Tag: Solmukohta 2020

The most memorable scenes in larps have one thing in common: they involve strong emotions. But how to know how your character should feel in a given situation? How to express their emotions authentically? This article gives tips on how to prepare for the game in order to create a character who easily feels and some practices for expressing the turbulence of their inner realms.

Here are some useful practices to help you to tap into your character’s emotional realm.

1. Understand What Is Most Important To Your Character

What would your character fight for? Die, or even kill for? Her loved ones, money, drugs, her spiritual guru, fame on social media, a better climate, her zombie pet puppies, or the freedom to have ice cream for breakfast? That’s probably her deepest motivation, which tints her thoughts and excites emotions. This is what fuels her every action.

You may also want to explore if that motivation is strong or is she losing her interest towards it? Are there some conflicting drives, some other important things in her life? What kind of things are held important in her culture and in her family?

Write down the answers to the questions above. Then imagine some interesting situation in your character’s life, like talking to her parents (living or dead), succeeding in her duties, facing her fears or falling in love. Select the scene and watch it in your head as a movie or free-write about it. Don’t think too much, just witness your character reacting.

2. Understand The Relationship Dynamics

Before the game, talk with your close contact players. What do you and they want from the game? What kind of traits do your characters have? What is similar, what is different? What is important to them? How do they usually express their emotions?

One powerful way to practice relationship dynamics is to come up with a scene in your characters’ past (a happy memory or a conflict) and play it for 5-10 minutes. After trying out the scene, share what it stirred up in you. This will give you both a hold of the dynamic and expression. It will also boost your confidence to express your character safely in game.

3. Make Sure You Are Safe

In our Nordic cultures we’re accustomed to playing it cool in our social roles, whether we are in or out of character. Even if we feel a storming rage or sparkling joy inside, we usually show up as grey and dull as the Finnish summer. It’s completely understandable that stepping out of this conditioning and revealing our hearts may feel daunting.

That is why it is important to feel that you are safe among your fellow players. If the larp touches difficult topics, then it is crucial. Larp organizers may want to create or co-create some social rules for the players, such as “everyone is responsible for their own boundaries”.

The best way to create safety for yourself as a player is to get to know your closest contacts before the game in person. Tell them what you like and try to find some common interests. Agree about the physical and emotional boundaries: what is okay for you and what is not. If you dare, share what you feel insecure about in playing the relationship of your characters and come up with ideas on how to make it easier.

4. Follow Your Character’s Impulses

Once you’ve done the groundwork properly, you have a good understanding about your character’s motivations and their relationship dynamics and a safe environment for playing. Then it’s time to let it go. Let your character happen in the moment: let her have her thoughts and feelings, let live her own life. Express whatever she wants to say or do and follow her impulses — of course in respect of your and fellow players’
boundaries.

She will automatically have different reactions when she hears that her children have been kidnapped, orcs are about to attack or that the dinner is late. You don’t need to know them all beforehand, just trust your character’s ability to fully be herself. You don’t need to act. This is one of the most freeing ways of playing. Neither you need to get lost in your thoughts in the middle of the game pondering how your character should react.

Surrendering to your character’s impulses becomes easier when you learn to accept your own impulses. Simple exercises used in improv theatre (Johnstone 1987) and the Meisner acting technique (Meisner & Longwell 1987) can also be very helpful here.

5. Practice Expressing Emotions

Conveying emotions involves more than just words. Our posture, movement, facial expressions, rhythms of speech and breathing, and tone of voice all reveal something about our inner states.

How do you know how the other person feels? A good practice for studying expressing emotions is to observe other people doing so, in movies, larps, and in real life.

Another way to practice expressions is by selecting a sentence (e.g. “I want to buy a unicorn”) and saying it with a different feeling (happy, sad, angry, in love, scared and surprised). Repeat the sentence with the same feeling a couple of times, and let it grow every time. You can do this in front of a mirror, by shooting a video of yourself, or with a friend. Pay attention to how your tone of voice, facial expression, and posture change and how you feel.

When you become more comfortable in feeling emotions and expressing them, the easier it is to express whatever your character feels. For some people being in character is very liberating, because it gives them a chance to overcome the restrictions of their own personality.

