daisyninjagirl | Entries tagged with larp

A thing thing, a thing that someone has already paid me money for.

Also known as Ulysses, a space opera adaptation of Homer's Odyssey. Greeeeeeeeeks iiiiiiiiiiin Spaaaaaaaaaaaace......
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/278895/Ulysses
Ulysses: a space opera larp inspired by Homer's Odyssey

Ulysses: a space opera larp inspired by Homer's Odyssey

This has been definitely the most challenging larp I've ever written. It started off with me being present at an oral reading of the Odyssey, and I suddenly realised that the stories I'd received as an adventure story were actually quite a lot more involved with domestic issues around the head of the household being gone, and the drama (and bloodshed) of his return. So I wrote a larp about it, because it can help to work my feelings out about something by getting other people to roleplay it for me. It's perfectly normal!

So, just over a week ago, my sister and I ran a fairy tale larp that was trying to mess around with the form. And our players. But in a good way!

I had two main things driving the design. One of them was a reaction to the intense emotionally charged psychodrama games that often get called Nordic larp. There are a lot of really powerful techniques being used, but a lot of the time they seem to revolve around making people feel miserable - I wanted to see if I could engineer a situation that would have the opposite effect. The other one was a video game called The Path. This came out a few years ago, and it just really stuck with me. The basic scenario is that you're a version of Red Riding Hood walking through the woods to your grandmother's house, and the gameplay is that you choose to walk, or stop for a little and encounter some object that's sitting in the woods, or if you're feeling lost and lonely you can wait for a guide character to come and give you a hug and take you back to the path. Or you can encounter the Wolf, which is devastating, and the only way to find out what will happen is go through with the encounter. And eventually you end up at your grandmother's house and there's some stuff that happens that depends on what you did in the woods. It's atmospheric as hell, and totally awesome. So I ended up with a game where the premise was that a group of lost 'children' (some of the characters were adolescents or adults) had each, once upon a time, fled from their own personal Wolf and become lost in the woods. Their goal, which they weren't explicitly told, was to find some sort of resolution with their wolf.

Game Design Stuff
First off, I'm going to thank my co-writer Catherine a huge amount - the original idea was from me, but if she hadn't been letting me bounce ideas off her, and helping me work out the mechanics - and writing some key characters that got me through writer's block, the game just wouldn't have happened. Plus, she really came through with the creepy doll. ;-)

For a lot of things in the game, there was often more than one reason why it was like that. The first one was the movement rules - the lost children had to keep moving, had to stay in the company of someone with a black headband (actually the GMs, the backstage helper 'wood sprites' and the wolves), and there was an OOC call "push-me-pull-you" to trigger them moving if they'd stopped. Partly this was to stop the game clogging up, which is something I've seen in other forest games - there's a huge play area, but 'something interesting' is happening at a particular site, so everybody stops and clusters around it, and ignores all the other interesting things going on. Another one, was that it was a way to make people tired. I wanted them to feel physically challenged but not in real danger, so that when they got to stop walking, that was a relief, and hopefully that would affect their emotional state. And the third reason - the be with someone with a headband rule - was to control the game and make sure that we could keep the lost children circulating around the different wolves, and so that no one was stuck by themselves for too long.

The area of the game was a set of interlinked tracks at a scout camp that I knew pretty well from previous larp events. We had a small fenced off area in the middle of the forest with benches and a single entrance (the scout camp's chapel) that we used as a base camp during the game, the mid game break area, and the final destination for the end game. There were also some buildings close to the game area with toilets and hot water facilities - we advised the players that while IC they were stuck with the group, OOC they could take a break at any time and wait at the chapel to catch up with the rest of the players. I don't think anyone used this, but it was important to me, because I figured that anything that we could do to increase people's physical feeling of real life safety would help them relax and enjoy the game content. We also scheduled a ten minute break for everyone about an hour into the game. This was originally for strictly practical reasons - to get some water and hot drinks, and food, into people in what could have been any kind of weather (Auckland in spring can be really hot and sunny, or cold and miserable, and no way to know in advance), but as we were working through the game design, it made sense to turn this into the emotional turning point of the game.

