Tag: Techniques

Many larps I’ve attended have had at least one character who did some kind of sex work, whether it was their primary job or not, regardless of the setting or era. I’ve played these roles too, but before I started to do sex work I didn’t understand how important those characters — and their portrayals — actually were. The way we portray sex work can reproduce harmful biases in the world, and can also alienate and isolate your co-players — more of whom than you expect may have themselves done sex work. My experience with sex work showed me the harm these characterizations can cause. I also realized how often players aren’t aware of the way they’re portraying sex work or sex workers, and how tropes about sex work are reproduced without examination.

Respect

First, consider your language. In some games, especially in historical settings, we refer to people or professions using language that has negative connotations. Consider taking the word prostitution out of your vocabulary. It has negative connotations for most sex workers, and in particular is used as a rhetorical device to deny them agency in the world. Words like “hooker” and “whore” are no better. You might use those words ingame, but I suggest you not use them offgame to describe your character, and that you be clear about the difference in language.

Avoiding Stereotypes

It’s easy to create a caricature of sex workers if you have a limited understanding of real-life sex workers (in their voices, not those of people who claim to speak for them) or you if haven’t considered stigmas you may hold against them. Sadly, few public officials and journalists choose to resist that stigma, which sometimes rubs off on us — the players — when we decide how to portray sex workers. Sex work is complex, and while there are negative sides to it — often coming from interactions with social bias — if you fixate on one part of what it can be, you won’t be able to portray a whole character or a role with any emotional depth. If you don’t interrogate the messages you receive about the profession, ideally in contrast with what sex workers actually say about themselves, you’ll just reproduce biases.

Ask yourself why you want to play the role. Is it because you believe the role will include trauma or a sad past, or do you want to play a marginalized person trying to be independent in a time where it might have been challenging? It’s easy to tell the other co-players that you yourself would “never” do this kind of work in real life, but difficult to judge or know what you would do in a situation until you’re in it. Playing someone who is involved in sex work should hopefully assist you in understanding those who are, even if it’s not something you think you could do in your current life. It’s common to approach sex worker characters with the assumption that their work must involve trauma or human trafficking. While these are both perspectives and problems that exist in the world, they are not even close to the majority experience. It also should go without saying (but doesn’t) that playing a sex worker for in a manner that’s primarily about fetishization is just as reductive. Build characters who are human first, even if they’re glamorous or flirtatious, and don’t use it as an alibi to bring sex into a game without considering the rest of who they are.

Nuance

The good news is that you have the power to insert nuance into your character in almost every game. What kind of sex work do they do? Are there some things they do and other things they don’t? Why do they do this work, and what do they think about it? Is it a thing they enjoy, or just a job that gives them agency in life they wouldn’t otherwise have? You can be as creative as you want with deciding what your character does when they do their job — like any other profession. If you were playing a door-to-door salesman, you’d think about what they sell and whether they see their profession as something they want to do for the rest of their life, or just over the summer — do the same with a sex worker.

Much of this comes down to doing your research. Watch shows or movies that showcase different types of sex work and have characters with agency who aren’t just sexual objects. I recommend Pose, The Deuce, Euphoria, and Harlots here. Confront your own biases, don’t just search for things that confirm them. Listen to sex workers and their experiences, no matter what type of sex work they do — be it porn, full-service sex work, domination, erotic dancing or webcamming. Sex work is an varied field, and I recommend you research which types of it your character may do or have encountered. If you’re playing in a fantasy or science fiction game, first understand the diversity of sex work in the real world, and then think about how that might translate to the fiction. Reading background material that looks at sex work from an economic and labor rights perspective can add depth to your understanding of their lives, like Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing The Whore (Grant, 2014).

The biggest real life danger to sex workers is the prejudice societies hold against profession. It’s the reason why few laws that try to regulate sex work protect workers from violent clients or give them the same worker rights as other professions. It’s also the reason why many people feel they need to “save” sex workers from their profession when they don’t want or need saving. This prejudice is the reason why I’m not using my last name here, as I don’t know how accepting future employers will be. Fiction, and especially larp, can be a powerful tool for understanding lives and breaking down biases. If we start portraying sex worker characters in a respectful and nuanced light and as whole people, it can help us get past our own preconceptions and inspire those around us to do the same.

Bibliography

Melissa Gira Grant (2014): Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, Verso.

Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Steven Canals (2018): Pose, FX.

George Pelecanos and David Simon (2017): The Deuce, HBO.

