Contributor: Zoe
Submission: non-fiction considerations about leaving a LARP temporarily
Years LARPing: 2
E-mail: collabnarration@gmail.com
Due to research pursuits and travel, chances are that I won't be participating in my usual LARPs this season. While I'll try to make a few of them, I'm facing a LARPless summer wherein I'll miss 2-3 events per game. In the games I play, I'm in the fuzzy limbo of new-relative-to-others/establish-plot. Accordingly, while my absence won't significantly impact the game, I don't want to lose the nascent plot-seeds I'm planting. While I'm not too concerned, I wonder the best way to exit the game, and, perhaps more importantly, re-insert myself into the gameworld.
This problem, it would seem, would be of large concern to many others-- especially those who are more established in the gameworld. Real life happens: weddings, funerals, pregnancies, illness, military leave, exams, business trips, and vacations. Sometimes, as has happened with a few friends, people just need a break.
So, what are the best ways to leave and enter a game? What experiences have people had that have been successful or disappointing? To start, I think communication is key. If the absence is planned, communicate with your team, plotstaff, and perhaps key NPCs. In game, mention how "due to the wedding of a relative, I won't be adventuring for the next few gathers-- is there a way I can contact you to stay in touch?" Touch base, again, OoG via an email, post-event letter, or in-person. Plot-staff, especially, may help you ease out of game. When you get back to playing, your team can help make special accommodations to get you up-to-speed on any changes.
In the event of an unplanned absence, use contact emails to let people know the circumstances. Generally, people want to make LARPing fun, familiar, and comfortable for you. While you may not want to disclose all of the details, it can be useful to have a "safe harbor" when you return from an illness or family emergency. Also, in many cases, remember that you're part of a larger community-- people may miss you, want to help, or stay in touch with you. Perhaps this sort of contact isn't your cup of tea-- if it is, however, it can be nice to let people know.
What suggestions do you have for leaving and entering a game in which you've been a long-time player?
Submission: non-fiction considerations about leaving a LARP temporarily
Years LARPing: 2
E-mail: collabnarration@gmail.com
Due to research pursuits and travel, chances are that I won't be participating in my usual LARPs this season. While I'll try to make a few of them, I'm facing a LARPless summer wherein I'll miss 2-3 events per game. In the games I play, I'm in the fuzzy limbo of new-relative-to-others/establish-plot. Accordingly, while my absence won't significantly impact the game, I don't want to lose the nascent plot-seeds I'm planting. While I'm not too concerned, I wonder the best way to exit the game, and, perhaps more importantly, re-insert myself into the gameworld.
This problem, it would seem, would be of large concern to many others-- especially those who are more established in the gameworld. Real life happens: weddings, funerals, pregnancies, illness, military leave, exams, business trips, and vacations. Sometimes, as has happened with a few friends, people just need a break.
So, what are the best ways to leave and enter a game? What experiences have people had that have been successful or disappointing? To start, I think communication is key. If the absence is planned, communicate with your team, plotstaff, and perhaps key NPCs. In game, mention how "due to the wedding of a relative, I won't be adventuring for the next few gathers-- is there a way I can contact you to stay in touch?" Touch base, again, OoG via an email, post-event letter, or in-person. Plot-staff, especially, may help you ease out of game. When you get back to playing, your team can help make special accommodations to get you up-to-speed on any changes.
In the event of an unplanned absence, use contact emails to let people know the circumstances. Generally, people want to make LARPing fun, familiar, and comfortable for you. While you may not want to disclose all of the details, it can be useful to have a "safe harbor" when you return from an illness or family emergency. Also, in many cases, remember that you're part of a larger community-- people may miss you, want to help, or stay in touch with you. Perhaps this sort of contact isn't your cup of tea-- if it is, however, it can be nice to let people know.
What suggestions do you have for leaving and entering a game in which you've been a long-time player?
This is less of a suggestion, and more of an explanation of a frustration that I have that I know some of my friends share. I travel long distances to attend some LARP’s and from time to time I will miss and event. What often drives me crazy is how difficult it is to get other players to explain to me what plot developments I missed at events.
ReplyDeleteMany of the LARP’s I attend are very plot heavy. The plot developments at one event set the context for the developments and story that happens at the next. Very often plot advancements come from PC’s putting together scattered bits of information and clues that came out over time in several past events and using them to solve a current plot challenge. In environments like this it can be incredible frustrating to entirely miss and event and not get told what happened. It can feel like you are trying to put together a puzzle where some of the pieces are missing, and you don’t even realize that you are missing pieces. All you know is that for some reason the puzzle doesn’t go together.
When I miss an event I usually scour the message boards and email lists and blogs to learn what happened. Often this will let me know what some of plot elements were that were in play at the event, but nothing in the way of useful details. Most after event recollections focus heavily on general impressions or brief vague bullet pointed highlights that lack context. These can often be more of a tease than a source of information.
