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.

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.

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.



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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.



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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?

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.

Procrastination sets in earlier than I had hoped

I’m at a point where I’m procrastinating against writing stuff or the February LARP. I expected this to happen, but hopefully this month will be the hardest one: I had all the time in the world to write the first LARP (and actually took a month and a half to do so). But the second LARP has to fall in the real month-long schedule, if I want to keep things on track. And since it’s the first one actually written in a month, I haven’t developed a set of habits for doing so.

But my procrastinating doesn’t help. Nor does losing my USB drive and my written notes for the game. Hopefully, I can reconstruct things. And hopefully, having to rebuild the game from scratch in two weeks will leave me better prepared for future months. One thing that has helped is the announcing the LARP well in advance, which means people are unconsciously reminding me about it whenever they RSVP. Which puts social pressure on top of the personally established system of deadlines. Social pressure might be more effective as a motivator to get me writing than anything I could do myself. And getting myself to write things and run things and try out new things and do some non-D&D based gaming is basically why I’m doing this LARP-A-Month project anyway.

But the longer I write this post, the less time I spend writing up time travelling Swedish superheroes. So off to adventure.