Pre-Gen PC Cheat Sheet

Community Larp discussion
#1

before every pre-gen game i get a character sheet from the GM. Sometimes its too long.

here’s what i do:

1.get a feel for the PCs background & persona, hold onto it, associate it with their name, role-play it alone, find a movie/tv/book/historical figure simmilar. there, done, ditch the back story pages.

  1. goals: usually these are given to you, but, if you read the background & character interactions you can often create more. eg. you might only have 1 goal of ‘deliver the hat to lady chichi’ but actually you might know ‘june’ who ‘has come a rash since seeing lady chichi, you wonder why?’ hello, this is a hint, that’s a ‘goal’ to find out too.

3.abilities: write them verbatim, the chimera approach of having them on business card size piece of paper is good, just hand it to the person you’re using it on, not say out loud or Time-out. get it back if it’s not a one-use power.

  1. possessions: you should be handed them by the gm so thats not on the cheat sheet.

5.relationships: i usually write the pc name, the player name (if i know them, if not, both their name, what they look like on fb) and then just a 1-2 word description of the feelings towards them & any major knowledges only you know of them

#2

As a game writer I find that comment offensive. Every word on that charactersheet has been created out of nothing, and such a dismissive attitude from the player makes me wonder if its worth doing at all.
How about you think of things from the other person’s perspective.

#3

As a game writer I find that comment offensive. Every word on that charactersheet has been created out of nothing, and such a dismissive attitude from the player makes me wonder if its worth doing at all.[/quote]

As a game writer, I consider it to be valuable feedback. Every word may be created out of nothing, but they might as well not exist if people’s eyes just glaze over if they are uninteresting, poorly written, or just plain too long. And as a player, who has had this reaction to character sheets in the past, I recognise that response completely.

This is not a matter of ungrateful and lazy players. It is a matter of how much we can expect people to usefully absorb and remember. Those limits are a fact of life, not a moral failing on the part of players, and as writers we need to work within them, by writing better, writing shorter, and making it as easy as possible to grok what we are trying to get across.

…which is why I was so impressed by “13 Angry Men With Guns”. They managed to fit everything on a single page, and it was well written and made sense. This is what we, as game writers, should be aiming for.

#4

I’ve seen some games set their sheets up as a page of freeform text on one side, then the other side forms into quarters (or sixths), and each quarter summarises the stuff you really need to know, like Goals, Abilities, Things You Know, that kind of thing, so people can read the freetext in their own time and get the flavour and emotional feel of the character, but also have a handy reference that they can discreetly check in game. It’s worked pretty well, I think.

I think as a player, I tend to really appreciate game writers who are relatively concise, like 1-2 pages of character and 1-2 pages of rules, at least for the one shots where you’ve only got three hours. (Campaigns have got more freedom I guess because they’ve got a bigger investment from their player group and can introduce new material over time.) More than that in a one shot, and I honestly have a hard time fitting it all in my head and remembering important details. And I can appreciate the time and effort that the game writers put in, but it’s also… I can’t engage in their game as well as I’d like to, or they would like me to, because every now and then I have to stop and horse around with my character sheet trying to remember if I know something or not. My two cents, anyway.

#5

I find I agree with Steph’s points, but I suspect there may also be people who appreciate the detail and without this have difficulty with buy-in of their character. It can also be good to have the reference material handy and I have had instances where it acts as a sort of ‘security blanket’, if I find my mind blanks for whatever reason. In the end I think it comes down to you can please some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.

Zanni’s technique for breaking the longer character sheets down into a format she finds useable is interesting - I’m always curious about how people fiddle with information so it makes sense to their brains. ‘Boring’ is a bit of an unfortunate word choice, but I get what she means.

#6

And that’s the point there perfectly. If we make things easier for the players, we get better games. As writers, we should be embacing this.

#7

For me, particularly thinking of Chimera, concise is better but not the be all and end all.

Bullet pointed info not waffling screeds is good. I love the flag ships but with final info only being provided hours ahead of time leaves a lot to absorb. Not boring but hard to digest and retain when you have already played a good number of roles is tough. Frequent checking of pages of info is distracting and frustrating if during editing some info does not transfer between character sheets… but hey it is a learning exercise.

Flavour sheets as used in Welcome to Happy Valley (the local news letter) provided a lot to the situation. Delivered weeks ahead of the event. Time to read and absorb detail is important.

One of my favourite larps from Chimera had a paragraph of info for the player and little more than why I was were I was. No rules included (nor hardly needed). I fleshed the character out myself with mannerisms and quirks. It doesn’t hold true for all larps but knowing very little enhanced the roleplaying in that situation because we created what we needed ourselves.

As a fantasy combat larp writer my challenge is carve things down to 2 pages. 1 character sheet with goals, motivation, character details etc on one and really basic rules on another. I managed that for Sacred Lands, it just happens that I managed to bugger up the timing and information flow and faction interactions.

#8

(Image removed by moderator)

allow me to rephrase myself:
“a bit tedious and difficult to hide in my cleavage”

#9

You keep using that image. I do not think it means what you think it means.

:wink:

#10

Thanks for this. It was important to Matt and I that we found that balance of giving players enough buy-in, and not requiring them to refer to their sheet all game/make a Cliff’s notes version of their sheet.

