We Also Take Requests, Apparently
While going over how my Origins went (just fine, now that you ask), Matthew asked me for my thoughts on a specific matter: how to write a good larp character.
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Nick, if you are going to do more game design blog posts, I would be interested in your thoughts on the art of writing LARP character sheets. The LARPs I played at Origins all had what I would consider flawed sheets, but in different ways. I noticed that when you were writing your LARP a month games, your sheets got steadily better. My disjointed thoughts on the subject:
1. Avoid game mechanics that will not be used in the LARP.
2. Give the character multiple "hooks", which can be anything from full-blown goals to personality traits that can easily develop into goals.
3. Give the player explicit permission to be creative on character personality/history in areas that are not relevant to the plot of the larp.
4. Be careful of hooks dependent upon specific other characters if some characters might have to be dropped depending on who shows up.
5. Every character should get at least one "special thing" that no other character gets.
That's off the top of my head....
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To which I initially responded:
--------------------
That is indeed a good thing to think and write about. All the advice you outline is indeed very, very good things to include on the sheet. The Space Between's sheet, for example, had a bunch of mechanics that were basically unused in play.
Point #3 can be manipulated to give the player choices (which means they're being creative and engaged), but also channel them toward more action and conflict and such. Like the cop you played in the bank robbery thing: "Why are you off the force?" is an interesting question and can make for great fun regardless of how you answer it. Maybe you had a terrible temper (as you chose), or maybe you had a knee destroyed by a bullet so you can't walk well. Or maybe you were wildly incompetent, or kicked off the force for gross sexual harassment. Each of those could affect you in play, and each could be fun in their own way.
You weren't present for the Lovecraftian Letters larp, but one of its flaws was that your entire character sheet was written in character by a specific NPC. This meant that there is some info that couldn't be conveyed at all: the guy was murdered and asking us to find the murderer. But he couldn't tell us who did it, because he wrote it before he died and probably wouldn't be dead if he had known. It also meant that he couldn't convey several other things, like what our PC's opinions of anyone else were (just what he believed they were, which may not be accurate at all).
Involving all PCs in at least two plotlines is good, to give them the ability to engage in the second plot if the first one has stalled out. And it means that the second plot is likely to spur the first into action if it does stall out.
I'll think about how the character sheet functions and see what I have to say.
-------------------------
To catch up anyone who missed some of those references and shared experiences: The Space Between was a larp that we both played in, which used a variant of the Cthulhu Live rules. These rules didn’t aid the game in any way, and were mostly ignored by player and GM alike. Lovecraftian Letters was another Cthulhu LARP that was run by GM fiat along a predestined railroad. If you want to see the progression of the Larps that I wrote, you can see all the documents on scribd.com. In order, the games are Bank Robbery, Second String Supers, Scifi Mystery, Providence Junction, Executive Decision, and Bloody Forks of the Ohio.
Looking at those sheets, you can see improvements in what information is given, what the characters are to do, how the mechanics work, and in how information is presented to the player.
So what did I learn? First and most importantly is that you’re running a larp to entertain your friends. They’re giving you an evening of their time, so you should give them something worthwhile and fun to do. A lot of Matthew’s points stem from that basic principle: having some special ability or secret is fun, and people like that. Giving everyone multiple plotlines or hooks to pursue in play maximizes the chance that they’ll have something cool to do at any moment.
Writing a larp character sheet is actually two interconnected issues:
• creating a good pregenerated character that will be fun to play, and
• conveying information in the best possible way
These are mostly separate issues, though both have some weight to them. There are more questions about how tostructure and run a good larp that interrelate with these issues, but I’ll mostly focus on those two aspects of making a good character in your GM head and then conveying that character into the player’s head.
Creating a Good Pregen
Characters are in the game because they are going to do things. They’re there to get in conflicts, to lie to each other, to spy on each other and to puzzle out what the other characters are up to. Maybe they’re all set to work together, or maybe they’re all opposing one another. But they key is that you want the character to do stuff. Dynamic characters doing interesting stuff are fun to play and fun to have in play.
