You Know You've Been GMing Too Much SLA when...

[thorfinn]

You Know You've Been GMing Too Much SLA when you arrive at work, there are loose wires hanging out of the front door, so you reach for your gun and SCL badge, and look around for the nearest cover whilst scanning for movement.

Anyway... the upshot is, DeadLine went well. Shaun Clarke, drwally, Euan Lindsay and myself wrote it (as announced in an earlier entry), and the collaboration worked well.

I had a good con, and although I didn't get to play anything, running the game was an awful lot of fun, and with four GMs and eight players for most sessions, we really got to specialise. And that was great. I felt far less tired at post-con than usual, and I hadn't lost my nouns!

Anyway... from here, I'm mostly going to talk about the Shtick, and how it worked. I'll avoid plot spoilers, but I do want to ramble about the shtick itself, because it's neat, and other people may want to try it. Still, if you want to play this game at some point (although I have no idea if we're ever going to run it again), you may wish to avoid .

The shtick (and not an entirely unique one) we'd come up with, was to run two four player teams in parallel (with Euan running the shooting/Red team, and Shaun running the investigative/Blue team, and me and drwally controlling an NPC capture/Green team off stage) during first session, squish them together towards the end of that session, shake well, then split them, push them out, give them new missions for second session in their new groupings, then bring them all back together for a climactic end scene.

We playtested it a couple of weeks out from the con, itself was chaos, because trying to keep track of the 20 or so locations around Mort City and 15-20 major NPCs in the game was total hell, and I nearly went mad during the playtest trying to keep track of it all in my head.

I had come up with a solution just prior to the playtest... One sheet per location, with description and timeline, plus a map, plus one sheet per major NPC. Status changes in locations and NPCs to be scribbled on the appropriate sheet, and NPC sheets moved with the NPC. Unfortunately, that wasn't ready for playtest time...

After the playtest, though, a couple of things went wrong... Shaun's computer blew up, resulting in us having printed draft character sheets, but no electronic copies... and although we had BPN texts for all the BPNs, they weren't pretty, and none of the location sheets or NPC sheets were written...

Still, with a lot of frantic work and late nights the week before the con (and I must thank lirion and seedy_girl for putting up with me as I got progressively more and more stressed), and a chunk of BPN-prettification and character sheet transcription by me and Shaun on the Friday morning of the con... we did it.

I arrived at the con on Friday around 3 pm with a large box full of 8 session packs, containing maps, location sheets, BPN lists, and every necessary item for running our game, including manila folders to put the locations into. A bit of frantic sorting later, and we were ready to run... A kinda scary moment, for a new writer, even one that's been around for years and has playtested and GMed for some of the best writers at cons Australia wide, and even though my co-writers are all experienced writers...

Boy was I happy at 10:30 pm that night, when the location sheets and NPC sheets had worked, and the location sheet system was proven, and our the "shake well and mix" shtick worked... First game I've been involved in writing, and it worked, and and the players were happy, and the world was obviously robust enough to cope with mostly whatever the players threw at it. Felt on top of the world, and went home and slept, because I knew Saturday would be the roughest day of the con...

And it was. We ran three teams on Monday starting at 9 am (Euan took a Red team solo and unconnected, drwally took a Red Team and Shaun the Blue Team, leaving me to do comms for the connected teams alone), and two in the afternoon/evening... That night, I slept like a log, and I was very very glad that we weren't running anything until Sunday 4pm. Three teams again that night, and two more on Monday morning. From Saturday, we started to get "helper" GMs who'd played the game, to NPC for us... that helped a lot too, and helped make the frantic climactic scene (which we usually ran the last 15 minutes in realtime) even more frantic.

Anyway... I dunno what to say, other than, well, I co-wrote a game, and it worked, and people liked it, and I'm happy! It was probably about time I crossed the line from "just GMing" to writing... and I think I like being on this side of the line. I like building a robust gameworld, and then kicking it off, and seeing what happens. It's a great deal of fun, and I think I'll have to do it some more.

Comments

[anthologie.livejournal.com]

Glad it went well.

But, don't you always sleep like a log? :)

G'day from San Francisco

[(Anonymous)]

David (the only name I know you by),

Kolya here from your old school. Stumbled quite accidently across your website - you've certainy changed! (or perhaps stayed the same, only now made your private life more personal online).

Just thought I'd drop a note and say Hi.

Take care,
Kolya

Re: G'day from San Francisco

[thorfinn]

Err, hiya. :) Feel free to drop me an actual email or suchlike. As far as personal life goes, well, I probably drifted more into the alternate lifestyle area at Uni.