Dogma 99, Part 1.

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So I’m working my way through slightly over a decade’s worth of writing about LARP, and while I know a lot of it is old hat, a decade and more later, it’s probably still of value to me to read it, think about it, and write about my responses to to it.  Some of it I’d already read and thought about before now, but I think writing about it will help me clarify what’s useful.  I decided I’d start with arguably the oldest thing: The Dogma 99 Manifesto, which is one of the things I’d read before – I suspect most LARPers have.  I’m interested to see that my perspectives on it have shifted quite a lot in the period since I first read it.

Obviously, it’s taking Lars von Trier’s Dogme ’95 rules as pretty heavy inspiration, and should be viewed in that light.  The Dogma 99 Manifesto, and a lot of the writing that followed it are obviously extreme statements of position, intended to provoke debate, and inspire people to try and do something new, different, and arguably “purer”, without being bound by a lot of the conventions that came before.  Basically: it’s not meant to be take 100% seriously.  Thank god.

One of the things that strikes me about it is that my first thought is “I don’t think I’d want to run or play a Dogma 99 game” and yet when I come to the dissection of each individual point, I find it quite hard to disagree with at least the intention of each of them.

I’ll probably take on one or two of it’s points per post for a bit, because there’s a lot to cover.

I’m going to close out these posts by noting a few things I want to consider as a result of them, when designing the next game.  It doesn’t follow that everything I want to think about will automatically become part of the finished game, this is just so I’ve got a short record of things to think about at a later date.

1. It is forbidden to create action by writing it into the past history of a character or the event.

I’m obviously not disposed to like this one. We just completed a successful two-year game that made use of the fact that several of the characters had decades and in some cases, centuries, of history with one another.  There were buried conflicts all over the shop.  And I suspect the same will be true of the next game.  I do not like the idea of a game that does not draw on background to generate conflict, because I like the depth and richness that a backstory gives.

But the spirit in which this rule is intended is one I really agree with: the only action that matters occurs within the context of the LARP time-in (on-camera, if you like).  Everything you need to know to understand the conflicts of the LARP must be shown at the time-in, and not in a “expository dialogue” way.

Part of the reason I disagree with this, of course, is that I like LARP as a serial form, rather than a one shot.  So there’s always going to be a context in which some of the action for any given session will be firmly rooted “off camera” as it were – because it took place in a previous time in.  And once you’re there, what’s wrong with adding a few similar kinds of conflict that are set up in backstory?

But there’s a key flaw in the medium: the only conflicts from backstory that are likely to play out are those between players.  Where a player writes an unresolved NPC conflict into their backstory, I have two choices: find a way to make that conflict relevant to more than just them, or, more probably, ignore it.  And unfortunately, if I pick one player’s backstory NPCs over another’s then it creates a sense that that particular character is more important than others, which is not a desirable outcome.

And having said that I don’t mind a bit of backstory, I think it’s important in a serial LARP to remember the same rules that exist in most serial fiction: every episode is someone’s first. If someone new can’t walk in and reasonably quickly hook in to what’s going on, with am absolute minimum of IC exposition, then the LARP isn’t working.  I know I’ve been guilty in the past of running games where there was a reasonably standard “new player” experience – a new character walks into the room, and is immediately introduced to a couple of key other characters, who proceed to infodump on them until they’re caught up.  It’s not the worst thing in the world, but I wonder if it can be done better?

Key ideas to consider for the next game:

  1. No unresolved PC-NPC conflicts in backstory prior to the first time in.  If PC-NPC conflict develops in the course of uptime, that’s acceptable, but not necessarily desirable.
  2. Every session is someone’s first, but every first session should be different.  Design so that new characters can be caught up on anything they need to know to access the game in a variety of ways, depending on player preference.

Systematic

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I’m spending a lot of my time thinking about rule systems at the moment – I want to get the basis of system that we’re going to use for the upcoming LARP sorted out over the next month, so I’ve been thinking a lot about what systems are for in these games we play.  There are plenty of very successful games out there run in a loose freeform way, where there are no real rules other than a sort of shared understanding of the style of play, within which the outcome of every contentious interaction is negotiated between players on an ad-hoc basis.  And rules often slow the game down, breaking immersion and draining dramatic tension.  So why have them at all?

