Because my 30th birthday was the other day, Amber decided to take over the larpwright duties for the month. This is good, as it gives me a break just around when GM burnout was setting in. And it means some vague, secretive plans are being made all around me, though that is more "mysterious" and "worrying" than it is clearly good.
But it leaves me in a position of not having a project to work on right now. I am communicating with Ross regarding the July event, but that's slow going. July's game is a long way away, and the planning is all via email (which slows the sharing of ideas), and I feel like I overrode Ross's input a bit much in the Western game we collaborated on. So I don't want to bound too far ahead of his input by writing more stuff (though I fear this may be happening regardless).
So this leaves me with no LARPs to be writing right now, just as the habit had formed. My solution at this point is to create a couple of outlines for future games, which will get fleshed out in the remaining months before the games are actually needed. This is good, since it provides a creative outlet and such. And it means I'll have preplanned ideas for in the future when people ask what's up for future months.
Now, depending on how things play out, some of these ideas might not get actually used. Any assistant GMs I have may wind up disliking the available list of potential LARPs, and we'll opt to write and play something entirely new. And at this point it looks like I have one more LARP idea than there are remaining months in the year. And, of course, more ideas will come in the next six months as well. So some of these ideas won't get played. At least, not as part of the monthly LARP project.
Some readers may think "Hey, you could continue the monthly LARP series into 2010!" But that's crazy talk. By next January, I'll need a good break from doing this. And I'll probably find some other creative outlet at that point. But part of the point of this (in my mind, anyway) is the limited scope: you write twelve games, run them, think critically about what happened, then move on with that information.
I'm sure more LARPs will happen in the future. But one a month is a difficult rate for me to keep up. Which is why I challenged myself to do so int he first place.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Tabletop Play, Inverted
Something has been growing clear to me as I run a series of LARPs each month. It has to do with power relationships between the players and the GM. But first I'll have to talk for a while about tabletop RPGs, before circling back to my monthly larps.
You see, LARPing is really a secondary hobby for me, despite it currently taking up a decent amount of my time over the last few months. The majority of my roleplaying historically and preferentially takes the form of "tabletop" roleplaying (if you're a larper) or "pen and paper" roleplaying (if you play computer based RPGs). People sitting around a table telling a collaborative story.
Now, in a typical roleplaying game, the setup goes like this: The GM says, "Hey, I want to start a campaign of Unknown Armies" (or whatever their game of choice might be). Then all the prospective players create backgrounds and personalities for their characters. Once characters are made, the GM creates a plot and the players react to that plot.
While the GM has some ability to influence character choices during character creation, the players really have primary control over what their characters will look like. The GM has relatively little power during chargen (relative to the GM's later power level, that is, not necessarily relative to the players... that varies from game to game and group to group). Players, on the other hand, often have a lot of poer to establish things in their character background and such.
Once play begins, though, the GM has near complete control over the events in play. Sure, abusing your GM power can get accusations of railroading or deprotagonization or otherwise upset players. But the GM has a lot of power over the system, in a traditional game. In particular, the GM controls a lot of the "plot" of a game, and can control flow of play more effectively than any other player. Meanwhile, players have reduced capability to establish facts about the game world: you might have made up an ancient ninja secret society that controls the government in your character's backstory and it was acceptable, but trying to bring it in during play will encounter more resistance. And in terms of controlling plot, the players have some ability, but it is noticeably less than the GM's.
Now, it's important to note that you can have very different power structures for your game. Different systems actively create alternative setups, and different groups often create looser power distributions, where players have more ability for input in play. A variety of "indie games" explore setups where players get more power, or less, or where there isn't a GM at all or the GM's role is conscribed in various ways. And these games are fascinating to me theoretically and often a lot of fun to play. But I'm talking about an abstracted ideal of traditional roleplaying arrangement, in order to contrast it to the Larps I've been running.
