Creating Play in the Magical Classroom is a multi-part guide to playing a teacher at the College of Wizardry and New World Magischola larps. While it was written specifically with these events in mind, it can be applied to many other larps and settings.
The texts in this series are written collectively by (in alphabetical order) Maury Brown, Stefan Deutsch, Johanna Koljonen, Eevi Korhonen, Ben Morrow, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson, Mike Pohjola, Staffan Rosenberg and Jaakko Stenros. The series is edited by Johanna Koljonen.
Part VI: Reasons for Your Professor Character Not to Get Personally Involved in Students’ Life-shattering Personal and/or Occult Drama, and How to Play Them
Most of the larp (but especially the last six hours of the game, when every remaining plot-line is culminating at the same time) will be great for students riding their respective plot trains, and an incoherent mess for anyone with some overview of the situation. (That’s people like you, because students will run up to you continuously to report what’s happening).
Towards the very end of the game, it therefore makes good sense for at least a few of the most powerful teacher characters to accidentally incapacitate themselves with port wine or potions to conveniently miss most of the plotting and battles – of course rewarding themselves with some other kind of awesome play, like sitting around a fireplace talking about other memorably failed proms, or making their own incoherent expedition in the wrong direction, or choosing to help the students with the most inconsequential problems, or drafting very long documents for some purportedly urgent purpose, or having an earnestly moving heart-to-heart with an unhappy student, or dancing “old people” dances on the dance floor.
A Good General Strategy All Through the Game Is to Be Exceedingly Optimistic and Trusting of Student’s Abilities
Downplay the severity of any situation and tell them that you trust them to sort it out themselves. If they are alone in the problem, ask them to go to a more senior or specialised student or get a bunch of their friends and get them to help (“you’re all smart students, of course you can do a simple banishment ritual”). If you must be co-opted into a plot, you can say this is a wonderful learning opportunity for students, so they should do most of the work and you are there just as backup in case things go bad.
You Can Ask Students with Similar Problems (or Situations That Appear to Have Narrative Similarities) to Collaborate on Solutions
If you have a student in your class with a special skill you can try attaching them to some other students’ plots (this is especially great if it’s a student who has performed poorly in the actual subject of your class: if you can identify a positive quality anyway and send them on an adventure they’ll love you for it).
Your Character Might Also Not Care about Students or Their Troubles That Much
If you have created a comically grumpy or snobbily cold-hearted character, they might simply not care if a student has gotten themselves into trouble they cannot get out of (“it’s probably their own fault”). Or they might be secretly or even openly glad that students might get injured or die (it’s weeding out the weak and the stupid or you’re just happy there will be less students for you to worry about). You might also think students are lying and telling tall tales (but this might cause them to try to prove it to you and you get sucked in).
If Your Character Has Been a Teacher for a Long Time, There Is Very Little in the Way of Student Generated Drama They Have Not Seen Before
You can play on generational differences, in an infuriating manner if possible. “When I was your age, all seniors actually had to banish a Yeti as part of their final exams – we don’t do it these days, because students just don’t have that kind of mettle”… or “this reminds me of that unfortunate business with the Harpies in ‘86…of course very few of them made it out, so I think we can all agree that the philosopher’s stone is NOT going to be the answer to your question!”
Also, You Can Always Remind the Students That There Is One Force Greater than Magic: Bureaucracy
You would love to help defend the school but there are overdue performance evaluations that need to filled right now — or there will be no school to defend come morning. Alternatively, you can start by reflecting on how to go about saving the school through the proper channels. “First of all you need to put in a request to stay mobile during curfew. Then we need to check that the janitors are informed that watering the lawn should be cancelled, if there is a pack of werewolves on the lawn. Indeed, why don’t I do that.”
This work is distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. That means you are allowed to use elements of this text beyond the extent of referring and linking to it as long as you credit the original authors and source. It’s not allowed to use parts of this work for commercial purposes, if you are unsure if this applies to your project, please contact us.
This is not intended as a cut and paste smorgasbord but rather a complete text. Please reference it, but avoid using parts out of context. It’s better to just link the articles where it’s appropriate for use.
Creating Play in the Magical Classroom is a multi-part guide to playing a teacher at the College of Wizardry and New World Magischola larps. While it was written specifically with these events in mind, it can be applied to many other larps and settings.
The texts in this series are written collectively by (in alphabetical order) Maury Brown, Stefan Deutsch, Johanna Koljonen, Eevi Korhonen, Ben Morrow, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson, Mike Pohjola, Staffan Rosenberg and Jaakko Stenros. The series is edited by Johanna Koljonen.
Part V: Authority Awry: Stop, Shut Up, Do What I Tell You
In this series, we have had lots of examples of what is encouraged play for professors. Here are a few examples of discouraged play. Professors sit in a position of authority and players (and characters) will be conditioned to obey them. This is good to an extent — the game needs to function and having students follow the directions of in-game authority figures is an important part of the game continuing to work. However, this style of larp is opt-in, which means a player always must be given a choice about what to play and how to react.
As a consequence, you should refrain from the following kinds of play.
Denying Agency
For example, a professor can offer the opportunity for a character to tell (under a spell) what is on their mind (see above). However, a professor should not suddenly put a character under a spell and then tell them what they are thinking, or what happened to them, or a family member, etc. Remember both the design of the magic system and your position as a teacher inside the fiction actively encourage you to explain what you magic will do – you can do this in an open-ended way (and perhaps even taking some extra time doing it) to allow the player choices and a second to reflect on how they want to play it.
Players should not feel ambushed, or that they have to stop what they were doing or playing as a result of what someone else did to them. An example is a professor turning another student into a vampire without their consent, or telling them that their character’s parents have died, or killing/incapacitating a student or faculty member and exorcising or resurrecting them, unless these scenes have been agreed to beforehand.
Shaming the Player (Not the Character, Whom You Have Agreed to Play Abuse With)
Professors teaching magic are also, on the meta-level, teaching the availability of safety techniques and the importance of consent-based play. A professor should never make it impossible or difficult for a player to use a safety technique such as cut or break, or make it difficult to step away or exit a scene. “Impossible” or “difficult” does not have to mean physically blocking the door or refusing to stop when asked (though these have happened). Because of a professor’s explicit in-game authority, a player who is feeling uncomfortable about continuing (like a student with a fear of snakes continuing with a cryptozoology class that may include an encounter with a snake-like creature), or even triggered by a scene, may not want to opt-out for fear of losing house points or social status.
House points should never be threatened or deducted for off-game reasons, and a player who has their character leave a scene for off-game reasons should not become the object of derision. But unless there is a specific game mechanic in play to signal off-game reasons for opting out, you will in practice not know which reactions are in and which are off. This makes it even more vital to offer students in-game opportunities to leave or not participate.
The organisers can encourage players who opt out for offgame reasons to discreetly tell the teacher-players so, just to make sure their characters will not be punished for it. But actually this can also be handled mostly or entirely in-game, assuming that all players know that playing punishments will be just as much fun as any other part of the larp. In that case, players can choose for off-game reasons to opt out of certain situations, safe in the knowledge that this might either pass entirely uncommented or open the door to a fantastic in-game experience. (For instance, at the first College of Wizardry, then set in the Harry Potter universe, the janitorial staff had students in detention participating in a dangerous ritual to destroy a horcrux).
