Violence in LARP 1: Context

alasdair

Last year, in a post on part of the Dogma 99 manifesto, I wrote:

When two characters cannot agree to disagree, their methods for settling their squabble, nine times out of ten, are some form of violence, be it physical or supernatural. I can bang on for a bit about why this is, but it basically comes down to “blah blah, root of hobby, power fantasy, blah blah”.

Time to bang on about it a bit.

There’s an old joke about the dominance of the superhero comic in the comics medium – that it’s analogous to walking into a bookstore and finding the shelves full of nurse romance novels, with all other novels consigned to 10% of the space, under one label “alternative”. Comics has improved markedly in the last decade, but violence in games feels like about the same thing. Trying to find an RPG where violence isn’t assumed to be a component of the game is hard.

It’s one biggest issues I have with role-playing games in general, this trend toward violence-as-problem-solving-mechanism. It’s obviously born in the tabletop wargame roots of the hobby, but here we are 40+ years after D&D was first published, and we’re still largely at it. There are very, very few games published where physical violence is strictly off the table, and those that are tend to be indie games with a tiny audience compared to the already pretty small audiences of the mainstream games.

It’s understandable. Roleplaying games are about drama – about conflict. And of course the ultimate expression of conflict is violence. So naturally they include it. Same reason that action movies are popular films. But action movies aren’t the only films.

But finding a literally zero-violence LARP to play in that isn’t an experimental one off is next to bloody impossible. The “mainstream” of LARP can be considered what I think is known as “boffer” LARP in the US, or “fest” LARP in the UK, and it’s pretty much the classic image – people with rubber swords running around in a forest in funny costumes, hitting one another. There are all sorts of variations within that, in setting and theme, but strip it all away, and that’s what you’re left with. (The hitting one another may not be the point of the game, but it’s definitely a key component.)

There’s a secondary mainstream of Vampire LARP – people dressed in black lace in a backroom somewhere, pretending to be vampires scheming against one another, but as anyone who has played one of those can tell you, 90% of the problem-solving in that ultimately comes down to violence, even if there’s an exciting game to be played in getting other people to do your violence for you. Sure, a lot of setting has some kind of ostensible prohibition against violence, but really, everyone knows that’s there in order to create challenges, not to actually prevent the violence.

In both of these forms, conflict almost always comes down to either “can you avert this problem without violence?” or “can you do enough violence to solve this otherwise insoluble problem”?

I should perhaps say that I have played in, and run, many game sessions where no violence has actually taken place, but the fact remains that I’ve never played a LARP where there wasn’t a system to handle violence, if it occurred. It was never off the table by design.

I definitely have it on my ambitions list to run a serial LARP in a pulp vein – ie. the kind of game I like – where violence is simply not on the agenda.

Next time: so, the above notwithstanding, what is violence good for?

Child-like gaming

alasdair

I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the past few months.  Partly, I’ve been thinking about it as I see my friend’s and family’s kids grow up, and I think about the challenges of running games for children, rather than adults and partly I’ve been thinking about it in relation to games based on children’s literature, partly inspired by the Redwall game a friend ran a while back, and a lot of it has been crystalised by the superb Moomin’s World an Apocalypse World hack for Tove Jannson’s creations, that could easily be adapted to almost any form of children’s literature. One of the reasons I keep coming back to it is, of course, because LARP and RPGs in general are often simply a structured form of the children’s game “Let’s Pretend”, and I suspect there’s mileage in trying to strip games back to very simply, childlike concerns.

Moomin’s World, I find particularly interesting, in that the usual character skills have been simplified down so that you roll when you “have to keep on going”, “have to be brave”, “don’t know what’s going on”, “trick or fool someone” or “try to help”.  And that’s it.  They immediately and perfectly give a sense of the scale and stakes of the game, and work perfectly for Moomins, and indeed, just about an children’s literature.  A friend has been talking for years about wanting to run a Care Bears game, and I’m certain this would work for that.

And yet, just look at them again.  I could run a horror game with those, with zero alteration.  I could probably run a game set in the trenches of the first world war pretty effectively, too.  And a something set on a space station.  Or one of a hundred other settings.  In sliming a system down to children’s literature, and children’s concerns, I think the developer has come pretty close to the soul and centre of a lot of narrative gaming.

