Objectives : a meta-discussion

Community Larp discussion
#1

This stems from a few post-LARP discussions and it’s need for writing has been brought to the fore by a couple of LARPy projects i’m trying to hammer out. Also it must be noted that i am a philosopher through and through so deconstruction is something i enjoy…

What i have been wrestling with is this: LARPs are stories. At base stories run on conflict. The story of me going to the store to buy milk is uninteresting the story of me going to the store to buy milk while fighting of hordes of zombies or in which the store owner is a long lost love or just the story of how i over came my fear of stores, are all much more interesting because there is some conflict and resolution.

Now there is a really easy way to set up conflict; get two characters too fight!!! (man vs man for those who have some play-writing/story-crafting training). But you can’t actually have them fight (most of the time) so you set them in competition over something that only one of them can have. This generates the following sort of objectives: You want the Apple, Boris also wants the Apple. Viola conflict!

I wish to contrast this style of objective-form with the other(s?). For i know there are others and the thing is i think the others are better/more fun. But i find them hard to describe. So first mission Diatribe can you help me in clarifying the other objective-forms?

Do they just follow the play-writing categories(man vs man, man vs world, man vs self)?

Secondly Do you think the competition-form is useful? i find that it generally leads to at least one of the two players not having fun.

I’m sure i can and will write more but i shall stop now so as too try and avoid the TL:DR tag.

#2

The competition objective is pretty common, particularly in the big theatre-style games. If it’s zero-sum, yeah, someone could get unhappy, but there are also player motivations involving having an interesting story line or the opportunity for big emotional scenes that can mean that going down in the flames can be just as (or more) rewarding than succeeding. It’s also a good idea to build characters who want more than one thing, so that they might not get one thing but do get another; or characters whose desires for a Thing aren’t diametrically opposed - they can find a compromise if they look for it.

Other kinds of objectives? At the player level: strongly felt experiences, comedy, costuming and props, performance/exhibition, shared storytelling and subcreation, spending time with friends, exploring the human condition, puzzle solving, observing everyone else doing crazy things… lots of stuff really. At the character level, giving people complicated interpersonal relationships to sort out can be great, discovery of information or solving a mystery, hedonistic desires like flirting or food or getting drunk, saving yourself or other people, changing the world. There are probably more that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

[quote]Do they just follow the play-writing categories(man vs man, man vs world, man vs self)?[/quote]I hadn’t really thought about it split like that. I’ve used all those categories, at one time or another. Not sure about an additional one?

I read an interesting point of view on a different board that in larp there are all these different threads of stories, so that no one can make sense of them all while the game is in progress, but that’s what the debrief is for - not as an optional extra, but for everyone to share their experiences and build up a cohesive image in their heads of what the game was. It’s the debrief that organises all those fragments for people and ‘creates’ the larp.

#3

Not all of larp is about conflict, but certainly the most obvious parts of it usually are. Movies, plays and books have to entertain the audience and conflict is a good way to do that. But in larp, the audience has to entertain themselves. If they want conflict, it is a simple thing to create it oneself.

Success isn’t the only way to be entertained. And while victory is a heady feeling, my best memories of larping haven’t been the victories, they are the losses. Just mentioning “Skagen” to many players will trigger a flood of emotion, because the memories of loss are so raw, real and visceral.

But for me the best moments are often late at night as people gather around the camp fire. Stories of the day are told; triumphs and failures with equal delight. Friends sit with their faces to the fire and their backs to the dark night, sharing a cloak and a cup of wine. Tunes are played, songs sung and poems recited. At these moments, there isn’t conflict, just a shared feeling of camaraderie. A moment stolen from time and shared with some good friend who “get it”.

Weeks later when the game is over, and you pull your cloak out of a bag to hang it up, you’ll catch the smell of wood smoke and the memories come flooding back and you think “I’d rather be there then here right now…”

#4

I was primarily thinking about objectives for characters rather than players. Also i must apologize rereading my original post it strikes me that i may have shortcut my explanation a little to much.

