Eight Days a Week of Just Making That Up 4

[jimhenley]

Yesterday was Terpcon, a local twice-yearly minicon at UMD. How mini? There were two tables at the morning session, though a full four for the afternoon. Good weather made for a lot of morning absenteeism, and in fact our first-session table of five included two people at loose ends because their own GMs didn't show

Comments

[mcroft]

Ugh. I feel your pain.

No amount of rules is going to prevent W from not playing by the rules. This sounds like a "life is too short to drink bad beer" situation.

OTOH, glad the first game went well!

[jimhenley]

First game went really really well. And I suspect W has no intention to grief people or understanding that he did. He's a fricking college kid. This is a case where the middle-aged man missed an opportunity to use his accumulated wisdom and savoir faire to foster a successful resolution. Instead I stewed while occasionally bringing up a piece of the problem rather than the whole thing.

[mcroft]

It's not your job to be someone else's teacher, but if you see it as a learning opportunity for you, (I need to be more willing to say 'I think this won't work because of X', or whatever), then good.

Still sorry you invested in play and didn't have fun.

[agrumer]

And I know for a fact that even among my friends, I can't be relied on to always raise my objections in the most constructive available manner at the most productive time.

Man, if I had a nickel for each time something bugged me at the gaming table, but I couldn't wrap actual words around the bugging until months or years later, well, I'd have, um, probably around a buck or so.

[perich]

The sick part? I'll bet you W. doesn't think he did anything wrong. And I'd put long money on either A. or B. not noticing anything wrong, either. Devil knows I played in games like that for years (most often as A. or B., but probably at least once or twice as W. - "finally, it's perich's time to shine!") and didn't know to expect anything better.

[indie_insurgent]

Jim,

I'm the writer of Misspent Youth, and I'm glad you enjoyed playing it so much. Daniel Levine is an incredible booster for the game, and I'm grateful he ran it so well.

Thank you for the critique. It's rare to get anything more than "we had fun," and rarer still when you're told something you haven't heard before.

Regarding friendship, if you've read the text, you'll know that friendship is extraordinarily important to the game; I'm going to write something up on my blog to respond at greater length, as well as to address your critique.

I got the sense you feel that MY relies upon people to already be friends in order to play productively. While it makes it easier, I just wanted to add that the design of the world, Authority, and character creation section is intended to help foster friendships. In fact, I made friends with Daniel by playing this game.

[jimhenley]

Hi. I think how play can *foster* friendship is a really good topic to extend the kinds of stuff Malcolm and I have been batting back and forth the last couple of weeks. It's a thing we've each kind of gestured toward.

Now, what I'm saying above is that MY succeeded for us not because of preexisting friendsihps - we didn't have any of those - but because we started from a base of mutual good will.

And indeed, "we had fun!" I hope that comes through. My skepticism about the game's replayability isn't really a critique of what the existing design *does*. About the only actionable criticism I might have is that there might be one too many scenes in the structure. (Are there five scenes plus denouement, or six? I forget.) Especially since the structure of each scene is, from what I can tell, identical, there's a risk of a "Here we go again" late in the session.

[indie_insurgent]

Yeah, I'm kind of considering writing about play fostering friendships