Bibliography

Keith Johnstone (1987): Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. Routledge.

Sanford Meisner & Dennis Longwell (1987): Sanford Meisner on Acting. Vintage.

Many people blame organizers, designers, or co-players when they have a bad larp experience, and sometimes, you just have bad luck with unfavourable conditions. However, larp is a co-creative medium — participants have a say in what happens at a larp and in their own experiences. Constructive Alignment is a didactic theory developed by John Biggs that focuses on intended learning outcomes when designing a learning programme. It was developed in 2011 for tertiary education, to facilitate sustainable learning and to refine control over learning processes. It’s also applicable to larp.

Let’s look at how you can use constructive alignment theory to improve your experience:

1. Identify Intended Experience Outcomes

Biggs’ theory focuses on the intended learning outcome. In larp, then, the first step is to identify one’s Intended Experience Outcomes (IEOs). What is it that you’re looking for in this particular larp? Is it a specific story? Experiencing specific emotions? Larping specific character relations? Portraying specific characteristics and experiencing the reactions? Having a specific function in the fiction of the larp?

2. Reflect on and Analyse Previous Larps

Once you have identified your IEOs, reflect. Have you had a particular IEO at a larp before? What made it possible? What prevented it from happening on other occasions? What part did you play in making it happen or not? What role did your co-players play in that? What other circumstances had an influence? What could facilitate this IEO, when it comes to your own actions or your co-players’ actions? Could the organizers help you with it, in particular in casting you in a specific role? You may find it helpful to talk to a friend about it and get some input. Take notes about your findings.

3. Communicate Your IEOs With the Organizers

If you yourself create the character for the larp, take everything you have found out into account when doing so. Try to communicate as clearly as possible what you’re looking for when you send it to the organizers.

If it’s a larp with pre-written characters, also communicate your IEOs to the organizers, within reason. Don’t do it face-to-face, as no one can remember every detail that came up in a conversation. Agree on a medium — casting form, email, or letter — through which to mention your IEOs and what you need to achieve them. You should also state what you do not intend with this specific experience.

A word of caution: don’t fixate on a specific character or event. Organizers will try to help you achieve a good experience, but sometimes wishes just don’t fit into a design. For example, no wizard school needs a hundred headmasters and headmistresses, and no spaceship needs fifty captains. More often than not, you will not get the exact character you wanted to play, but this won’t necessarily hurt your experience, either.

4. Adapt and Plan Measurements that don’t Interfere With the Larp Design!

Once your character and their relations are determined, re-visit your IEOs and your findings from previous larps. Have another look at the design document and the website, and then analyse the character and its relations. If the character is not what you were hoping for but you are happy anyway — cool! If you aren’t happy with what you got, it’s not the end of the world.

Try to abstract your IEOs and try to adapt them to the given conditions. For example, if you wanted to experience the responsibility of a leader and being looked up to by playing the headmistress of the wizard school but got cast as a student, then is there a way to experience something similar in this role? You could, for example, play the head of a student group or mentor another student. Based on this character, who or what could help you to achieve your IEOs? In particular, are there co-players that could help you achieve them? For example, were you hoping to be the center of every social interaction, but instead were cast as the shy introvert? Maybe somebody can play your friend who wants you to socialize and who drags you to every party.

Keep in mind as you do this not to interfere with the overall design of the larp or to plan things that might hurt your co-players’ experiences. You may want to re-ignite your discussion on IEOs with your friend from step 2.

5. Communicate Your IEOs With Your Co-Players

You hopefully now have some new ideas and it’s time to communicate, negotiate, and calibrate them with your co-participants. Contact them before the larp, if possible, and talk to them on location before the larp starts. Be clear about what you need from them and accept a no, if it doesn’t fit in their plans. More often than not, people will do their best to help you to reach your IEOs.

If you feel that only changing a part of your character might help, you can try to talk to the organizers, but please don’t do this if there are only a few weeks left until the larp — they are probably drowning in work.

