LARPs

[marknau]

Hi Walt,

It seems to me that your posts in this thread, especially the big'un, already constitute a phenomenal "how to" guideline. If you wanted to turn them into an essay, maybe add an example or historical anecdote or two, it'd be very welcome as an addition to the Articles section at the Forge.

Best,
Ron

I hate "me too" posts, but I just gotta. Walt, what Ron says is dead-on. I've got a 20-something person LARP brewing, and any and all advice I can get from the veterans is going to be fabulous. I agree that trying to package a LARP experience is futile, but even a brief look into your "how-to" knowledge packs a big punch for a novice thinking about getting into it.

[Walt Freitag]

I believe that the points I made apply equally to all three of your proposed categories. If you disagree, I would be interested to hear why.

A completely fair request. I guess the basic point of contention is this:

In my experience, there are two, and only two, sustainable modes of LARP play: player-vs.-player Gamism, and Sim-Char. (I suppose one might add Participationism to that list, but why not take a load off your feet in that case?) Anything else is hopeless. Maintaining coherence is a bitch, and an absolute necessity, too--those modes do not mix well.

Now, if you're talking about your experience, I have every reason to believe you. But I don't go along with the generalizations. I've seen plenty of Narrativist LARP play. That is to say, play in which:

1. The players' main decision-making priority was creation of story now.

2. The players were successful in doing so.

It's true that certain stances and mechanisms often associated with Narrativist play are not practical in a LARP. But hey, neither are most of the mechanisms usually associated with Gamist and Simulationist play. It's a different universe with its own balances, hovering (I believe) closer to congruence than tabletop play.

And protagonism is certainly an issue. But in my experience, some LARP environments allow players to protagonize themselves much more readily, and are much less likely to deprotagonize, than others. System does matter. As does GM approach -- such as asking things like "where are you going with this?" when a player wants to do something questionable that needs GM vetting -- or at least thinking it. The single most common and destructive error in SIL LARP design was, and I suspect still is, attempting to protagonize using the character sheet. "You are the world's greatest detective," says the character sheet -- but that sentence on a piece of paper cannot magically give you the skills of a detective, or the respect of other player-characters. Better to tell a player-character he's a nameless nobody, which he can go do something about, than give him a supposedly protagonistic role that the game gives him no chance to live up to.

Far more than in tabletop, player-characters must protagonize themselves. (Though really, who else can protagonize a character, ever?) There are some Narr advantages to SIL LARP. One shot games encourage Author stance, rather than pawnish self-preservation. And the initial set-up, when done properly, provides essentially a kicker for every character. Bangs (which can be on the individual character scale, group scale, or gamewide scale) are par for the course, though we called them something else.

It took a while to learn what worked and what didn't -- and I'm still learning, retroactively, from concepts here at the Forge. Such as why my silly cartoon character game (post Toon, but pre Roger Rabbit) was a hit while a big serious generic fantasy game was an incoherent mess. The cartoon game (Show Biz) was very focused comedic Narrativism. The set-up was an elaborate but silly cartoon combat system (in which combattants gained and lost not Hit Points, but Ratings Points). Player characters were led to believe that they would be competing with each other for more ratings and better time slots on the Saturday morning schedule. The kicker came on Saturday morning, when they discovered that every single one of their shows had been cancelled, replaced by toy marketing tie-ins and nonviolent PC cartoons. The cartoon characters had to find new jobs in other areas of show business, and eventually, after rooting out the corruption riddling Acme Studios, managed a big collective comeback. (The Roger Rabbit people never did send me any royalties. But then again, I never sent any to Warner Brothers either.)

All we prepared in advance were the characters, thousands of props (and a roomful of craft materials for players to make anything they couldn't find), and a schedule of auditions. Everything else was player driven. We had to invent the corruption one step ahead of the characters rooting it out. I'm pretty sure this wasn't Gamism in action, because at the Academy Awards finale we gave all the Oscars to the Bugs Bunny character, who most definitely didn't deserve them, and nobody cared. Sim, I guess you could make a case for. But I call it Narrativist. What about the Premise, you ask, tapping your foot? I guess it was, "What relevance do old-fashined toons have in the progressive 80s?" Not much of a Premise, drama wise, but what do you expect from a bunch of cartoon characters?