In terms of LARP design, I suspect that can be simplified further, depending on the goals of the LARP. A well put-together horror game, for example, probably doesn’t need “be brave” – it can rely on the players to judge an appropriate emotional state for their characters. A zero-combat indoor LARP wouldn’t need “have to keep going” – Moomin’s World intends that as an environmental challenge, a stat for pressing on in the teeth of a snowstorm, or when very tired, but it would obviously be applied to combat easily enough if one wanted. “Try to help” is expressly about teamwork on one of the other four, not a generalised “do something nice” stat, although now I think about it, in relation to the Care Bears game my friend is thinking of, perhaps it should be that, but in any event, I’m not 100% sure every LARP would need it.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, it’s just been on my mind.

Post-Hauntological LARP

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Nothing like starting a project getting out into the wild, past the point where I can make enormous structural changes to make me see all the flaws in it.

Well, nothing to be done now, but I want to note this set of thoughts down so I can try and get some use out of them later.  Sitting on the bus the other day, it occurred to me that with one exception, most of the LARPs, and indeed most of the RPGs in any form I’ve run are broadly hauntological.  And certainly, Restitution and Armistice are extremely hauntological, expressly reaching for anachronistic aesthetics, locked into examining aspects of the present through the lens of the past.

This bleeds through into their narrative design, as well, particularly in Restitution, which was very much about the inescapable hidden past of the setting.  In Armistice, it’s the characters, rather than the setting that are haunted (by their own prior actions), but the same concern with the past is still there.

There’s a reason for all this – it’s to do with laying the seeds of narrative down in the fictional past, in order that the play in the present can contain richer conflict and drama.

It occurs to me that Testament, failure though it was, was exactly the reverse – it was entire concerned with moving into the future by jettisoning the past.  I’d like to go back to that at some point.

While writing this, the notion of a generational game has occurred to me, where the players don’t have a fixed character, but play the scions of various houses at different points throughout history, although I think that might also get pretty hauntological if not very carefully designed.  Maybe start it in the present day?  Mind you that leads to SF type budget-concerns – LARP is not an SF-friendly medium by it’s nature.

Not really sure where I’m going with this, other than adding “run an unhaunted game” to my to-do list.

Horror in LARP, part 2

alasdair

So here’s my start point with horror in LARP: it is incredibly bloody hard.  It may even be unworkable.  (I should say at the outset that I am aware that one could run special events that get around any of the individual limits that I’m laying out here, but for the sake of the argument I’m defining here, I want to take what I think can reasonably described as a “regular form” LARP – a minimum of a dozen PCs, in a place where we worry about people’s physical and mental safety, and the goal is to have fun in some form.)

I’m not saying you can’t scare people.  I’m not saying you can’t given them a terrific, adrenaline packed hour, two hours, weekend, whatever.  But scaring people is scaring people.  It’s not horror.  I could pack a LARP time in with jump scares and special effects to frighten people, but that won’t make it horror.

The absolute essence of horror, when you boil it right down, is lack of agency.  It is hopelessness, it is the evil you cannot defeat.  It’s the zombie horde, representing the inevitability of death.  It’s the vampire who is simply more powerful than any of her mortal prey.  It’s Lovecraft’s vast and unbearably hostile cosmos.  It’s the unstoppable serial killer.  It’s the deluded protagonist suddenly coming face to face with their own madness and learning they they’ve been the monster all along.

Horror is the thing that cannot be defeated.

Any horror movie that has a happy ending with the heroes triumphant, while it may be a scary movie, is not a horror movie.  The most one can really hope for, in a proper horror movie, is that the protagonist survives their encounter, at the cost of their loved ones, their normal life, their sanity, and that it is obvious that this is the cost.  If they walk off into the sunrise, bloodier, sadder, but unbowed and able to return the real world, then they’ve had a terribly scary experience, but that “horror” movie is copping out badly at the end, in my view.

Yes, I could run a LARP where everything the players tried was doomed to fail.  Where the universe was cold and uncaring and there could never be a happy ending.  (Indeed, a number of my players might argue that I already do, although I’d contest that.)  But having said that scary is not the same as horror, I’ve got to recognise that without it, horror is pretty much indistinguishable from plain old misery.

So how do we make scary work?

Scary is the cold hand on the back of your neck.  The monstrous whisper out of nowhere.  The door that won’t open as the water rises.  Scary is sudden, scary is surprising, and scary is personal.  And honestly in it’s simplest form: scary is alone.

How do you make scary work for 20 people, other than an unexpected loud bang?  Well, you could always face them off against superior numbers.  Scary is being outnumbered two to one by zombies, and running low on ammunition.  (Or is that just a valiant last stand?)  You could put them against an something implacable and unstoppable – just something like being trapped in a room with no food.  (Or is that just a study in how people deal with the inevitability of death?)