6. Ensure There Are Safety Nets

Ideally, you’ve gathered a few ways to make your IEOs happen. Don’t just focus on one strategy. If you were cast as the shy introvert, for example, you would not only ask one of your co-participants to drag you into social plots and events, but also go more relations with co-players. If possible, you might also try to identify some opportunities for actions you can take during the larp.

7. Think About Pacing

Pacing is key to a cool experience. Good books and movies have well-conceived dramatic composition. It’s likely that your character will go through some kind of change during the larp, and that this is connected to your IEOs. Of course, it’s often hard to anticipate what is going to happen, but it’s good to gather some key ideas about your character’s development and how it can flow through the larp. E.g., if you want to play a person who loses their sanity, start slow and don’t lose your cool right away, as this will exhaust you. If you want to play an emerging romance, don’t declare your love on the first evening — instead, start with shy gestures or intense eye contact.

Think your pacing through and gather some turning points for your dramatic composition, but keep an open mind and be ready to have everything change — larp, after all, is co-creative and your co-players and the overall design will probably leave no stone unturned.

8. Reassess Your Experience During the Larp

Sometimes you’re fully prepared and still feel unhappy with your experience at a larp. You don’t have to endure this until the larp is over. Take some time for yourself and try to figure out if anything can be changed that could help you without interfering with the ongoing larp too much. If there is a safety team, talk to them and ask them if they see a way for you to achieve your IEOs. Try to talk to co-players who could help you. Again, most people will be happy to help. And don’t forget — once the larp is over, there will be no chance to change your experience, so be brave and change things while you’re still there!

Bibliography

John Biggs (1996): Enhancing teaching through Constructive Alignment. Higher Education Vol.32, pp 347–364. Kluwer Academic Publishers

Think for a second what words you use to describe yourself. For me, it’s words like shy, withdrawn, unlikable, angry, and very awkward. There’s nothing wrong with this — I love how I am. However, there’s something special about being able to step out of my usual self and be someone completely different.

I’ve played many roles during the years and I loved them dearly. They helped me grow and gave me lovely memories that I share with many larp friends.

The first roles I played were servant girls who were shy and easy to play. Growing into larping, however, I found I wanted to challenge myself more. I started to go outside of my comfort zone by playing military roles. This let me be more confident — I could command characters, shout orders, and make people listen. My first step toward becoming comfortable in the new roles was to actively analyze and plan how to portray certain characteristics:

• To play confident, I imagined I was alone instead of in front of twenty people. This made my voice steady.
• To play rude and cocky, I changed how I used my body. I leaned into a more forward stance and walked with longer steps. When standing, I kept my arms at my sides and cocked my head to the side. When speaking, I lowered my voice.
• Learning how to portray characters that other players would read as intimidating was hard, as I’m often perceived as non-threatening and as intimidating as an angry kitten. I settled on always looking people straight in the eyes and stepping into their personal space.
• To help other players trust my portrayal and our play together, I checked in with my co-players before larps and made sure they knew they never needed to be afraid to come to me with off-game things and most importantly, I made it clear that I in no way had any military background and that I know nothing about strategy and battle techniques. Most importantly, I stressed that I’ll always have their best interests at heart during the larp. This created trust and made both their larps and mine awesome.

Those dominant and commanding roles helped me grow and find my place as a larper, and they also made me dig out the confidence that always was in me. They gave me the tools to speak my mind freely and at the same time be caring. By playing every larp by thinking of other people’s needs, I made sure that I had control while also taking care of my co-players.

My greatest challenge came just over a year ago. I was given a character who was described as a bubbly, happy, romantic girl with no other ambition than to get married. A girl that was perfectly fine with having her life laid out for her by others. She was also much younger than me, a teenager, while I was in my thirties. For the first time, I was so outside of my comfort zone that I felt no connection to the character. None of my usual tools worked this time. My character was the opposite of my usual roles. I realised I could make this work if I let go of my control and left my character’s fate in the hands of others. This was a new context, and finding my comfort zone in it required a new set of tools.

I broke my previous patterns and made her as an image of the girls I was so jealous of in high school. I adopted their positive and annoying traits in a way I never was able to do when I was younger or in my everyday life today.