Sam Levinson (2019): Euphoria, HBO.

Alison Newman and Moira Buffini (2017): Harlots, ITV and Hulu.

As a player, I build my larp characters using the tools of sketch comedy. The style may be different, but the toolbox is the same. The crude basics offered by sketch comedy provide a functional basis on which to build more nuanced play during the larp.

The sketch comedy character building method is a hack. It means breaking down the character into repetitive concrete actions that make the character recognizable in the eyes of others and give you something to do when you’re uncertain and confused. How do you build a character for sketch comedy? Here are some of the basics:

• A visual hook. This is not the same as a good costume. Rather, it means that your costume has a few distinctive, memorable elements and the rest is unobtrusive. The goal is for people to remember the hook and forget everything else. (I’m not a costume oriented player and this is my cheat method.)
• Patter. What kind of things does the character say? Catchphrases, standard reactions, repeating subject matter, stories, anecdotes.
• Distinctive reactions. This is even more basic than what the character says. A good reaction or two can be milked endlessly through the larp. They can be things like surprise, excitement, or fear.
• Irrational opinions. One or two extremely strong irrational opinions about something peripheral are great for creating quick drama and making the character distinctive.

I played a teacher in one of the early College of Wizardry (2015) larps. My subject was combat magic. I was also secretly a vampire.

Creating the character based on the text provided by the organizers, I decided that my irrational opinion would be about how to properly hold a wand. I came up with a bunch of ways to hold it that I approved and one that I detested. I called it the “Farmer’s Fist” (the same grip you’d use with a hammer) and every time I saw someone do it, I would start an overblown lecture.

The distinctive visual element was easy: Sunglasses. Because of the vampire thing. No points for originality, but it worked.

In 2019, I played in the larp Grums By Night in Stockholm. It was a comedic larp based on Vampire: the Masquerade and my character was a violent idiot. For him, I created a distinctive reaction: Every time something he liked happened, he punched the air with both hands and yelled: ”Yes!”

It worked wonderfully, although it proved embarrassing after the larp was over when I found it hard to shake.

That character had a simple default shtick: He wanted to punch people, or for people to punch him. Both were okay. Thus when I didn’t have anything else to do, I started on that.

In a 2019 run of the Danish larp Baphomet, I played a travel writer. To get the character going, I developed a line of comedic patter about a trip to the Amazon. Then in the early parts of the larp I’d talk about that to keep social situations going. Later I discarded the Amazon line because the larp had provided other, more interesting subjects for conversation.

In another Danish 2019 larp, House of Craving, I had an even simpler catchphrase, describing everything as ”A beautiful, beautiful thing”.

The key to successfully building a character using the sketch comedy method is endless repetition. You have a limited number of reactions, phrases, and other elements and just use those all the time. In some larps where I’ve done this I’ve felt like I played for two days using a vocabulary of 200 words, but it doesn’t come across like that from the outside. It looks like consistency.

My personal measure of success for the sketch comedy method is when other characters start to make fun of me by imitating the defining elements of the character. This signals that the character has been drawn clearly and distinctly in their minds.

You’ll note that the sketch comedy method says nothing about the personality, motivation, relationships or any of the other elements we usually think of when we consider what a character is. Indeed, it resembles the experimental character building methods of larps like White Death where the character consists of repetitive physical action.

When I use this method it connects strongly to the larp’s pacing. Early in the larp I’m all about the repetitive character tics. This is because I haven’t internalized the character or the larp, and the tics give me something to do. As the larp progresses my internal play becomes more nuanced and I’m caught up in the events of the game. At this point, I don’t pay so much attention to sketch comedy characterization but usually I do it anyway because I’ve internalized it during the early game.

The best type of larp for the sketch comedy character is a sandbox-style, loose design where you have the space to play around with the character’s tropes. It doesn’t matter whether the larp is serious or lighthearted. Once you’ve internalized the tics, you can use the bandwidth this frees for other aspects of the larp, whatever that is in each specific design.

The method works less well in larps where you have to produce concrete in-game results, do work or solve plot. In such cases, there is less social space for the kind of social freestyling required.

[This article is also available in Spanish, at: http://vivologia.es/interpretando-a-un-personaje-dominante/
Thank you to Vivologia for translating it!]

Playing a dominant character comes with its own set of challenges. Dominant characters come in different forms: authority figures (benevolent or not), antagonists, or outright villains. However, each of these figures presents the same challenges: establishing and displaying dominance in a credible manner, managing interactions with dominated characters, and balancing character domination with respect for player agency.

