Merten
05-06-2006, 04:20 AM
I'd be thrilled to read some actual play -reports from LARP's; both from players and GM's/larpwrights/writers. I don't have any personal player reports written in English right now, but I do have one from GM's perspective. Arguably, it doesen't go into details.
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Isle of Saints, a two-day LARP held about five years ago.
Isle of Saints was a one to two days and nights long LARP for about 60 players, organised by team of three writers. It was also what’s known around here as a city game - a LARP where the play area is a whole city and sometimes beyond that. The two other guys had done a similar, if smaller, project before in which I was a player. So Isle of Saints wasn’t the first citywide LARP in Finland - I know of at least two, possibly three, earlier projects and I had participated in one of them, a Mage larp that was kind of a test drive and and prequel to IoS.
The game was held in Helsinki, which doubled as the capital city of Isle of Saints - an imaginary island in middle of Atlantic Ocean. The cities were identical copies and the players were instructed to think that the streets matched and internally think that the street names fitted the setting.
Ios was based on White Wolf’s World of Darkness, mostly Vampire: The Masquerade and Mage: The Ascension, though not on the Minds Eye Theatre-versions of them. One of the reasons we wrote the LARP was the distaste for weaker parts of loosely MET-based chronicle that had been going for five years; the cliches of Vampire-larps I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with - clunky rules, almost all games being social situtations, 50+ vampires in one room and city, and such. (To be fair, the chronicle lasted for ten years in all and had great moments in it)
What we wanted to achieve was a simulation of two days and one night for a host of normal humans, vampires and mages, all living in the same city and doing their things. The characters were meticuously prepared beforehand; we did the concepts first, then relationship maps, iterated and iterated again, before writing the actual backgrounds. We introduced a lot of plotlines; all characters had some on personal level, groups of characters connected had some, and few of the plots went through several groups and acted as the main plotlines of the game. We introduced triggers into characters, anticipated how things could run and played by ear, creating a complex web of relationships, goals and intrests. On paper, it looked pretty good - and it mostly worked out in the actual play as well.
The beef in IoS was that we had several “hot spots” around the city - while the players could play where ever they wanted, most of them had planned events for the first evening and night. Most notably, the vampires (around seven or eight of them, plus few lackeys) had an emergency meeting on the first evening of the LARP, which kicked some major plotlines in effect, and another one on second night. The technocracy operatives worked through the game from their base, and the tradition mages had some social gatherings as well. The humans mostly entered the play in second day, as the polices started their shift and other groups - co-workers gathering before an engagement party held by one of their team mates into a bar, city’s artistic elite met somewhere, and folks holding the engagement party met for a dinner. The engagement party itself was held late in the evening and was to be one of the major hotspots, gathering almost all humans and several person from other factions as well.
Another beef was that the factions didn’t really know about each other before the LARP, apart from few characters who knew something - like technocracy and the traditions being aware of each other. Players didn’t know who else was participating, apart from players of those characters they knew beforehand. This way, we could simulate the masquerade effectively - wheter it would fall apart during the play was up to the characters and players. Suprisingly, masquerade was kept during the game apart from some small breachers - it even went so far that when technocracy captured one of the vampires they didn’t know what they had caught and let the odd fellow free after initial questioning. Even if the players knew each other, their characters had no reason to suspect what was really going on, and they didn’t. Most of the humans had no clue that they were in a World of Darkness - even if some the behind-the-curtains -stuff happened right outside the engagement party.
I played one of the vampire lackeys myself and even if I did know just about everything, I was more than caught in events when the second vampire meeting ended in panic and we did - with the prince of the city - a mad dash through downtown to escape some all too attentive secret service polices (the technocracy masquerading as cops).
In the end, most of the game worked out as it was planned and the results were good. The actual concept rocked and players really used the whole downtown as playing area, keeping contact through cell phones, arrived to the hot spots, played there, left and so on. Most of the plotlines worked as well, most like we anticipated, while some had intresting twists.
