In A Wicked Age: "When being chased by a virgin-eating forest god, throw bees."

Our game of In A Wicked Age on Skype went well, despite boytoy's unfortunate absence on account of thesis. Any game that leaves me in fits of laughter because my character, the mysterious, virgin-eating god of the forest, has been thwacked in the face and engulfed in a horde of bees is a success in my book. Your mileage may vary, but I had fun.

Skype worked out fairly well, and was both less and more weird than I'd worried it would be. Everyone playing cross gender actually wasn't that big of a deal; that may have been because, being voice chat, it took on the quality of a spoken story, or a book being read aloud, but whatever the reason, I got used to it and it didn't throw me off.

A bigger problem was that I realized just before the game started that it had been over a year since the last time I played (rather than DMed) in person. Between that, my usual pre-game nervousness, and the fact that I was playing with new people, the immediacy of Skype brought on a mild attack of shyness. Early in the game I did that obnoxious "sit in the corner and don't do anything" thing that drives me crazy when my players get it into their heads, and there were a number of "umm... I dunno..." moments when Tim had to put me on the spot, as I slowly forced myself to actually play. By the end of the game I'd gotten into things more, which is how it always goes.

We kept Wave open to track character sheets and the Owe list, and the combination of Skype for play and Wave for reference worked quite well. Wave is a good way to approximate what you can do with an actual piece of paper at the table--write notes down on it and pass it around--and can even be superior for some applications, if everyone needs to have access to it continuously, since there's no actual passing involved. And using Wave strictly for reference purposes, rather than both conversation and record, cuts down on a lot of the confusion that can develop in a well-traveled Wave. (Not to mention the fact that needing to keep Wave open for game references cut down on a lot of the idle web-surfing I might otherwise have been tempted to do with my laptop in front of me.) If I play over voice chat again, I'll definitely look in to using Wave for note sharing.

Still, this is one game that I think is best played at the table, and while I wouldn't rule out another session on Skype sometime (time permitting; between school, my other games, and that pesky social life I'm pretty busy at the moment) I'm looking forward to getting a chance to play it with my old high school crew, as well as when I hit GenCon this summer. But Skype gaming itself ain't bad, either, and it's an option I'm glad now to have in my back pocket for when I want to play a game online for some reason that doesn't work well over text, or if I want to play long distance with one of those strange folks who don't find chat games to their taste. Neither it nor In A Wicked Age is going to replace my weekly Labyrinth Lord text sessions, but I'm never going to complain about having a little more flexibility in my gaming.

In A Wicked Age: Table Energy, and the Trouble with Wave

On Thursday night Tim Jensen succeeded in his long-running attempt to get me to play some kind of hippy indie game with a session of In A Wicked Age on Wave. Also in attendance were Trollsmyth, boytoy, and Willow. It was originally going to be a one-shot, but we took over two hours making characters and setting up the situation, so we've scheduled a second session to wrap things up proper. (More on that in a bit.)

Overall I'm pretty please with what I've seen of the game so far. It won't replace Labyrinth Lord, or that style of gaming, but it should fill a spot I've been missing in my game repertoire for a while: the no-prep pick-up game. I can get pretty close with Swords & Wizardry and a pre-made megadungeon, but In A Wicked Age is just that much better for the kind of spontaneous, at the table craziness kind of gaming my high school friends and I would like to be able to do when we get together on breaks.

I don't think that Wave is really the best format for this kind of thing, though. For one thing, I think this kind of game really benefits from the constant creative feedback you get at the table; there's no need to specifically comment on whether or not something is "cool," because everyone can tell, from posture and tone of voice and that kind of thing. Wave also has some specific issues, too. It's easy to create a very convoluted, hard to keep track of Wave with a lot of people working on it, or to bury vital information somewhere that it's not easily accessible. And because of the way In A Wicked Age uses interruption and retroactive modification, the log can become a source of confusion rather than clarification. In table play, there wouldn't be that gap between "what happened in-game" and "what happened at the table," because what happens at the table disappears.

We're playing again tonight, and this time on Skype, so we'll see if that clears up any of those issues. Of course, we weren't expecting to play by voice, so that may be an adventure in itself: we're all playing cross-gender. Well, except for me, since I'm not sure that my magical virgin-eating giraffe has a gender.

7th Sea: Those Basic Joys of the Game

I mentioned in my first post about the 7th Sea game that things had been rough. This has continued to be true since then; 7th Sea involves an amount and variety of dice rolling that's more reminiscent of 3e D&D than the old school editions I've gotten into lately, and it's driven home for me that rules light, DM-fiat driven play is really what I'm interested in right now. More importantly, though I'm slowing getting a better idea of the strengths of PBP play, I'm also slowly coming to the conclusion that it's not my preferred format, either, at least for a group this size, between the reduced immediacy and the logistical issues created when the party splits.

And yet, I continue to play, and I have no plans to stop any time soon. Why, you might reasonably ask, when I'm able to detail with tremendous precision, the aspects in which I find it unsatisfactory? To this question, I can provide only one answer:

Because this game is awesome.

