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Pride
Game Designs I am proud of-- (oddly, neither have been used by me. Further, these are likely to change as my design sense improves)
Simple LARP system (would like to use this as a tabletop mechanic, someday)
Riddle of Steel mass combat notes
World Designs I am proud of--
Keepers of the Sacred
Daiethion
and extended cosmos (snowfall, illumination, smallworld, etc.)
Games (that I GMed) I am (especially) proud of--
Sangre (though I admit fault, the plot construction technique gives me pride)
The Thief and the Knife
Waterhouse's Party
Nine
Transd War
Characters that I am proud of--
Mike Jorkowsky (CP 2020)
Eric (Whiterose -- storyteller)
Kent / Qui-to Chuang (Nocturne -- D&D and Riddle of Steel)
Interestingly -- there is very little overlap here -- Two of the games that I like are set in the Keepers of the Sacred fantasy world, but only just barely (Chorus is practically its own setting, and has the distinction of being my only setting to run under 4 different systems and in 3 different worlds.) "Nine" included two characters from the Daiethion cosmos, but they were pretty far gone from anything useful. Of course, I have barely ever had games run in the Daiethion cosmos -- I had contemplated a colonization politics LARP / tabletop hybrid, but I don't think that's going to happen, at this point. Neither will the Snowfall game, which is sad as hell, because that setting is bitching cool.
Further, of the games that I am most proud of, two are 1 session, one is 4 session, and one is 8 session. The only "epic" there is Transd War, which was run in early high school, and in a different time and place.
Also interesting is that I have yet to play a really jaw-droppingly good character whilst on the East Coast (albeit, Kent was under the influence of FGS). I wonder why this is the case? The closest that one comes to a full person characterization, I feel, is Val, but he verges on parody a bit too often to be really appealing to me. Zarquor, actually, probably comes the closest to someone I have pride in. But he isn't a hero. It's just that sometimes, there's a character, and sometimes, there's Andrew-fucking-Jackson.
Two of the three characters who I feel were the most interesting were being eaten alive by demons. I wonder if this reflects poorly on me? I think it has more to do with them having time to thrive (the games ran often, and didn't stop), and the generally more supportive RP style I encounter in CA then it does with the content of their personality and cosmological position. I have no doubt that Martin (a paladin type) would have blossomed into an interesting fellow, had he not been cut off in the bud by scheduling...
After talking with Dana a bit, I also came to the conclusion that the same thing was happening in all three of the these cases -- I was having fun with the character and so was the GM. In the case of Mike, it was a solo game that both involved were really into (it remains, to this day, the most intricately plotted game I have ever been involved with.) In the case of Kent, I hit exactly the themes that the GM wanted to explore. In the case of Eric, I managed to appeal to Jasper's sense of the morbid and his aesthetics of loss and sorrow, despite the fact that we were, essentially, playing a super hero game.
I think that the reason I have not experienced this in FGS is that everyone is familiar with this phenomenon, at least at an unconscious level, and there is a big "GM attention" game, which I am remarkably bad at playing either side of. I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing -- it results in very strange and remarkable characters -- but I think that it is probably a bad thing for me, because I can't compete :-)
Simple LARP system (would like to use this as a tabletop mechanic, someday)
Riddle of Steel mass combat notes
World Designs I am proud of--
Keepers of the Sacred
Daiethion
and extended cosmos (snowfall, illumination, smallworld, etc.)
Games (that I GMed) I am (especially) proud of--
Sangre (though I admit fault, the plot construction technique gives me pride)
The Thief and the Knife
Waterhouse's Party
Nine
Transd War
Characters that I am proud of--
Mike Jorkowsky (CP 2020)
Eric (Whiterose -- storyteller)
Kent / Qui-to Chuang (Nocturne -- D&D and Riddle of Steel)
Interestingly -- there is very little overlap here -- Two of the games that I like are set in the Keepers of the Sacred fantasy world, but only just barely (Chorus is practically its own setting, and has the distinction of being my only setting to run under 4 different systems and in 3 different worlds.) "Nine" included two characters from the Daiethion cosmos, but they were pretty far gone from anything useful. Of course, I have barely ever had games run in the Daiethion cosmos -- I had contemplated a colonization politics LARP / tabletop hybrid, but I don't think that's going to happen, at this point. Neither will the Snowfall game, which is sad as hell, because that setting is bitching cool.
Further, of the games that I am most proud of, two are 1 session, one is 4 session, and one is 8 session. The only "epic" there is Transd War, which was run in early high school, and in a different time and place.
Also interesting is that I have yet to play a really jaw-droppingly good character whilst on the East Coast (albeit, Kent was under the influence of FGS). I wonder why this is the case? The closest that one comes to a full person characterization, I feel, is Val, but he verges on parody a bit too often to be really appealing to me. Zarquor, actually, probably comes the closest to someone I have pride in. But he isn't a hero. It's just that sometimes, there's a character, and sometimes, there's Andrew-fucking-Jackson.
Two of the three characters who I feel were the most interesting were being eaten alive by demons. I wonder if this reflects poorly on me? I think it has more to do with them having time to thrive (the games ran often, and didn't stop), and the generally more supportive RP style I encounter in CA then it does with the content of their personality and cosmological position. I have no doubt that Martin (a paladin type) would have blossomed into an interesting fellow, had he not been cut off in the bud by scheduling...
After talking with Dana a bit, I also came to the conclusion that the same thing was happening in all three of the these cases -- I was having fun with the character and so was the GM. In the case of Mike, it was a solo game that both involved were really into (it remains, to this day, the most intricately plotted game I have ever been involved with.) In the case of Kent, I hit exactly the themes that the GM wanted to explore. In the case of Eric, I managed to appeal to Jasper's sense of the morbid and his aesthetics of loss and sorrow, despite the fact that we were, essentially, playing a super hero game.
I think that the reason I have not experienced this in FGS is that everyone is familiar with this phenomenon, at least at an unconscious level, and there is a big "GM attention" game, which I am remarkably bad at playing either side of. I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing -- it results in very strange and remarkable characters -- but I think that it is probably a bad thing for me, because I can't compete :-)
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