Characters sitting on the sidelines with nothing useful or fun to do aren’t fun to play and drag down the energy level of the other players. If you have a character with too little to do in the game, they probably can either be a minor NPC or combined with another similarly inactive PC. Or they can be cut from the game altogether, or they could get beefed up by adding more plots and stuff to do. Thqt last option is often the best course of action, particularly if you’re writing a game for a lot of people or if you absolutely need the PC for some other reason.
So we want the character to have stuff to do. Maybe they have goals to fulfill, or maybe they have character traits that require active roleplaying and interacting with other PCs. I think it’s a good idea to give a player too many things to do rather than not have enough: maybe their primary motivation draws them one direction, but a different bit of their background pushes them a different way. So for example, in the Bloody Forks of the Ohio game, William Trent had the Goal of “Get out of here alive”, but the character trait of “Always trying to prove you’re better than George Washington”. So does he flee the region, like the coward that he is? Or does he stay and fight to prove he’s braver than Washington? Either course fits with the character and entertaining to watch and play. And most of the time, the player will have difficulty choosing which to pursue. Or they’ll pursue whichever is relevant at the moment. (Trent also had some other minor hooks in his background and knowledge of other players and such as well, adding to the stuff he could do and the difficulty in deciding what to do).
So give them too much to do rather than not enough. This forces the player to make interesting decisions about how to use their time in the game, and maximizes the chances that they have something fun to do at any moment. It also gives the player control over their character, which is good. Larps (and roleplaying) aren’t about the GM/larpwright’s vision, in my mind. Cheyenne had a great analogy the other day about GM as stage manager: you set stuff up so that other people (actors or players) can be creative and awesome. Then you get out of the way while they’re being awesome. Give them freedom to act, and freedom to decide stuff about their characters. This makes them engaged (in their character and in the game) and means that you as GM can watch and be entertained and surprised as much as anyone else. Sitting back as GM and watching other people do entertaining stuff you never planned for is most of the fun of GMing the sorts of larps that I run.
Make the characters feel unique and special. Each player wants to be special, so each should have his or her own special place in the game. It’s all too easy to make the game center on a few characters and leave the rest in secondary roles. But even if the entire game is about a powerful king or general or someone, you can give all the secondary characters interesting stuff to do. Simply being a servant or other “background” character can give the player freedom to maneuver. And characters that naturally would be less powerful in the setting makes for very natural characters to receive secret information, magical abilities or superpowers. Or at the least give those secondary characters a sideplot or secondary plot. Bloody Forks of the Ohio was mainly about George Washington and the conflict between England and France. But on the sidelines there were a variety of conflicts making the situation interesting: Native American tribes in conflict, a British deserter married to a native woman, Shingas the Terrible’s secret love for French Margaret, etc. Each of these plots made the central plot more complex and interesting, but it also meant that the characters not strongly involved in that central plot had lots of stuff to do.
On the same general note: don’t have multiple characters who are basically identical. In The Space Between, I played Dr. Hikida, the Japanese theoretical physicist with no goals or special abilities. Stacie played Dr. Yoshida, a Japanese experimental physicist with no goals or special abilities. There was very little to differentiate our characters, and they really should have been collapsed into a single PC. Having two characters that were too similar made each seem less unique and less special. At the very least, we could have had different ethnicities or different goals.
For another thing, you want to give characters the ability to make meaningful changes. In general, you want to give players achievable goals, though I can sort of sympathize with The Space Between wanting to prevent complete escape. But even in a totally nihilistic Lovecraft scenario, our characters could have had goals beyond survival that were achievable: discovering what was happening, communicating that information to Earth, getting revenge on one another, etc. In something less specifically doomed than The Space Between, you want the character to have goals that they can achieve over the course of a few hours. If you’re sent to find the murderer, then there should be a murderer and there should be a way to find them. Scale goals down to where they’re doable in the timeframe for the larp, and signal to the player what is and is not really possible in the game.
Games are supposed to be a series of meaningful choices (the game design seminar I went to laid that out as a working definition of a game). So your larp characters need to be able to make choices about what is happening, and those choices need to be meaningful. If a character can’t make a meaningful impact on what is happening, why is someone playing them?
There’s probably a ton of other things you could say about how to create a good pregen character. And probably looking around online, you could find a lot of advice on how to make a good pregen character for a roleplaying game. I’ll just leave it at this idea: creating a pregenerated character is just like making a good character for any one-shot, except that the character is a gift to another player. So make it a gift that they will like.