Focusing the Attention on You, Your Power, or Your Plot to the Detriment of Other Players
For example, a professor is bored at the dance, where students are having a good time. They decide to create a scene that disrupts the scene in progress, for their own excitement and amusement.
The most problematic use of the spell casting system to my anecdotal observations were spell effects that stopped people from doing what they wanted to do, and spell effects that denied players voice (and consequently, agency). These types of actions tended to disrupt others’ gameplay without providing any “replacement play”. While these are might be enacted by student players on their own, student players are looking to Professors for behavioral precedents. What a professor does in controlled circumstances for entertainment purposes only, has a strong possibility of being reproduced by the student players. With this in mind, if the outcome of your professor’s interactions with students can be summarized as “stop/shut up”, try to find alternative outcomes that set a better precedent. (Ben Morrow)
This work is distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. That means you are allowed to use elements of this text beyond the extent of referring and linking to it as long as you credit the original authors and source. It’s not allowed to use parts of this work for commercial purposes, if you are unsure if this applies to your project, please contact us.
This is not intended as a cut and paste smorgasbord but rather a complete text. Please reference it, but avoid using parts out of context. It’s better to just link the articles where it’s appropriate for use.
Creating Play in the Magical Classroom is a multi-part guide to playing a teacher at the College of Wizardry and New World Magischola larps. While it was written specifically with these events in mind, it can be applied to many other larps and settings.
The texts in this series are written collectively by (in alphabetical order) Maury Brown, Stefan Deutsch, Johanna Koljonen, Eevi Korhonen, Ben Morrow, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson, Mike Pohjola, Staffan Rosenberg and Jaakko Stenros. The series is edited by Johanna Koljonen.
Being a Fun Professor Without Playing It All for Laughs
Magic school professors are inevitably strong characters. Whatever they are, they are to the extreme. Super wise, or bitter, or dotty, or eccentric. Actually, most of you can be eccentric, that just adds to the game.
Here are some questions to round out your character:
What is your character like in class vs. out of class?
Do they enjoy teaching? Like students? Why?
What are their pet peeves, their bitter disappointments?
If they are super controlled in class, what is something you can build in that will allow you to show another side of the character?
What is their attitude toward house points? Are they generous or stingy with them? Do they give positive points or mainly take them away for infractions?
Do they have a favorite house or branch of knowledge?
What sort of students do they favor, if any? Do they downplay or do they relish in this favoritism?
Also, what kinds of emotions do you want for the professor to inspire in the students?
What kinds of interactions would create the most interesting play for them – and you?
Will you offer to explain their dreams and other omens to them?
Will you ask them to assist you on a research project?
Will you invite a few people from each of your classes to a secret society? (Remember that secret society meetings should be designed just as much as classes are; this is true even if they are mostly social events – always ask yourself “what can we create together in this group that makes the experience of the larp richer?”)
Playing a Strict or Evil Professor
A magic school should have all kinds of teachers. Many of them are supportive, encouraging and wise role models. But at least a few should be strict and of dubious morals, who may even base their pedagogy on fear and terror. It can be a lot of fun to play at being terrified and being reprimanded, as that is such a big part of fictional magic schools.
Note: some players may be triggered by abusive play, especially from authority figures, so please save the really harsh stuff for those you have agreed to play that way with ahead of time. All play should be opt-in, because when a player (not the character) is genuinely afraid, they can lose the ability to opt out.
Practical tricks on how to play a terrifying professor:
Start a class by making everyone stand up. Wait a moment before letting them sit (as it establishes authority).
Expect punctuality, berate students who are tardy.
Hand out too much homework. (But demand that it is turned in “in five days” so that players need not actually complete it if they do not want to.)
Pick a name for your character that is impossible to pronouce, have the class practice the pronunciation (but not long enough for the class to learn it), then deduct points if someone mispronounces it. (“How can you understand someone’s ideas if you cannot even pronounce their name?”)
Don’t smile, glare a lot, keep pregnant pauses.
Keep your voice steady, never shout. When you want to emphasise something force the students to really pay attention by whispering your words.
Never use your wand. Build up expectations, but know that whatever the students have envisioned, you’ll never be able to top in game. Keep them guessing. (This is most efficient if only one teacher does it).
Place students in danger (obviously NOT the players), for example by having the student practice dangerous, illegal magic on each other. Remember to do this in a way that ensures that players can easily opt out without losing face if they don’t like the emotional content of the scene – for instance, you can ask for volunteers to take notes, observe and evaluate, or even construct a reason for students to choose to leave. If a player chooses to leave a class, never shame them or threaten them or gossip about them, in or out-of-character.
Discuss key events in history from the point of view of the “bad guys” and explain how history is written by the victors and how the “good guys” in power have done terrible things that have been hushed up. (“In this school we pride ourselves in looking at the world as it is, not as we wish it was. Your education thus far has been rife with propaganda. However, I vow to tell you what the world is like — even when the knowledge is deemed “dangerous”, “blasphemous”, or even “treasonous”.)
Have enough redeeming qualities. Maybe hint at lost innocence or a tragedy hard not to empathise with? Be fiercely devoted to your students, or maybe the protection of the school? Interesting villains are always multi-faceted. Perhaps your character is very strict until students get them started on that one topic they love, when they will suddenly spill all the dirt about their past or share magical stuff that is “really not for the undergraduate level”.
Here are some anecdotes from teacher players about expressing their personality:
“It’s fun to have very strong opinions on some things. My character for example despised Avalon school of magic. (I picked Avalon because I could remember the name.)
So I would constantly go:
“By now you should be able to cast some memory altering spells, change a person’s mood a little and boost your mental abilities. Except for those who graduated Avalon, they can barely spell their own name.”
“I’m only joking of course. I went to Avalon myself. Once. Those are the two hours of my life I’ll never get back.”
Etc etc. I was later told that it was fun especially for those who had indeed graduated from Avalon.” (Maria Pettersson)
“Ridiculous hatred is the best 🙂 My hate was directed towards a specific way to hold a wand I called “The Farmer’s Fist”. Everytime I saw someone doing it, I deducted points and said: “You’re a witch, not a farmer! Act like one!”” (Juhana Pettersson)
“I was really good at reading minds, right? So if I wanted to play somebody up I just did this.
Me: “Who created the Fides Completum spell?”
*silence*
Me: “Yes, Miss Seel, that is absolutely correct. One point to house Faust.”
The class: “But she didn’t say anything!”
Me: “Is that so? Didn’t you say it out loud, Miss Seel?”
Miss Seel: “No…”
Me: “Oh, my apologies. So, as Miss Seel here was THINKING, the spell was indeed created by Isobel Gowdie in 1658.”