I hope you can see what I’m driving at.  LARP is communal – there are other people there, sharing the experience, and in any context, and experience shared is made easier and less frightening.  It may be hopeless, but you’re not alone.  LARP is about agency – it’s about what the players/characters decide to do.  And ultimately: LARP can always stopped, simply by opting out of it’s frame of reality.  Then the zombie is just someone in makeup, the vampire is your mate with some fangs in, and the universe while still cold and uncaring, is no longer actively hostile.  (Well, probably not.)

It’s not a good medium for horror – many of the basic facts of how LARP generally operates as a form work against some of the basic building blocks of horror.

And yet I describe the games I like to run as falling somewhere between urban fantasy and horror.  Come back tomorrow and I’ll spout on about the kinds of horror I think can be made to work.

Technology As A Tool

alasdair

Just a little bit of generalised thinking out loud.

I was reading an article on the excellent Gaming As Women about the use of mobile phones in LARP which got me thinking.  In the first place it got me thinking that there might be people reading this who don’t know about Gaming As Women, and they bloody ought to, as it’s one of the best gaming blogs out there, so consider this a general reminder of its existence.  In the second, more pertinent place, it got me thinking about how to consider technology as part of setting design.

My last game, Restitution, was set in a place where there was no mobile telephony or internet, and I have to say, I really liked the effect it produced.  It meant that the characters pretty much had to be in proximity to communicate.  There was a certain amount of IC letter writing and suchlike, but if two characters actually wanted to converse, they had to be in the same physical space.

My instinct, up to now, has been to attempt the same thing in my next game – to continue to find ways to ensure that meaningful real-time interaction requires physical proximity.  But I read the article above, and it did rather set me to thinking about ways to use technology to enhance the IC experience – to actually use the very remoteness produced by technology as a storytelling device.

I’ve never been shy about using technology in an administrative manner – all my games have a custom-written on-line downtime system, they often have a forum and private messaging system, and I probably couldn’t run these games half as effectively without them, but I don’t actually spend a lot of time thinking about how to use these things as storytelling systems.

Part of the issue, a complicating factor, is that I don’t want to impose too much on my players lives outside of game time.  I don’t want to send them a creepy mysterious text message while they’re having dinner with their significant other – that’s intrusive on their time and others’.  But at the same time, I can’t deny that it would be kind of awesome to ring someone’s phone at a time in, and have an them hear an NPC (or another PC) having a very bad time, somewhere they can’t do anything about it.  Not often, because it’s an inherently disempowering stunt, but maybe once or twice.  And of course there are other tricks that could be pulled that are much less disempowering.

Ideas that have occurred to me while writing this:

  • All IC messaging could be assumed to be taking place in quasi-real time, no exceptions.  Previous games, I have worked on the assumption that it was OK for players to note something like “My character replies immediately, sorry it’s taken me a fortnight, I was busy”.  As much as I want to allow for player convenience, it means that all IC messaging lacks urgency.  You can’t send a messaging along the lines of “if you don’t get back to me within X amount of time, something bad will happen”.  But to allow for jobs/real life, etc, perhaps some kind of compact that there is a way to represent time passing with a less than 1:1 ratio?
  • The messaging is the only IC contact some characters can have outside of time in – ideally the ones who most want to talk in person?  Use it to enforce remoteness and isolation?
  • An agreed window when it is acceptable to message players via phone/email about IC matters with an urgent response window?  Perhaps some kind of “online and available for LARP-matters now” notifier?
  • Technology enabled meta-techniques to represent supernatural powers within the actual time-in are a superb idea, if I can get the toolset together to manage them effectively.
  • All this said: will new players be comfortable giving out their phone number to a ref who may be a more-or-less complete stranger?

What interesting effects/storytelling devices can you think of that we could use technology to produce?

The LARPers vow of Promiscuity

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I’m going to deal with another retro LARP-manifesto classic, just so I know I’ve covered it off.  This time it’s a pair of documents, The Manifesto of the Turku School and The LARPers Vow of Chastity.  I’m not going to break them down like I did Dogma 99, I’m just going to flag them up, and then talk about why I don’t like them, which is basically because they’re all about Immersionism.  However, for all I disagree with them I think that, much like the Dogma 99 Manifesto, they provide a great starting point for thinking, and I do encourage reading them.