We cast people by questionnaire - a lot of this was the standard stuff, like do you have any health problems, do you want to be a lost child or a wolf, is there anyone you do or don't want to be paired with. We also got people to fill in tag clouds, a grid of key words related to fairy tales which we asked people to decorate with word art, colours, bold, stuff like that to give me an idea of what they were interested in. We also put in a brief description of the Lines and Veils rule and asked people what squicked them out so we could cast them away from any problems.

We used the technique which I've seen in some other games of giving people the skeleton of the character, and then asking them a series of leading questions about themselves. Partly this was to help them buy into the characters, but we also staged this so that the lost children answered their questions first, then gave that information to the wolves so that they had a lot of information about their paired lost child, along with the lost child's tag cloud. We also set up an IC roleplaying forum a couple of weeks before the game with the intent of having each pair roleplay out their first encounter in which the child ran away from the wolf, so that we could set up some shared experiences pregame, and hopefully jump start the warm up period that I've often seen in larps where it takes a bit of time for people to feel comfortable with each other.

On the day things - the very first part of the briefing was that everyone had to shake hands and introduce themselves to everyone else, regardless of whether they'd met before or not. I nicked this idea off someone on Story Games (can't remember who, sorry) and it's awesome. It's a straight out jump start to get people from silently staring at you to giggling and slightly embarrassed in a "we're all in this together" way. I've also read a couple of articles out on the interwebs on the role that touch has on bonding - you get a small spike of a hormone called oxytocin, which is related to feelings of well being and attachment. Apart from this, we defined the touching rules as people's faces, arms and hands only, to keep things in a relatively neutral frame. The fighting rules were none - you weren't allowed to fight at all. You could talk it out or run away. This idea was robbed from a video game I can't remember the name of, where they'd found that if they gave players the ability to fight the monsters, people would try to do that even if it was difficult and a doomed effort, then complain that the fighting mechanics were clunky; whereas actually the game designers wanted to emulate the narrative of a horror movie where it's mostly about fear and hiding and survival. So they removed the ability and found they got better emotional responses.

We turned the mid game tea party into a 'tilt' event - we asked the wolves at this point to offer some food or drink to their lost child, and to change the tone of their roleplaying, from scary and messing with them as they'd been at the beginning, to more vulnerable. (I think the line my partner quoted from me on Twitter was: "Try to manipulate her into realising that you have no power over her." So, um, yeah. Like that.) After the tea party, we also encouraged them to split up the group more - reminding people that they could go off with any wolf or wood sprite, if they wanted. We also asked the wolves to try to push the storyline to a resolution - perhaps the lost child overcame their fear of the wolf and was willing to walk alone with them, or could finally stand up to them, or had found a way to let them go. Once they'd reached a point where the wolf felt the story was resolved, they were asked to bring their lost child back to the base camp chapel, where everyone who was there had been asked to give them a big cheer (because everyone, at least once in their life, should get a cheer. It's a rule.) The final debrief was the reverse of the opening, asking people to split up into pairs, shake hands, and tell each other something they liked about each other.

***

Right, I'm totally planning on writing up an Actual Play account, but it's late and I'm tired, so it'll be in a day or two. But I have pictures for you...

[originally posted on the Gametime LJ community: http://gametime.livejournal.com/86143.html]

(And I'm telling everyone. :-) Apologies to the people who've seen this in multiple places.)

The Bell is a science fiction suspense live roleplaying game inspired by The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky), Five-Twelfths of Heaven (Melissa Scott), Vacuum Flowers (Michael Swanwick) and the works of Cordwainer Smith. The Bell is intended to be an emotionally intense game that pushes moral dilemmas. It draws on a trope of science fiction which treats space travel as a spiritual journey. It doesn't make assertions about any particular religion, but it does examine metaphysical themes and ethical issues.

A light-hearted theatre-style larp for 15 players, published by Peaky Games. It was loosely inspired by the tv series Father Ted, Nuns on the Run and similarly daft movies about religion. Set in the diocese of Peaky-in-the-Sea (consisting of Rocky Island, Stony Island and Pebbly Island), An Ecumenical Matter is an irreverent religious themed game involving priests, nuns and a geographically dislocated archbishop.

