Writing for the real world

Good sites are hard to find. Finding interesting and innovative sites that are set up be used requires hours of work. My own personal limits include no site that doesn’t have water and I’m not hiring toilets. I suspect I would break the second one for the right location.

I’m lucky to be with Mandala, we have facilities for catering for large numbers of people and a generator as well as tents. We’re set up to be able to run in reasonably basic locations. We also have people stupid enough to try it.

Running modern day events either involves looking at the standard hostels, campsites and hotels or finding a building that’s abandoned/between uses, but that hasn’t degraded to the point of being unsafe/not having water and toilets. That’s actually a fairly small window. I’ve done bat surveys in buildings that have been empty for only 2-3 years and they’re already falling apart in ways that would make them unsuitable for living in or around, which we need for our events.

Events don’t have to be based on one location. As long as you have enough transport for the number of players that need to move between sites you’re okay. We’ve never tried this. The games we’ve run haven’t suited it due to genre (there’s been talk of locking people into the back of a van dressed as a shuttle, but we’ve not done it). However, games I’ve played have. We were all taken off to a tea room from SlenderLRP to talk to the staff and find out more history of the location we were in.

I really enjoy LRP being merged with the real world. Modern day LRP gives you an entirely functional economy (although you’re a little limited in the range to which you can phys rep a rich character, for example), it has the largest number of NPCs you’ll ever have. Players have a huge world to explore (as long as you can safely lose them).

That last one is a point. If players have the entire world to explore you need to work out why they would stay in the places you want them to stay in, or whether it matters if they do. For example, you’ve put them in a building filled with ghosts and murder. Why do they not just leave? You can lock the building down, or you can accept that they will need to play characters that will choose to stay. You’ll need to ensure they find reasons not to run. Most players will work with this.

Visits add realism. Giving people targeted locations that they can go and explore adds to the depth of a game, and makes things feel much more real. Also car journeys are pretty good for interplayer communication and giving people a chance to catch up on what’s going on. Plus I have been to the Northwest three times now and not made it to a beach. I want to LRP on a beach (You heard me!).

Using multiple sites also allows you to look at the those sites you couldn’t use (because they’re museums during the day, utter ruins with no toilets, don’t have anywhere for people to sleep etc) and find ways to build them into your game. You can take a group around a stately home looking for information - it’s an increase in the ticket cost, but it adds value, and gives your crew a chance to rebuild the main location.

If you’re running a real world game, then your major advantage is the real world. It’d be a waste not to use it, and any character you’re playing would have to get by in the real world in order to manage normal life.

Blending with reality

Modern Day LRP - set in the real world in the current universe.

This falls into two categories. You might playing with normal characters. They start as pretty standard people and get slowly more and more changed by their experiences. Alternatively you’re playing edge cases who are already pretty strange and expecting things to be weird - for example vampire games seem to work in this area.

For me, with a modern day game, dealing with real people is an important part of the setting. It’s something I would have to do if it was real, and it’s something I have to do in a realistic game.

So you’re at a game, you go out to a pub for lunch, and you’re still ic. This is sometimes how these things work. I’m completely fine with this. Other people aren’t. I’m putting this down to a couple of things:

• My normal life is pretty strange. I spend a lot of time sat in pubs writing games or building creatures. The conversations I have when pretending to be someone else are often far more normal than my standard pub conversation.
• I don’t really care what people think, as long as I don’t get shot because of it. None of those people know me. Most of them have barely registered I’m there and very few are actually listening to me. If they are and I’m discussing demons - that’s not actually illegal. I very rarely play characters that would plot murder in the pub when I might be overheard, so it’s not a problem for me.

At SlenderLRP I found myself stood in one of the offices in the building with the normal resident watching us in fascination whilst arguing about various game aspects. He didn’t mind. Most people don’t, and we gave him a chance to kick us out very early on. (He seemed very keen for us to be there).

Writing this blog has brought my worlds together. I know people from work and family members read it, and I suspect for a lot of them it’s entirely outside the realms of their experience. It’s not going to make a lot of sense to someone who doesn’t know the LRP world. It’s apparently not making a huge amount of sense to people who are on the periphery.

Yet people are choosing to read it. People have mentioned it to me at the office and at home. I’m never entirely sure how to respond to that. Do I tell people more? Do I offer to take them to an event? (I don’t actually do this anymore. I don’t play enough in enough systems to make this something I want to do. I’d think about it for Slender, but you’d have to ask.) Do I show them photos or tell them stuff about it? I honestly don’t believe I can give a good idea of what LRP is about without taking someone to a game.