So Immersionism and Me, then.  Well, basically, I regard Immersionism as selfish.  It is, particularly when taken to the extremes of the Turku school, all about saying “I came here to play this character, and anything that pulls me away from that is bad.  My highest obligation is to my character, which is to say to what is going on in my own head”. It feels like it’s kind of the roleplaying equivalent of Objectivism – elevating the (fictional) self, rather than the group.  (And it therefore doesn’t surprise me that it’s popular with a certain subset of gamers.)

Don’t get me wrong: I know it can be rewarding to look back on a session, and realise that you were thinking as someone else, making decisions that you would never make yourself.  And if that can be done safely, and while meeting one’s obligations to the group, than that’s absolutely brilliant.  But it’s a happy secondary goal, not the primary objective.

To me, the primary goal of LARPing is intrinsically social.  It’s saying  “I came here to share and shape an interactive narrative experience in such a way that the largest number of people have the most amount of fun.  My highest obligation is to ensure that those around me are enjoying themselves.”

I hate the phrase “my character wouldn’t do that”.  I absolutely believe that characters can have an inner life, and can with enough Immersion, suddenly originate new information about themselves in the mind of the player.  That’s fine.  But I also believe that the player is in charge of the character at all times, and that the character can be changed.

An overly-simple example: Character A is holding a gun to the head of Character B. If Character B is executed, it is known that the this will be No Fun for their player, who is up for playing out a fun, dramatic scene where a gun is held to their head, but not for having their character die.  And yet, in the fully-Immersionist school of play, if Character A would pull the trigger, then they should pull the trigger.

Except that Character A is fully under the control of their player.  The player can opt not to pull the trigger, and then work out why Character A didn’t do it later, and in the process discover/invent some new facts about Character A.

And, of course, it doesn’t need to be on this scale.  I’ve seen people (and I don’t exclude myself from this – I have done stupid things I wish I hadn’t in the past) do things that upset other players, ranging from the trivial (slightly inconveniencing of something another player had planned), to the more major (dominating another player’s game experience with their actions, in a way the other player does not enjoy) to the character-death example above, because they were “what their characters would do”.  And it can all be excused, if your highest goal is “Immersion”.

So that’s where I get to with Immersionism: it’s a nice and fun thing, but it does not trump other obligations to the overriding goal of Fun Game.  I’d be very interested in hearing opposing views, because I’m aware that it’s a very popular gaming philosophy, and I’d like to understand the thinking behind why it is considered good a bit better, in a way that the Manifesto’s amusing confrontational style rather fails to get across.

Dogma 99, Part 5

alasdair

Last two!  I’ll have to think of something else to talk about next week.

9. Game mechanics are forbidden.

I like it, I like it a lot, but the quote from the follow on in the manifesto is “(rules for the simulation of for instance the use of violence or supernatural abilities are not permitted)”.  It’s expressly aimed at not allowing for the kind of games I run, so we can guess the predictable answer.  I get why it’s there, I get the manifesto’s intent, but this particular rule has no wider application I can consider other than “run a different kind of game”.

10. The playwrights are to be held accountable for the whole of their work.

Ooh, I hate that term.  I don’t like the alternative “larpwright” much more.  Call me a faciliator, or a ref or something like that, because that’s most of what I do.  The creativity belongs to the players as much as the ref, and terms ending in “-wright” feel awfully centralising and self-important.

With that said: the idea here is obviously that the ref should be open to critique.  They should not be on the special creative pedastal, to which the only response is “thanks” (which according to the manifesto, sounds like used to be the case?).  They should seek out feedback about what worked and what didn’t, and they should always strive to do better next time.

This honestly doesn’t sound like anything but obvious common sense to me, and was obvious to me in the LARPs I was running over 15 years ago, before this was written.  I can’t fathom not asking for feedback, not holding oneself accountable for ensuring that the maximum number of players have as much fun as possible.  That’s kind of the reason I run these games, and it kills me when I think players aren’t having fun.

Basically, I don’t need this rule to make me hold myself accountable, but I do think it’s a very good rule to have.

Key ideas to consider for the next game:

  • Another “not very much”.  One inapplicable, one already part of my process.  Still, 3 out of 5 of these posts have definitely given me things to consider directly, and all of them have made me think about the kinds of games I might run in future, looking beyond the toolset I’m currently planning to use.  It’s really only the tenth one that I can completely ignore, and that’s only because I do it anyway.