An interesting artifact from that game is an introduction page I wrote. Though I didn't see it this way at the time, it was essentially a page-long apology for what I was about to do to the player-characters with Saturday morning's kicker. I had figured out that comedy, unlike drama, involves bad things happening to characters when they don't deserve it. But I'd never done anything like it before, in mid-game, to paying customers who outnumbered me. Running games in public that are impossible to play-test in advance is not conducive to peace of mind.

Oh man, I've rambled horribly. This LARP stuff is dangerous ground for me. Most of my youth, a lot of hard work and creative energy, a lot of incredible high points, a lot of abject frustration tangled up there. (I can't say it wasn't worth it, for one reason above all: a whole slew of happy marriages among people who met playing them.)

- Walt

[Wart]

after all, what work of literature really has 20+ main characters? (Aside from things like Anne McCaffrey's Dragon series, which only focuses on a few characters each novel, and Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy, which is really a bunch of different novels set in the same universe at the same time welded together.)

Not to be too snarky, but War and Peace has 150 or so characters.

And all of them are as important as the main protagonists?

In any case, I can't see a player's play being any different within the context of a larger or smaller group. They can still theoretically make decisions that are Narrativist. What I think the hinderance in most forms of LARP is to Narrativism is the lack of omniscient view that usually accompanies such play (as opposed to Tabletop).

Yep, essentially it's going to be nearly impossible to reconcile 20-plus people's take on a game's Premise (if we want to go all technical). Furthermore, getting 20-plus people in a room with the same idea of what makes a good story is damn near impossible.

Furthermore, a game with 20-plus people in needs lots of things going on if it's not going to seem empty and boring. One of the best ways to increase the number of things that are going on is to introduce player-vs-player gamism to the mix - interpersonal rivalry produces so much interesting tension. (Not that the game has to be entirely player-vs-player, allies being as important and enemies and so on.)

And once you already have player-v-player tension, and since the game format really lends itself better to diplomacy and negotiation than to action, really character-based Simulationism is the best way to experience what the game has to offer.

[Wart]

4th type: Invented independently by Oxford University's roleplaying society, also the Camarilla LRP organisation.

Other than the emphasis on ongoing play, this is indistinguishable from Walt's second listed style, "Game Tie-In LARPs."

Except, of course, that it doesn't tie-in with a published game.

[Wart]

4th type: Invented independently by Oxford University's roleplaying society, also the Camarilla LRP organisation.

Other than the emphasis on ongoing play, this is indistinguishable from Walt's second listed style, "Game Tie-In LARPs."

Except, of course, that it doesn't tie-in with a published game.

And furthermore, now that I think about it:

- My 4th type has no commercial links whatsoever - the rules system tends to be made up by the GM team. (Alright, so Camarilla doesn't fit in this category at all, my bad).

- None of Walt's varieties mentions turnsheeting.

[Walt Freitag]

I certainly have no objection to including a fourth style, or any other classification scheme people want to use. That only emphasizes my original point, which is the diversity of LARP styles that have been produced.

An MIT group used to run two week long LARPs. They were a hybrid of killer games (from which they inherited the two week runtime, a certain penchant for espionage and assassination, and less abstract weapon simulations, e.g. toy guns) and SIL games (they used pre written characters in a relationship web, having dropped the arbitrary assigned targets of killer).

On the other hand, very few if any individual games exhibit all of the characteristics of their "type." Many also borrow characteristics of another type. And most have unique characteristics of their own. When exceptions are the rule, the fit into types is necessarily approximate. Adding a type for every exception (how about those boxed murder mystery party games?) isn't always wise; there's often more to be learned by focusing on the similarities.

- Walt

[Mike Holmes]

Perhaps LARP is better looked at in terms of instances of play instead of trends. What I'd do in that case is find the spectra, and qualify a particular example by how it fits on all the spectra.

For example: Continuity - as a spectrum it goes from one-shot to indefinite. A specific LARP will end up being somewhere on that scale.

Intra-session play, rules complexity, Play-site type and size (indoors to outdoors or both), sponsor/producer, emphasis, game or liscence tie-in, length of session, frequency of sessions, setting/genre. player population (students, businessmen, military, mixed, etc)

Anyhow, probably lots more as well. But anyhow a classification system where you could ask a series of questions about any LARP, and at the end have a descent idea of what play might look like.

