Who plays what, when, and under whose direction?

Community Larp discussion
#1

I really couldn’t think of a good name for this topic. It’s about a fundamental aspect of LARPs that doesn’t get discussed much. Who plays which characters when, and who is in charage of what characters get played?

Part the First
In which a simple idea is made to sound strange

There are games where every player plays one character for the whole game (unless their character becomes unplayable, in which case they might get another one). In the UK, what they call “freeforms” are often run this way. In that instance, the characters are usually all written by the organisers, with little or no player input. In Sweden, fantasy games are often run this way - each player plays one character for the whole game. Except, I think they sometimes create their characters themselves.

And then there are games with “NPCs” or “bit parts” or “secondary characters”. In a game like Mordavia, around half the participants play one character for the whole event, and the other half cycle through playing a number of NPCs. In Mordavia the people playing NPCs take some direction from the game organisers about the nature of their character, goals, and sometimes specific actions they should take. They are under the OOC direction of the organisers, and their purpose is essentially to play characters that complement the player’s characters and make the fictional setting believable.

Are there other ways this could be done? How about a game where everyone has a main character, but don’t necessarily play it all the time. Some of the time you play your “main” character, and some of the time you play other “bit part” characters. There’s mention of this approach in this article: thelarper.org/tombstone.html ~ the advantages of this approach are:

  • Everyone gets to have a main character that they’re attached to, who is a free agent
  • People who enjoy playing multiple roles in a game or taking direction from an organiser get the opportunity
  • “Fill in” parts in the game that make it more satisfying but which might not be enjoyable to play for the entire event get someone to play them. This may include low-powered characters who emphasis the importance of the “main” characters and antagonists that aren’t likely to last long. Also known as “local colour” and “mooks”.
  • Give players whose characters become unplayable (through something like death, capture, coma, or leaving the game area) something else to do until either their characters become playable again or they create another main character.

Part the Second
In which a new strange idea grows out of the first one

Taking that approach to the extreme, there would be no player/crew division. Everyone would be able to play a main character, but also able to play numerous other parts if they desired to. Some people might spend most of the time playing these bit parts and only occaisionally play their main character. This would enable main characters that just occaisionally pass through the game area to be played believeably. Other players might choose to play their main character all the time.

Logistically, the key to such an approach would be making it as simple as possible to change from one role to another and get briefed (without that briefing being heard by other characters, if you wanted to maintain secrecy). Probably the heart of such simple changes would be having a space set aside for it at the game venue. Dressing/briefing rooms, essentially.

It seems to me that this approach would open up the possibility of player-directed bit part characters. In other words, rather than the game organisers briefing an NPC, a player could brief them on a bit part to play. This would be an extension of the player-created-setting concept that we’ve used in Mordavia. If the players create aspects of the setting, why shouldn’t they also be able to create bit-part characters relating to the setting and put them into play? For instance, if your character’s background is that they have a standing army, you might want members of that army to turn up now and then to take orders. And you might want to brief those characters yourself, or leave a written briefing for them to read.

This could be taken to extremes. For Mordavia players, imagine if the tentacled cultists in the game and all the plot relating to them was actually all directed by a player or set of players. And the same with all the other antagonistic characters - the Vampire Lords and their spawn, orcish warbands, etc. Basically, a game with no GMs where all the plot is created and run by players. The organiser’s role would be to run the logistics of the game and help manage all the information. Perhaps they could also help integrate all the plots, but the actual plot generation would all be up to players.

So, the entire fiction could be created and run by players. It’s an interesting thought, and I’ve never seen it considered anywhere.

#2

Oh - to give another example from Mordavia, imagine if the King and the Prince were player characters, and their players got to direct all the plot related to them. That’s a whole lot of plot. It would involve briefing a lot of NPCs, but would also include things like sending briefings to player groups like the Berium Guard who are loyal to the King.

I’m not suggesting this for Mordavia, just using it as an example.

Does this sound like moon talk? I can see it working, if you had a good enough framework for it. I can see it being very dynamic, and focusing in quickly on plot that players are actually interested in.

#3

For the Greek LARP I’m intending that players be given a character profile which may have some ‘aims and goals’ on it. Each person will only play one role and there will be no crew.

The gods will have spheres of influance where they will be able to make decisions if necessary (i.e. Hades will have the power over life and death - so you’ll report to him when you’re dead).

#4

I think that it would be easy to abuse and that you would have to have a lot of trust in your players.

