Dear future self,
If you're going to store all the information for the monthly LARP on a USB drive, make sure everything is backed up somewhere. Because you don't want to go emptying your pockets two days before the LARP and wonder "Where did that USB drive with the last month of my work go to?"
In this instance that where is "still in the computer that has Indesign installed on it at work". But in the future it might be "to the West Mifflin Garage onboard the 53F Port Authority bus, never to be seen again". So watch it.
Your Truly,
Your past self
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Back on track after a brief interlude
For whatever reason, this month began with a lot of stressing out, a lot of self-pity and negative feeling about the LARP project. I don' want to get into that right now, really, but it took me a while to get started actually working on the May LARP. And that procrastination there also meant that I was avoiding writing anything here about how it was all going.
Luckily for me, a weird quirk of the calendar means that I had an extra week between larps this month. The last few games were going off every four weeks, and now enough time spilled over now that I had five weeks to get the May larp ready. And at the same time, the game I have planned this time required substantially less prep work than previous games. So I have actually been spending some time working with Adobe InDesign to make some nice looking documents. This is a big improvement over previous month's Word documents, at least in my own opinion. Don't believe that it's a big improvement? go look at this character that won't get used and see for yourself.
At this point I have a few last bits to finish, and some more cleaning around the house, but everything should be ready in time. And hopefully it will all work out well. I have one or two reservations going into the game, which I might discuss after the event is over. That's only a few days away at this point, so we don't have to wait long.
Luckily for me, a weird quirk of the calendar means that I had an extra week between larps this month. The last few games were going off every four weeks, and now enough time spilled over now that I had five weeks to get the May larp ready. And at the same time, the game I have planned this time required substantially less prep work than previous games. So I have actually been spending some time working with Adobe InDesign to make some nice looking documents. This is a big improvement over previous month's Word documents, at least in my own opinion. Don't believe that it's a big improvement? go look at this character that won't get used and see for yourself.
At this point I have a few last bits to finish, and some more cleaning around the house, but everything should be ready in time. And hopefully it will all work out well. I have one or two reservations going into the game, which I might discuss after the event is over. That's only a few days away at this point, so we don't have to wait long.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
LARP photos
Amber posted photos from the April LARP for people to see.
On the other hand, I still don't have anything concrete for May's game. I should get on the stick and figure out what it is we're doing.
On the other hand, I still don't have anything concrete for May's game. I should get on the stick and figure out what it is we're doing.
Monday, April 27, 2009
April LARP: worked out pretty well
Didn't work out perfectly by any means, but most of the players enjoyed themselves a lot, reportedly.
As is the standard operating procedure here, all LARP relevant documents are up online for you to view and/or use for your own purposes.
Since this game was less GM intensive than the previous one, I will try to write up GMing notes so you could run it on your own, if you wanted.
There was a pretty good quantity of awesome in the game, as the hacked together mechanics for the game worked as they were supposed to and the characters interacted with each other. In particular, the poker mechanics meshed nicely into the rest of the game and subtly drew away the PC's ability to accomplish anything without killing someone. There were one or two mistakes on the character sheets, since plots had to be swapped around at the last minute. When two players cancel at the last minute, you have to scramble to adjust how the PCs fit together. But apparently I missed updating a few or the characters who were affected.
One or two players seemed somewhat dissatisfied with parts of the game. I'll see what we can do to rectify things in future months. Speaking of which, I should figure out what next month will be. At this point it's still almost entirely an unknown to me. I'd like something with less PC versus PC conflict, but still have to work out how to do that without increasing the GM workload.
As is the standard operating procedure here, all LARP relevant documents are up online for you to view and/or use for your own purposes.
Since this game was less GM intensive than the previous one, I will try to write up GMing notes so you could run it on your own, if you wanted.
There was a pretty good quantity of awesome in the game, as the hacked together mechanics for the game worked as they were supposed to and the characters interacted with each other. In particular, the poker mechanics meshed nicely into the rest of the game and subtly drew away the PC's ability to accomplish anything without killing someone. There were one or two mistakes on the character sheets, since plots had to be swapped around at the last minute. When two players cancel at the last minute, you have to scramble to adjust how the PCs fit together. But apparently I missed updating a few or the characters who were affected.
One or two players seemed somewhat dissatisfied with parts of the game. I'll see what we can do to rectify things in future months. Speaking of which, I should figure out what next month will be. At this point it's still almost entirely an unknown to me. I'd like something with less PC versus PC conflict, but still have to work out how to do that without increasing the GM workload.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Delayed thoughts and failure to write instructions
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:
--------------------------------------------------
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.
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:
--------------------------------------------------
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.
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.
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