(Digression: I really ought to give “the upcoming LARP” a working title just to I’ve got a definite article for it – NextLARP?  FutureLARP? I dunno, anyone got any preferences?  Anyone care?  I had a title for it, six months ago, but I’ve rather consciously put that on one side until I see what shape it’s taking in a few months time – I want the LARP to shape the title, not the other way around.)

So, I’ve come to the following conclusions about what I think they’re for.  I’m aware that they’d have other uses for other people, and I’m not seeking to provide an abstract answer to “what is the purpose of having rules in a LARP?” so much as I am trying to define “what is the purpose of the rules in a LARP I am running?”

1. Consensus.

The rules form an agreed basis for the world.  Kind of like the laws of physics, I guess.  They provide both IC and OOC context for the actions characters take.  Effectively, they’re the grown up, formalised version of the Cowboys-and-Indians “Bang!  I shot you, you’re dead!” (“No I’m not!”, “Yes, you are, I shot you!” etc.)  They’re the agreed basis for “fair” dispute resolution.

I’ve put “fair” there in quotes, because there’s actually no requirement that the rules be fair in the traditional sense.  Depending on the kind of game being run, it might even be desirable to have the rules favour particular outcomes, or even particular players.  Nonetheless, the rules form the agreed basis for cooperation between everyone involved in building the LARP – they ensure that everyone is on the same page about what’s possible.

This is particularly important because I like to run games that have a fairly strong fantastical element, and I want us to have an agreed basis for what that element is, can do, and what an appropriate reaction to that might be (in or out of character – it’s possible to have a lot of fun when the player know something the character doesn’t – indeed, it’s often a key ingredient in some of the best moments in games).

2. Drama

The rules exist to facilitate dramatic play – they exist to facilitate both external dramatic conflict between two (or more) characters, and in the sorts of games I like to run, some level of internal conflict within each individual character.  I’m not saying one can’t do internal conflict without rules, that’s obviously a rubbish idea, and I would expect most characters to have (many) additional internal conflicts that were not rules-defined, but on some level, I want a rules set that takes some of that internal conflict, and in some way externalises it so that each character’s internal dilemmas have to affect other characters.

3. To Get Out Of The Way

It’s not strictly a “why have rules” in abstract, so much as a “why have a particular set of rules”, but it’s important enough to me that I want to include it as a fundamental: one of the purposes of a system has to be to do it’s job as swiftly as possible in order to allow everyone to get back to the less systematised part of the roleplaying.  A freefrom negotiation style f play contains the possibility of getting bogged down from time to time if two players can’t come to a consensus, so one of the reasons we have rules is to prevent that, but we have to do it in a way that is more efficient than the problem being solved, or we might as well just get bogged down in a freeform way.

4. To Simulate Randomness And Risk

I think this is surprisingly important.  Good drama contains surprises.  The real world is not predicable.  And, for the kind of games I run: magic should be, well, magic.  A little bit scary and strange.  I think a good system should contain the possibility for a shock upset now and again, and unexpected outcome that no party in a conflict could reasonably expect.  Not often, but sometimes.  We’ve all played tabletop games where one freakish dice roll changed an important dynamic in the game, haven’t we?  I think a good LARP system should contain just a little touch of that.  A good set of rules exist to very occasionally throw an unexpected spanner in the works.  Tabletop games generally factor this in with dice, but a lot of LARP systems are diceless, so how can we bring that randomness in?

5. As An Indicator Of Key Moments

This is a minor thing, but I also like them to be used in a way such that they indicate on a meta level that something is happening that is dramatically relevant, that, if you like, a turning point has been reached.

It doesn’t matter whether that’s fighting, persuasion, powers of observation and deduction, or even something like seduction. (Having written that, I’d just like it to be clear: no game I run will ever contain a mechanical option to accomplish the seduction of a PC – the idea raises far too many consent issues, I just mention it as theoretical example.)  The point is that some times it’s actually good to invoke a system to indicate that something is either not a simple task, or when between PCs, to indicate that that is a point of conflict between the individuals concerned, that what is happening here is in some way important.

I think those are the key reasons to have a ruleset, rather than a more freeform approach.

