Giving Presentations

One of the things we do at work is to have small bursts of work known as "sprints". We plan what we'll cover at the start, work on it, then present it with a demo at the end, to all interested parties. On Friday they asked me to do the demonstation part of our presentation.

I went in with no preparation beyond writing down on a post it note the four things I wanted to show people. I stood up and talked to the room of somewhere around 50-60 people about it, and then we moved on. There were more presentations and demonstartions, the last of which was very innovative and flashy and interesting.

After the meeting eight different people came and told me separately how well they thought I'd done. I've been told I paced it well, I was engaging, I put things at the right level for the audience, and that I was a natural.

Now, I was comfortable with the material I was talking about, but I had no preparation time, and didn't feel particularly nervous. This morning two more people told me how well I'd done - and that's after they had a whole weekend for it to fall out of their heads completely.

I appear to have wowed an audience. I can only attribute this to being a side effect of learning to present material in an off-the-cuff way through larp. Give me a skeleton and I can give you back a ritual. Dump some plot on me and I can manufacture a rite. Tell me where we're going and I can pull a transportation rite out of nowhere. And give me the thing I've been working on for three weeks and I can tell you all about it and make it sound impressive.

As a colleague said on Friday - the trick is to work out how to make this skill work for me. Hmm.

Wasteland UK : Event 1 feedback

This piece is written primarily as a feedback exercise for the people who created and ran Wasteland UK's first event, Brum. As such, it will be most meaningful to them and to other players I roleplayed alongside on the field. However, it should still be accessible to others, and I hope it offers an insight into the game and some of the considerations involved in running a larp system. Comments and interaction are utterly welcome.

I've always enjoyed post-apocalyptic stories and enjoyed the latest 2 Fallout offerings. Until I was enticed into larp I was never that into the fantasy genre, and my favourite tabletop to date is Call of Cthulhu, so I was interested to see how a more modern setting would work. Very interested. Especially after reading the website and the build up on the forums. So interested, in fact, that I left my holiday in Wales a day early and drove to the site.

Unfortunately, being in Wales mean that I had no internet access in the preceding week and missed the in character callout message that was at the centre of the event, and had a bit of an issue with the rulebook. It's never easy to get to grips with rules in paper form without the board, online game, or in-person context to attach it to. For me it got extra difficult because I managed to completely and utterly screw up printing them out as a booklet and had a full set of rules page in a completely random seeming order.

I was one of the first on site, met a friend from LT as I arrived and we wandered around the place to see what was there before going for a drink. There I was introduced to Dudge briefly before he and my friend got very chatty and I felt a little out of my depth while they discussed a system I wasn't involved in, so I left them to it. As more people arrived I found more familiar faces, not all of whom I knew by name and we all started to kit up, which immediately gave me a good feeling about things.

The setting, The Grange, would never work for the fantasy sytems, but with the abandonned vehicles and ramshackle house remains it was really good for this system, and the players had done a pretty amazing job of kit. Perhaps some of that army surplus kit looked a tad too new, and to be honest I felt the tents let down the encampment, but beyond that it was fabulous. Looking through published photographs afterwards I've seen stuff I missed in person, and I was impressed while I was there. From the amazingly scary stimpaks to the moustache on our friendly robot, things just kept making me grin inwardly and I loved the ramshackle cobbled together stuff people were swapping. I got good currency selling a pencil and paper, and I liked the early encounter with the trader who was offering "socks. Real socks, never worn! Straight over from Ireland!" And as for the medical side of things... how many fields of gamers can you walk onto and count five stethoscopes? And everyone got right into the whole trading vitals and saving lives (at a cost, of course, the wastes are harsh) as far as I could see.

Despite meeting Dudge briefly beforehand, because I didn't really know him, he's always going to stick in my mind as Skins, now. He was brilliantly suited to that role and one of the best NPCs I've ever seen. Well cast, well played - inspired. I loved his reaction when we talked of our missing family member, taken by slavers. Awesome and immersive.

