Getting to Know You

Last weekend, I had the good fortune to be at a really interesting Mirror, Mirror event. The game was, as per usual, fun and more than a little exhausting. However, the really interesting part was the huge influx of PCs. Honestly, I have never seen so many PCs enter a game at one time.* This meant that there were many, many introductions. Introductions at MM are kind of fascinating for a few reasons. We're working with some pretty unique "getting to know you factors":

1) This game is high fantasy with a little extra high fantasy, just for kicks. People come in as really bizarre and unexpected things.

2) Because of IG and OoG rules, players can't necessarily say exactly what they are. So if someone says, "This, uh, might be rude, but... what exactly are you?" A typical answer might be, "Gee, well. I wish I could say, but, in this land, I just can't seem to say." The conversation then turns into an elaborate description that talks around the missing word.

3) Because most PCs come from disparate places, most PCs don't have experience with the majority of IG species and/or have different experiences of IG species. A related conversation: Person 1: I'm an elf.; Person 2: You, sir, are not an elf.

While MM has a reputation as a combat-heavy game (and it is very combat heavy), it's also some kind of expansive, elaborate brain puzzle that never ends. And that's what makes it so great, in my opinion.

However, as I mentioned earlier, this whole situation-- coupled with a huge influx of new PCs-- makes for some fairly interesting introductions. On that note...

Pick a character, any character. Well, pick a character (PC or NPC) with an interesting introduction. How does that individual introduce itself to new people? What have been some particularly good interactions?



* The frat house at Endgame being a somewhat close second.

Absence from those we love: Saying Goodbye

In more than a few of the LARPs I staff/play, there have been some very poignant player exits. These have involved a variety of circumstances, including player deaths and players electing to go "off-screen" in dramatic and meaningful ways. Exiting, as a player, is a topic unto itself-- how do you do it? Why do you do it? When do you do it? These are excellent questions (and, if the fodder feeds you, discuss), however, I'm more interested in the people left behind.

I recently wrote on the end of plot arcs. This generated some excellent comments-- many of the notes included that narrative resolutions can leave players disconnected and/or sad. Accordingly, it falls on staff (and the players themselves) to provide ways for those players to get re-involved. The exit of PC characters poses a similar, though more complicated, problem. Since my last quest on this topic was directed at staffers, this is directed at PCs.

Imagine, for a moment, you are in the climatic moment of whatever battle in whatever realm you frequent. Suddenly, one of your friends-- perhaps your closest friend and confidant-- does something heroic, unforeseen, and, ultimately, final: the player impacts the game in such a way that takes them permanently off-screen. Your friend, as a PC, has made their exit.

Take another situation-- a teammate, in a difficult and hard-won battle, is struck down, and, unexpectedly, fails to resurrect. The teammate's IG death is final, and they will no longer appear, fighting alongside you.

Or a slightly more complicated situation: your favorite teammate has OoG reasons that prevent them from playing. They have a new baby, a new job, or need to leave the country. Logistically, they have decided to quit the game, and the character is making an off-screen exit. In any case, neither you nor your character will see them IG.

Farewells, in whatever form they take, are inevitable and sometimes necessary. IG, player-exits can motivate narrative and heighten drama. OoG exits are necessary and productive for a variety of reasons. However, those absent certainly leave a hole: both IG and OoG, people feels the absence of friends and comrades. As a player, how do you deal with farewells from players to whom you are emotionally attached? How do you RP the drama of loss without making the game upsetting? How do you create new relationships that are equally meaningful? How do you commemorate players who have left the stage?

As always, your comments are appreciated.

p.s. Mirror, Mirror players-- I see a lot of enthusiasm floating around the netscape. If anyone is interested in doing some collaborative MM stuff, shoot me an email at collabnarration@gmail.com. If there are enough people interested, mayhaps we can do something fun before the first event.

On Repulsion...

Recently, I got into a conversation with a group of LARPers about "gross-out" techniques: LARP mechanics and special effects meant to elicit a visceral reaction-- generally one of repulsion. I wanted to mull over it a bit, and then present some questions to readers.