Roleplaying dominance can discomfit some players who feel they don’t belong in these roles, whether for physical or personality reasons or simply a lack of experience. Another perceived obstacle is that playing with status requires buy-in from fellow players. These factors have led to a widespread belief that playing dominant characters is overwhelming and difficult.

Contrary to this, we believe playing dominant is essentially performative and achievable through a series of techniques. We’ll provide you with practical tips to this end, on three topics:

1. Understanding your character’s function; and how you can calibrate for the part and structure your personal narrative
2. How to play on physical dominance when you can’t rely on an imposing physique to do the work for you
3. Tips and challenges for dominant play

The Function of the Dominant Character

Dominant characters have a variety of roles and functions that determine how they fit into a larp, and you should start by looking at your character in that light. The character can be a leader, an antagonist, or an oppressor, and they might be bringing the group together or providing dramatic conflict. Understanding where your character fits and what they need to do can support both pre-game calibration with other participants and character adjustments you might need to play. Ask the following questions and try to understand where your role fits on these scales:

Active ↔ Disengaged

Leadership: Is the character supposed to exercise authority, distribute tasks, take decisions, and make plans, or do they just occupy a privileged position where they are not expected to take an active role in decision-making? Are they part of enforcing the system or do they just benefit from it?

Brilliant ↔ Inefficient

Efficiency: Is the character good at using their power to achieve their goals, or have they ended up with power they don’t use well, like an officer placed in a position of command due to rank or family connections?

Benevolent ↔ Sadistic

Oppression: How does the character exercise their power in a dominant position? Do they only exercise power when confronted or pushed, will they try to intimidate or command others, or will they abuse their power for personal gain or just out of cruelty?

Legitimate ↔ Usurper

Legitimacy: For obvious dramatic reasons, a dominant character may face a challenge in some form or another. This question is important to examine closely, as it may determine the arc of your larp. A character who faces too much opposition might end up alienated from the rest of society.

Status quo ↔ Downfall

Trajectory: A character’s relationship with their own authority defines a lot about them. Are they trying to hold on to power? Are they trying to gain more power? Are they heading towards downfall? Do they suffer from power fatigue? This aspect of course is fluid, and prone to evolving over the course of the game in response to other players. However, considering potential narrative arcs in advance helps to calibrate and steer the game in the desired direction.

Once you understand these elements, you can figure out where you need to calibrate with other players:

• How much will you need them to “play up” your character’s status?
• How much delegation of tasks or power will the players of subordinate or submissive characters expect from you?
• How much gamemastering does the dominant position entail and how can you make sure your needs for this function are met (ask the organizers)?
• Is the character at risk of being isolated or alienated in ways that you don’t want to play out, and if so, which characters could work as a safety net for them?
• Is there any aspect of the character that feels hard to play and that needs extra support or adjustment?
• How will you display the emotions of your character? Do they have a public facade that they only abandon in more private settings? Will they try to keep face at all times? What could make them break?

There are several things you should track when looking at the function of your role and during calibration. First, you will want to avoid situations where other players do not seem willing to “play up” the character’s status, and if you don’t feel like you’ll be well-enough supported, you should request more “play to lift” to support your character, both from organizers and other participants. Second, dominant characters in leadership positions in particular run a risk of needing to perform runtime gamemaster functions. Try to anticipate these requirements and ask for support from the actual gamemasters as needed. Third, you need to understand how the dominant position will impact your character’s relationships with others, so you can steer toward interactions that will work. Finally, you should try to anticipate where the character’s narrative arc may go and specific challenges they may face, as you’ll need to direct your play more than in a less-dominant role.

The Physicality of Dominance

Dominant characters have power. Power, socially, almost always shows in the body. Self-assured people who feel power over those they’re in a social situation with take up more space. Physicality in larp is a useful tool. It conveys information non-verbally about who your character is, it signals how you would like to be played up, and it’s the basis for all emotionally-nuanced play. If you are playing on dominance, you are relying on other players to confer status on you or on your ability to wring respect out of them.

