As mentioned, the March game happened over the weekend. It seemed to me to be more low-key than the last one, though player comments indicate the opposite. The February one seemed to me as GM crazy and hyper-kinetic, whereas this one seemed a more subtle game. But players said that they had chunks where they weren't doing anything in February, but were constantly busy in March. This seems interesting to me, though I wonder about the phenomenon. Is it just a difference in my perspective as GM versus their perspective as players? Could I in some way control the flow of play to keep people constantly active? It always seems to me that once play begins I as GM have very little control over what happens (which is a good thing).
Actually, it's possible that this game was more predictable and according-to-plan than previous games. Like things happened as we expected them to, rather than veering off in unexpected ways. Except when the alien in a space-time vortex got stuck inside Josh's brain. That was unexpected, which meant we didn't have the proper character sheet prepared. But lots of other things happened very much as I had hoped they would, from Josh's crazed, bestial survivor interacting with the PCs to the conflict between military and scientists to the final reunion between Rachel Gaumata and Manassah Rayburn in his proper body. This was good, since it meant the game went mostly as we planned for, though it also meant there weren't as many moments where I as GM was amazed by the player's awesome creativity in solutions.
At times I was amazed at how fast the players figured stuff out. The puzzle for the door to upstairs was solved in like five minutes, and the captain's safe didn't take much longer to open. By the end of the game, they had figured out much of the mystery, though they became more distracted by events on the station while they were there. Between that and not asking the space/time vortex/alien the right questions, they never got quite the entire story what happened previously. But they got a good chunk, and possibly could get more from alien minds stored in crystals.
There were a lot of props in this game. An entire trunkful, and I think they did their job very well. It was a game about exploration and the external environment, so the larger number of props helped the players focus outwardly rather than on PC interactions (though there were plenty of those as well). While I was GMing, I saw Wendy playing a drug addict totally miss the drugs she was seeking because of all the other props in the medical kit. And the security badge prop helped the PCs solve how to open the captain's safe in a way a simple card or something wouldn't have. And Cheyenne as a corporate stooge was apparently hoarding crystals the entire game, an awesome use of props right there.
The science fiction background I had come up with seemed to work out pretty well. It threaded in and out of character backgrounds and documents, so that the station being on a distant outpost seemed fairly real. I will have to think more about how to best use setting information in a LARP.
What would I do differently if I ran it again? Write up a sheet for the time/space vortex alien, firstly. Possibly write up an entry for Hong Jacobson, too, so the PCs might find him and he might lie to them about what happened. There needed to be a bit more information about what happened right before the station stopped communicating, and Hong could give some of it. The alien could give more, but in both cases the difficulty would be in getting that information out of them. Scatter Dr. Koop's notes across more of the station.
I did have a couple moments of filling in additional details on the background, after the game was over. One thought was a different explanation of why there were only two military characters. Another explained why Lt. Washington didn't recognize Manassah Rayburn. Neither of these ideas is really very useful to me any more, but they would have been good a few days ago.
Regardless, this game worked out very well. I personally liked giving all the characters names assembled at random from the "Space Cowboy" entry in the Story Games Name Project. Then again, I always have enjoyed giving character ridiculously elaborate names, as my D&D character If-Not-for-The-Grace-Of-The-Gods-Above-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Varnamo. (He's named after a historical Puritan. And a piece of furniture from Ikea.)
I will attempt to write up directions for running the LARP, though we'll see how long that would go. If the last month's instructions went nine pages long, how long would this month's instructions be? We may find out, in another post.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
March LARP: Successful
The short form is that the March LARP happened over the weekend. And that it worked very well.
You can see all the documents online as is by now the standard operating procedure. I might go more into what happened and/or how to run the game later. But not today. This game is probably harder than the last one to run based on what I had written, because so much of it was secrets and mysteries and never entirely written down.
Anyone who wasn't there could read the data and come to their own conclusions as to what happened. That might be pretty cool, actually. Like some sort of experimental novel.