The theory would then look at how each of these considerations affected the play alone or in concert.

Sure, a large project. But I'd go to $50. 00 for a write-up, maybe more.

Mike

[Wart]

Perhaps LARP is better looked at in terms of instances of play instead of trends. What I'd do in that case is find the spectra, and qualify a particular example by how it fits on all the spectra.

For example: Continuity - as a spectrum it goes from one-shot to indefinite. A specific LARP will end up being somewhere on that scale.

Intra-session play, rules complexity, Play-site type and size (indoors to outdoors or both), sponsor/producer, emphasis, game or liscence tie-in, length of session, frequency of sessions, setting/genre. player population (students, businessmen, military, mixed, etc)

Let's also look at:

Play between sessions (players discussing what they're going to put on their turnsheets with each other, etc.) - this is a very important part in the "Oxford model", since though the meeting is where most of the playing in terms of diplomacy, negotiation, and the occasional surprise event takes place, it's in turnsheeting that the things that folk have agreed on in the meeting actually have an effect on the world. In other LRPs which have a downtime system, it's had less of an effect - in the UK's Omega large-scale LRP (a game the size of a combat-LRP, with a latex weaponry combat system, but with much emphasis on diplomacy) the GMs make a great deal of noise about how not participating in the downtime campaign won't penalise your character.

Experimentation. What sort of experiments can be made with the format without actually changing the basic nature of the game?

[Seth L. Blumberg]

First of all, forgive me for line-by-lining. In a discussion this large, where this much water has gone under the bridge since the messages to which I'm particularly responding, I feel it necessary to quote snippets of earlier messages to provide a more specific context for my responses.

I've seen plenty of Narrativist LARP play. That is to say, play in which:

1. The players' main decision-making priority was creation of story now.
2. The players were successful in doing so.

That's not the definition of Narrativism. Where's the Premise? "Story" is not Narrativism.

What about the Premise, you ask, tapping your foot? I guess it was, "What relevance do old-fashioned toons have in the progressive 80s?"

Fails the test for a Narrativist Premise--no moral relevance to the players.

By me, your Show Biz game was Simulationism focusing on Exploration of Situation and Color (and possibly Character, but you've presented no evidence in that regard). Your entire description of it focuses on the Situation and Color of the game, and ignores any issues of Premise.

some LARP environments allow players to protagonize themselves much more readily, and are much less likely to deprotagonize, than others.

Please, I beg you, I get down on my freakin' knees and beg you, tell me what elements of design and preparation you believe lead to increased player protagonism.

The single most common and destructive error...was...attempting to protagonize using the character sheet. "You are the world's greatest detective," says the character sheet--but that sentence on a piece of paper cannot magically give you the skills of a detective, or the respect of other player-characters.

From your fingers to every GM's ears. I've been burned more times by this one....

it doesn't tie in with a published game.

Sorry--I was seduced by your mention of Camarilla play, with which I am familiar, and ignored the Oxford style, with which I am emphatically not. For lack of any evidence to the contrary, I will stipulate to the existence of a fourth LARP style.

[James Holloway]

It's funny - regional variations in LARP styles seem to be quite significant. Where I come from, the dominant form of LARP is the outdoor game - weekly or biweekly, with players milling around some appropriate part of town. I've also run Cthulhu Live games which combine elements of the Vampire-type game and the outdoor combat LARP (not so much with the combat, but a lot of props and sets).

I couldn't say whether or not Narrativist LARPing is possible - I will say that play conventions which traditionally are used to facilitate Narrativism seem difficult in LARPs of any type without making them very similar to tabletop games. In fact, I'm not sure that the separation is as clear as people seem to think; anyone who read the old Call of Cthulhu scenarios "In Media Res" and "Grace Under Pressure" knows that they use player movement, props, and stage effects in combination with player and GM description of action.

So, if there are these types of LARPs, what are the elements that make them LARPs and not tabletop (do most people still play sitting around a table? Well, you know what I mean anyway)?

- description vs. action: as a rule, in LARPs players act out their character's actions in some way rather than describing them. The level of this varies greatly - some actions are obviously not easy to physically represent ("I fly away!") or not desirable ("I kick his ass!").

