Another tiny one

Magnitude 1.9
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 07:35:08 AM at epicenter
Location 33.952°N, 118.368°W (405 @ Arbor Vitae)
Depth 11.1 km (6.9 miles)
2 km (1 miles) WSW (252°) from Inglewood, CA

Maxicon

Yays to popepat & familia for opening up their house again to scores of gamers, and keeping the house from exploding or imploding. I saw Mrs. Pope slaving away fairly constantly, but at least people were lending a hand as and when needed.

I zipped up Saturday night for citizenbrown's RPG set in Iain Banks' Culture. It was a little unfortunate that I was the only player with a strong grounding in the universe, but I think it all worked out reasonably well. Chun had put together a diceless system that started with a fairly rapid character creation round in which we drew cards labelled with... attributes, let's say. These cards gave us some role-playing hooks and could be played during the adventure for improvements in success. Since I had the best understanding of the universe, Chun allowed me to play a Ship (and associated avatar). One of the attributes I drew was 'Hilarious' - "You're hilarious, but people don't always get your jokes -- the first time you make everyone (including the GM) at least chuckle, you get [a token used to improve results]." Anyway, I chose (for my 'hilarious' Culture ship name) N Objects Walk into a Bar. Now, I wonder if N Bodies Walk into ħ would be an improvement.
I can't remember what I said to first make people crack up, but I managed to do it a few times. When a drone was about to do something I considered foolish, I liked my deadpan Wonka "don't. stop. come back." More in the nature of a malicious prank was when rizwank demanded a weapon of me -- admittedly, in the middle of a battle -- and I displaced a board with a nail in it into his hands. Suffice to say, our diplomatic Contact mission got a little out of control, but I think we managed a nice success.
I chatted with a few people afterwards, but pretty quickly hit the road back, returning for my game on Sunday:
Session 38: Big Band Wolf, a rules-light adventure set in the world of Cowboy Bebop, with the players being the five crewmembers of the Bebop.
( Dullness Alert: TMI RPG war story theater )

After my game, Dab ran his goth RPG, where a group of club habitués tried to collect signed copies of some goth/industrial albums for a dying friend. Lightly plotted and more an excuse for Dab's acquaintances from the scene to show up as the PCs and NPCs, but there were some fun scenes as we riffed on the setting and the oddball characters. It ran short, which was actually nice, since then I could spend some time drifting around socializing with various peoples, and managed to hit an opportune moment to snag one of the Louisiana hotlinks I'd brought off the grill that the Pope manfully manned to feed the horde. Played some Rock Band, schmoozed a little more, and then headed back. Unfortunately, there was a two car injury collision on the 405 at Santa Monica that blocked the two left lanes and was not too far ahead of me. I almost made it over to get off at Wilshire, but didn't. I did get into the Santa Monica exit lane, but pretty soon everyone was at a standstill. I expect they towed the wreckage off down the SM offramp and so stopped all traffic. I was stuck there maybe 20-30 minutes -- long enough for me and a number of other people to switch off our engines. Crummy, but one of those situations where you know some other people are having a far crummier night.