One of the main challenges in dominant play is tailoring it to bodies not commonly perceived as powerful. Younger, non-male, or smaller players may find it more difficult to convey something that will be read as the physical gravitas of a dominant figure. Even in larps where participants are not supposed to play to your real-life body, it can be difficult for players to eliminate the impact of unconscious bias on how they react. A useful tactic to work around this can be modeling your presentation on an example of a fictional character in a position of dominance analogous to what you will play, and also explicitly telling your co-players about what you’re doing to get the picture in their heads too. Good examples, depending on genre, might include Lyanna Mormont (from Game of Thrones) and Susan Calvin (from Asimov’s short stories).

Some suggestions on how to convey dominance in your character’s physicality:

• Dress to impress. Make sure your costume stands out with visible accessories. Think crowns, tiaras, capes or billowing cloaks — elements that set you apart from everyone else or make you feel powerful.
• Physical demeanor. Stand straight, shoulders back, head high. If you can’t look people straight in the eye, look at the point between their eyebrows. Do not smile just because of social conventions or out of politeness.
• Placement. Place yourself in the center of the room, on the best seat. Surround yourself with your entourage. Do not make way for others. Keep others at a distance if you want to emphasize your superiority, or get right up in their personal space if you want to emphasize your ability to affect them.
• Voice and language. Use a loud, projecting voice when you speak in public. Alternatively, speak quietly and force people to lean toward you, or have an underling speak in your place. Make pronouncements and do not waver in public.
• Touch. The way we touch each other conveys a huge amount of status information and will affect both you and your co-players emotionally. Be careful about calibration and consent, and then look at how you can physically demonstrate dominance by how you touch your co-players.
• Reaction. If you think your character is likely to be challenged during the game, plan your emotional reactions in advance to give the impression of unquestioning authority, regardless of what you’re feeling as a player.
• Practice. If these tips do not come naturally to your body, practice in front of your mirror or with friends. Decide on a few gestures or expressions that you can base your performance on. This is significant if your body type is not conventionally read as dominant or you are not routinely rewarded.

Rules of Interaction

As a dominant character, some of the action in the larp will revolve around your character’s power and how they use it. This can include delegating tasks, social hosting duties, conflict management, bullying or hazing, and enforcement of rules, whether they’re pre-existing or just your whims. Looking at the rules that will structure your interaction with others can also be a good way to establish your character.

Here are a few things to think about around how you engage with others as an authority figure:

• Start things. Don’t hesitate to generate conflict when it’s useful for you, or simply to initiate play — you have all the cards.
• If you’re acting as a leader, delegate as much as you can, but remember to make the tasks playable.
• Take breaks and rest; being dominant can be exhausting (especially since players in dominant roles need to devote more mental space to emotional safety and care in handling conflicts, emotionally charged or violent scenes).
• Wear a watch — you’re more likely to need to set the pacing of play in a dominant role.
• Again, prepare in advance. For example, if you know you need to deliver a certain scene, it may help to have brainstormed some ideas for it.

There are some unique challenges for dominant characters:

• Managing adrenaline levels and “villain fatigue”. Playing an outright villain, or even an antagonist can be draining. If you have a lot of victim players to interact with who are all be interested in similar abuse stories, it can also be quite repetitive. It can often be lonely at the top — social exclusion and conflict play can take a lot out of you, emotionally. Self-care and rest is important when playing dominant. Consider making sure you have a positive ally playing close to you for emotional support. If possible, also have someone you share power with so you can tag each other in and share responsibility.
• Work with your victims to share the burden of arranging scenes.((See Playing an Engaging Victim by Katrine Wind and Karijn van der Heij in What Do We Do When We Play?)) Inside the fiction, the dominant character may be initiating a scene, but (especially on a meta-level) it doesn’t have to work this way. In particular, you don’t always need to be the one who comes up with the ideas. Encourage players of lower status characters to talk about how they want their characters to be ordered around, dominated, or abused — this will make your job easier and make their games better.
• Think about what happens when you’re
  “off the clock” in character if you’re playing someone with formal authority. You probably don’t suddenly start treating other characters as your peers, even if you’re playing a kind leadership figure. There can be a lot of interesting play in the subtle friction here, especially if your character’s status conflicts with their own needs or desires.

Conclusion

Not everyone enjoys playing dominant, but it can be accessible for anyone. Playing dominant means using a specific palette of social dynamics when you engage with other characters and shapes which kinds of narratives and challenges you will play out, but with a good foundation, you’ll both have a lot of room to improvise and the confidence to do so . Having a good grasp of how to perform dominance will make your play both more credible and more interesting. Thanks to Simon Rogers for some of the ideas in this piece and early discussions about it.