By conflict what i am referring to a character having to attempt to overcome some obstacle or otherwise antagonistic force. Hence why the obvious way of doing so is too pit two characters against each other.

So in reply:

Derek : Yes LARP the experience aren’'t about conflict or overcoming obstacles but LARPs the story by their nature are.

Steph: Yes i think you are right the competition form works when there is enough information/motivation provided for why the character wants the object of competition so that there is some method by which if the two character work on it they can come to some arrangement or they can both get something out of it or some such. Yes i think investigation and greed(get as many of the mcguffins as you can) are good forms as well.

So the reason i’m interested in Forms is first i enjoy deconstructing things and secondly i am working on a thing i am calling LOD: LARP On Demand. Which hopefully will end up as a system to run a two hour LARP at a con with an hour or so of generation time. For this i am looking for a way to quickly generate Objectives/goals for characters. The easy way to do this is to set people in contention but as i said i find that leads to people not having fun unless done well. so i am instead interested in thinking about the other forms such objectives can take.

i hope that all helps to clarify the discussion

#5

It depends on what drives the larp. Objective based characters are the most common in larps because it is very easy for players to find the direction in which to go. The downside, naturally, is that this often ties the player to the objective. Especially as competing objectives might mean that by abandoning your goals you could be taking out an important part of the game of another player.

Personally, I dislike objectives but that means that the drive needs to be replaced. The setting can do this nicely. Characters can be started with no set objective and an introduction of an external threat then brings a combined objective. The players can then interpret their own path but the drive is the external threat.

A further note on objective. There is a large difference in open and close ended objectives: Kill the king VS Find a way of deposing of the king. One sets you into a very specific storyline, the other allows for the player interpretation of the character.

I think that open ended objectives are one of the best ways of giving characters drive quickly and easily, for the purposed you have described.

#6

Disclaimer: I am not a super-experienced LARPer; what follows is a combination of my limited experience, my own observations, and my personal thoughts on LARP as a form.

Ensuring people have more than one goal, and that their goals are varying in difficulty, directiveness, and “competitiveness” may be ways to help balance your concerns.

By varying difficulty, you ensure that at least some goals will be achievable
By varying directiveness, you have some very specific goals if the player feels lost, but freedom to interpret vaguer goals or generate their own drama if the player feels more adventurous
By varying competitiveness, you ensure the player has some possibilities at win-win situations, even in conflict, while having other goals which are very high stakes.

For example:

[quote]A notorious jewel thief attending an movie awards ceremony might have goals like:

Steal the Fitzgerald Emerald, on prominent display at the venue, and heavily guarded.
Difficulty: hard, Directed, Competitiveness: will conflict with players protecting emerald, or other thieves

Rekindle an old romance
Difficulty: medium, Directed, Competitiveness: low - medium

Steal as much shiny as you can!
Difficulty: low-medium, Undirected, Competitiveness: low[/quote]

#7

Well, yeah. At a personal level, I tend to find mcguffin plotlines a bit unsatisfying unless the game has given me a good reason to care about them. So, a goal to find a fabulous diamond so that I’ll be rich after the game is less meaningful to me than a goal to find the medicine that will stop my friend dying in the game right now, f’r’instance. And I think I’m acquiring a preference for investigation plots where the point isn’t to find out a fact for it’s own sake (like “Who is the mysterious Man in Black”) but to trigger subsequent action (“once I find the six-fingered man I must achieve a satisfying revenge upon him” or “I’m looking for this piece of information expecting a particular result” which turns into “this information changes my motivations”). And I guess that I find a directive to find out information that could held by any one of 30-60 people, without much idea which one of them might have it or might have a reason to lie to me about it pretty frustrating. Knowing who’s got the information, and my story being what I have to do to get it off them is more interesting to me. (Personal preferences vary, though, I’m just saying what I like.)

