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.