Repulsion is a powerful emotion/reaction. It borders somewhere between hatred, fear, and, if the offensive subject is done well, pity. (In my anthropological work, repulsion and disgust is actually something that I have studied quite a bit-- I apologize, in advance, for pedantic babbling.)  For those familiar with Julia Kristeva's work on the abject, repulsion is the reaction that protects us-- the vulnerable viewer, the subject-- from a thing that threatens our personhood and identity. The most obvious example is a corpse (especially one that is visibly decaying): a corpse reminds us, the living observer, of our own mortality. By rejecting it-- through a wave of nausea, discomfort, and/or outright fear--, we reject, on some level, our own mortality. Our human weakness. The reality that, wriggling inside us, is the potential for decay. Of course, repulsion doesn't need to be directed at a corpse specifically: rotten food, vermin, insects, and disease all elicit powerful reactions of disgust. However, some would argue, and I don't necessarily disagree, that all repulsion stems from fear of the corpse and, more specifically, dying things.

To blather for a moment, to me, as someone who uses a significant amount of gore in her writing, art, and performance, there is a big difference to "repulsing" people and simply "grossing people out." Repulsion involves fear, and, to me, a confrontation with things we realize we never wanted to reconcile-- repulsion involves a recognition of a taboo intellectual curiosity. Gross-out moments involve a simpler visceral reaction: nausea or a clenched chest, without any sort of intellectual investment, as reaction to something that is simply disgusting to our senses. Both have their moments, though repulsion is more powerful. Repulsion taps into fear and, more importantly, intelligence.

To move on to LARPing, the power of repulsion is legendary. We have all probably had at least one moment, in-game, where our characters encounter something that is, simply put, repulsive. To give an example-- mine comes from Mirror, Mirror: At the tail end of a grueling 6-hour grinder, we had to reclaim orbs. The trouble was, we had to reclaim orbs from a vat of viscous goo (some sort of xanthan gum creation). It was utmost import that we, brave champions that we were, quickly and efficiently reclaim the orbs, and make a dash for it. Easier said than done: the goo was pretty disgusting. Beyond the slimy feel, the goo (which we couldn't see clearly due to the darkened module space) was disconcertingly tepid: it was warm enough to suggest something was wriggling and/or living within it. It was simple, repulsive, and, most importantly, really upped the intensity of the module. It was a good example, I feel, of the "repulsion component" used appropriately.

Repulsing people is a subtle art. As in a film, in a LARP it's easy to go over board: lots of gore, over-selling special effects, too many added sounds, and layering rotting-corpse-upon-rotting-corpse. For squeamish players, it becomes obnoxious to have to deal with excessive attempts at gore. For players who enjoy gore, excessive amounts become silly and laughable. Depending on the tone of your campaign, laughable gore might be perfect. However, if you're going for severity and mystery, less is more.

Repulsion, as I discussed, involves fear. That means it inherently involves manipulation. In order to repulse people, manipulate their expectations. Look at standard things in your game that players take for granted: safe spaces like taverns, standard attacks, and friendly, visiting NPCs. All of these things can be carefully tweaked to elicit fear. Consider the following examples...

1) Taverns: I, like many players, use taverns as places where I can feel safe. While I would never want it to be an all-the-time thing, careful toying with the Tavern, especially at "spooky" events, can be really powerful. For instance, many taverns have beds across which players stretch themselves. As part of a horror-based plot line, stick a disembodied hand under a pillow. When the players find it, it will be scary-- all the more so because a safe space has been invaded. Finding an unwelcome guest (such as insects, vermin, or, well, a hand) is much scarier in your own home than in some abandoned ruin.

2) Standard Attacks: Flavor attacks can go a long way to repulse people. Accelerant uses a standard call, "[Attack] [by Trait]" leading to calls like simply "Agony" or "Agony by Light" ("Agony" being seized by some sort of pain to the extent where you can only block). If hit by something like an "Agony by Fire," players generally roleplay the fiery pain. "Agony by Light" elicits players rping a blinding light. Accordingly, a well-placed Trait on this sort of call can easily repulse players. To again borrow from Mirror, Mirror, I give you the infamous "Agony by Maggots." Just think about it. Yes, that's right. Maggots squirming everywhere. When I was first hit by that Agony attack, as soon as my brain registered the nature of the trait, I was so repulsed that I almost dropped my weapon. It was brilliant and disgusting. Also, most importantly, it was subtle.

