Why is it that Microsoft products always seem to be a little rough around the edges? Or even a lot rough. Take a really simple and obvious operation like automatic updates. I’m glad that it has automated updates, rather than relying on users to find out about, and then seek out, download, and apply them. But MSWindows Vista is all intrusive in ways it shouldn’t be, and all hidden and stealthy in ways it shouldn’t be. This morning, I was once again surprised by my computer at work restarting, without any warning, due to having installed some sort of update. There was probably a notification in the start bar that I missed–but that’s exactly my point: it’s too easy to miss. And I could’ve been watching Hulu fullscreen (I had been earlier), or had the start bar set to auto-hide–then what?

That’s just not enough notification. Especially given the next step, where it restarts without any warning. What if I’d been working on something important, and it wasn’t saved [recently]?
Now, true, I’m sure some of this has to do with it being set up that way by IT–that is, if I had control, I could probably set it differently, rather than forcing the update at 3am every week. But, even given that I don’t have the power to stop it, it could allow me to pause the restart long enough to finish what I’m doing, or at least give me some in-your-face warning that I couldn’t possibly miss, so that I could manually clean up after myself (such as saving my work).

Instead, it just unceremoniously forces everything to quit and restarts. In particular, it didn’t trigger proper exit routines for apps (such as saving). And, as an added insult, in addition to forgetting everything i was working on (not only didn’t save, but it didn’t, say, remember my webbrowser windows and reopen them afterwards), it didn’t forget the one thing it was supposed to forget: my “one-time” login on a website. [Though, in fairness, this last part might be either Mozilla's or Microsoft's fault.]

In contrast, my Mac gives me a nice, obvious notice of available updates, and let’s me decide when I want to apply them. More importantly, even the automated process keeps the user’s needs in mind. It tells open apps to save documents, and remember their state, to the degree they do so–just like a normal quit. And if an app can’t quit cleanly (such as due to an unsaved, unnamed new document), it won’t quit at all–the restart is aborted for the time being.

p.s.: My apologies in advance for any formatting errors or other bizarreness–I’m trying out posting from my iPod touch with the WordPress app.

Saw this via The Brothers Brick, and just had to share:

Sensible bike advocacy and Legos, all in one. And it’s cute.

This spring, I placed an order from the Lego Shop online. Somehow, set #8259 ($10/165pcs) got turned into #8295 ($90/1182pcs). And clearly the error was at the fulfillment stage, because the invoice included in my package listed the correct set, and I was charged the correct amount. For a moment, I thought of considering the larger set it a loyal-customer reward. But I knew that I couldn’t have them making mistakes of that magnitude on a regular basis, so I had to let them know, in case it reflected a systemic problem.

When I emailed customer service, letting them know that I wasn’t upset, but just thought they should know, their initial reaction was a little disappointing—it boiled down to: “Thanks for letting us know about our error. Let us know a good time for UPS to pick up the incorrect set, or feel free to keep the set, and we’ll be happy to charge you for it.” Which was particularly surprising because Lego’s customer service wasn’t like that in the past. When I was a kid, my dad wrote them a letter about the various pieces we’d broken or lost over the years, and they sent us, gratis, replacements for several dozen pieces—might’ve even been a hundred. I don’t think they even asked us to pay for the shipping.

Now, I wasn’t expecting some huge reward, but it did feel a little, hmmm…ungrateful? to not give me any consideration when I could’ve just kept my mouth shut and they’d've never been the wiser, and I was doing them a favor—not only by being willing to return or pay for it (which I was), but by letting them know about potentially a larger problem. So, being a little irked, I decided to think about my options for a couple days, and didn’t respond to them immediately.

And then it slipped my mind.

Literally months later—it was probably more than 8 weeks—I finally called them up. I’d long since decided that I was going to keep the set—that it was a set I’d hoped to buy someday, and that I’d rather pay for it at this point than deal with the hassle of shipping it back. But it still gnawed at me a little bit. After all, it hadn’t been my intention, or even my unintentional fault. Certainly, both where I work, and every other time anything like that has happened that I’ve heard about, the business’s response has been something along the lines of “our mistake; enjoy your good fortune.”

Well, as I was going over the details for payment, I mentioned to the customer service rep that I was a little miffed, but, yeah, paying for it was both the right thing to do, and certainly within their rights to ask for. But I didn’t press the matter. Then she put me on hold to actually process the transaction, and update their records (presumably some sort of trouble ticket, or the like).

