Linear is shit

Community Larp discussion
#1

The more the organisers of a LARP decide in advance what is going to happen in it, the more shit it is.

Hello, my name is Ryan and I used to run linear games. I knew in advance what stuff the player characters would encounter, and the actions of the players were usually pretty irrelevant. I thought that I could ensure it was a better “story” by plotting it out in advance. I thought that giving players multi-choice options and having the story go differently depending on what the players chose was the height of sophisticated dynamism. I thought that if the whole party died, the best response was to find some deux ex machina to get them all resurrected and get on with the planned plot.

While I enjoyed those games at the time, if I was to play one now I’d say it was shit. Aspects of these games were fun, but the player characters couldn’t really make any important decisions. It was like a carnival ride with interactive bits.

What a waste of LARP, the most interactive medium there is. A roleplaying game is not the place to tell a pre-determined story; there are other mediums for that sort of art. Roleplaying is about improvised interaction, and improvisation means unpredictability. By forcing a pre-determined series of events to occur you render the actions of player characters empty.

Why do people make games linear? I find that many game organisers (at least in medieval fantasy LARPs) immediately assume that linearity is the best approach, without necessarily admitting to what they are doing. Here’s my idea on why:

  1. FEAR. It’s scary to organise a game and not have any idea what will happen. What if the players do stuff that messes up all your ideas? Will you be able to improvise interesting results to their actions, or will the whole game go dull? It’s so much less scary to know where the game will go in advance.

  2. LOVE OF CONTROL. The sort of person who is interested in organising a game often has a love of controlling what happens. They might have a story in mind that they want to tell (creative control). They might enjoy the social status of being “in charge” and bossing people around (social control). It may feel that the only way to have this sort of self-empowering control is to pre-determine what will happen. If you don’t know what’s happening next, you may appear weak. Must beat chest harder and know everything in advance! Also, one person can’t improvise enough responsive plot to keep a large event interesting, so they become a bottleneck. You need to empower lots of co-organisers to help with the improvisation. But that’s giving away your power. Must not lose control!

  3. OVER-PRACTICALITY. If I don’t know what will happen, I can’t know what costumes to create and what props to build. I may even have to build things on the fly at games. I can’t write a timetable of what crew to use in what NPCs roles. It will require too much communication to know what the players are up to all the time so we can come up with suitable responses. I won’t be able to control what time the game ends, or make sure people are in the right place at the right time for meals. I may have to run off to the shops to buy stuff needed for improvised plots. It’s all just too much work, easier to plot it all out in advance.

I reckon this problem of creeping linearity comes hand-in-hand with the presence of NPCs (under an organiser’s direction) at a game. Derek’s Epic Greek game isn’t going to have this problem, because there are no NPCs. You can’t tell a player “here’s what’s going to happen,” and “you’ll do this,” because it so obviously messes with their freedom of choice. Likewise, “freeform” games with no NPCs don’t suffer from this problem. But as soon as you introduce organiser-directed crew who can play multiple NPCs and be re-briefed, with it comes the temptation to railroad the game down a pre-planned story.

In a completely improvised game, you can still have story. But it’s an emergent story, one that comes out of the improvisation rather than being pre-planned and removing the relevance of improvisation. And there is no one story-teller, the story is organic and comes out of the actions of all the characters. In my opinion, that’s a far superior type of story for the LARP medium.

#2

I agree - linear games are less than dynamic games.

You’re certainly not alone there. Most of the games I ran many years ago were reasonably linear. I remember running what was considered a very radical game where I set it up with two parties of players (Robin Hood vs Sherrif of Nottingham) with minimal crew. The parties were in conflict pretty much the whole game. The crew basically played a bunch of set encounters that happened throughout the day (i.e. a Jewish merchant taking their wares to market, a fat bishop being escorted through the woods)

It worked, but it was still too staged as far as actual RP went because Robin and the Sherrif were always going to be pretty much at war.

If there is no way to change the future I’d agree, However, there is nothing wrong with saying “at 2pm a bishop and four guards will travel through the woods”.

