LARP Structure aka What Do We Do Exactly?

One of my chief concerns with the Dark Before Dawn LARP was whether there would be enough for the players to do.  In a 6 1/2 hour game you really want to make sure that no one's bored, or at least, that they're not bored for long.  Naturally a particularly social bunch eager to explore their character's psychological vulnerabilities could take any LARP pitch and roll with it for even ten or more hours, but most players need a little more structure than that.

My first consideration involved the characters' goals.  Give them goals that tie in with each other and suggest alliances, rivalries, and enemies, which were straightforward enough to understand but complex enough to intrigue.  The larger the web, the more entertaining these goals can be, but with a small group of 11 players I guessed that these goals would give them 2 - 3 hours worth of entertainment, tops.

In reality these goals became a subtle backdrop to the character's actions rather than holding star position - likely due to the possessions and mysterious location.  The goals did entertain, at least, but they didn't chew up time for long.  This was always a possibility, just because you give someone an enemy doesn't mean they won't put it aside for now and focus on what's in front of them, especially if there's no obvious and subtle way to deal with them otherwise.

My second consideration was to involve a mystery for the characters to solve.  They were in an unusual place.  They all disagreed on the exact date.  They didn't remember arriving at this location and had expected to walk in elsewhere.  This consideration took up an hour or two of actual game-time, interwoven throughout the six, as people queried each other for further knowledge and poked the various props about the place.  I discovered that mysteries were pretty unbalanced ... they gained weight as the game progressed and the little hints started tumbling together into an avalanche.  It certainly worked a treat and coloured everything else but it would have been pretty bare on its own.

My third consideration was to throw in some antagonists for the characters to butt heads against.  Initially I was going to draft in some cast but since the game attracted far fewer players than expected, I went back to basics and instead asked a few of the players if they wouldn't mind being possessed for a bit.  Since I didn't want them to lose their characters, and since relying on combat would be a bit of a drag, I threw in several exorcisms about the place that they could theoretically use and made it so that each exorcism targeted one person and that if the wrong person was picked, the Strix would become immune to that technique. 

I also made it so that the first two possession victims would be the ones with the necessary skills to use two of those forms of exorcism.  This ate up the lion's share of four hours, especially when the first possession victim took so long to dispel.  The third, ironically enough, was immediately exorcised on a whim by a character who didn't realise that the technique would lose its potency if performed on the wrong person.

My final consideration was the capstone plot ... everyone needed to cast their vote for one entity or another, or abstain completely.  This took up the last 30 - 45 minutes.

All told, we had just enough structure and plot to keep 11 people occupied for all but 15 minutes of the game (the bit shortly before the ending plot struck).

Naturally this was in part due to the low number of players, the mystery set up which tweaked characters to focus on solving puzzles (i.e. possessions) and the way external threats tend to put a dampener of internal politics and intrigue.  Part of it is doubtless due to local style and the desires of the various players involved, but it does make you think.

Sometimes LARPs Do Need Pre-Planned Endings

Chess will always provide some distraction in a game.

As with all things, there are a multitude of recommendations of how various events should, and should not, be run.  One pearl of wisdom is that LARP designers should never, ever, ever design an ending for the game.  Now depending on how you define the word ending, this is *mostly* true. 

There are very few LARPs that can benefit from an utterly pre-generated "ending" where everything is set in stone.  It *can* work, so long as the ending is a final curtain on a one shot that resonates strongly with the players ... such as if the apocalypse LARP is guaranteed to end with the location falling to zombies or where the game ends with the prisoners assist those soldiers arriving to free the prison camp from the enemy.

So it *can* work, and work brilliantly, but generally you want a looser *ending* than that.  Such an ending has a real sense of resolution, has been pre-planned, but must allow a meaningful choice to be made and have room for variation.

For awhile I sputtered and worried over the ending.  How to cap it all off?  My initial plans had 30 players whose chaos might be enough to keep the game running smoothly and whose antics might finally form into a suitable resolution.  But 11 players?  In a dice-based LARP where you can't simply throw in a final combat and expect excitement?  (Unless your idea of excitement involves a dozen players standing around and waiting for their turn to roll a dice.)

