Tobias blogs

This year’s RopeCon experience was just as good as last year’s. Amazingly enough. My expectations were very low — there was little planning on our behalf and there were only two of us. I looked forward to a laid-back con with some opportunities to explore more of the con areas and activities than last year, but boy was I wrong. I mean, man.

On Friday, we just did the one game. The Upgrade!, as sort of a salute to last year’s endeavours, but also because the hour was pretty late, and we didn’t want to kick-off with something emotional. We played a fairly good game, with five players and Thorbiörn as the sixth. Among the players were also Jiituomas Harviainen and Emily Care Boss. The game wasn’t so rich on possible futures and pasts as it could have — as usual, the less Jeepform-oriented players were struggling with the battery of techniques the game uses — but it was nonetheless interesting. Emily’s character had a dark secret that came out in the end (I mean this part of the sentence in so many levels that it scares me), which made Thorbiörn’s character fall out of love with her. No couple was upgraded.

Markus introduced us to Emily just as we arrived. She was chatting with Joc and Thorbiörn while I was running around trying to find the two crates of give-away games that we’d brought from Stockholm. We had found ourselves in an interesting discussion about “Forgean sectarianism” (I think) earlier in the day, so meeting an actual cultist seemed like a natural next step. Anyway, we attended Emily’s interview — which Joc did great — and I got to ask the deliberately provoking question whether Forgean games are stuck in dice-land in order to deal with players being crappy. Emily politely responded that it was true in the sense that we are all crappy players, which I can completely see fits the Indie philosophy. Naturally, I don’t buy into that stuff (maybe in some way, but way to complex and irrelevant for this blog post). Emily also made a reference to the Jeepform dictionary which was nice, but weird.

The theme of this year’s RopeCon was Love, which not only fit at least Emily’s game designer profile, but most importantly manifested itself in Jukka Seppänen and his co-con general dressing up like Love Boat captains for most of the con. Jukka looked smashing, especially with a pink t-shirt underneath the jacket with the text “My Little Coni” written on the breast in white.

Jukka Seppänen and his co-captain

If Friday was calm, Saturday was crazy. We played Lady and Otto, a Balcony Challenge from Jiituomas, Hostage!, Doubt (Tvivel), The Mothers (Mødregruppen) and ended the evening with Shooting the Moon. Jiituomas had a balcony challenge since last year, which he presented us with: two people waking up in a hotel room, just having had the best sex of their lives. Out on the hotel balcony, they start fantasising about the other person, and start to feel doubts about their relationship which eventually leads to them breaking up. It was a fun game to play, and Thorbiörn and I even threw in a rock-papers-scissors challenge event in honour of the Forgean guest of honour. The game had potential, and should definitely be structured more clearly (Jiituomas did it off the top of his head) and made available in a replayable form.

The game of Doubt was good, but one of the players did not want to play it close to home (or at least it didn’t seem that way). She had a very good English and so enjoyed playing the different mothers in the game, that it sometimes felt like an episode of Keeping up Appearances. On the up-side, when she left the stage for her partner to be tempted, it was like the game completely changed into this soft-spoken and beautiful love-game, where the characters kept whispering in fear of waking up the dragon. That was a very nice effect.

The highlight of Doubt was the other female player (whose name I’ve sadly forgotten) that had no idea of what we were doing and basically was dragged there by her boyfriend. She was initially a bit nervous, but after the game was played, and she realised that we were going to play another game immediately afterwards, she asked her boyfriend if they couldn’t stay for the next one too. That was heart warming and the best possible response you can get.

The Mothers went very nice. We were planning of running it in Finnish, and were fortunate enough to have met a woman to play the nurse with the GM role in Finnish. Then Emily wanted to join us in the last minute, which resulted in us switching to playing in English, and me taking a role as well. It was huge fun and caused just the right amount of frustration for the key player.

Now, it was a bit over midnight and we had just played five games straight since lunch. We had previously decided to play Shooting the Moon or Breaking the Ice with Emily, and since she seemed happy and full av hälsa (full of health) and both Thorbiörn and I were high on post-game adrenalin, we did just that.

We entered onto the balcony and started setting up the game. We (the jeepsters) were both a bit reserved as we wanted to grasp as much of the game mechanics as you possibly can when you’ve done dice detox more than 10 years ago with just minor relapses.

I was playing the beloved, Pirkko, and Thorbiörn and Emily the suitors Mauno and Ritva. We agreed on Finnish country cottage being the setting, and started making the characters. Thorbiörn ended up playing an introverted, lovely, pipe-smoking man with craftsman skills and Emily played a “cheerful but blind” (I take all credit I can get for that piece of brilliance) woman with a jealous lover. I played a Finnish-Swedish sad and lonely singer, who wanted nothing more than to be relieved of a sense of duty to the world, which was slowly crushing her.