Basic Background: GNS Theory And The Three Way Model

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I’m going to start out from first principles here for two reasons. In large part, it’s because I’m vain enough to be thinking about a notional audience for this blog (even if it’s just the 20-30 people who will play this future game) and I don’t 100% know what kind of background that imagined audience has, in either games or story.  So I want to make sure this site has enough information on it to be accessible to all.  It’s also because I want to restate some of the stuff I’ve known myself for years, to re-fix it in my head at the outset of this project.  If a lot of the next few posts is old hat to you, hang on, there’s (probably) more interesting stuff coming up later.

So, there’s a reasonably well known model for talking about tabletop roleplaying games called GNS Theory.  It suggests that games can be considered on three axes – Gamist, Narrativist and Simulationist.

Gamism prizes the rules-and-numbers side of the hobby – the tactical use of fictional skills and abilities, represented by mechanical traits, to defeat antagonists and solve problems in order to acquire better/more effective mechanical traits, without reference to why those antagonists needed defeating – they needed defeating because the game rules said that was the goal of the game.  D&D, in it’s original form was a relatively pure Gamist game – indeed, its creator, Gary Gygax devoted considerable editorial time, in the early days of the hobby to deploring the practice of play-acting that had crept into his skirmish combat simulation game.

Narrativism concerns itself with the idea that the purpose of these games (as distinct from board games or war games) is to collaboratively tell a story – with a coherent beginning, middle, and end, and even perhaps concerns like a theme.  White Wolf’s World of Darkness games tend to prize this aspect of hobby.

Simulationism holds that the purposes of these games is to simulate a fictional world and the various elements within it, because that is fun in its own right, without having to produce a coherent story.  I’m actually having trouble thinking of game that really skews Simulationist out-of-the-box as it were – leave a comment if you’ve got a good example?

I should say that GNS theory is, in the first place, just a model, and may not work for you, but also that no value judgement is implied by these axes – none is better than the others – and that it’s very rare to find a “pure” game of any of the three varieties.  Most games (both in the sense of published material, and the practical implementations of that material as conducted by any given group of gamers) fall somewhere in the middle of all three.

The Threefold Model, or Three Way Model is a particular adaption of these three axes, that is in common use in the Nordic LARP community to describe differing styles of play.  It was conceived by John H. Kim and others, and adapted by Petter Bøckman.  Mr Kim maintains an archive of material related to the topic, but in brief, for LARP play, the three axes are considered to be Gamism, Dramatism and Immersionism, reflecting the differing play style offered by LARP, and again, one would be unlikely to find a game that was purely one of them, with no element of any of the others present, and most games reside comfortably in a middle territory where they are all three in roughly equal measure.

Gamism differs from it’s tableop counterpart, in that it’s (more or less) a given in LARP that each player will be playing a character – an entity with fictional wants and desires distinct in some measure from that of the player, and that said fictional persona will be unaware of any of the “game rules”, meaning that pure “Gamism” in the GNS sense is next-to-impossible.  Under the Three Way Model, Gamism is held to represent a style of play in which the players are concerned with “solving” the game – figuring out puzzles, defeating antagoists, and do on.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this sounds a lot like GNS Theory Gamism, but my hair-splitting conception of the difference between the two is that in tabletop/GNS theory, gamism is closer to purely mechanical – it is, if you like, about using the numbers provided by the game systems to get better numbers, while in the LARP/Three Way it is about achieving in-character goals, without as much reference to the numbers/system level stuff as being a goal in and of itself.

Dramatism in the Three Way Model is largely unchanged from its GNS counterpart, Narrativism – it’s just a different word for being All About The Story.

Immersionism is the idea that the goal of LARP is for players to simply represent their characters within the fictional world of the LARP, playing them true to themselves, to the hilt.  It might also be said to raise questions of identity, as the goal of an immersionist player might be said to be to forget their “real lives” within the moment of the game, and to full embody the persona of their character.

Once again, there’s no value judgement made in the model, although individual players often prefer certain styles of play..  Again, most LARPs fall somewhere on all three axes – possibly even shifting position slightly along them at different points in the time frame of the games.

I find it interesting that there’s often a suggestion that Dramatism and Immersionism are in conflict, in a way that Narrativism and Simulationsim aren’t. To explain: in a purely Immersionist game, the phrase “my character would (or wouldn’t) do that” is the sole guiding star.  Each player’s duty is to immerse themselves, regardless of consequence (to the point that the game crosses over with reality, at least – causing actual harm to others or self would of course be frowned upon), and the game is crafted from the interactions between these fully actualised fictional entities, without regard to the idea that there is an overall story being told.

