Communication. It's a good thing, part 2.
The LARP itself is great, though. I'm at a stage of comfort with it where I think I get where we're going and what we're doing, where we've come from and how we've gotten there. Which means I can now start making changes to how things are done. One particular issue is troubling me; there's no politics in the game. The PCs are all united as a court against far superior external foes, so there's no jostling for positions of power, no backstabbing and no significant levels of roleplaying with or against each other. We have some really great players, they just all seem to be playing their PCs in little bubbles of LARPspace independently of each other, which doesn't really make sense to me. There are no deep-rooted in-game loves or hatreds (my character both seriously loves one PC, and seriously hates another PC for reasons that have arisen through roleplaying with those PCs), but this style of playing seems to be rare in our game.
This may have arisen from having are no social traits in the game, and no status mechanics. As well as meaning that the social interaction in the game almost always reflects the out-of-time feelings of the players (with only one or two exceptions), there's no advantage to be gained from positions like Prince and Primogen. They're all work for no reward, so no-one wants them. And there are no "evil" PCs; while everyone's entirely self-serving, no-one has taken it a step further to want to disadvantage other players to get what they want. This means everyone can automatically trust everyone else and tends to help everyone else, so things like boons are irrelevant.
Having the game set up in this way means that we have to work much harder at providing plot, because the drama isn't being generated internally. So I need to work out how to introduce the concepts of coteries and politics into a game that's been running for a few years with very little in the way of either. A recent chat with amcathra identified the lack of scarcity in the game; if there are limited resources available, the players will automatically, out of self-interest, fight for them. To do this would involve major structural changes to how the game's run, though, which I'm reluctant to do without exhausting any other alternatives. I think there must be other, simpler ways of introducing politics and social roleplaying into the game; I'm just struggling to think of any.
This may have arisen from having are no social traits in the game, and no status mechanics. As well as meaning that the social interaction in the game almost always reflects the out-of-time feelings of the players (with only one or two exceptions), there's no advantage to be gained from positions like Prince and Primogen. They're all work for no reward, so no-one wants them. And there are no "evil" PCs; while everyone's entirely self-serving, no-one has taken it a step further to want to disadvantage other players to get what they want. This means everyone can automatically trust everyone else and tends to help everyone else, so things like boons are irrelevant.
Having the game set up in this way means that we have to work much harder at providing plot, because the drama isn't being generated internally. So I need to work out how to introduce the concepts of coteries and politics into a game that's been running for a few years with very little in the way of either. A recent chat with amcathra identified the lack of scarcity in the game; if there are limited resources available, the players will automatically, out of self-interest, fight for them. To do this would involve major structural changes to how the game's run, though, which I'm reluctant to do without exhausting any other alternatives. I think there must be other, simpler ways of introducing politics and social roleplaying into the game; I'm just struggling to think of any.