When talking to people about LRP - especially none LRPers - I tend to default to the assumption that LRP is fantasy. This annoys me when other people do it, and it annoys me when I do it as well. Scifi is hard to do well (visually), but actually, so is fantasy. Modern day is the easiest of the lot. The public image of LRP is almost entirely fantasy. The Sci fi is probably too close to airsoft and gets bundled in with that, and I’m not sure how much good modern stuff there is. Does it happen in America or Germany? Whilst the Nordic stuff is often modern day, it’s not a game in the sense of what i mean by a LRP game.

Modern day always feels like it should be a far more accessible and interesting game to people than fantasy is. It feels like an interesting route into the LRP world. It’s a chance to play with things that are much closer to life as it is typically experienced than your fantasy game is. The Old Courts Theatre and Events are running a zombie experience. Mike said that none LRPers will pay £70 for one evening because they don’t know about LRP. They aren’t aware they could pay a similar amount for a whole weekend. There are a range of Zombie attractions around the country and people love them. Airsoft is similar but with more guns. People are already paying a lot of money for a few hours of LRP without knowing that the modern LRP world is out there. Yet we tend to talk about fantasy and vampire first, and only add Sci Fi and modern day stuff later.

Scared of the Dark

I am scared of most things (The dark, people, small spaces, long drops, large black cats, spiders, zombie spiders, people etc) I’ve mentioned this before. It really helps with buy in. I am honestly scared of whatever situation I am in most of the time at events (if I’m meant to be scared). Alternatively, I can imagine being scared of it, and use empathy to act appropriately and feel scared.

When we write we expect a degree of this from the players. If you’re playing a game and a situation calls for you to think a certain way you’ll get a lot more out of the scene if you can bring yourself to feel the required emotion. It also helps to improve the game for others, and a lot of LRP is a collaborative effort. We’re telling a story together, and although you may be fighting for a more prominent part in the story you are all trying to tell that story. 

I suspect this is one reason why Zapfest ended up being so much about the acting game. We had created a game for special snowflakes - for people who want to the be the centre of attention, and it really worked. However, this meant the on stage stories were competing and it was the offstage story that was most important.

Trying to catch out the big bad by asking a question it is less likely to know ruins the effect for it and the people around you (sorry Matt, well played). Turning on the lights as you’re all creeping through a dungeon and jumping at shadows is likely to ruin the moment. Packing for a horror event requires thought as to how to be scared. Whilst all LRP is comedy, it’s also deeply serious at moments, and needs planning and preparation to make it work.

A few basic things you can do with horror:

• Make torches rubbish. We normally run games with a 2 AA batteries or handheld only rule. We play games with uv torches and red gel over them to make them less effective, and then we find reasons to do that. I often use a lantern that illuminates me and the steps beneath me, and only gives me hints that there’s something out there.
• Split up. It’s really hard to be scared when there’re fifty of you. Visit the big bad alone, let other people visit the big bad alone. Work together to find reasons that things can get to you.
• Don’t hole up somewhere warm with proper light and easily sealed doors. If you OOC know they can’t get to you you’re forcing them to break the moment to move the monsters through a barrier or leave you be. Neither of these carry on the fear. There’s always a reason the safe option isn’t the best option, and whilst it might require doing something stupid you decide on your characters reasoning. No matter how much you talk about it in the third person your character is based on you and hence you can find a way to make them do the thing that gets you the game.
• Make sure someone knows where you are, if you care. I can quite happily terrify myself in the woods for a couple of hours by letting my imagination run away with the noise created by a mouse running past. However, if no one knows where you’ve gone then they can’t send anything to get you and more importantly eventually they get worried you might have fallen down a well.
• Take a radio. If the game allows carry a radio. That way when you fall down a well and get eaten by a terror mouse you can radio your fear back to base and they can share it while the people running the game wet themselves with laughter until they realise they’ve not sent any monsters out and whatever’s eating you is actually real.

Admittedly I play horror games, and I don’t go to be kept in my comfort zone. I stuck to that for the first 18 years of my life and things improved immeasurably as soon as I started taking risks and making things happen.

Slender - Nov 2014

Most of my writing so far tonight has been utterly uninspiring. I've filed it away to revisit later (I have a long document of titles and text that I haven't used yet) and instead I'm going to talk about what's on my mind. 

Tomorrow night I am going to SlenderLrp. We're going to the old courts in Wigan and staying in a city centre building for the weekend. It's a huge building, having previously been a mix of council offices, and magistrates court, and it has a lot of period features and odd corners and is inhabited by some of the stranger residents of the North West. I haven't looked forward to an event this much for a long time. 

I have a character I really like, a history and a need to know more, to follow threads and to understand what's going on. It's perfect. 