So I went back to basics and tried to figure out what an ending was.  The law of rising tension meant the most tension should come at the end which is what made me think of playing an NPC briefly as I can be quite strident and pull tension along.  Of course, just having an NPC rock up wouldn't be enough.  It had to affect the entire gathering so that no one missed out.  It also needed to raise the stakes above previous situations so I looked at a city-wide effect.  It should be tied into the prior sub-plots and thus I made it touch on Dr. Jonathon Taylor's rituals, its results, and the subsequent loss of Nurse Cassandra to the city's infrastructure.  Finally it needed player involvement.

And that was the kicker.  Any puzzle would necessarily require only a few players input.  Even a complex one could theoretically be solved by a couple people and there'd doubtless be a few who wouldn't know what to do even if there were a dozen pieces.  Plus I couldn't think up a good puzzle.

Combat, as mentioned beforehand, can be a real drag in a game and while it adds necessary spice even in dice LARPs, it's generally not suitable for an ending unless masterfully handled with several miniature  battles and I didn't have time to brief enough Floor GMs for that.

So I went back to the even more fundamental basics and realised that in the end games are all about the choices we make.  That's why combat needs so many rules to be exciting and why in a game with quick resolutions (or fewer players like in tabletop) it can be exciting - high stakes, multiple decisions to make.  So if games are all about choice, maybe that's all I needed, one big choice with huge stakes that would affect everyone and where everyone could be involved by getting their own choice.

And so my Dark Before Dawn one shot, the LARP ended with an angel arriving at the game with a box of rune-inscribed stones.  She gave a little speech regarding the merits of her god, contradicted by the pleading requests of a ghost who spoke via written text on a data projector, and bid each person take a stone and choose to set their will to either banishing the ghost from the machine (and potentially destroying her) and giving control to an alien God OR supporting the usurper and keeping the machine away from God.  She finally described it as a choice between Order and Chaos, which is bound to resolve in people even if they don't care much for either NPC.

(On an aside, they would choose by putting the stone in either an antique soap box that had previously contained an abjuration amulet or a velvet lined carved box that had previously contained phosphorous shotgun shells, so that involved some added metaphor.)

The third option, where the characters chose neither side, was valid though wouldn't weigh as strongly as those who voted in one direction or the other.  No matter what the players did, the angel wouldn't commit violence.  It wouldn't supernaturally compel them.  And once it had spoken, it retained the same position (a half bow) until the assigned ten minutes were up and stayed silent unless explicitly questioned.

So this was a pre-planned event.  No matter what the players did during the game, the angel would arrive and offer the choice.  The players had flexibility within how they engaged in that time but they couldn't gain more time and they couldn't vote for, say, power over the device to be transferred to one of their own.

The one piece of last-minute flex involved the elder occultist banishing the angel after a few votes had been cast and once everyone had a chance to discuss the matters among themselves.  The player kindly floated the idea past me first, got my ideas on what might work and how, then brilliantly roleplayed it after those who had an opinion had voted and those who were torn had either chosen to abstain or were moving toward that choice.  Therefore that *change* was more of a capstone piece to the event than a literal change to the ending.

Not only did this final choice work, it worked well, and if I had simply allowed the players to interact for those several hours with nothing to mark an ending, the LARP would have fared quite poorly indeed.  About ten to fifteen minutes prior to the ending events, the players ran out of plot, finished their individual goals and were left to discuss the metaphysics of the game world - something that excluded and confused the new players who were unfamiliar with the World of Darkness or who didn't control occultist characters. 

An additional thirty minutes of such conversation would have been a big let down and left a bad taste of confusion, helplessness and a sense of failure as the players contemplated whether there was something they *should* be doing.

The ending plot directed some of that conversation when it was realised, though until the angel walked through there was still some confusion.  Once it was all outlined and placed in front of them, people could finally have a final decision to sink their teeth into and once that decision was done they could face the final transition (leaving the hall via the back exit) with a sense of purpose and trepidation.

After all, the campaign LARP will deal with the fall out of their decision to largely abstain from the Choice and chart their own destinies -- with a slight weighting toward leaving Nurse Cassandra in the machine.

NOTE: I am *not* saying that all LARPs need ending events.  There are no absolute rules in LARPs so long as everyone has fun.  I had an 11-person investigative LARP in the adventure style so I needed it more than most.  My initial plans had a 30-person LARP which would have needed either more time for a "Choice" ending *or* could have resolved well simply by throwing another football for them to fight over in the ring whose resolution would have counted.  Heck, some political LARPs work just fine with people struggling over positions until the timer runs out.

