(Note: Jargon ahead. And it's long. Continue at your own risk. Ewige blumenkraft.)

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only LARPer on here. I know that's not true, so I'm encouraging y'all to come out of the woodwork here, tho all commentary is welcome. :)

Myself, I've played in boffer LARPs, Mind's Eye Theatre games (e.g. Vampire LARPs), and ILF-style system-minimal and freeform games.

So, before I get into the main point, let's talk funamentals. To me, the defining feature of Live Action Role-Playing is that the actual physical space the players are in corresponds in some way, usually 1:1 but not always, to the shared imagined space of the game. As part of this, where the player physically is, as long as they are "in character", corresponds to where that player's character is in the imagined space as well. IN a very real sense, it amounts to using your own body as a full-sized minature...

Now, some would talk about dressing up in costumes and immersion as part of the definition, and while those are a common elements, I think they're red herrings. First of all, I've been in plenty of LARPs where the players don't dress as their characters, but instead just use name badges. At best, it's Color, not what makes a LARP a LARP. Immersion I can see a bit more as an issue of secondary importance -- as usually nearly everything you say and do is considered to be "in character", much in the way it is for an actor that's "on camera" or "on stage", but really I see that as an extension of the idea that physical space corresponds to imagined space. There's no requirement that you feel yourself "inside" the character as much as possible, it's just very common that people feel that way, as immersion is a lot easier when you physically represent your character. But "token stance" is just as common, as anyone who's ever played a boffer LARP knows.

So, what are the side effects of LARP-style play, as a technique? Well, it encourages, but does not require, immersion, as I said above. Also, it facilitates splitting the players up into several small sub-groups, all over the space. This allows for games with many more players, as it's easier for the players to "do their own thing". In fact, it almost requires it, as by definition NPCs are difficult to do in the traditional way -- you usually need a human being for each NPC, if the physical space/imagined space correspondence is to remain.

Therefore the most effective LARP mechanics put a premium on bieng able to "work" with a minimum of GM intervention. In a boffer LARP, you don't need a GM to know when someone hits you -- they hit you if their boffer weapon physically touches you. In fact, given that a single GM cannot be everywhere, there is a reason LARPS tend to have a lot of GMs (i.e. more than one), and a lot of "graded levels" of GMs, like the Narrators in MET, which are empowered to make rules calls but aren't "full" GMs. The idea is to diffuse the GM's Authority around the playspace, becuase it's tougher to exert in a "traditional" manner. Of course, ideally the LARP should be able to tool along most of the time without any GM intervention at all.

Now, since most LARP play is derived from tabletop play, many LARP systems are, in essence, a tabletop system "adapted" to the realities mentioned above. For this reason, the vast majority of LARP systems are either Gamist, Simulationist, Gamist/Simulationist hybrids (of varying level of functionality), or vanilla Narrativist. In fact I can't think of any "pervy" Narrativist LARP systems at all.

For example, boffer LARPs are largely Gamist, with player skill being a premium factor, though with some Simulationist leanings, not unlike AD&D, which inspires most boffer LARPs. MET is Gamist/Simulationist leaning strongly twoard Simulationism, but the slide to Gamism is tough to stop, as any experienced MET GM would tell you. More freeform games tend to be very Simulationist, with some Drifting into vanilla Narrativism, which tends to get more pronounced as you get more "rules lite", given that the "rules light movement" (in LARPs and tabletop RPGs) is often the result of unrecognized Narrativist leanings and the belief that a ruleset gets in the way of "real role-playing" and is, at best, a "neccessary evil".

Given this, and given the Forge's large biases toward tabletop play (not as a pejorative thing, just in terms of who's actually here, methinks), this means not much work has been put into figuring out active techniques that are LARP-usable (i.e. require little or no GM intervention) but also encourage Narrativist play. For example, giving narrative power to the players, which is often used to support Narrativist play (though it doesn't have to), isn't really possible in a LARP. (Or if it is possible, it needs to be handled differently than it is in, say, InSpectres.)