The Non-Player Character is an interesting legacy of table-top roleplaying games where the gamemaster would play all of those characters not under the direct control of the players. For larps they have proven useful as plot devices, as functionaries of the game used to make a specific event happen at a specific time or in a predetermined way; or as short term characters who may only be present for a part of the larp. They exist at the service of the larp, and their existence and agency are secondary to those of the player characters. For the purposes of this chapter we will use the term “supporting character”.

For example the Krampus in Midwinter (2020) are supporting characters whose function is to torture, terrify, and re-educate Santa’s elves when they are naughty. The design suggests that all players must visit the Krampus at least once during the larp, and thus the people taking on the role will find that their (functional) play will be intense and unrelenting, but that they will have little time to simply play the character. From a design point of view the Krampus should not have full agency to affect the outcome of the larp, because they have too much power and too high a status.

Similarly guards in a prison larp may spend much of their time moving inmates from one place to another, or teachers in a magic school may have little time to explore personal plots. Antagonists often find themselves falling into a purely functional role, even if they are not supposed to be supporting characters, for much the same reason. However, a larper who takes on a supporting character is role-playing, embodying and experiencing a character with their whole body; so the experience can be just as powerful, or traumatic, or bleed-inducing as playing a full player-character. This short piece asks what we can learn from the NPC, and whether there are any techniques and methods that we can adopt for normal play.

Making Game for Other Participants

Some supporting characters are net producers of alibi, designed to create opportunities for play, to offer that invitation to the players, and to give them explicit permission to engage. A supporting character would not normally directly affect the story of the larp,unless specifically designed to do so. A supporting assassin who murders the queen is less interesting than one who tries to blackmail a player character to carry out that murder, as this second approach creates play for other participants. For example, in Countdown (2019) the host of a live TV show knows that one of the contestants is pregnant; a fact that she is unaware of. Whilst it would be a dramatic reveal to announce this to the world, doing so would reduce the agency of her player. Instead, the host whispers in her ear and leaves it up to her whether or not to let the secret out. Her character arc is her own, and her play — and moments of dramatic revelation — are more important than his. For players this is a generosity of spirit, an acknowledgement that the shared experience of larping is significant and that sometimes our own experience is not paramount.

Providing Alibis for Interaction

In addition, this idea of producing alibi is a useful tool for all larpers; we may create opportunities and invitations for interaction every time we speak to another player, but some larpers may need a more explicit invitation to engage.

“Would you like to dance?” Samuel asks William. This is a literal invitation to play, but William’s player is nervous. He wants to engage, but has not yet made the step from audience to participant. It is very easy for William to say “no,” to look away, to stutter an excuse.

“Can you dance?” is a more interesting opening. If William says “yes” Samuel can follow it up with “Well I can’t! Can you show me how?” and if William says “no” Samuel can either offer to show him, or can admit he is also gifted with two left feet and they can learn together. In every instance the supporting character is offering the player a reason to say yes. A nuanced version of this can be used for oppression play; the antagonist offers a reason to escalate in their line of questioning,

“There are people who you care for?”

“Yes”

“Well if you don’t answer my questions, we will come for them next”

or

“No”

“Then why resist?”

offering the victim both something to fight for and a reason to capitulate.

The supporting character creates new stories and activities, but when these opportunities arise, they pass them over to players and step away. The supporting character creates opportunity for play (makes game), cedes opportunity for play (gives game), and encourages play from all parties (produces alibi). But we can all do this, it simply involves a little extra work: steering for generosity.

Avoiding “Blue-on-Blue” Action

One of the pitfalls of having supporting characters is that they can end up playing scenes amongst themselves. This is particularly common with high status characters. It makes sense to the story for the king and the wizard to argue in the throne room, but their high status tends to force everyone else to become an audience.

High status characters take the spotlight simply by existing. Players want to talk to them. They have access to information and contacts, and they are responsible for taking decisions. Sometimes a co-dependency emerges. Players bring information to the supporting characters rather than sharing it with their co-players, although the supporting characters often have insufficient capacity to assimilate and disseminate the information; so the information gets lost. This bottlenecking comes from poor management or poor design.

Finally there is a high-status tendency to perform; to deliver a speech that takes ten minutes when it could probably have been done in thirty seconds, and when a high status character is talking it is difficult for a lower status character to interrupt. Instead they can facilitate conversation to ensure that everyone who wants to be heard has an opportunity to be heard.

