Well, although I have many years of anecdotes I could dredge up, I feel the need today to share a few short stories from the one-shot I ran at MacquarieCon four times over the last weekend. I also ran it with a test group a month or so before, so I have run it a total of five times. And although those five games shared the same plot, the same characters, and the same goals, they could not have been more different.
The basic tenet of the game was this - a group of five mages have heeded the call for help from an archmage, whose last living relative on earth is in danger, and he wants her kept safe. He'd do it himself, but he is over 400 years old, and if he sets foot on earth, reality will slap him into pasty ancient goo. His relative was a girl working in a vault complex in Sydney, which was under threat of robbers, and she had been taken hostage. Free the girl, keep her safe. That was the ostensible goal.
I say ostensible goal, because there was, as in all my con games, a twist - the mage did not in fact care in the slightest about his great great great grand daughter. But she had a ring, which was a powerful artifact which anchored his horizon realm to the earth. However, only one of the mages knew this (the monk whose avatar was the ghost of Bruce Lee). Well, that's not entirely true. One of the mages in the group was a member of the nephandi - that group of evil mages who wants to end reality - and knew that the ring was a powerful device that could aid in massive destruction, and figured this had something to do with it.
The ring's power further complicated things, by preventing any sort of correspondence teleportation or scrying into where it was held. And what the hell, to add a further complication, the robbers were all vampires - insane Malkavians who were holding the girl hostage to get the attention of the archmage, because they wanted help dealing with the technocracy, and figured he would come or at least send some mages if they put her in danger. And one of the mages in the group wasn't actually a mage at all, but was a ghoul of a vampire who was an enemy of these Malkavians, and he used blood to perform magic-like feats to spy on the mages for general occult information.
Okay, so it's complicated. But here's a summary of how each group who played this game sought to solve their problem.
The first group, the control group, ran almost like clockwork. They researched the building and the situation. They teleported into a subway toilet, and walked to the scene. The police had already turned up to the scene, so they pretended to be police (undercover, since they were dressed so strangely they may as well have been the Village People) and got access to the CCTV in the vault and found out the robbers' demands. They decided to go in and negotiate with the robbers, found out they were vampires (the ghoul hid himself to make sure they didn't recognise him) and agreed to help deal with the technocracy and help them loot the vault. The vampires then basically proceeded to break the masquerade, make sure all the CCTV caught it, then tipped their hats to the magi and said, "Well, they'll be here soon. Have fun!" and walked out the door. A technocrat came with a HITMark and a few others, a massive magical fight ensued, in which the nephandi was given the ring by a trusting member of the cabal and told, "Keep it safe!" Yoink, she made good her escape and a few months later the world was ended. Yay.
The first game I ran at the actual convention took a slightly different turn. The group decided to do absolutely no research on the facility, teleported onto the roof, and took the fire escape down, but found it didn't go to the basement where the vault was, and used spirit magic to make a deal with the fire alarm not to set off when they opened the door, if they promised to set off all the alarms in the building within 1 hour. They charmed a beat cop with magic, told him to ignore them, then snuck into the vault complex. The ghoul used dominate on the vampire with explosives forcing it to stay still, before they blew a hole in the wall, incapacitated the other vampires with a swarm of wasps and fire, and then told the hostages to run. They found the ring, which was safely snatched up by the monk. The nephandi then proceeded to summon a horde of spirits to attack his companions in an effort to get the ring, but had his top half disintegrated, and so the ring was made safe.
The second game followed a similar beginning to the first - they ignored doing any research, teleported onto the roof, and went down the fire stairs. But it didn't even bother them that they didn't go to the basement - they used matter magic to redesign the building and put in a fire stair to the basement. They then installed a secret corridor to the room with the hostages, whilst the nephandi spirit walked into the vault to get behind enemy lines (and stole the ring while in there). They froze the exploding vampire in time, stormed in with guns blazing, took out the other two vampires, before the nephandi grabbed the girl they were there for and escaped out the front door and into the hands of police. Thinking they had all done incredibly well, the monk went into the vault only to find the ring gone, and wondered where it was. The nephandi then won the game by accidently using spirit travel with the ring, thus tearing a hole in the gauntlet from Sydney to Colombia and allowing the denizens of the umbra to flood the earth, killing all humanity.
The third game had only three players, who did their research and decided to try and sneak into the vault through the airconditioning system. One player sought to turn themself into a cockroach, and succeeded in getting everything but the size right, and so snuck into the vault as a five foot tall cockroach. They then decided to enter the vault by dressing up as pizza delivery boys and snatched the hostage they wanted from the scene, trapping the vampires behind bullet-proof glass doors as they ran. The enraged vampires proceeded to quite horribly annihilate the other hostages, which the magi saw on their PDA which tapped into the CCTV, and felt bad - so they used magic to set off the explosives, destroying the whole building, and causing the two buildings either side to fall over onto the wreckage. THEN the nephandi decided to turn into a cockroach and sneak into the vault (now buried under three buildings' worth of rubble), while telling the monk through a mind link that she was a nephandi and she was going to get this ring, and he should totally join her. He responded by reaching into her mind and pulling out all thoughts to do with the ring so that, by the time she had the safe deposit box open, she couldn't remember what she was doing there, and so just took the ring as a trinket, and traded it to the monk in return for his promise to help her end the world.
The final game at the con involved five people who wanted to make sure everything went off without a hitch, and so planned for - I kid you not - two and a half hours. They researched, they planned, they schemed, they looked at the clock and saw they had 30 minutes to complete this caper, and they managed to kill the head police negotiator, get subsumed and trapped in a safe deposit box by the spirit of the vault, turn the water sprinkler system into holy water to melt the vampires to puddles of goo, and basically forget about the hostages. The nephandi locked himself in the vault, found the ring, and attempted to call his nephandi brethren through the spirit realm to tell them he had the ring and to ask what to do next - but botched, and accidentally got speaking to a werewolf, who appeared, tore the nephandi to tiny bits, and took the ring somewhere safe.
One thing that always bemuses me about con games is how you can prepare something (like the whole subplot about the vampires wanting help against the technocracy) and the players never even come close to stumbling over it. I mean, four games, and no-one thought to find out what the vampires wanted? Two of the groups didn't even do any research on the vault complex, and so missed out on the cool video I had prepared. Oh well, such is life.