In a pure Dramatist game, the notion of character comes in second to the notion of story – so characters might do things that would be considered inappropriate for them at a given point because for them to do so would fit better with the story, or even just the theme as crafted by the group – so Immersion is that much harder, because (in theory) a given player is both playing their character and shaping the story.  It would be inappropriate to be full immersed in a Dramatist game, as what a given character would, or would not do is not the primary compass by which the game should be navigated.

So, that’s some of the basics.  I’ll probably want to return to the Three Way Model in future posts, as I think it’s a really useful tool for thinking about LARP, and a surprising improvement over GNS theory given that the two aren’t more than a few notes apart.

A Little Light Reading

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I went to Gamecamp at the weekend, and had a lovely time.  I spent quite a lot of time hearing about (and playing) Nordic LARP.  I’ve been aware that Scandinavia has a fairly serious LARP culture, one that is notably different to the culture in the UK for a while now, but this was the first chance I’ve had to really discuss it with anyone who knows it, and learn about it.

In the UK (and the US, as I understand it), LARP (and roleplaying in general) is not taken terribly seriously, and that’s not a bad thing but it does mean that there isn’t a culture of study of the phenomenon from either a practical or an academic point of view, which means that running games in any form is a very much learn-by-doing exercise.  There’s no body of scholarship discussing what works and what doesn’t, and suggesting tools and devices that game participants can learn from.  That’s bugged me for a few years now.  The only advice gamerunners can get tends to be the “how to run this game” section of the various game books, and those tend to be quite highly specialised toward a specific game, and they tend to be very tabletop focused.  The UK LARP culture has almost no documentary tradition.

So I’m delighted to discover that the Nordic scene, in contrast, has a strong history of documentation, which means I’m currently immersing myself in this lot of books – a decades’s worth of LARP theory from the Knutepunkt conference.

I suspect that quite a lot of this blog, at least for the next while, is going to take the form of “I’ve been reading this bit of Nordic writing, and here’s what I think” or even just regurgitations of some of the basic concepts as I attempt to fix them in my head.  Bear with me.

There was one non-Nordic book I learned about, and the odds are I’m just late to the party on it, because it’s been out a few years: Hamlet’s Hit Points.  This is a book providing an interesting conceptual model for thinking about narrative as it applies to gaming – trying to be the gaming equivalent of Robert McKee’s Story, or similar other screenwriting texts, written by Robin D. Laws of Feng Shui/Gumshoe/other stuff fame.  Again, mostly tabletop-focused.

I’m a little hesitant to actually recommend the book, as honestly, it’s mostly a brief explanation of a model for thinking about narrative, and then a lengthy application of the model to Hamlet, Dr No and Casablanca and then a few pages that basically say “try applying this to your own stuff, see if you think it helps you”. That said, it has given me a few things to think about, and it might be of interest to some.  Were it free, I would recommend it without hesitation, I’m just not sure it’s 100% worth the price tag.  But it does give me hope that things are changing in the UK/US scenes, and we might start to see a bit more writing on these topics from non-Nordic sources.

(This concludes your broadcast from the department of faint praise.)

I don’t intend to run a Nordic-style LARP.  (I should say I’m aware that this term is a gross simplification, as there are loads of different styles of LARP this could encompass, many of which are not so very dissimilar to what I’ve run in the past, but I’m using the term to indicate that part of the Nordic scene that is different, so please forgive the simplification.)  I like my LARP as a serialised form, and I like it good and pulpy – the more-or-less traditional UK (and US) style, and that’s what I’m going to run.  But I think there are lessons I can learn from the Nordic form, and I’ll come on to that in posts to come.

In closing, I commend the following to your attention: http://www.meetup.com/Nordic-Progressive-Larp-in-Britain-and-Ireland/

There are some nice-seeming people trying to get a Nordic LARP scene started in London, and of particular interest, they are running a series of interesting one-offs, more or less fortnightly for the next few months.  I’m going to try to get along to a few, and if anyone I know is are interested, I might have a go at facilitating a couple of one-offs myself in a few months time (if I can find some interested players), just to see how people feel about the experiences.