- props, sets, and costumes: in some LARPs, props and stage sets take the place of the GM's description of the surroundings. These range from being abstract (how many times have you seen con LARPs with bits of paper posted all over saying things like "engine room?") to being totally realistic (this game is set in a remote mountain cabin and played in a remote mountain cabin).

what else separate LARPs and tabletop games? I don't know. Usually LARPs have a large number of players, but this is by no means universal: I once ran a Cthulhu Live game which had no more than five players. These distinctions obviously don't cover many LARPs: the SIL-West games I've played in, for example, have very minimal action and not too much in the way of props, sets, and costumes (this side of things is usually left to the players).

So, really, what are we talking about when we say "LARP?" I'm not at all sure I believe in these different categories - lots of games blur the lines between them. What makes a game a LARP? Once we identify the situations that make something a LARP, we can talk about how those things affect its ability to implement particular play goals.

Thoughts?

[Walt Freitag]

Fails the test for a Narrativist Premise--no moral relevance to the players.

I would like to answer that in two ways. First in my normal voice, and then in a sort of high-pitched whine. Um, I mean, yeah, two ways.

1. Sure there was moral relevance to the players. "What is my (this character's) fit role in society?" is always a morally relevant question as long as the player perceives some empathic or metaphoric connection between the character and the player.

Show Biz explores the plight of entertainers whose work is no longer accepted. That work, when it's not being ignored as irrelevant, is being openly reviled for being "too violent" or "a bad influence" on its main audience. Like the old Vaudevillians whose outdated schtick they originally parodied, they're partly to blame for their situation. They've become complacent and hidebound. But how can it be otherwise? They're toons, which means the roles they perform "on camera" are no different than themselves and their behavior "off camera." How can they update their message to remain meaningful while still remaining true to their own natures?

I'm now having trouble keeping a straight face here so I'll move on to the second answer.

2. A visible Premise with obvious moral relevance might be one measure of quality in Narrativism, but it cannot be a definitional requirement for the existence of Narrativism. Assuming we're operating within the GNS model here, decision-making priorities trump everything else.

A player in a comedic LARP is walking down the street. Sees a banana peel on the ground. Slips on the banana peel and has a huge pratfall.

That, my friends, is as clear an instance of Narrativism as you'll ever see. How do I know? It's clearly not Gamism. Slipping on the banana peel doesn't garner any rewards that relate to compeition or challenge. It probably does the opposite. Simulationism has to be addressed with a bit more care. Might the player just be playing out what the character would have done? That is to say, what a comedic character in a world full of banana peels would have done? No. It doesn't wash. Inside the game world, a comedic character who slips on a banana peel does so because he doesn't see the banana peel. To deliberately step on the banana peel would be completely out of character and inappropriate (not to mention, not funny). If the character slips on the banana peel, it's because the player has decided that the character didn't see it. A metagame decision has been made. And it's been made purely for the sake of non-Gamist metagame rewards: in this case, creating humor; getting a laugh from the audience. That's Narrativism, pure and simple. Ron's assessments of such examples in recent threads consistently reaffirm this: you cannot conclude something is not Narrativism because you don't see a Premise; instead, Narrativism as a decision-making priority demonstrates that there must be a Premise in there somewhere, even if you don't see it.

So, despite what I said about not keeping a straight face above, what I said there is actually true and valid. And the capping evidence I offer is this: at the end of the game, the players reported feeling a sense of accomplishment -- not because they'd "beaten" the GMs or each other (though Gamism in the form of beating the GMs by dealing with the situation the GMs had devised was definitely present as a subsidiary mode, as it often is in Narr games), nor because they'd explored what it's like to be cartoon characters facing typical in-genre situations (that's what they expected to do coming in, and what they would have done, except that the kicker took them out of their normal milieu and made its continued existence an issue to be resolved), but because by their play they had affirmed the value of the characters and of an art form that they were fond of.

Actually, I've personally been skeptical of Ron's theory that if there's Narrativist decision-making going on then there has to be a Premise in there somewhere, even if it wasn't put there on purpose or consciously perceived. My experience with this game is evidence in its favor that, going in, I didn't expect to find.

- Walt

[Mike Holmes]

I would totally agree with Walt that Narrativism can and does exist in LARP play. What Walt describes is "Vanilla Narrativism" exactly. Players addressing premises that even they might be unaware of (though they seemed to see it in the end). I would also say that it's rarer, and fairly difficult. I have speculated as to reasons for this.