Partly it’s low-grade information creep - if you take time out from your main character to play an NPC for someone else you’re going to pick up information that your main character really oughtn’t know. Even if people can cope with the schizophrenia of keeping two sets of information separate, there are times when it can really suck knowing something OOC and not being able to act on it IC.

The second area of abuse would be someone getting screwed over IC, storming back to the War Room to become an NPC and then trying to ‘get back’ at whoever messed with them in the first place. Again, people who are reasonably grown up won’t do that, but on the other hand, I’ve seen players write NPC actions in the Mordavia IC forum that sure as hell looked like they were motivated by an OOC grudge.

So I guess, it’s really how much you trust your players.

Steph

#5

Also I suspect how much they’ve invested in the character. For an ongoing game like Mordavia I think this is likely.

However for a day game like the Greek LARP where death is just another experience and there are gods who punnish people who are wankers, I think it will be good!

#6

The Greek game sounds like 1 player = 1 character.

That’s quite a standard approach (even though I’ve never played in a game of that style), and it doesn’t have any of Steph’s issues about information leakage. In terms of immersion and information containment I think “1 player = 1 character” is the ideal approach.

What’s a good name for that approach? Something like “Single Identity”? Also, what is a good name for this field of who plays what in general?

Steph, you’re right that an approach where players could swap roles frequently would require a lot of trust. However, there is some leeway for information containment. Players wouldn’t necessarily be able to play any NPC/mook. There could be restrictions, for example to stop them playing a mook from a group that opposes their primary character. The person running a “plot” (and the associated mooks) could determine who’s allowed to know secret information about it, and who isn’t.

#7

How about Character Assignment or simply Assignment ?

I agree with Steph re the associated risks and have thought of another risk, which I term “zerging”. Zerging occurs when an outcome is achieve through sheer weight of numbers. If players can influence who and what mooks are played, surely a strategy could be developed where a collection of mooks with similar goals are consistently sent into play until targetted players respond in a desired manner ?

I like the concept of Main and Mook characters, however the approach needs to be cognisant of players’ desire for the goals of their Mains to be achieved.

I would suggest that mooks are classified into Pro-Main, Main-Neutral and Con-Main, relevant to the Main that player owns. In order to do this, a Central Plot Repository (CPR) is required, and players would need to communicate their motivations and objectives to this repository - similar to how Mordavia is currently run.

The CPR would determine who would make good candidates for mook deployment, based on the motivations and objective’s of the player’s Main, and would provide players with a menu of compatible mooks when that player’s Main is unplayable.

It all comes back to the original “problem”: Crew have no stake in the outcome and Players have a major stake in the outcome, and mixing the twain is akin to mixing oil and water - one will float and the other will sink, except the Player is the determinent ad deciding factor.

#8

Character assignment is a pretty good term for it.

This might be true in a perfect world, but in reality things are different. Crew often get attached to favourite NPCs that they play and are loathe to see them die. And even when playing NPCs whose sole purpose is to get jobbed, some crew invest a lot of ego and manipulate things to “win”. I’ve often heard talk in the crew room about how we need more crew so that we can “beat” the players. At Mordavia, we actively discourage this attitude (because it’s stupid), but it does exist. And given that those competitive crew know about all the plots launched from the crew room (unlike the players who in theory only know what their characters know) they have a massive OOC advantage over the players that they may not be afraid to use. If a crew member got it in their head to kill a player, they could ask to play a series of NPCs that have the capability and then keep attacking until they get the job done.

It’s ugly, but those are the exact same people that you’d have to worry about in a game with an open character assignment approach like I was suggesting. Personally I think you can’t throw an idea out because some people can’t be trusted to do it properly. You just do your best to keep those people in check. There would still be referees, and they could keep an eye on this sort of abuse.

#9

Pretty much all NPCs* should be played as though they fear death. I remember in a Mordavia game wandering along with a small group of well armed players when a single bandit charged into the group and attacked us. We gave him a sound thrashing and when I was walking off I was thinking “that was stupid” the bandit had a 0% chance of living when they did that. The crew member wasn’t playing a “role” at all.
*I exclude lesser undead and mindless things like golums.

When it comes to simply wanting to kill a specific player, the OOC knowledge that crew have isn’t really much of an advantage towards that specific goal. Sapping, a dagger and the desire to kill is all you need to off a player. Or slightly different weapons/skills depending on who the target is.