[quote]So the reason i’m interested in Forms is first i enjoy deconstructing things and secondly i am working on a thing i am calling LOD: LARP On Demand. Which hopefully will end up as a system to run a two hour LARP at a con with an hour or so of generation time. For this i am looking for a way to quickly generate Objectives/goals for characters. The easy way to do this is to set people in contention but as i said i find that leads to people not having fun unless done well. so i am instead interested in thinking about the other forms such objectives can take.[/quote]That sounds pretty interesting. From the name - are you influenced by things like the Games on Demand stream at Kapcon? There’s an interesting article in the Solmukohta book by the story game/indy crowd on GMless tabletop games, which you might find worth reading (p163). Things like Fiasco and Mountain Witch do stuff around randomising character wants or ‘dark secrets’, and things like PTA and Fate get very specific about mechanics that describe what the character is about and encourage the story to move in a particular direction. You’d also probably find the Scandanavian Jeepform crowd pretty interesting - setting and costume-lite, and a lot of attention to pre-game workshops.

#8

I don’t think so.

Rather I’d say that larps are interactive experiences that can be designed to convey narratives, or can be perceived to contain them. Players are likely to perceive different narratives to an even greater extent than with traditional passive media, because there is no universal perspective for viewing a larp. That’s why Derek’s points are pertinent. Perceiving a story, or feeling like you’re helping to create one, is just one enjoyable thing you can do in a larp, and no more important than the other things.

#9

Ryan: i’d love to have this discussion in some other thread but i believe it would simply digress here quite quickly. What i will say here is that ,if i understand your and Derek’s point correctly, you are saying that it is not helpful to think of LARPs as Stories and i can agree with that to a certain extent ( believing they should have beginning/middle/end structures and that something ‘dramatic’ should always be happening etc seem to be bad ideas). But i would argue they are still stories.

Steph: you basically just listed all of the sources i am borrowing from… With the skeleton of a system as i have it now the relationships of characters are generated by a fiasco-esque method after the setting/genre/feel/getting everybody on the same page process which borrows heavily from the early stages of PTA.

Yeah i think that you guys are right that the best objective/drives are the sort of ‘the house is on fire’ objectives. So if you consider the LARP set in a burning building ; everyone one as an open ended objective/ drive (survive, get things you value out of the fire) and a reason why it has to be done right now. So to take Vanya’s king you end up with something like : you are going to be executed tomorrow. All criminals are pardon when a new king is ordained. There you are given a problem and one way to fix it the other obvious one is to convince the king to pardon you. importantly whatever you are doing you need to do it right now.

What do you think about setting objectives as problems? then do you have to provide that there will be answers to those problems or do you just leave players to figure it out for themselves?

#10

Unless the solution is spelled out in ALL CAPS and something reasonably formulaic (like collect the widgets and do a ritual at midnight) it’s pretty likely players will come up with a solution that is completely different to what a GM envisioned.

With a story, the author can completely plan what will happen from beginning to end. As the story grows in their mind, they can jump back and modify earlier pieces to make it all fit together really well.

But with a larp, you typically create an environment and release the players into it and then watch in dismay as they do completely different things to what you expected. Creating a story where you anticipate a very linear story without much digression by players is (in my opinion) doomed.

Setting objectives is fine, but be prepared for the entire game to be derailed by something as simple as a character deciding to cook some sausages.

#11

Sounds like experience here Derek.

In my experience in running sometimes very linear fantasy larps, players may not achieve an outcome even if you have given them the information instructing them to do so. Ideally, even in linear plots, multiple avenues of “success” or completion or whatever outcome you want will be needed that don’t rely on a single character.

For example there were 10 ways of saving a certain character from certain death in a large larp, with the information being available to a large number of different people… however because the right people didn’t talk and the wrong decisions were made that character died… her sacrifice was not in vain however, Hel died with her that night (ahh SWVH… not my larp of course but a good example)).

So even then, be prepared for the players to simply miss all of the clues repeatedly…

#12

[quote=“liquid_elf”]Steph: you basically just listed all of the sources i am borrowing from… With the skeleton of a system as i have it now the relationships of characters are generated by a fiasco-esque method after the setting/genre/feel/getting everybody on the same page process which borrows heavily from the early stages of PTA.[/quote]I wondered. :wink: Also, I just looked at your signature and realised that I know you a little bit from Kapcon.

