Lee Short's Journal

ACNW Amber Shadows
This is a writeup of the Amber Shadows game I ran at AmberCon NorthWest. Let me know what you think about the format.

The players were John Kim (

jhkimrpg), Emma Sansone, Pol Jackson (

pjack), Kath Nyborg, and myself. Thaddeus Rice was slotted for the game but had to cancel from the con. That left 5 players. SMC has never been played before with more than 4; 5 was fine. With 6, I think the game would have gone too long for a round of turns (that would have pushed it to 2 hours between turns). Had Thaddeus shown up, I would have facilitated the game and not played. Probably experienced players could make a group of six work but the game is really designed for 4 or 5. We sat around the table in the order Pol->me->Kath->John->Emma, in clockwise order. The player to your left is your GM, so I GMed for Pol, Kath GMed for me, etc.

I had originally asked for 2 separated slots, 4 hours Thursday night and 4 hours Friday morning. I wanted the players to have time for the game's process to sink in after the first slot, so that we'd hit the ground running in the second slot. That didn't happen (no fault of the schedulers); we had one 7.5 hour slot instead (including time for lunch). One of the things that I dropped from the game was the Gaming Preferences Discussion. The place where I think this discussion would have really helped the game was in the pacing. There was once at the table when it seemed that John wanted faster pacing than Emma, who was his GM. There was another time where I figured out too late that I scene I was running for Pol was too slow for his tastes (right?). I had the impression that Pol wanted the fastest pacing in the group, and Emma wanted the slowest, with the rest of us in betweeen. From table feel, I had the impression that there might not be any compromise pacing that would really satisfy both Pol and Emma -- but that, with a little discussion about references, either one could have worked with the other 3 of us.

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