Maria Pettersson
I was a mostly logical, precise and demanding teacher in the classroom, but responded to most situations outside class with either direct and snobbish judgement or positive enthusiasm. I was enthusiastic about 90% of the time when students came to me with problems. Everything that happened was WONDERFULLY interesting, or ABSOLUTELY delightful, and if student had any ideas about a solution to their problem I would very earnestly tell them that was a great idea. If they asked for immediate assistance, I’d either tell them in a blithely optimistic way that it was clearly not needed, or if it was (like some kind of actual battle with enemies outside) just be so incredibly inefficient about gathering other teachers and so on that the students had to agree to go on ahead and we’d catch up. I don’t enjoy playing battles anyway, and the best feeling is to arrive too late at a fight, patch up broken students, while listening to their jubilant war stories about how they beat the monster with just a group of JUNIORS at hand.
Johanna Koljonen
This work is distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. That means you are allowed to use elements of this text beyond the extent of referring and linking to it as long as you credit the original authors and source. It’s not allowed to use parts of this work for commercial purposes, if you are unsure if this applies to your project, please contact us.
This is not intended as a cut and paste smorgasbord but rather a complete text. Please reference it, but avoid using parts out of context. It’s better to just link the articles where it’s appropriate for use.
Creating Play in the Magical Classroom is a multi-part guide to playing a teacher at the College of Wizardry and New World Magischola larps. While it was written specifically with these events in mind, it can be applied to many other larps and settings.
The texts in this series are written collectively by (in alphabetical order) Maury Brown, Stefan Deutsch, Johanna Koljonen, Eevi Korhonen, Ben Morrow, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson, Mike Pohjola, Staffan Rosenberg and Jaakko Stenros. The series is edited by Johanna Koljonen.
Part III: Class Objectives and Making Up Knowledge
As discussed in the previous section, a good class will provide players with something useful for the game as a whole: a deeper understanding of their own character, an opportunity to develop the relationships between their characters, knowledge or gossip that is actionable in the game, or a tool or a skill to bring into the rest of the game.
The fictional or actual knowledge you impart is of course also in itself fodder for the game, since it imparts knowledge about the world that the larp will not directly explore. At the end of this section are some pointers about handling the pressures of inventing the universe in an authoritative voice.
But first, some practical suggestions about what to do in class, tested by the authors in game.
Self-reflection Goals
Have an ethics debate, forcing student characters to verbalise their opinions about controversial magical/moral topics (they’ll be surprised about what they find out about themselves).
Ask your students to design a magical rune or sigil for themselves (or identify their totem, etc). It should reflect who they are and their passions and goals. Perhaps tell them that drawing it on their bodies will release a slow magic that will make them more like the thing they want to be – but to be careful, because our secrets and fears can seep into this kind of magic as well…
Some divination techniques can be used in this way. E.g. tea leaf reading is ideal for self-reflection, as the symbols are always somehow ambiguous and players can thus interpret them in any way that fits their character’s story.
Lead the group in a mindfulness-suggestion exercise. Have them first slowly pay attention to a raisin, how it looks, feels, sounds, smells, tastes (check a website, a book, or a video of this). Then have them feel the magic inside them, warm and moving, surging, just barely in control, trying to escape towards the wand hand. Have them “breath out” the magic. Explain how this teaches control. (This has no game mechanics value, but more immersive players have reported it as a moment when they really ‘felt’ the magic inside them.)
Relationship Goals
Teach a spell that brings secrets to the forefront, for instance one that forces one to blurt out what one is thinking about. Demonstrate with a student or a few (you can practice this in advance with one or a few students if you’re worried about them getting it). This will demonstrate a few possible ways to create play with this tool – like comedy (“uh… uh… blue… cows.” or the obvious “sex”), plot-driving (blurting out a secret) or relationship-building (“Miranda is so beautiful” or “I want to take Bob to the prom” or “The girls from [some house] just made me cry at lunch”).
In your first class, especially if you teach juniors, ask students to introduce themselves, and (if this is the kind of topic they’d have studied before), to say how good they were in [your topic] in their previous school. That will help people to know whether to play them up or down, and remind them of their classmates’ names.
You can affect the social dynamic in the classroom by having favourites, or students you hate (set this up with the player in advance), or perhaps giving people successes without them even doing anything (see the Mind Magic anecdote under “Playing a fun professor” in the next instalment of this article).
If you divide the class into groups, think about how. Random groups help players build relationships to characters they might not know. You can have students count off, or pull their names from a hat, or divide by the predominant color they are wearing or hair color, or any other randomizing technique.
Playable Tools Goals
Teach a dance they can dance at the ball.
Teach them a spell they can use in the game and practice it together.
Have them make a potion with a specific effect that they can steal some of, then or later (you can ask them to mark their bottles with a label describing the effect, and the names of everyone in their group, and to leave them in a specific place so you can grade them “later”). Please note – if any potions are to be ingested by any players at any time during the larp, all potions present at the larp should be potable and edible. You can still do impressive experiments with kitchen chemistry!
Ask for model/bright students before the game in the FB group. Share your lesson plan and all questions you plan to ask with everyone who wants to play a model student, to give them a real chance to experience success. For the majority of the students that will have missed the post it will feel magical. (You can plant a few gold star moments for students in your class in advance even if you don’t otherwise work from a detailed plan).
Set a task that will create play as it is solved outside of class. Here is an example from a Mind Magic class: “On Friday I gave them homework and told them to return their essays before the Saturday classes. I gave them two options: you can either write an essay OR you can use any means of mind magic to produce one. About 20 people wrote an essay. The rest used Mind Magic to make their friend write it for them, to hex me into believing they had already turned in the essay (which was of course the BEST essay I had ever read) and so on. (I told them I’d call off my mind protection spells for 24 hours so they would have a chance to actually hex me.) Some used telepathy to deliver the essay directly into my mind and one even brewed her essay into a potion. Very fun!”
Palm reading was used by students outside classes to “find out” what will happen (i.e. reveal information known to one student, but not the others).
Use the lectures to seed relationship information to the students. What are the other teachers like, really? What kind of a dark history do you, their favourite teacher, have? Hints tend to work better than more overt explanations. It makes the students feel like they have stumbled on a secret. You can of course also have them work on solving a “hypothetical scenario” that is a real problem experienced by some students at the college or even in your class. This offers great opportunities for resentment, disappointment in you, passive-aggressive sniping among students, as well as allowing the real parties or their sympathisers to argue their case.
Making Stuff up During Class
You will be forced to improvise, because students will ask you questions you never even thought of. Don’t panic! Here are some choices you can make in that situation:
Make something up. If you’re not sure whether the stuff you’re spouting syncs with the canon, frame it as myth, folklore, a controversial opinion that your character has, and make bitter allusions to Some Other Teachers or Magical Authorities who, as the students well know, may not agree with your obviously correct ideas on this topic. (Or similar, as appropriate for your character.) This makes magic more like actual academia, and contributes to building the world. Make a note after class about what you now so firmly believe, so you can use it later in the game.