[quote]What do you think about setting objectives as problems? then do you have to provide that there will be answers to those problems or do you just leave players to figure it out for themselves?[/quote]I’m in the objectives as problems camp. When I’m doing a prewritten game, it makes sense to have figured out at least one way in which they achieve their goal, but most people figure out something else, or decide they’re interested in a new goal or whatever, so I tend to embrace that and turn it into a feature.

I think if you’ve got a prewritten game, you’ve got the advantage of being able to preplan things about the set-dressing and props, and that can be a big thing - so Derek really loved the experience of sitting around the campfire telling stories about what happened - you can’t do that if there’s no campfire. Things like lighting levels, food, smells, music, people density, and the game look and feel can all have a big impact on how people experience your game. On the other hand, you’ve got a big advantage that tabletop roleplaying doesn’t, which is that people are really affected by what happens to their bodies. Things like being able to touch each other (in a non-creepy way), the ways a game might encourage them to stand or sit or dance, the way people move their bodies as they express their emotions are all powerful tools that you have available.

You’re also going to have a thing going on with information transmission. In all these tabletop games that give players narration rights, everyone’s focused on what’s going on around the table, so they’re aware of it as it happens and it’s easy to incorporate a player spontaneously putting something into the setting; whereas it’s a characteristic of all but the smallest larps that people will split off into smaller groups and move around, so that information moves around the game as a wavefront. There are ways to deal with that (if you want to give them that right), but it’d need to be built into the game structure, whether it’s partitioning off what people came make up on their own, or doing something like the jeepform Soap Opera game where there’s an explicit scene that you’re either in or you’re observing, or, I dunno, something like having a big whiteboard set up where people can add Facts into the game or something.

[quote=“Derek”]Setting objectives is fine, but be prepared for the entire game to be derailed by something as simple as a character deciding to cook some sausages.[/quote]Is this a story told from bitter experience? Curious minds want to know…

#13

I’m sorry, it’s getting off topic but you will need to ask Tigger about the sausage reference. It’s a bit of a running joke in Auckland.

#14

That’s a grest description of exactly the problem i keep running up against. in a traditional one off larp you can simply hand out the information to the relevant people and so forth. But if you are generating content and want the sort of play that comes from various characters having different but releant information. then how exactly do you A) make sure they have info in the first place and B) signpost (but not flashing neon light) to the characters who want the info where to find it ? ( i guess you can replace info with Mcguffin if you are think in mcguffin style plots).

The signposting vs neon lighting thing i think is general problem for one off larps (off a decent size). But i digress… Anyway any ideas how to fix information transmission problems?

#15

Can you clarify roughly how you see this working? Are we talking software that helps a GM generate a game, a written system that helps generate it, or rules for how the game kind of self-generates during play?

I think Steph was identifying information transmission as a “problem” only if players have narrative control during play. If a player can do something narrative-changing that should effect everyone (perhaps even immediately), how does what has happened spread to the actual players?

In most larps where the players’ locations map to character locations, information transmission is not so much a problem as a blessing, because the physical separation means that larp simulates real-world information transmission well without any extra effort required. Tabletop doesn’t naturally simulate information flow, because everyone hears everything at once, so the GM has to artificially restrict information flow (if they want player knowledge to resemble character knowledge, which isn’t always the case).

Whereas what you’re discussing seems to be more about how information is divided up among players at the start of play. Which brings me back to wondering what you picture this LOD to be.

#16

If players worry too much about their character goals I think they can miss out on some of the best parts of the larp experience. The best role playing I have ever enjoyed has been in a sense “player vs. character” conflict where it was about just staying true to playing the character. Playing a role that is at heart a different person to who you really are can be exceptionally challenging and strangely rewarding.