There we are, back at the larps. See, the power distribution of the larps I've run goes very differently. Players have almost no power ahead of time, as I write all the characters and arrange a situation and such. But once play begins, I as GM have very, very little control over the flow of play. There are no NPCs to speak of, rarely any scene breaks or other pacing mechanics that a GM could use to channel play in various preplanned directions. My general GMing mode is "set up an interesting set of characters in an interesting situation, then react". Which actually is a really good way of running tabletop games, but isn't exactly the default assumption for how a game goes.
So my power as a GM of these larps goes: lots of power ahead of time, but relatively little once play begins. Now, other larps could imitate that traditional rpg power setup, and we could do that in a future larp. But I'm not sure I'm interested in going that direction with future games. The most recent larp had the most railroading that I really want to do, which consisted of a handful of facts coming out as the game went on, and two scheduled press conference. Rather, I want to see how I can vary the power structure in future larps in other ways... the randomly generated character of the political larp is an example.
Or maybe we will have a game where players generate characters in the future, though we'd have to figure out how to guarantee interesting conflict between the players. Or have it be a more external conflict of some sort? Now that I've identified a pattern, I want to figure out how to vary that pattern in new and interesting ways.
You see, LARPing is really a secondary hobby for me, despite it currently taking up a decent amount of my time over the last few months. The majority of my roleplaying historically and preferentially takes the form of "tabletop" roleplaying (if you're a larper) or "pen and paper" roleplaying (if you play computer based RPGs). People sitting around a table telling a collaborative story.
Now, in a typical roleplaying game, the setup goes like this: The GM says, "Hey, I want to start a campaign of Unknown Armies" (or whatever their game of choice might be). Then all the prospective players create backgrounds and personalities for their characters. Once characters are made, the GM creates a plot and the players react to that plot.
While the GM has some ability to influence character choices during character creation, the players really have primary control over what their characters will look like. The GM has relatively little power during chargen (relative to the GM's later power level, that is, not necessarily relative to the players... that varies from game to game and group to group). Players, on the other hand, often have a lot of poer to establish things in their character background and such.
Once play begins, though, the GM has near complete control over the events in play. Sure, abusing your GM power can get accusations of railroading or deprotagonization or otherwise upset players. But the GM has a lot of power over the system, in a traditional game. In particular, the GM controls a lot of the "plot" of a game, and can control flow of play more effectively than any other player. Meanwhile, players have reduced capability to establish facts about the game world: you might have made up an ancient ninja secret society that controls the government in your character's backstory and it was acceptable, but trying to bring it in during play will encounter more resistance. And in terms of controlling plot, the players have some ability, but it is noticeably less than the GM's.
Now, it's important to note that you can have very different power structures for your game. Different systems actively create alternative setups, and different groups often create looser power distributions, where players have more ability for input in play. A variety of "indie games" explore setups where players get more power, or less, or where there isn't a GM at all or the GM's role is conscribed in various ways. And these games are fascinating to me theoretically and often a lot of fun to play. But I'm talking about an abstracted ideal of traditional roleplaying arrangement, in order to contrast it to the Larps I've been running.
There we are, back at the larps. See, the power distribution of the larps I've run goes very differently. Players have almost no power ahead of time, as I write all the characters and arrange a situation and such. But once play begins, I as GM have very, very little control over the flow of play. There are no NPCs to speak of, rarely any scene breaks or other pacing mechanics that a GM could use to channel play in various preplanned directions. My general GMing mode is "set up an interesting set of characters in an interesting situation, then react". Which actually is a really good way of running tabletop games, but isn't exactly the default assumption for how a game goes.
So my power as a GM of these larps goes: lots of power ahead of time, but relatively little once play begins. Now, other larps could imitate that traditional rpg power setup, and we could do that in a future larp. But I'm not sure I'm interested in going that direction with future games. The most recent larp had the most railroading that I really want to do, which consisted of a handful of facts coming out as the game went on, and two scheduled press conference. Rather, I want to see how I can vary the power structure in future larps in other ways... the randomly generated character of the political larp is an example.