A word of warning... An Ecumenical Matter is not for the easily offended. It contains drinking, comedy satanists, unfaithful priests, references to unchaste activities, and horrendously bad accents.

Gender mix is 9 male to 6 female, but cross dressing is strongly encouraged.
When: 16 July
Where: Turnbull House
Where: NZLarps members $10, everyone else $12
Contact:Me!

More details: http://nzlarps.org/games/anecumenicalmatter/

So in some recent behind the scenes chatter, a comment was made that Gametime is currently "the lethargic zombie of NZ roleplaying discussion." Alas for Mash, there will be no zombies in this post. But then, that's kind of the point of it.

I've been on a larp writing jag for the last couple of years, working in the genre of domestic realism. I kind of drifted into it via a game about a wake, Sitting Shiva, which I talked about in an earlier post. The thing is, what I liked about that game wasn't the magic, it was the realism, and in fact I found that removing one of the 'magical' game mechanics in the second run made the game stronger.

I also think that if you ask people what are the basic ingredients that go into a larp, or any kind of roleplaying game, you'll often get a bunch of opinions back about how what you really need is conflict. You might also get some comments about how it's essentially an escapist form. These NZRag conversations are examples, but I don't think it's that unusual a view. But I want to challenge that view a bit - in the second conversation I linked to, I made a comment that what you really need is a reason for every character to be there, and something for every character to do. (1) But if you do remove conflict as a game element, what are you going to put in its place? What are people going to do? And does roleplaying have to be escapist, anyway? Isn't one of the cool things that people can get out of a game a heightened emotional experience? Don't we have heightened experiences in real life, all the time?

So anyway, that's where I ended up - games that aren't exoticised at all, that could pretty much happen to anyone and that my player pool would have a good set of referents for (2), but would also meet the criteria of 'heightened'. I was also looking for non-standard ways (for theatre-style larps) to deal with what people were going to do during the games; and I wanted game mechanics to be as invisible as possible. Three of these games ended up as very quiet, semi-larps that involved a group of people who knew each other well sitting around a table, talking: Sitting Shiva, The Book Club (pretty self explanatory from the title), and A Stiff One (an evening in a bar after everyone has had a horrible week.) The other two were much more chaotic: But Nobody Loses An Eye!, about a child's birthday party; and its notional sequel Super Sparkle Action Princess GX!, about filming an episode of a kiddie tv show - the one that the children were a fan of in BNLAE. (Credit where it's due - BNLAE, SSAPGX and A Stiff One had my sister Catherine as co-writer, and the idea for A Stiff One came from Vaughan Staples. Thanks guys! (3)) Looking back on the set, there have been some common features that turned up, that I'd like to talk about.

Structure
I gave up a lot of traditional control over the pacing of the games: no formal goals, no NPCs appearing with information, few timed or staged events (BNLAE was an exception to an extent), no contingency envelopes etc. These games were all set up so that players got their character sheets, walked into the playing area and started roleplaying until they stopped and walked out. In the three quiet games, I got to influence things a little by being another 'character' in the room and getting to contribute using the same mechanisms as the other players - by asking questions, or stating my point of view, but I tried to keep that to a minimum, mostly just nudging things if the game got quiet and sitting back when the players were talking. In A Stiff One, I also gave people the ability to call a couple of mutual friends (ie me via two cellphones), but in those phone conversations I tried to act as a mirror to the discussion that was going on in the game, picking up details from what they'd talked about and adapting what was happening with the friends to what was happening with the player characters. In the chaotic games, I had more of an NPC role by acting as an authority figure (the birthday boy's Mum in one, and the Producer's EA in the other) but again tried to keep in the background unless specifically called on.

Inside that formlessness, though, the basic structure of the games was activity focused. Everyone always knew exactly what they were there to do: talk about a specific topic, or do birthday party stuff, or run around filming, and their characterisation emerged around that skeleton. This was a deliberate design choice - I didn't want anyone in the games sitting in a corner wondering what they ought to be doing and feeling lost. Whatever else was going on, they always had the core activity to fall back on. I think they worked well enough to demonstrate that you can run an effective game without having to use some of the theatre-style design standards of puzzles, mysteries, political deals and object quests. I still had some romance plotlines in some games, because I like romance, but they weren't necessarily of the "there's someone you like, go out and win their heart" either.

