[Changeling LARP]

[Anna B]

Wow, yes politics that effect the characters in personal emotional ways. That is what I want in game I'm running. I not really sure how to do that though.

In the changeling game we set up the situation and hoped the players would build character that were invested in it. That didn't happen. I do think having the players make character and give input on the situation would help.

What does Pendragon do to support this kind of play?

Adam

That's for the welcome. Grapevine is very helpfull program and really aperate you writing it.

While we envisioned the game centered on poltics, we really did end up explore banality vs. the dreaming a lot. Most of the major villians were hallbrigers of banality in some way.

The one time I've played  Are You A Werewolf? it was fairly political but didn't have a lot of roleplaying going on. This was in part because I was playing as part of board game night, so the group wasn't very focused on roleplaying.

[Brand_Robins]

In the changeling game we set up the situation and hoped the players would build character that were invested in it. That didn't happen. I do think having the players make character and give input on the situation would help.

What does Pendragon do to support this kind of play?

Pendragon is far more focused than Changeling, and is a TT rather than LARP environment -- which makes for a whole different dynamic. In Pendragon everyone is a knight, everyone is caught between honor and duty as well as between between self (love/success) and society (family/loyalty). As a result everyone knows pretty quickly exactly what they are getting into, and has some say in the setup of their character's issues in terms of game mechanics. (I have "Love Madule 18" and "Love Family 18" and, oh, btw, Madule is the woman that murdered my aunt...., or more simply, I have "Loyalty Baron Osric 16" and "Honor 16" and Baron Osric is known for his dishonorable treatment of prisoners, but only when those prisoners have hurt his subjects....")

Setting up the dynamic push and pull between players and situation is far easier in a TT, with the smaller number of people. You can just get everyone together and start tossing ideas around, building characters and setting at the same time. I can see where doing this for LARP would be more difficult, however, as that's a lot of voices to get into the pot. Still, if you break it down into sub groups, have them create their domains, then work out conflicts between the domains in meetings between those domains... it could work.

A few other general words of advice: Don't create a setting, create a situation. The Countess who keeps everything in balance is a setting. The Countess who just died without a will and now everyone is fighting for the remains and has a chance to get powerful, or be destroyed, is a situation. Situations are dynamic, have chances for players to push them and really change them, and will not sit still long enough for anyone to sit about and do nothing. Move or be moved, there is no sitting.

Once you have a thumbnail of a situation, just something short and powerful, have the players build characters into it -- and allow them to develope the situation further. Don't just make it and then hope they build to it, have them build it as they create their characters. If someone wants to be the commoner in love with the Baron's ward and the Baron had no ward before, well now he does. This will tie both the character (through the love interest) and the player (through the fact that they helped create part of the world and so are invested in it) care and have reason to push on what is going on.

[Josh Roby]

Wow, yes politics that effect the characters in personal emotional ways. That is what I want in game I'm running. I not really sure how to do that though.

In the changeling game we set up the situation and hoped the players would build character that were invested in it. That didn't happen. I do think having the players make character and give input on the situation would help.

You cannot rely on the players to engage in the situation without clearing laying out what that situation is -- in other words, the difference between "there is a Traditionalist Baron kept in check by a Reformist Countess" and "your lifestyles will be threatened by this Traditionalist Baron" is huge.  So that's one way: lay out what the conflict is in explicit terms and stipulate that characters must engage in the conflict in a concrete way (preferably encoded on the character sheet somewhere).

The other option is to have players create characters with hooks, and then connect the hooks together to make the situation.  Not having any LARP experience whatsoever, I don't know if this would be more viable or a incredible headache.

(Oh look, Brand said almost the same thing while I was typing.)

[Sydney Freedberg]

Amen to Brand, first of all. Let players create chunks of the game-world, notice what they get invested in and excited about, and then threaten it -- always a good way to mobilize people.

On politics specifically, I'm a great fan of Shakespeare's history plays, which are marvellous examples of politics-as-drama and might be good sources for you. (Even the badly written ones, e.g. Henry VI).

I also had some success in creating a highly political roleplaying campaign some years back (I wrote the system, wrote the setting, GM'd, the works) by a very, very simple expedient, drawn directly from the Shakespeare plays I loved: Make the protagonists the dukes, princes, queens, and barons themselves. There were some NPCs of equal power to the player-characters, but no NPCs of greater power than the PCs, which meant that anything the players wanted to do affected the politics of the setting automatically -- even if they just wanted to go off and be alone for a while ("Sorry, m'lud, but if you don't receive the Ambassador in person, it will be a great insult and start a war!"). This is the opposite of the traditional White Wolf model: You don't make the player-characters the least politically powerful people around and have uber-NPCs control everything, you give all the political power to the player characters and make the NPCs the pawns.

To translate this to your scenario: The Traditionalist Baron should be a player-character. The Reformist Countess should be a player-character. The whole Anarchist Freehold should be represented by one player character only - okay, maybe a couple if there are factions -- if not relegated to NPC status altogether on the grounds of being politically puny. Any other PCs should be big, powerful forces in their own right, like, oh, the King's High Constable investigating the situation, or the Countess's outcast brother and his army of bandits, and so on, and so on.

[Josh Roby]

To translate this to your scenario: The Traditionalist Baron should be a player-character. The Reformist Countess should be a player-character. The whole Anarchist Freehold should be represented by one player character only - okay, maybe a couple if there are factions -- if not relegated to NPC status altogether on the grounds of being politically puny. Any other PCs should be big, powerful forces in their own right, like, oh, the King's High Constable investigating the situation, or the Countess's outcast brother and his army of bandits, and so on, and so on.

