Having/Playing morally grey/evil characters in larp

Community Larp discussion
#1

There’s some rather heated discussion going on following the Teonn endgame about decisions made by a few characters that culminated in an unhappy ending for some of the other characters. I was only crewing and so not involved, but I see some valid points being made on both sides of the argument, and I wanted to take the discussion away from blaming the individuals involved and have a more generalised discussion about this.

How to people feel about having manipulative characters played as PCs in campaign larps? Have people had negative experiences? What are some ways that we are able make this something able to be explored?

I for one would like to figure out a way that it can be done without the blame going to the player OOC or their being instant hate from other players, as I think these characters make the fictional world more colourful.

Any thoughts?

#2

I think it stems in part from the player mindset of ‘We’re the Heroes’- the thought of another player character turning around and pulling a stunt of some kind against the main body of PCs, especially when it’s completely unexpected, can feel as something of a betrayal.

If it’s known that not every PC is going to be a good guy/the player starts to drop clues and comments in their roleplay that they’re not entirely in the Good Guy camp then I’d think it’d taken better by the other players when Character B steals the Macguffin and sells it to the Bad Guys because the others will have had a chance to do something about it and it would feel more fair. If Character B had spent the past X games being nothing but sweetness and light and giving no clues at all about their true nature until the 11th hour of the final game when they sell everyone out to the Big Bad it doesn’t feel like the other players have had a fair chance.

#3

For me it depends on the game.

If the label is Heroic Fantasy then no it isn’t appropriate. If however the game is Dark Fantasy then of course it is appropriate.

It comes down as just about every discussion does to expectations, I get the impression game have generally been players running with the story, all working to get the best possible endings, but that is only one style of play and hearing the GM’s in the afterlarp it was pretty clear that a lot of new concepts, play styles and game styles were being tested out. The same thing was very apparent in the conversations at the hot-pools the next day as well.

A lot of us were new to Larping, we had no expectations, therefore we played with what we found and accepted it all as normal. Some other players had been in the community for a long time and their expectations were challenged by the changes.

As to the specifics of the final game and what happened I think the characters definitely have a right to be pissed off but I think there is a bit much bleed into the real world. In my opinion the only thing you can expect from a game is an ending and what you make of that ending is up to you. The role-playing that occurred when then Elementals met to make their choices at the end would never have been so powerful without the game turning the way it did. Larp is a chance to role-play, and it is pretty clear that many people play to enjoy the experience of emotional games, I suggest that a simple victory is not the best catalyst for that and in fact the way things worked provided a much more powerful and interesting ending that pure success would have.

Unfortunately the downside to strong emotion is bleed and that is what we are seeing in the discussions on Facebook. I say we learn to embrace it.

#4

I think a lot of it depends on the expectations of the players, particularly in relation to the setting. I come from a background of having played a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade. In that setting, you’re pretty much assuming they everyone is evil / out to get you. That way you can only be pleasantly surprised.

As I pointed out in the other thread, I feel like part of the issue is lying in LARPs. Many LARPs, as compared to tabletop, the players have much more input into the creation of the world. So when someone tells you “I come from a castle out in the middle of the woods”, you take their word for it, because you have no reason to doubt them. Believing what you are told becomes habitual.

The other thing I mentioned is that LARP, as a hobby, is fairly cooperative. A lot of what has been taught to me over the last few years is really about finding that way to make everyone the hero of the story, try and find the win / win so that you have a great time and so do they. The issue with playing villains is that often, you having a a great time / fun is coming at the expense of the other ‘heroic’ players.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say later, but there’s a starter for 10.

#5

That is an extremely valid point and something everyone should consider if they want to play a not-so-good character.

#6

That is an extremely valid point and something everyone should consider if they want to play a not-so-good character.[/quote]

Agreed, but this means we cannot play a villain unless we want to be found out and killed.

Personally I think the problem comes from everybody believing everybody wants to be the good guy, and then its a shock when some one is the bad guy.

For OOC reasons we come to trust a character, because we are meta gaming by believing everyone is on the same side.