The three quiet games seemed to have a natural runtime of around 1.5-2 hours, which is consistent with another 'talky' game I've played in, A Serpent of Ash by J. Tuomas Harviainen. At every run of BNLAE, it's tapped out at 2 hours (that's when people exhaust themselves). The first run of SSAPGX had a hard time limit of 2 1/2 hours excluding briefing/debriefing because of the event it was run at, but I think I wouldn't want to extend it's runtime to more than 3 hours (part of its shtick was that the players were racing against the clock).

The Shared Fictive Space
I also want to invent a new term here, Shared Fictive Space, because I feel like it, and because it riffs of some of the material that other Gametime writers have put up about Shared Imagined Spaces and GM Imagined Spaces. All of these games had an added layer of intertextuality, an awareness of an explicitly fictional element that they could manipulate directly in character, instead of having to negotiate in an OOC or game mechanics sense. In Sitting Shiva, this was our relationship with the Ghost (the conceit of the game was that the player characters are slightly alternate universe versions of themselves, in which they all have a relationship with another player who has just 'died'), which was built up as a cooperative conversation and storytelling throughout the game. In The Book Club, the shared fictive element was The Book, which in the game space was highly important to each player character, but in real life never existed. For that game, everyone was given a written essay describing their opinion about The Book with some details to back it up, and the goal of the game was to build up a group consensus about it. (4) In A Stiff One, the players were given information about something that had happened to them independently, but also shared information about some mutual friends and were encouraged to expand on that relationsip. In BNLAE, they were given a brief burble about a television programme they all liked, with enough space in the description that they could invent details - except for the one character who was an outsider to the group. And in SSAPGX, the shared fictive space was the point of the game - the group was assembled to produce an episode, but they all had different creative goals that they could push for in the course of the game.

Secrets, Lies and Maguffins
There weren't many. A few times there were some objects in the game that had plot relevance, but they weren't 'secret' and they weren't really hidden either - the closest we got was that in one case, there was a hidden object that one character was keen on that they'd 'lost' but they were pretty sure that another character had something to do with it. At a later point in the game the object turned up in a package for Pass the Parcel, allowing the players to guess the prize and try to manipulate who got the final present. The other objects in these games were designed to be revealed by their owners (either they wanted to show them to someone, or they were just highly visible), and things that would trigger an emotional reaction in the other players. There weren't many secrets, either. In some cases, people had information on their character sheets that wasn't well known but not plot-criticial, and this didn't really come out in the game; otherwise people had information about something that they cared about that they could choose to introduce into the game. Overall, I'm pleased with how these object plotlines worked - for me, anyway, questing for an object or secret in a game can often feel very mechanical and meta-game driven - but from my observer's view, it felt quite natural how the players used the hidden information or not, and interacted with the objects or not, as they cared about it.

The Emotional Game
We did put a lot of effort into character's emotional relationships with each other and the game material. In Sitting Shiva, this included a brief workshop at the beginning of the game where we all talked about how we knew each other, and inventing plausible connections where there weren't any real ones. And, well, that game had a lot to do with creating a safe space for emotionally sensitive topics. A Stiff One was written with the idea of emotionally processing a difficult situation - sometimes you need to talk something out before you've worked out how you feel about it, and the character sheets highlighted emotional dilemmas for the characters. The other games with prewritten characters were generally designed by thinking about the relationship map between characters and building them up from that. We put in romantic plotlines to several of the games, although we found that a typical "you fancy someone, go get them" plot didn't always activate in the games, and didn't seem to engage players as much as the alternative, which were the existing relationships. We wrote in several where the basic theme was "You have this person, but can you keep them? Do you want to? What about your mates' relationship?" These were great. The players involved were massively invested, the outcome was never possible to predict, and it made a good link to the other players because it's very easy to have an opinion. We also had some prewritten characters who had their own private unhappinesses, which were sometimes shared, and sometimes not. For these latter ones, I'm interested in hearing from the players of those characters - did they add to the game experience, or did they feel more like a nasty trick from an unkind GM?