So, the point of this thread is, given the fundamentals I give above: What would be some good LARP-usable techniques to facilitate -- rather than simply get out of the way of -- Narrativist play? Any suggestions?

I think one will probably have to go for a TROS style "Gamism supporting Narrativism" style of play. Certainly I think something like TROS's Spiritual Attributes, properly applied so they require less GM interpretation, might be one technique of the sort I'm looking for here...

I certainly think that eliminating GMs almost entirely might be part of the answer, or certainly might be part of a useful technique, as it's really only a holdover from "traditional" roleplaying that doesn't work quite so well in LARPs. (On the other hand, it's nice to have someone to untangle rules calls...)

Frankly, I'd like to design a Narrativist-leaning set of LARP rules, and I need a toolbox of LARP-usable techniques that could support Narrativism well, as well as how to give players the ability to engage in "Story Now" while in little clumped groups, in what is, in some ways, a very tightly constrained form of imagined space, as it's mapped onto real space, which is difficult to alter without "going tabletop".

Yell at me if I'm not making sense here. ;-D

Just wanted to chime and and say I'm a LARPer too. In fact, I LARP more than I table-top. My LARP experience seems to mirror yours -- boffer LARP, V:tM LARP, freeform LARP.

I'm not really up to snuff with the whole GNS concept, so I can't really offer any good suggestions to address your specific concerns. But I would be interested in hearing what ideas you've had so far, since I'm working on a game that is designed to be played either table-top or in a LARP setting without any changes to the rules.

As I mentioned, I'm not well-versed in GNS, but from what I've learned so far, my preferred style of play is either Nar or Sim (not really sure which).

But, from a non-GNS perspective, what you said about NPCs in a LARP is important. Most of my favorite roleplaying experiences in LARPs come from PC to PC conflicts. This is a fairly big jump from most table-top RPGs, but I think it's important to encourage players to develop the story on their own, with GMs there primarily to resolve disputes fairly.

Is there anything you'd like feedback on that isn't GNS-related?

Relationship maps. Bar none, the best LARPS I've played in that produced their own stories have been ones where the characters were pre-generated (either by the scenario designer or by the group to be playing) and each character had relationships with several others. This holds for MET as well as homebrew (haven't done boffer LARP, sorry).

NPC-as-Bang. LARP offers the awesome potential to have a bang show up, and stand there staring you in the face while you're going "crap crap crap". The best example from my own experience I can think of for this is during a rennaisance Italy style LARP with a tightly woven R-map, about half-way through the game, a prominent chararacter's husband, presumed dead for years, returned from being lost at sea to find her now betrothed.

Fact Board - have, preferably just outside of the LARP space (or for an on-going LARP, on a BBS or something like) a space where the things players create from whole cloth can be posted. It can vary from little things like "Master Gerald was a dancer for several years before he turned his hand to the sword" to long cutscene-like narratives. The important part is that it is a place where things created can be disseminated.

The biggest stumbling block to Nar (and Sim) LARP play is that there is no single SIS. There are several little SIS's with a lot of overlap that make a big fuzzier SIS. It's very difficult to push Story Now with small group A and small group B when those stories can end up establishing contradictory things about the SIS.

Some thoughts from a fellow LARPer...

James

Blankshield wrote: The biggest stumbling block to Nar (and Sim) LARP play is that there is no single SIS. There are several little SIS's with a lot of overlap that make a big fuzzier SIS. It's very difficult to push Story Now with small group A and small group B when those stories can end up establishing contradictory things about the SIS.

Well it's nice to see this topic crop up. I've done a lot of LARP, both LRP (rubber swords, boffer, though I've never heard that term used, perhaps it's a US term?), World of Darkness, Fading Suns and plenty of Freeform games.