• I always moved my hands when I walked. I talked in a much higher voice and also laughed in a higher pitch.
• I sat strictly and properly and I made sure to touch my face with my hands all the time when I talked to boys, just as if I was blushing.
• I smiled until my cheeks hurt and I widened my eyes when spoken to as if everything I heard was the most interesting thing on earth.
• Finally, I imagined that I was a Disney princess with my own soundtrack. That really helped me trust my own portrayal.

Two hours into the larp, I was that teenager. I blushed when the boys gave me flowers and I did not have a clue about anything other than landing a good marriage. I could play a romantic teenager and when I was proposed to by a handsome man, it felt like I’d struck gold.

When I look back now, I see I’ve been playing two extremes. I have played the most masculine roles and adapted a body language similar to my dearest male friends. I have played the flimsy girl from my high school dreams, so feminine and fragile. Between those extremes, I found a balance I can bring into both my future larp roles and also my real life. Today, I know that I can play characters close to the parts of myself that I don’t usually show, and also ones that are so far away from who I am.

I might be shy, withdrawn, unlikable, angry, and very awkward.

But I can be so much more.

The larper character sheet is a playful tool for evaluating your strengths and weaknesses as a larper. In the spirit of the Storyteller system, you get to allocate 10 points to your Attributes and 33 points to your Skills. As this is a tool for self-evaluation, you should allocate the same amount of points regardless of your larp experience. In our imperfect world, the amount of points in Advantages greatly depends on your background.

Attributes

Perception is your ability to understand the larp, listen to other players, and to be aware of what is going on around you. If you have a low Perception, you have a hard time understanding the big picture.

Intelligence is the capacity to make correct decisions based on perceived information. When you notice that everyone is having a terrible time, intelligence helps you understand how to improve the situation. If your Intelligence is low, you tend to make wrong calls.

Strength is your power to effect change in larp after you decide what to do. It is often about charisma, assertiveness, and leadership. If your Strength is low, you cannot improve a larp even when you know what is wrong and how to solve it.

Perception Skills

Calibration, following is your ability to notice safewords and calibration gestures, and to understand the nuance of how much the other player wants to adjust intensity.

Empathy is the ability to understand others’ feelings. Also useful between larps.

Ensemble adaptation is reading the crowd and adapting to the collectively emerging style. Playing together requires you to do this throughout the larp.

Larp mapping is the ability to understand the larp around you. How social relations work, where are the play affordances, where the plot trains stop.

Metareflection is the skill to take a deep breath between spurts of immersion and understand how the larp relates to ordinary reality.

Metatechnique initiative is the skill to detect openings for using metatechniques. Quick wit, good memory, and workshop practice are all helpful.

Plot spotting is noticing plotlines in the social fabric of the larp. After spotting a plot you can decide whether to jump in or dodge it.

Reading affordances is a skill to notice what is possible, feasible, and sensible to do in a larp. What actions will generate interesting play, which ones will be followed by the ensemble?

Self-awareness is about knowing whether you are in the comfort zone, approaching triggers, or genuinely terrified. Are you angry, hungry or horny? Makes a big difference.

Intelligence Skills

Character interpretation is the skill of turning a page of text into a fleshed-out personality with a rich and plausible inner life.

Consequence analysis comes with experience; it’s about thinking three steps ahead. If we improvise a general strike early in the larp, what will happen four hours later?

Cultural sensitivity is knowing how other players will react to female-presenting nipples or realistic stalker portrayals in their larp.

Eye for beauty in larp is finding beauty in the chaotic mess that is larp. Can you enjoy the beautiful boredom, sense the potential for a delicious failed romance?

Plot pacing often has a very high failure rate. Should I escalate or de-escalate a plot? When exactly should I break a heart? It takes two or more to tango.

Runtime larp design is helpful in making a broken larp work. As a player you have more information than the larpwright, allowing you to improve design on the fly.

Supportive play plotting is about lifting others with your play, allowing them to shine. A critical skill for players of the so-called non-player characters.

Vision alignment is the skill of internalising a creative vision and becoming a runtime instrument of the larpwright.

Winging diegetic facts requires quick creativity while staying within the established fiction. How spontaneously can you describe what your character did last week?