Game Translation: This War of Mine

Generally its a rare game that goes the full simulationist / slice of life route.  The grand majority of games are plotted.  There is some major conflict that you need to weave your way through, defeating a succession of obstacles of increasing drama and tension to defeat some Big Bad (or more rarely to merely survive and escape).  Therefore I have little experience, but loads of ideas, for how to accomplish This War of Mine through a roleplaying lens format.

In This War of Mine you don't play elite soldiers out to cleanse the city nor do you play rebels seeking to overthrow the government.  You're not even a single Action Hero Father trying to rescue your kids.  You could well be an old teacher, handyman, and sneaky girl from the wrong side of town.

You also don't shoot up bad guys unless you want to risk an easy road to death.  Instead you sneak through abandoned (and not-so-abandoned) locales picking up spare parts so you can spend your daytimes constructing various appliances, gardens, and water purifiers to allow you and your friends to survive a few days while occasionally thugs and desperate civilians make armed raids on your home.

It's a different sort of game.  It's a touch depressing.  And it would make for a very interesting roleplaying game.

If you have Narrativist players, then you probably already  know how you can run this.  You could simply focus on the relationships with some moments of rising tension, perhaps randomly drawn from a deck of cards to represent what is heard on the radio or what occurs during the night or on scavenging runs as a launch pad for ideas.  Players could then interject with what they think would be most entertaining - "I've caught a cold...."  "A sniper wings me...."

Simply watching the various characters interact as things slowly get worse and they struggle to put together enough to make it through the war could be perfectly entertaining for one or more sessions with the right crowd, but if you're a full Narrativist who have played a number of games in this style you probably don't need much advice on that front and as I've never run that sort of game I'm really not in the position to advice you on it.

So what if you're used to running the more common sorts of games with a GM in full control of the world around player controlled characters used to dealing with GM created obstacles while interacting with each other and NPCs in character?

Well you'll need to make sure that everyone plays pretty low-powered and ordinary characters.  So think small, think weak, think hopelessly out-gunned just like if the average office worker suddenly had to survive in an urban environment without proper stores.  Ensure the rules work with that and be sure the players are open to it.

You can play "This War of Mine" with more capable folks, say ex-emergency services personnel, and you can play the setting within a different style - even slice of life it with emergency services dealing with call outs within a besieged city but as that doesn't focus on the style of the videogame, just the setting, we won't be looking at that.  So make sure the players are onboard with creating utterly normal people with one particular specialty - good cook, good craftsman, etc.  I'd recommend each player make three such characters so that they can replace them quickly.

Ensure that wounds won't heal without medical attention and that sicknesses get progressively worse without warmth, food and rest.  When the characters get too hungry, too sick, too wounded or too tired, their movement speeds should be cut to a walk and then a stagger.  Every effort should take them longer and they should no longer be much use scavenging.

As with any good sandbox game you could get a map showing identified locations which they can travel and some basic rumours about them.  Danger levels, likely lootables, and possible NPCs should all be described.  You could even make it a bit of a hex crawl if you like by allowing PCs to spend a night in different blocks looking for places that haven't been revealed to them yet.

Unless you're willing to have a full group traipsing about to every location (increasing the chances of a TPK and reducing the sense of desperation), you'd need to keep the missions themselves quite short and sharp to allow players to guiltlessly split the party.  Ten to fifteen minutes per supply run should generally be enough.  Twenty to thirty if everyone seems enraptured.  Let the players know that they will need to split the party in advance so that they can protect their homes in case of looters.

I'd use a randomised system - like dice or card draws - to decide whether they're attacked.  You can either roleplay the attack or resolve it with dice or simply matching the defences against the attacker's skill and desperation, if you like.

Be mindful the PCs may crave revenge after a successful raid on them.

Inventory management is important as well in any game based on scavenging.  Firstly you'll need to determine the build phases - what they can build and what they need for it - then you can decide what they find.  You could do this board game style by putting tokens on a map and making them navigate the location or you could just decide it on the fly.  It's up to you.

During the build phase, you need to decide how many items they can build and if time will factor into it or simply what they have in their inventory.  Bear in mind how long you want it to take for them to purify water or grow crops.  You won't want this to occur in real-time as it would be very dull to have to get through fourteen days to make things happen so maybe have each phase represent a week of activities.