First, that being less omniscient of larger events that it's harder to figure out what decisions are available that are Narrativist in a given circumstance. That is, since I don't know everyting that's going on (like I would in a tabletop game) that I have to make decisions more locally. And as such, it's easier to fall back into "what would my character do" mode. I suppose that this would be easily mitigated by having smaller groups. Hmmm.

Second, given the potentially more Immersive nature of LARPS, that many will prefer to play Sim. That in stepping out of character mentally for example to make a decision to slip, as Walt mentions above, might be something that they'd rather not do.

Note that I think that working against this latter notion is the idea that people may have that they are playing to an audience, theatre style. In that case, and being improvisational, they might feel the need to step out of character to make that decision that might be more entertaining for the group as a whole, and as such some of these decisions might be Narrativist.

What I'd say is that Walt had found a set of qualities in setting up a LARP that did not impede Narrativism (reduced Gamist tendencies, for example), and a group of people who were likely to respond in a Narrativist fashion. As such I would expect Narrativist play.

Does that seem to coincide with our experience, Walt? For example, if you had played with more wargamers, would you not expect to see these things come out more Sim (or even Gamist)?

Or am I wrong? Does LARP have certain qualities that I'm not aware of that make it more conducive to Narrativist play (such as the aformentioned audience effect) than my small experience would suggest? For example, I wonder if players during those scheduled breaks talked to each other OOC, and let each other in on the big picture so as to make each player better able to have his character address larger issues.

BTW, on a related issue, and one that's poped up in other threads lately, it seems to me that it's hard to do really small LARPS. We've discussed the intimacy factor in small groups for tabletop, but it seems to me that this is ampified in LARP. By which I mean to say that getting any fewer than say seven people to play a LARP seems, well, uncomfortable. Is there something about LARP in your esitmation, Walt, that makes a larger "Audience Factor" a must for comfortable play? Is it the similarity to theatre, for example? I find this very interesting.

Mike

[Matt Machell]

Mike,

I've never had a problem with small LARPs. For example, in the Vampire LARP I'm involved in, we often have smaller events (3-7 people) between larger events (20-40 people). It tends to be good for intensive sim-char play (less other people in the way), but can also for Narativist play (easier to focus on a premise than with a large group). It's also used to protagonise characters more, which is difficult at largeer events.

The LARP in question also has a surprisingly Narativist bent for a vampire LARP (many I've played in have been very sim-char focused), as the organisers have been very vocal in establishing the focus of the game on the moral quandry of "which means more to you, freedom or loyalty?"

-Matt

[Walt Freitag]

What Walt describes is "Vanilla Narrativism" exactly. Players addressing premises that even they might be unaware of (though they seemed to see it in the end). I would also say that it's rarer, and fairly difficult. I have speculated as to reasons for this.

Oh, it's definitely rarer in general, at least on a systematic gamewide level. But let's not forget that LARPs have a whole additional dimension (that is to say, space as well as time) in which "instances of play" take place. It's generally held that most games have instances of all three modes of play, but that a few scattered instances of e.g. Narrativism is not enough to make a game Narrativist if some other mode predominates. However, in a LARP a relatively few instances of Narrativism could, in theory, represent one player's entire experience in the game. The concepts of focus, coherence, drift, transition, and congruence must be applied to LARPs with great caution.

First, that being less omniscient of larger events that it's harder to figure out what decisions are available that are Narrativist in a given circumstance. That is, since I don't know everyting that's going on (like I would in a tabletop game) that I have to make decisions more locally. And as such, it's easier to fall back into "what would my character do" mode. I suppose that this would be easily mitigated by having smaller groups. Hmmm.

Yes, I think that's true. Evidence supports that idea. Show Biz was a relatively small game (18 players, IIRC). The best example of a systematically Narrativist LARP, Arabian Nights, is a very large game but has mechanisms that deliberately break down the play into smaller units with smaller casts of characters per unit. (I'll post a complete overview of the Arabian Nights mechanics on this thread sometime soon.)