I personally make sure my characters are suspicious of every tiny political movement involving them or their interests, and really get to know anyone involved and make the character decision of whether to be intelligent enough to figure out I’m being screwed, or to continue playing the poor sap who is walking in to a trap.

One of my personal and biggest pet peeves in LARP is meta-gaming. When some one does something to my character, because they player doesn’t like something, it infuriates me.

I just wish everything could be kept in game, in character.

#7

As a player of morally grey and and evil on occasion characters I think they have a place. Like all people these characters have dark sides and motivations that swing from the external focus of help the people to the internal of help themselves.

These people colour the world and their actions add realism to the world. If done cleverly I absolutely love it. The issue is that the focus of characters like this is a little lonely. Like in real life the actions of these people lead to ostracism and that can be an unfun experience.

So I suppose it is player beware, but if this is something you like to do then do it. Just understand the consequences, and bear in mind that as long as it is all kept in the game it should be fine. My rule when it comes to this is make it fun. That doesn’t mean win or take the fall, it means make sure that whatever you do is dramatic and adds to the story. More than anything else if another character is at the heart of the plot you have planned then make sure they look good in it. Drop them hints, and if you get what you want, the penalty should not be final in most instances. For you getting one up on them will have them return the favour, creating more drama.

In Teonn I like George’s story. I like Bjarn’s story. I wish I had gotten more of an inkling because it seemed like such a disconnect. But all in all I liked it, and neither of these players should cop any flack for their decisions. In fact I feel I made a decision on Friday night, and of course that decision turned out to be disastrous for the happy endings scenario. But it was a decision made in game. Many steps lead to that and rightly the consequences were followed through.

#8

It has never been in the rules of any larp I’ve played that everyone had to be on the same page. That some characters wouldn’t be ‘dark’ or just plain evil. I don’t want to see players hated or ostracized because they want to explore that. Heck, one day I might want to play an evil character myself, and I don’t particularly want to lose all my friends because of it!

When you invest a lot of time, effort and emotional energy (and yes, money, but mostly the other things) in a character, it hurts when they lose. The bigger the loss, especially by betrayal, the more it hurts. If you want to play a character like that, be aware of this. And before you say we should keep IC and OOC separate, yes, of course we should. But we play for the emotional drama, among other things, we play for the feelings and when those feelings are bad, it’s pretty natural to take a few days to come to terms with them. Nobody likes to lose. Not IRL and not in Larp.

Be an evil mastermind if you want. Connive and sneak and plot and scheme. But if you succeed? Can I suggest you jubilate quietly, especially immediately after the game, rather than rub it in the faces of all the people your character just beat.

And I will pay you the same courtesy when I do it to you.

#9

[quote=“theotherphoenix”]
Be an evil mastermind if you want. Connive and sneak and plot and scheme. But if you succeed? Can I suggest you jubilate quietly, especially immediately after the game, rather than rub it in the faces of all the people your character just beat.

And I will pay you the same courtesy when I do it to you.[/quote]

This.

#10

If I was looking to play a character in a traditional campaign larp, who’s actions were going to be directly opposed to other players I’d make sure the GM’s knew exactly what I was up to so that they retained control of the situation.

This might make me feel more like an NPC, but I think I’d accept that to be sure I wasn’t going to cause too many problems for the story they planned to try and tell.

If I didn’t want my plans to be uncovered during the campaign, I’d probably look to drop a huge amount of hints to what I was up. That way at the end of the campaign people will be kicking themselves about how they could have possibly missed what I was up to.

However a better situation (I believe) as a player would be to engineer a situation where I get caught. Then the drama of betrayal happens in game and I’d have an added challenge of roleplaying my way out of the situation and or dealing with the consequences of my actions. This could lead to a redemption arc, or act as another warning/indicator of my intentions.

#11

[quote=“Mandos”]snip

A lot of us were new to Larping, we had no expectations, therefore we played with what we found and accepted it all as normal. Some other players had been in the community for a long time and their expectations were challenged by the changes.

snip

Larp is a chance to role-play, and it is pretty clear that many people play to enjoy the experience of emotional games, I suggest that a simple victory is not the best catalyst for that and in fact the way things worked provided a much more powerful and interesting ending that pure success would have.

