Evolution

Fest events are the hub of LRP. Not everyone goes to them, but they help to provide links between large numbers of LRPers from different systems and to help information flow around the community.

With so many people with so many different opinions and interests communication is vital. We have several large systems in this country (Summer Fest, CP, LT, Empire, The Vale…) and each has a core of its own players who may not play anything else, or may play games only attended by other members of that system.

Ruined Cottages on Lundy

There are a huge number of games in this country that I barely hear about. I used to play Skullduggery when I lived in Kent. I spoke to Dan Lagrue last night, and the games changed utterly since i was last there. So much they’re playing a different game. I hear and see images from a whole range of games that are right on the edge of the circle I interact with. They’re often things I’m not especially interested in and I mostly ignore them. Every now and then something catches my eye and if I'm free and it's within budget and other people are interested we try it. I suspect it’s similar for most LRPers.

Do we end up with a lot of similar mush? I don’t think so in the whole. We may stop one or two people from proceeding with plans, but we seem to be getting a wider and wider variety of games at the moment. I was reading about LRP in Croatia (http://www.crolarper.com) and they seem to be splitting in a similar way. LRP is evolving fast. Technology supports a much wider range of things. The LRP and AR boundaries are blurring. We have more money, a more developed idea of what's possible and more expertise that we seemed to have ten years ago when I started (I certainly have all of those things, but I've gone from being a student with limited LRP experience to this).

Whilst a lot of games emulate games that have gone before, the majority of people running games want to do better. They have ways to improve and they want to try it for themselves. Cross communication can constrict creativity (“We tried that and it didn’t work”) but with the right people running games it isn’t a major issue.A lot of people will hear that it’s been tried, consider why it didn’t work and build on that. ZapFest for us was something completely new. We had no idea if it would work. Jurassis LRP is the same. Eye LARP are running a Nutcracker inspired game (https://www.facebook.com/events/333838756796280/), which is a deviation from the normal well defined genres. We've got many more games with cinematic and trust based rules systems (again, my experience).

There is a game I wish I'd played. I often visit Lundy, an island 13 miles off Devon. There was a game that ran there that has reached almost mythical levels of awesome in my mind. I can't imagine how they pulled it off. It apparently even had underwater monsters pulling people off boats. I am aware that nothing I have run has reached that level, and that I don't know how to take what I am running to that level, but it is there as a target. One day I will be able to say that I ran something that good.

Ideas

 As anyone who's been around me in the last 12 months probably knows. Our next game is going to be dinosaurs. It's not the only thing we're talking about.

Mandala have been really good at Sci Fi. We're currently being really good at qwirky one offs. We don't run games that require downtimes. We don't run games that have recurring characters unless you're Jon Bliss. When I asked him if he would play his character again he told me what he wanted to have done since the last event. I had to explain that he was still in the same place in stasis and was not aware of anything since the last event. If anything he seemed more keen. 

We're still discussing what next. Slender is giving us ideas, but running something so close to what we play may not be the best immediate plan. There will be another Sci Fi game eventually. We need to get the software written before we write the game, and we'd quite like a really stunning site, but that requires a bit of looking. 

We've got one game that we've been holding onto for several years. It's a prison game. We've not yet found a prison. We've even bought and made props for it. We're holding out for somewhere perfect, so if you have a site that would make a nice sci fi prison let us know. I'd also like to run a paranoia game (who doesn't) which probably wants a similar site. 

We've talked about running something larger - a monster hunter fest game. I have some idea of the amount of work that would go into that and am absolutely certain that none of us have the time to make that happen at any point soon. 

We have also discussed shorter more intense horror games. They'd run at about 12 hours and I suspect we'd try and run twice over a weekend with lower player numbers. 

I would like to build a cube and run games for two people. Lock them in as a remote listening station for a post apocalyptic game. Make it a space station for a sci fi, or use it for a horror game. If we had a small room with a toilet that we could isolate from the workshop but that was close enough that we could use it we'd probably try that. I'm not sure how it would work, and it would take a lot of repeats for it to pay for itself, but it's something a bit different that might prove interesting to write for. 

I'd also like distributed LRP. We convince people up and down the country to convert a room to a cold war listening station. They'd need a computer and an internet connection. Then they role play according to the radio messages etc that they get. I'm not entirely sure when this stops being LRP.


I'm going to leave you with a link Paul Wilder shared with us, that I think is worth passing on. 
 Claus Raasted telling German LRPers how to get him to their games.

Strange Encounters

We write visually. We’re normally looking to produce key visual moments that the plot runs through. When we’re writing plot we will be talking about the moment the players first see the alien queen, or a player having to reach into the chest of a corpse, remove the heart, and destroy it, and we will work to make it happen. These moments are way markers. They may vanish from the final draft of the plot, but they help shape and direct what’s going to happen over the course of a weekend. Most of our events have major plot contained within a weekend.

A lot of our events are stand alone. When we’re writing for larger systems the plot will flow over a longer time period and if the players don’t reach the set scene then we’re not going to force it.With the alien queen moment we wanted her to be seen by some players and then vanish. We had tried to keep her secret and she was a lot bigger than players had any right to expect. We wanted her to become mythical, to be something that people saw and other people doubted, before the whole group could encounter her. As a result, we pictured that moment as having 5-12 players seeing her and running. With the heart scene it was going to be very intense for a small group of players, but as you added more it would work less well, so we restricted it to 5 players.

 I don’t believe that key scenes need to be seen by everyone. Each scene will have a number of people it works for, and to increase this is to dilute the effect. If you have more people than can immediately react to what is going on then there will be people stood around. With LRP often this is the point where you take the excitement and involvement that they have built up and let it drain away. It will result in a degree of disempowerment. The look of an awesome set will only occupy them for so long and then it will stop being game building. 

Hearing about something awesome happening does make people feel they’ve missed out. I heard about a lot I wasn’t involved in at Slender, and as I missed most of the key moments it changed the pace of the event for me. However, I was always somewhere else doing something else. I have some awesome visual images of the events that were described, and I was never left bored, but watching with 40 other people. Hearing about things going on that you don’t see does help build up a game world a bit. 

For each encounter I’m running I know how I want it to look. I know how many people will probably be present. I know which of those people are directly involved and hence get the full force and while are bystanders, and I hope to have an idea how long people will be bystanders for. We put a lot of effort into ensuring that if an encounter will only suit 5-6 people then only 5-6 people at a time get to experience it. We do expect players to share a bit, and we will have other things happening to occupy the rest of the players. We may not let players know limits before. This can lead to disappointment.

 Bystanders aren’t bad. There’s a moment of panic when you realise that you’re stood watching something really dodgy going on and no one’s doing anything. The more bystanders you have the less likely they are to react to what you’re doing. This is one reason why when we write a plot that involves people stopping the evil guys doing the clearly bad ritual so often no one does. Conversely, There are people who prefer doing to watching. LRP has a lot of them. They won’t appreciate being asked to watch something happen for long periods of time. Whichever situation you plan for you’ll get the other. 

Disappointment can be a game killer. However, the aim is to have enough going on at a game that each player gets to do things that other people don’t, and whilst someone might miss out on one thing, they should hopefully get to see other things. We do run some encounters more than once. Three lots of 5 people talking with the hag in the woods is better than 15 people talking to the hag in the woods. They’ll have different conversations and probably play into PVP stuff that needs encouraging. Plus it’s scarier being in the woods with 5 than with 15. You sneak rather than stomp and you don’t rely on numbers to save you. There’s a much higher chance that you’re the slowest runner.

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.