labcats | Casting Questionnaires: The Black Art

hazliya has an entry about how she interprets casting questionnaires that is very informative.

We do pretty much the same thing, I think. It isn't that we curse and shriek if we don't get essays and extremes. It's just that if we get questionnaire after questionnaire that says, basically, "Oh, I don't know. I'm good with anything and have no strong preferences", this gives us no help in casting the game. We might as well roll dice.

Now, of course, every character in a larp should be a protagonist, the main character of a novel. When writing a character, you should fall in love with that character. Then, repeat for the next character. (Then, remember that this character is no longer yours, but that, while important, is not what I'm looking at today, mostly.)

So, we love each and every one of our characters. But, as

mnemex admitted, we do love some more than others. This means that, given infinite time, we'd work on those others, make them better. But, we don't have infinite time.

So, when we cast, the "Oh, I'm good with anything" questionnaires go off to the side. Hopefully, there won't be too many of them. That we did get a number of them for Presque Vue tells us that that questionnaire probably needs a bit more work. But, assuming most folks give us something to work with, we put the rest aside.

The players are generally not trying to be difficult. Indeed, they are probably trying to be helpful. They simply aren't succeeding.

We cast the people with passion first, most of the time, because those are usually the most obvious casts. Some we will wait on because they are passionate and flexible. It is hard to explain how this differs from flexible-but-bland on a questionnaire, except to say that the first gets set aside because we know we can slot them anywhere, so we will put them where we need them most, while the second get set aside because we don't really know what they'll like, so they get what is left over.

This is not intended as a punishment. We want every role in our larps to be a good role. But, let us take our Ghost Fu larp. We have a Drunken Master. If someone specifically asks for that archetype -- and no one else does -- hey, we have a match! (Well, we have a match unless there are other factors counterbalancing that. But, I digress.)

If we get, as we did, a player saying, "I would jump naked into a tank of piranha to save the only copy of your game", having nothing more to go on for what the game is about than our blurb -- we will probably give that player a role that is a) good -- we'd all enjoy playing this role and b) difficult -- we really cannot slot Just Anyone into it. And the player who did fill out the questionnaire that way, and did get such a role brought delightful enthusiasm to it.

A "Okay, this is a safe role for a bland questionnaire" role is not a bad role. Indeed, it is often quite a good role. But, where possible, we want it to be a role that we don't have to have someone wildly enthusiastic to play it.

Hm, giving an example is tricky, because our non-amnesia games are rather well done in terms of good characters, even if we need to iron out certain mechanics issues, whereas I don't want to say too much about our amnesia games. But, in the first amnesia game we wrote, there is one role which, on paper, looks Really Important. A very good larper will make that role shine. A beginning larper, with enthusiasm, but some nervousness, will know what to do. Someone who doesn't seem to have a preference may have a great time with this, vastly exceeding our expectations, and this is indeed what we hope if we cast the role that way. But, if the person playing that role is merely "there", or if, at a general sf convention, the person playing that role drifts off to a party halfway through, it won't hurt the game as a whole.

Ironically, this probably means that the better a game is, the more critical every individual is, the harder it is to deal with "Oh, I'm good with anything." Or maybe not. One wants a larp where there's some give if someone punks. People have emergencies come up. Maybe someone oversleeps or gets ill. Or maybe someone plays and just fails to make a connection one assumes will be made. But, that's a different topic as well.

Some folks have larping resumes. I'm thinking maybe I should work on one of those.