Convention larps

Community Larp discussion
#21

[quote=“Stephanie”]I’d say that sublety is overrated for Chimera games (fatigue and all). I think that getting all your player specific information onto one A4 page, and all your background info onto another, makes a reasonable chunk of reading to aim for - more than that and you run the risk of people forgetting things.
[/quote]

I think it does always depend on the genre of games. With ones that fit into a genre like regency or 1920s its quite easy to provide one page of character sheet and your good to go, but with genres like Sci-fi there is a whole world you have to create.

I’m not sure if The Gordian Knot would have been as rich and enjoyable if our world had been less complex and providing the background documents made it easier to GM (we would have had to create the documents whether or not we gave them to the players). However we never envisaged people memorising everything, the best we could hope for that people got a sense of the world they were part of. And believe me there were parts of the owrld that we hadn’t even touched on which we got questions about. I would much rather give players too many leads into the game than not enough.

I have come to accept this as part of the process of Larps. Although it often breaks immersion I don’t mind if people check their character sheet, especially in the first ten minutes of the game, because (for me at least) the hardcore immersion into character hasn’t necessarily sunken in.

#22

I’ve got a few different ideas for scenarios for next Chimera and haven’t decided on one yet, but what I do know is:

[ul][li]the character sheets will fit on be 1 page, with 1 page of setting & rules on the back[/li]
[li]the scenario will take place within one room/building/forest glade[/li]
[li]there won’t be any crew[/li]
[li]everyone gets briefed in the same place, which is the play area[/li]
[li]everyone will provide their own costumes & props (within reason)[/li]
[li]set dressing and additional props will be minimal, or involve stuff we already have[/li][/ul]
Those restrictions should make it far more possible to start quickly, with players able to read their briefings immediately before the game and remember them easily, and much less stress to organise while also playing in other games. I reckon that will still leave heaps of scope for variety - but it’s nice to know what my self-constraints are in advance, so that if an idea veers outside those parameters I can cordon it off as a “not for Chimera” concept and run it stand-alone.

#23

I think the flagship is a bit of an exception, where greater demands of time and attention can be expected.

#24

This is a point worth highlighting. A strong genre gives people a very easy hook into a game, and ets you assume some knowledge.

#25

This is true, But having now been part of the Falgship team a couple of times I would say that Sci-fi definately involved more background work. I would assume that for a smaller game this work might still need to be done to a smaller extent (unless set in a fictional world that people are already familiar with)

Of course their are exceptions for games like The Bell (white-box), which was so minimalistic yet rich at the same time.

What I always like to keep in mind when writing is to give an emotional feeling to my characters rather than just background facts, but Stephanie and Catherine showed in The Bell that this doesn’t have to be longwinded.

#26

I’m a big fan of short character sheets in 12pt+ text. I find it extremely hard to find anything on the sheets that are smaller than 12pt. I also think it is better to print larger text and use more pages than shrink the text below 12pt. Also, if you need to use more than 1-2 pages, then highlighting/bullet-pointing the stuff that’s important can help prevent it being lost in a wall of text.

#27

I have no problem with that. Here is what I said in the same thread…

Anyway, I’ll think about the suggestions people have made and probably put forward a proposal at a later date.

#28

With the Flagship we were definitely concerned at the sheer amount of information that was being generated for players to read. I had several people come up to me and ask what exactly they HAD to know and what was just background fluff. I think it definitely had it’s place in terms of enriching the world, but we weren’t expecting people to memorise it.
Some way of highlighting what was essential information is always a good idea - like bullet pointing objectives separately for easy reference (which is already fairly common practice).
With the gear rooms I would have liked to have things more organised so we could get gear in and out in a timely fashion (maybe arranged according to game for eg) but in practice that would have been almost impossible - there wasn’t enough time to reorganise after each round. It was more than we could do just to try and keep things tidy!
In future though I think a gear rationalisation needs to be held before Chimera so we can be sure that things are in the right boxes - it would have saved a lot of time and running around on the day.

#29

I have no problem with that. Here is what I said in the same thread…

Anyway, I’ll think about the suggestions people have made and probably put forward a proposal at a later date.[/quote]

I think you would ran a fab tourney, Derek.

#30

This is true, But having now been part of the Falgship team a couple of times I would say that Sci-fi definately involved more background work. I would assume that for a smaller game this work might still need to be done to a smaller extent (unless set in a fictional world that people are already familiar with)

Of course their are exceptions for games like The Bell (white-box), which was so minimalistic yet rich at the same time.

What I always like to keep in mind when writing is to give an emotional feeling to my characters rather than just background facts, but Stephanie and Catherine showed in The Bell that this doesn’t have to be longwinded.[/quote]For The Bell, one of my big design criteria was that I didn’t want to be stressing about who was going to drop out and be added in at the last minute (someone always gets sick or has a family crisis or something.) So, minimalist costuming, characters that people could pick up on the night, and the way the characters were clustered so that I could handle flexible numbers without leaving plot holes. Plus some other SF works that I was riffing off, and wanting to use sound effects as IC cues and that, but reacting to Con logistics was a big part of how it came out. The stuff about the world and setting was pretty much built up on what Cat and I wanted the characters’ stories to be like and came out of the writing, so the only details anyone got were cherrypicked to be relevant to them (hopefully it worked out for most people.) Thanks for the comments, by the way.

For the Gordian Knot (please insert all disclaimers about personal taste and that), I felt that there was too much background information for me, and not enough of the emotional core of the character. I was given screeds of small type background info to read, but very little on what the character was about until about a week out from the game, and even then there was a significant lockdown on character information which I found very frustrating. The sets and costuming looked brilliant, and I’m glad so many people loved their experience, but I ended up feeling disengaged by it. (Sorry.)