You can see all the documents online as is by now the standard operating procedure. I might go more into what happened and/or how to run the game later. But not today. This game is probably harder than the last one to run based on what I had written, because so much of it was secrets and mysteries and never entirely written down.
Anyone who wasn't there could read the data and come to their own conclusions as to what happened. That might be pretty cool, actually. Like some sort of experimental novel.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
It's hard to write a science fiction one-shot, because you have to figure out a lot of stuff about the setting. What does scifi technology look like? What does future society look like?
Once you know what the setting looks like, you have to get all the players on roughly the same page. Preferably without spending half the session giving them background on the setting. (In a campaign game or multiple linked LARPs you could just establish a setting bible for people to learn outside of game.)
It's a tricky balance to find. I'm more used to playing tabletop games than LARPing, and in a tabletop game like this I'd just leave stuff undefined. Then if someone suggested that something was true about, say, future medical technology I'd agree to it and we'd define the setting in play.
That doesn't work quite as well in a LARP situation, because people are separate from one another so might not hear about setting details being defined. Jim the medical officer decides that medvats on the spaceship can read the minds of dead people, so he brings a body to the ship. Meanwhile, in another chamber Johnny the expert in bio-sciences declares that medvats can't do such a thing. both keep playing for a while, then eventually meet and find their established facts disagree with one another. In a tabletop game we'd see this problem right away (or avoid it all together) and resolve it somehow: many indie RPGs are more about establishing authority in this manner than they are about determining if your character succeeds at a given task.
I am not entirely sure how to manage this dilemma, or how to balance between too much setting info and not enough. I suppose that this is an issue every game has to decide for themselves, but it's something to consider as you write these games.
The last two games haven't had this sort of problem: the January game was set in modern, totally mundane earth. The February game was a silly superhero game, so A) things could be ridiculous and B) decades of retroactive continuity meant that if two people established conflicting facts about the past, both were probably true.
One of these months I should run a smaller game, where all the participants are within earshot of one another and try out different LARPing techniques. Something in the Scandinavian Jeepform tradition, perhaps. Still plenty of months in the future for weird experiments.
In unrelated news: I love the internet. When I'm writing a setting and say "I need a name for a fake drug that exists in the setting" I can just type "random fake drug name generator" in Google and get a link to a drug name generator. Granted, it doesn't make great drug names, but I only needed one.
Once you know what the setting looks like, you have to get all the players on roughly the same page. Preferably without spending half the session giving them background on the setting. (In a campaign game or multiple linked LARPs you could just establish a setting bible for people to learn outside of game.)
It's a tricky balance to find. I'm more used to playing tabletop games than LARPing, and in a tabletop game like this I'd just leave stuff undefined. Then if someone suggested that something was true about, say, future medical technology I'd agree to it and we'd define the setting in play.
That doesn't work quite as well in a LARP situation, because people are separate from one another so might not hear about setting details being defined. Jim the medical officer decides that medvats on the spaceship can read the minds of dead people, so he brings a body to the ship. Meanwhile, in another chamber Johnny the expert in bio-sciences declares that medvats can't do such a thing. both keep playing for a while, then eventually meet and find their established facts disagree with one another. In a tabletop game we'd see this problem right away (or avoid it all together) and resolve it somehow: many indie RPGs are more about establishing authority in this manner than they are about determining if your character succeeds at a given task.
I am not entirely sure how to manage this dilemma, or how to balance between too much setting info and not enough. I suppose that this is an issue every game has to decide for themselves, but it's something to consider as you write these games.
The last two games haven't had this sort of problem: the January game was set in modern, totally mundane earth. The February game was a silly superhero game, so A) things could be ridiculous and B) decades of retroactive continuity meant that if two people established conflicting facts about the past, both were probably true.
One of these months I should run a smaller game, where all the participants are within earshot of one another and try out different LARPing techniques. Something in the Scandinavian Jeepform tradition, perhaps. Still plenty of months in the future for weird experiments.
