Author’s Note: The essay below is a design thinkpiece that contains many evidence-free assertions about player behavior. This anecdotal information has been gathered from a lifetime of gamemastering and larp organizing. Your own experience and data may vary, and I welcome rebuttals with those differences in hand.
Larp is a medium of relation. We invent relationships and then spur them along, so that they flow somewhat messily between participants, and then we see what happens. However, if we ask players to keep secrets on behalf of their characters, then they will also endeavor to do so. The unfortunate default state of a character with a slate full of secrets is silence: A player will tell others nothing, lest they risk everything. What’s the motivation to do otherwise? Despite a healthy play-to-lose culture in European larp circles, the default relation of a player to their own character is often their conflation of goals: “If my character succeeds, I succeed.” Even if we were to say “I should behave as my character would in this situation,” it will not necessarily arrive at a dramatically interesting and relevant story outcome. As a medium of relation, larp relies on inter-player trust and re-calibration of one’s goals as a game proceeds. This poses to us a dilemma: How do we make a story element that involves secrets and betrayal, such as crime, while maintaining players’ trust in each other? How do we offer the wish fulfillment of crime fiction, while also responding to the practicalities of “doing crime” during the larp? Trust lies at the center of the maze.
Trust is admittedly the foundation on which our old child’s game of “cops and robbers” rests, at least in the North American context. Our local rules of “cops and robbers” were trivial: robbers run away from and hide from the cops, who put the robbers in a “jail” area. The robbers can break out of jail if another robber touches the jail or the robber, freeing them, whereas the cops win once all the robbers are in the jail. But without a fairly robust baseline of trust and consent, none of these rules work. The robbers could flee the game area, making the cops’ victory condition impossible, or they could simply not comply with being marched to jail, forcing multiple cops to restrain them, as in real life. The spirit of play underlying the rules is of equal or greater importance to the rules themselves (Stenros and Montola 2024). Put a different way, Mo Holkar (2024) writes “Leader characters may be described as being mercurial and unpredictable, even whimsical – but the player who is in a role that provides or controls the play of others, can never be those things.” Trust in others helps us make enjoyable bad decisions together.
Fictional crime in genre larps is a high-trust, prosocial affair. Both secrecy and exposure can ruin a crime plot, so we don’t design them very well. For crime even to matter in the larp, there first needs to exist characters or systems that might care and visit consequences on the transgressing character. In the larp The Future Is Straight (2021), for example, players live in a homophobic environment, but the larp refuses to call out or punish transgression. No consequence, no crime, and the larp instead turns to other matters. By contrast, the law of the Masquerade in the Vampire: the Masquerade (1991) larp franchise, in which vampires are forbidden to reveal their true nature to humans, offers both in-game punishment (breaking the Masquerade is often punished with a character being stripped of their social status or standing) and out-of-game consequences (the character becomes a pariah and is shunned, affecting a player’s experience) if the Masquerade is broken. As a player committing fictional crimes in a larp, I need to trust both organizers and fellow players will offer me an appropriate combined reaction that lets me feel the consequences — giving the crime narrative weight — without removing my ability to adequately participate in the larp. Crime is prosocial, because criminals rely on others to commit the deed and to treat them with playerempathy when they are caught. Given the rise of jubensha murder-mystery scenarios across East Asia (Shuo, Rouyu, and Hartyándi 2022) and the ongoing commitment to “transgressive” scenario play such as Forbidden History (2018) or Velvet Noir (2019) — both larps about hidden societies and their criminal breaking of taboos –– facing this paradox sooner rather than later feels productive.
Two additional factors complicate the larp form of “cops and robbers.” The first is that we rely primarily on genre fiction to frame what larp crime is and should feel like: mystery novels, swashbuckler and heist movies, and action-adventure games. Genre fiction often has little basis in social reality. Crime in real life is, statistically speaking, largely an unpunished white-collar paperwork phenomenon or an overt punishment of anyone who is poor. By contrast, genre fiction features the debonair thieves of Ocean’s Eleven (1960, 2001), the criminal masterminds of the Dr. Mabuse (1922) films, the poetic hitmen of Pulp Fiction (1995), and the smugglers with hearts of gold of Star Wars (1977). Not only do these genre fiction types have little basis in reality, but they are also difficult to successfully implement as active archetypes within a larp. The second factor is that the structure of crime itself — drug running, theft, racketeering, smuggling, even murder — requires a fully functional network of social relations and something of a working economy, because organized crime relies on money and extortion to come across as convincing. This necessitates a great web of secrets; a web which a single bored larp participant can often unravel in a spectacularly uninteresting way through a few words shared. Neither the larp nor the genre fiction nor even the real-life crime template are dignified through an unspectacular snitch.
