Ambercon
The con was a lot of fun and all of my games were (I believe) successful. Out of the games I played in, I enjoyed MK and KL's game the most. With two GM's, MK's style of game works a lot better and the players and GMs all did a great job. I wasn't sure that I wanted to play in this and find myself commited to an annual campaign, but in the end I think it was worth it.

I have decided that I do not like plots where the characters have to solve some problem that makes their abilities useless until they figure it out. Many of these gaes don't have many NPC's, so the players have to keep looking at eachother saying "Have we tried this yet?" I played in two games like that and while I enjoyed myself, I could have enjoyed myself much more. Sometimes you need have a few exciting NPC's so players can talk to them, wondering if perhaps they are the villian or if they have the clues they need. Without any NPC's in these games, you knew that your fellow PC's were in the dark with you and there wasn't much roleplaying where you try to get the answers out of them. These games are exercises in problem solving, not roleplaying. The GM's for these games did a good job of running them, but the concept of their game makes it tough to enjoy them if you're not a player who enjoys solving puzzles or if you were more interested in playing a certain character concept that doesn't try to solve puzzles.

Gamemastering Character Concepts
What can I say? Roleplaying is on my brain. I was thinking about the one game I played in and realized that the big thing a lot of GM's miss out on is catering to the character's concept. If you have a game where everyone can make their own characters, then they will create and want to play concepts that may not fit in to what you were planning. Many GMs just run the game as they planned, not adding anything or changing anything that allows the player to play the character they enjoy the way they want to play them. I don't try to be like that. I like to try and cater to what the player seems to want. This doesn't mean I scrap my plot, but I alter it a little and try to put in at least one scene where the player or character is in his or her element. For example, in "The Heist" JT built a combat monster named Alec. This guy was not the best at being sneaky, but excelled at fighting. Since the game was built around thievery, there was a point where Alec was sneaking around and ran into someof the elders. He was caught and beaten down. I could have left it there and had his character rotting in the dungeons. After all, he had failed at stealing the Jewel of Judgement and was captured: fair enough. However, that would have sucked for JT, since his character would have never done what he was designed to do. So he regained consciousness as the guards of Amber where dragging him to the dungeons of Kolvir. He had a great scene as he fought his way out of the dungeon. JT made a character based on Warfare because he wanted to play a character that fights. That was his concept. By working in a scene where he got to fight, I think he enjoyed the game more than he would have. Meanwhile, the sneaky lying characters got to lie to people and the sneaky cat-burglar types got to creep around Castle Amber. Everyone made a character they wanted to play and it's important if you are the GM to let them play those characters. Don't try and force them to become the characters you wanted in the story, like too many GMs do. (edit- I typed this out the other night and I was really tired from the con. It was filled with typos and poor grammar. I just tried cleaning it up, but I didn't change the content.)