And came back to say that she’d checked with her superior, and they could give me a $25 discount. That was a lot more than I ever would’ve asked for, if they’d asked me—that’s almost a 30% discount (and probably is, when you figure that I was also undercharged on shipping by a bit—though Lego sets aren’t very heavy), and I would’ve been happy with $10 off or so—just a token acknowledgment that I’d done them a favor.

And that was without them saying a thing about the delay in me getting back to them—which would’ve been a legitimate complaint on their part. I certainly wouldn’t get away without paying a bill for that long without at least paying a penalty.

So, in the end, Lego came through, and did the right thing, despite my behavior. That’s pretty good customer service. And matches my previous, excellent, experiences of a couple decades ago.

Now, if only they’d give us advance warning before discontinuing a set…

A couple of interesting news stories, about taking metaphors a step further:

Zombies are like a disease you can’t cure, only contain. But these researchers went a step further and took the ‘like’ out, and used them as a model in a book on disease modelling. Also, i didn’t know you could have a question mark as part of your name. That opens up all sorts of nifty possibilities for getting my name legally changed….

And one mother argues that parents of newborns are like addicts in their obsession over their babies —which would mean that a baby is a drug. Suddenly, Children of Earth doesn’t seem so ridiculous, does it?

Ars Technica summarizes a report on search engine usage online, which finds that Google users are more loyal—they are less likely to use competitive search engines.

I think the more interesting number is the number of searches per month of the various users. Or, more specifically, the combination of these two numbers. Google searchers perform, on average, about twice as many searches as the users of their competitors. I find it hard to believe there isn’t a correlation between this, and their loyalty. The only question in my mind is the nature of the connection. Is it purely correlation (those who are more likely to use Google are also more likely to do many searches, for some 3rd reason)? Or is there a causal link?

I suspect there is a causal link, but which direction does it run? Do people who use Google find it produces more-useful results, so they’re more likely to resort to a global search when they want to find something out, rather than digging through a likely website? Or are people who more often find themselves searching the web for information gradually driven to Google because it most often gives them the best results, until they end up searching there first? Regardless of the exact mechanism, it seems to me that the simple fact that Google searchers are less likely to use competitors’ search engines is only the tip of the iceberg. The implications of the fact that they use global search a lot more is what Microsoft and Yahoo! should really be worrying about. You don’t just want people to use your service, you want them to like using it, and therefore do so a lot. Right now, Bing/Yahoo! are where MSWindows is in A/V production—inferior, but not unusable. That can be fixed: just improve the functionality. But they are headed for where MSWindows is in print design—more-or-less caught up in functionality, but still overlooked due to a combination of historical inferiority and lack of compelling capabilities—even if actually identical in functionality, if it’s not actively better than the Mac OS offerings, why switch? [Not that i particularly want MS to take over another market and then stagnate, but I do want Google to have some competition to keep it innovating and honest.]

And then there’s the issue of using other search engines in the first place: I’ve used Bing a few times, both directly and indirectly (via a Bing vs. Google dual-search) since the re-branding, in order to give it a fair shake and make sure I’m not letting my dislike of Microsoft get in the way of using the best tool for the job. But, other than that, and the occasional webbrowser with a different default that I hadn’t changed yet, I never use anything but Google. I’m surprised at the %age of people that apparently use multiple search engines. Between most web browsers having a built-in default search engine, and people reflexively using what they’re familiar with, I’m surprised the number is more than a percent or two. Perhaps most people resort to trying a different search engine when their first choice doesn’t give them good results? I’ve always tried refining my search, and don’t think I’ve ever tried a different search engine. (Or, rather, never a different engine that targets the same data: if Google doesn’t give me my answer, I might try searching the Gracenote CDDB, or other specialized website that I know Google can’t search, but it never occurs to me that Bing or Yahoo! might find something that is generally accessible that Google didn’t. And, when I have checked, they generally didn’t.)

[As an aside, my conclusion on Bing vs. Google: Microsoft believes or hopes that all searches are driven by, and lead to, meatspace. Its results when searching for a business or airfare or movie review or camera are basically indistinguishable from Google's. And Bing has a few flaky add-ons that, when they work, produce better info in those areas. But when searching for "pure" information, including some news stories, Google produces consistently-better results. I very rarely am searching for info that ties directly or obviously to consumer activity, and search multiple times a day for information for its own sake, so I'm sticking with Google.]