By way of example, I recently played a character who beat his lover for nagging him. Just contemplating doing something like that in real life makes me feel physically ill. Taking this action didn’t really advance the story. It didn’t really get me closer to an objective. It was just a moment in the life of a character I was playing.

In real life your objectives may be to have 2.4 children and a mortgage free house by the age of 50. But most of the time you’re really not working towards those objectives. You’re just living your life dealing with day to day things and interacting with friends, family and workmates. Hopefully, you’re also managing all this without beating your lover.

The physical aspect of larp is one of the most powerful attractions for me. The experience of slipping over in the mud during a battle, of getting boot prints on your shield or breastplate, of watching a shield wall collapse, or a long arrow shot actually hit something, are special moments which are hard to explain in terms of game theory. The physical challenge of crawling down a dark wet cave, carrying another player through the woods at night or sharing a cup of hot chocolate under a rain soaked cloak are physical experiences you might never face in your day to day life. They are special, and memorable, because they are different.

Personally, I am terrible with information. Any kind of game that relies on me collecting all the information and figuring out what is going on I tend to do poorly at.

[quote=“liquid_elf”]I wish to contrast this style of objective-form with the other(s?). For i know there are others and the thing is i think the others are better/more fun. But i find them hard to describe. So first mission Diatribe can you help me in clarifying the other objective-forms?

Do they just follow the play-writing categories(man vs man, man vs world, man vs self)?[/quote]

I’m not really sure about play-writing categories as such, but some people toss around the idea of immersion. Of really just losing yourself in the moment.

#17

[quote=“Ryan”]I think Steph was identifying information transmission as a “problem” only if players have narrative control during play. If a player can do something narrative-changing that should effect everyone (perhaps even immediately), how does what has happened spread to the actual players? [/quote]Well, yeah. I’m figuring that shared content that gets worked out in the workshopping phase would be generally known.

I probably wouldn’t try to run a game that’s elaborately plotted with mcguffins/secrets or very competitive goals, I’d run a game that’s dealing with interpersonal relationships and interacting with the environment, so you don’t have to do that jigsaw puzzle thing of working out how all the knowledge interlocks and balances itself. I’d try to keep objectives very fuzzy, and set them up as a way to invite people into the game rather than defining their game experience. (So be very explicit that it’s not a case of “achieve this goal in order to feel success”, but “this is something that you want, which could get moderated by what happens in the game”.)

Some things you could do, maybe:
Partitioning - players know that there are some things where they can just make up things on the fly during play, like if nobody knows anything about their character, they can tell people about backstory as it becomes appropriate and that becomes a Fact that’s moving through the game, the same way it would with prewritten information. Or if they’re the only people who know about a particular organisation, or whatever, they have freedom to introduce narrative elements into the game without contradicting anything. That wouldn’t work for stuff that ‘everybody knows already’, though.
Providing a framework, with a few known facts, and a strong genre definition - I had good experiences in a couple of prewritten games where I had a specific element of shared fiction that people knew they could collaborate on during game play. So in one, there was this novel (that didn’t exist really) where I’d given everyone a short essay on how they felt about the book, and a list of ‘book club’ style questions that established some common information, and they built up this image of the novel through their conversation. It was a very small, focused game, though. Another one was about a tv show that they were filming an episode of, so they got a series synopsis, the style of show, and an incomplete script to give them the feel of an episode, and had to make up the rest of the episode as they went. Again, people were pretty happy about talking about “that thing that happened in the episode with the flying fish” and that.
Go minimalist with your set - like how the jeepform crowd will write something on a piece of paper to define what a room is, or I heard about a game that was set in an underground train system where the floor was taped out to show the train routes, and where there were stations, there’d be a pad where they could write down how the station had changed (for instance, if they’d had a fight with someone, they could write down that the tiles were chipped and there was blood on the floor.) And things like running the game in scenes, and having intermissions where people get to talk out how the game is going.

