The Moose Bellows

This section of the website is for me to sound off, ostensibly about Live and  table top role-playing, and the many bugbears (owlbears?) that infest it, but possibly devolving into a general soap box 'AND ANOTHER THING' Caps lock bashing session. I make no apologies, it's not like anyone is going to read it anyway....

...and no, I'm not putting a feedback section. Like I want anyone arguing with  me... On with the ranting...

Assuming the position....

Has anyone ever noticed that, well, all LRP scenarios are kind of ...the same?

Whoa there, hear me out before the pitchforks and burring torches are broken out by every Ref that's ever given up a weekend to herd cats for fun and no profit.

Just think about it, and you'll see I'm right. But let me clarify - I'm mostly talking about non-fantasy scenario's here; although I suspect the number of sword and sorcery games that follow a very similar structure to each other is pretty high as well. It's not for nothing the phrase '10 encounters and a big finish' has become an enduring cliché'. But I am mostly referring to games run outside the Tolkeinsien gated community.  And I cannot stress this enough  - THIS INCLUDES MY OWN!!!.

Generally speaking, I'm also not ragging on the stories being told here either - they may be melodramatic, and may have 'borrowed' a little too heavily from whichever book or movie the ref has been into recently, but in my experience, the back-story is pretty damn good, and normally as original as the ref can make it. After all, no-one want to be accused of copying  ref x's game from last year. In fact, most ref teams take great pains to try new stuff. Refs, and Players like to be creative, and the plot, or character story, is the closest most of us get.

So Moose, I hear you all cry with savage boredom, what the blithering hell are you talking about?

I'm talking about the game itself. Most LRP games, to use a really tortured metaphor, are like shooting porno (stay with me here) The backdrop may be different (although there's likely to be a suspicious amount of hung material and black plastic), the costumes will change, and the justification for what's happening won't be the same as last time, but ultimately, it'll be the same three to five acts , EVERY.SINGLE.TIME. They'll be filmed from a different angle, maybe in black and white (if it's 'arty') - but it's still the same basic process. Why? Because it has to be, in order to appeal to the punters, and it's basically the same for LRP. 

1) Foreplay :- Scenario start - a group of disparate, but basically competent individuals all turn up to a single location for a given purpose. They may have been summoned,  they may have been promised payment, or it might be 'bad luck' or blackmail, but something gets between 12 and 24 people into a given place. If the ref is being creative, everyone will have their own reasons for being there (or group reasons, LRPers have a tendency to form packs even before time in has been called), of course, if the ref is really lazy, they've written the entire campaign so that the players are stuck in a single, mobile location that they have to stay on or with, like, I duinno, a starship.......(why is everyone looking at me?). 

2) The blow Job : -LOCK IN - Now, I know some people are going to disagree, but basically, all scenarios start by locking the players into the current location. This might be a physical lock in (the doors/exists are sealed, there's a radiation storm outside, IF YOU LEAVE YOU DIE!!!! or some such), an environmental lock in (due to horrific damage, the flange-capacitor has broken, stranding you here until it's fixed) or a social/enforced one ("we can't leave, we have a job to do"; "if we leave now, we'll never know why the old man wanted us all here"; "but it's the great feast of ugimaflip, leaving now would invite disgrace, or death, or something")

Yes, this HAS to exist. If it doesn't, you have the issue of 'why doesn't everyone leave?' In the real world, people stay at nightclubs/bars/spaceships only because NOTHING BAD is happening. I can guarantee, if a bunch of orcs raided your local whilst you were having a pint, you'd leave your drink and go home, rather than staying there 'to see what happens'. Especially after it happened a second time, then a third (leaving just enough time between attacks for most of the wounds to have been healed). Even more especially when the toilet cubicles exploded, or the vending machine gained sentience and started trying to kill people, or the barman turned out to be a cultist.  You'd leave if you had the option. Unless, you know, you're psychotic. Whilst most players can, and will, 'suspend disbelief' over characters staying in what has blatantly become a warzone, not all of them will, and you don't have the time or budget to let them move 'en-masse' to another location (even one that looks suspiciously similar). So, they have to stay where they are.