The big problem that lots of LARPs face is coherant social contract. They tend to be big, and maintaining any kind of coherancy is a difficult prospect. Take The Gathering, the biggest rubber-sword type event, it gets thousands of players at once. Ask any player why they're there and you'll get a different answer. With the default lying somewhere in the Sim style, pockets of people muddle though doing their own thing, some of it may be vanilla narativism, some hardcore gamism.

Smaller games like The Camarilla are still running at between 30-100 people at a game, so you get those pockets of people doing their own thing. There's no guiding vision otehr than "we're playing Vampire, duh?" It defaults to Sim/Gamist cos that's easier to run and that's what most players are familiar with (and want, in many cases). You get big fat "Immersion is king" rants all the time at many of these games, which makes any narativist leanings end up being vanilla, or leaving the game.

To get anything Narativist you have to scale down a LARP to a level where everybody present has the same reason for being there. A few people, like a TT game but with more live-ness. I've played in some Sabbat games in Minds eye that had just a single pack present and were nicely focused on the games theme of freedom vs responsibility.

So the potential is there, but I think nobody has really exploited it yet.

-Matt

Matt wrote: boffer, though I've never heard that term used, perhaps it's a US term?)

Matt wrote: To get anything Narativist you have to scale down a LARP to a level where everybody present has the same reason for being there. A few people, like a TT game but with more live-ness.

Andrew Morris wrote:
Yeah, pretty much. It refers to the inelegant padded clubs we crazy Americans use in live combat games. Don't worry that you don't know what they are -- latex weapons are far superior.

Matt wrote: I'll stick to my Eldritch sword, thanks ;)

Okay, we've derailed a bit. Back to techniques:

So we want Narativist play in a LARP. The group has a coherant idea of what kind of play they want. We have a premise. Are the techniques any different to a tabletop narativist game?

I don't think so. Some might prove problematic in the medium, and a little rethinking of expectaions might be in order, but the basic ideas can still be used.

Take scene framing. As long as players expect you to cut away at a suitable resolution and set a new scene it's only an issue of communicating to all the relevant parties. Keep it small numbers wise and you're fine. What if a PC isn't present at a scene? Give them an NPC role. As long as they expect it, and it's part of the agreed style of play, not a problem. Or at least not in my mind. You do lose that feeling of consistent space a bit, but is that just an expectation from other games?

-Matt

Hiya,

The LARPs thread and the links within it ought to make for some great reading, as backup and foundation.

Best,
Ron

Blankshield wrote: Relationship maps. Bar none, the best LARPS I've played in that produced their own stories have been ones where the characters were pre-generated (either by the scenario designer or by the group to be playing) and each character had relationships with several others. This holds for MET as well as homebrew (haven't done boffer LARP, sorry).

Matt wrote: Take scene framing. As long as players expect you to cut away at a suitable resolution and set a new scene it's only an issue of communicating to all the relevant parties. Keep it small numbers wise and you're fine. What if a PC isn't present at a scene? Give them an NPC role. As long as they expect it, and it's part of the agreed style of play, not a problem. Or at least not in my mind. You do lose that feeling of consistent space a bit, but is that just an expectation from other games?

John Kim wrote:
Well, scene framing isn't a particularly Narrativist technique -- it is a general technique used by nearly all tabletop games. The problem for LARP is that often the numbers are large (i.e. a dozen or more) and people are often spread out beyond earshot. By suggesting that everyone be in the same room and pay attention to narrated direction, it seems to me that you are making things more tabletop-like. While there is certainly a grey area in-between, I think that true LARP techniques should be applicable broadly across LARPs.

Some discussion of generating coherency of Creative Agenda in Boffer LARP teams.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9984&highlight=

yrs--
--Ben

P.S. Put me on the record that I think LARPs are a totally different, if related, RPG animal, and the Creative Agenda as written does not apply.

One of the points where larp differs from verbal RPGs is that geographical variety is greater. Most larp-scenes have invented larp "on their own" making it much less standardized than verbal roleplaying, with its (compared to larp) huge industry.