Dogma 99, Part 4

alasdair

I’m going to run through three today, in the hope of limiting this set of posts to just five…

6. Superficial action is forbidden.

Another one I would be very interested to try as a device, just not right now.  What they mean by “superficial action” is, basically, violence, or the threat of violence.  They’ve quite accurately homed in the the fact that the metaphor for interpersonal conflict in LARP is, well, actual conflict.  When two characters cannot agree to disagree, their methods for settling their squabble, nine times out of ten, are some form of violence, be it physical or supernatural. I can bang on for a bit about why this is, but it basically comes down to “blah blah, root of hobby, power fantasy, blah blah”.

The point here is that it seems to be pretty much the one and only device for building tension – the threat of violence.  Even when the tension is not about violence itself, in that moment, it’s about something happening that might lead to violence at some future point.  And that’s kinda bad.  There are far more LARPs where the key feature is violence, rather than love or sex, and that’s a whole can of worms in itself, that I’ll save for a future post – this is a topic I’d like to come back to.

I’ve (more or less) done this one, pretty much by accident as it happens, in Testament, a game where the only violence that ever occurred was NPC-on-NPC.  That said, I’m not sure it worked, but I think there were a lot of things going on with that game…

Actually, now I think of it, while I wouldn’t claim to have done it in Restitution, it’s notable that absolutely none of the NPCs had an agenda that revolved around wanting to hurt or do violence to anyone.  Some of them did wind up forced into it, but none of them wanted it.  I suspect that will continue to do for my purposes – I tend to think an NPC whose agenda is actually to do violence is somewhere between stupid and dull.  But overall, I’m not ready to remove “superficial action” from the toolbox just yet, particularly as the current front-runner idea for the setting for the next game is the aftermath of a war.  It would feel thematically inconsistent to remove that kind of threat from this one.

But I think I’d quite like to run a short game at some point where violence is specifically off the table as a device.

7. LARP inspired by tabletop role-playing games are not accepted.

Yeah, look, just no.  I like pulpy supernatural games.  I may not be running a game entirely as per any published tabletop rulebooks, but I like them, and it would be disingenuous to claim I’m not inspired by them.  I get why the rule is on the manifesto – it’s about breaking the form out of it’s constraints, but honestly I think 15 years on those constraints have been well broken, and I’m OK with running what I like.

8. No object shall be used to represent another object.

This is a lot easier to do if you’re running one offs, with no violence or supernatural elements.  That said: the players in my games do pretty well for creating props, and I love them for it.  But as I keep saying, “doesn’t suit the kind of games I run”.  While many characters are unarmed, some of my players like to arm their characters (and as I said above, I don’t think I’ll be banning it), and I’m not having real weapons in my time in, thanks.  I’ll take foam representations, thanks.  That said, I m usually pretty strict on the idea that the representative object must solidly resemble the item it’s representing, unless that’s totally physically impossible.

Key ideas to consider for the next game:

  • Er, not a lot, I don’t think.  It feels a bit like these posts are starting to degenerate into me justifying why I can’t run a Dogma 99 LARP, which wasn’t the plan, but there we are.  This set, though, do make me interested in running some one-offs with some or all of these rules, particularly the absolute prohibition on violence or threat of as a dramatic device.  I really do think that’s strong.  Just not for the next game.

Dogma 99, Part 3

alasdair

4. All secrecy is forbidden.

This one interests me in an abstract sort of way.  I’m not sure it’d suit the needs of a serial game, because I think/hope that part of the enjoyment for players in games I run is finding out what’s going on in play, and reacting to it in the moment.  Additionally, I often change things (from small to large) because a player says something that gives me a better idea – I would regard it as failing the players not to do that, in fact.  And it’s not that I mind admitting that I’ve changed things, but it’d be kind of weird to be constantly going to players saying “that thing I said was true three months ago isn’t any more – I’ve had a better idea”.

That said: I am definitely enjoying the less-secret more-collaborative design process for this game.  Honestly, it’s not even that my previous design process was secret so much as I just didn’t make things as clear and explicit as I could/should have.

It’s also a bit weird coming to this one, when I’m reading stuff written four and five years later, when Immersionism is clearly seen as a primary goal for a lot of people, because actually, I think it’s a very Dramatist device, rather than an Immersionist one – players knowing any plans that might exist in advance will, I think automatically cause them to shape their playing to the plans, rather than having the plans change in the face of their playing, which is my preferred option.

That said, for a one-off type game, I think it’s an interesting idea.