As mentioned, I hadn't really wrapped my head around how to heal, despite being a doctor character. I wasn't clear on hour or half hour to check on the patient, and didn't immediately realise that they kept getting better as you checked them, and thought for a long time that medicine was more vital than it actually was. On the other hand, when I accepted that my trait meant I started with a level 2 infection and 6 INF points, I didn't realise a dose of medicine wasn't going to wipe out 3 of them at once (the rules said it would, the briefing said otherwise, and when checking with a ref they called on the harsh side). Similarly I got conflicting advice over how many MAL points should be wiped out by cooked food. And yet, I don't want that to come out as a complaint because the ref-attention we got was spot on. Even if we didn't manage to quite figure out what a doctor could do and what a medic could, everyone ran with the spirit of things, and it was refreshing to be checking the pupils of a patient's eyes, his temperature and his heart rate, then administering drugs rather than sitting around chanting as I would in a fantasy setting. Also brutal but fun to play with was the lack of magically getting better overnight, or suddenly having replenished stocks of the stuff that makes people better.

On day 1 one of my group was uncertain about coming back in future. It was complicated, confusing and harsh. By day 3 we were firm fans and have every intention of attending whatever we can. There's been a fair amount of feedback already regarding what worked and what didn't. Personally I think we had it pretty much spot on. No, I didn't get a single chance to use my lockpick skills, and random drops of chems were rare but... so what? I'd expect different settings to have different things being more prolific, and there was chance to barter and I got to acquire more food, break down a chem and do a deal for rad-away. At the end of the event I had less infection than I started with, more malnutrition and more rads. Our stocks of stuff to fix this, and our money have both decreased. As someone else has pointed out, perhaps it wasn't the most lethal start to the system, but keep us going at that level, take us down slowly and it gets interesting.

I'm torn on that, though. I like my character, I like our group concept. And, in fact, two different crew members complimented us on it, so we're not the only ones. And feedback afterwards has mentioned us, too. So while I want the survival stuff to be in the foreground, I am really keen not to lose the character.

People have said that bullets weren't dangerous enough. I can see their point. But if you make bullets more lethal then we need to either reduce their availability even further, or face mass carnage. I don't want to see the latter. We've got a bunch of scavs who know why they're handing around together, now. Kill ten percent of them, and whoever they come back as... well, why the hell would they join us? Really? We need a level of continuity, and I actually think there's more fun to be had with debilitating us massively and bringing us back from the brink than there is in having a high character churn rate. People seemed to be enjoying playing patient in pain and over-radiated characters who couldn't stop chucking up their paltry supplies of food. Bear in mind we're playing characters who have somehow managed to survive the wastes for years, it would be weird if we were to die en masse at every event.

One of the weird things about our group was that we didn't exactly fit the aims of the plot, and we were small. The bigger groups seemed to grab the plot and run with it, while we were at a disadvantage due to there being only three of us, but also because we didn't exactly have a reason to get directly involved. Based on the background we submitted and the trait I was given, I was playing Mary as someone whose absolute priority was looking out for her kids, and although I didn't get to play with the plot as a result of this, it did lead to character development and interaction. With the Cardiff Cartel off monstering, I found myself being the one taking charge and telling the third set of camp invaders "If I were you I wouldn't take another step forward." Similarly, when our original foraging plans had gone nowhere I found myself being the one coralling a new group together, setting down ground rules. "We need one person in charge, who will it be? Right... let's get a count of exactly how many are going out and make sure the same number come back. And preferably the same people IN that number..." It was cool to have influence. I also enjoyed the fact that I could play scary-mum in protection mode and bitch about others as a result. "Yeah, it was raining, no the rain ain't nice and it can fuck you up, but when nearly everyone is in camp and there are five feral fucking zombie ghouls I don't expect me and mine to be taking out three of them with no bloody backup because everyone's cowering under the tower and in their tents."

On the other hand, when the scary gas-masked creature wandered camp we went into lockdown mode, clambering into our tent, killing the lights and staying as still as possible. And as the three of us lay there quietly we all fell asleep - some of us briefly, some of us for longer, and it was a really nice shared group experience of bolting down and enjoying the safety, and replenishing energy to keep going when it was time to hit the raiders. I know it sounds dumb, but it was really cool. My other "my group is cool" moment came when Mary and Solan were outside the Skian Mhor tent and Toby had stopped being Toby briefly, while he turned back into Chris and admired the larp weapons. Solan nudge Mary, nodded over to the trading tent and said something along the lines of "Aww, bless, look at him looking at the weapons. He couldn't do anything with them even if we could afford anything."

