Coherency - part 3

The things that happen in the world you create have to make sense. Maybe not to the players, but you have to understand why things happen and what the likely repercussions of your players actions are.

 You can change things after the time as long as you’re careful. I generally work to the following rules in most cases:

• Death should be final - even if you made a mistake. Once players are dead they are dead. Unless you had a built in mechanism that all players knew about it’s not worth the damage that undoing death will do. If necessary, admit you made a mistake, but apologise and move on.
• Acknowledge your players actions. There should be results for their actions. They don’t have to be the results that they wanted, but acknowledge their effort.
• It’s your game. Decide what’s important to you, lay it out clearly and stick to it. Accommodate players ideas, but within your structure. It helps you to stay keen, and it helps the game to have an identity. It’s fine to say no to people.  

UK LARP Awards

UK LARP Awards.

In recognition of the UK LARP Awards I am spelling LARP incorrectly. This is to enable you to find it when you search for it to nominate your favourite events.

The LARP Awareness Party is happening the same weekend at the same location. It’s worth getting involved. It’s a good weekend and making it better represent UK LRP is good. A wide range of systems promote there and it’s a good chance to talk to other LRPers about what’s going on, buy or order some new kit, listen to the odd talk, and talk to people you normally only see in fields.

Finding Events

The UK has a wide and varied LRP scene. There are a wide range of small games of different styles that happen across the country. Most of them I will never hear of.

The UK LARP Awards run annually (along with the sister event, the UK LRP Awards which runs in the same location at the same time but with more accurate spelling). They’re fun. It’s a chance for a host of LRPers to get together, chat, and heckle each other. They’re also biased towards certain groups of LRPers. They only represent the people that get involved with them. A lot of UK LRPers won’t really have heard of them and it probably won’t occur to them to attend. When you get to small systems, if only 30 play a system and none of those are people involved with the judging at the LRP awards then they will struggle to decide which system wins (especially if they only have a locked Facebook group and no webpage, which is pretty much standard for the very small systems).

R&R characters at fest games

At Mandala events our crew get 4 hours sleep a night and have to hot bunk. We do feed them and keep them hydrated and we ask them to do ridiculous stuff. They come back because they enjoy it, and this is what we expect of our crew at Empire. We want people who are committed to crewing because it’s what they enjoy, not people who see it as a way to pay for a free ticket

These are fairly small events (up to 60 players) and we know we’re at the demanding end of this. We do run through the night. We work shifts. We have people queuing up to crew our events. They enjoy crewing our events and we have a very high quality, independent, reliable crew.

Set Dressing

You can run an event with almost any setting. Your event will be better if you can phys rep the setting in which you are aiming to run your event. I take this seriously. It's something that can really make you up your game.

It applies to everything - to the world, to the rules, to the costumes, and to the technology. In my opinion, if you're having to tell people what they're looking at you're doing it wrong.

We love SciFi events, and we try to do them well. We're pretty good at making the inside of a building look fairly futuristic, but we'll be the first to admit we struggle with dressing the outside of a scout site. We can do pretty cool looking set pieces, but we can't cover all that 'England' with something more blingy. 

The inside looks pretty sci fi

Mechanics

For the events I want to run I would like my players to be able to do things that they can't do in the real world. 

The players are reacting to a story. Even in a heavily Player versus Monster game you're relying on your players to interact and get involved with the world you've given them to make the story. Intense moments can come from putting players under stress and making them have to work to achieve things in difficult situations This tends to be a large part of games we run. Examples include the basics such as trying to rescue an injured comrade while people are trying to shoot you, and clearing a building knowing there's a good chance something bad is hiding in one of the rooms through to trying to replace parts for the power system whilst lying in a tunnel that's barely wider than you are in the dark with only one arm and a glow stick, or balancing meds on a critical patient and fighting to keep them alive. 

Plot and Choice

It's very easy to write a story for an event. It's vastly harder to write plot. It's even less likely to write plot that makes sense after the players get to it, and you'll need to have some mechanics to enable the players to make an utter mess of the plot you've carefully created for them.

At the start of an event the players have a situation. They have a reason to be where they are, and some stuff they know about how they got there. For Dark Hearts the players were Heros who had answered the Empires call and gone to save resources/villagers from an approaching orc force. For Alone often the players were an engineering crew or soldiers who were being sent to a suspect location by some corporation.  For Slender events we're paranormal investigators going to somewhere where paranormal activity has been reported. With a 'Saw' themed event you might wake up in a small room with no idea how you got there and possibly minimal information about who you are.

I like to start my events with very little background. I know why I believe I'm there, and I know what I think I'm trying to do, but usually this is the extent of my knowledge (other than how my char fits in with the wider world). We do get players who want more. I can understand that that's their style of play, but given the way we write games and the way I think about the games I'm writing it's hard to work out what extra information our players are after. Briefings are given in game, often by the commanders the players have picked themselves, or packs are handed over at the pub in the hours before time in, and the players are dropped in running.

I tend to find people who run events have patterns they tend to follow regarding pacing. Some of this is dictated by timings they run to, but event those are often chosen and stuck to by organisers. For example, at Mandala 24 hour time in means 24 hour things happening at all hours and if we think too many people are sleeping we'll find ways to wake some of them up. At other games often much less happens from 2-3am until 10am. We benefit from having refs who are early risers and others who sleep late. We have shift systems for monsters to ensure people are awake through the night and time out between midnight and 3 on the sunday morning to give people a chance to sleep.

We also like to time out at a dramatic moment. We will build up to a shuttle launch, or final large battle and rarely play through the effects of it for long. Players can make that bit happen without us.

We've had to ban individual 'thank you' speeches. Too many people were getting missed because having run on almost no sleep for the last few days and built up to running around with flares in the dark to make that ending special for the players is not conducive to remembering who you have to thank. People always get missed and they're inevitably tired enough that it's not as easy to ignore as it should be.

Events normally involve things happening for us. These can be the result of things we do, the result of things the players do or things that are entirely unexpected and no one ever works out quite how they happened. Usually there are things that players can't stop. Some of these are things that've happened before the players got there. We like to give players choices and have things that happen as a result of the choices the players make. If the players feel they were responsible for the choice they're more likely to feel personal responsibility for the effects of that choice.

We aim to give the appearance of choice. We cannot guarantee what the players will do, and we aim to have options for as many of their actions as we can predict. You can often give the illusion that the players actions are having an effect whereas both of the two most likely choices had the same outcome. We will ignore entire sections of game if the players don't take the hook even if it means they don't get to see a lovingly prepared set piece. The set piece doesn't add value if it's forced in to a plot where it doesn't belong. There have to be coherent reasons for each happening even if the players can't work out what they are. 

We have people who spend most of their time at our events writing and rewriting plot to respond to the players actions. Finding out what the players are planning and working out how we respond to things are major uses of our resources. We've had one game where the plot was being rewritten constantly and had five major rewrites with new endings and new story lines over the course of the weekend. They did end up with an ending very similar to the one we'd originally written, but that was by no means a sure thing and they took an entirely different route than planned to get there. For that event we had a few people comment to us that the plot had seemed a bit linear.