Maybe some ways to make the reading load feel less heavy would be to bullet point the key points, or produce some of it as an IC publication? Or introduce small chunks a bit at a time over the lead up to the game? For building emotional connections, I liked what I saw in Hamlet where they gave you the skeleton of the character and what you’d done - and then asked you why you’d done that stuff, and how you felt about it really. And I remember one mindblowing game (for 6 people) where the GM ran a character workshop before it started and got people to work out shared histories with each other.

#31

One thing that REALLY seemed to work for one young girls first larp (Lucretia - that’s you) The Doll Makers Wife was the very very sparse character sheet. We had an idea about what and who we were. About why we were there. And that was it. It worked because we were left with plenty of time to add to our characters ourselves. Basically we had liberty to mould the characters as we wished and it was done by the GM leaving us in suspense. Not saying it would work in all situations but it did work for me.

#32

What is the Main LARP Purpose?
I found in some of the game’s I had this weekend, teh purpose of the game wasn’t spelled out.
Ex: Asterix - great backround, awesome character description and relationships, goals were laid out - But I didn’t get the premiss of the game.
It wasn’t until we made our way to the “Council” that I found out we were travelling to have a discussion with the other gauls about the romans and potentially signing a treaty.

Why am I here?
Sometimes my character sheet didn’t specify why I was in the game, or part of the group, etc. This could be part of the above problem, if you don’t know why the group is doing something, or what, then it can be hard to know why “that character” is partaking in said adventure. However, this could be my newbie-ness coming through, relying on a character sheet to spell out everything precisly.

I know in some games, like Forgotten Gods, I was a solider, so I was there because of my awesomeness as a solider for example, but the overall adventure was to retrieve an item that the necromancer had seen in a vision. Perhaps that was role, to tell people why we were there. But a line in the character brief could read: “so here you are, recently disembarked from a ship with no idea on why you’re here, accept to protect the nobles” etc.

In House on haunted hill, I was invited as I was the police chief and thats what police chiefs do, they get invited to all the parties… So that wasn’t so bad.

#33

Agreed. I almost pointed out earlier that making the font smaller wouldn’t be an acceptable way to make the character sheets be only one page. Personally, I’d say that one page, single spaced, in a readable 12-pt font, is the max anyone should need to have with them on the day of a game.

Personally, I’m contemplating something like half of a page of necessary character details, goals, etc., followed by up to a page of elaboration for if the players are interested; the idea being that you can play just fine having only read the half-page, with the rest providing more in-depth backstory and the like which might help some people in getting inside their character’s heads, but which they don’t actually need if they don’t want it.
We’ll see how that turns out, though :stuck_out_tongue:

#34

I’m professional Costume Designer, I would have no problem doing a workshop helping people develop costumes, and teaching basic costume theory…

#35

[quote=“Krintar”]Personally, I’m contemplating something like half of a page of necessary character details, goals, etc., followed by up to a page of elaboration for if the players are interested; the idea being that you can play just fine having only read the half-page, with the rest providing more in-depth backstory and the like which might help some people in getting inside their character’s heads, but which they don’t actually need if they don’t want it.
We’ll see how that turns out, though :stuck_out_tongue:[/quote]

Yeah, I think that if the character sheet is longer than a page, then a one-paragraph Executive Summary at the start that tells you everything you must know might be good.

#36

[quote=“TazzyD”] What is the Main LARP Purpose?
I found in some of the game’s I had this weekend, teh purpose of the game wasn’t spelled out.
Ex: Asterix - great backround, awesome character description and relationships, goals were laid out - But I didn’t get the premiss of the game.
It wasn’t until we made our way to the “Council” that I found out we were travelling to have a discussion with the other gauls about the romans and potentially signing a treaty.[/quote]

Um on a slightly defensive note, when you signed up for Asterix the premise was explained in the blurb. Just not on your individual character sheets!

#37

[quote=“Jared”][quote=“TazzyD”] What is the Main LARP Purpose?
I found in some of the game’s I had this weekend, teh purpose of the game wasn’t spelled out.
Ex: Asterix - great backround, awesome character description and relationships, goals were laid out - But I didn’t get the premiss of the game.
It wasn’t until we made our way to the “Council” that I found out we were travelling to have a discussion with the other gauls about the romans and potentially signing a treaty.[/quote]

Um on a slightly defensive note, when you signed up for Asterix the premise was explained in the blurb. Just not on your individual character sheets![/quote]

Well there you go!! I think the only time I looked at those blurbs was when I was deciding on the game, back in… when ever that was. Apologies! :blush:
Maybe having that blurb on the character sheet would help dolts like me! hehehe.

#38

[quote=“Jared”]Um on a slightly defensive note, when you signed up for Asterix the premise was explained in the blurb. Just not on your individual character sheets![/quote]Yeah, I had that same problem too - I’d forgotten what was on the blurb. Just as a proofreading note for next time you run this (which you will, right? :wink:), my character didn’t have her husband listed in the People She Knows section. It was fine, because there was a lot on that in the main section, just that it was a minor incongruity.

#39

I found that the best way to resolve confusion was to straight ask the GM :stuck_out_tongue:

#40

This sounds like it was an issue with the casting, that character perhaps wasn’t a good fit for you, because of the nature of the character being a hologram with no past that she remembered. You might have had that fix of emotional intensity when/if you got your memories back but unfortunately that particular plot didn’t come out in game. Sorry about that.

The purpose of sending out the world info out early was so everyone could get a feel for our world, unfortunately with all the secrets in the game we didn’t want to send out individual character sheets too early.