Are you getting the impression I liked it yet?

So what wasn't so great? Well, loresheets weren't available and event packs didn't necessarily contain everything they should. But it's not much of a complaint because it all got sorted with minimal fuss. True, the crew did seem pretty stressed and unsure of which problem to fix first, but they figured something out and it got done. And straying back into positives territory: The ref attention was superb. I wandered past the ref hut, and paused waiting for someone in the toilets, and was checked up on - "Are you okay, player?" We were checked on during a rainy downpour. "Are you having fun? Anything not working for you?" and they talked us through the confusing of healing, and they came and told us in private and politely and in a friendly manner when one of us miscounted his hits and didn't fall as soon as he should.

We did get a bit frustrated by not being able to get a scav encounter on Saturday. That was a very weird situation actually. We got a bunch of interested people ready to go out, and alerted the team. Then nothing happened and the group got involved in other stuff. Eventually some of the initial group, frustrated at not having had a chance, went out to look for stuff that might exist outside of properly set up encounter areas - some had improvised and managed to heal MAL with picked berries, and we thought maybe there would be some drops of stuff. There wasn't. As we wandered, we got roleplayed at by some people we found in the wastes, and so we played back, and had a fun encounter. Which it turned out we shouldn't have seen, and which had been set up for someone else. Oops. We stole an encounter. But to be honest, after waiting so long for one of our own I didn't feel guilty for it. The issue, I think, was being understaffed, and the demands from players were hard to meet. But when we complained we did get our own stuff sorted for the next morning and a heads up that it would be available - so it's hard to criticise too much.

What else wasn't great? The site was a bit small. We had to keep being told by refs whether we could see stuff in character, despite it being loud and obvious out of character. I got sunburn. Damn refs, not controlling the weather appropriately. Um... Oh, the wind down at the end was weird. There seemed to be a massive lull after the radbadger (which was awesome - he had talons THIS BIG!) and people drifted off, not sure what was going on. Tents were already being dropped by the time Skins came back to talk to us. The briefing at the end... that was a bit odd. I've never encountered that before, and it was taking a while to get round people. I was sort of expecting more input from plot than the team wanting input from us. I sort of thought it would go "So, over the next two weeks will you be travelling with the party? Right, you encounter x, y, z..." and it was more of a "so what did we do well?". I totally understand why the team needs that, especially when we're kind of still in a beta-test sort of scenario, but we weren't even told to think about the questions we'd be asked, so felt a bit on the spot and unable to answer "what was the high, what was the low?" sort of stuff. And it was necessary to feed back what state our characters were in and what equipment we had, but I don't really want to wait around at the end of an event to be dealt with when I have a massive drive home ahead of me... not sure how we get around that.

Which reminds me of another point others have mentioned. The team running this stuff is small. I'm not convinced it's practical for them to have to find every player and sort out their malnutrition increases, but how else do you handle it?

One concern I have, related to such things, is that the system really, really relies on honour. I strongly doubt that anyone there cheated deliberately at this event, but I suspect that that could change as people grow more attached to characters and the player base increases - especially if a death means a loss of significant skills or stuff which could happen if down-time and continued attendance develops characters. It's way too easy to avoid the hand out of MAL points, or accidentally lose a sticker if you want to - how do we avoid that? Even more ref attention than we already have? Hmm...
Moving on. Something you could take as a negative is that we completely missed our plot hook. My group is on the look out for Lucy, my daughter, the boys' sister. One of the traders we walked away from, happily brandishing our purchase, were actually part of the group of slavers who took her. But we didn't hear what they called themselves. That said, the history I wrote said that Lucy was taken by slavers posing as "nomadic traders" and these guys apparently named themselves as "Nomadic Traders". Thing is, in the wasteland, there are hundreds of nomadic traders who really are just that, I'd not intended it as a company name or similar so even if I'd head it I'd have missed it. It's fine, I'm cool with it - Lucy is an excuse for us to leave home. If we do recover her it'll be quite a surprise to Mary, even if she wouldn't ever tell the boys that.

