Larping 101

This isn’t quite a guide or a class on fundamentals. Just my thoughts about running a larp and the difference that makes one situation good or another great.

Running a larp is more art than science. I used to have debates over which is more important: the story or the characters. I used to come down that it was 50/50. Both were equally important. Now I believe I was wrong. The characters (players) are far, far more important than the story.

See, the story doesn’t have any meaning without the characters there to give it meaning. You can be the Shakespear of writing but if you can’t get any of your players onboard with your ideas, you’ve ultimately failed.

The point is that you have to sell your plots to the players. There are a number of ways to do that. Bottom line is, the more personal and immersive you make it for the player, the more they will buy into your plot. Once that happens, they will work to complete that plot, because everything really comes down to ‘solving’ the game.

The big secret is that most larps are, more or less, murder mysteries. The game starts with a mystery. The players work to solve it, by unravelling the clues and figuring out what is ‘actually going on’. Then it often ends with a big fight against a bad guy.

As such the players need to be compelled to ‘solve’ the mystery. If they don’t buy into it, then your plot either progresses unimpeded (which is kinda dumb if you think about it) or stalls out. If the later, then the GM often is forced to ram it down the player’s throats to get them to take notice of it.

So selling a plot is key. And the best way to sell it? Well, this IS a larp. Immersion is what larpers come for. Therefore running scenes for the characters is crucial. I’ve found that players don’t always respond well when you write stuff for them to read. Reading a turn is informative but it’s not immersive. Only a small number of players get a lot out of reading a turn. Most players get a LOT more out of running their character through a scene. In some cases, simply because it was a scene, the player immediately ‘buys in’. In other cases, the scene must be more compelling to the player/character for them to buy in.

Then we get to another little element which I’ve picked up on after finishing Heavy Rain. It’s about the stages of Progression.

Players start everything blind. They’ve not lived in this world but are trying to pretend they have. They rely on the Storyguide for information to know how to make their first choices in this world. Baby steps if you will. Once they’ve taken their Baby steps they are often ready to find a plotline to dive into.

So they look for information that appeals to them. That’s Stage 1. There has to be something that interests the player (and I say player a lot because you are appealing to both the player and character at the same time). Heavy Rain was ‘easy’ because, with the backgrounds provided, I KNEW that some players would jump on particular monsters.

Example: Wayne’s background named Sethra as his nemesis. Thus when Sethra was listed as one of the main bad guys, I knew he and his group would focus on them. Steph and Lorne came into the game with missing children. Thus, when Father was potentially kidnapping children, it was not great surprise when they focused on him.

Stage 2 is a broad big stage. I call it the information stage (for lack of anything more snazzy). The information stage is where the player is collecting the information about the plotline that they are following. The information stage can take a long time, if the plot is big enough. The information stage is critical because too much information and the player solves your plot too quickly. But too little information, providing confusing information or conflicting information is dangerous.

And I’m going to have to go on a tangent here: I will maintain until I die, that a Storyguide does a grave injustice when they specifically put in false information and red herrings into a story. They do nothing but hurt the story entirely. I will go as far to say that any storyguide who does this is flat out wrong.

The reason why I’m so adamant about this is because of one simple truth: Players are legendary for misunderstanding, misinterpreting and generally fucking up the 100% truthful information that is presented. It’s rare that they intentionally do this, but rather it is the PurpleMonkeyDishwasher theory. Players will just screw up the information on their own, through little fault of their own. Thus, I’ve NEVER seen a reason as a Storyguide to ever give false information.

Instead, I’ve seen countless times where giving false information will destroy the fun for players. A player spends months of downtime looking into something, providing other players with lies and ultimately, they find out that what they were looking into was wrong and they feel that they’ve utterly wasted months of their time. I’ve also been in a Sunfall quest where I was paraded around for hours doing a red herring. To find out that I was duped by the game and actors was no small source of resentment on my part. I was hours behind solving anything in the game and as such, I had already ‘lost’.

Getting back to the point, and I’m not done with Stage 2 but I must then explain Stage 3: Progression.

Progression, I’ve come to realize, is critical. The players MUST feel that they’ve Progressed the plot. However, going back to the 101 lesson: I’ve realized that a lot of us storyguides easily confuse Stage 2 for Stage 3.