Unfortunately the downside to strong emotion is bleed and that is what we are seeing in the discussions on Facebook. I say we learn to embrace it.[/quote]

I sincerely believe Mandos has hit the nail on the head with the word ‘expectations’. Thinking back to every issue I’ve ever seen surrounding Larping, they have all been due to the expectations of two different individuals or parties being disparate.
When the players are expecting something but what the GMs and game delivers is entirely different, there will at the very least be confusion, if not hurt feelings, perhaps even offence caused as a result.

I’ve seen these issues pre-emptively dealt with by everyone having a positive attitude and an open mind. However the majority of the issues are dealt with retroactively, which means that the ideal way to do so is in fact by communicating. Restorative justice, such as a thread like this very one, where all points of view can be aired and accepted, is the key.

This hobby is a collaborative one, let’s also collaborate on how we’re feeling. Let’s keep communication and positivity at the forefront.

#12

The major issue is that often players don’t see hints coming if you hit them over the head with them. Over the course of the campaign I…

Openly plucked still beating hearts out of the chests of dead NPC’s and crushed them in my fist.
Showed little or no remorse over deaths
And at one point was told loudly that all the women I had killed I had done for no reason, to which I yelled back that all the killings had been right and still no-one spotted the serial killer in their midst.

I was told that another character and myself were two little peas in a vile little pod and so watched carefully and you know what all the signs were there. Players just don’t get hints, they are wrapped up in their own stories and often miss what you think may be obvious.

#13

The major issue is that often players don’t see hints coming if you hit them over the head with them. Over the course of the campaign I…

Openly plucked still beating hearts out of the chests of dead NPC’s and crushed them in my fist.
Showed little or no remorse over deaths
And at one point was told loudly that all the women I had killed I had done for no reason, to which I yelled back that all the killings had been right and still no-one spotted the serial killer in their midst.

I was told that another character and myself were two little peas in a vile little pod and so watched carefully and you know what all the signs were there. Players just don’t get hints, they are wrapped up in their own stories and often miss what you think may be obvious.[/quote]

THIS.

Even as a GM I have had hints being dropped all around and players still refuse to pick up on them. They really are very tied up in their own thing. Certainly a lot of my characters have the blinkers on most of the time.

#14

In the Teonn example, there were also between 50 and 80 players at every game, with a reasonably equal number of NPC’s muddying, clearing or just generally complicating the waters. Even getting important main plot info disseminated to everyone that needs it is a job of work.

Making sure the person with your previous hint also sees the next one so they could become suspicious? Hitting them over the head with it might be a better way.

The other thing that has just occurred to me, is that people are more likely to be upset OOC because it’s the final. There is no way to deal with this IC. If the betrayals and deceptions at this game had been done at a previous game, there would have been consequences for the instigating character, but they totally ‘got away’ with it, because there is no way to continue. So the feelings spill more ooc, because what else can you do?

#15

Caveat: no clue about what happened in Teonn; no idea how relevant my assorted decaffeinated ramblings ever are.

Bleed, to some people, is one of the greatest joys of LARPing. It reinforces a sense of just how real the weekend was if you can’t forget about it for a few days. But negative emotional bleed, over in-game feelings of grief or anger or vengeance, is a bit of a difficult thing to respond to.
If I found out that I’d been betrayed over the course of a campaign game (and I completely agree, Mandos, nobody really notices that stuff, no matter how unsubtle you try to be about it), I’d be pissed off, but I think the important thing is that there’s space in the game for me to deal with that in-character. Players seething outside the game strikes me as a sure sign that there’s an opportunity for interesting roleplaying that was missed because the big reveal was too close to the end of the game. This is a weird thing to formulate, though, because I don’t really know how it can be fixed.
If someone’s playing an outright evil character, then that player needs to full-well anticipate their terrible comeuppance by the end of the game, and if minimizing negative feelings is a priority (not that I’m suggesting it always needs to be) then there ought to be space for this to happen in-game. The real problem with this is that in LARP there seems to be a very short list of options to deal with evil: kill it or rehabilitate it. What 33AR is learning is that ‘kill it’ is the faster option, and players will almost always take the faster option. As a result, then, if I’m playing evil, it seems like I almost need to set aside time at the end for everyone else to decide whether to kill me or not if I want to spare their feelings outside the game.