3) Missionary :- There's a problem. Or two, or five. And you can bet your bottom dollar the problem(s) require the input of groups of the player characters. This is, most likely, in addition to the 'lock in' problem above - as that one will be solved by the players, but it'll take, Oh, say 24 hours to do (or however the long the game is set to last). Occasionally, the lock down isn't the problem , and might just be solved by time (like waiting for a specific event, like a return shuttle, the engines returning to full power, or a planetary alignment needed for the spell, whatever) - if this is the case, then it'll be like one of those 'defend the location' sections in an FPS - sorting out all the lethal problems and combat that will kill you before the 'event' takes place (or, more realistically, until time out is called)

Like Combat, the problems have to exist. And there have to be a bunch of them. Investigators need to investigate, hackers need systems to crack, mechanics in the party? Air scrubbers need urgent repair or you are all going to die!.  Medics/doctors, well, the combat takes care of them, ditto the gun-nuts. Basically, no problems = players with nothing to do. Yeah, they MIGHT get off on just socializing with each other, but that's a heck of a risk!  The best plots give the option of being involved or not, so the socialites can get on with hand-stapling whilst the goal-drivers are busy with the problems at hand. If nothing is going wrong, you can bet the players will invent something. Of course, that might be what you want....assuming they tell YOU what it is they've made up. The alternative is that some people will get drunk and talk about OC stuff, which is a bit like people in a porn movie watching the baseball on TV....

4) Doggy-style :- Combat. Always Combat. And it will always come from outside, despite the issues this creates (see the foreplay section). The reason for this is that there are always going to be a limited number of NPC's already in the location with the players. These NPC's will be outnumbered, and (given the usual plethora and paranoia of combat players) outgunned, even if you temporarily rectify that by stripping the weapons off them. The 'inside' NPC's represent the only social interaction most of the players will get , and the only source of 'plotanium' the players have access to. If the NPC's betray them of shoot them in the first five minutes, the NPC's will be butchered en-masse , or worse, captured and tied up, meaning it's very difficult to use the crew!!!

 The combat assault exists for the combat players. It has to. The gun toting lobby get bored if they have noting to hit/shoot at, and they might then turn on your 'friendly' NPC's, or worse still, the other players. It also give a sense of urgency to the game (mostly). Unlike the 'problem' lobby, above, bored combat types are an IMMEDIATE problem, as they can flip out and start shooting at the worst moments. And both sets will complain if there was nothing to do on the weekend. Plus, some NPC's really enjoy shooting at players, and bored crew is EVEN WORSE than bored players (I'll explain another time)

5) Reverse-Cow Girl - The Bad guy.  Someone the players can trace the problems back to, blame for everything and , for preference, KILL or at least foil in a dramatic way. This might not be the main bad guy, in fact, it may well be that he represents a 'big bad' for the campaign, either as a metaphor or as an actual employee. However, if all the players problems can be solved by what amounts to 'dice rolling' until the engines come back on line, there's going to be some frustration, especially amongst the 'combat inclined; (see above). Plus, if it was just a faulty engine, why did all those orcs kick in the door and shoot the barman?

6) Money Shot - The big run out. This is what leads into the cry of time out. It might be a massive escalation of combat raids as the timescales for fixing the engines gets closer; it might be the big ceremony /summoning that solves the problem; it might just be a boss fight. regardless, this is the heroic payoff, a chance for everyone to get involved in one last, desperate push, before emerging sweaty, exhausted and heroically drained into the adulation the other side, spurting...Um - ok, this metaphor has definitely been pushed too far. But this is the bit before the post-coital cigarette of the de-brief. It's got to be big, because ending on a low note, or a 'quiet moment' isn't very Hollywood. Plus, leave it too long, and people start having more in character chat, and then there isn't a clear 'end point',  which creates it's own troubles.

So, tortured allegory aside, is the rather predictable nature of an LRP event a bad thing? Well, I don'/t think so. Like porn, there's ample variety within the basic template. Perhaps the light bondage of a plot twist, the pretend girl on girl of an unexpected background NPC, or the threesome of a surprise party betrayal (sorry, got carried away there). But the basics remain the same because, well, it has to appeal to everyone who's involved. You can play with the ratios, move the positions around in the running order (within reason) and maybe even eliminate one of them, but it's always a risk A risk that you'll wind up annoying or alienating part of your core audience, just because you wanted to be 'arty' or 'more original than thou'.

So, the next time you complain about all LRP's basically being the same, remember, there's a good reason for it, and it's not a lack of imagination on any-ones part, more the restrictions all of us have put on the genre.

Then just start thinking about porn. It's what I do... 

Moose Out....