Whenever I ask people what happened at an event, or what I missed, it can feel like pulling teeth to get anything explained. Without knowing what happened, it is hard to ask specific questions. But questions like “What happened?” or “What did I miss?” often get maddeningly vague or broad answers. “It was fun. It was a cool event. I don’t know, there was a lot of elf stuff going on. I made some progress on my personal plot.”
Whenever I ask people about events I didn’t attend, I am usually reminded of the comic strip trope about the kid who goes to school and spends all day going to classes and meetings and activities and experiences all kinds of crazy and exciting social and academic things. After a whirlwind day of the chemistry lab exploding and getting a new girlfriend and movie star visiting the school he goes home and his mom asks him what happened at school today and he just mumbled “I dunno. Nothing, really.”
Part of the difficulty in my case is that I don’t see the people I LARP with everyday socially. Most of the people who are my closest LARP associates I typically only see at events and at the rare party or get together. I talk to some of them from time to time using internet chats and the like, but I don’t spend a lot of leisure time face to face with them. IM is not particularly well suited for a back and forth question and answer session about an event.
For the most part I know why it is difficult to get people to talk to me about events I missed. For one things, it is hard. Really hard. Tons of information gets dropped at events and any one person is unlikely to get more than a fraction of it. Most of us have experienced the frustration of sitting down to write a PEL a day or two after an event and wracking our brains to remember all the stuff we did. Even a summary is difficult to put together sometimes, and often we are afraid to tell people stuff we don’t remember well because we are scared we will miss it up.
Missing an event can get you disconnected from the ungoing plot. How much, and how easy it is to get back on track is different from game to game. But knowing how much of an aggravation I suffer when I miss an event I always try to go overboard when someone asks me what they missed at an event. Often I go back to my own PEL to get an outline of the stuff I want to explain to them.
George
I know the feeling, because of school, I miss more events (NPCing ones, generally) than usual, and I feel out of the loop. In the games I PC, the friends from whom I would get information are generally from different teams-- they can go on for a long time about vampire hunting, but I'm not really interested in that.
DeleteInformation, in and out of game, is a great way to make people feel connected. IG, it builds bonds, gives people plot hooks, and generally enhances the game's narrative. OoG, it also builds bonds-- for people who have been absent from a game, it demonstrates to them that they're still a part of a community. For people who are long-distance, tangled up in family emergencies, or pregnant/caring for young children, I think this is especially important: in those situations, people can feel isolated really quickly. Not only will this make them more likely to drop the game, but it will also, in general, improve their well-being.
So, yeah. I agree. In summary, if someone has missed an event, give them as much information as you can.
To add on just an extra thing:
DeleteMy best friend plays on a different team from Chris and I. However, we talk about our LARP plots with eachother all the time. Even though RJC has a "you hear it OoG, you hear it IG" policy, we've decided against that. Anthony can tell us all about his plot, and Chris and I share all of ours. IG, our characters don't know these things. Nobody abuses it, nor uses it as a way to get into other players' secrets. While I understand the value of the in-place rule, information sharing, OoG, is another way for us to build community.
My two cents:
ReplyDeleteIf I'm just missing a single event, I will generally drop plot an email to let them know that I won't be there (if it's a game I regularly attend, so as not to cause them to waste time planning something for me, if they were going to do that), make up some random excuse IG as to why my character won't be there (one reoccurring one for a character with 11 younger brothers and sisters was, for a long time, 'my mother is giving birth, and I want to be there for it'), inform a few friends of my IG excuse, and leave it at that.
If you're going to be gone longer, I think most plot teams would be happy to help you come up with some explanation for it, if you give them enough warning/time to come up with something. I've seen that take a couple of different paths, anywhere from the player coming up with what they're doing and plot providing a few tidbits of flavor-text about what they found when they were off doing it (one that comes to mind is an Eurvein player going off to help among the refugee camps... I think we gave him a few sentences of description about what it was like there and what the attitudes of the refugees were), to the player saying 'I need to be offboard for X amount of time, willing to go with whatever' (which may have resulted in an elf being kidnapped by the Winter Lord).
One thing I would say about that is that you shouldn't assume that plot will have the time to help you go off-screen, so you should always have some sort of back-up plan if they just don't have the time in the event-preparation schedule to come up with something. "I am willing to go with whatever you come up with, and if not, X is my backup plan" reads much better than "I can't wait to see what you are going to do."
That's a good point-- I think most people, myself included, get excited about IG possibilities for a character (like, say, icy elves). However, plot doesn't necessarily have the intention/time to give you a big exit. Especially if you're PC leaving for a few events was just the amount of wiggle room they needed.
Delete