Being a norwegian larper, I have the norwegian perspective on larp, which is decidedly different from the american one. To point out a few important differences:



• Norwegian larps are usually not based on published verbal RPGs.
• They usually feature little or no system apart from a few de facto standard safety rules, such as Cut! and Brake! (No touching is not one of them though...)
• Larps with little or no combat at all is becoming increasingly common. When there is combat, it is very often Karma-based. Sometimes it's just improvised, but Karma followed by improvisation is becoming more and more usual. There used to be complex systems with hitpoints and whatnot, but this has mostly been abandoned.
• Play is usually plot and character relation-driven, but other forms of interaction-motors are being developed and put to use (Systemic larp, Fate-play (which is Norwegian, by the way) and my own unaptly-named Narrative Function (see Beyond Role and Play) are examples of this).



In norwegian larp analysed from a GNS-perspective there is quite much simulationism, some illusionism-thought-of-as-narrativism (curse all ideas of "storytelling" in roleplaying!) and the occasional actual narrativistic larp. Gamism occurs, and sometimes unwantedly, but there has been few attempts at making larps that are consciously gamistic, or that contains gamistic elements and potential.

Blankshield wrote: The biggest stumbling block to Nar (and Sim) LARP play is that there is no single SIS. There are several little SIS's with a lot of overlap that make a big fuzzier SIS. It's very difficult to push Story Now with small group A and small group B when those stories can end up establishing contradictory things about the SIS.

To concentrate on a real tiny bit of a really cool post:

Erling Rognli wrote: (Another interesting example of a highly successful, and more pure narrativistic larp is inside:outside, which I was not personally involved in, but I'll try to get one of the people involved to post something, if there is interest.)

I think your biggest problem there (as with any political/faction game) will be avoiding drift to very gamist play. Though that's a very premature judgment on my part based on far too many Freeform/Vampire LARP games.

-Matt

Matt wrote: I think your biggest problem there (as with any political/faction game) will be avoiding drift to very gamist play. Though that's a very premature judgment on my part based on far too many Freeform/Vampire LARP games.

xiombarg wrote: I'd very much like to hear about that LARP.

Much like Merten, the LARPs I've run are based on R-maps. This does give you the potential to build in Premise, but you do face limitations - in the end, the desire to address premise has to come from the players. The games are one-shot and last ~6 hours, run roughly once a year.

On the one hand, we've had players decide that pursuing their goals isn't worth risking the End of the World - is this addressing a premise, or wimping out and ignoring their character sheet? I'd tend towards "address premise" in this case, but we can certainly argue the toss.

For our next LARP (coming up on June 20), we asked players for 5 words to describe what they might want to play (per a suggestion from Walt). This hasn't been entirely successful in generating fodder for our R-maps & briefings to include more premise, but we have one potential major hit - a player asked for "a character like Vir from Babylon 5" - a moral person trying to loyally serve an immoral boss. The player asked for that premise, and we're delighted to provide it in the briefing and R-map. We'll see how it pans out in play.


Gamism-serving-narrativism: players understand "these are your goals" pretty well; how wel does it work to provide goals that either/both a) conflict with each other; b) require them to do things that the player may consider morally repugnant? Inevitably, the outcome depends on the player.


Xiombarg specifically: I'd argue in favor of keeping the game as rules-light as posible; and the nature of possible depends heavily on your group. I run games for friends whom I can trust not to be munchkins, which radically cuts down the rules overhead. Your mileage may vary. However, IMO, social rules get really clunky really fast - I'm better off forcing players to fall back on their own social skills. Your mileage may vary if your players are generally not up to that. Combat can't get rules-free, though, and always bogs things down in mine, despite trying to streamline it.

<de-lurk>
Hi!

Erling wrote me about this thread and asked me to describe inside : outside. That description is coming up next. But first, I noticed the fateplay technique was mentioned earlier in the thread.

The fateplay technique is desribed here. Mostly in Norwegian, though there is an [URL=http://fate.laiv.org/fate/en_fate_ef.htm]introduction and a definition in English.