I’m not sure how new of a thing this is, but we went to a scheduled, ticketed event Wed night. I would’ve said that was “before the con”—and, in fact, we ran into an interesting dilemma: one of us forgot his badge at home, and had to have it FedExed overnight, so he was without for Wed night. So, could he play the Wed night game? It’s a ticketed event, but there’s no such thing as a badge for Wed admission, because the convention is Thurs-Sun. And the game was in one of the hotels, not the convention center. So it’s a little unclear whether they can actually demand that you have a badge—or have paid admission at all—to play a Wed night game. Arguably, a 4-day badge is for “the whole convention”, so I suppose that covers it. Though I wonder if they’d let someone with just a Thurs badge play in a Wed game? Anyway, I digress.

Wed night’s game, which we barely made it to (mostly my fault, though i’ll let the construction along the way take some of the blame), was Fairy Tale/Noir, a QAGS game (and unrelated to the RPG Fae Noir, other than topic). The basic premise was pretty much what the titile implies: a mash-up of film noir and faerie tale motifs. Though the “film noir” was really more hardboiled detective, and the faerie tale motifs were much more Grimm’s, Mother Goose, and Disney, than actual folktales. The game was set in Happily Ever After, the faerie noir equivalent of Las Vegas, and revolved around solving a murder.

It was very fun, but not quite what I was expecting—simultaneously weirder and calmer than I expected from a QAGS game in general, or that setting in particular. The calmer part comes from my experiences with the creators of the game, one of which is very wild and crazy when running it, and the other of which is wilder. So i was expecting something with the zaniness and frenetic pace of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Instead, we got fairly sedate wackiness, most of the time. Which isn’t bad—just unexpected. Probably better, however. A couple of my friends who played the game with me were commenting that a wackier game of QAGS they played later in the con was too wacky, and it was hard for them to get into any groove with it. OTOH, I was a bit sleep-deprived at that point (i’d been up for more than 24hrs when the game started) and a more frenetic game might’ve kept me a bit more engaged.

I think part of it was the GM and players coming into it with slightly differing expectations. The PCs were to be the members and collaborators of a detective agency. But 8 people is a lot for that sort of thing—and the entire main cast (protagonists and antagonists) of many of the film noir and hardboiled detective fiction i’ve read/seen isn’t any bigger than that. And we were supposed to be just the protagonists. He got around this, to a degree, by suggesting some of us play adjuncts to the actual agency—Chondra and I ended up playing Tommy Tortoise and Harold Hare, a thief and a huckster that often teamed up. Though the whole-group element made it feel more like Ocean’s 11 than The Maltese Falcon, to me. Which is not to say it wasn’t fun—just another example of it being a slightly different sort of fun than I was expecting.

The other characters were Betty Butter, a gun moll with an odd butter fetish; Mickey Mouse (no relation), one of the Three Blind Mice, who was a Zatoichi-style swordsman (though that really never came up) and our surveillance specialist; B.B. Wolf, the head of the agency, with a bit of a checkered past; Little Red Riding Hood, a drag queen and the agency’s secretary; um, crumb!, i can’t remember his name, but the woodsman, who had an uneasy partnership with B.B. after that whole Granny incident—probably partly because he isn’t too bright—and served as the muscle; Geppetto & Pinocchio, a ventriloquist and his creepy dummy, who had a disturbingly-dark, yet childlike, personality. The woman playing Pinocchio—and occasionally Geppetto, on the rare occasions when he spoke up—really stole the show.

The plot revolved around Doc, a member of the PDF—I can’t remember exactly what it stood for, but it was close to “Professional Dwarf Fighting league”—turning up dead in the desert, and his wife, “Mrs. Doc”, hiring us to find his killer. I won’t give away the ending, since I don’t know how much they reuse scenarios, but it appeared to be player-driven. Talking with the GM afterward confirmed that there were a number of possible killers, depending on how we played it, and what we did. But I’m not sure to what degree, so it’s hard to tell whether we were being clever, or the murder unfolded as we declared it did, regardless, or some hybrid of the two. Not that one way is better or worse than the other, just that i’m curious.

In fact the whole thing was pretty broadly painted. Of the setting elements, it was hard to tell to what degree the GM was making up things as he went, and to what degree he had developed a fairly detailed setting, and was just revealing the surface of it to us. And that’s probably a good thing [that I couldn't tell].

The game was well run, and we had plenty of fun. It reaffirms my feeling that 8 people is too many to engage in a game, unless they’re some sort of tightly-integrated team, or grouped together into smaller groups. Betty Butter didn’t really get to do anything until the final confrontation—though the player seemed fine with that—and the woodsman had a pretty minor role. Maybe in a longer game, that number would work.