When a larpwright creates criminal backstories or in-larp crimes, they are also creating the potential conditions for ostracization and social abandonment of one or more player-characters. How do the non-criminal player-characters treat those who have been caught doing and/or found guilty of doing crimes? “Larp magic” (Rönnåsen 2022), or co-creative design for successful human interactions, may permit larpers to come up with a whole legal system on the fly, but generally a standard genre larp will execute mob justice in an unfair and ugly fashion, potentially replicating real-world prejudices if the player is a woman, an immigrant, and/or non-white. Players who aren’t playing criminals may very well hinge their whole characters on a sense of law and justice, meaning that even a single, unpunished criminal walking free in a larp reminds them of their character’s failure. We live in an unjust world, so it is understandable that many players attempt to impose order on our fantasy micro-worlds. By the same token, a player character whose criminal past is blown wide open 30 minutes into an 8-hour secrets-and-powers larp –– the “default” larp design of adding hidden character information and character special abilities to a larp design (Budin 2015) –– may then also attract a type of player who insists that those criminal player-characters stay in larp jail for the remaining 7.5 hours. By the standards of our international larp community, this is bad design. Crime characters may have victimized or are victimizing others, but they also are quite vulnerable to becoming victims themselves, in that larp requires player characters to inhabit the same physical space and react to evolving states of hidden information, including accusations of criminal activity.
To recap: Crime characters are usually inspired by genre fiction, but larp doesn’t operate according to genre fiction’s rules of narrative and information revelation. Moreover, doing crime in the larp as an active story element requires building (or having built) a high-trust social network with vulnerabilities that likely set up these genre-fiction crime characters to fail, which means that the choice to play a criminal is more a willingness to deal with the shitty in-larp consequences of one’s past and present actions than it is to play a proper cat-and-mouse game with the authorities, the essence of great crime fiction. In larp “cops and robbers,” the robber’s best strategy is silence, perhaps defining the larp’s content through its structured absence, and the cop’s best strategy is the absolute domination and subjugation of the robber. Both best strategies shut down play.
Crime backstories and criminal subplots are thus structurally built to fail in most genre-fiction larps. They are difficult to get right and incentives simply don’t line up properly. Great player efforts at building an archetypal crime family are more often punished than rewarded, but no crime plot is very entertaining without the thrill and consequences of being caught. For an individual player with a crime or two in their character’s backstory, they can at least savor the feeling of having a secret. If that character has a host of crimes, however, they are now a “criminal” and much more subject to the laws of genre fiction and sociological projection. We all can identify with having one skeleton in the closet; it’s much more unfathomable to us all when we make all of that a lifestyle. A shared crime between more than one player-character is a criminal conspiracy and now requires a different social apparatus to handle it. Much of this needs to be taken into account, but such consideration is infrequent. Instead, the standard secrets-and-powers framework ensures the silence and relative lack of activity from criminal characters. The risks are otherwise too high.
I was recently given a strong impetus to think through all of these factors when I participated in the writing team for the 2024 runs of Odysseus, the famous Finnish larp that converted a Helsinki school into a spaceship set for 3 fifty-hour space dramas. As a clockwork larp (Montola 2024), each individual section of the larp is intended to affect the other: the bridge game impacts the fighter pilots, who are then injured in battle and sent to medbay, while the engineers fix the battle scars and the science team deciphers their next coordinates from mysterious artifacts retrieved by the marines. There is, however, a whole criminal subplot as well. A nefarious crime family has infiltrated the ship and also stands to benefit amidst the chaos and confusion of the renewed Machine War. I took up the task of writing the “Criminal Activities on ESS Odysseus” document.
I had received reports from both the Odysseus design team and players from the 2019 run that the criminal subplot had not functioned as intended, largely for reasons I have already articulated above. Characters in Odysseus need to be positioned to have to make terrible decisions, many of which will have ripple effects throughout the clockwork. However, criminals have zero formal position within the clockwork, except as a highly unstable conspiracy with concealed plotline information. Player characters have little to no personal reason to reveal their secrets, and therefore most do not, despite the fact that criminal consequences will help drive the storylines and moral quandaries of all the other PCs. In addition, with no money economy in the game whatsoever, any further criminal activity on the ship has to balance on a precarious network of favors that gets quickly drowned out by the rolling crises endemic to the larp. Furthermore, Odysseus contains a jail cell as this massive opportunity for jail play, but we would need to steer to make sure it was frequently emptied out, so multiple characters could use it in play and jailed characters would still be able to experience the rest of the larp.
