Larp Theory

[mneme]

Lisa and I played in a bunch of LARPs (togwether and collectively) at Intercon, and ran two. While it's interesting to look at how the games played and what was fun, it's more interesting to see what the games were trying to do and how they tried to accomplish it.



I'm going to include spoilers for nearly all the games here, so be aware.

The first game of the weekend was the Buffy "Jonathan's Party" game (I think just called "the Buffy game") -- a game which conflates the most popular and interesting characters from Buffy and Angel...at the most interesting and conflict driven points of their stories. So rather than rerunning a particular (or even conflating two) plots, like "The Wish", or writing a wholey original plot, the author has chosen to take Riley from the "blood doll" period, Spike from the "robobuffy" arc, Linsey thinking of leaving Wolfram and Hart, in love with Darla, and half-head of Special Projects, Giles during the "demonic transformation" episode, Angel during the "laced blood" episode, etc. And, of course, Jonathan from "Jonathan." What makes this work -- and it does -- is that despite each plotline being drawn from the two series, the way they are mixed together makes the ending completely based on the players, and their decisions regarding the moral and practical dilemmas they're placed in. On the show, Linsey's frustration boiled over after Angel raped Darla, causing him to beat Angel to an inch of his life. In the game, however, left bereft after Angelus turned Darla back into a vampire at her request, Linsey (played by YT) turned from W+H and evil, moving to Sunnydale with Lila and probably joined Oz's new band.

Our first game -- Jamais Vue, is a different beast. There aren't a lot of preplanned crux points or crises -- instead, there's a fairly straightforward political plot, a murder mystery, an alien spaceship to explore, and a freeform invention system to help people build things to work out their differences...but all of this is obscured by the fact that most of the characters have lost their memory at the moment the game started. A lot of the fun of this game is discovery, some of the rest involves unexpected alliances, situations, and working out the various problems.

The Fables game ("Grimmer Tales") was a combination between these two -- with some light "situation" plot and, at least for me, a lot of politicing.

The Nightmare Before Christmas game (A Nightmare Before St. Patrick's day) was very atypical -- it had a bunch of related failures I won't get into now (see ambug666 of interconlarp), but even in conception, it was a series of puzzle-game adventures for media characters, where the fun was intended to be in bringing a beloved movie to life, in playing out the entertainments, and in the catharsis of expected resolution. Because this is an adventure game rather than a theatre-style one, there are very few avenues for story-level creativity -- no matter what, the holiday leaders will be rescued and the villain will deliver an ultimatum at game end.

The final game was the second one we were running: A Day at the Races, a Day at the Bathes. Here, like the Fables game, there's a mix of politics and character resolution, this time with an added element of "playiong in the pool" (though we have slightly more in the way of player-accessable mechanics than Fables does). We've run this three times and it's run very differently each time, though we had very different cast numbers -- 11, 8, and most recently 22.

Comments

[mneme]

It's an interesting question. She attempted to seduce him at his nadir, he responded sexually and violently, ending the result by, yes, leaving money. Viewing rape as violence projected onto the sexual act, I'd argue that he did, in fact, rape her, but the contrary is clearly arguable.

I agree that keeping only to plots from the shows was limiting, and that the game could use a bit more "glue" to merge the various bits and explain why people are carrying various widgets on them, but it still works amazingly given the elegance of the setup.