Oh, and it turns out I’m not nearly as clever as my character was supposed to be, at least not when sleep-deprived. Oh well—I hope the player of Geppetto/Pinocchio didn’t feel too put out when I roped her into my “clever plan” that wasn’t, and spent 10-15min of our time on it.

The first game of Thurs was Starblazer Adventures: Return of the Star Kings, pt 1. Starblazer Adventures is a massive tome, an extension of the Fate system based on an obscure 80s British comic. The comic itself was, as near as I can suss out, a pastiche of all the space opera that had come before. As such, it seems to have a lot of unique names and details, but the broad strokes look a lot like all the other space opera, both before and since, and thus rings very familiar. In both good and bad ways.

I’m not entirely sold on the setting of the game. It’s distinct enough that, to play in it, you would need to learn the setting. But, after all that effort (it’s a big book), you wouldn’t be using a particularly distinctive setting. It seems to me that a better way to do it would be to create your own pastiche, based on whatever settings the people you were playing with were already familiar with. You’d end up with roughly the same thing—a not-terribly-distinctive setting, evocative of larger-than-life space opera—but with much less effort, and probably greater familiarity. And, for that matter, it wouldn’t be at all hard to just take Spirit of the Century and adapt it to space opera.

Someone else I talked to, after the game, was commenting that what’s cool about Starblazer Adventures isn’t the setting, it’s the rules. It apparently expands greatly on Fate, particularly on the macro end: tweaking and applying the rules for large objects—starships, planets?, armies?, societies?—I’m not entirely sure.

Keep in mind that the previous two paragraphs are only semi-informed mumblings. I’ve flipped through the book, and played a short demo game, and talked with other people more familiar with it than I, but I haven’t given it a close—or even cursory—read.

Anyway, back to the game. We had it explained to us that “terran” (i.e., human) society had expanded across a chunk of space, conquering or wiping out a couple of other races in the process. But humans had since butted up against Taurian society—and they look just like the name implies: 3m-tall brutish bipedal bull-men. Further, there’s an intergalactic society of more advanced aliens, who want to see the Taurians and Terrans grow up before they’re let into polite society—or, at worst, wipe each other out in their own little corner of space, without messing up anywhere else. They patrol in immensely powerful ships, and mete out “justice” on any Terrans or Taurians that stray outside of their box. Our characters were to be the senior officers of an exploratory/scientific/military starship. Very much in the mold of the original Star Trek.

The GM had us randomly grab the characters, and I ended up with Captain Dirk Solar. His character sheet could’ve been for James Tiberius Kirk—or Peter Quincy Taggart—and featured Aspects like “a girl in every starport” and “always manages to get his shirt off”. There were more along those lines, but I forget them at the moment. He also had fairly low skills in diplomacy-type things, and fairly high ratings in, IIRC, seduction and fisticuffs (or whatever they’re called in the game). I decided to take the hint, and do my best to channel Shatner for the hour or two of the game, much to the amusement of the rest of the table. I guess I didn’t do it too badly.

The other characters were similar pastiches of mostly-Star Trek sources, though less blatantly so. And unlike the captain, they were a little mixed-up (in a good way): the doctor was an alien, but the science officer was human, etc.

The game was fun, and the scenario/situation appropriate to the time alotted—not railroad-straight, but not particularly complex, either. One interesting change to Fate was using d6-d6, rather than 4dF. It gives wilder results, and I’m not sold on that part. Sure, getting extraordinary results—good, in particular, but bad can be fun, too—can make the game larger than life. But it also runs the risk of making the game wacky. Your Star Trek pastiche can easily slide right past Galaxy Quest and into Futurama territory (or, in RPG terms, Star Frontiers, Farscape, and Teenagers from Outer Space, respectively). Which is fine, unless you wanted serious or merely light-hearted, rather than satyr or outright farce. The flipside of the more-centered curve of the Fudge dice is competency: your character is highly likely to perform within one step of her rated capability, so you can be reasonably assured of how something will turn out. Sure, extraordinary successes are considerably rarer, but so are shocking failures. Ramp up the skill levels, and with the greater consistency of results, and you’ve got your larger-than-life heroic characters.

I do have one outright criticism of the game we played: use of time. A 2-hour allotment really means you have 1:45, or so. At that point, anything over 15min of introduction before play can begin is too much (unless your game can’t sustain more than an hour of play without playing again, such as some card/board games). Our GM spent more than a half hour telling us about the game and the setting (and a few other sundry tidbits, not all of them strictly on topic). And we ended a bit early, due to having overcome the primary obstacle. I’ll get back to that part in a bit. Too much introduction is an easy mistake to make—you’ve got all this cool setting to show off, and a new set of rules to explain, and you feel like you need to tell the players everything that their characters would know, as well as everything the players should know. You don’t.