Ask the other students what the correct answer is. This gives the characters a chance to shine, but in addition players also get an opportunity to contribute. The answers can be considered “right” by your teacher character or maybe disputed, thus generating interesting discussions out of nowhere. In a situation like this, when a student player exposes themselves, you should never downplay them – except if you agreed to do exactly that with the player involved in advance. If no one has anything, ask them to look in their textbooks, or ask leading questions, or describe a hypothetical scenario (or a personal anecdote from your character’s exciting life) and ask them to make deductions from the facts you’ve just presented. When they come up with something good, reward them with praise and/or house points. (Make a note afterwards of the thing you have just claimed to be true. You can also bring it up with some of the other faculty in a social situation – “my students were discussing this principle in class…” – because it might be valuable input for their classes, whether their characters agree or disagree)
Divert or delay. If they ask something during class, tell them it’s a good question and that we shall discuss that topic later this semester – or if it’s not related to class, tell them to come talk to you after class. If they come to you outside class, you can always be busy and tell them to come back to you later or ask another Professor (who might be more knowledgeable on the subject than your character!). If they are asking about something suspicious, you can always question their reasons (“why are you asking about love potions anyway?”)
This work is distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. That means you are allowed to use elements of this text beyond the extent of referring and linking to it as long as you credit the original authors and source. It’s not allowed to use parts of this work for commercial purposes, if you are unsure if this applies to your project, please contact us.
This is not intended as a cut and paste smorgasbord but rather a complete text. Please reference it, but avoid using parts out of context. It’s better to just link the articles where it’s appropriate for use.
Creating Play in the Magical Classroom is a multi-part guide to playing a teacher at the College of Wizardry and New World Magischola larps. While it was written specifically with these events in mind, it can be applied to many other larps and settings.
The texts in this series are written collectively by (in alphabetical order) Maury Brown, Stefan Deutsch, Johanna Koljonen, Eevi Korhonen, Ben Morrow, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson, Mike Pohjola, Staffan Rosenberg and Jaakko Stenros. The series is edited by Johanna Koljonen.
Part II: Designing and Running a Good Magic Class in the Nordic, Wysiwyg, Trust-based Style
What Is a Playable Class?
While the professor is the leader of the class, the professor is not putting on a one-person show for the entertainment of the students. The professor is a facilitator who is helping to promote interactivity, participation, collaboration, risk-taking, and play.
Fundamentally, a class is a mini-sized collaborative game that teaches the students how to play it as it unfolds. Obviously, your teacher character will give the students in-character instructions about how to behave in the class, and you can also design and affect their interactions and mood through for instance the lighting of the room, selection and placement of seating, or the props and tools you provide for exercises.
Ask yourself these control questions:
What kinds of activities will your students be doing? (Sitting, listening are not enough)
What kinds of interactions are possible in your class?
How are the players able to express their character during the the class?
How many opportunities for collaborative creativity and mutual or collective storytelling have you included?
Is your class design playable for the number of students in the classroom?
Is your class design playable for the constraints of the physical space?
Do you need supplies and/or NPCs that you must request ahead of time?
How will this class affect the players, physically and emotionally?
The class should be possible to play as a good student, but also allow for alternative entertainments. If you’re the boring teacher, you can start by absolutely forbidding the passing around of notes in class, and then make sure to turn your back a lot to enable your students to pass notes. (Have a plan for what to do when you catch someone breaking your rule). If you’re a potions teacher, create an experiment that involves many sub-tasks, but also takes time, so students can gossip and flirt and sabotage each other while waiting for the stuff to boil. If you’re teaching a physical subject, buid in a few roles that are important for the class but don’t involve moving very much, to include players that aren’t very mobile (and characters that can’t be bothered).
You can design a class where you do a knowledge-dump on the students in lecture form. But it’s probably more fun to think of a topic that works well using one of the following methods instead:
in Socratic teaching (you asking them questions)
that can be structured like a quest;
or an exploration of objects, text or environments you’ve prepared in advance;
“Concept attainment,” which is a pedagogical technique that has students deduce a greater learning or idea from a presentation of non-examples and examples of the concept and has them actively comparing and contrasting and refining hypotheses;
or to set up exercises that are so evil they push the class to rebel against you (this is you playing to lose!);
or an experiment you have them perform in groups and reflect on together.
Theoretical lectures can be spiced up in many ways.
One good way is to have a homework text that the students are supposed to have read and then ask a few questions. This lets students clearly show if their characters have done their homework really well — or if they just don’t care.
You can also assign a reading and then, as the professor, disagree with it entirely, and see what kind of discussion you can create.
Another trick is to use the theory in practice as “there is nothing more practical than a good theory”, for example by bringing in a monster for the class to study (“Let us explore the two souls in one body dilemma by experimenting on this pregnant cyclops”).
Also, you can arrange for the lecture to be interrupted in someway that is interesting, dramatic, and creates play opportunities.
Any kind of practicing of using spells on each other, as well as strategies for countering, deflecting or resisting them, is great. Remember you are setting the tone for what range of play is appropriate for the magic you’re teaching! Tell the class what the spell does when it works, and some common side-effects, and perhaps some very rare extreme cases that might happen. The more ludicrous or comical the effect you describe, the more serious you should sound when describing it.((Also see “Examples of how to teach a spell so that the teaching makes it clear how to play” in Part VII))
A good class will give the players something that enriches the game: a deeper understanding of their own character, an opportunity to develop the relationships between their characters, knowledge or gossip that is actionable in the game, or a tool or a skill to bring into the rest of the game. Class is also the only framework where student-players will feel confident about playing with magic they don’t know. You are literally teaching them [how to larp] magic.
This work is distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. That means you are allowed to use elements of this text beyond the extent of referring and linking to it as long as you credit the original authors and source. It’s not allowed to use parts of this work for commercial purposes, if you are unsure if this applies to your project, please contact us.
This is not intended as a cut and paste smorgasbord but rather a complete text. Please reference it, but avoid using parts out of context. It’s better to just link the articles where it’s appropriate for use.
Creating Play in the Magical Classroom is a multi-part guide to playing a teacher at the College of Wizardry and New World Magischola larps. While it was written specifically with these events in mind, it can be applied to many other larps and settings.
The texts in this series are written collectively by (in alphabetical order) Maury Brown, Stefan Deutsch, Johanna Koljonen, Eevi Korhonen, Ben Morrow, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson, Mike Pohjola, Staffan Rosenberg and Jaakko Stenros. The series is edited by Johanna Koljonen.
Playing a professor is great fun. You have the perfect excuse to play an over-the-top character and the classroom setting offers an entertaining combination of performance, run-time game mastering, and attentive, game-creating play.
As a professor character in a hierarchical setting like a school, your character will likely have a fair amount of authority. This means you as a player will have four jobs. They are rewarding, but also time-consuming, so you should ideally plan your character’s personality, relationships, and interests in a way that makes them playable in short snatches whenever your attention is not consumed by your duties — or grabbed by events hurling themselves at you.