Strength Skills

Bravery is often overlooked, but in order to lead from the front, you have to take creative and social risks. Lead the way in being vulnerable, despicable, strong or decadent.

Calibration, leading is the counterpart of following. Knowing how to invite more intensity, and how to play around a rejected invitation.

Intensity escalation is the larp equivalent of filling up an empty dance floor with your crazy moves. Can you turn an argument into a fight, a bad mood into tragedy?

Intent telegraphing is the skill of wordlessly conveying your intent to the other player before you do a thing, in order to improve dramatic effect, agency, consent, and safety.

Nuance projection is the undervalued skill of doing less, not more; playing frustration instead of rage; pushing instead of punching; threatening with a break-up instead of breaking up.

Off-game negotiation is the art of having the awkward discussions that allow you to play difficult content. Can you assert your desires and limits while adapting to those of your partner?

Plot hogging/dodging is about getting on and off plot trains. Hogging a stray plot is a great way to salvage a larp experience.

Safewording usually happens a bit too late — when we get hurt, not before we get hurt. But even worse, we often fail to safeword at all when necessary.

Steering is the act of guiding your play based on off-character concerns. A skilled player can steer hard while portraying her character with complete consistency.

Other Fields

In Backgrounds, you can evaluate your personal history and how it impacts your larping. If you know everyone and have larped here before, things are often easier for you.

Checking one’s Privilege is important in understanding your relationship to other players. In addition to gender, race, sex and ability, you should also consider social class and cultural and linguistic privilege. Age and (conventional) beauty are also axes of privilege in larp.

Virtues are about performing to the first-person audience; how you, as a person, impact your own internal larp performance. Authenticity, for instance, is a virtue of newbies, untainted by cultural mannerisms. Openness to magic is the beautiful, naive immersion allowing adults to pretend to be Harry and Hermione.

Heittäytyminen is one’s capacity to daringly plunge into the depths of immersion.

Getting a pre-written character can be an exciting part of the pre-larp process, but what if you don’t like your character? It can be disheartening, especially if everyone else seems enthusiastic about theirs. How can you go about turning a character that doesn’t inspire you into one you’re looking forward to playing?

Who Is This Character?

Your initial reading of a character might be cursory, which could cause you to miss important details. Take the time to read it again thoroughly to establish a more complete picture of the experience you might get from playing them.

If you have a strong emotional response to reading the character, it may be a good idea to leave a few hours or days before you tackle this in-depth re-read. However, If the character is actively triggering for you it may be best to skip rereading and go straight to contacting the organisers.

As you read, look out for a few things:

• Who is the character? What are the key elements of their history and personality?
  What motivates them to do what they do?
• What is the character’s role in the larp, both in the fiction and in the larp’s structure?
  Who or what might they be responsible for?
• What is the character’s story likely to be?
  What do they want that they will likely need to expend effort to achieve because of the tropes of the larp’s genre or the desires of other characters?

If you’re comfortable reaching out, you can also ask the organisers more about the intention for the character to help you at this stage.

What Doesn’t Work for You?

Now take a close look at what you don’t like about the character. The problem might be something specific, or it might be something broader that seems to impact the whole character, but either way, being able to articulate it clearly will help you resolve it.

Look out for:

• Things you aren’t comfortable with playing, like themes that are too close to home or personal relationships you don’t want to embody
• Things you don’t think you’re capable of playing, for example because they would require specific offgame knowledge, more larp experience, or because they don’t feel like they work for your body
• Things you don’t want to play, for example because you’ve played something very similar recently or the experience isn’t what you wanted from the larp
• Things that are missing that you feel you need, like a certain relationship dynamic or an explicit motivation for the character

Consider if you might get an interesting experience from playing with some of the elements that you initially reacted negatively to, and if you think you might, you can challenge yourself to keep the character as it is. You might also feel the character has enough going on for you to be able to deprioritise the elements you’re less interested in playing and still have enough of what you want to play a fulfilling larp. Take a little time to think it over, and if you still aren’t happy, continue on.

What Would You Change?

