Nordic Larp

Tag: Czech Republic

  • The Cure for the Stuffed Beast

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    The Cure for the Stuffed Beast

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    The unexpected problems of a game stuffed  with themes and plots and their working solutions.

    113_9714We made the most expensive game in Czech larp history, we had worked hard on it for a year and we had prepared almost 100 detailed pre-written characters. After the first two runs of the larp a lot of people said “It was alright.” This article is about searching for changes which would make the game better than “alright”.
    De la Bête was a larp inspired by the French legend about the Beast of Gévaudan. It captures 97 characters of hunters, prisoners, soldiers, merchants, scientists and nobles in 18th century France. Our goal as the authors was to make a  two-day-long dramatic larp with minimum downtimes, a game with interesting plots, twists and dilemmas for each character. To assure this will indeed take place, we decided to use pre-written characters and design almost only personal plots, few group plots and no global plot  with impact on all characters in the game. As a result we have written 110 plots, each directly involving on average four characters .
    Pre-written characters and game filled  with personal plots is in the Czech Republic a usual game design for chamber larps and is also quite common for dramatic larps up to 40 players. But it has never been consistently used for a game of such scale. The chosen design approach and the amount of content brought about several unexpected problems. We knew, that the number of personal plots will let us to a multi-thematic and also multi-genre game. In De la Bête you could find horror plots about the  price for knowledge and secret societies, adventure haunting plots about friendship and rivalry as well as a romantic storyline about a young noble love triangle. We thought that the game is big enough to hold all the genres if all the players walk down the same (purely dramatic) road of the three way model. Well, basically we were right about the ability to hold the genres, but not about the way how to do it.

    The Unexpected Complications

    After the first two runs of the game we decided for a massive redesign. But firstly we had to analyse what were the weak spots of De la Bête. Among others, we found these problems to appear during the game.

    Incoherent Plots

    Each character was involved in app. 5 plots. Couple of players considered the plots and the character itself as incoherent. All motivations of character were clear for us, because we spent a lot of time sharpening them. But we hadn’t been able to communicate them correctly to all the players. And they didn’t ask. This lead to omitting of a few plots which players found unfitting. Of course, the character’s input to the plot was missing to other players.

    Shallow Play

    Few players had more plots than they were able to play. They ignored some of them as in previous case. But more often this lead the players to shallow play. They were more “doing” and less “acting and feeling”: Declare love, checked. Business meeting, checked. Confront the rival in love, checked. Break up, checked…

    Inconsistent Subjective World

    The design based on  a huge number of plots resulted in inconsistent subjective game worlds. Basically, the players were overwhelmed by topics they came across during the game. Players thought: “It is fine that there is a haunted castle and night hunts, but a society of Freemasons? Come on… This is too much.” We didn’t realize during the game development how many personal plots will go public and that the players will have a problem to incorporate them to their subjective diegesis.

    Out of Context

    Even the scenes in the best movies could look stupid without proper introduction and when you don’t know the context. It is the same in a larp.

    A short personal story follows: Once, I was watching O’Connor’s Warrior and I was moved by the final fight scene. Suddenly, my wife came and she started laughing because she found the scene cheesy. She couldn’t get how emotional it is when Joel Edgerton strangles Tom Hardy while saying “It’s alright. I love you.” Even the scenes (or the whole topic) in the best movies could look stupid without proper introduction and when you don’t know the context. It is the same in a larp. We found how big problem this is when the end of the game was coming and most plots were going through catharsis. The players were shouting at each other, duelling, declaring love and dying. Everything in public as is expected from dramatic players. It led to over-escalated scenes without context, feeling of deaths inflation and no time to feel the impact of anything. This would not happen in a design with a global plot, where the catharsis touches every character.

    New Game Style

    113_3858Most of the problems rose from the unfitting game approach. At the beginning of the game development we thought that the game style of De la Bête would be the same as for drama larps for 40 players. Honestly, we didn’t think a lot about it, we considered it as a clear thing. In Czech a “typical” drama player is someone who tends to : 1) play to lose, 2) tell the character’s secret to as many other players as possible, 3) play the tense scenes in front of as many other players as possible and 4) whose goal is to make each separate scene as dramatic as possible. It works very well in most larps, especially chamber ones.

    We didn’t notice during the development that the approach wasn’t suitable for De la Bête and that it would cause the complications mentioned above. So we grabbed the chance to change it for the third run. The new approach was our guiding principle for all pre-game documents and workshops and we did an extensive review of all game content because of it.The new idea was that De la Bête should be played as a novel. More specifically a big French historical novel such Dumas, Balzac or Hugo wrote. Every player is telling the story of the main character through the game. There will be a number of subplots and supporting characters, but the player shall focus on the development of the character’s overall story,  where the character’s main theme plays  a crucial role.

    Main Theme

    The theme was in some form a part of the characters from the beginning, but we decided to formulate it explicitly. This is an actual in-game example of a character’s theme:

    Her main theme is the clash between responsibility to the community and personal happiness. She has to cope with the role of a moral authority, which is a new deal for her. New responsibilities and  expectations are brought in her life. What it means to be the chosen one? How could she combine  the responsibilities, which are arising from her position, and ordinary human happiness? And is it possible to love every creature of God and be fully committed to only one man at the same time?

