Tag: LARP

Spring Weekend 2011 Part 2: Tenneman's Will

After Houses of the Blooded, I decided that I needed to understand LARPs better.  My offer to join the Eindhoven LARP as a moderator (an assistant to the GMs) was met with silence, so I, with reluctance, signed up for the Spring Weekend LARP, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t find it terribly boring as I inevitably seemed to find LARPs.

Before I talk about the LARP, I think I’m going to discuss the technical aspects of LARP design.  I’m allowed to comment, of course, because I have at least one successful LARP under my belt ^_^  The LARP wasn’t released until two days before the weekend which was very short notice indeed.  Pim came to me and discussed the LARP design and said that he had wished he had started with it much sooner.  I replied “That’s why I started in August,” which is true.  You could certainly see the problems that their late start caused.  For example, I received the character of Jopie, the youngest son of the late Gerrit Tenneman, a philosopher and an idealist.  I had two children, about whom my sheet had very little and no comment about their mother, and I had some connection with Domingo (played by Marco) but there’s literally nothing there, just a blank space.  To learn about other characters, I had to talk to others (or, more specifically, they had to talk to me.  Sabrina pounced me basically the day we received our characters, calling me “Jopie” and “Papa” and peppering me with in-character questions.  Without realizing it, she did a lot to get me into character, to look at myself and see how I would interact with others.  I think I really needed that).  At the last minute, though, the final piece I really needed to make the character click came in the form of Alida: Raymond walked up to me and said that she was playing the mother of my children, and that she had left me when the children were 2 because of my lack of ambition and money, and that she’d written me a letter to say that she was coming to the reading of the will.

You’d think with these obvious holes, the LARP would have serious problems, and I’m not saying it didn’t… but I am saying I had the most fun I’ve ever had playing in a LARP.  I chose to play Jopie as an idealist, someone who was essentially useless because he pursued what amounted to a Liberal Arts degree and secretly expected the world to conform to his unrealistic ideals, but the world wasn’t a place where someone earned lots of money or saved the world by sitting in coffee shops talking about feelings or the human condition, but by god, I was going to try!  This contrasted with my sister and her husband, ruthless pragmatists who valued accomplishment over empty sentiment (something I, out of character, had a hard time arguing against, and I had to dig deep into feel-good TV cliches to combat).  My goal was to keep the house and get enough money to pay off my debts and put my kids through school, as well as ensure that the cook and the butler got to stay on.  Meanwhile, the woman who had broken my heart was awfully friendly with my brother and kept approaching my children.  I pounced Karin (Alida), told her that she’d given up the right to be “their mother” when she left them, demanded to know where she had been, etc, and generally being a jerk while trying to hide my character’s real feelings.  She managed to persuade me to let her meet her children while not telling them who she was.  We pretended she was only interested in them because of her real estate business, in what I felt was an emotionally charged and understated scene.

As the LARP progressed, Raymond and Pim read different parts of the will, which required different tasks from the players.  The most interesting part for me came when we had to divide 20% of the company between the three family members and Christina, the 22 year-old widow of our father (his trophy wife, played by Desiree), and decide who would keep the house.  Around then, Domingo told me of his dream to play football (soccer) pro and his father’s disapproval (Jan, played by Arjen, the eldest son of Gerrit and my brother).  I talked Jan into connecting again with his son, telling him what he told me, which was that he didn’t disapprove of Domingo’s desire to play soccer but that he felt Domingo should put his heart and soul into it.  When they connected, it also meant that Jan and I connected too, so he was all too willing to go in with me on the house, to keep the butler and cook on.  At the same time, Loese (played by Jasmine, her first LARP) revealed to us that she’d been having an affair, cheating on her husband.  Pouncing on the first moment of vulnerability and emotion expressed by my “haughty” and “excessively practical” sister, I pushed her to divorce her husband and love-bombed her with all the moral support she needed, and so reconnected wit hher.  We’d left out Christine, who wanted a single percent of the company, but she and I had been talking (She loved the house as much as I did, especially the piano room), and I felt 1% just wasn’t enough, so I talked both of my siblings into giving up 1% each, to get her up to 3% (and in the final negotiation, it became 8% for Loese, and 4% for each of Jan, Christine and myself).