• There are three primary ways you can change a character:
• Change the balance of importance of the elements of the character
• Add extra depth, motivations, or events to fill in any gaps that are there
• Change things that are explicitly stated to be something else

If you’re okay with playing everything in your character but like some parts more than others, spend your prep and your runtime energy on the bits that speak to you. If you have relationships that depend on elements you find less interesting, consider contacting other players to tweak your connections.

If your character feels like it’s missing detail or something you know your enjoyment depends on, add new elements. Strengthen your internal play by adding compelling reasons why the character acts how they do, or determining events that have challenged their outlook. Boost your external play by including recent occurrences they need to confront their contacts about, or adding strong opinions on topics that are closely tied to the larp’s themes and are likely to be debated.

If there are elements of the character you really don’t think you’ll be able to play, consider making material changes. Think about what you might alter, perhaps trying to keep past events thematically similar whilst changing how they played out, or changing an uncomfortable opinion. Remember that suggested or historical interactions with other PCs, named events or NPCs in the character’s history, or strong stances in the character’s worldview might indicate places where your character is designed to create a specific type of play in a larger context, so prioritise seeking organiser guidance if you want to adjust these elements.

Check With the Organisers

You won’t always need to contact the organisers, but you’re usually welcome to and it will give you more certainty about any assumptions you’ve made. If the larp design is low transparency, the organisers might have planned events that will impact or even change the character during runtime. In these cases, it’s especially important to voice your concerns so the organisers can review any secret information that you might not have access to.

If you’ve changed anything factual, encountered anything in the character that you find especially uncomfortable or triggering, think you might want a different role in the larp, or can’t figure out how to improve the character by yourself, getting in touch is highly recommended. Use the organisers’ preferred method of contact and try and articulate your concerns concisely and specifically. Offer solutions if you have them, but be ready to listen if the organisers suggest something else.

You don’t have to accept the changes right away. Feel free to ask for clarification on what any alterations might mean and why they’ve been suggested and, if you want to, take some time to repeat this whole process for the altered character. It’s your character, and you should enjoy playing it.

Groups are a staple of many games, taking forms such as families, political blocs, military units, ships crews and scooby gangs. It is easy to see why: a cohesive team has more means to steer and affect their game in meaningful ways. It is also a lot of fun building and creating this additional shared identity with fellow participants.

Many groups are player-driven — even or perhaps especially in larps with pre-written characters it is seen as a constructive way to contribute to the game. Most larps also come with built-in groups while some have entirely pre-written groups. Nevertheless, while pre-written characters are generally very detailed, groups are often a series of brief descriptions and aims with room for contributions.

Building a group and fostering relations therefore falls mostly to players, and requires different player skills from solo preparation. Below there is a list of tools in the form of questions and descriptions for constructing a group concept in a deliberate fashion. It should work reasonably well for most forms of larp, but focuses mainly on the entwined and transient nature of one-off Nordic style games where each ‘run’ is a fresh exercise in group-building.

Before the Game

Communication and Breaking the Ice

Initially, group concepts will be published or pitched, people invited or assigned, and first meetings organized. This will often be a digital format, such as Discord, Skype or Facebook chat, based on preferences or availability. If you are a group organiser or find yourself cast in that role it is smart to summarize the pitch of the group. It is highly recommended to try voice chat at least once so you can all hear each other — a big challenge if multiple time zones are involved.

First, consider what the group will add to the larp. Don’t set the concept in stone, and try to flexibly include the expectations and wishes of your fellow players in the group pitch. It is okay if this is a bit messy and takes a while to figure out. This is just the first step, and helps break the ice between you and your players. At this point the idea is to set up effective communication and build trust.

With so many (larping-)cultures, players and personalities, miscommunications are bound to happen. Words on a screen can be misinterpreted, and many of us communicate in a non-native language. If you find that someone may not understand you, reach out — the earlier the better. Always assume the best of intentions and work from there. During the preparation phase voice communication or face to face is preferable — hearing each other prevents a surprising amount of miscommunication.

What Is the Goal of Your Group?

There is often a difference between the ingame and offgame goals of a group. While bringing a nefarious plot to fruition is a good ingame goal to have, the group may decide that outing themselves “by accident” on the last evening of the larp may be their ultimate goal. In this case, goals may seemingly be at odds, but everyone in the group is on the same page.