There are lessons here for players, as every criticism aimed at high status supporting characters applies to any high status character. High status players need to be aware of their privilege and use it to create opportunities for everyone to engage.

A larp is a compressed fiction; it offers a finite amount of playable dramatic space which is shared by all participants. An experienced player should be aware of the space they take up and look for ways to share or cede that space.

Hug Your Antagonist

Antagonists are often written as supporting characters because they perform a one dimensional, one directional, or disposable function. An oppressor may do terrible things to generate game for their victims, but it is hard for the victims to willingly engage with their oppressors outside of this context. Indeed characters who are dangerous and powerful can end up isolated. Their energy is directed at their victims, but beyond that interaction there is little opportunity for them to engage with the story. It is a lonely experience to play the sociopath bully.

It is easier for a supporting character to interact with an antagonistic player character. Perhaps the alibi of being in a supporting role and thus not having to find a good diegetic reason to interact with the antagonists helps. Because supporting characters are not fully in play, they are in a position to notice when a player character is isolated or disconnected from play and can engage with them and bring them back into the fold.

Recognising the narrative labour carried out by antagonistic co-players is important. Players can engineer interactions with characters who are awful, without expecting awfulness or oppression in return. If we fail to do this, we are treating our antagonist as a supporting character, not a co-player.

Serial Focus

Some players are willing to interrupt what they consider to be a non-dramatic scene in order to inject their own drama, or to further their own play. Supporting characters sometimes adopt the “nothing is more important than the player I am talking to right now” technique; this is a strictly serial order of interaction — essentially a queue — which means that they will always finish the scene or conversation they are having before moving on. The news that another character is bringing might be important to your larp, but it is not as important as the play you are having right now.

Creating an Accessible Character

A well designed supporting character heuristic is to always engage, to always make play, to always have a conversation. Supporting characters tend to accept invitations to play more easily than some player characters (or some players.) This is the most important lesson we can learn from supporting characters: to always find a reason to engage, to initiate play, and to offer other players alibi to engage with you.

When larping, players don’t always wear costumes, and even when costumed, a character ought to be more than a funny hat. Here, we offer practical ways to flesh out how a character moves and speaks, in the hope of making it easier for you to do so.

Analyzing your Character

However much or little information you receive on the character you will be playing in a larp, you will probably form a mental image and decide where you want to take them. The aspects which define a character are numerous, so a list of identifying traits is a good start, if you know how to translate them into your play.

Walking the Walk

Once you have an idea of how the character should appear to other players, there are different aspects to consider when defining those characteristics. This section will focus on bearing, posture, gait, and breathing(An interesting tool to consider when designing motion aspects is Laban Movement Analysis (sometimes: Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis). For larp purposes, LMA has been written about by Erin Marsh in the Nordiclarp.org blog (see bibliography).). When making these choices, it’s good to consider the difference between internal and external perception. Does the way I move or hold myself convey the meaning I want it to, or is it just in my head?

Bearing, Posture, and Gait

Inner perception or posture can affect your outer bearing in a useful way. Putting yourself in the right frame of mind translates well into the way you stand, sit, or walk. Practice in front of a full-length mirror or film a video: seeing the effect helps you calibrate it.

If you struggle with finding your own, copy signature mannerisms from actors. E.g., for arrogance in servitude, look no further than Stowell, Alun Armstrong’s role as a butler in season 5 of
Downton Abbey((https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3962976/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast, 21. October 2019)). Films and TV offer many such examples for a variety of traits.

Gait, the way you walk, contributes a lot to a character’s general appearance. Walking on the balls and toes of your feet, keeping the heel off the ground will make you appear slightly taller, more willowy, and lighter on your feet, while stomping heel first can seem more decisive. Experiment!

As a practical example, take the run of the Shakespearean larp Forsooth, where, for the major role of a count (we’ll disregard for the purpose of this paper that a funny hat was worn), arms and hands were held a certain way: shoulders down, upper arms closer to the body, lower arms outward, palms turned more or less upwards, which might have been sustainable for a longer time. In contrast to that, a butler/servant character was portrayed as bent over forwards and partly sideways, with a rounded back, hunched shoulders and the head thrown back, so as to always seeming to look up at his ‘betters’ – this works for a limited amount of time, but remaining in that role over several hours on end, let alone days, might well have ended painfully.