Around then, I decided that it was hypocritical to tell Loese to chase her passion and love while I was yelling at the love of my life, pretending I didn’t care because I didn’t want to get hurt.  And so I swooped down on Karin and told her I had been a fool, confessed my feelings for her, and used the same idealism to break down her guard, to rebuild the family that had fallen apart.

I didn’t learn until after I had done this that Christine had fallen in love with my character, and had been in love with him for quite some time.  When Loese learned I was getting back together with the mother of my children, she objected (“She’s been away for 14 years!  She broke your heart! Why are you just telling us about this now!  Christine loves you!”)  but she wanted me to be happy, so supported me if I went this route. Christine and I had a deliciously awkward scene as I implied to her that I knew she cared, but that I was going to get together with the mother of my children and “as my step mother and family” I hoped she approved.  I also told Jan, who also had feelings for her, that he should tell her how he felt, because this would be his last chance.  He proposed to her.  She said she had to think about it.  I decided to propose to her (Over the objections of Lysanne (Sabrina) who, when she was introduced to Karin for real, was skeptical and felt I should take this slow)

At the next reading, I was told I would earn a million dollars if I got engaged, which really harshed my mellow, since I totally intended to propose anyway, and so I fell to my knees before Karin while Christine stalked out, unable to watch.  Karin said yes, and later, Desiree managed to actually squeeze out tears as she (Christine) told me that she had loved me for a long time and I could only awkwardly tell her that she was always welcome in the house (“Oh yeah,” she later said “To watch how happy you are with another woman.  Fun fun!”)  Christine ended the LARP with her eventual suicide, unable to bear her lonely future.

I’m only touching on some of the things that went on, because I was a busy bee, and you can see how involved I was in the game.  At no moment was I bored or unable to find anything to do.  Instead, I was constantly engaged, constantly surprised, constantly involved, constantly in character, and utterly wrapped up in the story.  When I say “That’s the most fun I’ve ever had playing in a LARP,” I’m not being polite, I mean it.  I think this LARP has shown me that I can, in fact, be a LARPer.

But the LARP was far from flawless.  In addition to the problems mentioned above, some other problems became obvious as I talked to other people.  There was another part of the LARP, the business side, which never seemed to interact with the family side.  It was like there were two LARPS going on at the same time.  While games should have many stories, I think those stories should interact, and I felt these two stories did so to a too limited degree.  Moreover, while I was constantly busy, other people weren’t.  For example, Erik was the cook, and his only goal, his only story element, was to stay on at the house… which I arranged for him.  He literally had to do nothing for the entire LARP.  I saw him and a several other people just swinging on the swings or lazing in the grass, bored and with nothing to do.  There were many peripheral characters who had no reason to be there, nothing to do, beyond a single element in the will.  Finally, the coolest things that happened to me in the LARP had little to do with what Pim and Raymond had written.  In fact, the players basically subverted the entire thing.  Alida was supposed to play her character as a  gold-digger, but couldn’t bear it with my puppy-eyes looking down at her.  Jasmine was supposed to be the evil sister, but was instead fascinated by Erik’s suggestion of her having an affair (he intended it as blackmail, but instead it turned into a reason for her to connect with my character and to chase her long stagnant romantic feelings while divorcing her husband), and Desiree had no story, apparently, beyond “You’re lonely and bored,” and so falling in love with my character was entirely her idea.  Now, LARPs are supposed to be chaotic and unpredictable, but this basically means the story I was playing was only loosely inspired by what Raymond and Pim were writing.  I was really playing with Erik and Desiree and Alida’s story.  As a result, this was the happiest, fluffiest LARP ever, where everyone got what they wanted… except for Christine, which means Desiree got what she wanted (Tragedy!  I told her later “Revenge!  You killed my character last night, and I killed yours today”)

So what’s my final verdict on the LARP?  The game was technically sloppy, and the fun I had was more the result of the other players than the GMs, who didn’t prepare nearly as much as they really should have.  But, ultimately, only a single measure of a game’s success exists: Did you have fun?  Yes, I had fun.  Lots and lots of fun.  So, it’s a success (at least for me).  Preparation isn’t about turning a game from a failure to a success, it’s about improving the chances that it’ll be a success.  Ultimately, the writer of a LARP has little control of whether that LARP works, as it’s always in the hands of the player.  When I wrote HotB, I gave my players as much to work with as I could, so nobody lacked inspiration.  Here, Raymond and Pim gave us very little to work with, but very talented people turned it into quite a LARP.