3) Friendly NPCs: We all expect unfriendly NPCs to be ugly and heinous, but what about friendly ones? Try this: send an rp-heavy NPC into town. The goal of this NPC should basically be to chat up players, get to know them, and help them out. However, make this NPC hideously ugly-- perhaps gaping sores or something similar. In any case, make the NPC truly difficult to look at. This will no doubt repulse players, but in a very powerful way: it will force them to reconcile any biases they may have based on the physical appearance of an individual. That's the power of repulsion: it forces us into an internal debate with our values and prejudices.

So, these are just a few ideas, and urge you to pursue your own. What have been particularly repulsive moments in campaigns? Is there anything that you would want to try? Is there anything that has failed? Where do people need to draw the line?

The Art of the Joke: Humor in LARP

by Zoe

So a friend and reader of the blog, bakeneko, urged me to do a post on humor in larps, and I think that's a really interesting topic. One of the reasons I larp is because I like the community, and, more specifically, I like how people bring their senses of humor into play. Also, as anyone who has larped with me will know, I'm kind of a ham, and I like to be funny. Larps are one of the few places where my (bad) jokes are fully appreciated. In fact, now that I think about it, humor is one of the major things that drives me to larp-- I've never really considered it before. So, I posed a few questions to myself, and urge all of you to answer them as well. Most of my examples come from Accelerant's "Mirror, Mirror," so apologies to non-players... but it really is a funny game.

Why is larp humor so funny?

At larps, I often guffaw at things that would elicit, in real life, only a light chuckle. I chalk this up to two things. Firstly, consider the horror movie: a well-done horror movie has really funny moments, with laugh out loud jokes. These jokes are made all the funnier by the emotional switch to fear borne from suspense: the contrast between scary and funny makes the jumpy moments (as my sister calls them) terrifying-- and the comedic instances hilarious. Larp achieves this same effect: the seriousness of a significant battle makes the IG banter all the funnier. Also, during a larp, you're generally exhausted, so everything's a riot. 

Also, larp allows us to exploit fantastical situations more easily: some of the funniest things in Mirror, Mirror are the flavor traits that people use to flesh out character abilities. For instance, take "Heal by Darkness"-- admittedly, only lightly humorous on its own. However, when a "by Darkness" healer heals a downed Person of Righteous Goodliness, and that individual is agonized or traumatized by the effect, it turns into a subtle joke that really only comes across in a larp interaction.

What kind of humor works at a larp?

I think the more larp humor can play on in-game situations, the better. That way, no one's offended, and you really add to the immersion of a game. Mirror, Mirror offers some of these in-game based jokes: for example, consider unicorns and orphanages. Among a number of characters, there's the ongoing joke/completely serious concern that neither of these things is particularly good news: unicorns are constantly being corrupted, and orphanges are the origin of evil cult rituals 9 out of 10 times. This has lead to many player-spoken litanies against helping unicorns and/or orphanages. 

I generally think humor functions the best when it's worked directly into how a character interacts: if a character is naturally funny, to me, it feels more genuine than when a serious character looks for opportunities to be funny-- it turns into character-breaking jokes. An example of in-character humor: there was once a brilliant NPC who we referred to as the "wedding planner." His job, during a large field fight, was to "fix" the attacking monsters through in-fight adjustments-- he did so accompanied by a series of obsessive-perfectionist comments and criticisms, muttered under his breath. There was no obvious attempt at humor, which may have been jarring-- instead, comedy was worked deep into the character's personality; the character was fantastically acted, which made the whole thing effective.

How can you work humor into a character?

For me, working humor into a character can be difficult. Some people are naturally funny and gregarious: playing a character that exploits these personalities, for those sort of people, comes naturally. For others, myself included, it can be a bit more of a task to make a character funny: falling into the pit of "trying too hard" is exhausting and obnoxious. Instead, I try to seize on things that work towards in-character comedy-- especially ones that mesh well with the gameworld. I tend towards absurdism, so predilections towards odd obsessions, asking seemingly obvious questions, and sporting questionable morals (towards the darker shades of gray) all work well for me. Ultimately, I think comedy in a larp is not wholly reliant on clever jokes-- for me, the funnier characters depend on acting and full incorporation of humor into a character's larger personality.

What kind of humor doesn't work at a larp?

