breakinglight11 | Festival ’14 con report, part three

This was Resonance’s seventh run, and still managed to the first game to fill at the con. It’s gotten very good word of mouth, but I don’t want to allow it to coast, so I was nervous anyway. We ended up with a lot of last-minute drops— a circumstance that plagued Festival this year —so bronzite and Hyde kindly agreed to fill in. I’m also very grateful to lightgamer and Bernie for helping GM, as while it’s not a hard game to run, it really needs several sets of hands just to move all the paperwork involved in the scenes.

We ran it slightly differently than usual. We kept it moving fairly quick, transitioning in and out of the scenes basically as soon as the conversation started to lull. It was slotted for the six hours it is usually given, but we really only needed four or so. For me this felt better, as it seemed to keep the game from ever dragging. We also gave different instructions for the third act. It’s usually run with a fairly heavy plot hammer, and I wanted to try and run it without it. So instead we said “You have this limited time until (X game-ending thing) happens. What do you do with it?” It actually had fairly decent results, perhaps not exactly what our design intention is, but the players seem satisfied.

Also one player commented on a design aspect of the plot and she put into words something that had been nagging at me. I’m not sure it is something that really has practical bearing on the game, but I may bring it up to my co-writers when I have recovered my brain.

It's a damn good game, though. We saw some great roleplaying moments, particularly from Dave K, and it definitely justified while it still fills so fast.