To maximise use of resource (i.e. crew and time). I think the perception is that (for a GM) it’s easier to say “From 10am-1:30pm you’ll be a farmer. At 2pm you need to be a guard ready to enter the woods. At 3pm do this…”. You can timetable the game in advance. You can try to avoid “dead spots” where no “game” happens.

I think linear games work for players who are “reactionary” rather than ones who will drive plot.

I think FEAR is mostly LACK OF FAITH that the game will work without constant plot injection. It is a leap of faith to say “you play A, you play B, game on” and then to sit back and see what happens.

I think there is a big difference between players who will drive plot and those who are spectators. If you have a lot of players who will drive plot, you always know a game will happen. If you have a lot of players who react to events around them, then it is likely that you’ll end up with people sitting around saying “nothing is happening, this sucks!”

I don’t like a game where player action will not change the future. However, I think the GM should consider at least a basic flow chart of events that could transpire. i.e. “If the nuclear missiles red alert has not been stood down by 2:00am then the Chinese sub will launch against New York”.

#3

I like to take an experimentative approach to LARPing (and RP in general). Perhaps this is because I am a scientist.

I like to have a bunch of characters and then poke them with certain stimuli. Then see how they react and let things happen from there.

Sometimes this works well.
Sometimes my stimuli get ignored and players wander around looking for the plot.
You win some, you lose some.

I feel that an important part of RP is to find out how your character would react to different things. When I have a character sitting in the back of my head telling me how he feels about the events around me that is when I have the most fun with the game. So my style of game suits my way of playing.
Selfish I guess.
It also suits my generally less organised nature.

I try and put my work into background stuff now, so that when the players wander off into a nook or cranny of the story I hadn’t intended I at least have a framework to build on.

I think another reason that linear games are favoured is because people expect to find a capital P plot somewhere. The players are in many cases actively looking for it and if they don’t see something to latch onto they can get restless and a little bored.
This isn’t always wrong though. A simple hook and some interesting characters can make for a very good game that is still relatively linear.

The desire for a plot can often come from gamers used to tabletop RP.

LARP is, in my opinion, the best type of RP for character imersion. In tabletop RP the mechanics, or the chips, or the cat, or the phone can always break the flow kicking you back into yourself and away from your character. This shouldn’t happen so much in LARP. So you can produce a good LARP game by focusing more on the characters. In a tabletop game more Plot (for lack of a better word, by this I mean complexity of story puzzles etc) can make up for the lower imersion.
Many of the best LARP gamers I’ve seen have never played tabletop games before.
I’m not saying it ruins a player, just that some seem to come in with expectations.

Another reason for linear plots is beacuse it allows the ST (or whatever, yes I’m a MET gamer, sue me) to show off their knowledge or the world, their cunning and deviousness, and to generally feel superior to the players. This is in a lot of ways a subset of the control motivation mentioned by Ryan because it gives you a greater sense of control of the whole game environment as a staff member, you can appear to know much more and bolster your confidence from that.

Sorry this is a bit rambly. It appears to not be my sharpest day.

#4

[quote=“Derek”]I remember running what was considered a very radical game where I set it up with two parties of players (Robin Hood vs Sherrif of Nottingham) with minimal crew. The parties were in conflict pretty much the whole game. The crew basically played a bunch of set encounters that happened throughout the day (i.e. a Jewish merchant taking their wares to market, a fat bishop being escorted through the woods)

It worked, but it was still too staged as far as actual RP went because Robin and the Sherrif were always going to be pretty much at war.[/quote]

I can see that kind of thing working, though. If it was a series of independant encounters, but you worked the results of each encounter into the next one then it could be responsive to player actions. Would be much harder to run as a non-stop IC game, the two groups would probably duke it out quite quickly unless there was a massive forest for the merry men to hide in and a good reason for them to hide.

It sounds like fun.

So long as the players characters can affect this occurance in any way that they are able, then yes I agree that’s fine. Basically what you’ve got there are some off-screen NPCs with plans. They might change their plans, though, based off player actions.

But what I’m really railing against is a series of planned events. “at 2pm a bishop and four guards will travel through the woods. They’ll find Robin and his men, the bishop will have some harsh words to say to Friar Tuck, and he’ll escape to tell Nottingham about the encounter and the presence of a monk amongst the outlaws.” I’ve read numerous GM plot plans like that. What if the players slay the lot of them? What if they 've got a neat idea involving taking the bishop captive, but the organisers have him pegged to play another specific NPC soon?