Or maybe we will have a game where players generate characters in the future, though we'd have to figure out how to guarantee interesting conflict between the players. Or have it be a more external conflict of some sort? Now that I've identified a pattern, I want to figure out how to vary that pattern in new and interesting ways.
Monday, June 1, 2009
How It All Played Out
So how did everything actually go?
(Note that there's plenty of spoilers, and you may want to have read the relevant scenarios in Executive Decision and the Cavendish Memo to follow along here.)
In both scenarios, there was always enough discussion that I as GM had very little to do. I sat back and listened, occasionally answered questions, but in general the discussion moved enough and never got repetitive, so there wasn't much GM intervention needed. I had a few bits prepared to introduce new complications and thereby spur on new discussion. but if anything, I had trouble finding a good point to spring these twists on the players.
For the first scenario, the President was Matthew, who was pretty active and forceful and good at having the discussion flow around and making sure each person gave some input. They decided initially to delay saying anything about the memos, and just had the FBI (or whatever the appropriate agency would be) investigate the secretary's disappearance and the missing memo. So we assumed that they waited a day, then reconvened. In that time, the memos were leaked, and sothe White House wound up at a disadvantage on the news narrative. (The FBI did find that the secretary had been talking to a political rival Senator, but that was not much use). So the second day they had to figure out how to respond to the memos, which they succeeded pretty well in rebutting in the final press conference. The White House's story became that they were planning on meeting with Cavendish CEO in person and telling him "no" on loosening environmental policy, but trying to work out some other way to keep the factory in the country. I don't recall if anything was actually decided about a long-term policy change to help the corporation stay in the country.
President Campbell did a good job presenting their story to the press, answering the difficult questions and dealing with things. People had a positive reaction to his presentation, so it worked out well for the White House. Mostly, the reporters stuck to the pre-scripted questions, except for Adam, who didn't get a reporter (we were short one). Adam played a reporter from the Weekly World News claiming the President was a Reptoid. After being escorted out by Secret Service agents, websites devoted to tearing off President Campbell's human mask and revealing his reptilian heritage spread across the Internet.
The second scenario still played out pretty well, but ended a little worse for the White House. Amber played the President the second time, and still seemed to do fairly well refereeing the discussion. But though diplomacy with Kerzhakstan was repeatedly discussed, it was never actually pursued as a serious option. So the PCs never heard Kerzhakstan's side of the story, just the version in the international news. They did communicate with Russia, and Russia was, basically, looking for an excuse for violence against a country that seceded from them at the end of the Cold War. So since they had two warped, negative views of Kerzhakstan and a fair number of military minded PCs (Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, etc.) they wound up pursuing a military solution: send in a commando force to recover the pilot and plane and experimental doomsday weapon (!) and get out.
Doomsday weapon? There wasn't anything like that in the original scenario. That was made up by Director of national Intelligence Stacie, as she tried to find ways to fulfill her agendas. Everyone was surprised the DNI had a secret project like that, but isn't the head of spy operations supposed to do all sorts of sneaky, secret stuff?
Truth to tell, I had been considering putting a nuclear weapon in the scenario for the last two weeks or so, but eventually didn't do so. But Stacie adding it in amped up the tension of the whole crisis, so it was good. It did cause some suspension of disbelief issues for one specific player, but eventually it got smoother over enough for play to continue.
Initially it was some sort of experimental nuclear warhead, but at some point while I was out of the room the players changed that to an experimental anti-matter bomb. Other than the fact that they're stealing from Dan Brown I was okay with the change.
Because of an experimental antimatter bomb, the player characters decided to prioritize recovering the plane over saving the missing pilot. And so the final story was to lie to the Kerzhakstani ambassador and send in the military while distracted. I as GM couldn't see any way for them to pull off a military maneuver without someone getting hurt, so the pretty young pilot died in the crossfire.
(She was apparently the sexiest vegetarian in the armed forces... Google can tell you the weirdest things. I just searched for "air force lieutenant and found her.)
