Intercon yay!

[beetiger]

I went to the Intercon LARP con this weekend, and it was really good. :) lediva did a nice little game-by-game con report, so I won't repeat what she said too much, except to say that it was an awesome if exhausting weekend, and that RPing with her really rocks. I ended up the weekend feeling re-energized creatively and in terms of my relationship with lediva --we have a wonderful time together doing not-too-much, but also doing intense stuff.

The overall quality of the players there was pretty high, which meant that the games ran pretty nicely, and the in character interactions were able to be really engaging. I think I really like the short/one-shot LARP format a lot, and especially enjoyed the four-hour games with one fairly well-developed character to manifest. Playing the Bright Half of Alice in Wonderland 2.1 was really satisfying to me -- it was an emotionally intense character, the archetype of which I really grokked, and the players playing the other Alice and both Cheshire Cats were all very fun to play with. I also enjoyed doing coordinated dress-up for it, and got to use my famous "cry at the drop-of-the-hat" skill for something more that the usual of making people uncomfortable and ruining my bargaining position like in the real world.

We played two Horde games as Horde. Unconventional Odyssey was fun if silly, and a good break after the intensity of the Alice game. Oh God, Everybody's Dying was pretty much an improv game with people playing archetypes/ famous people and trying to convince a board of angels to let them into Heaven. It reminded me why I really like LARPing, but I don't think I'll ever actually train or perform in improv formally. I don't like trying to do imitations of particular people, where watchers will naturally judge if I've successfully evoked a particular person rather than a newly created character or an archetype. And I'm always terribly worried that my spotty media familiarity and poor memory will mean someone will hand me something obvious and I'll just utterly fail to connect it with anything at all. Two hours of that was too long for my personal tastes, but this was much more about the interaction between me and the nature of the game than about any flaw in how it was built.

I was pretty tired and cranky by the time we were ready to go play Blackie's, but the game went much better than I expected. The 50 pages of background turned out not to be so much necessary to play, but more just a history of what turned out to be the last official session of a multi-year game. My wimpy character power (soft invisibility) actually turned out to be an awesome character power (soft invisibility + mimic anyone else's power for 5 minutes), and in addition, gave me the ability to have fun doing something totally socially unacceptable -- walk up to people in the middle of a conversation, get too close while staring at them and eavesdropping, and walk away without saying anything if they got boring. Also, my character got a nice dramatic end-scene involving a lioness-on-lioness death match and dragging my best friend's dead body out to be rebuilt by feminist aliens. Watching lediva be all gleeful about being "I p0wn technology girl", and then be squeeing all night because the GM admitted that the logical outcome of her being in close proximity to the alien nanotech at the endgame was that she'd eventually be able to rule the world.

I won't talk too much about the extra mini-LARP at the end of the weekend, the one where the interior light had been left on in my car and I had to figure out how to get the car jump-started when it was dead in the parking lot, except to say that lediva continues to be an awesome teammate, and that you wouldn't have the AAA card in your player packet if you weren't allowed to use it.

One other cool thing: this morning, I had one of the most socially clueful conversations I think I've ever had with projectmothra. He came in in the morning, and said things that obviously showed he remembered where I'd been and was curious about it ("I missed you Mommy! How was the convention? Did you like dressing up like Alice? Did Aunt Julia give you hugs?") and he listened to the answers. Then he told me relevant things about his weekend, unprompted ("We played a lot of games of Aquarius and we went to the library. Daddy cooked dinner and I helped him. I had fun even if I missed you also.") My little boy is growing into a person. :)

Comments

[awfulhorrid.livejournal.com]

That extra mini-LARP reminds me of "Lost, starving, and itching: The Wilderness LARP." I've never played, but I hear it's quite realistic.

Anyway, it makes me glad that I remembered to sign up for my own AAA card this past weekend, particularly if I'm driving down on KY in April. (That's a heck of a long way from WI if the car was to break down.)

Yay Aquarius! (Says the guy with hair down to his butt ...)

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

AAA rocks. They have saved my tail a lot of times, both ones that were sincere road emergencies and ones that were mild idiocy on my part.

(I used to rely on the "gas low" light in my old car to tell me when to go get gas, because Toyota is pretty conservative on when they set that light to come on, activating it when there were about 2 gallons of gas left. When that light blew and I didn't notice, I ran out of gas. Literally putt-putt my car just stopped. And AAA brought me a gallon of gas so I could get to the station.)

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

I heart AAA so much. They've been saving my butt since 1990.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Most modern cars use an electric fuel pump that's located inside the gas tank. They rely on the fuel flowing through the pump to lubricate the pump and keep it cool. If you run the car out of gas, you've just dramatically shortened the life of the fuel pump. In some cars where the fuel pump is designed to be submerged in fuel, if you habitually run the tank below 1/4 full, you can end up overheating the fuel pump as well.

Not to mention, with a gas tank full of air rather than fuel, you also have a lot more opportunity for water to condense out of the air with rapid changes in temperature, thus contaminating the fuel and increasing the opportunity for your fuel tank to rust. (Although many (most? all?) fuel tanks are plastic these days.)

Of course, it's going to happen from time to time that you're driving around late at night or are on a road trip somewhere and have trouble finding an open gas station. But "running on fumes" is a bad habit and generally to be avoided.

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

Well, I have a hybrid now, so it's more complicated, but I try to remember to fill up at 1/4 tank these days.

Thanks for the extra good car-maintenance advice, newver a bad idea to be reminded.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad y'all enjoyed the convention so much! Reading your accounts of Intercon almost makes me contemplate attending someday.

I said wistfully to lediva this morning that I'd love to have you in one of my tabletop games sometime -- whether the ongoing campaign as an NPC or in a one-shot.

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

Well, we're already unofficially committed to going back next year -- you should come! And if you ever plan a one-shot game on a weekend, do let me know and I'll make my best effort to get out there.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

We'll try to do a one-shot sometime when the weather is better. :) Every time we've tried to schedule a Takarazuka showing this winter, the weather has sabotaged us, so now I'm all paranoid about scheduling much of anything!

[rowyn]

Welcome home! I'm glad you had a good time. My own LARP experiences have been kinda mediocre; I probably should give it more of a chance. :)