If you’ve got NPCs at all, then there’s certainly nothing wrong with having an idea how and when they might enter the game and what those characters’ intentions might be. It’s just if that entry is inflexible, or if you have plans for exactly what will happen when they enter, that you go down the road of linearity.

Answering why do people make games linear, you said:

This comes under practicality.

However, I think it can be done better on the fly. It’s better because when you improvise you know who is actually available, not who should theoretically be available. The two are seldom the same, especially if the guard who enters the woods has been taken captive or is otherwise involved in ongoing play (see above).

I believe everyone is capable of drivign plot, but some people never learn how because they have the training wheels of planned plot to lean on.

Agreed.

Although, an unplanned game can still have constant plot injection. It’s just that the plot being injected is improvised, not planned.

How well can a game can work when interference from outside the players is minimised? That’s another question entirely, and it’s not related to planned vs. improvised plot.

I don’t see a need for flow chart, but I agree it’s handy for an organisers to have thought about how the environment might react to various hypothetical player actions. I think that the less structured these ideas are, the more likely they’ll be useful in the chaos that is actual play. Very structured plans are a hindrence.

Here’s a great article about related approaches to tabletop roleplaying games: ptgptb.org/0027/theory101-02.html

#5

I think this is a great idea. I’m not against knowing your fictional setting, just against “knowing” where actual events will go.

I agree. But Plot can be planned or unplanned. You can honestly make it up on the fly if you have a talented teams of GMs or STs or whatever who are used to improvising plot responsively.

I fully agree.

I also think LARP is the best environment for player freedom. In most tabletop games it often becomes impractical if the player characters aren’t working together to some extent - even in Paranoia the players have a reason to stick together. In a MMORPG, you can split up and go whereever you want but because of the inflexibility of the setting player decisions often won’t have much of an effect on anything. In LARP, players can split up and make any shit up, and the environment can react. But only if the organisers are responsive in their approach.

Every sort of LARPer is more than welcome here (including people running linear games - I may rant against it but it’s all LARP).

Yep. Easier to show off your wonderful fiction if you’ve got everything planned out in advance. Then you can actually SCRIPT what NPCs say, and play a big powerful NPC who dramatically rescues the players from the other NPCs, and… pass the bucket please… blurgh

I think that’s a combination of fear of improvising and love of control. You want to impress (to get the creative kudos), so you plan everything out because you’re afraid of failing to improvise well. As a result, it doesn’t matter a damn what the players do… but at least you look good!

What a misguised motivation.

#6

Actually, i’m thinking of how your approach applies to story-telling and writing.

In my younger days, I used to start a story with an interesting character and/or situation and just go on from there. It was fun, and there was a great process of discovery, but for the longer stories, the plots tended to flail around, contradict themselves, and sometimes just die. These days, I tend to have more formal approach, especially when I’m working with someone else, and keep a tab on characters and projected plot-lines. There’s quite a lot of preparation before the story really gets going, you understand.

Some writers (professional) often talk about mapping out their stories - Arthur Ransome, the guy that wrote the Swallows and Amazons books had each novel plotted out in advance and could write each chapter as he felt like it; Joan Aiken claimed to write similarly. Others talk about self-willed characters taking over the show.

I don’t really have a point to make, I suppose. However, when the story is happening on-line, with other people writing bits of it, it tends to be very fluid. I will have an idea of the main characters, with maybe a few good lines that I’d like to get in, or interesting pratfalls, but nothing is set in stone and it goes in interesting ways as the other writer(s) add bits. Specifically, I’m in the middle of one in the Mordavia forum. One of the characters, Creed, is trying to track down my character Paradox (from the game). Paradox does not want this to happen. As a consequence, Creed finds himself talking to two NPCs, whose colourful nature comes entirely from the back of my consciousness. I decided what they knew and roughly how they would react to various stimuli beforehand. At about this point, Stephanie asks to join in, so I gave her a briefing on the NPCs and she set to with a will. An unexpected but amusing argument between the NPCs then invented itself, about rent and, um, other things, and they just keep on going. There have been some unexpected inputs from Creed, and I have no idea how the story will turn out right now.