What they build should also have meaning during the gameplay and roleplay parts as well.  You could assign bonuses or penalties depending on what they have but other than slowing the PCs down when things get too rough I would focus on adding roleplaying pressures.  Describe the aches and pains of sleeping poorly ... describe the taste of dog food when they lack vegetables for soup ... describe the pangs of thirst ... describe the aching cold ... describe a day spent with nothing to read and nothing to do ... describe the maddening lack of information on how things are progressing for lack of a radio.  Each day, no matter what they have got and what they have recently built, describe what they lack and make it ache.

When the characters don't eat, simply progress them through categories that are easy to understand.  Slightly Hungry.  Hungry.  Starving.  Starving.  Dead.  Same thing with a lack of sleep or creeping sadness.  Reinforce the sensations of it most of all by describing the physical issues within each problem.  That will be the most galvanising thing for the players. 

When it gets cold, you could make one of them them draw from five cards to see if they get sick - increase the number of illness cards if they are exhausted, starving or if the temperature has gotten quite low.

So that it doesn't just become a depressing spiral of angst, ensure that there are some moments of levity as well.  People request for help and offer it.  People repay their debts when the PCs help them out.  Some of the locations are open to trade.  Some are robbed.  Some are cruel.  Most are just trying to survive.

Anyway, a campaign based around This War of Mine or including elements of it, should appeal to -

Communicators who find personal interaction and psychological horror interesting may enjoy it quite a bit though anyone who's main desire is for politics may find it sorely lacking unless they can affect alliances and recruit NPCs over to their way of thinking.

Explorers may enjoy the voyeuristic thrill of poking through people's homes and businesses while on scavenging missions so play it up and ensure little secrets are found here and there.  Keep it lively and keep the descriptions full of unqiue moments.

Action Heroes will stick a target on some of the bad guys and want their revenge.  If they succeed, they will love it.  If they fail, or fail too often, they will become frustrated.  They may be able to do it for a session as a favour to other players but this is not a good game for them long-term.

Tacticians will find it irritating because there's no win condition other than base survival.  Every decision they make is as bad as it is good.  Oh you built a cage to trap animals?  Well now we don't have a heater ... or a vegetable garden ... or an upgraded machine shop.  Some may enjoy this, plenty won't.

Investigators won't have much in the way of questions to solve and cases to follow.  They, like the action heroes and tacticians, could enjoy the setting but not the style of This War of Mine.  They may well find it dull.

So if you want to check out the trailer, you can find it here.

For the next Game Translation (which will be in a fortnight's time), you have a choice of these: Wastelanders 2, Wolfenstein, Dead Space, or Vampire: the Masquerade (Bloodlines).

If you want to see the list of games I've done thus far, you can find the Game Translation series starter over here.

How The LARP Went

When I initially planned my LARP back in January, my plans revolved around an expectation of between 25 - 35 players.  I don't know why I was so ambitious.  I suppose because I knew I had a ridiculous amount of both interactive and decorative elements and I knew that hundreds of folks in my home city have LARPed before over the years.  If they had gone to LARPs that had fewer (sometimes even no) props, phys-reps and interactive elements that you could touch and discover, surely they would be eager to come along to my LARP simply to bathe in the ambiance if nothing else.

No such luck.  Whether due to LARPer burnout or a lack of interest in vampire, or the shortcomings of free advertising, we ended up having only 12 tickets purchased.

Or should I say, loads of luck ... because this ended up being a really awesome LARP and it could only have happened with a small but wickedly awesome bunch of LARPers, first timers and experienced.

Sometimes things work out for the best when they don't go according to plan.  After all, a 30 player adventure-style game is difficult indeed, especially when you're using dice and therefore going more down the path of murder mystery style clues than boffer weapons and swinging traps.

Still the realisation that I had fewer players meant I couldn't put all my reliance on simply giving a bunch of players opposing goals and letting them "have at each other" for 6 1/2 hours.  A dozen players can easily make amends or choose to quietly hold a grudge after a couple hours.  While thirty folks will get in each other's way often enough to make peace (or at least a new status quo) hard to grasp, a dozen individuals will get enough time to resolve their differences if they need to.

And yes, this is a vampire game, but without crazy levels of escalation, you also run out of things to do.  There's only so many folks you can give a rumour to and so many ears to whisper "Don't trust him" in before you've done it all.