I can't entirely explain this opinion, because it's based, in part, on certain details that have yet to be revealed to the rest of the party. But that in itself is something--I enjoy executing those kinds of reveals, and Erin's handed me a few items that should prove particularly intriguing in that capacity, and that let me explore a number of things I've been enjoying about my character. Who is in himself yet another reason; spooling out the various conflicts I set up in my character's background has been a lot of fun, and discovering new ones as he interacts with the rest of the party has been even more so. And then there's that ever-reliable social element--having Trollsmyth as a fellow player, and a game with my (currently ex, on account of Florida) roommate, are enough in themselves to make my frustrations with other aspects of the game relatively minor.

I have a lot of ideas about how games "ought to be played," and what I want out of a system. I've given a lot of thought to exactly what features I like, and why. I'm still figuring all that out, as always, and my opinions are subject to change--but I have them, and fairly extensive ones at that. But those ideas about system and playstyle and rules, while significant, fade when put up against those basic joys of having a character I enjoy, and playing with interesting people. That's the foundation of everything that comes after it.

7th Sea: New Campaign, New Character

At this point the Erin's 7th Sea Wave game has been running for about a week now on Wave. Trollsmyth and made characters who had met up before the game got started proper so we'd been playing a bit before Christmas, testing the waters, but the game didn't really get started until December 30th.

Things have been, well, rough. Fun, yes, but there's been a bit of friction. That's normal for a new campaign, particularly for one where the players don't all know each other and haven't all played with the GM before, but the period of adjustment can still be awkward, even if you're expecting it.

A lot of it, honestly, is a side-effect of Doom & Tea Parties. That game going for a year now means Trollsmyth's been my DM for more games than probably all the other DMs I've played with combined. (I game a lot, but the campaigns I've run tend to be short and the campaigns I've played in tend to be shorter. I've had probably eight DMs in nine years of gaming, and run a lot more than I've played.) Which means that I have a lot of habits and expectations and things based on the particular style of that campaign. And Doom & Tea Parties is weird. I love that game, but the ideas it's given me about how I should handle in-game situations, and what the results of various actions will be, don't translate to every game, and it's caused a couple spit-takes on my part when Erin has done something that reminds me, oh yeah, new GM. Not to mention that Labyrinth Lord is not exactly the same rodeo as the drama dice slinging 7th Sea. So that's an on-going adjustment.

But that's part of why I signed up for the game in the first place, so I'm not complaining. As you may have noticed, one of the things I like to do is try new kinds of games and new styles of gaming, so I'm looking forward out of getting shaken out of my rut a little bit. It's a fun rut, and I'm not planning to abandon it permanently, but I could use a little vacation now and then.

It also doesn't hurt that my character, Alasdair the Highland Marches (read "fantasy Scottish") Pirate, rocks, and I'm having all kinds of fun playing him. I put a somewhat ridiculous amount of work into developing him pre-game (1000 words of character background and another 400 of physical description, way more than I would have even considered writing a year ago) and so far it seems to have paid off, giving me a lot of things to riff off of and interesting reactions for him to have. I'm particularly happy with the relationship Trollsmyth and I sketched out and are playing with between our characters -- recently re-united half-siblings, which has produced quite a bit of banter and continues to keep me amused.

He's the first male character I've ever run, which is an interesting challenge that I'm not sure I'm quite meeting yet, and something that I have wanted to do for ages but never did -- first because we had a rule against cross-gender play for a long time in my high school group, and later because I'd seen some cross-gender play at the table and decided it was too confusing to be worth it. In text, though, it works.

So that's where that is. Early in the going of it, but promising.

Early Thoughts on Wave and Gaming

NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, so predictably, I've been thinking a lot about gaming lately. If all goes well, things are going to continue to be quiet around here through the end of the month. Last year I quit NaNo early, partly because I got massively distracted by a sandbox I was working on, but mostly because the novel was terrible. So I'm hoping that doesn't happen this year.

Anyhow. The main thing that's had my attention lately, gaming and otherwise, has been Wave. Trollsmyth and I have been using it to chat about gaming and setting stuff, and it's been great for that. It's a more convenient format to re-read than e-mail, there's a lot of tools for organizing conversations, and most importantly, conversations have a lot more structure to them. Everyone talks about the real-time, simultaneous editing, and it does conversations run a lot faster, but being able to break a conversation into multiple streams, or head off in another direction if I think of another question a few days later, is the main advantage Wave has over my other forms of communication.

The improvement in my between-session activities is good enough to make it a permanent tool in my gaming arsenal, but naturally I've also been pondering the use of Wave as a gaming platform directly. There's a different ways here to adjust (and perhaps improve) traditional play-by-post gaming; in particular, Wave's editability suggests a lot of possibilities, and the ability to easily manage a number of Waves with different combinations of participants should come in handy as well.

Trouble is, one of the main things I like about the online chat gaming I've been digging so hard lately is the ease of immersion. The 15-minutes-a-day format of PbP doesn't really encourage that. It's got other advantages -- and I don't really have another spot for a 4-hour block of gaming in my life right now -- but that's still a serious drawback. So I'm starting to think about what would take the best advantage of the PbP format, if I was to run a game like that. There's no point running a game that I'd be happier with if it was in chat. If I'm going to use the medium, I want to do something with it that only it does well.

Unfortunately, right now when I ask my brain that question ("What would PbP do well?") it keeps spitting back "Vampires!" So I think I'm going to give it a few more weeks.