Jackercon III Game Postmortem: When You Stare Into The Abyss
Mar 25, 2014 15:30:22 GMT -8
Post by sbloyd on Mar 25, 2014 15:30:22 GMT -8
"Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it; he died as one that had been ... no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
This sums up the angst that led up to running my first online game, during JackerCon III. When I was a youngster and a young man I ran a very freeform sandbox style 1st ed and 2d ed AD&D campaign that spanned about a decade or so, from the early eighties til the early nineties. That ended right around the time White Wolf published Mage: The Ascension, which I fell in love with but never had the chance to play: this was around when I married my first wife, who was very serious and thought I needed to put game-playing behind me.
Fast Forward to JackerCon 2: Jack Harder (or whatever we called it
), I signed up to run a Mage: The Ascension game based around an idea I came up with in a brainstorming session. I was jazzed as hell, and terrified. Deeply afraid. When I had to cancel at literally the last minute, I admit there was an aspect of relief. Come JackerCon 3, I swore I would run the game, and went into more development. About a month ago, I just kept running into trouble in figuring how to communicate the immense amount of info needed to play a Mage in Ascension, and so I changed tracks to Mage: The Awakening, the similar-but-not-the-same successor for the New World of Darkness... a game I'd never really given any heed to.
So last week I ran a game online, for the first time. For strangers, for the first time. For a game I'd never played. Until I started the Hangout, I was scared as hell. Once we started rolling, though, it all came back to me. My players, Ryan, Curtis, and Andrew made it easy, too - many thanks, you guys.
So, on to the game itself. Elevator-pitched as "Modern mages meets Warehouse 13." Thank god for Warehouse 13, it's an easy trope to plug into a game, and it's popular enough that people get what you're talking about fairly easily. The PCs play spell-slingers in the modern world, sent on a mission to discover the source of a demonic incursion into our reality.
I'd never run an investigation game, or a horror style game either. So glad it's ground that has been covered on Happy Jack's time and again, as well as Scene style adventure construction. I had a series of scenes - the initial (murder) scene, the bookstore, abodes of various involved people, the streets of the city, and the abandoned factory. Modular scene construction let me plug the apartment scenes into the factory as needed, though by that time the clues from the apartment were un-needed for the most part.
Looking back on the game - I just finished re-listening to it, I think that's a great resource for GMs. I noticed that I pulled some "No, but..." style moments when I should have "Yes, and.." -ed, and one where I did both - I said no to a player, but we all proceeded like I had said yes, so it worked out. I should have put more (living) "face" NPCs to interact with, as well, so the game would have been less of a vaccuum, but that didn't seem to slow the PCs down much.
The biggest stumbling block was unfamiliarity with the rules. Thanks again to my players for letting me pretty much pull rules issues out of my ass... now I know certain key rules I need to go back and take a look at.
Pregens. My pregens were too... stand-alone, I think I would describe them. Each was kind of self-sufficient: some combat skills, some investigatory, some miscellaneous. Their summaries were only two to three sentences (followed by a couple paragraphs describing what some of the jargon in the paragraphs meant), but I neglected to have any interplay between the characters built-in. Every man was an island. If I had it to do over again, I think I would have complexified the characters some.
I also noticed I neglected to have each player introduce the character he was playing, but as they'd all just looked over every character it didn't occur to me to have that saved for posterity's sake.