Be aware that while a more or less obvious limp is a sure way of changing the look of your gait, it really shouldn’t be done for comedic effect, but rather have a medical or possibly psychological reason in the character’s background. “It looks different” is not a reason, it’s lazy characterization.

Breathing

You can also use breath for character building. Slower, more pronounced breaths can suggest frailty, which can underline old age or some ailment or other; this is something Holger used in
Bunker 101 (Chaos League), playing a character who had aged beyond the societal limit for being supplied with anti-radiation drugs, by pausing to “catch his breath” or coughing every now and then.

Talking the Talk

Your speech pattern is an easily recognisable characteristic, and changing it up will affect both how others perceive your character and how you perceive them in relation to yourself. Speaking differently will increase the difference between you and your character.

There are many elements to speech — tone, volume, register, speech pattern, etc. Your tone is connected to the way your voice travels through your body as you make a sound: a tone can be nasal, if you speak a lot through your nose, or raspy if the sound travels up your throat in a certain way. Volume is, as indicated by its name, the volume with which you speak; you can whisper or shout. Your register is the part of the total human vocal range your voice moves within; someone with a deep voice has a lower register than someone with a high voice. The amplitude of the register varies from person to person — trained singers have usually developed a broader register than someone who mostly uses their voice for everyday chats. The speech pattern is all other little quirks that mix into the way you speak; your accent, potential stutters, a lisp, using certain words more than others (e.g. “like” or humming a lot) and so on.

All of these vocal elements can be changed, though some (such as broadening your register) require more practice than others. The easiest are tone, volume, and minor speech pattern alterations. Although changing the way you use your register when you speak is effective, it can be hard to avoid slipping back into your “vocal comfort zone” as the larp goes on without constantly having to focus on the way you speak.

Tone

Changing your tone of voice is simple, and does a lot for your character portrayal. This allows using people’s unconscious biases (e.g. “soft people have soft voices”) as quick shorthand to enforce your portrayal. A snooty character might have a nasal voice, a scarred warrior a raspy one, a caretaker a soft one, etc. Be aware, though — raspy tones can damage your vocal chords and result in a sore throat if done incorrectly, so avoid those unless you know how to use them safely. Remember you will have to sustain this tone for hours or maybe days. The further away from your natural tone you go, the more challenging this is going to be.

Volume

Volume speaks volumes — we alter our body language depending on how much space we are comfortable claiming for ourselves, and the same happens to the volume with which we speak. A self-assured character will not have a problem being loud, while a confused or shy character will speak quieter, maybe even whisper or mumble at times.

Speech Pattern

The most cost-effective speech pattern changes are small. What are your character’s favourite words for expressing joy, anger, awe, etc? Do they often lose their trail of thought mid-sentence? Perhaps they interject themselves with constant uhm’s and eh’s, or click their tongue a lot? Think of a few quirks and try combining them. Decide what to keep and what to scratch — less is more, especially before you get used to playing with your voice. Play around until you find a voice you feel suits your character, while still being comfortable to maintain. If it feels uncomfortable, change it. A sore throat, cough, or loss of voice never made anyone’s larp experience any more fun.

Avoid fake accents: they are difficult to do well, and even more difficult to do without engaging a lot of unintentional, misguided, or outright offensive cultural stereotypes((The same goes for stereotypical speech impediments, such as stuttering. A disability is not a costume.)). Perhaps you are willing to put in the required effort, but let’s be realistic — we always leave larp prep to the last minute, and no one is going to believe that Scottish accent practiced overnight. Instead, focus on original, smaller changes!

Sustainability and Safety

If the physical and vocal tools you’re employing need to be sustained for the duration of a larp, consider both the safety and health of the player. The length of the larp and your physical fitness may reduce the viability of some choices. For example, certain changes to tone and register require a lot of work and risk damaging your voice if practiced without professional guidance — especially over a longer period. However, if you are a trained vocalist, you may already know how to safely experiment with these. For every technique we present here, players should ask themselves whether it’s sustainable for the purpose of the particular larp and/or role they want to use it for.

Conclusion

Now that you have assembled the bodily and vocal identifiers for the character, remember that practice makes perfect. You may not have the chance to do that for a mini larp, but before going to a bigger event, try combining the different aspects you chose, putting yourself through the expected emotional states of the character, imagining situations they might need to react to; and see how your design holds up to all of these. Practice your character voice and movement around friends to see how you’re able to sustain them during intense social interaction. Be honest about them, don’t be afraid to discard those not up to your expectations, be creative, be safe, and remember to have fun!