I think they knew where they went wrong.  Pim says if he’d ever do this again, he’d put much more work, more time, into it, but I think ultimately, their LARP was successful for the same reason my LARP was successful.  We both grasped the ultimate truth of a LARP: LARPs are all about the players.  You can give them lots of ideas, or a few ideas and lots of room to maneuver in, but you have to let them play, rather than try to control them.  Both LARPs wrote up plenty of material and created goals, and then stepped back and let them do what they pleased. As a result, the LARP worked… mostly.

Personally, I loved it.  I think next time, they should put more work into peripheral characters, suggest more options to characters in general, and think through the consequences of the goals they offer to players (too often, they amounted to “If you do X, you win!” with little potential fallout.  Getting the house was too easy for my character, and there was no consequence to that action.  Contrast this with my romance, where choosing one character killed the other.  Ouch!  More of the latter, less of the former), but I think they absolutely had their heart in the right place, and they showed that a very simple LARP can still be a lot of fun.  They received well-deserved praise at the end, and I salute them.

HotBlooded: After Action Thoughts, part 1

I’m posting from the distant hinterlands of America, so I’m afraid I can’t post all that often, but I thought I’d at least take a little time to talk about my very first LARP while my impression was relatively fresh.  I don’t have pictures yet (they’re coming), so I’ll hold off on the actual report until I do.  But I can at least discuss my thoughts and theories behind the design of the game, why I think it worked despite the concerns of my editors, and what I learned from the experience.

I seldom LARP (very, very seldom), but I often listen to people discuss their experience.  I personally find that the greatest foe to LARPing (and RPing in general) is boredom.  Players need something to do and wandering about saying “How do you do?” and “My isn’t the weather lovely” makes for a terrible game.  Someone once argued that RPGs are 4 hours of work to get 1 hour of fun, and I don’t want that.  I want the players to hit the ground running, and so I tried to create a game that would explode as soon as it came into contact with the players. 

My editors found my approach overwrought.  “Are you writing a one-shot or a campaign?” they asked.  They pointed out that there was no way all of those story elements would come out, and that my details would overwhelm the players.  In some ways, I felt they completely missed what I was trying to do, and the general success of my LARP proves me right.  First, a campaign needs less work than a one-shot, not more.  In a campaign, we build story, layer by layer, session by session.  We can start with nothing and slowly build context.  In a one-shot, we don’t have the time for that.  Players need to know who they are and what they’re doing NOW.  Second, it’s true that not all my story elements would come out (thought at least one thought that large strokes would fall through, and that didn’t happen: Every major element showed up in the game), but that as the point.  I don’t know what players will like and what players won’t, and I don’t know how their interactions will shift the story.  NOTHING happened like I anticipated, but because of the ruggedness of my design, it remained terribly interesting.  For example, Rianne’s character was supposed to be the target of romance, but instead, all of the boys fixated on Sabrina and Desiree’s character.  And yet, Rianne’s association with the murder of Fyx Steele turned into a huge story element for her.  Some people have asked how I would know these things would happen, but the point is that I didn’t, and I wrote knowing that I had no control.  I gave everything enough material to keep them busy, and if one line of story failed, they had two more they could pick up, and that’s exactly how it worked out.  Finally, I too was concerned I would overwhelm the players (Erik Kamerman’s game certainly did, and I produced as much word-count as he did).  I tried to avoid this by carefully explaining how the system worked several times, and by making much of what they had to read optional.  However, I found that the players dug right into the game and weren’t confounded at all by the complexity.  I expect this was the result of two things, neither of which I had actually anticipated: First, I spoke a great deal with my players, asked them what they wanted and generally stoked interest in the game (entirely by accident).  Second, I put the LARP characters out about a month ahead of time.  This proved critical: Apparantly, the main problem with Erik’s LARP wasn’t necessarily the detail, but the fact that people only had two days(!!) to read it all up.

So, the LARP was a grand success.  I mean, really, a huge success.  I can’t tell how it rates in the grand pantheon of LARPs (I’m tempted to say that Jimmy’s LARPs are generally better, but I really have no idea).  I do feel it’s safe to say that “It was a success.”  I’ve outlined why I felt it worked, but I thought I’d touch on a few elements that were mixed or could be improved.