And since Russia was looking for an excuse, and because Kerzhakstan was terrified of Russia and had no idea who was attacking, both basically used it as an excuse to go to war with each other. And America wound up on the Russian side, contrary to the rest of the United Nations. Not great for international prestige.
Because of unexpected military action and unplanned doomsday weaponry, the prescripted reporter questions were much less applicable, so the reporters had to ad lib a lot more. And the President and Press Secretary Ross had a tougher time answering questions. Dead political martyr and internationally unpopular war don't work out too great for America.
Overall, I think it went well. Better than last time, on first impression. Some stuff could certainly be improved, and I had two technical difficulties while the larp was going on (the CD of "Hail to the Chief" kept skipping and one projector in the President's eyes burned out after a second of blinding light. I swear I tested this stuff ahead of time.).
One thing that I might do differently is sort Agendas out by scenario, as I did with the player characters (the little 1 and 2 in the upper corner of any character sheet shows which scenario it was in). And be a bit better prepped on what to tell the players at the start of each scenario... the relationship between Russia and Kerzhakstan was initially misunderstood by some players, and it was central to the second scenario. And possibly the Attorney General should be replaced by some other Cabinet official, as partisanship never came much into play. But nothing failed miserably, as far as I could tell.
At some point I might want to write a post musing about how political games like this will shift more rightwards/more conservative, just due to the nature of political thinking and how it works. But that's a post for some other day, if ever.
(Note that there's plenty of spoilers, and you may want to have read the relevant scenarios in Executive Decision and the Cavendish Memo to follow along here.)
In both scenarios, there was always enough discussion that I as GM had very little to do. I sat back and listened, occasionally answered questions, but in general the discussion moved enough and never got repetitive, so there wasn't much GM intervention needed. I had a few bits prepared to introduce new complications and thereby spur on new discussion. but if anything, I had trouble finding a good point to spring these twists on the players.
For the first scenario, the President was Matthew, who was pretty active and forceful and good at having the discussion flow around and making sure each person gave some input. They decided initially to delay saying anything about the memos, and just had the FBI (or whatever the appropriate agency would be) investigate the secretary's disappearance and the missing memo. So we assumed that they waited a day, then reconvened. In that time, the memos were leaked, and sothe White House wound up at a disadvantage on the news narrative. (The FBI did find that the secretary had been talking to a political rival Senator, but that was not much use). So the second day they had to figure out how to respond to the memos, which they succeeded pretty well in rebutting in the final press conference. The White House's story became that they were planning on meeting with Cavendish CEO in person and telling him "no" on loosening environmental policy, but trying to work out some other way to keep the factory in the country. I don't recall if anything was actually decided about a long-term policy change to help the corporation stay in the country.
President Campbell did a good job presenting their story to the press, answering the difficult questions and dealing with things. People had a positive reaction to his presentation, so it worked out well for the White House. Mostly, the reporters stuck to the pre-scripted questions, except for Adam, who didn't get a reporter (we were short one). Adam played a reporter from the Weekly World News claiming the President was a Reptoid. After being escorted out by Secret Service agents, websites devoted to tearing off President Campbell's human mask and revealing his reptilian heritage spread across the Internet.
The second scenario still played out pretty well, but ended a little worse for the White House. Amber played the President the second time, and still seemed to do fairly well refereeing the discussion. But though diplomacy with Kerzhakstan was repeatedly discussed, it was never actually pursued as a serious option. So the PCs never heard Kerzhakstan's side of the story, just the version in the international news. They did communicate with Russia, and Russia was, basically, looking for an excuse for violence against a country that seceded from them at the end of the Cold War. So since they had two warped, negative views of Kerzhakstan and a fair number of military minded PCs (Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, etc.) they wound up pursuing a military solution: send in a commando force to recover the pilot and plane and experimental doomsday weapon (!) and get out.
Doomsday weapon? There wasn't anything like that in the original scenario. That was made up by Director of national Intelligence Stacie, as she tried to find ways to fulfill her agendas. Everyone was surprised the DNI had a secret project like that, but isn't the head of spy operations supposed to do all sorts of sneaky, secret stuff?
