mmm, cookies.

[godream]

I should go to bed. Instead, I think I'll ramble about my very first LARP game. (Live-action role-playing. Yes, I'm a geek. Yes, you can laugh at me now.) Long Ago & Far Away was... interesting. I find myself vaguely disappointed -- probably largely because a.) I was kinda bad at it and b.) I had ridiculously high expectations. Everyone got a yellow half-sheet of paper, telling you about your character and your goals, much of which seemed to be along the lines of "obtain items x and y for goal z". So far as a game mechanic goes, the whole plot tokens business is tried and true and everything, and I don't know what I expected to happen. In retrospect I can think of all sorts of things to whine about -- in particular, I thought the cast of characters was unbalanced in terms of abilities and in terms of the information that we started out with. Not that I could have done better, or anything, just sayin'.

And of course another bit of the problem is my subconscious obsession with "winning" or something that means I won't let go and be silly or take risks or whatever. I think maybe I was just way cagier than we were intended to be. It was only a two-hour game and I didn't make decisions fast enough, wasn't assertive enough about trading and whatever, was way too passive in general. (Which bears no resemblance to real life. *Really.* Ha.) I had a shopping list of a few items, of which two should have been easy (but I didn't get anyways) and one was nearly impossible, because absolutely everyone was looking for it and it was sort of the key to one of the central plots of the game.

One of the central plots, by the way, that I managed to know nearly nothing of till the game was over. My character was the younger of the two princesses of the realm, the kinder but uglier one, and I ended up queen for some time, I think, after the king got turned into a horse and then killed and the older sister got killed as well, though there was this thing with an uncle and it was all a bit fuzzy. And it totally wasn't through my machinations, but rather this other guy whose knight character was planning on marrying my character to get the throne and then killing her off. (In which case my refusal to do things quickly was more useful; he kept pushing for "let's get married now!" and I kept demurring. Which -- well, if I'd been playing the character rather than sort of trying to "win" I probably would not have done. Through the preliminary character notes, it was really obvious that a.) the knight in question was in it strictly for the throne, and b.) my character had no clue. Which makes what I did really bad role-playing, if halfway decent strategizing. But hey, at least the guy playing the character was really cute. Mmm.) And then the wicked witch (see previous re: overpowered) decided to turn me into a cockroach two minutes before endgame, and that was that. :P

So it was a good couple hours of entertainment, I guess, and I'm glad to have tried it, but I'm kinda iffy on whether I'll do it again.

Oh yeah, and "The Punisher" is a really bad movie, very nearly painful to watch in spite of a bunch of pretty explosions.