It's a technique, but it was invented in order to and is usually used to facilitate a kind of play that you would probably call "pervy narrativist" in forgespeak. A common premise would be "Opposing the cruelty of destinty leads to even greater cruelty in fulfilling the destiny". The technique was developed in order to larp-roleplay stories from greek mythology and theatre in a satisfactory manner.

I think fateplay has become so pervasive in arthaus Swedish larps (like "Hamlet" and "Mellan Himmel och Hav") that reviewers don't bother to mention that it was used. Although, precisely because reviewers don't bother to mention it, I'm not certain. In the technique's homeland, Norway, it's a rarely used though a diluted version - what I call "suggestionplay" - is quite common. Suggestionplay is basically fateplay where you can overrule a fate instruction if it doesn't seem appropriate - often mixed up with puzzle and conflict.

Personally, I invented the technique but haven't really used it since 1997 - because the larps I've been writing since haven't fit with fateplay, but also due to the huge workload of making sure every fate works with every other fate. More open-ended techniques allow the larpwright to be more sloppy, since players can improvise to fill in the blanks.

I used fates on a larp held a couple of months back, but in that case just to kick-start some conflicts during the actual play of the larp instead of writing them into back story. I guess you can say, in that case, that the fates were used to facilitate sim or gamist play.

peace and love,
.eirik.

For those doing their homework on LARPs (with all these links and references, this thread is becoming quite a gold mine), here's my more detailed description of the Arabian Nights LARP that was mentioned several times in the LARPs thread that Ron linked to previously.

That game sheds some interesting light on Kirt's (xiombarg's) initial observations. The Virtues as character requisites come close to filling Kirt's prescription for "LARP SAs;" in fact, I mentioned in the description that the Virtues in Arabian Nights seemed midway between SAs and traditional requisite scores, due to the ways they're used in play.

On the other hand, the game goes the opposite way on the issue of GM's. Arabian Nights is GM-intensive. It's a bit more complex than that, though. In terms of "traditional" LARP GM functions, the Arabian Nights GMs are more in the background, less needed, than for other similar LARPs. Refereeing of rules disputes is rarely required. High-level management of information gradients is unnecessary, and it was planned that way because the large scale of the initial run of the game would have made any such management difficult. However, the GMs in Arabian Nights have an additional unusual function: technically, as organizers of sub-games; socially, as a critical audience. In a way, although this is nowhere stated in the rules, if the players collectively "play" Shahrazad, the GM's collectively "play" the Sultan in the frame story.

James (Blankshield) wrote: The biggest stumbling block to Nar (and Sim) LARP play is that there is no single SIS. There are several little SIS's with a lot of overlap that make a big fuzzier SIS. It's very difficult to push Story Now with small group A and small group B when those stories can end up establishing contradictory things about the SIS.

Matt wrote: To get anything Narativist you have to scale down a LARP to a level where everybody present has the same reason for being there. A few people, like a TT game but with more live-ness. I've played in some Sabbat games in Minds eye that had just a single pack present and were nicely focused on the games theme of freedom vs responsibility.

I posted the inside : outside description as a separate topic.

When it comes to seeing inside : outside as a "highly successful, more pure narrativistic larp" (-Erling), I would be hard pressed to find a single premise for all the different narratives that were in the larp.

"Opposition to a cruel system is a moral duty even if subjugation is inevitable" might be one, often the one players thought they were approaching initially, "self-sacrifice is necessary to achieve moral good" might be another. But mostly, the larp dragged players as deeply as we could get them into the soup of existential questions - who am I, what is the lesser evil - "what is it that makes you human?" (to quote one of the Judge's favorite questions). The extreme subjectivity of a larp experience, which we tried to accommodate as larpwrights, meant that the narrative, theme and premise were different for each player. Does that mean classifying it as "narrativst" was wrong, that one-premise-per-player is okay for narrativism, or that G/N/S simply doesn't apply very well to larps?

p&l,
.eirik.