Truth to tell, I had been considering putting a nuclear weapon in the scenario for the last two weeks or so, but eventually didn't do so. But Stacie adding it in amped up the tension of the whole crisis, so it was good. It did cause some suspension of disbelief issues for one specific player, but eventually it got smoother over enough for play to continue.
Initially it was some sort of experimental nuclear warhead, but at some point while I was out of the room the players changed that to an experimental anti-matter bomb. Other than the fact that they're stealing from Dan Brown I was okay with the change.
Because of an experimental antimatter bomb, the player characters decided to prioritize recovering the plane over saving the missing pilot. And so the final story was to lie to the Kerzhakstani ambassador and send in the military while distracted. I as GM couldn't see any way for them to pull off a military maneuver without someone getting hurt, so the pretty young pilot died in the crossfire.
(She was apparently the sexiest vegetarian in the armed forces... Google can tell you the weirdest things. I just searched for "air force lieutenant and found her.)
And since Russia was looking for an excuse, and because Kerzhakstan was terrified of Russia and had no idea who was attacking, both basically used it as an excuse to go to war with each other. And America wound up on the Russian side, contrary to the rest of the United Nations. Not great for international prestige.
Because of unexpected military action and unplanned doomsday weaponry, the prescripted reporter questions were much less applicable, so the reporters had to ad lib a lot more. And the President and Press Secretary Ross had a tougher time answering questions. Dead political martyr and internationally unpopular war don't work out too great for America.
Overall, I think it went well. Better than last time, on first impression. Some stuff could certainly be improved, and I had two technical difficulties while the larp was going on (the CD of "Hail to the Chief" kept skipping and one projector in the President's eyes burned out after a second of blinding light. I swear I tested this stuff ahead of time.).
One thing that I might do differently is sort Agendas out by scenario, as I did with the player characters (the little 1 and 2 in the upper corner of any character sheet shows which scenario it was in). And be a bit better prepped on what to tell the players at the start of each scenario... the relationship between Russia and Kerzhakstan was initially misunderstood by some players, and it was central to the second scenario. And possibly the Attorney General should be replaced by some other Cabinet official, as partisanship never came much into play. But nothing failed miserably, as far as I could tell.
At some point I might want to write a post musing about how political games like this will shift more rightwards/more conservative, just due to the nature of political thinking and how it works. But that's a post for some other day, if ever.
May LARP report
Cheyenne was unable to attend this month (due to being gainfully employed), so requested a more thorough LARP report. Which is probably a good idea, anyway, as I should do a better job supporting this blog-space, if it is to be meaningful to anyone.
As I hope some of the various larps in the future will be, May's game changed up a lot of how the game was played. There were no detailed character backgrounds, or indeed any pregenerated characters at all. We had a prescripted series of four scenes, and players swapped roles around halfway through the game. There was basically no secret information that the players could have read and spoiled the game ahead of time. There were few secret agendas. And everyone spent the entire game sitting down, probably making it the least larp-like larp so far.
Maybe I should go back and start from the beginning:
This month's larp scenario is taken almost entirely from Greg Stolze's free sper-simple RPG Executive Decision. The players roleplayed being the President of the United States and his Cabinet and miscellaneous advisers trying to deal with some political controversies.
Basically, the game went like this: Everyone got two agenda card that I had made, then chose one of several roles available. Each job in the presidential administration had its own attached agenda, too.
So there weren't any established characters. Just some randomly generated characters. And no one had any fictional names, which got some player rebellion. Some people (well, one) wanted people to have fictional character names, but most didn't care, so they all wound up just using people's real names for their fictional cabinet officials. There were some Name Badges, but they really just identified background information others should know about some characters, like if they were the token member of an opposing political party. These tied into some of the agendas (any with a star in the upper corner). My favorite was the "Protect your job" agenda, since any player that got that agenda had a choice of why their job was in danger. Did they pilot a massive program that failed miserably? Or say something politically insensitive on national television? (Those were the two chosen when the agenda came up.)