This is an important question to ask yourself. Humor is powerful. It can both build and sever bonds between players. Moreover, when people are getting laughs from half of the player base, they don't necessarily realize a group of people are not amused (in an out-of-game sort of way). Admittedly, you can't please everyone, and people may be un-amused for a variety of reason. However, your sense of humor, however artfully delivered, could border offense. For that reason, it's important to incorporate humor into your gameplay carefully. To this end, I have three basic rules. 

The first one: be nice. It's Rob Ciccolini's rule from Accelerant, and I think it works well in determining what is or isn't funny. Even if you're trying to be funny, don't be insensitive. Don't insult things like physical appearance, speech impediments, skill, or perceived intelligence. If someone sings a song or reads a poem, and it's less than stellar, don't say anything negative unless it's really obvious they were performing in jest. If you're character is an insensitive jerk, and you really want to make jokes at another player's expense, focus on in-game things: elf-ishness, in-game character traits, and obsessions with, say, unicorns. Also, make sure that the brunt of your jokes is ok with it-- if it's your plan to habitually joke at someone else's expense, talk about it before game. Say something like, "My character is an ass, and likes to make jokes about others-- is it ok if I do that to you? I don't actually mean anything by it, but I like interacting with you, and guessed that you probably wouldn't mind." And go with whatever they say.

Secondly-- don't make people uncomfortable. The big one for me on this hinges on OoG racism: I've run into out-of-game racist jokes one or two times, from individual players, and it made me supremely uncomfortable (to the point where I avoid the situation altogether). Rape jokes are another big one: avoid them. There's been a lot of discussion, out of the larp community, on why sexual abuse jokes aren't funny-- a larp situation is no different, in many ways, from an OoG social situation. Think before you speak, and recognize that people come into game with OoG sensitivities. Be nice. Be respectful. Be considerate.

Thirdly-- keep it in game. Don't break immersion by making a joke. Admittedly, I'm not an "all the time in game" person. Muttered jokes and conversations with friends, in the safety of my own cabin, sometimes dally outside of purely in-game conversation-- I come to larps to be with people. However, I avoid making jokes, loudly and publicly, that clearly break immersion for others. That's rude-- we all come to this game to play, and the general expectation is that you stay in-character at all times.

Not to end on a downer note... but what do you find funny? What are some of the funniest experiences you've had in a larp? What hasn't worked?

Marcel Mauss, Beneficial Actions, and Refusing a Gift

Contributor: Zoe
Submission: The art of beneficial traits and character development

Just some very pretentious rambling about LARP theory and anthropological theory.
For those of you who have taken courses in anthropology or economic theory, you are probably familiar with Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift and reciprocity. For those of you who are not, I will briefly summarize one of the key points: gift-giving creates social bonds between members of a group. Reciprocity, the impulse and obligation to return an equal-and-opposite (and-even-slightly-greater) gift in return, is one of the most fundamental of these bonds. Therefore, when an individual refuses a gift or refuses to return a gift, then they are not behaving neutrally, but instead making a very strong statement. To refuse an individual’s gift, for instance, can be to refuse a relationship with that person. The Gift, by Marcel Mauss, is a relatively slim novel, and worth picking up, if this interests you.

Onto LARP and gift theory...

Spotlight on Mirror, Mirror: Thoughts from a Cave

Contributor: Zoe

Submission: Thoughts from a Cave, fiction by Tev

LARP System: Accelerant-Mirror, Mirror

Years LARPing: 2

With the teaser released, the bags packed, and the happy band of (most anti-)heroes ready for adventure, I give you a somewhat anti-climactic end to the Mirror, Mirror spotlight. Check back in tomorrow for another post, and Sunday for a recap of the event. I'll also be posting something else from Beth about PELs-- even for those of us who have written dozens (or hundreds), a refresher is never a bad thing, especially if something goes horribly wrong in the first event of the season. But, for now? Thoughts from a Cave, by Tev.

Spotlight on Mirror, Mirror: Loralon

Contributor: Lawbard of Livejournal, or Trelaine of Madrigal
Submission: fiction, Reflections of Fire
LARP system:  Accelerant - Mirror Mirror
Your Location:  MA
Character name:  Loralon
Years LARPing:  21

A recollection from everyone's favorite totally-not-evil warmage! (Or whatever he is-- war priest, mayhaps?