I am aware that too much anticipation can ruin an event. The last slender event was very very good, but in my mind it's been amplified by my enjoyment of it. I am holding it on a pedestal and it is unfair to expect this event to live up to that memory. As much as anything, even if it is a spectacular event it will only be as good as the last one. So, I am tempering my enthusiasm and looking forward to an adequate event. That way it stands a good chance of being better than I am expecting. 

It's a nice system. The characters are normal people so the themes can fit nicely into normal everyday life with almost no thought. The drive up will be in character, the site is in the middle of a town and all of those people will be our npcs. We've got the technology we're used to and the world that we are saving really exists. The boundaries are there. They had problems at the last one when they planted a sound system ic, and all the players worked around it. We assumed it was an ooc thing to create the effects. There will be places we can't go and rooms we can't see, and we'll have to be a little bit careful about summoning fake police to a real workplace. However, that's not a massive compromise to make for such an immersive environment. 

I love that we're running a fake paranormal investigation in a building that is used by real paranormal investigators. I also love that we'll see far more than they do. 

I'm going to leave it here tonight. I'm not up to anything especially insightful, so you'll have to bear with me until next week when I'll go back to thinking about writing things instead of playing.

What is UK LRP

Since I started this I’ve had an awful lot of people tell me I should cover the LRP/Larp debate, usually while giggling suspiciously. I stand firmly on one side of the debate. That’s mostly because it’s funny, and also because Vampire added the ‘A’, and Vampire isn’t what I think of as LRP.

There are a range of different things that count as LRPing to various different people. I know that my definition now would not match my definition 5 years ago, and if I can’t agree with myself then I shouldn’t expect other people to either.

In the UK we have a wide range of different systems claiming to be LRP - and they probably are. We have systems with about 10 and others with several thousand people. We cover genres from modern day, lovecraft, 1950s, 1930s, dark ages, fantasy, sci fi, post apocalyptic, and a range of others. We have systems that have no rules, and others that have rule books the size of a dictionary. We have systems where anything is a weapon (apparently they’ve been known to use benches), events with nerf guns, with foam swords, and others where there’s no combat. There’s star gate, star wars, serenity and next year we’re even running Jurassic LRP. This is amazing, because if you want to play it it probably exists.

I know very little about LRP in other countries. I haven’t played them, and whilst I haven’t played most games in the UK either, a lot of my friends have. I hear a lot about what they like and don’t like. I see photos, and whilst photos aren’t the best way of judging a game they do give you some idea, at least of what players and organisers consider important. I also know very little about UK LRP. We were talking about the LRP awards the other night. It was mentioned that it’s not representative of UK LRP. Of course it’s not. It was started as something fun. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. The counter argument was that people outside of LRP don’t know that. That if they take the results seriously and think they they’re representative then then won’t know about the broad range of events that are out there.

I still don’t know about the broad range of events that are out there.

There isn’t one group of LRPers in the UK. Even at the fest level it’s broken down into CP players, Empire plays, LT players, Vale players, F&Hers, and all those circles overlap. When we started playing Slender I didn’t know the people running it. They run games in a style we love, and like the same sort of things as us, but despite both groups having been involved in running LRP in the UK for over a decade we didn’t know each other because we weren’t in the same circles. A huge number of games are never really advertised and remain something for a select group of people. New people joining the hobby will never get an accurate picture of what’s going on in the UK. Does it matter that they will see something listed as the ‘Best UK LRP’ try it, and not really get an idea of what’s really out there?

UK LRP is very undefined and that’s one of its best features. You can decide what’s important to you and you’re not constrained by a very set idea of how LRP should be (individual players may have more set ideas, but people as a whole are very accepting). We can try things and people will go along with it. We aren’t necessarily trying to change the world, or our view point. We’re mostly having fun - even if by fun we mean being scared witless in the dark for 30 hours straight.

Is it real?

I try to play some events. I believe that playing events helps improve the quality of the events I run. It gives me insight into how some things play through and what players are really thinking. I managed to go three years without playing anything. Previous to that I mostly played fantasy fest games. Then I moved to running sci fi. I honestly believe that isn't a sci fi game out there that's an improvement on Alone. Feel free to make suggestions if you think you have something.

I play fantasy fest LRP again. I returned to CP and it has, for me, become a really lovely system. It suits the players it has, and has a really good atmosphere. I also tried modern horror games. I love these as well. They feel to me like they have much more in common with the games we're running, although they're still different genres and we tend to close in and control the players environment much more.

Games make more sense if they’re set into a coherent universe. Each of the Alone games was tied together by being part of a coherent back story. We knew what was happening and why, and we knew about it in the sense of the greater story. There was a survivor of the first game (technically there were two) and we knew for each of the following games where he was in relation to the players. Each game built on the last. I don’t think most of the players knew. It wouldn’t have mattered if they did. It affected how we wrote, not how they played.

