Tuesday 5 September 2017

Currently writing...

I’ve been looking back at my old posts here, and the excitement and awe I felt at discovering roleplaying and larp for the first time. It’s interesting to notice that the questions I had then are still the questions I have today - ‘What are there practical applications of larp?’ and ‘How can we allow people to feel and act as safely as possible while playing?’ Although I think that my understanding of the topics has increased since then, that has opened more possibilities and nuances that I’m looking forward to exploring.


It's hard to feel bad about a less than perfect playtest when everything is beautiful. 


Today I’m writing about two short larps which I playtested recently, one which I wrote, and one which I co-wrote . Mo Holkar writes about them on his blog here:


Inside is a game I wrote and playtested based on my experience of working in the education department of a women’s prison. This is an environment that can be sensationalised and I wanted to depict a more accurate reality. The character creation process of this game takes almost as long as the game itself which actually felt like a worthwhile trade off to have fully fleshed out characters and a game which makes a point about anxiety and boredom while keeping players immersed. I got some great feedback which suggested that I had achieved the effect I wanted (“I was miserable, but in an immersive way”!) I also got some suggestions on possible improvements. At the time having a teacher in a player role felt interesting because I thought they could play out their own feelings regarding the situation of teaching people who resented being there, but also who could benefit from it. In practice though, I think it proved too frustrating. The game wasn’t long enough to provide the internal conflict I was hoping for, so it just became an exercise in frustration for the player. In future I will structure it slightly differently and make that a GM role, giving more possibility to steer play and drop the idea of the teacher as their own character.
Another idea suggested was to get players to create a reason why their character was in the class and how much control they have over whether they joined it. I think this will work really well in the future and am looking forward to running it soon.


I co- wrote First Blast of the Trumpet with Patrik Balint. I think it began as a conversation after a we’d had a few drinks and picked up pace as we came up with ideas for NPCs and situations that don’t actually appear in the game at any point. The idea was to have a modern day feminist group carry out an action which would have significant effects on the course that their country was taking, but would be morally distasteful. We split the game into two parts, the first part being flashbacks to a time that character had suffered under the patriarchy, and the second part playing out what happened after the group had been given their mission. We had mechanics to replay and increase the intensity of the flashbacks if the characters started having doubts about the mission. The idea was to invoke real life anger by playing relevant music, and using articles about violence and discrimination against women in the present day.

Unfortunately it didn’t work, I think mainly because of the scope of the mission and lack of workshopping of the group. We wanted the group to generally have positive relationships and to induce strong feelings about the importance of the mission which meant that there was little source of conflict for the characters. The scope of the mission was also too large for the players to feel a personal connection to it, so I hope that for our next run we will be able to scale it down, give a more personal feel to it and allow players to build positive and negative relationships. I’m still very excited about it, and think it has a lot of potential.