I spend more time as crew coming up with reasons NOT to kill players than plots to kill them. I’d disagree that crew abuse OOC knowledge. Heck, most of the time they ignore IC knowledge. How many times do crew ignore the sounds of players sneaking up on them through the woods?

There will always be people who don’t get on and who get an extra buzz from killing a particular person regardless of the character they are playing. However, on the flip side, they’ll also probably have friends they don’t kill even when they deserve it. I say, put it down to “fate” or “karma” or some kind of cyclic reincarnation thing and don’t worry too much about it.

I think the best way around the “problem” is to acknowledge some people will naturally be in conflict with each other and when allocating characters put them in roles that should naturally come into conflict. Likewise, with friends/lovers/spouses you know won’t enjoy attacking each other, you may want to cast them in roles that you plan won’t conflict.

#10

This may come as no surprise, but personally I see the players running NPC plots as a spawning ground for disaster.

The NPC system (while short on the actual number of NPC’s) works, as they are of course NPC’s, what if no players wanted to fall out of character to follow / create a plot thread? You have a stagnent game for periods of time.

I’d be one of those who cry out for more crew, specifically for the sole reason to populate the forest with nasties, there are enough people crying out for more danger in the forest to be heard.

I’m not saying this idea won’t work, but in running a few demo examples through my head it tends to sway to power abuse, and fall out.

One rule still holds true in running plots, “what ever you expect the players to do they will do the opposite” this can also be reflected if the player is playing a temporary NPC role.

Just my 2 cents.

#11

Depends on the genre - in some “herioc” genres, killing armies of fearless mooks is suitable.

In most genres though, I agree with you. But the problem is not playing an NPC to avoid getting killed. The problem is using OOC knowledge to further your NPCs IC objective of not getting killed. Or inventing abilities for your NPC on the fly to stop them being killed. All I’m saying is that I’ve seen the desire to cheat (and really, when you talk about using OOC knowledge to further IC goals, it’s cheating) present in NPCs already. Maybe not common, but present. I don’t think it would become any more present in a mixed model. You may not have noticed people playing NPCs cheating or power-gaming, but it happens and it’s something we try to keep a lid on. Just like players doing it.

Here’s another observation. I’ve noticed that when confronted with a new way of doing things, most people balk at it and throw up numerous reasons that it wouldn’t work, saying that it’s inferior to the status quo. For example, in the US most fantasy LARP use massive boffer weapons and have infinite reincarnation so player characters never die. If you mention to them that there are alternatives, they’ll tell you that latex weapons are horribly unsafe and that players would leave the game if their character died permanently. Likewise, in the UK when Maelstrom started up using the “player-driven” approach (where all the major plot is driven by player groups that are in conflict with each other), numerous critics said that all the players would just fall on each other in a huge bloodbath until some group dominated. The reality is completely different - combat is quite rare and the game is tense and dramatic.

Personally, I think the idea I’m suggesting could work well for a player-created game. That’s different to player-driven Maelstrom, where the organisers create most of the background and the players run all the major characters (i.e. any NPCs play fairly insignificant parts). In a player-created game, the players would both create all the background for their groups (and the setting of the game) and run the groups. If there were fantasy races, the players would be able to design them, including abilities. Basically the whole fiction would be player-created.

Scott, not all games involve a forest full of monsters. Many games require few NPCs to remain lively.

Most players enter a game wanting it to work. They make the effort to make it work. In this case, that would involve players making an effort to play fair by separating a little more IC and OOC knowledge than usual. I imagine that the players who are better at doing that would gravitate towards running more plot. The benefit of this extra IC/OOC partitioning would be a game where players have ownership over the entire fiction.

#12

Ryan Paddy wrote:

In the example that we are using “Mordavia” it is suppose to, agreed not all games, but Mordavia is the example, and it is meant to be.

However if you are going to test this new way of running an event may I suggest you don’t use a Mordavia for a test ground, if it was to go horribly wrong the last thing you’d want is spending the sort of money we do on an event for it to go pear shaped.

#13

Read my original post.

#14

The risk is up to you.

#15

Alright, looking at the mechanics of how to make such a thing work, I think that the Mordavia style of often quickly briefing NPCs on the fly would not be a terribly good idea. This is not a statement that Character Assignment play would be a bad thing, or that it ought to be more like Mordavia, just that Mordavia is the game I know best in terms of people playing multiple characters and I think the briefing structure would need to be different.