There were some elements which didn’t work out, though - communication with the GM’s being a major one. We had few phone numbers, irc-channels and other technological stuff which were supposed to work as clearing houses for information - players could place their calls for NPC’s to the GM’s and get information from them, and so on. The communications department, being mostly handled by one GM, soon became the bottleneck for the game. In hindsight, we would have needed at least three persons handling that stuff. The result was that the police departments game never really took off the ground and few techhead-characters communicating mostly through irc and email, were left pretty much alone. Also, few character concepts didn’t work out, either because they didn’t fit the players or because they had too few connections to rest of the game.
I’m especially sad for the polices, since I wrote most of their characters - the combination had huge potential and even if most of the players liked the game, it could have been a lot better.
In the end, however, the LARP worked out even better than we anticipated. It was a thrilling experience, to look at the big picture from writers perspective, and to hear after the game how things really went, since we didn’t really have a too much control of things after the game started. We did the preparation work, provided information during the game, and that was pretty much it. And it worked.
I still keep coming back to read one players after-game report, once a year. Antero Isopuro (http://merten.kapsi.fi/rpg/?page_id=65), your normal computer clerk who though he was a secret agent. There’s a textbook example of rich internal tapestry for a character - looking back, the actual background information for the character was good, but not outstanding. As the player took in the background and made it real, both inside and outside, it went right through the roof.
A small note about the rules used in Ios; we used very light resolution mechanics because of the lack of control and knowing there wouldn’t be any on-site GM’s to smooth things out. First of all, the players were handpicked and we knew that they knew how to handle things. Second, resolution system handled only physical combat, and that was done through simple combat values - which ever side had a better total decided what would happen. Knifes, guns and other weapons would mess normal humans and the players had to decide what would actually happen.
As for supernatural things, mysterious powers were downscaled and some characters had one or two of them. We only used powers which worked “silently”, and left out everything which would have needed serious propping or special effects. Physical stuff affected the combat values and mental stuff was used with a command word; when a player begun a sentence with the word true, other players knew that what followed was meta-information that would be absolutely right and correct. So, to quote the inventor of the system: “true: I just put laxatives to your coffee. I think you might be heading to toilette in few minutes”.
As we had picked our players and knew we could rely on them to pull it though, the rules worked out very well. It’s a matter of trust.
---
Link to original text, with some comments from players (http://merten.kapsi.fi/rpg/?p=64)
---
Isle of Saints, a two-day LARP held about five years ago.
Isle of Saints was a one to two days and nights long LARP for about 60 players, organised by team of three writers. It was also what’s known around here as a city game - a LARP where the play area is a whole city and sometimes beyond that. The two other guys had done a similar, if smaller, project before in which I was a player. So Isle of Saints wasn’t the first citywide LARP in Finland - I know of at least two, possibly three, earlier projects and I had participated in one of them, a Mage larp that was kind of a test drive and and prequel to IoS.
The game was held in Helsinki, which doubled as the capital city of Isle of Saints - an imaginary island in middle of Atlantic Ocean. The cities were identical copies and the players were instructed to think that the streets matched and internally think that the street names fitted the setting.
Ios was based on White Wolf’s World of Darkness, mostly Vampire: The Masquerade and Mage: The Ascension, though not on the Minds Eye Theatre-versions of them. One of the reasons we wrote the LARP was the distaste for weaker parts of loosely MET-based chronicle that had been going for five years; the cliches of Vampire-larps I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with - clunky rules, almost all games being social situtations, 50+ vampires in one room and city, and such. (To be fair, the chronicle lasted for ten years in all and had great moments in it)
What we wanted to achieve was a simulation of two days and one night for a host of normal humans, vampires and mages, all living in the same city and doing their things. The characters were meticuously prepared beforehand; we did the concepts first, then relationship maps, iterated and iterated again, before writing the actual backgrounds. We introduced a lot of plotlines; all characters had some on personal level, groups of characters connected had some, and few of the plots went through several groups and acted as the main plotlines of the game. We introduced triggers into characters, anticipated how things could run and played by ear, creating a complex web of relationships, goals and intrests. On paper, it looked pretty good - and it mostly worked out in the actual play as well.
