Recently Filtered Good Gaming Ideas and Fuck Ups on My Part

Man my birthday this year has kicked ass. All the people that I didn't want to know about it didn't (I'll just leave that at that for now). I'm getting Monster Burner for Burning Wheel, Prime Time Adventures and Breaking the Ice to try with my wife, and maybe Nine Worlds if I can sneak it by. I got a Doctor Who scarf from my sister-in-law J-9, and we (my wife, Jeanine, and Adam [a good friend of us all]) went to see the kick-assest show of Enter the Haggis at Tir na Nog. Finally, I noticed that I got linked on a blog I have recently begun to read and respect. Wow! But to top it all off my birthday present that I didn't purchase for myself was to go and see (or will be to go and see) Ira Glass at UNC-CH next month (link impermanent)! He's the host of This American Life and if I had a spare $3,000 or so I'd own all of his shows. I love it love it love it to death, or, in this case, I love it to This American Life.

But the title of this post refers to the other birthday presents I got (whether those presents know it or not): NC Gameday 9 and Andy K.'s new site (I can't figure out if I can link to it or not, but there're enough clues on this site to get you there). NC Gameday got me together with my recent hookup friends at Chapel Hill Meetup. These people are awesome and kick the indie-gaming scene into new gear and most are already established authors! I got to play a good trio of games and will probably remember that weekend for some time to come. [Note to self, write up observations about Face of Angels playtest to give to its author].

So, let's get the fuck up out of the way and move on to the good gaming ideas. A friend of mine, Henry from EnWorld, has a gaming crew down in SC where he lives. He brought them with him to Gameday 9 and most were going to play Feng Shui. One very twitchy guy, Bob, came to play but found himself signing up for games quite unlike anything, and I mean anything, he'd ever played (Feng Shui being the most radical). Ignoring the concept of the fact that he signed up for them as a preregister, not an on the fly last second thing, he seemed to have a hard time getting going and muddled his way through the games.

One of my best newest most helpful friends, Jason Morningstar, author of the Shab-al-Hiri Roach, fretted over Bob. Bob seemed to be the exact audience he wanted to study the most. A willing neophyte that came to a different kind of gaming table to enjoy something radically new. I helped Jason (and still am) try and resolve some issues he'd been having with his poor ability to help out such a willing but misunderstanding .. customer.

But you know what? My fucking bad memory failed to recover something I'd heard for over two weeks: Bob had turned to Henry when he found no games open that he liked, and Henry suggested my game (which I'd heavily advertised on EnWorld) and thus, by proxy, the other game I was signed up for, Roach. He went with my game at Henry's suggestion AND because I was giving away a free book (which I'd developed as an incentive previously for taking up two slots, not necessarily to bring in people who wouldn't normally want to play the game). I didn't end up taking two slots, but the prize remained.

What I'm trying to say is that Jason agonized over this Bob dude and I could have told him just after the game that despite him preregistering for the game he was probably only doing it for swag and no other games were open. I apologized to Jason at Andy's site, I'll do it in person, but I'm doing it here because I really should have thought more and reflected more before I just jumped in and started trying to analyze and fix a problem that probably didn't exist.

That out if the way, let's move on to some new good gaming ideas:

• Shreyas Sampat wants to make an anime gun-angel X style game with a beautiful astrological/glyph map as a character sheet. I love it so very very much. He's even letting me contribute, and I've been giving it my all. Oh, yeah, it's Nine Gun Choir [ナイン・ガン CHOIR].
• Jeph is working on a fantasy RPG (which I will convert to Final Fantasy as soon as I can because I'm just that kind of dork) where you get an overland map with no towns or caves or whathaveyou on it and you add them in game to expore and add to the world. I think it would work great with timfire's In a Land Called ...
• Joshua BishopRoby started a snowball (which I'd participated in once before on EnWorld and was delighted with) and a great little haiku giant robot game is in development. There are some items I'd throw out but I think it'd be great fun. I added to it, and I love the maturity of the site that allows people to accept these ideas and keep on rolling.
• Joshua is also maybe working on revising WoD into a set of rules that realy evokes what most of us assumed would come out of WoD. We'll see.

That's it for now. Signing off.