When we first started running convention games, we made the same mistake. In particular, we had games of Advanced Dimensional Green Ninja-Educational Preparatory Super-Elementary Fortress 555 slotted for 2hrs, and the intro was taking over 30min. Plus at least 5-10min for people to choose characters. Plus 5min or so in case someone is running late for the game. etc. I watched games being run, and realized that we were losing people—they’re here to game, not listen to storytime. We talked about it, and trimmed the entirety of the introduction down to 15min, tops. Even for our 4-hour games, we’ve considerably tightened up the introduction, aiming to start play, proper, within 30min of the start time of the game. And that’s despite Four Colors al Fresco requiring a relatively unusual set of rules to be explained, and Dread requiring people to fill out their character questionnaires.

The secret is to figure out the bare minimum to get started and then be more aggressive than you would be with your home game group about interjecting additional pertinent information as it comes up. You don’t need to tell us about the intergalactic society that keeps the Terrans and Taurians boxed in, if there is no chance of them showing up in our game. You’re going to have to remind people to use their fate points in the game anyway, so you can wait until a situation where they would be useful/important comes up, and then explain the details—as is, the GM basically told us all the rules for fate points at the beginning of the game, but then had to explain them all over the first time or two that someone tried to use them. And I know it’s hard to skip over all that—you feel like you’re leaving players in the dark about important mechanical options they have, or about cool setting details you’ve created. Get over it. It’ll make your game more enjoyable, and people will come away with a more-favorable memory, and be more likely to check the game out in the future. Whether you’re trying to sell a product, or just get people to come back for more, that’s to your advantage.

And I really mean the bare minimum. Four Colors al Fresco’s setting can be summarized as “Renaissance Italy, but where da Vinci has actually built all the things he imagined, there are superheroes, and megalomaniacs regularly try to take over the world”. And some variation on that is about all i usually say about the setting for a convention game. I’ll generally add a sentence or so introducing the specific characters being played (“you are the senior class of Professor Omega’s School for Gifted Omegas, in Venicia”, “the Daring daVincis are artist friends of da Vinci that he gave superpowers in order to create a crime-fighting team”). In both cases, that is glossing over huge details that might even be relevant to the game. Frex, the fact that Italia is the “inverse” of Italy, with the Sea of Italia where Italy is, and land where portions of the Aegean and Mediterranean seas are in the real world. And that the Pope is the head of government, as well as of the church. And how various places and groups of people see Omegas (the superheroes of the setting). And that there is no France[-equivalent]. And the way that social mores differ significantly from not only modern mores, but from typical movie portrayals of Renaissance mores. If anything like that comes up, and would matter, that’s when I explain it. And if it doesn’t—well, either they’ll discover it when they buy a copy to read, or they’ll never know what they missed. But, either way, it won’t have bogged down the game. Similar strategies make sense for mechanics issues, with the caveat that, yeah, you may need to explain a little bit more to give players a comfortable handle on what they can do. But, even there, you can often wait until it comes up in the game. And then, the extra context will probably make explaining it easier, too. Or, you can give the cursory overview of the mechanics prior to play, but only really explain them once someone wants to actually use them.

Unfortunately, the Starblazer Adventures game committed another cardinal sin of convention games: not everyone got their chance to shine. Now, sometimes, it just doesn’t happen. I nearly screwed that one up in one of my Four Colors al Fresco games this convention when, due to the particular 4 characters chosen (of the 7 available), how the players went about tracking down and confronting the villains, and the specific capabilities of the villains, all garnished with some lousy dice luck, meant that one character totally stole the show in the big climactic confrontation, and one of the players in particular felt pretty left out, until the very last moment. But the GM should be specifically working to try and make it happen. In your 2-hour game, you’ve got, at best, 1.5hrs of play time (assuming you’ve trimmed your intro down to 15mins). Given that, you either need to keep the characters together, or you need to have something significant for all of the characters to do. And if the scenario really only has one real challenge/mystery/opponent, you better either keep the group all involved with it, or invent something more if they separate. In our game, I immediately declared shore leave in rotating shifts, assigned the job of figuring that out to the 1st officer, grabbed the head of security, and headed for the spaceport. The doctor also headed down to the planet to look for medical supplies. As it turned out, the communications officer got to discover some interesting info [presumably important in pt.2, or later] that never really led to anything within our game, the doc stumbled into the primary villain, and I and the head of security solved it. And I and the doc were the only ones who got any real spotlight time. Additionally, by seizing the initiative, I inadvertently ended up with the majority of the screen time, too, in the form of a couple inconsequential encounters before that. Which, Shatner-channelling or no, certainly wasn’t my intention.