Similarly, a player needs a background - this can be really simple or really complicated. I often build them up ic, they don’t exist until they need to. However, no one needs to know that background. It is for the player to inform their choices and put themselves into the world.

Characters should feel real. They need to add to the world in the same way as the npcs, and the settings and the stories do. They should feel like they have a place and are tied to it.

When we write a character creation process we will often put in a detail that we want to know. It’s very easy to play a caricature. To take one element of a character and amplify it beyond what is logical. This doesn’t make for a natural feeling character and I tend to find it jarring.

The decisions we make help to determine how much we enjoy the game we’re playing. For example, if we don’t find reasons for our characters to go out and do things it can be quite easy to just sit around and hope that stuff happens and then get bored. We decide whether our character will go to an event or not, and how they’ll feel about certain situations. I’ve never played a character that’s interested in rituals because I find them dull. This doesn’t have to involve making unnatural decisions.

You Monsters!

Most events involve crew of some sort. They play the parts the players don't cover. They're often npcs and sometimes also monsters. In our games we tend to have a mix of both. The majority of crew are distinctly humanoid and this does limit the variety of roles that they can play. They can't fly, they haven't got 8 functional limbs and they're typically between 4 and 7ft tall.What's even worse than this, frankly inexcusable, is that most of them can't walk on stilts.

However, if they were a varied bunch who could play an assortment of inhuman beings and possessed the skills to make our special effects unnecessary that would also be a pain. We'd have to know exactly who was crewing an event before making costume for it, and buying morph suits to suit a range of limb quantities is bound to push the price up.

Because of what we do in the workshop, and that we like to think we run cinematic events, we tend to try and provide high quality monsters and something that goes a bit further than at your average event. It's one of the reasons we run so much in the dark (another being that a lot of our costumes get incredibly warm if warn in the sun for too long). For Alone we had the aliens. Wookie made about 7 for the first event, and they were on paper suits. Over time we moved them onto black morph suits, built more and made other changes. We ended up with about 12 suits, and each one used £90 of materials. I spent weeks gluing the things together before Alone 2. Given the resources we have we were still right at our limit to produce these things, and yet what really made them was the crew. 

We specifically wanted tall crew with a chest size larger than their waist size. This last point was important. The costumes looked wrong on people with a belly. When someone puts on an alien costume they typically look like a man in an alien costume. As such they're about as scary as a man in an alien costume, that is, for most LRPers they're just not scary at all. 

With the original alien costumes they took very tall actors and made them taller. The actor looked out through the neck, the shoulders were built up and the heads were several feet long. They wouldn't work for what we were asking our crew to do. Those of you that aliened for us over the years will know that you had very small spaces to see through, and effectively had to breath through a straw. Thank you for your awesome work.

So we asked our crew to act differently. Simply changing their stance made them look utterly different. This went through several iterations. We needed interactions that produced fear in the players, and a lot of the time having just a few aliens around and them staying in the tree line, being half seen was good. We typically wanted to build the aliens from a distance, and have them as a suggestion initially and then have more impact later. We wanted the players to feel surrounded especially when they had holed up and were refusing to come out of the buildings. 

That actually caused some of our more difficult situations. The players had gone to ground and wouldn't come out. We dropped off the pressure to try and get them exploring (this was a mistake I think. We got both negative and positive feedback for it) When we couldn't bring them out and had pulled out the entire crew for hours we sent the crew into the building. Which meant a full scale assault and blowing a few doors away. We should have found other ways to split the players up. We shouldn't have let them all go to ground together. We gave them an option that meant they were shut up in a small space and wouldn't leave it, so they took it.

Building non humanoid monsters is possible. Lizzie - our alien queen - was a puppet that was mounted on a back pack. She was a bit too heavy for a single puppeteer to use (especially given that Mandala staff all have back problems) and became a static installation. We now have better ideas on how to build this sort of thing. Those of you that were at Empire may have seen the war rhino, which was the work of Bill Thomas. It took several people to carry, but bought a new dimension to the battlefield and required a totally different set of techniques to deal with it. 

For monsters that are large, especially if they're being used to fight in, they tend to bring their own issues. They typically need ref supervision. The person wearing the costume often can't see or move properly and hence needs someone to monitor them, make sure they're coping, tell them when they've been hit, and in the case of the war rhino ensure they don't trample dying heroes. Building costumes that can stand up to a fight and be LRP safe is a different design challenge than building costumes that the players only have to talk to. 

Large, inhuman monsters can add a nice dimension to an event. We spend a lot of time thinking about how we use them. Typically we use them in the dark, we limit the time the players can see the monsters clearly, we make sure the crew are briefed with the atmosphere we want to create, and we only use them for the appropriate number of players. Things have more atmosphere if you're alone.