These are the four tasks:
Creating and running what are essentially nano-larps – your classes – in the context of the overall game. These need to be designed to be playable in at least two different ways (for students/players who are interested in your topic and teaching style, and for students/players who are not interested). Students can skip classes, but if all student players start skipping all classes because class is boring to play, that might actually break the game. Ideally, the classes will give your players something to bring into the rest of the game as well as an opportunity to either explore their characters deeper, further their social plots, or both. (This will be covered in more depth later in this series).
In hierarchical organisations in larps, plot tends to run upward. Student-players will come to you with their characters’ problems, either because that would be a reasonable thing to do (“Professor! My classmates have started a necromantic cult that threatens the very survival of the school!”), or because they don’t know how to get further with some kind of plot they’ve found, invented, misunderstood, etc. (“Professor! There’s a living tree in the forbidden forest who has half the soul of a former student that needs liberating so he can die!”). Your job is to listen, get the gist by asking questions, and rapidly enable the student-player to go on solving these problems themselves, ideally with the aid of other students. You can get personally involved with plot and events that involves school administration, the house cup, and perhaps one random thing during the larp that is totally irresistible to you as a player – but between classes, school administration, house monitoring duties, faculty meetings, grading if you give homework, and responding to the emergencies of the next 30 students, you won’t have time to go on adventures. In fact, if you do, you might actually hamper the play of student characters who need to speak to a teacher for legitimate, teacherly reasons (see point 3 below). Playing a professor is a practice in running away from plot. If you want to go on quests, request to play a student instead.PLEASE NOTE: Quite often it would be more realistic for your character to get involved in the crises of the students, but you can’t and you will need to give your character a good reason not to. We will return to this in a later instalment.
Runtime game-mastering, through the in-game actions of your characters, everything that has to do with or affects the school as a whole – teaching, points for houses, meetings where all characters gather, administration of prefects/presidents and house selection, new situations that might require a change in school rules or a faculty response, etc. If the school has rules, you may also be involved in maintaining those rules, so that breaking them becomes playable (but please remember that punishments like detention have to be just as fun and interesting to play as classes – while the character should feel bummed out, the player should feel like they won the lottery by getting caught).These responsibilities are super important, because you have eyes on the ground in a way the actual game-masters never can. On the other hand, it doesn’t feel like work, because this stuff is what your characters would logically be doing anyway. It’s just important to stick to the limits agreed upon with the organisers, which will probably be the following: The overall schedule of the larp must be adhered to under all circumstances – small in-game delays for major in-game reasons are acceptable, but you can’t cancel events like the ball (unless you make sure to dramatically un-cancel it) and teaching will continue no matter what. If you’re cursed and can’t move, have the students carry you to class, or come to you. In brief, in-game problems will typically be solved in-game, but the schedule is holy, which might require you occasionally to heavily steer your character’s actions towards this goal.
Portraying a diverse, interesting, and functioning school faculty. Larping is a team effort, and your portrayal of a professor happens in the context of a school with students, staff, and faculty. One part of this is to ensure that the teachers are different. There should be good, evil, and neutral teachers, lax, strict and lazy ones, teachers who are absent-minded, paranoid, over-protective, ethical, irrational etc. For a dynamic game, it’s good to check with the other teachers that you don’t all have same teaching style or pedagogical methods. One very boring, theoretical class is great – so that people will have a boring teacher to hate on (except for that tiny minority who find that teacher the best). Some should be very practical, others more conversational, some physical, etc.Another important thing is to portray a unified facade. Even if two professors hate each other, they should publicly treat each other with respect — fundamentally, the enemy of the faculty are the students. If too many teachers lose respect in the eyes of the students, the game will no longer function. In the interest of maintaining the cohesion of the larp, the faculty should always play each other up when it comes to status.
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The pre-game workshop tradition in Nordic larp is mostly oral, with little written material. People take part in workshops as players, then borrow and develop ideas from those experiences to construct workshops for their own larps. So I thought it might be useful to put together a method which looks at some of the different intentions and purposes that workshop activities can have, to help designers think about and plan their workshops more systematically.
The table below lists and categorizes workshop activities that I use in my own practice, or that I will use if I run a larp that requires them. The sequence of the table is the sequence in which I use these activities: ie. first working on the players themselves, then working with them on their characters; start with warmup, move on to impro basics if required, and so on. There may be requirements to move back and forth (eg. perhaps a re-warmup will be needed partway through, or meta-techniques may be practised again in-character), but it’s this general direction.
In practice you may use workshop activities that have more than one purpose: this may be desirable both for conciseness and for helping to reinforce the activity impact upon players. For example, flashback scenes can be used to calibrate players’ understanding of relationships with each other. Or the way to teach a particular technique could also serve as a trust exercise.
I’ve given an example activity for each aim, but of course there are many different ways of achieving all of them: some will be more appropriate for some larps than for others; and you’ll have your own favourites. The useful Workshop Handbook site has a categorized collection of activities which give plenty more examples.
A few of the items talk about ‘calibration’. This is a very important larp-preparation concept, introduced by Martin Nielsen (2014). The short definition is: “all participants adjust their interpretation of a phenomenon, so that all participants have more or less the same interpretation.” (Where I take “phenomenon” to mean something like: an aspect of the culture being portrayed/experienced in the larp.)
(click to open PDF version of this table)
* Safety exercises aren’t always included in workshops; indeed they’re quite rare in some larping cultures. But I personally feel that there should always be at least a minimum safety brief.
Details
Spelling each of these out in more detail:
Introduction– the frame through which players enter the workshop and the game. Welcome them, check off names if appropriate, tell everyone what the game is that they’re about to play, tell them that now they are in the pre-game workshop.
Practicalities – those useful things players need to know so they can be comfortable in the space. Where are the bathrooms, where are the exits, can they eat and drink, how long will the workshop and the game last, will there be breaks… etc.
Structure and purpose – explain why this game is preceded by a workshop, and what will be achieved during it. You may want to go into detail about the workshop activities – more likely, you’ll just give a general picture. (Or you may want to keep the activities secret for now, so the players aren’t expecting them.)
Warmup – important to get players relaxed, disinhibited, and moving freely. There are lots of great warmup exercises, such as Penguins and flamingos, Human knot, Jump in jump out, Shake hands… Choose exercises that are appropriate for your number of players and for the space that you’re using.
Impro basics – simple exercises to reinforce (or to introduce, if your players are new to this) the basic improvisation tools of Yes, and…, Not blocking, and so on.
Physicality – this may be important if the game requires physical contact, but your players are unaccustomed to it in their larp tradition, or are strangers to each other. The exercises should familiarize them with each other’s touch, proximity and presence. This doesn’t need to be any more intense than it will be in the larp itself.
Trust – particularly useful in emotionally intense games. If you can help players become comfortable entrusting themselves to each other’s care, it’ll make opening up emotionally that much easier.
Out-of-game – this won’t always be required, particularly if you’re going straight from the workshop into the game. But if you need to explain practicalities of travel, food, sleeping etc relating to the game, now is the time to do it.