The beef in IoS was that we had several “hot spots” around the city - while the players could play where ever they wanted, most of them had planned events for the first evening and night. Most notably, the vampires (around seven or eight of them, plus few lackeys) had an emergency meeting on the first evening of the LARP, which kicked some major plotlines in effect, and another one on second night. The technocracy operatives worked through the game from their base, and the tradition mages had some social gatherings as well. The humans mostly entered the play in second day, as the polices started their shift and other groups - co-workers gathering before an engagement party held by one of their team mates into a bar, city’s artistic elite met somewhere, and folks holding the engagement party met for a dinner. The engagement party itself was held late in the evening and was to be one of the major hotspots, gathering almost all humans and several person from other factions as well.
Another beef was that the factions didn’t really know about each other before the LARP, apart from few characters who knew something - like technocracy and the traditions being aware of each other. Players didn’t know who else was participating, apart from players of those characters they knew beforehand. This way, we could simulate the masquerade effectively - wheter it would fall apart during the play was up to the characters and players. Suprisingly, masquerade was kept during the game apart from some small breachers - it even went so far that when technocracy captured one of the vampires they didn’t know what they had caught and let the odd fellow free after initial questioning. Even if the players knew each other, their characters had no reason to suspect what was really going on, and they didn’t. Most of the humans had no clue that they were in a World of Darkness - even if some the behind-the-curtains -stuff happened right outside the engagement party.
I played one of the vampire lackeys myself and even if I did know just about everything, I was more than caught in events when the second vampire meeting ended in panic and we did - with the prince of the city - a mad dash through downtown to escape some all too attentive secret service polices (the technocracy masquerading as cops).
In the end, most of the game worked out as it was planned and the results were good. The actual concept rocked and players really used the whole downtown as playing area, keeping contact through cell phones, arrived to the hot spots, played there, left and so on. Most of the plotlines worked as well, most like we anticipated, while some had intresting twists.
There were some elements which didn’t work out, though - communication with the GM’s being a major one. We had few phone numbers, irc-channels and other technological stuff which were supposed to work as clearing houses for information - players could place their calls for NPC’s to the GM’s and get information from them, and so on. The communications department, being mostly handled by one GM, soon became the bottleneck for the game. In hindsight, we would have needed at least three persons handling that stuff. The result was that the police departments game never really took off the ground and few techhead-characters communicating mostly through irc and email, were left pretty much alone. Also, few character concepts didn’t work out, either because they didn’t fit the players or because they had too few connections to rest of the game.
I’m especially sad for the polices, since I wrote most of their characters - the combination had huge potential and even if most of the players liked the game, it could have been a lot better.
In the end, however, the LARP worked out even better than we anticipated. It was a thrilling experience, to look at the big picture from writers perspective, and to hear after the game how things really went, since we didn’t really have a too much control of things after the game started. We did the preparation work, provided information during the game, and that was pretty much it. And it worked.
I still keep coming back to read one players after-game report, once a year. Antero Isopuro (http://merten.kapsi.fi/rpg/?page_id=65), your normal computer clerk who though he was a secret agent. There’s a textbook example of rich internal tapestry for a character - looking back, the actual background information for the character was good, but not outstanding. As the player took in the background and made it real, both inside and outside, it went right through the roof.
A small note about the rules used in Ios; we used very light resolution mechanics because of the lack of control and knowing there wouldn’t be any on-site GM’s to smooth things out. First of all, the players were handpicked and we knew that they knew how to handle things. Second, resolution system handled only physical combat, and that was done through simple combat values - which ever side had a better total decided what would happen. Knifes, guns and other weapons would mess normal humans and the players had to decide what would actually happen.
As for supernatural things, mysterious powers were downscaled and some characters had one or two of them. We only used powers which worked “silently”, and left out everything which would have needed serious propping or special effects. Physical stuff affected the combat values and mental stuff was used with a command word; when a player begun a sentence with the word true, other players knew that what followed was meta-information that would be absolutely right and correct. So, to quote the inventor of the system: “true: I just put laxatives to your coffee. I think you might be heading to toilette in few minutes”.
As we had picked our players and knew we could rely on them to pull it though, the rules worked out very well. It’s a matter of trust.
---
Link to original text, with some comments from players (http://merten.kapsi.fi/rpg/?p=64)