This is the tack that a lot of Changeling MUSHes work off of, but it runs smack-dab into the "balance" issue I mentioned before.  The temptation is to give everybody roles and then make them all roughly equal in power, so that all the factions are balanced.  This does not work.  You've got to kick the legs out of somebody, preferably a couple somebodies, and hand a big fat club to a couple different people.  Ideally, so people don't feel cheated, you tell people what will happen (kicked or club-gifted) before they start making their characters and get attached to their static state.

[Adam Cerling]

Joshua, for having no LARP experience, you give good advice about how to make it work!

To all the MET games I've played has clung the unspoken idea that the chronicle should go on and on with no end in sight. This idea, I think, causes people to design LARP settings in stasis. If the political structure is poised on the brink of collapse, how can you be sure there will be a game to play twelve months from now?

Instead, Anna, set up a LARP that would play really well in five sessions. It doesn't matter if the game runs longer than that: get to the good stuff now. When you come to the end of those five sessions, if there's still life in the game, plan another five. If it's winding down, kill it and start something new.

To create the kind of politics you want, try a technique that I'm using for a LARP system I'm writing:

1. Sketch out a setting in broad strokes. "There's a Barony, with the main freehold. Then there's this other freehold that's just been discovered by commoners."
2. Have your players create characters for the setting. As they do so, prompted by their questions, fill in the detail of the setting. When they ask things like, "Can I play the Baron?" say yes. If they ask for detail like "What House does the Count belong to?" say, "I don't know, what House would be cool?"
3. Tell your players to write down on their character sheets three to five things their character cares about most deeply.
4. Design the LARP completely around the those things.

Read what people care about. You'll be able to tell pretty quickly if nobody gives a rip about the new freehold that's been discovered. Look for common themes among characters: you might be surprised to discover that three or four people are really passionate about exploring the Dreaming. That's something to use.

Then threaten those things. Don't only threaten them with NPCs: create situations that pit those things against one another. If a bunch of characters care about upholding the Escheat and a bunch of other characters want to create more Dreamers, design a situation in which breaking the Escheat would help create more Dreamers.

If you need to give one particular character grief, pit two things she cares about against themselves. Force the lady courtier to choose between her True Love and her loyalty to the King.

I ran a one-shot Changeling game this way last September, and we had a blast.

[Josh Roby]

4. Design the LARP completely around those things.

I'm going to sharpen the point: Design the LARP completely, totally, and only around those things.  Do not include anything else, not for color, not for plausibility, not for immersion, whatever.  These are the things that the players care about -- and what's more, this is the color that they care about, the plausability that they care about, and the immersion that they care about.  Everything else is the bathroom in Star Trek -- you never see it because it's not important, and it's not important because you never see it.

[Arpie]

You will never get good political roleplay out of Changeling as written, because the setting refuses to make decisions by the ruling elite actually affect the lives of the people they are supposed to be oppressing.  There are, for instance, no taxes (which is how a feudal system works).  The resources that the nobles control are, by law, open to anyone who needs to use them.  Would-be democratic revolutionaries cannot propose new systems that would demonstrably affect the problems presented in the game's typical situations, because the typical crisis in a Changeling game is a monster (chimera, mundane, whatever) that needs to be taken down.  A noble with a couple knights will do this better, faster, and more efficiently than a congress with a militia.  In Chris Chinn's terminology, the political 'choices' provided are almost all bunk choices.  If you want to tease some political roleplay out of Changeling, you have to pretty profoundly change the way the setting works so that the player-characters will have specific interests that they rely on that are threatened.  Otherwise you will be reduced to dressing up and acting petty -- that's incredibly accurate, Danny.

Wow! That's a very astute critique of the system you've given yourself! I agree because I ran into the same difficulties when I tried to play.

I fiddled with some of the rules mechanics themselves in Changeling but not to any satisfactory conclusion (perhaps you can learn something from my failed experiments and off-hand ideas at this site:
http://www.geocities.com/yokeltania/chchan.html#CHFF
or here for bunks/magic thoughts
http://www.geocities.com/yokeltania/chchan.html#CHFB

Sorry to make people go all the way to another page, but to summarize: I thought that using, say, playing cards or something to represent dross would at least introduce a practical fiscal element to play - something to tax or sell or bribe or even power your... uh... powers with. Gold is such an important element in so many fairy tales, I thought treating Dross* as magical gold would do the trick. Also, it gives nervous/new people something tangible to fiddle with.)

*Did I just capitalize a semi-misinterpreted word for no reason? I did, didn't I? I thought I'd gotten over that habit! Also, just as a side note, I'm trying to encourage more GMless play in LARPs. You're probably not going that direction, but hope springs eternal...)

[Arpie]

Sorry to double post, but I forgot I'd reworked the Changeling LARP rules once myself:
Again, please learn from my mistakes (I was kind of angry at the time and I was still trying, more-or-less, to hold on to the basic stylistic elements of both the Changeling and White Wolf milieu.)
http://www.geocities.com/yokeltania/chxart.html
Thanks for looking, if you get a chance.

PS. Yes, one person should represent an entire political movement. I agree. It makes for more dynamic diplomacy.

[Anna B]

Thanks everyone. While I'm not planing on running another LARP soon. I'll keep your advice in mind when I do. I am planing on trying to apply to it to some tabletop one shots I'll be running over winter break.

On Bunks: We used a system modeled on Jester's Rules from the players guide. Basically some one does a bunk and we assign a number of points based on how long it took, how it fit with what they were trying to do, and impressive-ness. It worked well for us.