If I was writing a novel, I’d be bashing my head against the wall wailing, at this point.

#7

I’d have to agree with Derek on most of this.

Provided you have a lot of time, many NPCs and/or gifted players, it works to have everything completely free-form. However, if any are lacking, things can fail.

If your group of players are more reactive (often the case with beginners, or younger players) then if you dont provide a flow of events then nothing will happen. Similarly, if they are all trying to make things up for themselves, and you’ve only a small crew, then they will find most of the woods unpopulated.

If you organise all of your NPCs into a particular encounter, and no players turn up, then its annoying but not the end of the world. However, if they decide they’re going to do X and all your NPCs are off on other threads, you have a much larger problem.

Of course most games fall somewhere in the middle. Mordavia is closer to the no-script end (although many events are planned out), and works because there is a relatively high number of NPCs and there are enough players who will take an initiative. Take out the best players, though, and things would grind to a halt.

The games we used to play at university were very linear, since we would usually have a crew of 5 and limited time (a couple of hours). People wanted action, not politics (there were other games catering to the people who prefered to politik). Not only that, but the majority of the players were new to LARP and we wanted them to have a sense of achievement at the end of things.

I would say you should design the game structure according to your situation. I was initially very surprised that the more freeform structure of Mordavia could work, but it (usually) does due to high crew numbers and proactive players. It is much harder to GM (you never know when/if you’ll have crew when you need them) and you still get the ‘passive player’ problem, but its very satisfying when it works.

On a related note, the Og game which I hope to run in January will have very few NPCs indeed, provided there are enough players to make 2 tribes. I’m hoping that the proactive players will be in this one, else I’ll have to quickly roll out Plan B – a more linear plotline that I can push them into instead.

#8

Free form is Linear but on a broader canvas.

The classic linear would be 1 to 20 encounters; the players meeting encounter 1, 2, 3 and so on until the big finale.They don’t have a big choice in the way the game goes.
This is great for players and crew .The players get to concentrate on fighting and exploring there characters as the game goes on.

So encounter one; the thief on the party gets to use his skill of picklock. Encounter two; there is a guard, the fighter gets wounded, and in encounter 3 the healer gets to heal. All controlled and easy and the players get to have their moment, and they know there will be a big baddy at the end. Worked for years and will work for more.

Freeform works in a similar way (the players do have a choice) instead of 20 encounters that are rolled off at the players in quick succession, things are slowed down, and interact with the different players when the players are ready to do so.

So the npc to roll things off will have a prewritten message that will get the players talking. It could be that the duke’s son has been kidnapped and must be rescued.
The players are split as some like the duke and others want his title. Questions are thrown up that will lead to answers whatever they may be.
You would have other plot threads going around as well. This would get the players moving in other directions, and then the players backgrounds would be used to further the game. This would make the game very deep and could take the game anywhere.
The event runner must know what the answers will be. Whether it be one, two or three answers, and be ready to set up that plot strand.

Also, some plot strands would be created and resolved by the players without any NPC or ref interaction, and so you would have to be prepared for these as a ref, and be aware of how it may impact later encounters. Freeform works best with many characters with different backgrounds, they will rub each other up the wrong way or they will marry. Freeform has to make this work by putting in pre-written npcs, they would help introduce people if it was quiet, or start an argument that would bring up details that would get the players interested and talking or maybe taking up there swords. Npcs also listen to the players and report their findings to the organiser who would then act on that information to get the best tailored circumstances for his players. The ending will never be the same, but you will always know what out-comes there will be to choose from.

Linear can also mean you can enjoy the event without thinking to much.

I ran an event based on the 13th warrior, every player knew the story already, and so we knew there would be few surprises, but what they came for, was to immerse themselves in the world that was created.
Knowing the players were after the “epic” feel, I knew I had to focus on something large scale. We had 13 players and 50 crew available, so with that setup I could have players see the fireworm come at them from down the mountain, (50 armoured guys with burning torches snaking their way closer towards the stockade) and give them the right moment to say those one liners from the movie that they wanted, before the inevitable carnage.

