WPI Live Action Weekend

[mllelaurel]

On Friday night, I played Gayelette Locasta, the Queen of Gillikin, in Oz. Prior to the game, my consort had been killed in a terrorist attack, and I wanted revenge. My suspicions lay with Quaddle, led by nyren's character, and the two factions had been at war for some time.

When I got the character, I knew she would be a challenge, but I also really *liked* her. I hope I did her justice in-game. I could have been more of a bitchy hardass, theoretically, but nyren wasn't giving me cause, most of the time, and I genuinely wanted revenge on the real culprits rather than a handy scapegoat. If Quaddle turned out to be innocent, awesome - I just started out seriously biased against them.

Of course, we wound up cooperating once shit went down. I figure that's in-spirit with the Oz themes. We did, eventually, catch those responsible for the attack. Their fates...won't be pleasant.

At any rate, it was a great game and I highly recommend it.



I had no morning game on Saturday. In the afternoon, I helped GM Bard of Avalon. From my GM perspective, it was a pretty damn awesome run, with some real standout performances - many of them by people whose lj names I don't know. Let's just say one of our last minute replacements (EDIT: shadowravyn) utterly pwned the game and it was awesome.

It was a little odd watching things proceed from an outside perspective after having played in this game, which had turned out to be one of my most immersive experiences. I'll always be a player at heart, even when I'm GMing.



I'll start by saying that casting myself and wired_lizard where we were cast was an inspired move on the part of the GMs. Also evil. She played a faded starlet lost in her own fantasy world, named Norma. I played her butler, who had once been her husband, but whom she now failed to recognize. This should sound familiar to those of you familiar with Sunset Boulevard, particularly the musical.

I'd also witnessed a crime being committed by two cops prior to game, and had to figure out who I could trust with this information. I picked the person I did wind up trusting fairly early in-game and turned out to be right. From an in-character standpoint, yay! From a narrative standpoint, I almost wish I'd made it harder on myself.

(I'm starting to think I'm more of a narrativist than I'd previously thought.)

A couple of the mystery pieces needed more ways to come out in-game, but overall, I had a good game, largely due to liking my character and his emotional state.



There was a bit of foo with my original casting in this game. Basically, I was the one with the most flexible questionnaire - and this is something psychological on my part. I *really* dislike and feel bad about putting hard yesses or nos on my questionnaire, unless I know for a fact it's something I won't enjoy. (For instance, I put down that I cannot play kids, on my Chatteau Ennui questionnaire, and insisted on cast rather than comedy troupe in Shebopaleileigh. But those are very clear cases, and I *still* felt bad about it. Don't ask me where that comes from - damned if I know.)

At any rate, the original character I got was quite flat and intensely gamist. She had no strong connections or motivations - those had to come from the player's desire to 'win the game' - something that's irrelevant to me unless my character cares about it. I would have attempted to do my best with her (and I was flattered that the GMs thought I could make something out of her), but even after sleeping on it for a couple of nights, nothing was coming to me.

Thankfully, the GMs were very understanding about it. I got a backup character, whose personality (the fact that she had one!) suited me much better. She was not without her potential pitfalls: there was a chance she'd be immediately removed from game by an investigator convinced she'd committed every crime on-record, but the investigator's player decided to be nice to me, I guess, so that never happened. I got to be skittish, scared for my life, somewhat ditzy yet determined. And then, I got to gag a villain with my pink scarf. Dude!

Of course, then it turned out that wired_lizard's character was the one who'd attempted to kill me. I had a good LOL at that.


There was also some non-game related stuff, like wired_lizard getting into an accident. Thankfully, neither she nor her car were hurt. Still scared the pants off of me. Add to that the torrential rain and the usual con meal schedule (read: meals? what meals?) and... actually that made it a typical con experience, pretty much. Keeps me young and fresh.

Comments

[juldea.livejournal.com]

last minute replacements utterly pwned the game = shadowravyn :D

[mllelaurel.livejournal.com]

Thanks! And thank you for putting me in contact with her.

[phoenix-rinna.livejournal.com]

I'm really glad people enjoyed Chateau. ^_^ If you have more specific suggestions about Chateau, would love to hear! (Like, which mysteries were relevant to you or that you saw needing more clues and such.) Regardless, glad you had fun!

(I'm currently exploring the potential of giving Cecil an entirely new and interesting plot dimension, feel free to ping me non-publically if you're curious, I'd be interesting to hear thoughts from someone who's played the role!)