Some people complained about the random weird things that hit the camp. I have no problem with the seemingly indestructible mystery thing in a gas mask doing that. I like a bit of mystery and fear without a simple and obvious resolution. I liked and was intrigued by the flashing ball, too - although I was a bit surprised when it paralysed me. If paralysis is in the rules I forgot about it, and had no idea how long it was meant to last on me (something I will check).

And that's kind of all I have right now. I loved the atmosphere, I quite liked roleplaying without plastering my face in makeup and wearing a thousand layers. I enjoyed seeing other people's interaction with the game and getting to know people a little bit better. We're keen for more and looking forward to it.

We're not on any kind of a recruitment drive, but if anyone wants to give the system a try the Jones family is pretty enormous - if you're my sort of age or higher you could be a brother or sister to me, younger players could be cousins, distant or close. I definitely recommend the game based on event 1 and as a result of ebay in the aftermath of the event I now own some really rather interesting items. Turn up next time to see what!

Many, many thanks to the team for seeing it through to fruition, for all the work it's taken. I for one appreciate it hugely.

Infinite Gateway

Thrilled to have discovered the Infinite Gateway blog. I think I'm going to pinch a load of their subject lines for my own musings in the future. Check them out if you're interested in larp.

http://infinite-gateway.com/

Bizarre

I bought Bizarre magazine this month at there was an article in it covering the larp system I play. It was a good article, quite sincere and interested rather than piss-taking. Shame it was surrounded by a huge number of pages of adverts featuring scantily clad women and cost over four quid. Still, I did get an article on Neil Gaiman in there as part of the bargain.

Very, very quiet

I've been away from the blog for a while. First of all I went to a larp event (The Gathering) that totally shook the world's foundations for my character, meaning that despite the system officially having no down-time, the forums have been full of chatter, further roleplay and general frothing about the events. Outside of work that pretty much filled an entire week and it's not over yet.

After that, I went to Wales, and spent a pleasant week near Whitesands beach, where phone coverage is very poor and the internet doesn't want to pour through my iphone.

I'm back as of late yesterday night, and planning to try to posts out more regularly in future.

Who goes to a larp event?

I've been away over the weekend at an event hosted by my own faction. It strikes me that people don't tend to write about the out of character logistics and how an event comes together, so I'm goin to write a few pieces intended to address that gap.

As always, I'm talking about my own personal experience. This definitely differs from system to system and probably within the system between factions to some extent as well. The events I'm talking about are the smaller ones, sanctioned by the Lorien Trust, but run by the individual factions or guilds. This one was a Harts faction event.

Around a hundred people turn up, 95-100% of these will have pre-booked as signing up on the gate is discouraged. This site was a Scout camp, hired for the weekend. Sometimes the site will be a custom purpose site, such as Stockwood towards Wales, or Candlestone which is in Wales, but usually the site is a Scout camp. The attendees break down into three types. The players, the crew, and the monsters. These people are all volunteers.

The crew are mostly the people who pull it all together. They will include some of the command team for the faction or guild running the event, people involved in creating the plot for the event, refs and marshals and a sanctioning officer. The sanctioning officer writes a report of the event to send back to the LT who have certain requirements that must be met in order for the event to run. They okay the plot, insist on having enough first aiders on site and generally give the yay or nay over whether your event can take place. If they wanted to, a sanctioning officer could close down the event halfway through. The refs are there to see that rules are properly followed, in this case that refers to the game rules. Lorien Trust is on the third iteration of its rulebook, and players are expected to know all the things within it that apply to their character, and hopefully more. The refs are there for clarification and enforcement. The marshals' job is to keep things safe, stopping combat from straying into dangerous areas, physically blocking hazards, and helping out to some extent with the rules, although they can't make declarations with the same weight as a ref. Refs and marshals take tests to gain their positions, and refs will also help out with marshal duties.

As regimented and harsh as it sounds, it's actually very informal and friendly. The only other specific crew role I can think of at the moment is that of weapons checker, although this is sometimes carried out by players. Again, nobody is a weapons checker until they've made the grade and they are tested, and their job is to examine primarily weapons, but also some costume and other kit, to ensure it's fit for purpose and meets the LT requirements for being used in the game. Old weapons wear out and can become unsafe, and some new ones are badly made or simply don't live up to the rigid requirements this particular system wants.

