One of the more interesting workshops I’ve attended came at the 2014 Sigma Play conference here in Bloomington, Indiana. My son and I participated in a “parlor” role-playing session about vampires, werewolves and a murder in the woods. I found it compelling because of the process to set up the characters—done as a group—and the use of different locations to allow you to move to part of the story without knowing everything that is transpiring.
Before that conference, I thought of LARP-ing (live action role playing) as a cross between CosPlay and beating the crap out of each other with non-lethal weaponry. As a kid, we made swords and shields out of wood, cardboard and masking tape, attacking each other with reckless abandon. That proved to be a recipe for getting hurt, so that kind of play didn’t last too long. With the parlor LARP, however, I found a group game that put good character development at the center of an evolving narrative.
Our campers like to LARP, in my childhood sense of the term. There are safer materials (foam, PVC tubing and duct tape) but the play is still centered around building weapons and big battles. At Geek Camp, one of our goals is to emphasize the “RP” in LARP and use the activity to build good stories together.
The Role of Fate
When I was first trying to introduce my own sons to Dungeons & Dragons, the rules kept getting in the way. Setup was complicated and long, and the game mechanics focused on rolling interesting dice and checking lists. To help simplify everything, I developed a three-page version of D&D called “DNDish.” The gist was to take standard six-sided dice and reduce the complicated character sheets and interactions to something simpler: You try to do something, roll to overcome an obstacle, and advance the story.
As the person running the game, I found the sessions enjoyable. It was fun to shape the world on the fly with characters in the adventure party that ranged from a golem to an oracle duck. When we switched to the new version of D&D later (then in beta testing), those traditional constraints got in the way of the story.
Last year, a Kickstarter brought me the Dodeca game, “There’s A Game In This Box,” that relied exclusively on the most underutilized of dice: the 12-sided. It seemed a good mix between the complexity and rigor of D&D and the loose structure of DNDish. Still, the setup in a group setting took too long and it didn’t really translate well to live-action play.
Enter Fate.
A game based on FUDGE dice—four six-sided dice that feature only +, 1 and blanks—Fate combines an accessible framework for character development with a simple mechanism for advancing the action of a story. Characters have free-form aspects with both benefits and consequences, but so do locations and equipment. These aspects can be invoked or compelled at a cost, by paying the game’s currency (a fate point). This serves to both limit power and free it.
Adapting to LARP
Our camp relies heavily on exploration, experimentation and iteration. In that spirit, we are about to try to invoke the best aspects of Fate to help set the stage for group storytelling in this week’s LARP. Today, I’ll take this week’s campers through character setup in advance of explaining the game mechanics and the actual LARP-ing session on Thursday.
Not everything from Fate is going to translate in a practical way to running around the park for a couple hours. Out in the field, we want to downplay rolling dice, which shifts a lot of the decision-making into the minds of the players and location managers. For now, the most important step is to define the characters and their relationships to other players and the world we’ll create together.
In Fate, characters are defined mainly through aspects. They are presumed to be mediocre at everything, except where explicitly described by the player. With aspects, every strength is also a weakness.
In looking through the rules, these are the aspects we will define in a Day Two activity to shape our characters:
- HIGH CONCEPT is a simple description that sums up the character
(e.g.,”Field Agent of S.H.E.I.L.D.”) - TROUBLE is what always makes your life more complicated
(e.g., “Haunted by a bad decision”) - PERSONAL NUANCE is something important about yourself
(e.g., “Doesn’t say much”) - BESTIE NUANCE is something notable about the relationship to another character
(e.g., “Saved the Director’s life”) - TURF NUANCE is something particular about being in a given location
(e.g., “Hesitates too much when returning to the Warehouse”)
All characters will start the LARP with three fate points, physical coins that players can use to invoke their own aspects or compel others to do the same. Because there is a scarcity in the economics of the game, even well-crafted aspects are going to need to be used with purpose. The only way to earn more fate points is to suffer setbacks, barriers or other consequences.
A STUNT is a no-cost situational advantage. Where the aspects each cost a Fate Point to invoke, a stunt describes a specific advantage you always have in a particular situation. It does cost a fate point to create a stunt, however, which means this character will begin with fewer than three points.
(e.g., “Because I am Quick on the Draw, once per game session I can choose to go first in a physical conflict.”)
APPROACH is the way you choose to go about an action. These include Careful (pay close attention), Clever (think fast), Flashy (draw attention), Forceful (brute strength), Quick (dexterity), and Sneaky (misdirection and stealth). Each character declares themselves good at 1 (+3 bonus), fair at two (+2) and average at two more (+1). Since we are minimizing the dice rolling for the LARP, approaches will act more as guides when role-playing the character.
When we move on to explaining game mechanics on Day Three, the campers will already have some solid characters to help operationalize those rules.