Large death scenes were set, as not all the characters in the movie made it, and the players knew this. The large scale battles were brilliant. All the players had there moment, and that’s what they play the game for. Linear will never be shit, because it’s the roots of how we all started. New people are coming into LARP all the time, and they will grow with the game, as the game has grown into the multitude of different guises it has know.

You have to know what the players want.

#9

The word “freeform” is used to mean so many different things that it’s practically useless except in highly-defined contexts.

For example, in the UK it’s quite commonly used to mean a game where all the player characters are written by the organisers to create a big web of intrigue. Like the Kapcon larps that are run in Wellington.

I’ve also heard people use “freeform” to mean “no rules”.

I’m not sure what you’re defining a freeform larp as. It sounds like “everything that isn’t linear”. But then you’re also saying that there are NPCs guiding a set of plots. I guess your point is that even when you take away the linear format where there is a series of pre-determined events, the course of the game is still shaped by the organisers.

If that’s what you mean, I disagree. You can have games with no NPCs, where the organisers have no idea where the game will go. or games where NPCs don’t lead or influence plot any more than PCs do. Such games are not “linear but on a broader canvas”. They are a completely different approach. In fact, there are a large number of very different approaches to larp that bear no resemblence to linears.

Nope. Not if the answers depend entirely on the actions of PCs. If the Duke in your example was a player character (along with his son, and the kidnappers), why would the organisers need to be involved in how it pans out? They wouldn’t. They can just kick back and oversee the mechanics, leaving action and reaction to players. The Maelstrom campaign in the UK is an example of this working in practice. No organiser interference, and therefore no organiser pre-determination.

When I say “linear is shit” I mean that it’s shit for me. It’s not what I want in larp. As a player I want freedom from the pre-determination of organisers. And there are ways of organising larp that provide that freedom. They may be more challenging to organise than linear (and than the type of freeform you’re describing), but ultimately, I believe they are more rewarding to people who share my preferred play style.

No offense intended to people who play and enjoy them. I did for years, but I see things differently now. I just don’t think that linears maximise the best aspects of larp.

#10

At the risk of waxing theoretical, I’d say that both the linear and freeform games you’ve described are organiser-led and plot-driven (to borrow some terms from the Story Matrix Model).

My rant is really against pre-planned or “plot-driven” larp stories (which are described as plot-driven in the Story Matrix Model). I don’t like advance planning of what will happen at larp events, because advanced planning tends to reduce the ability of player characters to affect the setting. Linear larp is the most extreme example of this non-affectable setting material.

#11

Because I like replying to myself, a quote from Pagga.

This is another way of saying what I meant. If the organisers have a clear idea where things are going, the players experience a sense of pre-determination in the lead-up, which makes their character’s choices seem less relevant.

I’m not keen on the term “story-led plot”, I think using two words as ambiguous as “story” and “plot” in the same phrase make it completelty useless. But I think what Dave Jones is really talking about is pre-planning in larp, and I agree with his conclusions about that.

#12

Dave Jones wrote:
This is the problem with story-led plot; as soon as something is predetermined, it has a cascade effect on the events leading up to it. It ruins the whole concept of cause and effect - the effect has been decided upon and so the cause of it has to be forced. It’s not a case of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ story-led plot, the simple fact is that if you already have a story in mind then you have some things which are prêt ermined, and that’s what leads to the problem.

I agree with Davey on this if the event was run badly. have played events where you knew what was coming next no matter what you did, you could see the set up coming even if you set out to stop it. But what if you could change, it even though it was not meant to be.
What kind of game would it be called. The players react to your encounter but go in a random way. A bad organiser would do anything to make sure they stick with his story because it is good and he feels like god or that same organiser would think on his feet and be prepared to roll with it.

If an event was billed freeform but was not I would not be happy.
I also think that we all have a different perception on freeform, is it 20 players put together in a world and thank you very much get on with it with no help from the npcs or organisers [this could get very dull on those quiet moments] or is it 20 players put together with help from npcs and organisers to insure there are no dull moments and to push the game on even though the outcome is still not predetermined.