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Fermius Firefly

A Dream Log, whenever I remember the dreams I've had.

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Location: San Marcos, United States

Fermius is a pen name drawn from a series of short fiction I wrote when I published the small press magazine Stellanova (on paper.) I play RPG games to escape from my daily grind as a technology wage slave for the state of California. I eat out a lot in order to do my part in supporting our increasingly service level economy. I am butler to 2 feline masters. If you ask them they will tell you I'm not very good at it, late with dinner, don't have enough hands with brushes in them, and sometimes I even lock them out of their office.

Sunday, March 12, 2006

Mixed Media Mashup

Dreams last night and this morning were obviously drawn from the days reading and TV viewing. Battlestar Galactica meets Naruto meets Knights of the Dinner Table.

I was running an RPG at a convention, and during the course of the game, there was a Cylon attack. Somehow we managed to avoid getting vaporized. Did we stop gaming. NO! We just retreated to a room down in the convention center basement and set up some windup lights and made the person who was taking a turn wind the crank, so the torch got passed around. It was a good system, it kept folks from hogging the game. For some reason the crank was fairly difficult, so no one wanted to spend more than a minute or so cranking the thing.

The game was plunged into blackness a couple of times when we though we heard Cylons walking around outside. During one of our blackouts an argument broke out about who's characters were tougher; Jolly Blackburn's Knights of the Dinner Table's Untouchable Trio, or Masashi Kishimoto's ninjas in Naruto.

The group was soon making up the stat blocks for both sets of characters so they could duke it out on the playing mat. I tried to explain that the story systems were different, very different. The argument then began to turn to game mechanics, and we ran up against the same issue we had with a group I played with in High School a Quarter A Century (!) ago. Most people can't reasonably play a fantasy comic book style character and maintain any real sense of game balance. Either you can't do what the character does without being hopelessly overpowering, or the system makes it impossible to survive an encounter with an appropriately balanced badguy. The game typically becomes rocket launcher tag. Some people find that a blast. Some of us would like the characters to live long enough to develop some sort of story.

In the dream it seems the system monkeys and rules lawyers took the Untouchable Trio and Trashed Naruto and his bunch, then the argument came up that the Trio was well experienced and battle hardened, while the Naruto bunch were basically Ninja Interns. Whole new argument began. Meanwhile I was starting to get concerned about the Cylons roaming the hallways outside our little meeting room. I also was becoming concerned about munchies, we were nearly out of chips and salsa, the Oreos were gone and I had whole wheat fig bars, but no one seemed interested. Finally I called a break, and some of the group decided to use their "Ninja Skills" to get to the restroom and rustle up some "real" food.

Real food turned out to be Mrs Fields cookies and rasberry twizzlers along with a couple cases of Dr. Pepper and Coke Cola. The gamers who'd ninjitsued ("nitwitsued" is what I actually called it in the dream) off to find the restroom didn't return, so I went after them.

At this point I knew this was about to turn into I can't find the restroom, or once I do find it it will be full of cylons and I'd have to wait an hour for a stall, so I woke up.

Back to sleep I fell right back into the convention game master role. A slightly different bunch of gamers, this time including two "Sharon" models and a "Six" model from BSG. There were a couple of battle robots with the shiny eye going back and forth watching over us. There was a long haired balding guy and ML who kept morphing into Brian, a former student. ML was trying to teach the cylons the finer points of rules lawyering, but pointed out that in a rules light system like mine, that was really difficult. Soon the game was underway, a Mike Mignola's "Hellboy" scenario this time. About ten minutes into the game, Six looked worriedly at me and asked if this was common on this world. The game broke up into a long discussion of what the difference was between strategic simulations and a RPG. Fantasy, story telling. The concepts were not novel to them, but they really didn't understand. Finally I asked if while playing she had felt anything more intensely, or been forced to think harder to solve problems in the game than she might of during a routine day.

She admitted that was so and looked thoughtful. She asked if Game Masters ever traded in game power for out of game rewards, like sex. I replied that Game Masters don't really get to have sex.

I hate night terrors.

As astra per sombula
FF

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