The next set of attendees are the players. This is the whole point of the system - to have players there to build a story around the plots that the plot team come up with. There will generally be an average of around 60 players in attendance. Each of these has built a character according to the rulebook, and they may have collected Occupational Skill Points by attending events which they have subsequently spent on improving and upgrading their basic character. I understand that two years is a fairly average lifespan for a character, but some players have characters in the system that have been going since its inception, making them something around 15 years old. A player can only have one official character in the system, although they are free to dump it whenever they want to. They play this same character at all the events they attend, although they can alter the skillset a little if they want to tweak it. The gameworld is one big set background, over which LT have the final say. Each event that takes place in this world has to slot together with all the others to some degree, so the players build up a knowledge of a huge and intricate game world by attending different events, and at a character level, different countries or lands. Every character stand the possibility of dying at one of these events, the methods for which are laid out in the rules. When a character dies they cannot return as death is a permanent end to a character. The players are there to solve problems and defend the land. Although anyone can book to turn up and play, players are asked to consider the reasons for their character to be there and the significant proportion of the players will belong to the guild or faction leading the event.

The final set of attendees are the monster team. While players pay up for their attendance, the monsters are generally subbed and may even be provided with food and drink for the duration. They also generally get first chance to use any indoor accommodation the site provides. The reason for these incentives to be in place is that most by choice will play their characters, but the monsters are an integral part of what is needed. The players need somebody to fight and interact with and the way the system works is quite similar to MMORPG games such as World of Warcraft. Our monster crew takes on the role of all the random creatures that attack would-be warriors, as well as all those non-player characters that stand around to pass on information when interacted with. Of course, when you're not run by a computer routine you have a lot more flexibility in how you can respond to the player, and the roles that the monsters play can be very intricate and detailed. Sometimes monster roles carry between events, but often they are one off characters for a single event. This weekend, for example, we defeated a vampire we've known of the existence of for some time, but have only just encountered. Meanwhile there were a number of villagers having issues we needed to solve. We're unlikely to ever see them again, but it's possible that should the plot require it we could ask that we get to chat to the Librarian from Penross because he now has an established position in the game world.

Certain areas of the site will be declared in character (IC), while places such as bunk rooms, the player camping area, the toilets and so on are out of character (OC or OOC). There will be a room or space set aside as the "monster room" where the planning is done, the monsters are briefed and given stats and get their faces painted for creature roles and/or costume for roles. Within the IC area you're expected to stay in character at all times.

That's the general breakdown of how the attendees fit into different roles, but it's worth mentioning the kind of people who turn up. I swear my mother thinks I'll outgrow it any time now, and I've had to correct her assumption that I must be, at 36, one of the oldest attendees. Mainline events allow children and so there are babies aged only a few months at the lower end of the scale. Most of the kids old enough to know what's going on love it and look forward to the larp weekends, and more than a few parents have had to explain to the school that actually, when Johnny says he spent the weekend fighting demons, he's not actually making it all up for attention. At the upper end of the scale I'm aware of a couple of players rapidly approaching their sixties, and I expect there are people I don't know who exceed that age range. There tend to be a lot of people who have been playing for years, but new people do enter the system as well, and this particular sanctioned event had a big student contingent who are fairly new to the game. Sanctioned events are often stricter on the lower end of the age range, many events are 18+ although some exceptions are made for established players.

The backgrounds are interesting. There's a strong bias towards traditional geeky pursuits so there are a lot of programmers and other IT types among us, but other professions make up surprisingly high numbers, with teaching and police work among them. Alongside these I've known shop workers, a postman, long distance drivers, admin staff, high ranking civil servants, a swimming instructor and a tree surgeon. Attending larp events expands your horizons - imaginary and otherwise!

Everybody knows what you do

Another import from the old, dead blog, this time from last May.

On the internet nobody knows you're a dog. So goes the old adage. The thing is, it doesn't matter. What sets apart online activity from everyday activity is that if you do nothing you might as well not be there. You're not even a part of the scenery, effectively you are absent. It is by your actions that you're recognised and lurkers don't really count for an awful lot.