Bibliography

Erin Marsh (2019): Characterization in a Hurry: From Laban to Larp, https://nordiclarp.org/2019/11/11/characterization-in-a-hurry-from-laban-to-larp/, ref. Feb 23rd, 2020.

Playing a super-rich character in a larp probably sounds fun and easy. It is neither, at least not at all times. Centrally, it requires a fine line of balancing, in order to not take the role over the top, but sufficiently close, in order to provide the most optimal playable content to other participants. We believe, based on our experiences at for instance, Tuhannen viillon kuolema, (Pettersson, Hannula et al, 2018), that this is best done in groups or ensembles. That way, an individual character’s affluenza((The unhealthy and unwelcome psychological and social effects of affluence regarded especially as a widespread societal problem, such as A: feelings of guilt, lack of motivation, and social isolation experienced by wealthy people. B: extreme materialism and consumerism associated with the pursuit of wealth and success and resulting in a life of chronic dissatisfaction, debt, overwork, stress, and impaired relationships (Merriam-Webster) )) becomes part of a greater whole rather than a corny stereotype.

Creating a believable super-rich character is difficult. How to combine a real, playable personality, with a sense of affluenza? Role-playing usually requires a sense of connection and interaction, so the player has to be able to convey playable realism and a sense of unreality at the same time. Avoiding satire, comedy or outrageous in-game spending is usually recommended, unless the larp organizers specifically want a two-dimensional non-player character. Like simplified villains, they can of course fit some larps, but here we want to look at a more realistic approach.

In our experience, the first element for successfully constructing a super-rich character is the origin of their money. This has a significant effect on character personality. For example, it is possible to play someone who has inherited their money as either ruthless and efficient or as complacent, but if the money has been earned somehow through one’s own actions, the character will probably default to the former — even if they are now resting on their proverbial laurels. Remember to interact with other characters: a character who has ennui, or just hides in an enclave, is not useful as more than story decoration. However, by approaching the ennui and talking about it, or planning the enclave (as in Tuhannen viillon kuolema), creates playable content for others.

The second recommended step is to find at least two types of affluenza. The character should optimally be able to deviate from typical middle-class behaviour in at least one way, and be outrageous to poor characters in at least one as well. If these are different things, all the better. They should also be playable, so that they come out during play often enough. Maybe it is an off-hand art purchase that is expensive, but not immensely so, or the firing of several people during a phone call that others can hear. A classic solution is to emphasize in play how “everyone could be rich, if they just worked as hard as I did”. Unless the character is supposed to be a ruthless tycoon or something similar, however, it is far better to come up with more interesting ways to express the increasing removal from understanding the realities of those who earn or own less. One of the best ways we have found for emphasizing this, is to select some things (e.g., optimizing travel without caring about prices) that are not at all easy to the poor or even the middle class, but which the super-rich character takes for granted.

The third suggested step is to find at least two types of mental relations outside of the social class of the character. These are ways in which the character believes that they relate to other people. It is very typical for even the very rich, at least in the Nordic countries, to think that they are “not that different, just wealthier” from hard-working people with less money. Therefore, playability and interaction increase, if the rich character has situations where they can sincerely say “I’m just like you in this regard.” For some topics — like both characters going to the gym, even if one of them has a group of personal trainers and the other a student discount – it can create believable temporary empathy. In many others, this can be used to emphasize the affluenza, because the rich character’s statements will sound dissonant to the other, who will not likely see the presumed “similarity”.

The fourth step is linked to the third one. The artificial affluenza gets more realistic, if there is not just one or two contacts outside one’s economic core group, but rather a large number of characters from the middle class and “poor people”. Power is not taken, it is given, in this case by the other characters’ reactions. Playing the rich among others of similar standing provides little content to others, and can quickly become boring. Doing so in an environment of economic differences that are not just transactional creates fruitful play — and emotions — for all concerned. While playing aristocrats and their servants has its own charms, playing a rich character in a more open setting offers more possibilities.

Finally, playing rich is best done in a group of rich characters, each of a different type. Tuhannen viillon kuolema really emphasized this point for us, in its contrast with many other larps with similar themes. One super-rich character can easily get satirical, even if played well and with good care. A few of them together, with different types of estrangement, become a surprisingly realistic group of people. This also enables some of them to take the play to the level of occasional satire, especially if such satire still reflects something seen in real life (think “pharma bro” or “trophy-hunting heiress”).