First, the system.  The more veteran players looked at me like I was crazy for including a system and, in general, it went well, but almost nobody used the “contest” system.  I think that’s John Wick’s intention: He included that not as something players would use all the time, but as something the players would touch on only if needed.  Still, there are elements of the Contest system I don’t like: If I spend 3 style persuading you, or 3 style contesting you, I’m still out 3 style either way.  Second, the contest can force players to do something they don’t want to do, and I’m not sure I like that.  At one point, Loes tried to force Hugo’s character to do something he simply wouldn’t do, knowing what he knew (she wanted him to kill someone he was allied with over something that Hugo knew that the character wasn’t involved with).  What if she had succeeded?  I could have declared Bad Form, or simply told her not to do it (which is what I did), but it would be nice if the system simply prevented things like that from happening.

Related to the system were the characters.  I found that players both loved and hated going over their character sheets and choosing.  Raoul argues that it’s a great mechanic as it encourages players to think about their characters in more detail than they normally would, and I think that’s true.  On the other hand, several players strained against their limitations, wanting to bring everything, and others couldn’t be asked to figure it out, and resented dealing with mechanics at all.  I doubt I could ever please both the mechanic and the fluff side of an RPG, though this system was a great compromise.  Still, most interestingly, I found that players didn’t care much for Aspects except as neat little additions to their character (I think players would have enjoyed them more if they didn’t have a simple list: they liked things like Heartbroken and Madness), but they really enjoyed the Special Powers aspect of their character.  If I had to write a new system, I’d probably make the kewl powerz front and center of the game, as players used those more than they used anything else except spies and soldiers.

The only complaints I really recieved were the servants.  Ironically, I had chosen to follow the advice of my editors and simplify, partially with the assumption that the servants would interface with their lords and work together.  This turned out to be partially untrue: the newer players felt they had no right to speak to their lords, to interrupt them.  Interestingly, the veteran players had no problem shifting their focus based on what was going on around them.  I could have given them even less material and they would have done just fine.  I think this is what my editors were talking about, as they generally run games for veterans.

The trading game was also very, very well recieved.  Having little pieces of paper helped a lot, I think.

The game began very slow.  There’s this sort of feigned stateliness that I just hate in LARPs.  People walk in with lifted chin and speak slowly and quietly, saying things like “Ahhh, how do you do?” and “Oh, it’s so lovely to meet you,” and it’s all a giant tea-party.  That’s lovely, if it’s what you’re looking for, but we want soemthing to happen.  We want drama and shocking revelations and tragedy!  For the first hour, this seemed to be all that was going on (though several disagreed and pointed out that they made big trades early on, and I certainly missed some elements of the game), and I worried that my game was going to devolve into mindless conversation, a sure sign that I had failed.  But once Raoul announced the murder of Fyx Steele, the game quickly accelerated into high gear, and when I closed out the game, I had several players giving me puppy-dog eyes asking for the game to keep going.  I still can’t decide if I made the right decision closing it out, but I certainly left them wanting more.  Still, there has to be some way to kick-start a game more quickly.  Those I ask are of two opinions: Some agree with me and think there must be a way to go faster, but most think that players need about an hour to “get into character” and to feel one another out.  Maybe that’s true

I’ve been bitten by the bug, and within a day, I was inventing an even better system (cough).  I think I need more exposure to LARPs before I try again, but I must say, I was very very pleased to make such ripples in the LARP community with my first effort ^_^

HotBlooded: Release Day

I’ve heard nothing from my editors, meaning that there’s no disaster in my material, and that means: Release day. I have a few things to work out, but I’ll be editing this post with constant updates.  Because I know you guys are totally watching this blog breathlessly.  Look, I’m excited, awright?  Awright.

^_^

Release day!

EDIT: Character sheets separated, and PDFed.  Cover Sheets complete.  Waiting on word about release.

EDIT: They want to have a meeting first.  Ok.  But that means we won’t see release until sometime after 5:00 pm 😦

EDIT: They’ve decided they want to send all the sheets themselves, so I went to bed.  Got to zip them all up now.  It’ll be a bit.  Hopefully today, though.

EDIT: It should be out!  Enjoy!