I think some key ways of getting character buy in can include:

  • Getting the character blurbs to people well in advance so they can process the information and ask questions of the GM
  • Let people know who they have character connections with/what information they can share so they can chat to other players if they wish - sometimes even just coordinating costumes with people is enough to get you in the buy-in zone.
#11

In general I prefer more detailed backgrounds as I don’t improvise particularly well and prefer to have the answers to why the character has done something in the past provided for me. Also, If the answer to ‘how do you know that?’ is ‘it appears in an unrelated bullet-point on the character sheet’ then I would consider that to be an issue with the character sheet.

I understand that other players prefer a more freeform approach and will happily roleplay for hours off a few lines. There are some games in which I have done this and enjoyed it as it was appropriate to the game style but others in which I floundered through lack of background detail. A particular pet peeve is lack of character relationship information. Sure, if the character doesn’t know many other characters then that section will be minimal, but where the character is in a large group that has known each other for a while then all of the other members should at least be listed.

From a gamewriting view, I will tend to longer and more detailed character sheets because of my own player preferences. I would also tend to agree with Hannah that every word is something that has had to be created out of nothing. Even I’m not enough of a masochist to do this unnecessarily, so if I’ve written something, there’s a reason for it to be there! Something that looks like flavour text could include plot points that would not necessarily be apparent to the character at the start of the game, but could require interaction with others for their significance to become clear. It may well be more vital for another character’s plot than the character on which it is written.

For this reason I think that Zanni’s approach could be unhelpful as it eliminates these specifics and would tend to lead not only to that character having a poorer game, but others that interact with it also missing out. It also eliminates the possibility of reexamining the background in light of new information that arises in the game, so could potentially cramp character development.

That said, I would agree that a character sheet that doesn’t fit in your cleavage is too big physically (unless the game format involves a place to keep it). I would argue that this doesn’t particularly relate to the level of detail on the character sheet, but the formatting. As far as I can tell, the larpwriter output is particularly awful in this regard - it might look pretty as a pdf but is a pain to carry around at a larp. Formats involving booklets or other layouts are preferable - if they come down to one or two sheets of paper, fantastic!

#12

the main reason is because during this one game i kept having to pull four pages out of my bra, flip through them, and just to see if i can do this one ability or not cus i forgot the number of times i could do it.

#13

That’s a system thing though, not a background thing. How does that justify you ditching the backstory?

#14

I’m someone who likes having as much back story and juicy details as feasible to back up the bullet points of stuff I know, stuff I can do and other such things that my character will be getting up to. I find that it helps me get into my character’s head and figure out their responses to things.

Having a page or so of straight prose information followed by a second page with the cliff’s notes bullet points of important details is a format I really enjoy working with. If I find there’s things that I think are important/other details I want to be able to look up quickly I can make my own bullet point notes on that second page and have that somewhere convenient as my quick reference page while the other page can go into a back pocket or something.

#15

[quote=“jadikel”]
That’s a system thing though, not a background thing. How does that justify you ditching the backstory?[/quote]

see cheat sheet point 1,
with acting you don’t need to memorize every detail of the back story to ‘know’ the back story.
eg. in teonn (i know it’s not a pre-gen but its a good example) it has a LOT of back story.
however, im one small pc in that world. i know only that pc’s perception of the back story.
so, if im handed a 4 page description, my pc is likely going to be able to recall about only what they actually interacted with or learned about.
day dream about it, use it’s language, and its easy to ‘step into’ that pc’s experience without going ‘hang on, was there the war 1 or 2 years after the elementals arrived?’.
in short, you don’t ditch it, you digest it.

#16

So are you talking about general background or specific character backstory?

For general character background, sure, the character may or may not remember all the details. For specific character backstory, if it’s written in there, it’s because the character DOES remember it, specifically, by definition.

As far as I can see, your approach would work in the types of games where you’re interacting more with props/stuff or NPCs and using ‘special powers’ where system is quite important, but badly in more purely roleplaying interaction games where the ‘plot’ is actually entirely based off details in character backgrounds.

#17

yeah as i said this is for pregens, where usually the character motivation (informed by background) is generally more important than the specifics of the character background for plot movement

#18

I feel that ‘pre-gens’ is a poor generalization.

Note that I’m currently at the end stage of writing a large larp with pre-generated characters where the specifics of character backgrounds comprise several levels of the plot. Anyone who relies purely on motivation is likely to miss out on large chunks of the game.

#19

I find that one of the most important things for me playing in a LARP (both pregen and campaign) is getting a feel for a character. As a game writer I find that a rich background is the best way of getting this across. But if there is really important plot information I also like to include this in the goals or relationships section so it is emphasised. When I have written games I have strived to make every part of the background immediately relevent to the game whether it be relationships or plot. Unfortunately bullet points aren’t able to get across the same feel as prose, but I agree with Shades that its good to have both juicy backstory and something you can easily access.

As to the down the cleavage, I also find it useful to build in a useful handbag or pocket into the costume. I have kind of accepted the fact that pregen games have a bit of a Timeish period (a term I picked up in europe) where there will be checking character sheets for people you know. It’s never hurt my experience of a game, because it stops happening and you can become immersed in the swing of things.

#20

As a GM I have tended towards writing verbose character sheets because I am trying to pack as much plot as possible into a small sheet. However, I feel that when a character skims or doesn’t read stuff then crucial bits get missed and the game ends up vastly different to what it was intended to be… nothing wrong with that its just that the game may not work. A classic example is this

PC: "I just slept with X NPC what would our off spring look like?"
ME: "You what?"
PC: "Yeah I was just there it seemed right."
Me: Pointing at the PC’s sheet
PC: “He could be my dad…ewwww”

There ain’t nothing wrong with skimming a character sheet but be warned, your results may vary.