Expectations of play – you may prefer to let these emerge naturally, of course, or to let players infer them from the material. But if you’re expecting a particular style or mode of play – for example, if the game’s intended as a farcical satire in which nothing makes sense; or if players are to act with grand, exaggerated gestures to communicate their emotions; or you expect them to act like hardened criminals who behave as if their every move is under watch – tell them so, and explain that you will be showing them how to do it later in the workshop.
Skills – some games may require the players to use out-of-game skills that they do not (yet) themselves have. If dancing is an important part of the game, you may need to teach them how to dance appropriately: and so on.
Safety – go through the safety policy and practice of the game, and act out examples where that’ll be helpful. Cut, Brake, ‘The door is open’, Traffic lights, Lines and veils – whatever you’re using. You need to make sure that the players are familiar and comfortable with the safety techniques, and (ideally) that they won’t hesitate to use them – or to interpret other players’ using them – during the course of the game.
Rules and system – where present. For example, in a combat larp, there may be rules about how many blows will cause injury or death. Or if there’s non-WYSIWYG magic, players may need to be told how to interpret its commands. Explain and practise until they are familiar.
Techniques – this covers unnatural things that players may have to do during the game for some (non-meta) purpose. So, for example, suppose your game features a fantasy culture who traditionally greet each other by clasping each others’ forearms between their backs. You want the players to learn this manoeuvre and to practice it until it comes as easily to them as it does to the characters that they’re playing.
Meta-techniques – techniques that are ‘meta’, ie. that operate outside the game reality and allow players to communicate directly (rather than as their characters) in some way. Maybe you want players to be able to deliver an internal monologue of their character’s current thoughts: they will need to learn the meta-technique that triggers it, such as standing in a designated part of the room, or having their glass pinged by another player.
Mutual understanding of game world — very important if the setting is not a familiar one. If players have differing internal assumptions about how the world works or of facts about it, that can cause problems in the game. This element of calibration is best carried out by discussion, followed by improvised scenes using the established knowledge. The GMs should provide guidance and suggestions.
Mutual understanding of relationships – if characters are already designed, the players need to make sure that they and the people with whom they have relationships (of any kind) have a shared understanding of what those relationships are and how they work. This is best done by discussion, and again can be followed by improvised scenes acting out the relationship (for the more important ones).
Creating characters from players’ own ideas – in some games, the players will invent their characters wholly, within the workshop. The GMs will have to explain how to do this, and facilitate the process.
Around a GM-designed skeleton – in other games, players may have been given a skeleton character that they fill out themselves. If you have time, one nice way of doing this is with a ‘prelude’ – a one-on-one GMed scene in which the player is led through decisions and statements about their character that combine to flesh it out fully and satisfyingly.
Practical – if there’s any system or rules (or numbers of any kind) applicable to character creation, GMs need to explain them and help players apply them.
Role exploration and definition – if the character is to play a particular narrative role in the game (eg. captain of the ship, mysterious stranger, disruptive toddler, Prussian spy) then GMs may need to brief the player on how to fulfil those duties.
Building character relationships – allow the players to mutually establish their characters’ attitudes towards, and history with, each other – where this is appropriate for the game. GMs might shape this strongly or leave it to the players: different activities will be appropriate.
Rehearsing those relationships – for newly-established material and also where characters have been designed in advance (by GMs or players) and players haven’t previously had the chance to explore them. A combination of discussion and playing out interpersonal scenes is generally effective.
Background filling-in – it may be desirable to add richness to players’ understanding of each other’s characters by the public provision of detail. Hot seat is a straightforward activity that allows players to question one another.
Take-off – you may wish to help the players get ‘into character’ so they don’t have to leap straight into the game (although that can work too: see Flying start). This might perhaps be a formal exercise where they assume their characters, or a quiet meditative space for them to do so privately or as a group.
Players Casting: A Case Study from the Larp Skoro Rassvet
This article describes the selection process used for high-resolution dramatic larp called Skoro Rassvet [Breaking Dawn] (2012, 15 players). Its advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Knowing that we could take the risk because the number of potential candidates exceeded the number of offered roles several times over, we decided to perform an experiment and select players according to their motivations and abilities.
Generally in the Czech larping community, the opposite problem is more common: how to find enough players for your larp. Nevertheless there are several events (especially chamber larp festivals and certain specific games) which tried to resolve the same problem as we did. The most common approach is the “click fest” (applicants are accepted solely based on the time of registration), friends-only (one simply chooses people she personally knows), and “pay more to ensure you will be selected”. For a number of reasons we decided not to follow any of these possibilities. Instead we prepared a questionnaire with the ambition to measure the multi-dimensional concept of players´ motivations and abilities.
There were five questions in the questionnaire. First the applicants had to watch a three minutes’ clip from a Czech modern movie adaptation of the Karamazov Brothers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVXAZM3vDSs; English subtitles included). The clip shows a scene where all brothers are arguing with their father about God, immortality, drinking and women (all these topics were used in the larp). The scene is expressive enough to provide number of associations for answering questions. We chose this clip also because it refers to our larps setting and the movie is about a group of actors playing a theatre drama, mingling their real lives and drama characters (which is in fact quite close to larp). The video was followed by five open-ended questions the applicants had to answer:
Choose one of the main characters from the clip and describe one of his or her aspects, attributes or attitudes which figured there using 3 sentences. This question measured the understanding of the character and sensitivity toward roles of other players. Unfortunately, we failed to perform a final check of the questionnaire and this question (with the same youtube link) occurred twice with different wording. It confused and even discouraged certain applicants. In the evaluation we focused only minimally on the repeated question. We collected a wide variety of answers which were rather difficult to compare (varied from list of character traits, hypothetical past, dynamics of relationships toward the others, to interpretations of inner emotions and possible adaptations for larp), but the length of an answer highly correlated with its the richness and adequacy.
If it was a scene from a larp, which scenes could follow after this one? This measured another aspect of the larpers´ imagination. We were quite satisfied with this question as it was quite easy to evaluate (finally we decide to score the question primarily on the basis of the number of relevant suggestions).
Which elements from the clip are interesting for a dramatic larp? The intention of this question was to measure the understanding of dramatic larp. After evaluation we realized that the players understand the concept well. We received a wide variety of tips: gestures, building conflicts, the themes father versus sons, a clash of authorities, a subtle indication about Ivan´s lover, Christian values, a promise, secrets, an intoxication, an icon, a reflector, props, the table as the center of the scene, a fainting, the seemingly retarded brother and so on. In retrospect I feel this question measured the time one is willing to spend with the selection process rather than the understanding of the concept much more that the others.
Would you like to deal with any of the topics you have seen in the video? Or are there any other topics from Russian literature you think you are interested in and want to deal with in the larp? There was no correct answer, but we had two reasons to ask this. We wanted to see if there is overlap with the topics in our game (and yes, everyone got at least one topic), and we use it as a secondary guide for selecting roles. Applicants mentioned more than 30 topics including family, alcoholism, rationality, traditions, faith, (low) price of the life, war, boredom and love.
