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.