and people who know me well know that that’s a rare declaration.

FATE — oh gosh.  Fate still escapes me.  I have to admit it.  I’ve played Core a few times, both one shots and campaigns, and there’s something about it that just exhausts me.  It’s fiddly.  I was able to play Fate Accelerated at the con (CAMELOT Trigger), and I will say that Accelerated beats Core all to hell in keeping me interested.

I hate saying that I still don’t really get how the aspects pile on top of each other.  It’s one of those things like trigonometry that my brain hears and discards.  Every time I’ve played, there’s been a tipping point about 3/4ths of the way through the one-shot or campaign in which the aspects start clicking, and then they’re awesome — but it seems to happen organically, and I wish I knew how to make that happen as a deliberate gaming choice.

I think I need an Accelerated campaign to really get my head in the Fate game.  That said, I liked the structure our GM gave the one-shot a lot. Her obvious enjoyment of Fate also kicked my enthusiasm level high.

And finally, Golden Sky Stories was thoroughly enjoyable.  I was a cat!  A cat henge, a helper kitty who displayed many traits of Cat even when in her human-seeming form.  The mod we played — A Peaceful Town — was just adorable, and I can imagine a really interesting array of solutions to its very small problem.  I was especially looking forward to this particular game because of my friend the GM, not to mention the paradigm shift from the fairly grimdark rest of my weekend.  As Carl wrote in the con game’s blurb:  “There are 1000 RPGs where you can solve problems with violence. This is not one of them.”

I’ll put it this way — as someone who loves acting out grimdark emotional train wrecks as much as I do, I’ve never said “AWWW” so much in a game.  The other players were just as much into it as I was.  My husband the dove henge is still claiming he casts “Tranquility” on me every time he hugs me.  So much fun.

A few other notes about Big Bad Con:  Oy, that is not a great hotel.  But!  The con is organized so well, and the trade-off that comes with the not-great-hotel is the price that allows people who couldn’t otherwise come to the con to do so.  I wish the games started earlier, so the breaks between games were longer.  The food trucks were a brilliant idea.  I will also remember next year that I too can bring bourbon to the table.

tl;dr — Of all the gaming cons I’ve been to, Big Bad Con is by far the most smoothly-run and low-key, with a great group of attendees.  A++, will game again!

The XO is so much more than the curmudgeon at the end of the hall; he is the hammer that drives the CO’s and the Marine Corps’ nails into the horseshoe that keeps the horse running down the track.

– The XO:  Where the rubber meets the road 

—–

I had a blast playing Commander John (“Johnny”) Ozee in the Colony Wars hack of Pelgrane Press‘s new Drama System.  What’d he want?  Respect.  Respect from those he respected.  To retire with dignity, with his legacy intact, with pride.  What were his dramatic poles?  Conformity and principle.  Stick with regulations and policy and how things have always been done, or push out of bounds for one last blaze of glory that’ll be remembered long after he’s gone?

He wanted more than that.  He wanted the pretty Company security woman for himself, though he kidded himself that he thought of her only as a precocious surrogate daughter.  He wanted the station union boss to keep him in the loop, even though Johnny denied information to almost everyone else.  He wanted to snub the old money families while still expecting the shadowbox of medals and flag – someone’s flag – when he retired.  He wanted to give stirring speeches while underestimating the men needed for all the critical tasks shoved his way.

He wanted the NPC captain who jumped from promotion to promotion like it was nothing to understand that she needed him, even though it seemed fairly certain that she didn’t.  He wanted Frederick to take care of keeping the place running, without having to be bothered.  He wanted civilians to stop crawling up his ass with their fool problems.  Human resources? Company problem.  Labor agitators among the immigrants?  Riley’s problem.

An unknown thing tearing up the far-space colony and ripping apart marines and company men alike?  That’s a problem a Stellar Marine can solve.

