Pork Lips Whirled and Pessicary Weevil

This was a banner weekend for gaming. First there was JB's one-shot on Friday night. He's been eager to run a game of something called Apocalypse World with this group and persevered despite lack of sleep and more players than he'd bargained for. Only one member of the six-person alternate Sundays group couldn't make it, but Grergory roped in two young friends, making it a mercy that both his and vianegativa's partners ultimately took a pass.

I'll admit, I suppressed an eye-roll at the fact that we all started out in a bar. I cut JB slack since, after all, one-shots don't exactly leave a lot of time for the characters to get to know each other. The Powered by the Apocalypse system actually allows for an extensive amount of cooperative character-creation, but with time so short we skipped this stage and folded it into play.

I should know by now to have more confidence in this group. I learned a great deal playing with princeofcairo, but one of the most important lessons is that, when you have good players, you can trust them with a lot of the creative work. Hmm, that comes across as a bit of a slam on players who are less skilled at improvisation. Let's say "the right kind of players" then. Munchkinism (or, to be polite about it, "powergaming") is a legitimate style of play. But it's boring to me compared to the mindset which first asks the question, "What would my character do?" and only then considers whether this is advantageous in the context of gameplay or not.

We actually had a terrific example of that in Sunday's game, where dedos acquiesced to having his Atlantean lord possessed by demons because it furthered his goal of becoming Emperor of Atlantis. Of course, now he's in the difficult position of deciding whether or not to continue with the character (thus obligating all the other players to find some means of exorcising him and bringing him back to the fold) or switch to a new one halfway through. But that's how it works: the interesting choices spawn more interesting choices.

But back to AW. Within short order, we'd figured out that Grergory's go-go dancer was the bar's primary draw, that my bouncer and Bigboy's onsite healer (incongruously using a template named "Angel") had an organ-harvesting sideline, and that vianegativa's florid Capote-esque mentalist was as ubiquitous as he was hated. The new boys, being both mercenaries, had a certain rapport with my character, a rapport which blossomed into the session's most unexpected romance. Oh, and JB had determined that the whole shebang was located on a former oil platform about to be attacked by marauders with jetskis.

There was at least one moment during play of pure magic (involving the touching apotheosis of dedos's stammering vegatable-pedlar), aside from countless moments of hilarity. I honestly can't remember the last time I've laughed so much in such a compressed span of time. I encouraged Grergory to act out bits of his big dance number, and he not only obliged but sang snatches of the cub DJ's mix. "This is a world where Smashmouth is the greatest band ever," he informed us. After a moment of spectacular denseness on his part, one of the other players blurted out, "Oh my god, so basically, you're playing Zoolander."

Of course, this only made it harder to readjust to the unengaging unidimensionality of his character in Necessary Evil. I initially had the impression that our group divided naturally into half powergamers and half deep roleplayers. Now I see that, really, everyone has good roleplaying chops, some just haven't been exercising them as much. vianegativa acknowledged as much in our post-game discussion of the next game. "This is a group that really likes character development," he said before suggesting perhaps something in the Storyteller range next time. If it brings out the full range of what the players are capable of, I'm all for it.

He did reassure us, however, that he wasn't getting bored yet with the current game thanks to our ingenuity at confounding his expectations. "As long as you guys keep doing things like possessing one of the other PCs with demons, I won't get tired of running this." Will I get tired of playing it, though? My character isn't much like I conceived of her and she's accomplished both more than she set out to do and much less. For the first several sessions, I was always bracing for the cutthroat endgame when the PCs inevitably turn on each other. It's still not clear that bloody climax will ever come.