At the beginning of the month I attended Metatopia, the annual game designer conference in New Jersey. At one of the panels I attended, we were discussing the development of Larp Rules (for the sake of fairness, while I have not signed a NDA, I am not saying the name of the rules for respect of privacy. Let the company release that info at their own time). I had some experience with larp rules based on tabletop mechanics, with my time playing and running in various New World of Darkness games like Requiem, Lost and Awakening. I also spent the last five years running the Dresden Files larp, which used rules similar to FATE Core.
What the session was, for me, was part of a larger conversation. Being friends with a plurality of game designers (slew? Cabal? Illuminati?) of multi media projects, and you begin to see and discuss the limits of each format you use. I've heard people taking a stand, siding with one or the other and I've heard others try to find a balance and a method to translate one to the other. This writing is my attempt, if it doesn't feel complete it's because I'm still processing and still listing my ideas. Expect more posts on this as we go on.
First of all, let us begin with what Table Top and Live Action role play games are. Shortly put, they are both collaborative story telling exercises. People gather and take on the roles of other characters to engage in scenarios often moderated in some way by someone known as a Dungeon Master (DM), Game Master (GM), Storyteller (ST) or some other title.
That's the gist. Now let's begin with how they differ. Going back to the Metatopia discussion, we were talking about how plots work differently within the two mediums. "Table Tops offer an exapansive experience while Live Action is about the focused event."
I'm going to use 7th Sea as an example of Table Top gaming, because I've been running it recently and it conveys a lot of what I'm looking for. You have a conspiracy between multiple nations spanning hundreds of miles and nautical leagues. You traverse the countryside, travel the seas, explore the vistas of the world around you.
This can be done in an entire session. Not that it should be, but it can. It can do this because the players (and GM) assembled have gathered together to share that experience at the same time. There isn't a lot in terms of physical setting, or plot, and the GM is the major source of what you are experiencing in the world. It's all one mass hallucination and half the fun is collaborating with each other in that experience.
With Live Action, everything is about that one single moment you are currently experiencing. Things follow a "What You See Is What You Get" method, even for events in a black box and have minimal set dressing. You are playing a character at the Vampire Court where the Prince is making his declarations and new members are being introduced and plots are being put in to place. You see the tables and chairs, the decorations, the darkened corners where plots and trysts and snide comments are made.
Things may have been done in the time between this meeting and the last, and will between this one and the next, but you aren't able to experience it all. You are someone experiencing the event, and while you may even have the ability to effect the event in some way, you will never see the entirety of it.
Live Action games are not unlike Event Planning. Having worked both, they take a lot of preparation before, during and after. One of the main things an event runner knows is that you can bring people to an experience, you cannot dictate the experience they will have. While you play the game, the agency you have during that time is more your own. You are able of telling a story with other players, of course, but the chances of you having that with everyone gets smaller the more people you have present.
For the tabletop, the setting and the plot are the things the players search out for. For the live action events, the setting and plot happens at the event for them to experience (or not, there are no guarantees). The tabletop's story isn't bounded by the physical location the story takes place, while the live action is. You can be in a sprawling campground or an abandoned town. You can't explore past those borders though in real life. The story is forced to come to you.
This makes live action events seem both spontaneous and expected. You never know what may show up, though you know at some point something will, somewhere, and someone will pick up on it. This also lends to a practice I've called "The Thrown Chair Policy" because nothing short of a riot will sometimes get a rise out of people if they don't want to engage and just sit at their table. Everyone at a tabletop event is aware of the plot, even if their characters aren't in the scene. Their ability to effect it is limited (in some games. Games like ReMemorex have mechanics to interact with a scene you aren't in). Tabletop characters seek out plot, not necessarily the GM's plot, but they seek it out. The Live Action awaits plot to come to them.
There are challenges to plot seeking in Live Action, Plot Hording and what I call "The Thrown Chair" policy. I've spoken about the latter a little bit in the past, I'll talk about both more in the future.
So, we've established that while Live Action and Tabletop gaming are a collaborative story telling element, how they tell stories is profoundly different. Tabletop games are expansive and deal in scope, not unlike movie cinematography. Live Action involves the immediate and focus on the moment as it is happening where it is happening, not unlike theater.
Can these two styles work together? Yes. I think they can, and there have been many attempts to make them work in the same space.
A good example was a game of Ex Arcana I experienced at GenCon a few years ago. Ex Arcana is primarily a larp by Nerdy City productions and focuses on the clashing of victorian magic traditions in a modern world as magic suddenly returns. We started the game at a table, being narrated our entry in to Indianapolis (we were all playing our characters from New York, and only the first time players started at the larp space). We got to interact with the world using the system (CHRONOS, which was card based) in ways we didn't usually and got to interact with the world differently. My character, Lin, is a social character, and while I used the cards to back up the roleplay in the live action, dropping the cards down felt more potent during those moments at the table.
In an example of the reverse, I've seen Live Action events that, when previously using mechanics, went roleplay only. The event worked better, seamlessly and people enjoyed it on a level we'd never seen before in the game.
I'm of the mind that the more mechanics you have in a live action game, the less effect you'll have. I've seen entire events ground to a halt when suddenly people were claiming major actions like fight scenes. That sort of slamming on the brakes at social events kills the energy of the group and is less likely to be regained. When a live action game suddenly grounds to a halt and becomes a tabletop is when things have an issue.
Like the Ex Arcana example before, I've seen people get more and more in to their character where they can just 'roleplay it out' effectively making what they are doing an ad hoc larp. A friend of mine suggested that tabletops should be the main attraction while the larps are those special occasions you save for big events that change the landscape of what you're doing. I like that, and I agree with it to a degree.
I think that, with enough time and comfort and with every one on board, a tabletop has an easier time of incorporating elements of Live Action than the reverse. I think the best way a Live Action event can utilize what makes tabletop storytelling work in its system is to use it only when interacting with things outside of the event at hand. If you want to do something, or respond to something, that cannot be otherwise achieved while physically in the space, then is the time to go back to tabletop ethics. Doesn't have to be a straight up tabletop game, but the elements can remain.
To conclude, I think that Tabletop and Live Action gaming are two mediums that are intrinsically connected. They are stories that we tell to each other. How we go about doing them is how the two differ. There have been many attempts to combine the two, with varying degrees of success and failure over the years. The conversations about how work with the two has begun, and I look forward to what happens next.
I hope you enjoyed this. This post is by no means definitive or comprehensive, and not only do I welcome other opinions I actively am asking for them. I want to start the discussion, I want to see what we as players, designers, and runners, can come up with.
Thank you all.
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