Runester

Last week was very hard. I stayed up late on Wednesday night at my D&D (e3.5) game – and we had a blast! I stayed at work very, very late Thursday and didn’t get home until almost 11:00 pm. I was able to have a pretty good Friday but still didn’t make up enough sleep and Saturday morning I was up bright and early at 5:00 am so I could get over to Tresi’s and pick him up and drive us to JiffyCon. We made it on time!

I was tired, but JiffyCon was still fun. During the morning session I played in Tresi’s Paranoia game. It was the first time I’ve ever played that, even though it’s been out for many years and consistently makes various “games you must play before you die” lists. So, I was eager to try it out and get the whole ‘paranoia’ experience. “The Computer is Your Friend!” etc. It was fun, and the amount of mayhem we (the players) were able to create by being completely paranoid of each other while bootlicking the Computer every time it appeared; it was a total blast! I’m not sure you could really run this as any kind of extended campaign, but boy does it shake the RPG cobwebs out of your head and get you thinking very differently about your character and your characters place in a setting and a PC group.

For lunch we went to a Thai restaurant, and met a few new people from the con. Then during the afternoon session Tresi played “Misspent Youth” and I played “Labyrinth’s and Lycanthropes.” The L&L game I was in was interesting, sort of an exercise in minimal set-up, fantasy dungeon crawl. The players and the DM work together to generate the monsters, using playing cards that specify the type and level. Then they work together to draw a fantasy map and add cities and towns, and finally one dungeon/maze/castle/labyrinth per player. So, we had four total, that’s four labyrinths. The game is supposed to be comedic, but all of the comedy has to come from the players, and we were tired. The comedy ran thin rather quickly, but the game system itself was still interesting. We ran through a single labyrinth (Office Space themed with file-cabinet golems, and attacking secretaries in wheeled office chairs). It was fun to see how a clever system could turn some ordinary decks of playing cards into an afternoons game of bashing monsters and looking for clues. I, personally, think this game would be great for kids or people not interested in the full 350 pg D&D experience, or are only likely to play once. For example, at a Thanksgiving Day family get together.

I felt pretty terrible on Saturday, due to seasonal allergies. My head was stuffed up, my sinuses were constantly draining, and I felt tired and winded. I kept taking Benadryl, but this gave me cotton mouth and made me drowsy. I feel that if it weren’t for the antihistamine I probably wouldn’t have been able to make it through the whole con, but because of it I didn’t have the energy to really socialize and make the experience everything it could be.

Today, Lisa and I went to see 2012, the end-of-the-world movie. I liked the beginning and the special effects were pretty damn special. The movie didn’t fall apart, for me, until the end. They spent way too much time creating arbitrary suspense, where none was really needed. On the other hand, they spent almost no time exploring any of the hard questions that this plot made available. Questions like, how much are people willing to sacrifice to see that humanity survives? How desperate will people become to survive? What kinds of hard choices have to be made to allow anyone at all to survive? Most of these issues were only mentioned in passing, or glossed over. Then, everyone the audience was groomed to care about survived. The ending had no teeth, and it cheapened the feeling of “this is the end” which any good apocalypse is supposed to have.

Oh, and the science was such utter crap I won’t even mention it.