Homebrew LARP: eliciting player input

[JamesSterrett]

(See Homebrew LARP: Player Death for general background information on the game.)

Before each of these games, we've asked players to let us know if they had any preferred characters/character types, traits, etc they might want to play.

The response has been pretty minimal.

According to both player's comments and our own attitudes, most of the niftiest moments in play come when the players get emotionally involved and have to make a tough decision.

We presume those are more likely if the players have characters they can identify with.  [We still write up the characters, since we have to fit everybody into the relationship map so there's an extensive web of intrigue and secrets set up for the start of the game.  I'm open to discussing ways around this.]

Anybody have ideas on how to better elicit commentary from players on what they might want to play?  I'll happily agree that the phrasing of the invitation has not been very good in the past.

Note that I don't think we can count on replies from everybody, and requiring a reply might simply drive a number of people away from playing.  For the people who don't reply, we'll continue to stumble along using what we know of the person in question; I'm just trying to increase the number of people who *do* hand us a character hook.

[Walt Freitag]

Hi James,

In the 80s and 90s I ran dozens of LARPs of the same basic type as you're running, with pre-written characters that had to be assigned to players or, when circumstances permitted, custom-written with a specific player in mind. But all my games were public events, and most of them involved some sort of pre-registration. In order to be guaranteed a part, players had to send in a registration form with basic information (name, address, etc.) and it was easy to include questions about the player's character preferences. (If a game wasn't sold out in advance, we'd allow walk-ins, but that was clearly a take-what-you-get situation.)

Years of experimentation and debate took place about what and how much character-preference information to solicit. Between my own events and others', I've seen scores if not hundreds of registration forms, ranging from no character-preference information at all to multi-page questionniares that look like somebody's psychology research project. (There have also been deliberate parodies of these, with questions like: "Do you own a blow dryer? If yes, what brand? ____  Wattage? _____ Color? ____")

My own preference for my own games eventually converged on a simple approach: I'd have one line on the registration sheet that said "List five words or phrases describing yourself" and another right after it that said "List five words or phrases describing the character you want to play." That encouraged players to express not only what their preferences were but what the dimensions of their preferences were. For one player, a particular character type might be important ("samurai" or "lawyer"), for another, a particular social situation ("free agent" or "leader" or "loyal minion"), for another, a particular quality ("stealthy," "heroic," "powerful", "treacherous"). It also allowed players to make requests without our calling attention to specific issues. For instance, occasionally a player would want to play an oppositely-gendered character. But instead of having a questionnaire item that says "Do you want to play a character of opposite gender Y__ N__" which makes it sound like a big important deal that everyone should think about, players who did want to request a gender could easily include it as one of the five characteristics. Similarly, this method avoids appearing to promise characteristics that we couldn't necessarily provide. For instance, if there were a question that said "How powerful do you want your character to be, on a scale of 1 to 10" it tends to imply that those who request power-10 characters will get them. By requesting only undefined descriptors instead, we leave a player free to write down "powerful" or even "godlike" but there's no appearance of any guarantee that their character will actually be so.

LARP GMs that used the questionnaire approach instead eventually learned that the most useful questions were those addressing the player's game play on the metagame or social level: whether the player wanted to be a lone wolf or part of a tight faction; whether or not the player wanted to be in a leadership role over other players; whether or not the player wanted a character with clear and explicit goals; and how high a priority the player wanted playing the game to be, relative to other activities (including eating and sleeping).

Now, you've got a different situation because you're running games for your own friends, so you don't have the built-in necessity of turning in pre-registration forms to piggyback character preference questions onto. My suggestion is that you invent (if necessary, on a game by game basis) something that players have to do and submit in advance as a necessary preparation for play.

Let me break this down more. Let's start with what you tell the players about the game in advance. Are you waiting for players to submit character request information before you start designing your scenarios? That's probably not necessary. You should be able to get them excited about the game in advance by sending them a scenario teaser of some sort. (How excited do you get about going to see a movie if you have no idea what it's going to be about?) In my LARPs in my era the one-page flyer was the standard. My own signature style for a one-page flyer was like this:

Red Hotels
(date) (event)

Atlantic City in the 1920s is a glittering metropolis of golden opportunity. Real estate prices are skyrocketing all over town, from the slums of Baltic Avenue to the silver beaches beyond the Boardwalk. Ambitious new companies are competing for contracts to provide essential Utilities, whle the four established Railroads vie for their share of the lucrative passenger traffic from New York and Philadelphia. Building contractors are busier than ever before as brand-new houses and posh resort hotels spring up everywhere. All the forces of capitalism have been unleashed, offering wealth and power to those capapble of harnessing them. But...

Something Strange Is Going On!

