Plot and character design

I’m currently waiting for this year’s Knudepunkt book to hit the web so I can do the usual series of posts dissecting it. In the meantime, some of the con participants are posting their talks themselves, and there’s a set of slides up from Laura Kröger on “Plot and Character Design”:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1qHaSFzZ_ucVfxrHYeuAUH8E_AuBaC1uS

Its a rare look (for Nordic larp) at designs involving pre-written characters: something completely normal for NZ, but unusual in a Nordic context, where the general trend is workshops (though the Finns are the exceptions to this). NZ writers will find a lot of what she talks about - what makes a good character, what makes a bad one, the need for certain sorts of relationships to give a good experiencem and the need for clear communication and consistency of facts across sheets - quite recognisable. And its certainyl a different tone from the quite negative piece about “brute force design” from a few years ago (NZ thread on that here).

One interesting point is on p13, where they summarise the player feedback received from one larp (Pyhavuoren Perilliset - a game about Finnish werewolves, vampires and witches) to make the point that a character which is bad for one player can be perfect for another. The idea of this sort of organised feedback on games (and having enough of it from enough runs to have stuff for every character) is fascinating, and I’m wondering whether its worth trying to collect about some NZ games in future (though its only worth doing if you tweak based on it, and the point made in the presentation is that you might not need to)