HotBlooded: Update

I finished the last of my second drafts today.  If I had to, I could send all the characters out right now.  I’m going to leave them for awhile, let my editors look it over (if they have time, it’s looking like they don’t), put together a rules summary, and then send.

I think it’s safe to predict that you guys should have your characters by Monday.  Then it’s just a matter of squaring away the servants, and then I’m done woohoo!

HotBlooded: But it's all wrong!

The LARP rapidly reaches completion.  I’ve sent the first draft of the Elk out to be edited, and I’m finishing up the first draft of the Fox as we speak, so I wanted to take some time out to tell you how the game really works, because I’m doing it all wrong.

This is the first impression many of you will have about Houses of the Blooded, and you might get the idea that this LARP is a normal representation of the game.  Rali Steele, for example, doesn’t have a Spy Network, while No Yvarai lacks Personal Guards or Roadmen.  All of the Fox have a set of resources they can bring and nothing else.  We have the Great Game, special rules for Espionage and so on.  None of this is in Houses of the Blooded.  All of it’s wrong.  John Wick designed HotBlooded for the long haul.  He meant you to play it over many, many sessions, building your land, gathering your strategems, watching your character grow old, put together a family, and die.  Obviously, we don’t have time for that in a one-shot LARP!  And so, I made concessions and design decisions that I thought would give my players a flash of insight into how HotBlooded works, without actually playing out all the excruciating details.

Land

In the LARP, your “land” is represented by what resources you can bring.  All Foxes, for example, can bring a Luxury or an Industry (which represents things like bolts of cloth, pottery, or other manufactured goods), and that’s it.  In the actual game, you have a highly detailed domain, filled with forests and villages and mountains, each producing their own resources, each with their own unique little buildings that benefit your character.  If you wanted to play Houses of the Blooded like a game of Civilization, you could!  And that would kind of be the point.

The problem is, of course, that you don’t have sessions and sessions to build up this land.  I don’t have time to explain and reveal the nuance of your domain to you.  In the real game, we’d expect that certain Houses might focus on certain elements (the Fox might focus on Luxuries and lack for Lumber, for example) and they might use up some of their resources and suffer the need for others (Can’t build that new building without some Lumber!) and thus, trading would come into the picture.  As Desiree’s character worried about how she would put together her new Opera House, she might borrow some of Raoul’s Lumber to do so, in exchange for some spare Luxuries she has floating around that she isn’t using.

In a one-shot LARP, there’s now way to make that work, so I just cut to the chase.  Every House has certain resources that it specializes in, and certain resources it needs.  This facilitates trading, but you can see that you’re missing out on lots of nuance and detail in the process.

Vassals

In the LARP, everyone has a couple of Vassals, usually a few bands, and some NPCs that they can bring, if they can find a player to play that character.  Duke Torr Adrente, for example, has military might, so he might have some Personal Guards and some Roadmen.  In the actual game, you have hosts of Vassals.  You can have one vassal band “per domain,” so Torr Adrente, as a Duke, might have ten domains, and in each domain, he might have a band of Personal Guards.  That’s 30 points worth of Personal Guards!  But you’d expect nothing less from a Duke of the Wolf!  Likewise, you’d expect that even if Spy Networks were not his focus, he’s have at least a few, if only to protect his lands from espionage.  He’d have maids, seneschals, artisans, apothecaries, an entire swarm of servants.

This is impractical in the LARP for several reasons.  As stated above, we’re not detailing out all of Torr’s land, so it’s hard to show you just how much power he has.  Rather than give him everything, we show what his specializations are and limit his options.  Presumably, even if Torr had 30 personal guards spread over 10 domains, he couldn’t bring them all to the party, so he’d just bring one… but having so many soldiers, he could certainly afford to do so!

The game doesn’t actually require that you represent all of your Vassals with physical players.  There’s a maid, as a vassal (a stat on your sheet) and a maid as an NPC (a person, with ideas and a story and stats!).  Only the latter needs to be represented with an actual person, of course.  However, I wanted to show you what it’s like to be Ven, actually have that sense of power, and that  means having someone to order around.  With so many people willing to assist in the LARP, I thought it would be nice to actually represent some of the maids and swordsmen and spy masters with actual people.

