This weekend I went up to Ashland, OH to help run a game of NSDM being sponsored by the university there. I had a good time and it was an interesting experience for sure, being the first time I've actually really spent much time in Ohio and also the first time I've helped out with an NSDM event outside of GenCon. Aside from having a good time though, I felt pretty good about being asked to help out in the first place, especially since I have only really been involved with NSDM in any real capacity for a couple years.
My iPod has decided to die on me, so I was listening to the radio on the drive over there, and I have to say that going to Ohio is a bit of a change from Champaign. Radio-wise, when you're looking for something to listen to that is like what you usually listen to back home, you run into a lot of stuff on the way that is...unusual. I don't think I've ever heard quite as many Christian music/talk stations before as I heard on the trip through west Indiana and Ohio, and the conservative bias even on the commercial music stations (one of which was evidently having Ann Coulter as a guest on their morning show in the upcoming week, which I would find hard to fathom here in Champaign) was pretty weird. In terms of terrain, I didn't realize Ohio was as hilly as it was either; I got to experience the lovely weightless queasiness of cresting a steep hill for the first time in quite a while. I also discovered that Columbus is a lot bigger than I thought it was; I thought it was maybe twice as big as Champaign or Springfield, but I think it's probably a lot closer to Indianapolis or St. Louis than either of those.
As far as the NSDM game went, we had originally planned to run three cells, the US, the PRC, and Iran. However, we had a few less players than anticipated and ended up only running the US and Iran. Even so, it was still a good game, with a lot of stuff happening (too much at times, it seemed to some of us), helped out largely by the new US cell design Ed Rollins came up with. The old cell used mostly members of the executive branch and actually marginalized the role of Congress as much as possible, mostly because getting anything passed was gigantic hassle, and it was hard to have enough people to adequately staff Congress. The new cell made most of the cell members of the legislature (and didn't bother splitting it into House and Senate), and allowed them to adjust various parts of the budget rather than force endless hashing out of the budget between Congress and the president (I think -- I admit that I missed the explanation of the cell, so I wasn't clear on all the details). The end result was that the budget didn't take up nearly as much time as it used to, which gave the US players a lot more time to actually work on legislation and getting things done.
And get things done they did. The US cell got to learn the hard way that social change can't happen overnight. The first things the US Congress decided to make the center of its social policies (reflecting, I suspect, the conservative leanings of Ashland University's student body) were outlawing affirmative action in all its forms, locking down the borders and banning all immigration, and cutting corporate taxes by a third. Of course, they didn't seem to have anticipated the uproar this caused with minorities and unions -- it didn't take long before there were marches and strikes all over the country. Riots broke out not long after as racial tensions continued to rise without abate (leading to the quote that heads this entry), and then when they finally got them under control (mostly by repealing or relaxing the legislation in the first place), they had to deal with the backlash from the far right, including white supremacists. All in all, a nice mess, and that was just their domestic policies....
Meanwhile, in Iran, we had an 8 year old who was the Hizbollah player (and for a very brief time, the president of Iran) who was getting just a little too excited about blowing things up and causing trouble for everyone else, radical students/professors who started a worldwide smallpox epidemic when their personal biological warfare program blew up in their face, Iranian business and industry that managed to basically do whatever they want (including sell a good deal of oil to the US, somehow), and a nuclear program that was destroyed by a US-sponsored Israeli attack that they couldn't really respond to because a good deal of the population was in the throes of the aforementioned smallpox outbreak. At the end of the game, the theocrats were pushing to invade Iraq (which the US was trying to abandon as quickly as possible, while defunding the military's strategic transport and naval budgets) when the army and most of the rest of the country decided they had had about enough of them and seized power.
It was a good game, probably on par with the average GenCon one, though i am really getting less and less fond of the closed-door policy in many of the more repressive cells. Iran had its door closed for most of the game, which really hurt information flow -- it took them almost half an hour to realize that members of their diplomatic staff had been detained by the US government for espionage activities, and it took them way longer than it should have for them to respond to the smallpox outbreak because they weren't talking to anyone outside the country. Having played in a North Korean cell during GenCon, which is probably the most closed of the closed society cells, I can say that you really do miss out on a lot. For me as a player, most of the game is interacting with the other players, and when you are stuck dealing with only a relatively tiny number of people (especially when, as when I played as part of North Korea, it is a shark tank with everyone angling to off the rest of the cell), the game experience suffers. I hope that we can come up with a better mechanic to represent that, instead of just locking out an entire cell.
I am definitely looking forward to playing or facilitating again soon; it's a shame that I don't think I can make it to Fall In or Cold Wars. I'm going to try to make it to Origins and GenCon (again) next year, but that all depends on ye olde financial situation, which is a bit up in the air these days. Still, seeing as how there's at least 2-3 NSDM staffers that live in Columbus, Origins might not be out of the question even on a tight budget. After seeing how things went this weekend, I'm definitely curious how an Origins game is different from a GenCon one.
