I am unable to understand how such a totally ingenious plan could go so amazingly, horribly wrong.

smoczek, being a lady of infinite resource and sagacity, has recently acquired the Fiasco! role-playing system, and five of us spent a somewhat enjoyable few hours in narrative construction yesterday. It's a lovely system: the point is character interactions rather than stats or exploring a world, and the whole thing progresses as a series of highly cinematic scenes, with responsibility for driving them rotating between characters. The mechanism for choosing and resolving scenes is both minimalist and elegant. At a conservative estimate I'd say that the whole thing was designed in response to the classic gaming group predicament of everyone wanting to play and no-one actually wanting to run a game, by a bunch of roleplayers with a neo-noir fixation, a respectable chunk of LARP-design experience, a good grasp of narrative balance, and thoroughly evil minds. It is quite possibly the most fun I've had role-playing ever, and I'm not just saying that because I ended up with the contortionist burlesque performer with pythons and a cat-burglary habit who finished the session having sold out absolutely everyone at least once. And we didn't even use the jewel-encrusted sex toy.

Also, the mechanism for choosing who gets to go first is to determine who has the smallest home town. I was born in Bulawayo. Win.

It was a lengthy, animated and (as usual) rather drunken session. I'm feeling more than somewhat fragile today, although I can't tell if that's because of the booze (I don't think so, actually), another thrice-damned sinus infection (a bit of an occupational hazard at the moment, everyone seems to be exploding from pollination), or the fact that I attended my Favourite Niece's fifth birthday party this morning. She had a fairy party. There must have been two dozen small kids there, most of them in some combination of fairy dresses, wings, wands, glitter and butterfly deely-bobbers, and a uniform outbreak of pink. Even the little boys were all crowns and cloaks and what have you. (And, for no adequately defined reason, a Spiderman). Much fun was apparently had by all. I bowed out early owing to the depredations of Sid, but it was rather fun watching them bounce around the show on frenetic cupcake energy. Also, memo to self, decision not to procreate apparently working well for me.