KapCon 2018 - Day 2
Round 5: Nightmare Town
With three pretty successful runs under my belt, I arrived at the game feeling pretty confident. I had two players in the game that I respect a lot and have played with successfully very often to further enhance my confidence. Maybe that was what went wrong for me, which I knew it was going to about ten minutes into the game. Confronted with the murder of their colleague, they go to her house to search for clues and I let them know that they don't have keys, at which point the action stalls as the 5 players around the table decide there's not much they can do about being locked out. I pointed out to the relevant character that they had a special ability allowing them to automatically bypass all locks, and the action is back on track. I now realise I'd already let them down by not briefing them properly and expecting them to have too much system mastery - even if that was the same level of mastery as the other groups unfamiliar with Gumshoe had displayed. You need to play with the group actually at your table, not the guys from bright-eyed fresh-brained Round 1.
The group limped through the rest of the scenario, but I never really regained equilibrium or momentum. To run a game 4 times and have a great time 3 of those is the B+ of GMing achievement. I came to KapCon to deliver a 5* experience 3 times, and it's pretty hard to accept how badly I let that third group down. Maybe if I'd just helped more with the system at the start, to build some familiarity, that would have made the difference. By the time the really egregious stuff was happening, like the psychiatrist saying they had no skills relevant to undoing hypnotic suggestion, or the occultist sitting silently while the group decide that waiting for the cult to summon the demon and then taking action is the best course - because there's no such things as demons making it a risk-free approach - it was clear that nothing was going to save the game. It was so tough that at 2:40 one of the players asked me how many Network points they'd need to pool together to have the police go and solve the scenario for them.
This is still a less egregious failure than some I've had, but galling all the same, and you shouldn't be surprised to see more from me on the topic of what I should have done in the future.
Round 6: The Sixth Beast
In a strange coincidence, the play-group was the same as I'd had for The Endless Night, with one addition. This was a light and breezy high fantasy quest, whose successful conclusion was based on... talking to people, helping them, finding out about their problems, and healing rifts in the community. It was the kind of palette-clensing ray of sunshine that I needed to clear my head, get back my energy and will to roleplay, leading into the last round.
Round 7: Cartel
In Round 7 of KapCon 2017 Steve Hickey ran a little game of Cartel which was as brutal, yet affecting, as anything I've watched on TV. A few weeks before the con, he e-mailed me suggesting we should do another session. I was honestly skeptical - lightning in a bottle? a year of time passing? But over the weekend we set it up, albeit with a couple of cast changes.
The important thing about a game like Cartel is trust between the players. It's a game of murder and betrayal, of intra-party conflict that is simultaneous with enormous externally-applied pressures. And it's a game that explicitly includes a high level of savagery. Session 1 had ended with the Boss finding out about an affair between his wife and one of his lieutenants, a lieutenant who was also betraying him commercially. The Boss physically dominated his wife, and then forced her to choose whether her cousin (also complicit) or her lover would live through the night - poor Ants' street boss was executed as the closing shot of the game.
The kind of trust you need for that is unusual - it's that you're going to get fucked up by your friends, but for a good reason. Part of the trust is not just knowing that it's a story, but that the horrific things are going to be good. It's as much about love for your fellow players as confidence in their creative abilities. Session 2 was perhaps not quite as punchy as Session 1 had been - the 6th player probably slowed things down a tad, as did introducing replacement characters, and the time spent recreating the details of the cartel. But - I think this is basically the best of roleplaying, the point where it becomes more than just silly make-believe and becomes something like art.
Epilogue
The post-con drinks were as low-key as the pre-con drinks. There wasn't the carnival atmosphere that we used to have in the heyday at Norm's. But I was very glad to have a proper catch-up with a couple of people I hadn't really seen for 5 years while I've been away. This KapCon has left me brimming with enthusiasm, and optimistic about the event's future.