Getting the Information to the Player
Presentation matters. No, really. How you provide information to your players is hugely important for how the game will run. So you want to do your best to present character information in a way that is clear and memorable.
Running several larps in a row showed me how easy it is for important information to be glossed over or forgotten. A larp PC can involve a lot of information, and it is hard for a player to keep it all in their head. You need to remember that Bob who you play Changeling with is playing Admiral Pyett, who is in charge of the Eastern Wing of the Galactic Navy. And that Admiral Pyett stole your girlfriend (Lady Ardessa, played by Julie, who you just met but is John’s new girlfriend), so you hired the famous Assassin X to kill the Admiral. And you know the Assassin is someone here at the party (didn’t we mention that this is a party? Admiral Pyett’s birthday party in fact) but you don’t know who the assassin is or who is playing them.
See? That’s a lot of information that needs to be kept straight in your head. And that’s probably only a fraction of what your character knows about what is going on and who’s doing what.
If you don’t make clear what is important and what isn’t, then they’ll forget essential details. The first couple of larps’ character sheets I made were basically a big wall of text. They were largely unformatted Word documents, with little in them to guide a player’s reading.
So how do you give someone a lot of information but keep it manageable? Chunking things into bite-sized pieces helps a lot. Divide the character sheet into several pieces, each of which is small enough to remember and clearly labeled. If you clearly separate “People that you know” from the rest of the text, you’re already helping out the players a lot. If you label the characters by who is playing whom and which are NPCs, then they’re even better off. A section on motivations or goals or roleplaying notes and one on special abilities can also help a player keep track of everything.
In general, a human being can keep track of 3 to 7 things in mind, so you should aim for roughly that many headings on a character sheet. The key for that, though, is that you can nest information: each heading under the 4 main headings can have 3 to 5 subheadings. The human brain will only bring those up when needed, and ignore them when worrying about a different main heading. So you can a few main headings (“Goals”, “People You Know”, “Roleplaying Notes” and “Background”) and each of those has entries underneath it, outlining each character that you know, or each of your goals or whatever. Breaking down a character sheet into manageable parts makes it easier for the player to get a handle on what they are supposed to know and what they are supposed to be acting on. If nothing else, it makes it easier to scan their sheet for a PC’s name if they forget what John’s dude’s deal is.
Another thing that helps: cut down on unnecessary flavor text. That may sound like blasphemy to some roleplayers. But you need to be economical in presenting information. Too much information confuses and distracts the player. You need to make sure that anything you tell the player is actually something that they need to know. The key is to know what is and what isn’t necessary. Avoid things that are pure mood pieces or entertaining details. Or better yet, establish mood and make those details important at the same time. Doing so requires some skill at writing, but if well done it can be very effective.
Leaving things undetailed also gives the player more room to be creative and make the character their own. That’s good: you want the players to take the larp and run off in directions you never imagined. At least, I do. And to do anything like that, you need the players to define the characters as their own and feel like they have the freedom to be creative in play. Letting them create details and background for their characters is a big step towards them creating stuff themselves and entertaining you.
Avoiding cluttering the character sheet with unimportant numbers and data is in the same general boat. Any mechanics and numbers that aren’t useful should be cut out of the game. In The Space Between, that was every single number on the sheet (as far as I saw), but especially the convoluted color based sanity system. When it was described, I wondered “Why isn’t that a number, like everything else?” That way I would have to remember which end of the scale was which and I wouldn’t have to remember that green was below blue for some reason.
On the other end of the spectrum, you can have a sheet without all the info that a player needs. This isn’t usually the problem for me, but I’ve seen other games where it’s a problem. Lovecraftian Letters had a lot of situations where other people knew stuff about your character that you didn’t know. This was a problem, because Adam didn’t know what he was being blackmailed about. So when Stacie tried to hint at the wrongful death he had caused, he didn’t know what she was talking about. This seems to me like less of a problem, provided that you do a few editing passes of the character sheets and reread them to make sure everyone knows what they need to.
Those are my thoughts on the matter in general: make a good character that the player will enjoy playing, convey the information as clearly and effectively as possible, and let the players surprise and entertain you.