In unrelated news: I love the internet. When I'm writing a setting and say "I need a name for a fake drug that exists in the setting" I can just type "random fake drug name generator" in Google and get a link to a drug name generator. Granted, it doesn't make great drug names, but I only needed one.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Delayed LARP writing thoughts
I wrote this a month ago, but kept it stowed away to keep from spoiling the game. Looking at it now, I'm less certain what I thought would spoil anything. After the old text, I'll write something talking about how it turned out.
-------------------------------
February 11th
I am writing the February LARP, in which incompetent superheroes, guard a real hero’s base while he’s gone.* As I write, I need to keep reminding of two things:
1: Make the game silly. This is a comedy LARP, though I’m not sure how to encourage or enforce genre and playstyle on the payers, really. But the inspirations for the game are clear: The Tick (comic, cartoon and live-action all, though especially the live action one), Mystery Men (comic and movie), etc. But how to make sure the players get the right feel for the game, and don’t take themselves seriously?
2: Make sure there’s enough conflict. A superhero story usually involves good versus evil battles, but the sorts of games I run usually just have muddier morality, and a big web of conflicts. A simpler, binary Manichean morality would mean the LARP quickly resolves all conflicts: this might be said to have been an issue in the January game.
An answer for #1 that I’m considering is a system where you’re rewarded for making people laugh. And possibly rewarded for other character appropriate silly behavior: the supervillain might get rewarded for monologuing, and the ancient Viking warrior might get rewarded for not understanding what people say to him in English. I’m still uncertain about this, though I do think that this game will need a bit more system than the January event.
-------------------------------
The mechanical benefit for doing funny stuff did seem to work out as planned, and did make people do funny stuff. Characters wound up in tone somewhere in the middle of the Tick cartoon/Mystery Men/live action Tick spectrum of tone, which worked out pretty well.
There was certainly plenty of conflict, though it maybe collapsed down into one big conflict a bit easier than I would have liked. A lot of the game was focused on the Brainjack plot, and several subplots got relatively little play. But they all seemed to come up to some degree, so it wasn't a failure by any means.
Right now I'm failing to get much headway done for the next one. This is largely because of being sick for the last week, which has prevented proper concentration on mental tasks like planning a LARP. The planned sci-fi mystery LARP might get pushed back to April while I run a fallback scenario. Which might also help with sme scheduling difficulties. We'll see what I can get done, though, and what my volunteer assistant GM has to say about things.
*Yes, I stole the plot from an episode of Spongebob Squarepants. Why do you ask?
-------------------------------
February 11th
I am writing the February LARP, in which incompetent superheroes, guard a real hero’s base while he’s gone.* As I write, I need to keep reminding of two things:
1: Make the game silly. This is a comedy LARP, though I’m not sure how to encourage or enforce genre and playstyle on the payers, really. But the inspirations for the game are clear: The Tick (comic, cartoon and live-action all, though especially the live action one), Mystery Men (comic and movie), etc. But how to make sure the players get the right feel for the game, and don’t take themselves seriously?
2: Make sure there’s enough conflict. A superhero story usually involves good versus evil battles, but the sorts of games I run usually just have muddier morality, and a big web of conflicts. A simpler, binary Manichean morality would mean the LARP quickly resolves all conflicts: this might be said to have been an issue in the January game.
An answer for #1 that I’m considering is a system where you’re rewarded for making people laugh. And possibly rewarded for other character appropriate silly behavior: the supervillain might get rewarded for monologuing, and the ancient Viking warrior might get rewarded for not understanding what people say to him in English. I’m still uncertain about this, though I do think that this game will need a bit more system than the January event.
-------------------------------
The mechanical benefit for doing funny stuff did seem to work out as planned, and did make people do funny stuff. Characters wound up in tone somewhere in the middle of the Tick cartoon/Mystery Men/live action Tick spectrum of tone, which worked out pretty well.
