as simple as a kettle, steady as a rock

I had a good weekend, all things considered. Friday it was tear-your-face-off cold, so I hung around at sleetfall's apartment and was grateful for the relative warmth. Saturday I went to Vericon, and am thus able to add Shaennon Garrity, Jeffrey Rowland and Rich Stevens to the list of webcomics people who I have actually seen and interacted with in person. I suppose in all fairness I should also add Tallahassee Econolodge to the list as well, as she was present at the Saturday webcomics panel and confirmed for me that she has been known to wear a tiara to work. To which I said, and say, "awesome." Paul Southworth was there too, but as I don't read his strip I somehow don't feel qualified to comment on him.

They were all about what I expected, which is to say, fantastic and cool. Stevens was a little bit late for the panel, but made up for it by being consistently hilarious once he arrived. He also struck me as the sort of person who, despite a constant stream of jokes and cleverly-disguised nonsense, was actually very thoughtful and reflective in his answers. He's clearly very passionate about the strange medium that is webcomics and has some very interesting and obviously informed opinions, and if I were actually involved in the scene at all I'd love to pick his brain about it. I was briefly afraid I may have incurred his wrath forever when I admitted I didn't read his news posts, although I was later able to qualify that I partially chalk that up to them being "below the fold," which is to say I am too horrifically lazy to scroll down. In point of fact however I'm sure he rapidly forgot about the whole thing.

I’m feeling a little bit sniffly and sickly today (and so is my whole office, from the sound of it) and I’m not quite sure why, because I thought I was essentially over my cold. I’m used to persistent congestion in the Spring because of allergies, but the notion of it starting in late January is too grim to consider.

if you think you're hurting now you better not wake up again

I laid open the floodgates to requests a couple of posts back, and to my relative surprise a couple came trickling in. Alright, fair enough. Let's do this thing.

sleetfall has asked that I describe a little bit of the ill-fated Vampire game I ran, a game which was in many ways the bastard great-grandchild of the Changeling game that got me started playing White Wolf games in the first place. When it comes to gaming I am notorious for my tendency to get pretentious and overblown about the tiniest little thing, to spend days agonizing over the name of a minor NPC and to hesitate for weeks on end before finally settling on a title for the campaign. You see in my demented little head all campaigns simply must have titles, otherwise how would you know that they were wonderful, meaningful stories? Yes, I know I'm crazy. But its important to me that things have titles (whether or not anyone but me knows it), that they be relatively succinct and yet evocative, summing up what a game is about thematically in a few short phrases.

Which is why its significant that years after the fact the people involved with this game still refer to it simply as "the Chicago Chronicle," a lackluster moniker if ever there was one.

It went down like this: after bits and pieces of other games coming and going, as they tend to do, with false starts and creator's remorse and all that jazz, a group of people emerged who were committed to the idea of a regular, long-running game, something we'd all been without for a while. There were three players and a GM, just as there were in the Changeling game, which is one of the reasons I have come to think of three as an ideal number of players. The GM (or Storyteller as he is referred to in the White Wolf parlance) was me, elected more or less by default and by circumstance. And the game in question was to be a Vampire game.

The thing is, back then, I was really not into Vampire: the Masquerade. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I hated it, but it was fundamentally uninteresting to me. So I made one of the most petty and childish decisions I have ever made in my gaming career, a decision that would come back to bite me so hard that I'm still reeling from it today. I decided that we wouldn't actually play Vampire after all. But rather than being clever and simply disguising another game as Vampire until things were up and running, I decided to use Vampire as a springboard into running the sort of game I actually wanted to run, which is to say basically anything else. I decided I would run a Vampire game so frustrating, so aggravating, so relentlessly oppressive that no one in their right minds would want to continue playing it, under the theory that after a few sessions everyone would quit and we could get on with having some real fun.

"So frustrating, so aggravating, so relentlessly oppressive that no one in their right minds would want to continue playing it." I succeeded, and failed, beyond my wildest dreams.

Its confession time, deep dark never-before-revealed secret time. In my head, at least, the Chicago Chronicle had a title after all. This being the late nineties I originally referred to it, in my internal monologue, as "Everything You Want." What can I say, I was a pretentious mindless twit when I was a teenager. Eventually that title would transmute, again only in my head, into the far more fitting and less asinine "(Be Careful) What You Wish For." I was resolved to let my players, none of whom knew all that much about the world of Vampire, make whatever ridiculous decisions seemed fitting to them at the time and then suffer the consequences. Moreover I decided to distill each of their character concepts down to its very core, figure out what it was that they really seemed to want out of playing that character, and then give them the exact opposite. Cruel and unusual? You bet. And did it backfire completely? Uh-huh.

• Kate P, who you may remember from my earlier descriptions of the Changeling game, wanted to play a Lasombra, because, well, who wouldn't? Obtenebration is neat. I played upon the psychological issues of both her character and the player herself, rapidly rendering her so terrified of even thinking about manipulating the shadows and darkness around her that she soon flatly refused. Her character's best uses of Obtenebration were unfailingly the ones that were completely involuntary, and generally reduced her to a sort of whimpering catatonia.
• Salomé, in a game in which the other two players wanted to play members of the core clans of the Sabbat (without really understanding what they were choosing, mind you) wanted to play a Caitiff. Not a Pander, you understand, but an honest to god Caitiff, without any real knowledge of what she was or where she came from. And thus I elected to make her, completely without her knowledge, a Malkavian Elder with a lower Generation than any of the other PCs and several of the major NPCs. She also would find herself using Disciplines without her knowledge, although she rarely if ever recognized them as the upper levels of Obfuscate.
• Finally sleetfall wanted, for reasons that escape me, to play a Tzimisce, a vampire seduced and Embraced by a beautiful woman in a story so rife with classic Vampire themes it could have been taken right out of Anne Rice. His character secretly had a heart of gold, and he was looking for a story about a hero in darkness. I had no intention of letting him live as long or as well as the whiny Louis de Pointe du Lac, and thus decided that almost everything he thought about the circumstances of his Embrace would turn out to be wrong, a fact that would crushingly be revealed to him mere moments before his anticlimactic and ultimately meaningless demise.

In a turn of events so stunningly predictable that you all have probably worked it out by now, the players simply couldn't get enough. I felt like mafioso Lou in Fight Club, watching in confused and increasingly horrified disbelief as my players, in the role of Brad Pitt, took all the abuse I could dish out and seemed to actually derive some sort of insane pleasure from it. This ill-conceived Vampire game, not designed to run more than a session or three, suddenly had to find a way to keep going and going because the players demanded it (despite the fact that, reasonably speaking, all three of their characters would have been dusted sometime around the start of game two.) And so it was that I learned a very fundamental lesson, a lesson that has served me well as a Storyteller 'lo these many years: most players are fucking masochists. Give the people what they want.

a follow-up post because I just noticed it

OK, so... what the Hell, people? Seriously.

This is the third time I have commented on some creator I like and respect in the webcomics/blogosphere, only to have that person waltz by my podunk little blog unannounced and leave a comment. Once is understandable, and can be written off to chance and good fortune. And twice, well. demiurgent and weds are like Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry -- they may not always have been together, but once you've had them as a pair you're never going to want them separately ever again. But three times? And rstevens? Seriously?

What the Hell?