RapierCon 2009: BRATS

Last week I attended a local convention here in Jacksonville, FL called RapierCon.  This is my second year attending and I’ve enjoyed both years.

I rolled in Sunday morning expecting to play The Mountain Witch at 9 AM.  Unfortunately, the game was canceled by the GM, which was a shame.   Also, nobody had signed up for my Inspectres game at 2, which was kinda depressing.  I was asking the lady at the registration desk if people often just showed up at games on Sundays and she said that was the case.  So, I was trying to think of how to waste the next five hours at a primarily wargames minicon.  Luckily, Chris, the RPG organizer, overhead me talking at the reg desk and asked me what was up.  I told him about The Mountain Witch being canceled and he said, “I’m running a game right now, follow me”.  I did.

As we took the elevator up to the conference room I realized he was the guy who ran a pretty fun Necessary Evil game at last year’s RapierCon.  I commented on this and Chris told me he’s been running a supers game of one kind or another every Sunday morning at RapierCon for the last four years.

This years Sunday Supers game was Champions 5th Edition game featuring the Bay Area Reserve Action Team of Superheroes aka the BRATS, a group of teenage supers living in the Champions HQ and training to someday be superheroes on their own.

Highlights:

The M/F ratio was surprising – 4 girls and 3 guys counting the GM.  Since half the pregen PCs were female, this worked well.  Two of the girl players were in their teens, so the young PCs were a perfect fit.  I tweeted this on my phone (it was a slow start) and Daniel Perez told me to out-teen the teens!  I sure tried.

The plot was intentionally absurd and we hammed it up – Foxbat, an insane cross between Batman (rich with lots of toys) and The Joker (criminally insane, in love with his wittiness) had threatened Bay City.  The Champions were out of town, so it was left to the BRATS to protect the
innocent citizens!

The internet culture of youth was frequently referenced during the game. Some examples:
* After defeating a monstrous minion of Foxbat, one of the PCs took a pic with her camera phone and posted it online and sent it to Foxbat, mocking him

* My PC, the team speedster who also had ADHD, would frequently zoom ahead of the group and then text message a member of the team what was going on

* The team and Foxbat got into Twitter battles over who was most supreme

The final battle took place at Foxbat’s secret lair and involved threatening Foxbat’s comics and beating him to a pulp.

Afterward, I found out that the youngest player in the game was 14 and that this was one of the first RPGs she’d ever played.   I asked the group to sign up for my Inspectres game at 2.  As for how that game went, I will be posted the audio recording on an upcoming episode of the Canon Puncture Actual Play feed.