All up, I'm glad I put the work into these games, I think I got a chance to try out some ideas that I'll keep with me for further work, and there've been some crazy awesome moments that were great to feel part of. I did find that writing this post has been surprisingly hard, involving a lot of poking at it for over a week trying to get my scattered thoughts into a semblance of order, and rereading it before I post it still feels very disjointed. I'm glad I did that, too, because it's a way of telling myself that these games are a set, that fit together, and that they're done now. And they are a set, for all it was a very organic process I went through to write them, and they do fit together, and I think that it's time for me to move on and do something else now.

(OK, when I started writing this post, Gametime was pretty quiet. It feels much less so now.)

(1) In hindsight I think it's a bit pat as a statement, but I think it's still true, with an additional rider that you need to give every character a reason to not just walk out early in the game.
(2) Yeah, just put in some corollaries about my accessible player pool being products of middle class Western society. So am I - there's been a really strong element of writing what I know, here.
(3) Seriously, Cat is the Best. Co-writer. Ever. She was astonishingly good about being bailed up for a weekend to brainstorm, and kept on throwing a big sparkly ideas ball back at me, and just came up with these amazing left field ideas that really made the games she helped with.
(4) At the time I wrote the game, I was spending a lot of time in Honours level English Lit seminars, and there were more than a few days where it felt like the conversation was less about getting on the same page as the author and more about asserting a point of view and finding enough evidence to make it stick. It really felt like a performance art - it wasn't just the book + author's intentions, it was book + author + the people in that particular room on that particular day as a transitory moment in time. I find the postmodern school of literary criticism to be extremely abstract and pretentious, but that my Big Critique of postmodernism is itself a postmodern work is not lost on me.

[This was originally posted on the Gametime LJ community: http://gametime.livejournal.com/83313.html]

Is now running on Thursday, 11 February, arrive from 7pm with start time at 7.30pm, at Nasia's place. Runtime is expected to be 2-2.5 hours. We have a couple of spaces left if anyone would like to come but hasn't gotten in touch yet. (Naomi - did you get that link to the date poll I sent you? Would you still like to come?)

Cheers,

Stephanie

EDIT: One spot still available.

(Oops, one more place to post this. Apologies to people who have seen it already.)

But Nobody Loses An Eye!
It was supposed to be the greatest day of your life, the pinnacle, you doubted it could ever be cooler than this; you were invited to a birthday party. But now you're here you're not so sure: someone's widdled in their shoe, the little kid next door is hyped on sugar, the birthday boy is crying, and now you all have to play Pass the Parcel. Just pray they don't get round to Charades or Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

Join the horror of a 5 year old's birthday party: the laughs, the tantrums, the food stains. But it's OK - nobody loses an eye!

Introduction
This game is about the magic, chaos and terror of childhood. The characters are children in the 4-7 age bracket, at a fifth birthday party. While there are some competing goals and personality pressures in the game, But Nobody Loses An Eye! is mostly about giving people licence to let loose their inner five year old.

( Read more... )

(Hoiked from Amphigori.)

We're having a meetup on 6 September at 1pm at JJ Murphy's to discuss getting more LARP going in Wellington.

All interested parties are welcome to attend - even if (maybe especially if) you've not done much (or any) live action RP before.

We're keen to get everyone's input on what kinds of games they'd like to see run and get your feedback, suggestions and ideas.

More info can be found here:

http://www.diatribe.co.nz/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4041

Hope to see you there!

Consider. You have decided to run a theatre style larp with a plenitude of romantic themes. You have recruited players and filtered them through a questionnaire so that you know who is interested in playing out a love story. You have written your characters, dressed the venue, made your final announcements and said “Go.” Nothing to do now but watch.

This article discusses the actual play of the romance story lines in Sanctuary, a larp I co-ran with Naomi Guyer and Sean Broadley. We had a range of romantic storylines planned. Some were quite sad, others were designed to be as chaotic as a Shakespearean comedy, and in fact some of our inspirations were drawn from there. (1)
( Romancing the Larp... )

Unrequited, Unconfessed Love. We had three characters who were written with some form of secret crush on another character, varying in strength from “You’re very loyal” to “You’re a bit psychotic about this.” Sadly, in all three planned instances, the objects of desire were entirely oblivious. In one case there was a marriage proposal and a suicide after the character was turned down – very much to the surprise of the person who was proposed to. Another character asked his object of desire for romantic advice as a prelude to dropping hints and was blithely advised to “find himself a woman.” I guess that roleplayed love is as subtle and hard to notice as the real thing. Advice to larp-writes: drop a hint to the object of desire that there might be a little bit more going on than is obvious.