During this step it is important to distinguish between player-written and pre-written characters, and the role of transparency. Group building with total transparency is often a lot easier as the actual character goals as opposed to perceived goals are clear. On the other hand, games that deliberately obfuscate generally do this for a very good reason. This must be taken into account during group creation, especially if this is a player-generated entity.

Much of the responsibility is then on the players themselves, to consider whether this group is for them. A good solution is not to define the group goal too narrowly, but as a series of directives for the players so they can play their characters aligned with the group, such as the example
“not costing the house points for the house cup deliberately” or “don’t do the big reveal before Saturday night”.

Roles in the Group

It is also important to clearly distinguish here between ingame and offgame roles. Offgame leadership and relationships generally do not reflect the ingame nature of the group dynamics. It is important to determine what roles there are in your group, how the hierarchy works and if this is where your characters will conflict.

Especially if the group decides on a single leader and a ‘command and control’ style hierarchy, ensure that everyone communicates their expectations for that well. For instance, while the strict hierarchy of a military unit is cool, the group may decide that offgame a more ‘cool-thentic’ approach fits better. Calibrating one or more metatechniques for this is recommended, such “Is that an order, sir?” as an indication of preferably not following the order while staying within the hierarchy.

On Site

Affirm trust

The nature of international games means that this may be the first time you meet in person. It will probably be a bit awkward, so get a drink, take a walk, get to know one another. If time, pre-game briefings and preparation allows, take the time to run through the concept, roles and goals one more time in person, preferably while in costume. This way you all start the game on the same level.

Check in and communicate

Things change during the game. Priorities of players and characters shift, plot happens and time seems to warp. Sometimes you gain a better idea of what you want as the game progresses, or the character takes a different direction from what you had originally envisioned. This is perfectly okay, but if it impacts your group play, you will want the others to know.

Casually checking in can be done easily without a break in the game. Mealtimes are generally good, as the game slows down and there is a good reason why your characters get together. Communicate quickly and preferably ingame, and keep your teammates in the loop on what is happening.

Some prefer digital means to stay in touch, if either the game world or player preferences allow it. This is not a guaranteed solution, with phone and wireless connectivity seemingly inversely proportional to the coolness of the larp location. A lot of players also prefer to have their mobile off and stowed away off game. Still, a chat app can be a good and authentic way to maintain contact, and can be easily read back in a quiet moment.

If a longer meeting is necessary, scheduling around mealtimes is still a good idea for the above reasons. Try to keep the meeting short and to the point. Game time is precious, and preferably spent ingame.

If Things Go Wrong

By nature one-off games with a long run-up and very busy signups will see significant change during the run-up, which will affect any group planning. Furthermore, priorities can change during the game, necessitating on-the-fly changing of the group dynamics.

Cancellations

Players will drop out for various reasons. If this happens, it is smart to quickly return to the first phase and reconsider all questions. This is i deally done as a group.

Busy busy busy

Other plots and groups can draw players in and change their priorities. In this case the best approach is to ask the player directly if the group still works for them. A variant of this I call conflict avoidance. Sometimes players can disappear, whether before or during the larp. It may be a player that is overwhelmed — international games can feel like a lot of pressure — or that circumstances are focusing their attention elsewhere.

While it can feel inconvenient or annoying, it is best to let that player rest and/or have their experience while ensuring that your group — and by extension your own experience — is not dependent on it. Carry on with those that commit to the group, and recalibrate where necessary.

After

Debriefings are as vital for groups as for characters. How was the game for the group, best moments, did it work as intended, and the general experience are all valid topics to debrief. If the group was the primary driver for your game it is wise to make it a priority. Many larps include group debriefings for these reasons. Even if this is not the case, try to make time for it.

In Closing

Well organized groups are more than the sum of their parts, even beyond what group or game writers envision. They are not without their pitfalls and struggles, but these can be mitigated with this sort of deliberate process. And when everything works, group dynamics can bring the larp design to life and ground very significant and even revelatory player experiences, as well as offer the players another way to bring their creative and nuanced contributions to the game.