What should have happened was that each of the players got at least one, however-brief, bit of [shared] spotlight time, perhaps in groups, in different scenes. Preferably contributing to solving the central challenge. But, failing that, any sort of side scene that focuses on an otherwise-left-out character would suffice. The lack of this was particularly galling given that we ended early. Given such a short game, and the way it had run (mostly focusing on just a couple characters), wrapping up the main plot should’ve been a cue to have an extended denouement, inventing a minor scene or two that focused on the left-out characters, rather than to wrap up the game.

Also, another trick to trim your intro: save the parts that aren’t necessary for playing the game for after the game. Tell the players about things like the game company or other games you’re running or where to buy the game as part of your wrap-up, rather than your intro. That’s also an excellent excuse to keep people lurking for a few minutes so you can talk to them and get feedback—and it’s the least-important info to the game experience, so if it runs over time and someone has to bolt to get to their next game, they haven’t missed as much. Most of the “meta-info” about the game they can easily find later, so long as they remember the name of the game. And assuming they had a good enough time to desire to track it down.

BTW, I do want to emphasize that I’m not upset with the GM, just disappointed. And he was a good GM in every other way, so he probably runs great games at home, or given a little more time. But he needs to tighten up his game a bit if he’s going to continue to run short demo/intro games. And, honestly, I had a great time. But I’m not sure how much fun the other players had, particularly the 3 who didn’t really have any chance to shine (or the one whose only bit of spotlight turned out to be inconsequential within the scope of the game session). So, if the GM in question sees this essay, I hope he takes this as constructive criticism. And for anyone who is planning on running games at a convention, if any of this is news to you, I hope it helps.

The next game on Thurs was one I was running: Four Colors al Fresco: Champion of the School. This one started with a snafu: a tournament-style event was scheduled for a dozen tables [the entire room] from noon to 8pm, but the tables had only been scheduled for 4 hours, ending at 4pm. So, when I found this out at about 3:50, the convention staff had about 10min to deal with nearly a dozen double-booked tables. Well, while just about every one of them had some sort of event scheduled to start before 8, on the upside only two of the tables were double-booked at 4pm, so they had a little extra time on the rest of them. But, still, a bit of an issue. After some discussion with the main HQ, the local volunteers did what I would’ve expected them to do in the first place: move some games. The delay was a little frustrating, as my game time loomed, but I’ve probably been doing this longer than they have—but, still, it seemed obvious to me what had happened: somebody entered the event duration into the scheduling software wrong, and the tables were, in fact, double-booked. And the only variable in the solution was whether to move the in-progress tournament (a dozen tables set up with various gear and materials, but only one event, and everybody affected was already there to notify) or the upcoming events (ten or so events over the next several hours, all of which would require notification). Neither is a great situation, but I thought it funny that he went back and forth comparing various databases, and then talked to the main HQ, which just said “yes, you have a problem—you solve it; just tell us how you solve it”, rather than simply jumping right to the solving-it step. In the end, they left the ongoing game in place, and moved the rest of us. Luckily, to a room just across the hall.

So, I put up a couple signs (luckily, I carry a marker and paper for just such an occurrence, though I wish I’d had tape, too), and we moved across the hall. And then I did my prep/set-up, rather than being able to do it before the game time, as I prefer. On the upside, I picked up another player—someone who showed up at our scheduled room just as I was putting up signs, only to discover that the game he’d hustled over for had been canceled. So I had a full game: 6 scheduled players, plus the 1 extra that I always have room for, just in case (and so that, normally, even the last player still gets to choose a character, rather than just being stuck with the last one). A couple of the players were people I’ve had in al Fresco games over the years at various cons, but most were new.

Once I’d done my intro spiel, people picked characters, and we got to playing. The basic scenario revolves around sort of “graduation exams” for the senior class of Professor Omega’s school—the characters need to prove that they’ve learned their ethics and classics, along with how to use their powers, before Professor Omega turns them loose on the world. Mid-way through, Professor Omega disappears under mysterious circumstances.

This game was great fun, for two completely separate reasons. First of all, the players all got into their characters, and had a riotously good time with it. I laughed so hard and so often that I had a headache and a sore face by the end of the game. Second, they really took the style of gameplay to heart, and made sure the unfolding story was firmly in their control, not mine. I may be the SG, but a good game of Four Colors al Fresco is like grasping desperately for the reins of a team of runaway horses—the last thing I want to be is in control of the direction the plot takes.