In which way are you willing to prepare for the larp? I have to admit that for me personally this was the most determining question. As it was an open-ended question we received a large variety of answers. Some of them were really surprising: “I’ll certainly come”, “I’ll get there in time”, “I’ll do what you tell me to do” and “I’ll be looking forward to it”. Than there were some serious answers: “I’ll go through the materials several times”, “I’ll talk to someone who knows a lot about Russian history”, “I’ll watch the movies/dramas/read books”, “I’ll bring some special props with me”. And my favourite was: “I’ll learn a poem by heart”. Each activity promised received a certain number of points. And even though we did not check if the promises were upheld, it seemed to me, that players we really prepared for the game.
The positive aspect of the questionnaire was that it self-selected the applicants very effectively. We know about a number of people who did not manage to fill it in or refused this type of application. There were several arguments ranging from “I didn’t have enough time” and “I’m not clever enough to fill it as I don’t know anything about larp design/Russian history” to “Your questionnaire is stupid, I’m not at school anymore” and “I’m a skilled larper/famous larp person/your friend and that’s why I’m don’t have to go through this process”. Nevertheless we had to select 30 from 55 applications.
We decided to score each of the five answers with 0, 1, 2 or 3 points. The higher the score, the better the answer. The evaluation was blinded, so we did not know which set of answers belongs to which applicant. After detailed discussion the question no. 4 received lower value than others. We made a sum index and realized that applicants were naturally divided into three groups: approximately 18 of them were in the “green” group with the clearly highest score (these were accepted), around 15 were in the “red group” with the lowest one (these were refused). But so far we had “yellow” middle group. In this group the differences among individual applicants (or rather their scores) were rather small and it was impossible to divide them clearly.
After all we had to select 12 among 22 applicants, which meant we still had to adopt other criteria than those based on the questionnaire scoring. We applied several not very systematic modes of selection: we went through the evaluation once more and reevaluated some answers, we preferred those who already applied for previous runs and for some reasons did not took part and finally we chose three of our friends. The reason for the last step was simple: it was too personally difficult to refuse them (we had to refuse our friends from the red group anyway). To the rest of the yellow group we offered places only in case someone cancelled their participation the game. After the whole process the overall feeling was rather negative. It was time consuming to evaluate all the written answers and the differentiating power was not strong enough, especially among those in the yellow group.
But after both runs we found several positive unintended aspects of the selection: players came in time, they were motivated and well prepared and all of them had read the pre-game materials. Moreover, compared to the previous runs during workshops it was easier to explain to them how the larp should be played. All of these aspects are unusual and we have not seen them all among players of previous iterations. It seems that selection process did not choose the most skilled ones but those who respected our rules not only during the application process but also during the on-site workshops.
To conclude: I have to admit that the selection process itself raised negative emotions around some part of the larping community. The questions only partially measured the dimensions they should have measured. In the end we actually measured the willingness to spend free time with the questionnaire and the ability to accept not very precisely set criteria given by us. This application method discouraged quite a large number of potential attendants in advance. On the other hand as an unintended consequence all the players were highly motivated to take part in the workshops and the game itself. In the future we will probably use the questionnaire only as a partial criterion, improve question wording (and omit questions 1 and 3) and more clearly communicate the questionnaires purpose. All in all I believe that this method of selection is still better than those commonly used in Czech larping.
Skoro Rassvet [Breaking Dawn] (2012, 15 players)
Skoro Rassvet is a high-resolution dramatic larp. The game was about Russian aristocracy in mid-19th century and it is inspired by classic authors like Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol and others. After the first run of the game, the players spread very positive word-of-mouth feedback among the Czech larping community.
Credits: Martin Buchtík, Sarah Komasová, Petr Platil, Markéta Haladová, Tomáš Hampejs, Jaromír Vybíhal
Date: November 2012 – April 2014 (7 runs in total)
Location: Vacíkov u Rožmitálu pod Třemšínem, Czech republic
With a few exceptions, all larps take place in a set culture. This can be either a fictional culture or a culture based
on the real world. For the previous larps where I have been part of the organizer team, we have made an effort to define
the culture together with the players through a pre-larp workshop. This includes facilitating that the players calibrate
their understanding of the culture. Earlier this month, I facilitated a workshop on this subject based on the larps Tinget [The Council] (2011), Till Death Do Us Part (2012) and Huntsville (2013) at the Swedish larp
conference Prolog [Prologue]. This blog post is based on that workshop.
I will go through different strategies for communicating cultural understanding and present some suggestions on how to
use a workshop to calibrate cultural understanding. I will also present some arguments for why I believe traditional
means of communication has a lower potential than a workshop in order to calibrate cultural understanding.
What is culture?
Most larps center on one or a few groups of people. Each group has its own organizational or tribal culture. This is
defined as «Shared mental assumptions that guides interpretation and action by defining appropriate behavior for various
situations» (Ravasi and Schultz 2006), or informally “how it works here”.
Depending on the larp, it is possible to “zoom in” on the organizational/tribal culture. For example, Till Death Do
Us Part is about Palestinian and Scandinavian culture, and it is an important part of the larp how these cultures
are portrayed. But it is also about families who each have their own “tribal culture”. Similarly, in a larp about a
company there will be one overall organizational culture, but also a more specific culture in sub-groups in the company
(e.g. among the graphical designers).
There are several good reasons to make an effort to promote the players’ understanding of the culture before the larp
starts:
Players feel safe that they are not playing “wrong”, in particular in the early part of the larp.
Misunderstandings can be resolved before the larp starts.
The players will have a stronger ownership over the culture.
If the larp takes part in a cultural setting where some players, but not all, have played before, there will be
more equal opportunities to take part in the larp.
Cultural understanding can be achieved through playing the larp. My view is however, that it is much better to prepare
beforehand. Not only because it’s unrealistic for characters who have lived or worked together for a long time having to
tip-finger the culture in the early stage of the larp. Due to the lack of opportunities to adjust the culture underway,
it is also much more likely that a larp that calibrate the culture after starting playing ends up with a stereotypical
culture or a culture that is limiting the opportunities for play, and were the tools for adjusting it underway are very
limited.
Establishing and calibrating
I will try to introduce the term “calibrating”. What I mean by this is that all participants adjust their interpretation
of a phenomenon, so that all participants have more or less the same interpretation. By establishing I mean creating
something from scratch. It’s hard to draw an absolute border between establishing culture and calibrating culture in a
workshop, but that’s not the point. My point is that even for larps where the organizers wants to have maximum control
over how the culture is established, there will still be need for the participants to calibrate their understanding.
An example: The organizers have described the culture as “everyone shares whatever food they’ve got. This happens with
dignity, and one is expected to show gratefulness towards the ones who share with you”. This is a description of a
cultural norm that can be interpreted in many ways. Even on the condition that the players have read the instruction and
do everything they can to fulfill it, it is likely that many players will be insecure on how to actually do it the first
time they are to share food. If the interpretation is calibrated beforehand, it will promote better play in the larp and
give more equal opportunities to adjust the understanding to something that is playable and works well for everyone.
How to communicate cultural understanding to the players
When the organizers are communicating the culture they want in a larp, they have several channels at hand. Some common
channels include:
Writing a text they want the players to read
Base the culture on an existing (real or fictional) culture that the players know (e.g. Battlestar Galactica or
ancient Rome).