We get into a mistake that Stage 2: collecting information IS synonymous to Stage 3: Progression. But it is not.
Progression means that you’ve actually moved the plot forward. That the plot has shifted in some way to change it. But again, we storyguides fool ourselves into thinking that, by virtue of the fact that we’ve provided the player with information that the player feels a sense of satisfaction. Well the player does get the Stage 2 satisfaction. They’ve gotten the satisfaction that they went from Stage 1 to learning something more about the plot.

But make no mistake: Stage 3 is just as critical as Stage 2. Information is NOT progression. Progression means that the player has somehow influenced or changed the plot line in some fashion. They have done something to impact the game.

I’ve got some wonderful examples from Heavy Rain, my last larp. It was a hunters game that took place in a universal that I said ‘bordered both my own Kingdom Come world and that of the hit TV show Supernatural’.

In HR, I provided the players with a list of ‘assignments’. This list displayed the general monsters in the game.

A player could, in one month Investigate (Stage 2) and hunt down and kill (Stage 3) anything on the list. As they killed the monster it would be crossed of the list. That is a very basic example of Progression.

One of the monsters, a werewolf leader named Haight, had his own little storyline. Once some players focused on him, during Stage 2 they learned that if he wasn’t stopped by the November game, he would become extremely powerful. Stage 2 didn’t last particularly long but the players involved did some investigation to see how bad this ritual of Haight’s would be and then decided how best to deal with it. In addition to all this, there was some backstabbing because one of the characters in the game was loyal to Haight.

Finally came Stage 3 where they went and attacked Haight. The PC’s won the day due to their actions. It’s still very compressed but this was tackled over 2 months rather than all done in 1 month.

Now here’s an example of a failed situation. My Father plot was all about 4 characters. 2 of which were the parents of this evil creature (not by their choice mind you) and 2 were the people who had ruined this creature’s first host. Now my fault was that I was blind. I kept the entire group is Stage 2, but mistakenly thought that indeed, I was giving them some Progression, because I was giving them information. But I was most definitely mistaken.

But hindsight is 20/20. I only realized this after the final game. I had given them no actual progression. Only pieces of the puzzle. I fooled myself into thinking that they had the information to deal with this, to see the puzzle as it were. And they did, just barely, by the end of it all. And that makes the information I gave them some measure of progress, but it’s not the Progression that I speak of. They knew more about the Father plotline but they hadn’t moved the plot any closer to conclusion.

I ‘screwed’ my players out of Stage 3.

And I’m not saying that Stage 3 is solving the plot. Hell no. A big plot line should be a good blend of Stage 2 to 3, going back and forth as the players learn stuff, solve stuff, learn more stuff, solve more stuff. Until they are ready to finish the plot. If it’s the uberplot, then that typically happens at the last (or near to the last) game.

As an example, I set some of the monsters up with a group of guards. Their Presence of monsters. To attack the main boss directly at first was foolhardy. The players would have to attack the Presence first. Therefore, they spent some time in Stage 2 (learning that attacking without defeating the Presence was foolish), then they entered into Stage 3 (killed off the Presence) and then touched briefly back into Stage 2 (learn about the main boss’ lingering defences) and then plunged back into Stage 3 (kill the main boss).

Although it was all streamlined for a short whirlwind 5 month game, the idea is still sound. Killing off the Presence first, was a very obvious and clear display of Progression. The plot has moved forward. That particular boss monster was going to be a less tough fight than charging headlong into them.

Overall, one who played HR can see that there were technically lots of Stage 2-3 happening over and over again. The ultimate obvious goal of the game was to destroy all 5 main bad guys (and it turned out there were 3 ‘secret’ bad guys as well). Thus ‘winning’ HR was about killing those 5 main bad guys. Progression was happening as one by one they feel but the final Progression would only be completed once the 5th boss monster was dead (or in this case, she wasn’t’ killed but her Presence was utterly destroyed and she efficiently ran off).

So yeah, that’s it in a nut shell. Stage 1-3 of how to run a story and how easy it is to fool yourself into thinking that Stage 2 IS Stage 3.