In this particular game, they introduced and then exonerated another villain, discovered that a rabbit-generating hat was missing, and then determined that one of the other teachers was behind it all. I’m probably missing a few other twists they introduced, but I was way too busy having fun to take notes. And, of course, those are just the major twists—there were tons of little details, not to mention the generally-excellent role-playing.

After this, it was back to the room to drop stuff off, and then a late dinner, and then—well, I don’t remember what we did Thurs night. I think that was the night Caitlin and I hung out with Eppy and Eero (and others) for a while. And then, much too late, off to bed.

Fri morning started with Best Friends: The Clique. Caitlin and I played with a couple, plus the GM. The game itself is a fun little exercise in exaggeration. But I think the GM should’ve had a bit more structure prepared, or scheduled a shorter game. We started out worrying about Homecoming and campaigning for Homecoming Queen, and then progressed from there, fairly naturally. But it really felt like it was starting to peter out a bit towards the end. And it was unclear to what degree the GM had any plans for challenges or situations, beyond Homecoming, and to what degree she was letting us create our own.

To be clear, even then the game was great fun. The woman playing, hmmm, Cyndi?, was a riot—something tells me her highschool experience wasn’t as far removed from the basis of Best Friends as one would hope. But I think it could’ve been even more fun with a goal large enough in scope to encompass the whole game session, against which our rivalries and jealousies and friendships could play out, instead of a series of smaller situations, with not much connection between them other than the PCs.

So, the game dragged a bit towards the end, but was great fun for the first few hours. Unfortunately for you, most of the fun was situational—I really can’t relay it in a meaningful way here, because my recollection isn’t good enough to provide the context that makes it funny/clever/surprising/horrifying/whatever. And I was definitely having too much fun to take notes.

The Dis[sed ]Mounties

The next game on Friday was another QAGS game. Which should have been even more ‘next’ than it was, but I screwed up—more on that in a future post. Anyway, this game was “Life is Random”. The premise of this was to randomly generate, well, just about everything about the game, and then play it. So we randomly rolled setting, and opposition, and so on—even a theme. Even our characters were semi-random: we rolled what sorts of characters we were playing, and even the WWPHITM? (more on that later), but still chose job and schtick and so on ourselves, and allocated points in the usual way (which, though, is itself something involving random dice rolls).

This game also turned out to be my second-best of the con—Thurs’ al Fresco game topped it, and perhaps that only because of my pride in having run it. Like that game, this one had me laughing so hard that it left me sore.

So, after some rolls on The Book of Dumb Tables, we determined that our characters were Mounties with mutant powers, our opposition were cultists, and the theme was “Good always triumphs over Evil”. There were probably some other things that I’ve forgotten, and some secret rolls that only the GM knew the results of (though, presumably, that’s where the rest of the game came from). We had some discussion around the table, and filled in some of the cracks. It was decided we were in Saskatoon, and that we were actually ex-Mounties (unless that was part of the rolls?). The backstory was that we had been investigating a chemical company for shady dealings, there had been an explosion at the chemical plant that gave us all mutant powers, and we had been quietly discharged without pension while the government covered the whole thing up. So, we formed a detective agency.

I’m not sure who came up with “The Dismounties” for the name of our group, though i think it was me, but I know I came up with the version “The Dis[sed ]Mounties”, which i think I would prefer even if I didn’t have some investment in it.

Let’s see if I can remember all the characters:

• Female J-name—Jessie? Jade?: microscopic vision, so she did all our lab work, as well as some of the on-site forensic work

• Enoch Haberdasher: psychic control over hats. Late in the game, we “found out” that he can also see anything that a chosen hat would be able to see, but only if it’s a fancy hat. Enoch was the head of our little detective agency.
• don’t remember the name: He had grown up wanting to be a hockey star, but couldn’t make the cut, so he had to settle for the RCMP. His mutant powers were some sort of control over either hockey pucks or hockey sticks, though I never quite caught the details—basically, he was the super-hockey-player. He was pretty much our muscle.
• Elise, i think her name was: her mutant power was an udder. She was a very mothering sort and our secretary/receptionist. Who did a surprising amount of field work. The player was awesome, affecting a great stereotypical accent, and totally playing up being everyone’s mother. And kept offering us milk, which no one would drink.
• somebody male: mutant power was that he blended in with everyone. He was also an expert juggler, which he also used to throw knives, among other things. I don’t remember what specific role he had in the agency, but he mostly spent his time blending in with the badguys to get info, and then getting beaten up by one of us who had also fallen for his power.
• somebody female: Her mutant power was tentacles. She had tentacles replacing her arms (5 on the right side, 4 on the left), and did all our paperwork and billing and permits and that sort of thing. She could type on several typewriters at once [hey, it's Canada, they're kinda backwards, so of course they still use typewriters. ]
• Huh, what was my character’s name?: My mutant power was animal magnetism: I could magnetize any animal I touched. It came particularly in handy once i grabbed a gunny sack full of hamsters. I had been a 4th-generation Mountie, and had grown up in the wilderness, and was a master tracker and trailer.