5. After the event has begun, the playwrights are not allowed to influence it.

I really don’t like the term “playwright” here, but moving on…

It’s a very interesting idea.  Restitution definitely increased my comfort level with the notion.  Again, a difference between the one-off events this is largely concerned with, and the serial games I run, is that it’s hypothetically possible for one or two players to take actions that render the setting unplayable – the narrative equivalent of setting off a nuke in the middle of play, and in the past, I’ve seen it as part of my responsibilities as ref (the rather less grandiose term that I prefer) to prevent that from happening.  At a certain point in Restitution, I decided to simply say “it is completely possible that someone will do something that will end the story/game tonight”, and roll with it.  And of course, the game did not end (in fact, it ran a few months longer than I thought it would).

I came to see the action of yelling “time in” as an act of surrendering control over the overall narrative.  “Anything could happen in the next three hours!”  And in a serial game where the ref is more or less “in charge” of everything that happens in downtime, that’s quite a powerful thing.

This would all probably surprise many of the players, because I know I played a number of NPCs that loomed pretty large, but 80% of the time, I just tried to play them as them, rather than use them to steer action, and honestly, I hated it every time I felt the need to use them to “steer”.  So I intend to be more relaxed about this in the next game.

That said, I don’t think I’m going to go without a “host” NPC.  My reasoning is partly that I personally find it weirdly inhibitive, when I’m playing, to have someone in the IC space who is not a character who can be interacted with, and I find that even a token NPC role solves that.  The other thing is purely personal: it’s actually quite boring to just sit and watch, unable to interact with anything.  The interaction doesn’t need to be meaningful or game affecting, it just needs to be on the level of “able to open mouth, speak, and be heard”.

Key ideas to consider for the next game:

  1. Advertise my willingness to answer most questions during the span of the game, to anyone who wants to know (and who has a reason beyond “I’m just curious”, maybe), but reserve the right to keep some things up my sleeve?
  2. I like having a host NPC to play, but I’m going to design a very different style of NPC for the next thing – a subservient, service-staff type role, I think.  Something that exists to be given instructions.

Dogma 99, Part 2

alasdair

There are two items in the manifesto that I think are driving at the same thing from slightly different angles, so I’m going to cover them off together.

2. There shall be no “main plot”.

As anyone who has played in my games will attest, this is one I’m disposed to pretty much reject outright – not because it’s always a bad idea, but because it does not suit the style of games I like to run at all.  The games I like to run can be summed up as “serial, about two years long, ending when the plot resolves”.

I cut my LARPing teeth on various large scale Vampire LARPs where there was no main plot, merely a series of events stretching on and on forever. (The ref team might well have been writing “main plot” on a “right this one is done what shall we do now?” basis, but it’s not the same as one single coherent narrative – the games kept going after each plot resolved)  Nothing ended.  No complete stories were told.  Well, no, that’s not true.  Individual characters’ more-or-less-complete stories were told, ending when they died or stepped off the stage.  But they weren’t unified by anything, and the games were (much) weaker for it.

I think I may have swallowed Alan Moore’s introduction to The Dark Knight Returns whole, at an impressionable age, because I very passionately believe that what gives stories power is their ending.  If you don’t bring the curtain down, in a clear and tidy manner that wraps everything up that needs to be wrapped up (although bear in mind that not everything does) and then stops, then you are Doing It Wrong.

This doesn’t mean I’m blind to the flaws of Big Plot. I have been toying with trying a different structure for the Next Thing, one that unifies the game around a series of smaller plots across an express theme, rather than having one big plot, but honestly, I don’t think it will solve the problem that this is designed to prevent – which is the idea that some events in the game are more “important” than others, and that some characters get more to do that others because they are more influential within those events (and then they get more to do because they were influential in those events, creating a vicious cycle).

But I think I’m willing to live with that.  “Main plot” unifies the game, gives a sense of forward motion and a sense of completeness when it ends, in a way that simply running half a dozen thematically connected (but narratively disconnected) stories just won’t do as well.  Doing that does mean, though, that I need to find ways to make sure no characters feel more important than others.

3. No character shall only be a supporting part.

This is pretty connected to the number 2, above, and one I don’t disagree with at all.  Every character should be the star of their own story, which should feed the greater story.  I don’t like PCs that are created as double acts, unless it’s very clearly a double act of equals.  I try and make sure that everyone that wants to get something to do, gets something to do, and that it’s all equally important.  I’m not always successful, I know that, but that’s certainly the aim.

Key ideas to consider for the next game:

  1. How to avoid the idea/appearance that some characters are more important by virtue of their interaction with External Plot (or any other reason).
  2. A multi plot-arc structure?