The internet is a meritocracy: actions draw attention. It's not necessarily clear what actions will have what consequences, and in the case of things that go viral it can be baffling, but internet celebrity is unfailingly driven by action, whether it be running a conference, pretending to be a Jedi in front of a movie camera, or contributing considered thoughts to something like the Microformats community. And so what if you're a dog, or a cat? Fame could still fall at your feet. Go on, tell me you don't know Ceiling Cat.

In my larping life I am a dog*. Well, sort of, I'm actually a beastkin:


Believed by some to be the closest kin of Humans. Beastkin are intelligent animaloid creatures who draw their ancestry from many of the wild animals of Erdreja. Commonly tribal in nature, and intensely close knit, these differing races are also incredibly diverse.


And there's something similar going on there. It's the actions that matter, not what costume you're wearing or what race you're from. Players take on characters but the game works because there's collaboration, teamwork, leaders and followers. We're not rocking the world, we go home and forget about it at the weekend, but we play alongside people whose names we might not learn for years. In the same way you might not know the real name of somebody online, it's largely irrelevant because you are judged entirely on your actions.

My little beastie just got made vaguely important as a conduit between her faction and the Healer's guild. In terms of moving and shaking the world it's no big deal, but then neither is having the top rated Youtube video for half an hour - still makes the creator mildly proud.

It's interesting to note how being anonymous isn't necessarily a barrier to make social bonds and being promoted by your peers. Game worlds, online, and real life. How different are they, really?



*No I am not a furry.

Larp characters

My friend, Anthony, put together a number of short YouTube videos that cover the way that a few things work in our system. Below is the one in which he describes a character card. He's taken to filming early of a morning before things get going at the event and this video touches on a few things.

- The rules and the honour system we're bound by
- What's on the character card
- The concept of groups
- A little of what his skillset means

To be honest, some of what he says is probably quite confusing for someone completely new to it, but it's a nice basic introduction and well worth a watch.

What is larp?

Ask old enough players and they'll tell you larp is an abomination and we should be referring to lrp. Ask others and they'll talk about "larps" as plural items. It's both, neither and all these things depending who you ask.

Larp stands for Live Action Role Play. Older players don't bother to mention the Action part, after all, everything is action once it's live, whether it's the action of chatting or hitting someone with a fake sword.

For most people with a fleeting interest, the closest thing to larp is a computer game such as World of Warcraft, but it's different in a lot of ways. Some also deny familiarity with such games, so it's easier to ground the description in non-computer terms. A lot of larpers talk about "cross country pantomime" because it is, indeed, done cross country in scout camps and large fields and there's a high degree of costuming involved. Personally I don't like the description much because it suggests more of a scripted engagement.

For me, the best description is that it's something like a crossover between a paintball game and a murder mystery evening. Larp involves taking on a character and engaging in a story. Some might say it's not a very good story because everyone in it thinks that they're the main character and the start and ending are not as well defined as your typical script would have. While it's a freeform engagement, it's played within some very specific rules and these rules differ from system to system. There is somebody in charge to make sure it all holds together and plot is introduced that may not be player driven, but the point is that the players take an active role and become someone else in a different world, be it a post-apocalyptic version of this one or some faux medieval mythology setting.

It is difficult to generalise beyond this because the systems do have significant differences, and while some think it's similar to re-enactment it's usually got some very different aspects. For one thing, most larp takes place in a made up setting and the outcome may be directed but it isn't usually enforced. My understanding of re-enactment is that those taking part take on specific roles and play out some event where the final outcome is pre-determined according to historical records. Similarly, re-enactment involves recreating a time gone by with close attention to detail and some level of eschewing day to day modern comforts. In larp you're expected to fit in, but the rules regarding costume are more lax. While re-enactors use real or very realistic weapons to do battle, larp involves using specialised equipment, generally made of foam and latex which is crafted to look realistic and designed to be able to do very little harm.

Most of the time when I write about larping I'm going to be referring to the system I play most, which is Lorien Trust, but I've tried to make this introduction more generic, short as it is. I will try to cover more than just LT when I write, but most of what I know from outside my system is stuff I picked up on the internet or chatting to friends, I'm no expert within my own system, I know much less about others.