    The theme unified the character’s plots and brought depth to the game. The players were guided to think about the overall character’s story all the time: What my character did and how is it connected to my theme? How is my theme developing and where is my character aiming? The overall storyline of a character in De la Bête was more important than separate scenes. Therefore, the scene itself can be less intense and dramatic, but the overall feeling will be way more coherent and impressive (and also immersive). A part of this game approach was also the ability to incorporate everything in the game to one´s own personal story (and theme) or discard it as useless for the character’s storyline. It can be labelled as subjective narrativism, which would be a subset of dramatical approach.

    The players were guided to think about the overall character’s story all the time.

    In the first two runs there were free organizers in the field ready to deal with players’ queries. For the third run we encouraged the players to talk about the story development with the organizers a couple times per day or at least to find the time to think about it. More frequent consultations were beneficial in several ways: 1) the players thought over their character story and theme, 2) we knew what was happening in the game, 3) we were able to discover  mistakes (i.e.  wrong times of meetings), 4) we had a chance to identify bored players in time and 5) we partially oversaw  the psychological comfort of players. After a day of the game we named the consult room as the Heaven (because the organizers were in contact with thrilled and excited player) and the backstage as the Hell (where the organizers had to deal with problems).

    In the pregame documents and workshops we tried to teach the players when, where and most importantly with / for whom they should play the catharsis of a character’s storyline. It should be the players who know the context and know what preceded the tense scene. During the 3rd run significantly less scenes took place in public and for example, deaths took place in family circles.

    Outcome

    113_3971According to the post-game questionnaire there were in the first two runs 32 % of excited players, 40 % of satisfied ones, 13 % of players who considered the game average, 11 % below average and 1 % as a bad one. The third run has much better rates : 71 % of excited players, 27 % of satisfied players with only 2 % of players considering  the game as average.  Nobody labelled the game below average or bad. Of course, there are more aspects than the redesigning itself, but we believe that these changes significantly helped the game and solved the “unexpected complications”. The theme connected character’s plots and pointed out interesting thoughts in individual storylines. The “novel approach” helped the players recognise what, when and with whom should the game be played and it brought about a strong feeling of game integrity to them.

    The problems raised in the first two runs are obvious to  us now, but we had to work hard to discover them. And even if the “novel approach” originated as a secondary solution for this specific game, I believe that it could be successfully used in other larps.

    All photos in this article by Lukáš Makovička.

    De la Bête

    Used Concepts: Pay and Play, Pre-written characters, traces of Fateplay, Act Structure, Persistent play, Aspiring to 360º illusion
    Credits: Adam Pešta (chief of production); David František Wagner (chief of game design and writing); Kamil Buchtík, Ondřej Hartvich, Lucie Chlumská, Mikuláš Pešta, Petr Turoň (game design and writing); Alice Ďurčatová, Slaven Elčić, Iva Vávrová (PR); Tomáš Bazala, Eva Mlejnková (costumes); Vít Filipovský (website); Alena Kučerová (accounting); Michal Olbert (pre-game photos); Rosenthal o.s., Rolling and another 30 people.
    Date:: 25–29 September 2013 1st run; 2–6 October 2013 2nd run;  28–31 May 2014 3rd run
    Location: Valeč Castle, Czech Republic
    Length: 2 days + 1 day of paralarp
    Players: 97 per game
    Budget: 1,000,000 CZK (36,000 €) for 3 runs
    Participation Fee:: 1,800 – 2,600 CZK (65 – 95 €)
    Website: www.delabete.cz
    Photos: http://makovicka.net/galerie.php?lang=cs&g=140709 and http://makovicka.net/galerie.php?lang=cs&g=131025 and http://pwx.rajce.idnes.cz/De_La_Bete/

  • Russian Roulette in Practice

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    Russian Roulette in Practice

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    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:

    1. 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.
    2. 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).
    3. 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.
    4. 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.
    5. 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

    Length: game – 7 hours, workshops – 10 hours

    Players: 15

    Participation fee: €50

    web: www.rassvet.cz (in Czech only)

    photos: https://www.facebook.com/martin.buchtik/media_set?set=a.10202235993481935.1253094743&type=3

  • Larp Exchange Academy 2013

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    Larp Exchange Academy 2013

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    The Norwegian organization Fantasiforbundet is holding a week long event for young larp designers. It will be held in Oslo during the week leading up to the 2013 Knutepunkt conference and is eligible for participants born after October 1st 1982 and live in (or hold citizenship from) Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Czech Republic, Belarus and Palestine.

    Want to take a hands-on crash course on larp design and meet new friends from all over the world? Join the Larp Exchange Academy!

    From 12th to 18th of April 2013, Fantasiforbundet is hosting a new event on learning about game design. The week before Knutepunkt, the most important conference on Nordic Larp, we invite 40 young larp designers to Oslo to work together intensively for six days on making and running larps together! We will even cover the travel costs.

    Read more and sign up here:
    http://www.larpacademy.org/

    Read more about Knutepunk at the Nordic Larp Wiki:
    http://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Knutepunkt