---------------------
Nick, if you are going to do more game design blog posts, I would be interested in your thoughts on the art of writing LARP character sheets. The LARPs I played at Origins all had what I would consider flawed sheets, but in different ways. I noticed that when you were writing your LARP a month games, your sheets got steadily better. My disjointed thoughts on the subject:
1. Avoid game mechanics that will not be used in the LARP.
2. Give the character multiple "hooks", which can be anything from full-blown goals to personality traits that can easily develop into goals.
3. Give the player explicit permission to be creative on character personality/history in areas that are not relevant to the plot of the larp.
4. Be careful of hooks dependent upon specific other characters if some characters might have to be dropped depending on who shows up.
5. Every character should get at least one "special thing" that no other character gets.
That's off the top of my head....
-------------------
To which I initially responded:
--------------------
That is indeed a good thing to think and write about. All the advice you outline is indeed very, very good things to include on the sheet. The Space Between's sheet, for example, had a bunch of mechanics that were basically unused in play.
Point #3 can be manipulated to give the player choices (which means they're being creative and engaged), but also channel them toward more action and conflict and such. Like the cop you played in the bank robbery thing: "Why are you off the force?" is an interesting question and can make for great fun regardless of how you answer it. Maybe you had a terrible temper (as you chose), or maybe you had a knee destroyed by a bullet so you can't walk well. Or maybe you were wildly incompetent, or kicked off the force for gross sexual harassment. Each of those could affect you in play, and each could be fun in their own way.
You weren't present for the Lovecraftian Letters larp, but one of its flaws was that your entire character sheet was written in character by a specific NPC. This meant that there is some info that couldn't be conveyed at all: the guy was murdered and asking us to find the murderer. But he couldn't tell us who did it, because he wrote it before he died and probably wouldn't be dead if he had known. It also meant that he couldn't convey several other things, like what our PC's opinions of anyone else were (just what he believed they were, which may not be accurate at all).
Involving all PCs in at least two plotlines is good, to give them the ability to engage in the second plot if the first one has stalled out. And it means that the second plot is likely to spur the first into action if it does stall out.
I'll think about how the character sheet functions and see what I have to say.
-------------------------
To catch up anyone who missed some of those references and shared experiences: The Space Between was a larp that we both played in, which used a variant of the Cthulhu Live rules. These rules didn’t aid the game in any way, and were mostly ignored by player and GM alike. Lovecraftian Letters was another Cthulhu LARP that was run by GM fiat along a predestined railroad. If you want to see the progression of the Larps that I wrote, you can see all the documents on scribd.com. In order, the games are Bank Robbery, Second String Supers, Scifi Mystery, Providence Junction, Executive Decision, and Bloody Forks of the Ohio.
Looking at those sheets, you can see improvements in what information is given, what the characters are to do, how the mechanics work, and in how information is presented to the player.
So what did I learn? First and most importantly is that you’re running a larp to entertain your friends. They’re giving you an evening of their time, so you should give them something worthwhile and fun to do. A lot of Matthew’s points stem from that basic principle: having some special ability or secret is fun, and people like that. Giving everyone multiple plotlines or hooks to pursue in play maximizes the chance that they’ll have something cool to do at any moment.
Writing a larp character sheet is actually two interconnected issues:
• creating a good pregenerated character that will be fun to play, and
• conveying information in the best possible way
These are mostly separate issues, though both have some weight to them. There are more questions about how tostructure and run a good larp that interrelate with these issues, but I’ll mostly focus on those two aspects of making a good character in your GM head and then conveying that character into the player’s head.
Creating a Good Pregen
Characters are in the game because they are going to do things. They’re there to get in conflicts, to lie to each other, to spy on each other and to puzzle out what the other characters are up to. Maybe they’re all set to work together, or maybe they’re all opposing one another. But they key is that you want the character to do stuff. Dynamic characters doing interesting stuff are fun to play and fun to have in play.
Characters sitting on the sidelines with nothing useful or fun to do aren’t fun to play and drag down the energy level of the other players. If you have a character with too little to do in the game, they probably can either be a minor NPC or combined with another similarly inactive PC. Or they can be cut from the game altogether, or they could get beefed up by adding more plots and stuff to do. Thqt last option is often the best course of action, particularly if you’re writing a game for a lot of people or if you absolutely need the PC for some other reason.
