Confusion

[mundens]

Is, for those reading this who are not local, a role-playing convention held yearly at Turnbull House, a community event location, which is just over the road from the back entrance to the New Zealand Parliament buildings.

I haven't always made it along, often because the 48hr Film Competition has been on the same weekend, but this year they were some distance apart, so I got to go. It's good to go to a con like this where almost everyone is known to each other, so there's a lot of trust. I registered and got my name down for a game in the first round, caught up briefly with people like eyes_of_winter and exiledinpn, and then popped out to grab a coffee.

My first game was jenni_talula's brother's run of Three Sixteen : Carnage Amongst The Stars, by Gregor at BoxNinja, and available on Indie Press Revolution. "Three Sixteen" comes from the players being part of the 316th Expeditionary Force.

Whilst it comes with it's own justification, that Earth military forces are killing any alien life they come across just in case they may one day become a threat, it's what I'd call a "generic" space marine game, in that you could very easily play any trope that has space marines in it, merely by trimming available weapons and limiting the randomness of the aliens. You could just as easily play Warhammer 40K space marines, Aliens Colonial Marines, Starship Troopers, or even Starcraft utilizing this very quick and simple system. As an example, after a short while my character became customized as a cross between a Starcraft Fire-bat ("Ready to Burrnnn!") and a WH40K Inquistorial trooper. This lead to an interesting discussion with the ship's chaplain about Zoroastrianism.

The games has stolen the Classic Traveller range band concept for combat, and has basically two "skills", Fighting Ability and Non-Fighting Ability which are rolled using the old Pendragon system of "under, but high as possible). As such it could easily be played as "just a game" without any real role-playing, in a similar manner to how you could play GDW's En Garde, or you can concentrate on the role-play, and revel in the abstract mechanics. I think the system can be very easily minimaxed and leads to rapid escalation, but because of the ease with which this can be done, I expect minimaxers will quickly become bored. It also encourages some minimal role-play with the idea of Strengths & Weaknesses, which require a player to detail a "flashback" of the character's history explaining why something is a Strength or a Weakness, in order to use them.

Our session probably played it more as game than role-play, lusting after bigger weapons and higher kill-ratios like any munchkin. It was a lot of fun!

Luke Ws game was a CthulluTech game with a plot and characters heavily influenced by Neon Genesis Evangelion. As such it was a tightly scripted game that required the characters to follow a particular plot, and in some ways was more of a "demonstration" that you could do an NGE in style game in CthulluTech and make it work, rather than a "realistic" game.

Nevertheless, it was a lot of fun! Even though my character did end up dead in interesting ways, the scenes were a hell of a lot of fun to play through. Knowing the Cthullu mythos reasonably well, and also being quite familia with NGE, meant I could totally play along with what was going on, doing things that both made sense for my character, as well as nicely decorating the scenes, and hopefully helping Luke freak out the other players.

One of the best bits was when my character's ex-lover asked her to dance at a masquerade ball half a breath before I asked him, and I managed to respond with a breatheless "I thought you'd never ask!" It certainly showed that people were getting into the spirit of things.

Luke successfully capture the feel of NGE, though his recently becoming a father may well have influenced parts of the plot! :) The soundtrack assisted the mood well. Especially the dream sequence.


catnip_mouse ran this, and I'm afraid I may have not taken the game seriously enough. On the other hand, I don't think we were supposed to take it too seriously.

I played the wife of the murder victim, and I get the impression I might have been supposed to try and solve the murder, but I played the Lady Huntingdon? as being, frankly, glad the fool was dead, and really not all that interested in who had killed him, as long as she managed to maintain control of the estate and not have the fact that his book was based on Lord Huntingdon's investigation into the death of her previous husband, come out.

I don't think I fully succeeded, but I did find mashugenah's Dutch/Belgian accent and the way he played the insufferable Hercule Poirott imitation very amusing, and the rivalry between the detectives was also extremely amusing. However they weren't very good detective's, and I don't they would have made a final decision on the murderer had not house_monkey, the murderer's player, decided to make it a little more obvious by trying to kill one of the detectives as well.

It was a lot of fun.

Comments

[mashugenah.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I pretty much suck as a detective. There's a big long rant coming on Gametime sometime soon about the evils of investigation based games. :/

[mundens.livejournal.com]

But you're great at being an insufferable Belgian! :)

[catnip-mouse.livejournal.com]

Of course, I never intended for Murder Most Mysterious to be an investigation based game. The murderer was selected randomly at the beginning of the game and the physical clues could have fitted any of the characters.

[mashugenah.livejournal.com]

Yeah; but we didn't really come to the party in terms of intra-party accusals and counter-accusals, which left actually trying to get clues as what we were up to. :/ I think that the basic problem was that the "red herrings" fell flat, so there wasn't really anything solid enough to make making a scene seem worthwhile.

[jarratt-gray.livejournal.com]

The 48 is never on the same weekend as Confusion. Confusion is always the 1st weekend of August. The 48 is in May. I think you are confusing the May Larp (which doesn't always seem to happen).

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, you're right, I am confusing things.

[grandexperiment.livejournal.com]

That's a pretty accurate summation of the experience of AANE. The scenario was originally designed as the foundation for 12 month campaign but like the Eva movies it gained a focus, frantic pace and greater incoherency in the Con format :)

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you;re right it was like a Eva movie in compressing stuff. Like the series, players could have had a lot of fun exploring inter-character dynamics over an expanded period of down-time and additional missions, but while it would have been fun, it would not have affected the outcome very much! :)

[grandexperiment.livejournal.com]

True, though I am as much in the dark as to what that outcome was as the players :D