Previous threads in this series: its Debut in Indie Game Design, the playtest Werewolves in L.A. and the Memorial Day playtest.

Rochester, New York -- Last week I visited my old college town for a Friday night wedding. The friend I was staying with invited me to attend a one-shot Dark Ages: Fae LARP on Saturday. But when that night rolled around, she confessed to having little enthusiasm or preparation for the game. She'd really rather be playing than GMing.

Sensing an opportunity, I offered to take over for her with my nascent LARP system Ends and Means. The result, I'm pleased to say, was a grand success. Here's how it went.

The Players

I had thirteen players, half of whom were old friends from college, the people with whom I learned to love LARP. I knew they shared many of my tastes in regard to Creative Agenda. The other half were new faces, people who had joined my friends on the local LARP scene since I'd left.

Seven players were female, and six were male.

The Setting

My friend had pitched the game to the others as a flashback: it would be a night in the past lives of their characters from an ongoing Changeling: the Dreaming chronicle. So while it was a one-shot, several players expected to see tie-ins from their usual game, not to mention thematic repurcussions. The setting was Dark Ages Europe, where a Faerie King named Lothian was holding a celebration of victory over the goblin hordes to the south.

I took this sketch and just ran with it, without worrying much about the ongoing chronicle or its characters. I trusted that their character relationships would create the tie-ins they wanted, and that they'd later incorporate what repercussions they found interesting.

We were playing in a large university lecture hall, so the physical environment wasn't helpful for imagining high fantasy. But it did have a huge dry-erase whiteboard, which came in very handy for the next part.

Character Creation

Nobody had pre-generated any characters. I pictured a night in which people invented characters they weren't very familiar with or invested in, then milled about with them making empty conversation. Shudder.

I resolved to avoid that. The technique I used was a Relationship Map. As players trickled in, I asked each of them for a character name and a two-word description. I wrote this on the whiteboard and circled it. Then I asked, "What do you think about this person? About this person? Oh really? Hey, other guy, do you return that sentiment?"

All the players totally got into this method of creating their concepts. Relationships like "respect," "rival," "disdain," "big sister," "groupie," "infatuation," "suspicion," and the like soon cris-crossed the board in a huge messy tangle of lines. Within thirty minutes or so, everyone had a good idea about what their character was like.

One guy, talking about a Werewolf: the Forsaken LARP he was planning on launching, commented, "I am so using this to start my LARP."

Next I squeezed Ends and Means into a twenty-minute spiel, including questions taken. People took ten minutes to create Ends and Means for their characters, and distribute fifty points of Weight among them. Here is an example of one of the characters created:

Liusaidh, Unlikely Champion

Ends
Defending her honor (6)
Protecting the King's name (2)
Protecting her companions (5)
Leave a lasting legacy (6)
Her True Love (2)

Means
Swordsmanship (6)
Secret-Keeper (3)
Heightened Senses (4)
Well-Known and Respected (7)
Metamorphosis Magic (5)
Aura of Fear (4)

This sounds excellent. I particularly like the buying of Scenarios (anything that gets players to come to you when they're bored is nice). And especially the idea of combining two incompatible moral ends to create a scenario. Nice.

Reading the last thread, the one with the Werewolf game, it sounds as though you were much happier with this playtest. What changed between the two?

Wow, Adam, even for only a dozen players, GMing a LARP at the last minute is an impressive testament to your skills -- either your skills as a coordinator or your design skills in creating a system that can be run at the drop of  a hat.

I have a couple of suggestions for the challenges you came across.

First, it seems somewhat odd to me that buying a scenario is cheaper for a group than for an individual. Unlike, say, manufacturing, scenarios don't get cheaper or easier to construct with more characters involved. In fact, they get harder. So it doesn't seem unreasonable that groups should have to pay per particpant . I think it would still be fair if you asked for individual buy-ins along with a group cost.

Second, in terms of buying the scene, not to say "I told you so," but...well...I told you so. Back in your first thread, I mentioned that the mechanic seemed particularly brutal, and it sounds like your players in this event felt that way too. Of course, you said that you wanted it to be brutal, so it could easily be a case of these particular players just not being your target audience.

If you feel this is something you need to change, though, I've got a suggestion or two. You could, as you say, lower the amount of  Focus Tokens handed out at the start. Another way is to simply raise the cost of stealing the scene to another set, flat number.

You could also solve the problem of a player taking all 1s by changing the cost of stealing the scene from one FT to a number based on the difference in total Weight. It could be one-to-one, or some other ratio if you think that would be too expensive. For example, I have a total weight of 2 and you have a total weight of 18. That difference of 16 weight coudl mean that I have to spend, for example, 8 FT (2:1), 5 FT (3:1), 4 FT (4:1), etc, in order to steal the scene.

Graham --

Thanks for the nice comments. I'm especially pleased with the Ends vs. Ends technique. I think if I have to answer that Forge question about "what gets you most excited about your game," I will point and say "that!"

My previous two playtests were run with groups much smaller than what I've designed the game for. This was the first game that hit the right number of people for a small LARP. It also helped that for the first time my players were experienced LARPers, already comfortable with the idea of entertaining themselves and one another without an omnipresent GM.

Andrew --

You flatter me! Unrelated to Ends and Means and my skills running it, I attribute much of the evening's success to the 5'x8' Relationship Map I scrawled across the whiteboard. I chose the right technique to draw the players in, not only in to the idea of their characters, but in to the idea of interacting with other characters.

But I won't sell short the system technique of pitting a character's Ends against themselves. That point of design was a tremendous enabler for me to GM so much on the fly. I think even a GM who relies more on prep could use it to great effect.

And you're right! You told me so. I didn't want to believe it, but I guess even players with high stats need love too. I suspect that one of the system's greatest flaws right now is that high numbers are so passive -- one the Stakes are set, you don't have the strategic decisions to make that people with low numbers do. I think the solution to the Weight 18 vs. Weight 2 situation will be have to be some manner of active defense that the high-Stakes player can choose to invoke, at a cost.

You're right that I should definitely lower the number of Focus Tokens people start with, too.

Thanks for the feedback! It occurs to me that I should also e-mail the players and encourage them to come post about the play experience from their end.

One thought on how to empower high-score players is to add in some mechanic that allows them to defend against stealing the scene. If you still want the balance of optional or limited-resource narration to remain with the low-score characters, you could say that every time the high-score player announces their score, they hold out their hand, containing either a Focus Token or not (it remains hidden). Then, if the low-score character wants to steal the scene, they can do so as usual. The kink is that if the high-score character put out a Focus Token, they counter the scene stealing. If they put out a Focus Token and the low-score player doesn't try to steal the scene, then the high-score character gives the Focus Token over to the low-score player. Or something along those lines.

A Player's View
Having been at that game (as Laochas, the Impetuous Lordling, son to the king, general blowhard) I really thought the system did work well. I really like (Andrew's) idea about the being able to buy off a scene where you may win, but maybe it should be attached to the same rule as the buying off, like, (for example) when you need to give someone a bead for every time you've stolen a scene from them (1 bead first time, 2 beads second, etc) where blocking a stolen scene works the same way. It would simply become more difficult to figure out the buy off (or counter scene steal) once you got into larger group conflicts.

As to the scale when stealing scenes, I like that too...

All in all though, save for those minor considerations with scene stealing, and some concern as to how this will go with a less mature group of gamers, I thought the event went fantastically and would gladly play in the system again.