So we want the character to have stuff to do. Maybe they have goals to fulfill, or maybe they have character traits that require active roleplaying and interacting with other PCs. I think it’s a good idea to give a player too many things to do rather than not have enough: maybe their primary motivation draws them one direction, but a different bit of their background pushes them a different way. So for example, in the Bloody Forks of the Ohio game, William Trent had the Goal of “Get out of here alive”, but the character trait of “Always trying to prove you’re better than George Washington”. So does he flee the region, like the coward that he is? Or does he stay and fight to prove he’s braver than Washington? Either course fits with the character and entertaining to watch and play. And most of the time, the player will have difficulty choosing which to pursue. Or they’ll pursue whichever is relevant at the moment. (Trent also had some other minor hooks in his background and knowledge of other players and such as well, adding to the stuff he could do and the difficulty in deciding what to do).
So give them too much to do rather than not enough. This forces the player to make interesting decisions about how to use their time in the game, and maximizes the chances that they have something fun to do at any moment. It also gives the player control over their character, which is good. Larps (and roleplaying) aren’t about the GM/larpwright’s vision, in my mind. Cheyenne had a great analogy the other day about GM as stage manager: you set stuff up so that other people (actors or players) can be creative and awesome. Then you get out of the way while they’re being awesome. Give them freedom to act, and freedom to decide stuff about their characters. This makes them engaged (in their character and in the game) and means that you as GM can watch and be entertained and surprised as much as anyone else. Sitting back as GM and watching other people do entertaining stuff you never planned for is most of the fun of GMing the sorts of larps that I run.
Make the characters feel unique and special. Each player wants to be special, so each should have his or her own special place in the game. It’s all too easy to make the game center on a few characters and leave the rest in secondary roles. But even if the entire game is about a powerful king or general or someone, you can give all the secondary characters interesting stuff to do. Simply being a servant or other “background” character can give the player freedom to maneuver. And characters that naturally would be less powerful in the setting makes for very natural characters to receive secret information, magical abilities or superpowers. Or at the least give those secondary characters a sideplot or secondary plot. Bloody Forks of the Ohio was mainly about George Washington and the conflict between England and France. But on the sidelines there were a variety of conflicts making the situation interesting: Native American tribes in conflict, a British deserter married to a native woman, Shingas the Terrible’s secret love for French Margaret, etc. Each of these plots made the central plot more complex and interesting, but it also meant that the characters not strongly involved in that central plot had lots of stuff to do.
On the same general note: don’t have multiple characters who are basically identical. In The Space Between, I played Dr. Hikida, the Japanese theoretical physicist with no goals or special abilities. Stacie played Dr. Yoshida, a Japanese experimental physicist with no goals or special abilities. There was very little to differentiate our characters, and they really should have been collapsed into a single PC. Having two characters that were too similar made each seem less unique and less special. At the very least, we could have had different ethnicities or different goals.
For another thing, you want to give characters the ability to make meaningful changes. In general, you want to give players achievable goals, though I can sort of sympathize with The Space Between wanting to prevent complete escape. But even in a totally nihilistic Lovecraft scenario, our characters could have had goals beyond survival that were achievable: discovering what was happening, communicating that information to Earth, getting revenge on one another, etc. In something less specifically doomed than The Space Between, you want the character to have goals that they can achieve over the course of a few hours. If you’re sent to find the murderer, then there should be a murderer and there should be a way to find them. Scale goals down to where they’re doable in the timeframe for the larp, and signal to the player what is and is not really possible in the game.
Games are supposed to be a series of meaningful choices (the game design seminar I went to laid that out as a working definition of a game). So your larp characters need to be able to make choices about what is happening, and those choices need to be meaningful. If a character can’t make a meaningful impact on what is happening, why is someone playing them?
There’s probably a ton of other things you could say about how to create a good pregen character. And probably looking around online, you could find a lot of advice on how to make a good pregen character for a roleplaying game. I’ll just leave it at this idea: creating a pregenerated character is just like making a good character for any one-shot, except that the character is a gift to another player. So make it a gift that they will like.
