Blacker Than the Dark of Night

[Tiny]

Hi All,
This past weekend October 7-9, 2005 at INTERCON XX, MID-ATLANTIC 2005
Avonelle and I Ran: "Blacker Than the Dark of Night", a Sin City inspired LARP.
We are looking for critiques and comments.
If you played in our event your feed back would be appreciated.

Thank you
Tiny

[Dragontologist]

Like I told Avie, this was an AWESOME larp.  Only goal: "Make your son happy"  end result: one man dead, one man wounded, the loss of my character's job, and the splitting of every political alliance in the entire city.  Whoo!

[Kate Beaman-Martinez]

I have to say one of my fav moments was me pulling the gun out on Simms and wanting demanding answers. I think people were a bit surprised when I pulled out 'Bridezilla'.

[`_100003005030 (Zero)]

Well, I'll kick it off.  It's not a secret that I was kinda dragged kicking and screaming into this one after the event I signed up for was cancelled; it really didn't seem like my kind of scenario at all.  That, and I spent the weekend realizing just how rusty my RP chops have gotten from playing nothing but campaign games the last few years.

OK, having said that -- this was the most memorable game of the weekend for me, by far.  It felt "real", somehow.  It was frustrating, in a way, because I was "stuck" babysitting instead of being as involved as I would have liked to be, but it was IC frustration, which was terrific.  I found myself ruminating on married life, sharing stories (and marital advice) with Jr., and in general just settling into Riordan and his world like an old, rumpled uniform.  The players were all awesome; I was still having trouble Sunday peeling off my feelings about the characters from the players.

By the way, in spite of people having to consult the matrix a lot (especially early on), it was great to at least have a guideline of impressions of various people.  I realized that more after playing in another game where I had very little idea who I even knew, much less what I thought of them, which caused me to spend a lot of time being suspicious of someone who was, in fact, my employer!  (The character sheet never named him.)  By having everyone's name on the sheet, I had an instant idea of where things stood, plus more in depth info on enough people to give me a "hook" on the world as a whole.

Oh, and those badges with the faction symbol on 'em were awesome!  It was great to able to tell which group someone belonged to from a distance, and made searching for specific individuals a lot easier.

Linda/Riordan

[Barbara]

Oh, and those badges with the faction symbol on 'em were awesome!  It was great to able to tell which group someone belonged to from a distance, and made searching for specific individuals a lot easier.

The assistant props manager thanks you. I love my Google image search!

Barbara
'she who hides in shadows and giggle-snorts diet coke'

[Frigemall]

I enjoyed the LARP very much. I played an unusual character for me and very much enjoyed developing the character. The only way it could have been better in my opinion, is adding more skills that are not present for various reasons in the Avatar system, more players and more GMs, and a longer time slot with more plot points. All in all, not much needs changing. It was good.

[Avie]

More GMs? No way! I loved it the way it was.  Made everybody much more self-sufficent.  We weren't responsible for the action; the players were responsible.  Once people got the hang of the dependency matrices, things really moved as far as I could tell.

Was there any specific instance you needed one of us and we weren't available? I don't think we were ever both tied up with a combat or in the bathroom at the same time, since there were only two of us.  With 15 people, I can't imagine more than 2 GMs.

[`_100003005030 (Zero)]

I remember very few cases where a GM was even needed, except for the (thankfully) few combats.  Two seemed plenty.  Also, I thought there was enough player-driven plot to keep us busy.  Boss C's tiara, and various other power plays ... there was plenty of room to maneuver.  (And a longer time slot?  I'll pass!  It felt like the longest night of my life as it was!)

The only reason I can see one would need more GMs is if you had a combat-heavy, RP-lite group, who started a bloodbath.  In which case, the mod will be over soon enough.  And as for more skills, my impression (based on my minimal involvement) is that most mini-LARPs are run on a "make it up as you go" basis.  Seems fine to me.

I can think of things you *could* do -- put more details about the other PCs on people's sheets, for example -- but it would be too much to keep track of.  You have these characters for four hours max, you don't want to spend the first hour digesting your character sheet.

Linda, aka Chief Babysitter
(And author of the "literally" deathless line: "You wanna maybe run this crown thing by the crime lab?")

[Frigemall]

The reason I spoke of more GMs was not to say that you needed more with the present number of players. I was speaking of what it would need if the con was bigger and more characters were in this LARP. For the 15 players we had 2 GMs was perfect but if you were to go to say 30, you may need 1 more GM just to keep it smooth. At Dexcon for instance, chances are there might be more like 40 players. The reason for more skills is that some skills are taken care of with powers. For instance I went to use stealth and the Avatar System does not really have stealth skills in the traditional sense. I was allowed to do it but it was something I had to stop and get a GM ruling on.