The reason I think it wouldn’t work so well is that the player doing the briefing would need to either stop what they were doing and head back to the briefing room anytime someone switched to one of their NPCs, hang out in the briefing room all the time (basically be a full time GM), or leave long and detailed notes to be handed out on new characters. The last option wouldn’t be very good because people getting a new character to play from a written description invariably have questions to ask and sometimes want to change things about the character, which is usually fine, but sometimes not, and how are they going to know?

What I do suggest as an alternative is that people write up multiple characters before the game starts and they only play those characters(1). The characters would already know all their background information and how they fit into the setting and related to other people, so that would stop being a problem. This doesn’t stop players sending instructions to each other, but it could be entirely IC, through a postal service (2). When you want to change characters, swap costumes, check your mail and work off that information.

Does it sound workable?

(1) I suppose you could make one exception, if there was a sudden need for a very large army of mooks and the army was under the control of officer PCs who did all the decision making.
(2) Like what Kirsten has been doing for Mordavia, but preferably with 2 or 3 postpersons wandering around at any given time so it’s easier to find them quickly.

#16

Mike suggested “Character Assignment” as a name for the whole idea of who plays what, when, and under whose direction. It’s not intended to be a name for this specific approach I’m suggesting. I don’t have a name for this approach. I guess it would be something like “player-controlled open-role-swapping character assignment”. But I’m open to ideas for a more concise name. :wink:

I think a combination of pre-written characters and on-the-fly briefings would work. Some players will spend more time in the briefing rooms setting up mooks with verbal on-the-fly briefings than others, and that’s fine. They will probably be playing main characters who don’t enter the game as much (villains, passers-through, people who live elsewhere but have influence, etc).

Also, many of the written briefings can be generic. To use Mordavia as an example again (because it’s familiar to many people here, not because I have any desire to change the way it runs to what’s obviously a completely different framework, as previously stated), a player could write a generic description of say orcs or ghouls, and other players who want to take on a mook role could expand the generic concept into a specific character or groups of characters. This again works in closely with the “player-created” concept; not only is the generic briefing player-written, other players then get the opportunity to interpret it and expand on it.

#17

As I recall from the last game, once a Player got a look at the briefing room, ie. died and became Crew, they couldn’t be released back into the wild ie. make yp a new Player Character. As I understood it, this wass so that we wouldnt see Crew gearing up for the next big surprise (like the werewolf).

How would you handle this problem with Player-run briefings?

#18

[quote=“Ryan Paddy”]I think a combination of pre-written characters and on-the-fly briefings would work. Some players will spend more time in the briefing rooms setting up mooks with verbal on-the-fly briefings than others, and that’s fine. They will probably be playing main characters who don’t enter the game as much (villains, passers-through, people who live elsewhere but have influence, etc). [/quote]So basically, everyone’s a GM and is running their own storyline, the main difference being how much time they want to spend GMing and how much time they want to spend playing NPCs for themselves or the other GMs.

You could call it Open GMing. Just a thought.

#19

I believe that a culture of trust brings out the best in people. If players all have the responsibility of playing fair and making important decisions, they rise to it.

In the SCA (“Oh god”, you all say, “here he goes again”) ALL combat is decided only by the person struck. There is no referee or judge to say “you must take that blow, you are dead”. The person struck decides if the blow was good enough. SCA combat is very competitive. Much more so than any LARPing I’ve ever seen.

This would work for LARPing just fine. If players always decide what effect the world has on them, it will work. The world may not be 100% consistent, some people may abuse the system, but it will work.

A lot of emphasis is made on “what is fair” and “what is balanced” when people discuss rules. I’m not worried much about “fair” and “balanced”, I’m worried about “fun”. Some people like to power game, some like to roleplay, some like to fight, some just like to make pretty clothes and some just like to watch.

Allowing people to judge the effects of the world for themselves, I believe, lets them play the type of game they want.

If I’m playing a character who gets worked over and left for dead, I’ll likely start a new character.

However, if someone is very attached to their character (and they’re worked over and left for dead) why should I care if they decide that their character got better, wandered around the woods for a couple of days and came out with amnesia and a nasty scar on their throat.

#20

If you were the person who worked them over, you might be annoyed that they’d negated your decision and your action.

Again, I don’t think this would be any more an issue in this approach than any other. I agree that people rise to the level of trust you place in them.

Steph, I’d prefer to call it player-created LARP. Forget about GMs, it’s about empowering players to make the game they want.

Cath, you’d have lots of separate areas for running briefings in.