The Great Game

In the actual LARP rules, the Great Game is just a cute thing you can play “for points.”  It doesn’t really have the sweeping, political implications that I suggest in my LARP.  In reality, one would expect the sort of machinations represented in Banquet’s Great Game to take place over months.  In between LARP sessions, players would use “season actions” to do things like move soldiers onto a rival’s terrain, spy on an opponent, or build up his lands.  You’d see the evolution of politics session by session, like watching a game of chess in slow motion.  We don’t have seasons, so I’ve tried to summarize what would surely be an entire year worth of political intrigue into a single session.  Doubtless, it’ll be explosive, but you have to understand that it doesn’t normally work like that.

—

These aren’t the only minor tweaks I’ve made.  Quite a bit of the game relies on long term play.  Obviously, normally, players would make their own characters.  They would pick out their own enemies.  Their relationships would naturally evolve.  You wouldn’t need me to conjure up all of this material, as most of you would be doing it for one another.

But that’s not the nature of a one-shot.  In a one-shot, you have a single day to sort of “take in all the sights” of a particular system.  You can look at the LARP I’ve created as sort of a whirlwind tour of what Houses of the Blooded has to offer.  If you like it, dig in.  The real thing is a little different, a lot richer, and beautifully complex.

LARP Update

I finally have the rough draft on all (Ven) characters done!  I’ll spend some time editing them and rebalancing them, but hopefully, I’ll have a copy of them sent out to my editors before the end of the week, and then get them out to you guys next week.

Having the preview out already really lightens my work load!

The Beauty of LARPs

For the life of me, I cannot find the scene, but I believe it can be found in Amadeus, where Mozart extols the virtues of Opera.  If I remember correctly, he said something to the effect of “In a play, you can only have one actor speaking at a time.  More than that, and you lose what everyone is saying.  It stops making sense. But in an Opera, every can ‘speak’ at once, all singing in harmony with one another, and what they say matters less than the music that they make.”

As I’m putting together my LARP, I find that this metaphor works very nicely.  When I reveal portions of my LARP to others, some comment that it seems “awfully complex for a one-shot” and that “I don’t need to worry about so much.”  This might be true (I lack the perspective to know for sure), but, in my view, a LARP works very differently from a table-top game.  In a table-top game, you need to pick your focus and stick to it, as ultimately, you can only explore one thread at a time, preferably with everyone together at once so nobody feels left out.  You cannot have the Princess exploring her undying love with her champion at the same time that the Knight tries to uncover the mystery of his father’s death, even though these two elements might be tied together.  In a LARP, not only can you, you must.  You cannot stop the LARP and explore the princess’s elements and then shift to the Knight.  Instead, you’ll have the Princess doing her thing, and the Knight doing his, everyone amusing one another without interfering with each other’s “attention bandwidth.”  Everything is going on at once in this grand, harmonious cacophony, and only at the end can you stop and start to see the big picture.

So why am I making everything so rich and complex?  If you actually boil down my grand stories, you only find, roughly, 4-7 threads: One per House, and then a couple that mingle characters from the various houses (for example, there’s a thread surrounding the Scallywags, as well as a thread that, for example, will occupy the Elk).  Every player has a part to play in several of these threads: A player might be a hero in this thread, and a villain in that thread, as different characters see him from different perspectives.  Because I cannot know what elements will speak to a player and which will not, we add to the complexity by giving them a lot to choose from, knowing that they’ll pick a direction, a role, and go with it.  This means that not every player will be fulfilling every “threads” role, but every thread has more than enough players in it that they can likely keep it going.  For example, the Princess of the House of the Bear wants a strong, romantic thread for her character, but she’s not aggressive, and thus I must bring players to her.  I could pick a single player as her love interest, but what if he’s more interested in other things?  In such case, I’ve directed several characters in her direction for different reasons.  Thus, if only one out of those three is actually interested, she still gets her story, while the others have a sense of choice and direction.

The result, I hope, will take advantage of the inherit chaos of a LARP.  Instead of forcing players into parts, I’m directing movements and creating possibilities and paths, designed robustly enough (hence the “complexity,” which really isn’t complexity at all, but redundancy) that even if one element should fail, the general movement of the plot should continue and, hopefully, contain enough surprises that everyone enjoys themselves thoroughly.

How fitting, to describe a Houses of the Blooded LARP as an Opera…