Love at First Sight. OK, not love love, but roleplayed love, in which the player is handed a note when they first meet the other person telling them that they suddenly feel a strange desire. These had pluses and minuses. One player was reportedly quite appalled when he read his note and complained afterwards that he would have met the character previously and shouldn’t have been so thunderstruck. Another character took his ‘epiphany’ as a challenge and spent the rest of the game working hard to achieve marriage with the woman he’d ‘fallen in love’ with. In other cases, I don’t think that some of the planned pairings ever met up, or if they did, the new goal was subsumed underneath other material. From a larp-write point of view, these kinds of GM-mandated easter eggs seem to me to be a bit random – you might get a cool storyline, or it might never emerge out of the chaotic stew of the larp. I also think that the most successful character to roleplay being struck suddenly by Cupid’s arrow was one who had already been primed with a character sheet suggesting that marriage might be a good idea, hence putting the player in a receptive mood.

Same Gender Romance. These worked out rather well, if I do say so myself. The most spectacular of these storylines was full of confusions and ifs and maybes, in which the central figures were stumbling into each other, leaping to conclusions, quizzing people for (often misleading) information, recruiting friends for help and making meaningful looks at each other across the room. Often, the meaningful looks were also bouncing off an old flame of one of the principals for added melodrama. Most of this was subtle enough that I as a GM wandering about the room hadn’t realised it was going on until near the end of the larp when the two lovers got married, and most of it I heard about afterwards. The thing that made this storyline so successful was the degree to which the players leapt into their parts. One person commented afterwards that while he spent a little time managing his political goals, he was trying to get that done as quickly as possible so that he could spend more time worrying about his love life. In case it matters to anyone, the participants were a mix of straight and gay. I didn’t hear of any problems with people roleplaying outside their regular orientation. It was a question we had specifically asked people before casting them, and it made us a lot more comfortable with assigning characters.

Touch Me/Touch Me Not. There was very little physical contact in this larp – I think the limit for people was holding hands. One guy that got ‘married’ said that he would have kissed his partner if someone else had set a precedent, but that was as close as anyone got. I’ve heard of a mechanic invented in Scandinavia called Ars Amandi that deals with a low contact way of simulating sex by touching people’s arms and hands, but it wasn’t relevant to our game which, after all, was focused on the falling-for-someone stage rather than the doing-something-about-it stage.

Crossing the Boundaries. How far is too far? That’s always the question. People’s out-of-character relationships had a strong effect on how they roleplayed their in-character stuff. We had a player group of 62 people and some of them knew each other already and some didn’t. From the comments people made afterwards, I think that a previous acquaintance meant much more trust between the players and they were more comfortable pushing the envelopes of their parts. On the other hand, one pair was already dating each other in real life, and I don’t think I’ll knowingly cast that way again, because they said afterwards that there was a fair amount of confusion between what was real and what was in-character – quite important when you’re in the middle of a lover's tiff. I’ve previously played in a six player larp called Couples by Tony Shirley which had a very extensive preliminary phase to help people get into character and comfortable with each other, so I know that there are ways to shortcut the kind of trust you get by knowing someone well. I cannot stress how valuable that trust can be in a roleplaying environment.

You Can’t Write Me Love. Overall, I was very pleased with how the romance storylines went in Sanctuary. One thing I did notice was that you can’t compel people into roleplaying a romantic relationship, no matter what you write on their character sheets. You can plant plot hooks, you can dangle bait, you can drop hints, but if the people involved aren’t interested, nothing is going to happen.

When they do happen, when people leap into the uncertainty, melodrama and glory of a love affair, you get something magic.

(1) There is an Afterlarp report on Sanctuary here for people who would like more background.

[This was originally posted on the Gametime LJ community: http://gametime.livejournal.com/44830.html]