On the counter side, to encourage the kind of thing that Derek likes with the vivid experiences:
Have a really rich and evocative set, and make that contribute to your game - so maybe arrange to have your Larp On Demand in an interesting forest, or a bonfire, or in one of those old sets of gun tunnels like at Wright’s Hill or North Head, but don’t have any ideas before hand about what the game is going to be about. Get people to tell you what’s special about the setting at the same time as they develop their characters. So, if you’re in a forest and it’s drizzling slightly, why are the characters there? Do they own the forest? Are they visiting? Poaching? Defending? Invading? Why is it raining? Is it always like that, or does the change mean something? Is it just rain? And maybe bring some interesting props along as triggers for the game and all. Get them to tell you what the big challenges are in the game, and how they fit in, and set them off. (I think that could work for an adventure-type game as well as intrigue, if you primed the players right.) Keep the gameplay area reasonably tight so that you at least can observe what’s happening and provide some triggers of your own if you need to. Maybe?

(My partner just said to finish this with “and they all lived happily ever after.” I think he wants me to go to bed. G’night.)

#18

So i guess i should lay out the system as i have it:

The aim in general is that given this system and about an hour give or take you and some amount of other people can have a serviceable game to play (of generally the theater style so more about characters than say combat or other focuses(this mainly comes from me only really being familiar with this style))

the first phase is as you say to workshop the setting/genere/a way into the game for the players /perhaps some ideas for roles people will need to fill can be floated here (in broad terms alla PTA series generation)

the second phase : players are semi randomly assigned what their characters relationships are (alla fiasco) This is the first part of character generation

the third phase is the one in which i stumble at this point the character that are forming need to be given drives/objectives/techni-coloured hamsters and it is how to form those on the fly in some meaningful way which is troubling me.

Which is one of the reasons i started this thread. The second is because i think meta-discussions like this help us all:P

And yeah Steph i had just generally assumed that outside of the stuff generated in the start up of the game then everything else was up to the players to decide. especially things like their own back stories and to a certain extent others back stories.

As set dressing and such like i was happy to leave that up to whom ever was facilitating the game. But i do like the idea of using the location or some other such thing as the base of your discussion when setting up a game.

Derek : IMO Such experiences as you describe are a really important part of what many of us get out of LARP. But it is not something you can or should aim to manufacture. Instead you should be on guard not get in the way for such experiences and try your best to present interesting experiences to your players.

#19

Ah, so you spend an hour following a written formula that helps you generate your characters and the setting and situation, and then you spend two hours playing it out.

One suggestion I have is that because you are likely to be in a big space, with a fair number of people (because that’s how larps differ from tabletop), you could make use of that by having the players split into spearate groups that can’t hear each other during the prep phase.

Let’s say that each player belongs to a number of groups. A group might be a family, a workplace, a religion, some people who experienced something together in the backstory, anything where people share knowledge. Groups can be any size, from two players to everyone.

During the prep you have a series of rounds where people split up into random groups of various sizes.

For example, in round 1 I’m randomly allocated into a group with four other people. We randomly (or not) define what our group is. Let’s say we decide we’re a family, and we generate a history and common knowledge of the family, and the various strains within the family. My sister is a coke addict and I’m a conservative Christian politician who is scared people will find out. Everyone in the group is aware of this, but because we’ve split off nobody in the other groups know it… yet.

In the second round, I’m in a group of two and we work out we’re old school buddies. The system says we must share a secret, so I tell him about my sister’s addiction “while drunk in a bar”.

And so on, with information, secrets, goals, etc. being generated in a series of rounds by physically separated split groups, and then spreading through the players a little. By the end, my political opponent may have found out my weakness and be planning to expose me, while I’m trying to keep it hidden but don’t know they know. Instant drama.

Plus, you could “play out” a little backstory scene with each group during the prep phase, to get a roleplaying feel for how they interact and to further expand the backstory. That way the prep phase is less dry and “systematic”, and by the time you hit the main play time you really have a feel for how to portray your character and what other several characters are like.

For what it’s worth, I’d do the randomisation with little decks of card. They’d say things like “Share a secret”.