So I needed a plot framework *and* I needed a capstone ending. 

And I only realised I needed these things two weeks before the LARP began.

Naturally I only discovered what the framework would be on the Monday before game and I only discovered the ending on Tuesday.  And yes, yes, I've heard that you don't need to come up with endings in LARPs because the players will all mystically come to a fitting conclusion that is mutually satisfactory and needs no GM involvement and HOGWASH I say.  Pure hogwash.

Creating a game with no ending in mind works for *some* LARPs but not for *all* LARPs and it certainly would've rung a death knell for this game which was otherwise great but really needed something to keep it from trailing off into speculation and confusion.  But I'll discuss that more tomorrow.

Worthy Link: Play-by-Post

In place of reading more stuff from me for the week, check out this awesome Paizo Thread on running a decent Play-by-Post!

LARP Preparation Trumps Game Translation

All right, I admit it, I was wrong.  You won't be getting a Game Translation this week as I'm still too busy preparing for my LARP.  What with a player meet up yesterday, GM meet up tomorrow, and player meet up on Friday evening -- and full time work every day but Wednesday (a half day), I'm a little flat out getting everything re-jigged for Saturday.

Luckily all of my research into various LARPs has finally paid off as I not only have a pretty good framework to keep people thoroughly occupied but I also have an ending.  A real bona fide ending!  And I don't mean an "outro" where the GM narrates a conclusion which can be great fun but always functions more of an epilogue than an ending due to player passivity.  I mean something the players can do which involves real dramatic tension!

This is a major relief for me because if you have played dice LARPs before where you use randomised rolls (or card draws or whatever) to settle combat, you can't just have a hoard kick in the door and up tension that way.  I mean, you *could* but unless the combat is over quickly or involves a small number of players (doable with 12, I suppose) it often turns into a grind that can still make for a satisfying conclusion but it's not something I would want to rely on with *this* game.

On the other hand, generally you can't just throw a final puzzle into the mix (few players involved) and social wrangling can work but you need a sizable cast (which would go against the theme of this session) so instead I went with the core definition of player interactivity.

Decision making.

In the end, everything (even combat, especially *interesting* combat) boils down to making meaningful decisions.  So why not make that the main attraction?  Strip it to its core and let the players decide something that truly matters.  Naturally spending a full 6 1/2 hours making one decision is hard to pull off outside of Nordic LARP so I have another plot line that is meaningful and adds shading to the final decision but isn't wrapped up in it per se.

With a real ending, everything is falling into place but it needs a little extra work to ensure that it has the support it needs for the players to make a real decision on the matter.

More details to come once the game is done!

Vampire LARP ... eep

So my first big vampire LARP as part of the Adelaide Roleplaying Community Incorporated is due to kick off this Saturday.  I'm kinda nervous.  It was initially slated to run with 30 people so all I had to do was ensure we had enough Floor GMs and Assistant GMs.  We had a nice hall, fancy decorations, and some really neat character goals to keep things going for the six and a half hours and to justify the $16 non-concession door price.

Then we had 12 people purchase tickets.

Ye gads....  You can't rely on 12 people to entertain themselves for 6 and a half hours.  Well, you can, but you shouldn't, because they won't be very entertaining 9 / 10.

So I'm having to shift things around, take the original advertised concept and mould it a bit so that everything I said about the game remains true but there's more stuff to do and keep them occupied.  As it's a dice LARP I can't rely on drumming up buddies to charge in there as bad guys because, well, dice LARP combat even between 12 people is pretty boring, so I need to find ways to keep them entertained that doesn't rely on NPCs.

For a little while, I panicked.  I won't lie.  I considered swapping venues and building up a real murder mystery style game, very Lovecraftian, lots of props, but swapping venues a week beforehand is generally a bad idea.  It looks sloppy.  Plus I didn't have enough time to really do all the props and handouts that would make that work.

So I stole a couple Nordic ideas through a lens of Vampire: the Requiem.  We should have more than enough stuff to keep folk entertained and busy.  6 1/2 hours.  12 players.  The time allotment works brilliantly as well.

Naturally I can't discuss it upfront as some of my players will read this but I will be able to give you all of the details next week.

Also sorry I've been slack with this blog.  I've been busy with LARPs and life and stuff.  I'll do up a Game Translation this Wednesday on This Is War to make up for it.