My iPod has decided to die on me, so I was listening to the radio on the drive over there, and I have to say that going to Ohio is a bit of a change from Champaign. Radio-wise, when you're looking for something to listen to that is like what you usually listen to back home, you run into a lot of stuff on the way that is...unusual. I don't think I've ever heard quite as many Christian music/talk stations before as I heard on the trip through west Indiana and Ohio, and the conservative bias even on the commercial music stations (one of which was evidently having Ann Coulter as a guest on their morning show in the upcoming week, which I would find hard to fathom here in Champaign) was pretty weird. In terms of terrain, I didn't realize Ohio was as hilly as it was either; I got to experience the lovely weightless queasiness of cresting a steep hill for the first time in quite a while. I also discovered that Columbus is a lot bigger than I thought it was; I thought it was maybe twice as big as Champaign or Springfield, but I think it's probably a lot closer to Indianapolis or St. Louis than either of those.
As far as the NSDM game went, we had originally planned to run three cells, the US, the PRC, and Iran. However, we had a few less players than anticipated and ended up only running the US and Iran. Even so, it was still a good game, with a lot of stuff happening (too much at times, it seemed to some of us), helped out largely by the new US cell design Ed Rollins came up with. The old cell used mostly members of the executive branch and actually marginalized the role of Congress as much as possible, mostly because getting anything passed was gigantic hassle, and it was hard to have enough people to adequately staff Congress. The new cell made most of the cell members of the legislature (and didn't bother splitting it into House and Senate), and allowed them to adjust various parts of the budget rather than force endless hashing out of the budget between Congress and the president (I think -- I admit that I missed the explanation of the cell, so I wasn't clear on all the details). The end result was that the budget didn't take up nearly as much time as it used to, which gave the US players a lot more time to actually work on legislation and getting things done.
And get things done they did. The US cell got to learn the hard way that social change can't happen overnight. The first things the US Congress decided to make the center of its social policies (reflecting, I suspect, the conservative leanings of Ashland University's student body) were outlawing affirmative action in all its forms, locking down the borders and banning all immigration, and cutting corporate taxes by a third. Of course, they didn't seem to have anticipated the uproar this caused with minorities and unions -- it didn't take long before there were marches and strikes all over the country. Riots broke out not long after as racial tensions continued to rise without abate (leading to the quote that heads this entry), and then when they finally got them under control (mostly by repealing or relaxing the legislation in the first place), they had to deal with the backlash from the far right, including white supremacists. All in all, a nice mess, and that was just their domestic policies....
Meanwhile, in Iran, we had an 8 year old who was the Hizbollah player (and for a very brief time, the president of Iran) who was getting just a little too excited about blowing things up and causing trouble for everyone else, radical students/professors who started a worldwide smallpox epidemic when their personal biological warfare program blew up in their face, Iranian business and industry that managed to basically do whatever they want (including sell a good deal of oil to the US, somehow), and a nuclear program that was destroyed by a US-sponsored Israeli attack that they couldn't really respond to because a good deal of the population was in the throes of the aforementioned smallpox outbreak. At the end of the game, the theocrats were pushing to invade Iraq (which the US was trying to abandon as quickly as possible, while defunding the military's strategic transport and naval budgets) when the army and most of the rest of the country decided they had had about enough of them and seized power.
It was a good game, probably on par with the average GenCon one, though i am really getting less and less fond of the closed-door policy in many of the more repressive cells. Iran had its door closed for most of the game, which really hurt information flow -- it took them almost half an hour to realize that members of their diplomatic staff had been detained by the US government for espionage activities, and it took them way longer than it should have for them to respond to the smallpox outbreak because they weren't talking to anyone outside the country. Having played in a North Korean cell during GenCon, which is probably the most closed of the closed society cells, I can say that you really do miss out on a lot. For me as a player, most of the game is interacting with the other players, and when you are stuck dealing with only a relatively tiny number of people (especially when, as when I played as part of North Korea, it is a shark tank with everyone angling to off the rest of the cell), the game experience suffers. I hope that we can come up with a better mechanic to represent that, instead of just locking out an entire cell.
I am definitely looking forward to playing or facilitating again soon; it's a shame that I don't think I can make it to Fall In or Cold Wars. I'm going to try to make it to Origins and GenCon (again) next year, but that all depends on ye olde financial situation, which is a bit up in the air these days. Still, seeing as how there's at least 2-3 NSDM staffers that live in Columbus, Origins might not be out of the question even on a tight budget. After seeing how things went this weekend, I'm definitely curious how an Origins game is different from a GenCon one.
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