My response was to break the content down into 3 areas: (1) the fictional framework needed to interpret what crime is on Odysseus, (2) the meta-level understanding of what a criminal character’s story arc might look like, and (3) what players should actually do in the larp as criminals. If we are concerned with the “aesthetics of action” (Stenros 2013) of crime, then the most important thing a character that considers themselves a “criminal” can do is, of course, more crime during the larp. On Odysseus, listed activities were hacking, election rigging, stealing, concealing stolen items, selling drugs or blackmarket items, blackmailing others, hurting others, and avoiding being caught for crimes, past and present. Articulating the activities was one prosocial strategy: one needs for players to imagine actually doing these things, and such an imaginary is frequently necessary before a player will even take a possible risk with their character. Criminal characters would have to, in real time, do “criminal interviews” on fellow characters: sizing up their boundaries and the potential to commit a crime against them. While breaking these activities into tasks may have made criminal activities clearer to the players, they may not have been any easier to implement in play. Again: the lack of money in Odysseus made things difficult, as a bribe for someone to look the other way or to be included in the criminal conspiracy was not forthcoming, and the alternatives –– threats, blackmail, favors –– had little proper leverage within the clockwork game.
Another prosocial design act is to give criminals a broader identity, organization, or purpose. Do the characters belong to a shared crime family? Are they revolutionaries? Are they from the privileged ruling class? Crime is necessarily collaborative, but the easiest path in larp after keeping quiet is to casually reveal all of the activities to the authorities. A shared group identity protects against that impulse, as in real life. With an invented past and invented traditions, crime is suddenly more than a mere activity, but also an identity that provides greater opportunities for role-play and meaning-making. In Odysseus, the two criminal organizations are the Zodiac Web and the Gray Scorpio, the former being a for-hire crime family and the other being a revolutionary terrorist group. For Odysseus runs 2 and 3, we created little spider-logo calling cards to leave at crime sites or otherwise signal membership in the web. Having a literal physical badge pointing to crimes helped with the secrets problem, since now other players could pursue investigations whenever they would find a mysterious slip of paper with a spider on it. However, the web also had its own hierarchies and past, which then directly led to who was able to authorize a criminal action and for what purpose. These traditions made criminal activities by the Zodiac Web seem more like “who these characters were,” rather than “what they happen to do.”
Yet another prosocial design act would be enhanced player transparency, including quick means of scene negotiation and safety metatechniques. Blowing secrets and transgressing will not only move the plotline along, but will also result in direct consequences for the criminals without many alternate play options beyond “You will be in jail for the rest of the larp” or “We will put you on trial.” Trials, hearings, and imprisonment offer excellent role-play scenarios, but should also incorporate rapid means of checking in on players and seeing what they want will avoid the law-and-order defaults of mob justice and insistent retribution. On Odysseus, a useful solution devised by the team was a fictional “ankle monitor,” which both shows that a criminal has been punished while also allowing the player to continue to maneuver through the larp space. Now the fictional jail cell could be free, but the rest of the Odysseus crew could convey their disdain for the ankle-monitor-wearing criminal in their midst.
As we further the boundaries of larp discourse beyond the economy of player secrets and cops-and-robbers stereotypes, it is important for any prospective larp design team to at least ask themselves the question of what criminal backstories or activities are doing in the larp itself. What does it look like in the diegesis? What meta-level player expectations come with it? What activities should PCs attempt to achieve certain outcomes? Will the larp appropriately calibrate any consequences or punishment to suit player experience? Designing crime with discipline lets us support the players in exploring darker themes and richer experiences, and without the real-world consequences.
Works Cited
Budin, Nat. 2015. “Decoding the Default: Secrets and Powers Larp”. WyrdCon Companion Book 2015, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman. San Diego, CA: Wyrd Con.
Holkar, Mo. 2024. “Silently Patching the Magic Circle.” Mo Holkar’s Blog. https://blog.undyingking.com/silently-patching-the-magic-circle/
Meland, Karete Jacobsen, Tor Kjetil Edland, and Anna Emilie Groth. 2021. The Future Is Straight. Norway.
Montola, Markus. 2024. “Odysseus: In Search of a Clockwork Larp.” Nordiclarp.org https://nordiclarp.org/2024/07/04/odysseus-in-search-of-a-clockwork-larp/
Odysseus. 2019, 2024. Helsinki, Finland: Illusia ry.
Rönnåsen, Moa. 2022. “Leading with Larp Magic.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 100–104. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
Shuo, Xiong, Wen Ruoyu, and Mátyás Hartyándi. 2022. “The Chinese Hotpot of Larp.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 86–89. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
Stenros, Jaakko and Markus Montola. 2024. The Rule Book. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Vampire: the Masquerade. 1991. Atlanta, GA: White Wolf.
Stenros, Jaakko. 2013. “The Aesthetics of Action.” https://jaakkostenros.wordpress.com/2013/10/28/aesthetics-of-action/
Cover image: photo by Kat Wilcox on pexels.com