There was certainly plenty of conflict, though it maybe collapsed down into one big conflict a bit easier than I would have liked. A lot of the game was focused on the Brainjack plot, and several subplots got relatively little play. But they all seemed to come up to some degree, so it wasn't a failure by any means.
Right now I'm failing to get much headway done for the next one. This is largely because of being sick for the last week, which has prevented proper concentration on mental tasks like planning a LARP. The planned sci-fi mystery LARP might get pushed back to April while I run a fallback scenario. Which might also help with sme scheduling difficulties. We'll see what I can get done, though, and what my volunteer assistant GM has to say about things.
*Yes, I stole the plot from an episode of Spongebob Squarepants. Why do you ask?
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
How To Run February's LARP
Is apparently a lot of information. I tried to write up what was going on behind the scenes, which wound up being nearly as much information as was given to the players in the first place. Hopefully, by reading this document someone else could create a similarly entertaining evening for their friends.
Even those not interested in running the game might be interested in the "behind the scenes" thinking going on in the game. I tried to explain my decision making process as GM, and why and how some things were done. I didn't delve to much into why some characters are written the way they are, but you get a little sense of that in the casting section. It still didn't cover, say, why so many character had few actual demonstrable superpowers (so that they might be suspected of being Brainjack) and similar issues. Perhaps that might be fodder for a future blog post.
Even those not interested in running the game might be interested in the "behind the scenes" thinking going on in the game. I tried to explain my decision making process as GM, and why and how some things were done. I didn't delve to much into why some characters are written the way they are, but you get a little sense of that in the casting section. It still didn't cover, say, why so many character had few actual demonstrable superpowers (so that they might be suspected of being Brainjack) and similar issues. Perhaps that might be fodder for a future blog post.
LARP photos
Those not present might want to see what the event looked like. Or those present might wish to see how embarrassing they look dressed as a superhero. Either way, readers might wish to see the photos from the February LARP. The only people likely to be disappointed would be those looking for photos of either GM. Amber was busy taking said photos, so does not appear in them. I meanwhile, am apparently some sort of vampire or other soulless abomination that does not show up on film.
Few of the photos are action shots, because during action-y times a GM is busy doing other things. So I don't know if it gives an accurate depiction of the LARP. But it'll give you an idea what the bottom rungs of the superhero society look like.
Monday, March 2, 2009
February LARP report
Despite my total failure at logistics, the game went really well. I though some of the time I had scheduled for 7:30, when I in fact scheduled for 7:00, so we wound up even later than I though we were. Then when we got there, I realized I had everything except the character sheets. Which are, you know, the most important part. So Amber had to drive back to our house to get them, then return.
But that meant that I had half and hour or so to explain to everyone the situation, spell out what each room meant in game, point out the props, etc. And each player had the chance to see what everyone else’s name badges (which we had) and get a little idea of the other character (and a bit about themselves, too).
The Davis family costume trunk served very well for this game. The Bank Robbery game in January had little costuming involved, but everyone had at least a bit to make them look superheroic. Seaman wore a cape, which I thought got the right useless superhero vibe: how do you swim underwater while wearing a cape? Warning Sean ahead of time that he was playing a Viking meant he had some Nero gear, including a vest of chainmail, so his costume was awesome. Hopefully Amber will post some pictures of the game soon so other people can see how it all looked.
Once we got character sheets, everything got going smoothly. The really basic conflict system seemed to work very well, and it seemed to encourage the behavior I wanted to encourage. Actually, it’s surprising how many of my plans actually went as planned, like Copycat not having any powers but always avoiding having to show off his powers (which then put some suspicion on him as the game went on).
Lots of spontaneously entertaining things happened in game. Bjorn Yesterday wound up worshipping Detachable Head as a god, because he saw the Head detach and was confused and terrified. Powerbroker initially tried to explain this as a demon, then magic, but both those encouraged Bjorn to attack, so eventually the only excuse he’d accept was the Head was a god and that was a miracle. Bjorn then followed the Head around and gave him presents and things.
