Lawful GM

I have designed and run a number of one-shot LARPs that have been successful, yet they have been formulaic. There's always a situation with lots of drama (death of a monarch, castle under siege, high stakes auction, etc.), player conflicts, plenty of intrigue, and a fast pace wherein the action steadily increases to a climax. The nature of one-shots helped - players throw everything they got into the LARP, accepting the real possibility of death and ruin at the end. The formula has generally worked with assassinations, betrayals, and bold deals being revealed at the end. Because I wanted characters in the four-part LARP to survive across multiple sessions, I was worried about this sort of energy getting half the characters killed in the first session. I therefore ratcheted down the drama and character conflicts, which proved an overcorrection.

You need to give your players plenty to work with; they need motivations for their characters, whether it provides focus in strategizing or inspiration for roleplaying. Characters need to be bold in their motivations, because that helps players get excited about their characters. The process used for this LARP was for players to answer questionnaires to get a feel for what type of characters they wanted to roleplay, the ideas in the questionnaires would be converted by the GMs into characters. It was an awkward approach and a lot of the concepts provided by the players boxed their characters into corners, which combined with the GMs ratcheting down the drama meant the stage wasn't set for good drama. The good news is that this can be corrected. You can inject more drama and by the end of the third session this weekend, the LARP is now back on track. There is now plenty of drama, but the initial setup wasn't good and there were consequences.

Another issue was abstraction. There is a continuum of abstraction in games that begins with card games that are very abstract and moves to boardgames to tabletop RPGs and then to LARPs where the abstraction is progressively reduced. As you move down the continuum the constructs and rules inherent to abstraction give way to roleplaying and interactions that try to be real. Our second session was heavily abstract, the LARP was run via two abstract boardgames-inspired scenarios, one for political maneuvering and one for solving a mystery. The LARP became more about making tactical decisions on a boardand finding clues to finish a physical puzzle than actually interacting. Some elements of this approach where good but generally it didn't work. Abstraction and LARPs is tricky and if you are too removed from the roleplaying then immersion and engagement suffers.

This brings us to what proved a significant problem and that was the role of GMs. At the beginning I had six GMs, which was the whole point of this LARP to show other people how to set up and run LARPs. I provided a lengthy design period so all of the GMs could contribute to the process, but all save one pretty much zoned out of this process. Thus in the end, I realized it would be all me and frantically threw together the LARP in a much shorter period of time than I would have liked. The big mistake I made here was not micro-managing the process. I mistakenly gave the other GMs too much freedom, which overwhelmed some. I should have scheduled meetings at my house for everyone to work on the LARP instead of doing it online, which requires more discipline and motivation to effectively work. The other GMs hadn't done this before and it was too much to expect them to rise to the occasion; things that are easy or exciting for me are not easy or even interesting for other GMs.

The other problem with GMs is how to use them. My vision was for 2 GMs to manage a LARP and the other 3 GMs to roleplay NPCs who can engage the PCs during a session and help drive the action. I communicated this vision but it wasn't accepted. I believe GMs have two responsibilities: serve as Arbiters of the Universe and roleplay engaging NPCs. Everyone was on board with the first responsibility but the second was mostly rejected by the other GMs. In the first session the three GMs running NPCs pretty much just interacted with one another ignoring the PCs. In the second session, the GMs running it had no plan for using the other GMs to run key NPCs and one GM decided he wouldn't show up if all he had to do was run a NPC.

Once again this was a failure on my part. I am good at running NPCs and enjoy it, but I believe most GMs are not that comfortable with roleplaying. In tabletop you can get away with minimal roleplaying as a GM by focusing on narrative, but in a LARP you have to be able to act when running a NPC. I'm not winning Academy Awards with my acting but I can communicate a pretty good range of personalities. This is something that makes a lot of tabletop GMs very uncomfortable; they don't enjoy it and can't commit to the process to make it work. My mistake here was not scheduling meetings where we could plan out NPCs and I could have given the GMs some instruction in how to effectively run them. I do think this was a deep division in how everyone viewed the role of GMs, though I was very clear from the start about my view of how GMs would operate in the LARP.

One reason tabletop players balk at LARPs is that they remove the comfort of sitting at a table sheltered by dice and lots of rules. In tabletop there's a lot for players to hide behind that's removed with LARPs, which makes them frightening. There's no where to hide when it comes to roleplaying a character. GMs have these same fears and this was something I forgot.

The first session was like a weak pilot for a drama series. We introduced the personalities in the palace of a Queen in a sci-fi fantasy setting and set up some broad story arcs, but it wasn't that engaging or interesting. The first session had 24 participants. Ratings dropped after the first session. The second session was an artsy episode with 17 participants, several of whom were vocal about their frustrations at the abstraction used in the session. Ratings plummeted to 13 participants in the third session with two those participants being GMs.

Just like with many television series we finally found our stride. There were two key events of the LARP: a tribunal and a starship race. The tribunal was to determine the responsibility of a PC in regards to his brother's death in the second session. Three PCs served as the judges, one PC handled prosecution, and another handled defense. Every other PC participating had evidence to contribute. One GM, me, managed the tribunal and roleplayed various NPCs summoned by the tribunal to fill in gaps in the evidence. The other GM ran the starship race as an abstraction, a boardgames-style approach, with the PCs providing evidence to the tribunal running the leading racers. Everyone had something to do and the GMs kept the pace moving. There were some surprises at the end that led to a coup of the government that plunged the world into civil war. This just leaves the finale of the LARP in early August, though it's pretty clear at this point this series will not be picked up for a second season.

It's been a good experiment and lessons have been learned, which hopefully I can apply to whatever LARPs I run in the autumn and winter for our group.