One of the cleverest touches in QAGS is the WWPHITM? stat: “Who Would Play Him/Her In The Movie?”, which is a very clever way of giving not only the player, but everyone else at the table, a handle on what the character is supposed to be like. It’s particularly useful, in my experience, for convention games. For this game, we used the “actors/actresses who should get more work” tables in The Book of Dumb Tables, which led to some pretty interesting selections. Which, unfortunately, I don’t recall, except for Portia de Rossi. Nonetheless, the WWPHITM? stat is, in general, a great idea, and in this particular game, randomly assigning it basically meant randomly assigning a personality. Which provided some interesting challenges.

During the course of the game, Saskatoon was a fairly small town—pretty much a one-stop-light town. They don’t get any bigger than that in western Canada, do they? At one point, someone was playing up being unable to find a word: “…that place where the teenagers hang out” “the gas station?” And the focus of social life in town was the Chocolate Moose, sort of a Canadian Perkins.

[BTW, before anyone gets up in arms: First of all, we all knew we were playing up ridiculous stereotypes and exaggerating for comedic effect. Secondly, I can't speak for anyone else, but I've been to Canada numerous times, Calgary and Edmonton mostly, in fact, and even lived there for a while as a young kid, so I know that most of our generalizations were bogus. Third, I know that Saskatoon is a thriving metropolis, not a frontier village, but I didn't want to spoil everyone's fun. So, yes, we cartoon-ified Canada. It's comedy. Plus, those Canadians are all so nice, so you can make fun of them without getting beaten up.]

The whole game was a laugh a minute: it started with us apprehending some local [talking] bears that had gotten out of hand and started bombing the city—by riding around on unicycles, juggling the bombs until they tossed them. Which turned out to be important—the terrorist bears’ cave became our hideout when our HQ was invaded, and their unused bombmaking supplies saved the day when we needed to blow up the Unspeakable Horror that the cultists were trying to summon. And it only got sillier from there: I made a sort of tree stand to hang out on the side of a steel-sided warehouse by magnetizing a bunch of hamsters. Elise’s milk (already decanted into thermoses–don’t be gauche) turned out to have all sorts of useful properties. Hats and hockey pucks were our most frequent weapons.

It turned out the cultists were convinced our tentacled typist was the harbinger of their tentacled demonic god, due to a certain visual similarity, and needed to sacrifice her at just the right time and place in order to usher in a new age of hell-blasted death and suffering (the cultists (i.e., GM) had a cleverer turn of phrase for their goal, which I’ve forgotten). Once we figured this out, our clever plan was to have blend-in-guy pretend to be a cultist, and take the semi-captive tentacle-woman to them.

OK, the plan was both a little sounder, and a lot wackier, than that. Our lab tech had built a bomb into the trunk of the car, with which to blow up the cultists and/or their god; I rode along on a unicycle, clinging to the back of the car, disguised as a terrorist bear, and passed off as a snack for the soon-to-be-awakened elder god; our typist was wearing a fancy hat so that Enoch could see what was going on; and the others followed in a van, and provided catering with Elise’s cookies & milk, in order to get into the cultists’ lair.

It also helped that the Cultists were clearly worshipping the wrong god: the dice gods were not on their side which, combined with liberal use of yum-yums on our part, meant that they were dumb. Would you fall for “oh, that sorta-mountain-man-looking guy on the unicycle holding a hamster to the trunk of my car? that’s actually a very scrawny bear that I’m bringing along to the sacrifice so that the new god will have a snack when he wakes up”? Luckily, it was supposed to be a comedy game, so the absurdities didn’t ruin it, but instead enhanced it.

Oh, and the theme? Clearly “Good always triumphs over Evil” means that if we won, we were the good guys—otherwise, the theme wouldn’t be supported by the narrative. I’m happy to report that we did, in fact, turn out to be the good guys.