The traits system totally rocks! It is such a clever way of assigning tokens to important aspects of the characters, putting them on the map and making them expendable. I really enjoyed using it, and I’m sure I’ll end up stealing some of it for a game in the near future.

The game had many strong moments — Pirkko was telling Ritva what the sunset over the lake by the cottage looked like, and Mauno (who was tone deaf) serenading Pirkko in a desperate attempt to win her love. Most of the strong moment naturally arose as we acted out the scenes, but the challenges were powerful too, in a way that I’m not as used to as I could be. I remember Emily crossing out cheerful on her character sheet as I placed an ad for the cottage in the news paper — “now she is only blind”. I can’t imagine a good way of playing that out with the same clarity and force as the very concrete striking it from the character sheet. Awesome.

The dice moments came, of course. And both Thorbiörn and I felt stupid and inadequate. I generally wanted to take the scenes we played somewhere, but since I wasn’t completely in control of my character (no-one was, just the dice) I felt a bit trapped and constrained. I acknowledge, of course, that restrictions foster creativity, but I felt it was an obstacle to playing powerful love scenes, which to me was what the game was about. I’m guessing it has also a lot to do with experience in juggling dice and internalising the criteria for a nine-dice challenge or whatnot. I have far to go, and I don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, but I’m sure I’ll make it eventually, which feels like a prerequisite for making a just evaluation of the game. (To me, it feels like the game was a bit too complex for its own good, but I know that’s a plus to some people. Or so I hear.)

In the end, the dice actually did play a role. Thorbiörn had scored almost all points, I had four and Emily two. We suddenly found ourselves shaking dices in our hands in anticipation of the final roll and broke into a laughing fit because of the absurdity of the situation. To much surprise, Emily won, and Ritva and Pirkko sailed of to Argentina together in a way that clearly established their relationship and the overcoming of Pirkko’s guilt complex obstacle. Beautiful and calm, with only a few dry moments of Emily flicking through the rulebook to find out the consequences of a certain dice roll, etc. Ace.

High on post-game euphoria (which is really not me), we continued bonding over game design and talking nerd to well over four a.m. before Thorbiörn and I decided to walk the 4 or 5 miles home to Joc’s mother’s apartment in order to wind down. Naturally, it started to rain half-way, but nothing could break our spirits and the happiness that we had been basking in since our first game started on Friday. We arrived home close to seven a.m.

Sunday was a short day. We didn’t arrive at Dipoli before 14:00 and we immediately started to do the schedule for the day. Naturally, just to fuck ourselves and raise the stakes, we decided to create a new game and play-test it.

The game we came up with was surprisingly good considering we only spent 15 minutes on it. The idea was to do a serious follow-up on The Upgrade! show — a digging journalism/talking heads show was questioning the ethics of shows like The Upgrade! and the players played couples who were either formed on such shows or had survived them. We blatantly stole Emily’s mind-map ideas of character creation from Breaking the Ice, but with the Jeep twist that the mind-map should be made from previous relationships the players had been in, which turned out to work well even though I have a few ideas (stolen from Shooting the Moon, BTW) on how to improve it for a more quiet setting. The players were divided into two camps, those who were in favour of these kinds of shows (The Upgrade!, Temptation Island) and those who were not.

The game was OK. A bit all over the place, but good nonetheless. It definitely had potential, and needs some obvious tightening and form consideration. When the credits were rolling, the players played phone-in messages from the viewers and then we proceeded to a vote where the characters got to vote (not as part of the TV programme) whether these kinds of shows should be allowed and motivate their vote. Then we let the players vote as themselves, which lead to a very interesting discussion.

The game really felt like a good follow-up of The Upgrade! and we’ll definitely develop it further. I’d like to play it back to back (with perhaps a lunch break or something in-between) with The Upgrade!. It really felt like we got some closure on that game, which is important since, even though The Upgrade! is extremely silly, prejudice and tongue-in-cheek, it revolves around the serious subject of our (the players’) prejudice against people who actually sign up for these shows, and the (lack or) morality of TV shows of that kind.

Topi

One of the players was Topi, a great guy who reminded us very much of Olle by starting his sentences saying things like “In the glorious days of Rune Quest”. Later that evening, Topi took Markus and Thorbiörn and me back to his place and treated us to huge dungeon maps (Olle could just as well have done that), 21 year old Japanese whisky, detailed stories about geishas and a very disarming and vivid spirituality that I immediately fell in love with. A couple of hours later we were joined by Robin D. Laws, Emily and Merten. We immediately hit the sauna, which was perfect. Topi kept throwing water at the aggregate and at one time even instructed us all to duck down to avoid a huge cloud of steam that now only got to burn us on our backs.

