The Christmas Game 2014

The Christmas Game for last (!) year took place on Monday. I'd been looking forward to it for quite some time for several reasons: 2014 had been a poor year for gaming generally, this was to be the first chance to play the new Firefly RPG, and the Christmas Game has become something of a highlight of the gaming year and is always something I look forward to.

Perhaps due to these factors, or perhaps simply because Firefly makes it quite easy, I was actually very well-prepared for this game. I'd been able to apply my recent revelation regarding the four-act structure to the game, and I'd made sure in all applicable cases to at least consider my four possible solutions (Fight!, Evade, Seduce, Deceive). So not only was I feeling good about the amount of preparation I'd done, but I was also quite happy with the type of preparation I'd done. And I was feeling vindicated that the lessons I thought I'd been learning were indeed the right ones. Huzzah!

In the event, the game suffered two late call-offs. One of these was due to illness, while the second was due to a mistake about the times. So we were down to three players, each of whom took on two characters. But that was fine - at least it meant nobody was stuck with a 'bad' character! (Though it turned out that there were no 'bad' characters, so that turned out to be an invalid fear anyway.)

The game itself all went extremely well. The four acts actually proceeded in the order expected, with little bleeding between them, and although I didn't predict everything that happened, or even close to it, there was no point when I felt I wasn't prepared for what was happening.

The was one story-telling weakness in the plot as it unfolded, which was that the PCs fled the scene immediately before the bad guy got his much-deserved comeuppance, which meant that that happened "off camera". Though I'm not entirely sure that's a truly terrible thing.

So, all in all I was really happy with the game. I was actually also quite happy with the way Sabra worked out in this game - as I've posted before, she's the character that doesn't quite 'fit'. However, the Firefly game is actually constructed such that no character is ever truly useless - even when doing something they're 'bad' at, the character should have something to contribute, which is good.

(Also, as part of my research for this game, I revisited "Alien: Resurrection", and noticed something I hadn't seen before: in the middle section of the film, the crew lay claim to a number of guns of various sorts. And although she's in the background much of the time, Sabra is depicted as being quite comfortable with weapons. So maybe her third Distinction should actually be "Veteran of the Unification War", thus making her a bit more of a warrior-type, and hopefully making her a bit more fun to play without requiring a rewrite for every game. Maybe.)

As a result of this game, I'm going to press ahead with my notion of running "Firefly: the Lost Episodes" at various times this year. And I'm currently working on some ideas for the next "Christmas Game" - "Memoirs of a Companion".