I tried to write up instructions on how to run the March LARP. I really did, but I don't think I'll be able to. The March game was a mystery game, see, and so it had a lot more stuff to it that wasn't on people's character sheets. There was another entire story, not directly spelled out anywhere in particular, that would need clarified and properly ordered for someone to be able to run the game themselves. And a lot of talk about the game's science fiction setting and then some conflict resolution rules.
You see, lots of stuff that wasn't already ready to be posted online. Which is a bit of a pity: by now I'm busy writing the April game.
(And if I ever get a chance and remember I should write a post about my mental boom/bust cycle writing these things, or one about the inversion of authority from how it works in a traditional tabletop RPG or lots of other things. But right now there's cowboys to write up... mainly cowgirls, actually, given the game's gender ratio.)
So while I don't have any new deep thoughts for you today, I do have some thoughts I wrote a month or so ago, regarding the scifi mystery game, tropes caused by writerly laziness and the Disney Channel:
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The original background for the March game went like this:
A science fiction research outpost found an alien artifact, which could be used to raise and lower someone's intelligence. One survivor of the research team has been turned into a bestial monster man by having his mind drained, while others used it to raise their intelligence greatly. Unfortunately, raising your intelligence thusly lowers your empathy for normal human beings, leading you to think of them as insects, or tools for a job. Or pests to be exterminated. One of the scientists used this item to raise their intelligence to amazing heights, then created a time-space anomaly to wipe out most of the crew.
I was a bit unhappy about the intelligence modification stuff, because I'm sometimes bothered by the fictional trope of intelligence = evil and being dumb is morally superior. You see this in various forms. The place it always annoys me most is in, of all things, Handy Manny, where the smart and almost always correct flathead screwdriver is looked upon poorly for pointing out how stupid the other, moronic tools are.
Moving on from criticizing anti-intellectualism in children's shows, I am happier with the new background I came up with. It's mostly similar (research outpost, alien artifact, crew member made half-human, wiped out by guy who experimented on himself) except the artifact does not raise or lower intelligence. what it does is store someone's personality in little crystal things. One of the crystal things found contained an alien intelligence, stored by one of the race that made the thing. This alien is very anti-human, and its motives are unclear except that it wants humanity off its damn planet. Possibly, the alien was some sort of alien psychopath, imprisoned in a mindcrystal as punishment for something. Or maybe all the aliens would be this violent and anti-human in such a situation, I don't know.
Either way, it removes the moral qualm/aesthetic problem I had with the initial plot. Not that anyone else would have even likely noticed or cared.
Showing posts with label sci fi mystery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sci fi mystery. Show all posts
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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