Getting the Information to the Player
Presentation matters. No, really. How you provide information to your players is hugely important for how the game will run. So you want to do your best to present character information in a way that is clear and memorable.
Running several larps in a row showed me how easy it is for important information to be glossed over or forgotten. A larp PC can involve a lot of information, and it is hard for a player to keep it all in their head. You need to remember that Bob who you play Changeling with is playing Admiral Pyett, who is in charge of the Eastern Wing of the Galactic Navy. And that Admiral Pyett stole your girlfriend (Lady Ardessa, played by Julie, who you just met but is John’s new girlfriend), so you hired the famous Assassin X to kill the Admiral. And you know the Assassin is someone here at the party (didn’t we mention that this is a party? Admiral Pyett’s birthday party in fact) but you don’t know who the assassin is or who is playing them.
See? That’s a lot of information that needs to be kept straight in your head. And that’s probably only a fraction of what your character knows about what is going on and who’s doing what.
If you don’t make clear what is important and what isn’t, then they’ll forget essential details. The first couple of larps’ character sheets I made were basically a big wall of text. They were largely unformatted Word documents, with little in them to guide a player’s reading.
So how do you give someone a lot of information but keep it manageable? Chunking things into bite-sized pieces helps a lot. Divide the character sheet into several pieces, each of which is small enough to remember and clearly labeled. If you clearly separate “People that you know” from the rest of the text, you’re already helping out the players a lot. If you label the characters by who is playing whom and which are NPCs, then they’re even better off. A section on motivations or goals or roleplaying notes and one on special abilities can also help a player keep track of everything.
In general, a human being can keep track of 3 to 7 things in mind, so you should aim for roughly that many headings on a character sheet. The key for that, though, is that you can nest information: each heading under the 4 main headings can have 3 to 5 subheadings. The human brain will only bring those up when needed, and ignore them when worrying about a different main heading. So you can a few main headings (“Goals”, “People You Know”, “Roleplaying Notes” and “Background”) and each of those has entries underneath it, outlining each character that you know, or each of your goals or whatever. Breaking down a character sheet into manageable parts makes it easier for the player to get a handle on what they are supposed to know and what they are supposed to be acting on. If nothing else, it makes it easier to scan their sheet for a PC’s name if they forget what John’s dude’s deal is.
Another thing that helps: cut down on unnecessary flavor text. That may sound like blasphemy to some roleplayers. But you need to be economical in presenting information. Too much information confuses and distracts the player. You need to make sure that anything you tell the player is actually something that they need to know. The key is to know what is and what isn’t necessary. Avoid things that are pure mood pieces or entertaining details. Or better yet, establish mood and make those details important at the same time. Doing so requires some skill at writing, but if well done it can be very effective.
Leaving things undetailed also gives the player more room to be creative and make the character their own. That’s good: you want the players to take the larp and run off in directions you never imagined. At least, I do. And to do anything like that, you need the players to define the characters as their own and feel like they have the freedom to be creative in play. Letting them create details and background for their characters is a big step towards them creating stuff themselves and entertaining you.
Avoiding cluttering the character sheet with unimportant numbers and data is in the same general boat. Any mechanics and numbers that aren’t useful should be cut out of the game. In The Space Between, that was every single number on the sheet (as far as I saw), but especially the convoluted color based sanity system. When it was described, I wondered “Why isn’t that a number, like everything else?” That way I would have to remember which end of the scale was which and I wouldn’t have to remember that green was below blue for some reason.
On the other end of the spectrum, you can have a sheet without all the info that a player needs. This isn’t usually the problem for me, but I’ve seen other games where it’s a problem. Lovecraftian Letters had a lot of situations where other people knew stuff about your character that you didn’t know. This was a problem, because Adam didn’t know what he was being blackmailed about. So when Stacie tried to hint at the wrongful death he had caused, he didn’t know what she was talking about. This seems to me like less of a problem, provided that you do a few editing passes of the character sheets and reread them to make sure everyone knows what they need to.
Those are my thoughts on the matter in general: make a good character that the player will enjoy playing, convey the information as clearly and effectively as possible, and let the players surprise and entertain you.