Tell the players fragments and leave to them to improvise the rest (e.g. “everyone respects the elderly”)
Assume the culture to be a function of the characters
Give special instructions to some players and let them lead the way
Workshop
Workshops are frequently used to build trust in the player group, teach certain skills (e.g. a dance or how to stage a
fight) and exercising game mechanics (e.g. how to initiate a flashback). Some larps also establish characters and
culture through a workshop, something which usually also includes a fair deal of calibration. I still believe that more
larps, in particular larps where the organizers have the lion’s share of establishing the culture, should pay more
attention to letting the players calibrate the culture through a workshop.
“High resolution larping” (Nordgren 2008) means that the players are enabled to communicate through small nuances in the
characters behavior. High resolution communication requires a fine understanding of the relations and cultural
framework. My point of view is that the cultural understanding required for high resolution larping cannot be achieved
by words alone.
One of the things I have been doing when not larping, is training for leaders in various youth NGOs and student
communities. Throughout the years, I have been speaking for several hundred of them about organizational culture. And I
have yet to meet someone who is able to give an accurate description of the culture in the organization they come from.
This is not because they are bad at describing, but because of the complexity of the phenomenon, even when not taking
into account that all members of the organization will have different interpretations of the culture. I believe that we
who are familiar with larp are very fortunate, because we have at hand a tool that is better than anything else at
communicating cultural understanding. And we should use the larp tool more actively in workshops to improve – the larps.
Example of a pre-larp workshop exercise to calibrate cultural understanding
The three larps I mentioned above all use test-scenes to calibrate the player’s cultural understanding. The test-scenes
can be roughly divided into three categories:
Everyday life (e.g. children playing, meal)
Rites (e.g. member leaving the group/death, festival)
Taboos (e.g. violence, person of authority crying)
The method is simple: The players are divided into groups that get to prepare one test-scene each. The organizers should
give a task to each group to help them getting started (e.g. portray a family sharing food). It is possible to use the
characters from the larp to calibrate the relations as well as the culture here, but using other, temporary characters
can cultivate a stronger cultural focus. After a few minutes of discussion on how to play the scenes, start playing the
scenes.
both in a workshop and in the larp itself if we have to improvise the cultural understanding as
we play
The other participants observe while one group plays their scene. Encourage the observers to take notice of small
details in the culture, and to observe both “the exotic” and “the obvious”. This is important to increase the awareness
of how we easily reproduce stereotypes and our own culture, both in a workshop and in the larp itself if we have to
improvise the cultural understanding as we play. “The exotic” is what clearly makes the culture different from
stereotypes or our own culture. “The obvious” is cultural norms we take for granted, it can be for example shaking hands
when people meet, men doing physical work and women caring for children or the distance people keep between them when
they talk.
After the scene is over, ask the observers to describe what cultural norms they saw, both “the obvious” and “the
exotic”. Take notes on a blackboard or flip-over if possible. It is OK if different people have observed contradicting
norms. When the observers are finished, ask the people playing the scene if they have anything to add. Then, open a
discussion of whether or not we are satisfied or not with the norms. Criteria for assessing the norms can be:
Is the culture in line with the vision for this larp?
Is the culture playable for all players?
Is the culture sustainable over (sufficient) time?
Is there anything we can do to increase playability?
(Are changes required due to off-game concerns, such as player safety?)
The organizers can take part in this discussion along with the players. If the players and organizers agree that major
changes would make a better larp, the scene should be replayed by the same group or another group and another discussion
can follow. Of course, time will limit how many scenes you can have, but the more scenes that are played the better will
the calibration of the culture be.
At Till Death Do Us Part, we also did a more extensive variant of the same exercise, by playing a small test-larp
for about an hour. This must not be confused with a prologue where what happens enters the minds of the characters as
their background. Nothing that happens in the test-larp, is part of the characters’ history when the real larp begins,
it is just a way to try out understanding of culture, relations and characters and then adjust and calibrate before the
real larp starts.
Other approaches to promote cultural understanding
Culture is usually understood as something you learn by taking part in it, and by following the example of others. I
believe this is no different in a larp compared to the real world. My point of view is that written information has a
low potential for furthering cultural understanding, even if we don’t take into account how time consuming it can be and
that some players sometimes don’t read all the information.
Even for concrete, physical things, it can be very difficult to describe accurately how something looks. Here are some
paintings of elephants made by medieval artists who had never seen an elephant, just read descriptions of elephants.
My view is that the workshop format has qualities that the other ways of conveying cultural
understanding cannot match.
Today, we have professional artists whose job is to make drawings of wanted criminals based on descriptions. Even these
professionals, who are specialized in this subject and who can do it after two-way communication with witnesses, cannot
make the drawings look exactly like the real people. But describing a cultural norm is many times as complex as
describing a physical appearance.
Some larps are based on TV-series or movies. This can be helpful to kick-start the players’ cultural understanding, but
it still doesn’t give the players the culture “under their skin” and able to play out high resolution drama.
My view is that the workshop format has qualities that the other ways of conveying cultural understanding cannot match.
It is not only more efficient in terms of the ratio of invested time / achieved cultural understanding. It also
heightens the ceiling for how much cultural understanding the players can carry when they enter the larp.
Many parts of a larp are subject to individual interpretation. Let’s say your character is described as stubborn. You
will have large freedom in interpreting how to play out this, and since (usually) only one player plays one character,
it is not a problem if different players would interpret the description differently. But for some parts of the larp it
is important that the players (at one single run) have a common understanding. This is particularly true for relations
and culture, which are the frameworks for the interaction between the characters. While absolute coherency in the
interpretation cannot be achieved, a thorough workshop can get the players rather close to this.
Just as a text will be interpreted individually by the different players, will the workshop. Different players
calibrating the culture for the same larp at different runs will of course end up with different understandings even
though the workshop is the same. But at a single run of larp, the players will ha a calibrated common understanding.
This is because the method is participatory and because its form resembles the form of the larp itself.
Larp is a powerful tool for learning and understanding, in particular when combined with
discussions.
That the process is participatory means everyone takes part, actively, at the same time. That the form resembles the
form of the larp means the participants will use the same patterns of interpretation in the workshop as they will use in
the larp. If we want high-resolution role-playing in the larp, it is necessary to use high-resolution methods of
communication when preparing the players. This is the case regardless of whether the culture is established from scratch
by the players or it is prepared in detail by the organizers and only the calibration is left to the players. Larp is a
powerful tool for learning and understanding, in particular when combined with discussions. Therefore, we should more
often use larp itself, combined with discussions, as the tool when the purpose is learning and understanding to how to
play a larp.
This text was originally published at Alibier.no and is being re-published
with permission.
Why do people do the stuff they do at larps, and how can you make them do other, more interesting, things? Characters! Relationships! Dramaturgy! A primer on what we think we know about larp design.
The lecturer will lecture. The audience will listen. Some will be bored and leave early. Others will stick around and discuss larp design until their brains explode.