#16

This is a really valid point as well. Bad Stuff happened that we couldn’t do anything about.

#17

Players just don’t get hints, they are wrapped up in their own stories and often miss what you think may be obvious.[/quote]
Agreed you’d have to ham it up to the nth degree, which is why my preferred situation would be …

Which is what Anthony did to great effect at St Wolfgangs, making for a lot of drama and fantastic roleplaying.

#18

I have no idea about what happened at Teonn, but my general guideline to playing ‘evil’ is that there are likely to be hurt feelings bleeding over into real life unless the ‘evillness’ is massively telegraphed and with a rock solid opportunity for the ‘good’ players to overcome it. I’m not saying that playing evil characters is a wrong thing of itself (depends a lot on context and player expectations, as other people have discussed), but from a social engineering point of view if you want to be that player then making a serious effort to be thoroughly nice in the afterlarp phase is a good idea. Making sure people see you help clean up, tell people how awesome they were, bring people drinks, all that kind of stuff.

#19

None of my comments are directed at the actions that happened in Teonn. I was not at the last game, so I don’t have first hand knowledge of what occurred. These are just my general thoughts about Larping and playing evil characters within them.

Things are different in one-off theatre form larps, where PC antagonism is often a major part of the plot. Same with White Wolf Vampire games, where politicking and betrayal are the mainstay of the game.

I think that playing bad guys amongst the heroes can be okay, but can easily lead to bad feelings. The reason is that it is not an even playing field. It is very easy to play the secretly evil character and betray the rest of the PCs at the opportune time. If you play the character as a cheerful and fun character, then there is no reason to think there is anything else to the character until it is too late. Even a quiet and sullen, moody characters can get away with blending in with the good characters until the perfect time to strike.

By picking the right time for the betray, the secretly evil character has a much higher chance of succeeding at screwing things up that the heroes have of foiling them, because they will normally only choose to act when they have the advantage and when the favour is stacked in their favour.

There are a number of factors that lead to trusting others. I think it is partly the OOC assumption that we are all playing heroes with a common goal. This is the one I have the least respect for, because I don’t think that is always the case, and characters can have individual goals which may or may not be aligned with what the majority.
But another factor is the difficulty of telling if someone is lying in a game. Without magic, it is a lot harder than in the real world, because everything that the character is saying is made up, everything is actually a lie. Saying “I am Timothy the Orc. I am a great warrior chieftain!” is a lie, I am actually Dave the human pretending to be an Orc named Timothy. So when the player is making up everything that is considered to be the “Truth” within the setting, it is very easy to make up things that are not the truth within the setting, and the subtle clues that the character is lying are not the same as they would be in a real situation.
Also, it takes quite a bit to stand out as evil among PC groups, because players want to play interesting characters. This often takes the form of a troubled past; a conflicted moral code; emotional baggage of some description or another. So showing signs of “bad” behaviour, what a player may think is a hint at their characters true nature, may not stand out from the pack of troubled heroes.

So, personally, I think unless you are being quite obvious and consistent with clues about the true nature of the character, then a victory by betrayal is actually a rather cheap victory in these sorts of larps. It really is not a surprise that someone can “win” in this sort of thing. Unless they set out to purposely loose, or at less give obvious hints and clues out over the course of the campaign to give a reasonable chance of of being found out, then it would be a surprising for them to lose, in my opinion.

So when someone is “victorious” in this sort of way, I think others can feel hard done by, because really they had little chance to spot the evil among them and are pretty much powerless to do anything about it.

#20

I like having a few characters like that in the game. It makes it a richer experience for me personally.

Also, they get all the best lines!