All Eyes on Me

Friday night was the debut run of the newest larp I worked on with natbudin, emp42ress, and twilighttremolo under the banner of Alleged Entertainment. Pub Crawl, as it’s called, takes place on New Year’s Eve in a dying former industrial town as many of its residents celebrate by traveling around the local bars. It’s supposed to be an exploration of new beginnings and possibilities for the future centered around an interesting mechanical design— it’s made entirely up of horde characters. There is no consistent cast of any kind, instead intended for the players to swap out their horde roles between leaving the previous pub and arriving at the next. I’d never seen a game with only horde characters, so I was interested to see if it would work.

I had an odd experience of this one. Though it seemed out design was functional, as a GM I was not particularly engaged with the game. I had some interest initially in seeing how the characters we wrote would work, but I found it difficult to follow who was who. All roles are designed to be gender neutral and as such are given only last names, but allowing the players choose what to call themselves made it tough to keep track of who they were playing. I usually really love listening in on player conversations, but through no apparent fault of the players, I found myself checking out on them. I had some fun playing a drag queen NPC who was the bartender at the gay club location, but honestly, overall, I was kind of bored.

I’m not exactly sure why. It could just be that, as a modern, mundane-setting, low-stakes game with no consistent characters to follow, it just didn’t spark my interest. That tends not to be my cup of tea; I probably would not sign up to play a game like this if I saw it on a con schedule. But I’m concerned the failure is on our end, in the writing of it. The players cycled through the characters a LOT faster than we anticipated, which indicates to me that they were too thin, not substantial enough to sustain playing them longer than one pub. I know a number of players had fun with the game, but I think others probably were bored, or at least not really getting the experience they hoped for. I am one of them, unfortunately.

I’m not sure how to approach editing something like that. We may need to poll more players to figure out what the problem is. It might be possible to fix up and improve, but at the moment I can’t really put my finger on the issue with it.

The schedule of games for Intercon P is now available for viewing, and I've made my signup plan for this year.

Friday night I will be helping to run Pub Crawl, the new three-hour horde game I'm writing with Alleged Entertainment. It's interesting because it's ENTIRELY horde, and the cast rotates at player discretion the entire game.

Saturday morning I am running Woodplum House, my silly two-hour Woodhouse-inspired comedy of manners. Happily, it starts at 11AM who want a light fun larp and don't want to get up early.

That's what I'm certain of. I am trying to decide whether to sign up for one or both of the following games.

I am not wowed by any of the games in the Saturday afternoon slot, but I tend to like historical fiction dramas, so I might go for The Congress of Vienna. It should have some fun costuming and takes place after the defeat of Napolean, which is a cool time period.

On Saturday night I will probably go for wired_lizard's game, The Inversion of Me and My Room. It sounds weird and trippy, but I generally enjoy her games enormously, so that's good enough for me.

I think I will be signing up for Inversion first, and then we'll see how I feel about The Congress of Vienna by the time the second round comes around.