Well, not so much lesson as observations:

• The first day (Thursday), everyone looked just like me:  plump, 40+, white.  That lessened slightly over the weekend, and I was glad to see a gender balance after so many gaming cons of being one of like three women in the room.  Of course not everyone was plump, but …yeah.  The overwhelming whiteness never lessened.
• Speaking of whiteness:  in one panel, a panelist stated that he couldn’t handle a media project at all because it featured an African-American character in a historically incongruous setting.  In that same panel, we mentioned zeppelins, Frankenstein, future neo-Victorianism and motorcycles that ride between stars.  Seriously, the PoC as an authority figure is what’s going to break your suspension of disbelief?  Good god.  I halfway raised my hand to ask the panelist to clarify, but then put it down again – I was surprised, and then embarrassed that no one else seemed freaked, and I missed out on a chance to be a good ally.  Shame on me.
• There was still a point on Saturday afternoon in which I burst into tears and said I didn’t want to go home.  My husband smiled at me indulgently; I guess finding a con ‘tribe’ brings that out in a person, that revelation?  But – and this is awful, but trufax – it wasn’t about the people.  I’m shy as hell; I didn’t actually speak with many people, let alone new ones.  It was about an atmosphere of creativity.  At one point I sat in a panel with about three hundred other people who want to write.  Eager, up-turned faces, all with a story they want to tell.  That sense of …gosh, creative acceptance, made me want to give up our fast-paced Bay area lives and get a little house back in Austin and fill it with cats and books and …yeah.  Live the dream.  Someday.

There is room for me in the world of writers and creators, but I have to write and create to earn my space. Angsting and planning about writing means nothing, compared to actual work.

Also, what a difference in settings.  This morning’s sky in California was a crisp, saturated blue, sharp-edged and almost painful to my tired eyes.  Texas has a sort of faded-jeans look.  Hazy, drifty, big.  Polaroid, to San Francisco’s digital.  I miss Polaroid.

“You only get better at writing by writing.”

Friends and I were talking on Facebook recently about the types of characters we tend to play, and I can sum it up very easily (at least in 4th Ed. D&D):

Leaders.

Not “hey guys follow me come here do this!” but the very specific healer/buffer role in a party. My goal is to have one of every leader class, but oy. I only have so much time. Here are my current incarnations, both in LFR (Living Forgotten Realms) and a home game:

Faral – lvl 16 Valorous half-elf bard. Roleplay-wise, she desperately wants to be a trophy wife. She’s gorgeous, avaricious, neutral, urban. She has no interest in woodlands and wilderness; she just desperately wants to be a noble. I tend to play her more in home games / online than at cons, since I downplay her roleplay considerably in a con setting. One or two instances of “duh, what other sort of woman IS there” asshattery made me “meh” about setting free my inner farcical money-grubber.

Laela – lvl 11 healy mchealerbot elf cleric. She’s the emotional successor to Laelin, the elven cleric and Melora-worshiper I played in a home game for a couple of years. Laela is the LFR version, with a bow and a darker side, so she worships Sehanie, waxes rhapsodic about the moon, and shoots a silvery bow rather than diplomacize with everyone she meets.

Ensa – lvl 9 Inspiring tiefling warlock. I love tieflings. I love them so. Ensa is (due to an early module she played) an assistant professor of Tiefling Studies at a posh Cormyr boarding school. She teaches the young nobles of the land tiefling cultural awareness and basic “do not automatically kill X race because it is X race.” After the events of the Battle Interactive, she opened a Tiefling Cultural Center in Elturel.

Gurdis – lvl 5 healy mchealerson dwarf shaman. She’s loud and drunken and likes the more raucous spirits. She’s entered into courting negotiations with a much more upright/proper dwarf; who knows if they’ll EVER be married. Her spirit animal is the spirit of her deceased werebear uncle. They’re very close.

Mary – lvl 5 healy mchealberry changeling ardent. Ardent, I’ll admit, is boring the bejesus out of me, even though it’s effective. Mary grew up at the fringes of Aglarond, in a family of changelings who have appeared as elves for generations. Her fondest wish, and greatest hope, is to become a Real Elf someday.

Callie – lvl 3 shadowydeathdeath halfling assassin. My one striker! She’s a dance-hall girl on a riverboat; she wears nothing but pink and white, has blonde ringlets, and an infectious giggle. She also gave part of herself to Shadow in exchange for escaping from her powerful Amn-based halfling thief clan. She’s really not that unhappy about the Shadow thing. She carries a whip everywhere.

—-

And in my home game! Lily, the lvl 11 longtooth shifter runepriest, is a feral, snuggly, Melora-worshiping, buff-granting, gorge-jumping, tree-climbing beast. I’m loving it.