The Atlantic tides that bring money and innovation also bear corruption and danger. The newly-elected Chairman of the Board has been accused of bribery. Several investors have been sent to Jail without due process, and though they claim to be Just Visiting, many think they're in for a long stay. As Income Tax rates rise to ten percent or two hundred dollars, orderly city planning has succumbed to the lure of the quick buck. Even the once-traditional Free Parking is now scarce. And who is willing to put up the money needed for general repairs on all properties? Certainly not the mysterious and all-powerful Bank, at least not without the sacrifice of yet more real estate to its expanding mortgage equity pool. Is there really a profit to be made, or are investors and deed holders all doomed to bankruptcy by the escalating rend spiral? And is it true that no first prize will be awarded at this year's all-important Beauty Contest?

Red Hotels is a live action role-playing game in a completely original setting based entirely on the vivid imaginations of the GMs of the Society for Interactive Literature. Players will assume the roles of real-estate speculators and developers, builders and hoteliers, bankers and rail barons, politicians and auctioneers, slumlords and celebrities in Atlantic City, New Jersey in the mid-1920s. Everyone will start with a fifteen hundred dollar stake and a purchase option on a property. The rest is up to you. Wealth or bankruptcy, influence or imprisonment: what will the Queen of Resorts have in store for you?

This tells players enough about the setting, scenario, and types of characters that they can make reasonably informed requests about what sorts of character they want to play. It also piques their interest (or, if the game sounds not to their taste, lets them avoid disappointment by not playing).

Then, what you need is a reason to collect something from the players in advance of the game. In a few games I requested photographs of the players (to use for ID badges, intelligence files, wanted posters, etc.) The item or information requested in advance can be something that you use in designing or casting characters, or it can be something that players need to do or to have before the game but after they know what character they're playing, making it necessary for them to know their characters in advance. For example, for the Red Hotels game you might tell players to create business cards for their characters (which will be needed for some in-game mechanism, perhaps). The sooner they give you the sign-up information you've requested, the sooner they'll know their characters' names and the more time they'll have to make the business cards.

Costuming is another really good reason to have character casting completed in advance. Do you require or encourage costuming in your LARPs?

In the end, I find it hard to imagine that your players can't be bothered to provide a few words of character preference information before the game, or that they'll be driven away if required to do so. Couldn't they at least answer a few questions over the phone or by e-mail? Are they afraid that making a request will ace them out of some cooler role that they didn't know about, that they might have gotten if they left it up to you? Or do they not want to commit in advance to playing the game at all, just in case some better invitation comes their way on Saturday night? (If that's it, then your efforts as LARP host are being ill-rewarded, to say the least.) Getting your players more invested in the game beforehand is within your rights, it's almost certainly within your creative powers, and it's to their advantage too.

- Walt

[JamesSterrett]

Thank you!  Thought-provoking stuff.  :)  Your example of a teaser page demonstrates to me just how woeful our email teasers have been - my fault!  We'll spice them up.

I like the idea of the "5 words", and we can probably get a high degree of response on that.

The thing your post really has my brain ticking over, though, is the wider issue of how much we can/should expect from our players beforehand.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, a large proportion of these people are very new to RPGs/LARPs, and some of them probably wouldn't self-identify as gamers if asked.  We've tended to assume that these people require a low barrier to entry into the game.  In some cases, that's probably worked out to be true; some of these people would likely have balked at having to come up with a character concept (and did not reply, or gave "whatever you provide is great" replies, to our questions in that regard), yet those same people enacted major changes in their real-life schedules to attend the game.  I suspect this is a matter of confidence and concept-comfort: our rookies have fun, but aren't sure where the safety lines are when we ask them where they'd like to swim.

I fully agree that getting the players more invested will improve the game all around; we're trying to balance that against the fear that some of them may balk if the investment looks too difficult.  We may be underestimating them - shame on us, if so.  Part of my fear on driving people away is the subversive hidden agenda to these games: getting non-gamers to play and enjoy turns them into gamers.  :)

Answering specific questions:

I don't know if players are afraid that requesting a specific role will bump them out of something cooler; I hadn't thought of the possibility!  More likely, they don't know what is possible, because a) I've written the blurb badly and b) many lack experience in RPGs.

Players do commit to us reasonably far in advance, and we do make a meal out of that being a serious commitment; I'm not aware of anybody ditching us because Something Cooler appeared.

Costuming is more difficult.  We haven't required costumes because a) not everybody has the time to make one; b) we try to set the games in more or less "now" so that modern dress is "in costume"; c) the game is played in a small farmhouse and the surrounding woods and fields - carefully made fancy costumes mix badly with mud and cat-briar!  The outdoors setting also means we have to keep in mind the possibility of rain or snow.  [The most recent game solved many of these issues by being set "at an archaeological dig" - so boots, jeans, etc were all perfectly in character.]

That said, some players do come in special costumes, and they do get social kudos for doing so; so the behaviour is reinforced, but not required.