Anyway, once people knew what they were trying to do, everyone sat together at a big table, presented themselves and their position and such, and then they were given some crisis that they had to deal with. And then they all would discuss what the president's administration should do until they reached a consensus. In said discussion, different people would try to advance their individual agendas.
The first crisis involved a missing former secretary of the president's, confidential private and politically controversial memo being leaked (along with a terse but vaguely positive response) being leaked to the press. The memo intersected with a lot of different agendas people had, involving giant corporations, environmental concerns, military matters and the like, all mixed together in a tangled mess. Which is often how politics is, in my experience.
The second scenario involved a tiny former Soviet state accidentally capturing an American fighter jet, which worried nearby, antagonistic Russia greatly. And the country acted stupid and went to the international press before the American government, showing the plane and the pretty young female pilot on CNN.
Both these dilemmas were taken straight from the original Executive Decision document. I can't really take any credit for them, myself.
After the cabinet reached a consensus on what to do in each of these cases, then the President (and/or Press Secretary) needed to field questions from the journalists at the press briefing. We took all the players downstairs, gave them an alternate reporter identity to play for a moment, then the President or Secretary had to come down to lots of lights shining right in their eyes and give a speech and answer questions.
More on how the scenarios actually played out, later. And what worked, what didn't, etc.
As I hope some of the various larps in the future will be, May's game changed up a lot of how the game was played. There were no detailed character backgrounds, or indeed any pregenerated characters at all. We had a prescripted series of four scenes, and players swapped roles around halfway through the game. There was basically no secret information that the players could have read and spoiled the game ahead of time. There were few secret agendas. And everyone spent the entire game sitting down, probably making it the least larp-like larp so far.
Maybe I should go back and start from the beginning:
This month's larp scenario is taken almost entirely from Greg Stolze's free sper-simple RPG Executive Decision. The players roleplayed being the President of the United States and his Cabinet and miscellaneous advisers trying to deal with some political controversies.
Basically, the game went like this: Everyone got two agenda card that I had made, then chose one of several roles available. Each job in the presidential administration had its own attached agenda, too.
So there weren't any established characters. Just some randomly generated characters. And no one had any fictional names, which got some player rebellion. Some people (well, one) wanted people to have fictional character names, but most didn't care, so they all wound up just using people's real names for their fictional cabinet officials. There were some Name Badges, but they really just identified background information others should know about some characters, like if they were the token member of an opposing political party. These tied into some of the agendas (any with a star in the upper corner). My favorite was the "Protect your job" agenda, since any player that got that agenda had a choice of why their job was in danger. Did they pilot a massive program that failed miserably? Or say something politically insensitive on national television? (Those were the two chosen when the agenda came up.)
Anyway, once people knew what they were trying to do, everyone sat together at a big table, presented themselves and their position and such, and then they were given some crisis that they had to deal with. And then they all would discuss what the president's administration should do until they reached a consensus. In said discussion, different people would try to advance their individual agendas.
The first crisis involved a missing former secretary of the president's, confidential private and politically controversial memo being leaked (along with a terse but vaguely positive response) being leaked to the press. The memo intersected with a lot of different agendas people had, involving giant corporations, environmental concerns, military matters and the like, all mixed together in a tangled mess. Which is often how politics is, in my experience.
The second scenario involved a tiny former Soviet state accidentally capturing an American fighter jet, which worried nearby, antagonistic Russia greatly. And the country acted stupid and went to the international press before the American government, showing the plane and the pretty young female pilot on CNN.
Both these dilemmas were taken straight from the original Executive Decision document. I can't really take any credit for them, myself.
After the cabinet reached a consensus on what to do in each of these cases, then the President (and/or Press Secretary) needed to field questions from the journalists at the press briefing. We took all the players downstairs, gave them an alternate reporter identity to play for a moment, then the President or Secretary had to come down to lots of lights shining right in their eyes and give a speech and answer questions.
More on how the scenarios actually played out, later. And what worked, what didn't, etc.
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