Copycat at one point was cornered by Powerbroker, who wanted to see Copycat’s (nonexistent) ability to duplicate superpowers in action. This was to prove Copycat wasn’t the villainous Brainjack. Using her ability to speak any language, she said something in Swedish about Ikea, so Copycat seized on the only word he recognized and said (in English) “I love Ikea!”. Powerbroker, revising the experiment, tried to have Nestor talk to Copycat in Swedish, but Copycat distracted Nestor by asking or an autograph and asking about stories from back in Nestor’s heyday. By the time the story was done, Nestor’s senile brain had forgotten about the Swedish conversation.
At one point, Nestor determined that maybe Seaman’s true power would only show up under great duress, so he encouraged Seaman to endanger himself or stop drinking water constantly. Seaman didn’t like this plan (what if Nestor was wrong and it just killed him?). So we never got to test it, but I would have gone along with it, because I though it was funny.
There was a lot of good stuff going on in the LARP. I had a lot of fun watching it, and I think everyone else did, too. I think it was more successful than the Bank Robbery larp, overall. Let’s hope next month will be even better than this one. Most of the LARP documents are online, though I'm trying to write up a document about "How to run this game" that might make more stuff clear.
But that meant that I had half and hour or so to explain to everyone the situation, spell out what each room meant in game, point out the props, etc. And each player had the chance to see what everyone else’s name badges (which we had) and get a little idea of the other character (and a bit about themselves, too).
The Davis family costume trunk served very well for this game. The Bank Robbery game in January had little costuming involved, but everyone had at least a bit to make them look superheroic. Seaman wore a cape, which I thought got the right useless superhero vibe: how do you swim underwater while wearing a cape? Warning Sean ahead of time that he was playing a Viking meant he had some Nero gear, including a vest of chainmail, so his costume was awesome. Hopefully Amber will post some pictures of the game soon so other people can see how it all looked.
Once we got character sheets, everything got going smoothly. The really basic conflict system seemed to work very well, and it seemed to encourage the behavior I wanted to encourage. Actually, it’s surprising how many of my plans actually went as planned, like Copycat not having any powers but always avoiding having to show off his powers (which then put some suspicion on him as the game went on).
Lots of spontaneously entertaining things happened in game. Bjorn Yesterday wound up worshipping Detachable Head as a god, because he saw the Head detach and was confused and terrified. Powerbroker initially tried to explain this as a demon, then magic, but both those encouraged Bjorn to attack, so eventually the only excuse he’d accept was the Head was a god and that was a miracle. Bjorn then followed the Head around and gave him presents and things.
Copycat at one point was cornered by Powerbroker, who wanted to see Copycat’s (nonexistent) ability to duplicate superpowers in action. This was to prove Copycat wasn’t the villainous Brainjack. Using her ability to speak any language, she said something in Swedish about Ikea, so Copycat seized on the only word he recognized and said (in English) “I love Ikea!”. Powerbroker, revising the experiment, tried to have Nestor talk to Copycat in Swedish, but Copycat distracted Nestor by asking or an autograph and asking about stories from back in Nestor’s heyday. By the time the story was done, Nestor’s senile brain had forgotten about the Swedish conversation.
At one point, Nestor determined that maybe Seaman’s true power would only show up under great duress, so he encouraged Seaman to endanger himself or stop drinking water constantly. Seaman didn’t like this plan (what if Nestor was wrong and it just killed him?). So we never got to test it, but I would have gone along with it, because I though it was funny.
There was a lot of good stuff going on in the LARP. I had a lot of fun watching it, and I think everyone else did, too. I think it was more successful than the Bank Robbery larp, overall. Let’s hope next month will be even better than this one. Most of the LARP documents are online, though I'm trying to write up a document about "How to run this game" that might make more stuff clear.
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