Most large LARPs involve many smaller overlapping units of plot, even when that's not emphasized in the mechanics. And I think what can happen is, Narrativistic instances of play can arise within the context of those subplots. This might involve one or two players most involved in the subplot to take on a Narrativistic stance toward it; or all of the players involved in it can shift to Narrativism as the game nears its end in order to work toward a satisfying resolution.

Second, given the potentially more Immersive nature of LARPS, that many will prefer to play Sim. That in stepping out of character mentally for example to make a decision to slip, as Walt mentions above, might be something that they'd rather not do.

Again, I hadn't thought about it before, but there's evidence for this. Narrativist-leaning LARPs often give players a bit of license to step out of character, often in the form of genre expectations. (As in slipping on a banana peel... a player might think, "I'm a cartoon character, of course I'm supposed to slip on the banana peel" without ever thinking of it as an out of character decision. After all, it's an in-character action.) Also, Show Biz has a deliberate level-mixing quality to it that it inherits from the cartoons themselves. Bugs Bunny is both an anthropomorphic rabbit being pursued by a hunter, and an actor with Oscars, a mansion, and an agent. When Daffy Duck argues with the animator during a cartoon, is that a "metagame" or "out of character" event? A little blurring of IC/OOC lines seems natural here, even beneficial.

And guess what... Arabian Nights has quite a bit of a similar blurring. The Arabian Nights tales are stories about lots of things, but mostly they're about stories. And they're all taking place inside a frame story, which is itself about stories. The game mimicks this very effectively. Each time a player takes on a different character role (which in Arabian Nights she can do many times), she's aware that the story she's about to enter has purpose: to entertain and to instruct. If some of that knowledge leaks into the character it doesn't seem out of place. Another way of saying it is that each player is explicitly told that he's playing two roles simultaneously: his individual main character, and Shahrazade who is telling their stories, so not only license but mandate is given for Narrativist decision-making. Then if the character goes to a storyteller to hear (that is, enter and play out) a story within a story, and thereby takes on a new role, now he's got three different perspectives, all of them arguably "in character": the new role inside the sub-story, the main character who is learning the sub-story from a storyteller, and Shaharazade who is author of all.

God I love that game.

Note that I think that working against this latter notion is the idea that people may have that they are playing to an audience, theatre style. In that case, and being improvisational, they might feel the need to step out of character to make that decision that might be more entertaining for the group as a whole, and as such some of these decisions might be Narrativist.

Yes, that's definitely a factor. In fact, this factor can create quite a strong and destructive tension if you fill a LARP with the wrong kind of roles. The ultimate currency in a LARP (and I think in most non-solo RPGs) is attention. Yet given a choice, many players will request shadowy characters who work in secret and wield great power behind the scenes. They do so because they associate such characters with effectivness, and they are accustomed to RPGs in which character effectiveness is essential for getting attention. (Around a tabletop, the attention can be OOC, with the exploits of the shadowy lurker getting as much or more air time as everyone else.) It took us years to learn not to pay much attention to such requests; that players requesting such characters in LARPs were hosing themselves because the better they played their role, the less reward they got.

I've always wondered how Vampire LARPs manage to get around this problem. A whole cast of characters who are secretive by nature acting in a medium in which audience appreciation is the main reward never seemed a very promising recipe to me. My guess would be that Vampire LARPs have adapted to provide settings and situations in which secrecy may (or must) be dropped.

If you had played with more wargamers, would you not expect to see these things come out more Sim (or even Gamist)?

Yes, I would. But LARP audiences are very self-selected and their style preferences can often be predicted. Show Biz took place at a shared LARP convention along with a cyberpunk game. The wargamers were clearly not going to be the ones choosing to play cartoon characters.

Actually, there was one wargamer player who ended up "in Show Biz" because he couldn't get into the other game and wasn't very happy about it. He ended up playing spectacularly and the game quite won him over. But if half the players had come in wishing they could play cyberpunk instead, the results might have been very different.

Speaking of self-selection, the players for the first running of Arabian Nights were about 60% female. Despite the fact that the game was running at an SF convention whose overall membership was about 15% female. Considering the costuming that the Arabian Nights setting inspires, I really felt sorry for the rest of the con. (Did I say, God I love that game?)

I wonder if players during those scheduled breaks talked to each other OOC, and let each other in on the big picture so as to make each player better able to have his character address larger issues.

There's no evidence that that's a significant factor IME.