Robin, Markus and Merten left shortly after the sauna. We didn’t really break the ice with Robin (no pun intended), but he seemed a nice guy. Topi and Thorbiörn and I immediately started singing “Row row row your boat” in canon, and where joined by Emily as she entered the apartment through the window.

Markus and Topi had started discussing the undying idea of musical larps, and I found myself vividly insisting that we should “play one, tonight”. Topi ingeniously put on a record with 30 of Elvis’ #1 hits and we soon found ourselves playing a game with one scene per song. We took turns to do spoken narration over the music while the others made freeform musical improvisation which was at times quite powerful. The arbitrary order of the songs worked a lot like the dice in Shooting the Moon in creating unexpectedness — powerful scenes were followed by songs using accordion in the intro. The game was about an abused American girl who ran away from her parents. Our improvised inner first-person monologues told stories about beatings, drugs, first sexual experiences, violence, bank robbings, etc. Eventually, to the sound of “Return to Sender”, the girl was hanged and wondering as she heard her neck breaking what her return address was, heaven or hell. Powerful and damn fun. And musical. The highlight of a great evening.

This RopeCon, I’ve found myself constantly being the guy that said “The night is young!” Even at four in the morning. This time I did not manage to convince anyone else to keep going, so Topi drove us home, Emily to the Dipoli Radisson/SAS hotel and Thorbiörn and me to Joc’s mother’s wonderful apartment on Drumsö.

If I had been cheerful since we left on Thursday, that was gone on Monday. We had decided to play Doubt with Jaakko, Emily, Markus and Satu and I had to prepare my game master monologues. I had already decided to go all-in, trying to get maximal effect from the players when new opportunities arose that I could just use straight off. Forgetting that I was in stone-walling, Turku immersionist country, I misread the players’ reactions several times, and thought the monologues were just fucking up the game and damaging flow. (OK, so they were meant to be, but not in that way — someone said “I felt punched”) It turned out they had hit so hard that people were unnerved or dispirited. And I once again showed myself that GM powers can be extended well beyond the game itself. Perhaps not the nicest thing, but it turned out well. And it was the Jeep thing to do. Incidentally, the monologues I wrote were leaving me pretty naked (I wont comment on the level of truth in them) and I had to erase all tracks of them when the session was over.

Preparing for the “Lit Candles” scene. Bed as dinner table.

All in all, I think the game was good. I too fell for the immersion — faking nervousness etc. soon made my body respond turning me depressed for real. A stupid and possibly unnecessary trip, but at the time, I felt that I got what I deserved.

The game is perhaps a little bit too complicated to pull off in four hours with players not used to the techniques and several levels of story with “inter-textual references” etc. Satu argued it was not a game, but since I was too messed up, I didn’t have the stamina to get into a discussion. Also, she used the words “transcended” No, really, the game was good, but I wasn’t. I misread the players several times. I could see that some of the stuff was causing the right reactions by watching Markus and Satu in the breaks. We had a brief discussion after and then did the insensible thing of going to the RopeCon after party and get boozed. Oh, and Jaakko did some awesome monologuing.

Repeated trips to the sauna and the Gulf of Finland made me get back to my old self again and soon Thorbiörn and I were singing “15 minuter från Eslöv“, Östen Warnerbring’s hilarious cover of “24 hours from Tulsa” , strangely enough to the amusement of the other people in the sauna. More singing followed. Meat. Coming clean. Talking to a lot of people in the sauna about freeform and trading tickets to events of next RopeCon.

Emily and I made a deal to make a game together, possibly about loss of self and distorted reality, which was discussed as the hopelessly outnumbered Forge ambassador walked through Finnish night with the two jeepers and the wonderful Mikko Pervilä as the creeper of the night — stumbling and with memory loss. Mikko eventually made sure we got home alright and showed a great sense of responsibility despite being more drunk than Thorbiörn and me together.

The forming of the JeepForge. Hakkis, for Solmukohta 2008, to the right.

Going to bed at 5 or 7 am three nights in a row, and waking up just a few hours later led us to believe that we had absorbed ETC by osmosis. But more importantly, it makes me happy that I can still do this, go on for fucking ever and look at myself from the outside and say — someone should really punch that guy to make him stop.

On an end-note, getting to know Emily was great, and, as I think Jason Morningstar pointed out a long time ago, it seems that the stuff we do is not really that different. There is a difference in angle and a bit in objective with the games. I think those differences are much more interesting to discuss than the presence or absence or random elements and flow vs. making things explicit through rules, bidding systems etc. We’ll see what come out of this in the future, but regardless what it turns out to be, I’m going to have fun doing it. I’m going to pour my crazyness into this, for better or worse.

RopeCon is a great con, and if the logistics of next year don’t make it impossible, we’ll be back. This is the highlight of this summer, to be sure.

Who is Jukka and who is Joc?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 11:46 am and is filed under English, Life, Jeepform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.