BTW, on a related issue, and one that's poped up in other threads lately, it seems to me that it's hard to do really small LARPS. We've discussed the intimacy factor in small groups for tabletop, but it seems to me that this is ampified in LARP. By which I mean to say that getting any fewer than say seven people to play a LARP seems, well, uncomfortable. Is there something about LARP in your esitmation, Walt, that makes a larger "Audience Factor" a must for comfortable play? Is it the similarity to theatre, for example? I find this very interesting.

I agree that smaller LARPs are harder. But I never associated this with an audience factor. One's immediate audience in a LARP is usually small in any event. It has more to do with pacing (20 players can move through or generate about 5 times as much top-level plot in 24 hours than 60 players can), and the amount of interesting turbulence and interconnections that can be generated with a larger versus a smaller group. Also another, even more basic factor. I used to explain "how SIL LARPs work" as follows: "You enter a fictional world that's made up primarily of the people you meet. The other players, by playing their roles, create the game world for you. By playing your role, you become part of the game world for everyone else." Therefore, fewer players, less verisimilitude, generally speaking.

I know from one of my own LARP playing experiences that Narrativist play doesn't require an audience (though I doubt I'm a typical case here). My best LARP ending ever as a player was in a feudal Japanese game. My character, a minor noble, basically saved the Empire through a series of the most dishonorable actions imaginable, including arranging the assassination of several incompetent (non-player-character) Emperors in order to bring an effective candidate (a player-character) to the throne -- who was the one person who knew what I had done and was honor-bound to impose the proper penalties. My crimes were revealed and I was permitted to perform seppu-ku in front of the whole player cast. That was fun, at a basic moment-in-the-spotlight level. But the really cool part was classic in-play exploration of the theme of Honor. As I began the ritual I was thinking: this business of an "honorable" death is a joke, pathetically inadequate to redeem such a dishonorable spirit -- unless the good intentions and heroically successful results of my actions are taken into account. In which case, why does my redemption demand my life at all? Yet surely no one so dishonored could live; only death could make any amends at all. I decided that to die with the question circling endlessly in his mind was a fitting end for this character. And no one in the audience ever had the slightest inkling that this part of the story had taken place. (Of course, this could not really be Narrativism by the GNS definition because my decisions for my character's mental state near his death were not reflected in observable behavior. But that's a necessary limitation of the GNS model, not a diminishment of my experience.)

- Walt

[Mike Holmes]

I've never had a problem with small LARPs.

Sounds like cool stuff. But there are two things which I suspect mitigate the size effect of which I spoke in your case.

First, the players are all regular LARPers in your example. Let me ask a question. If you were to introduce a newbie to the game, would you think they'd be more comfortable in the big sessions, or the small ones? I think your small ones work precisely because the players have been introduced to the form in the large games. I'm also betting it's the most experienced players who do the small LARPs.

Second, I assume that this is somewhere in the UK from your ID. It seems that LARP there has been more destigmatized than it has been here (if there ever was a stigma to lose). Here I think that LARP is seen as a potentially very public and very potent way of "freaking the mundanes" which (if you aren't aware) is gamer speak for disturbing people who won't understand what you're up to.

I make this assumption based on what I've read in general of gaming in the rest of the world, and especially in the UK and Australia. And that is that gaming has never been seen as that odd an activity in these places (when it's known at all). This in part due to the fact that RPG gaming was begun by adults in the rest of the world, while here it was largely started as a childhood passtime*.

In fact, I have been given to understand that in the UK there were events prior to Walt's introduction of LARP as such to the world that were similar to LARPs and as such the conversion has been relatively easy. Assuming my reading is true, I'd think that players have less hurdles in general to leap getting into a LARP as a whole. As such, any small group intimacy effect might just be less noticeable.

Or maybe it's just the British stiff upper lip thing. I dunno.

OTOH, this could just be my own biases showing, and my understanding of the LARP and RPG phenomenon as it exists outside the US could be completely skewed. I readily admit that. Still, however, I stand by my first point. (and I may be mistaken about the LARP size thing as a whole, BTW, I'm just working from anecdotal evidence; I'd just like to hear more evidence before capitulating to another single set of anecdotal evidence).

Mike

*Please let's not debate this point here. If you disagree, that's fine and say so. But if you really want to mull over this point, please start a new post.