The Evolution of a Game

[jducoeur]

The process of LARP writing is a fascinating mix of fear and exhilaration. Yesterday, I have a mass of semi-related characters, and I'm nervous about the whole mess. Today, after six hours of brainstorming and design, I have a game. Still need a few more plots, but every character has two so far and most are up to four.

Finishing casting helped a lot (the letters will be going out shortly). That finally commits me to which characters are going to be in the game, and that presented me with a neatly-organized matrix of characters vs. plots. (Thanks again to those who helped me figure out how to get the nested queries working.) And that, in turn, made it nice and clear which characters needed more beef, so I could focus on drawing the right lines in the web to fill those holes.

Which brings us up to the next step: writing the damned thing. There's a lot to write -- 27 characters in about six weeks. But that's reasonably straightforward, once the plot web is done...

Comments

[tpau]

you are an insane man. :)

[jducoeur]

I try.

In general, though, I'm reasonably happy about the state of things: it's not quite as far along as I'd like, but by absolute standards it's in pretty good shape. And while a fair amount of the casting is a bit unexpected, I think I've given everyone as close a fit to their requests as possible...

[tpau]

don't get me wrong, i am happy withthe character, jsut concerned about costuming :)

re: as close to...

[etherial.livejournal.com]

I got my top choice, so no complaints here. I'm pretty sure I'll only have to make one piece of the costume, as well.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Some day I'd like to sit down with you and hear about your process for generating a LARP, and what a plot web means to you, and so forth...I've had some of these conversations with learnedax, and still have the crazy larp-writing-support-software ideas kicking around in the back of my head...

[jducoeur]

Well, keep in mind that that's a large part of what motivates the ProWiki/Querki project. Writing a LARP is more or less the process of describing a small world, and that's what has driven me to the OODB-wiki model: OODBs are pretty much always the best way to do worldbuilding.

Curiously, this seems to be one of those little facts that crops up again and again, with little common understanding of the phenomenon. On the one hand, it's the best way to build sim games: Looking Glass' games were built on top of a very sophisticated in-memory OODB, which gave us wonderfully detailed and flexible worlds, far more complex than most. On the other, I recently came across Eastgate Systems, who apparently have evolved a system for more-traditional story design and management that bears many striking resemblances to ProWiki.

But yes -- I'd be happy to schmooze on the subject. It's become something of a passion of mine in the past couple of years. (I really should have suggested it as an Arisia panel, but it didn't occur to me...)

[keshwyn]

Pardon me...

Mwuhahahahahahaah!!!

*glee*

[jducoeur]

Happy to be of service. You were easy to cast: you were clear about who you wanted, and it wasn't one of the 3 or 4 that everybody asks for, so I could simply give it to you. The only trick was figuring out what to *do* with that character, but that's shaping up to be pretty interesting...

[keshwyn]

Yay! As I recall, this is the second time I've asked for an obscure character - the first being Polychrome, who you told me emphatically was a boring character to play and thus you'd cut her.

After the game, I'd be curious to know who the 3 most popular characters were for each gender...

[jducoeur]

Oh, there's nothing secret about that -- that's just what people asked for, and has no bearing on what characters are actually in the game.

IIRC, the most-requested characters were, no surprise, Gil and Agatha. (Indeed, there were an amusing number of, "Well, I guess everyone's going to ask for Agatha, so I won't bother".) A whole bunch of guys asked for Klaus and a fair number for Krosp; among the women there were a number for Lucrezia and a smattering among the other good character roles like Von Pinn and DuPree.

But by *far*, the most requested characters were the Jaegermonsters. Usually not specific ones (although there were a few), but I think there were around ten people whose first choice was a Jaeger...

[jducoeur]

Also, I will add that this is the advantage of being in on the first run. I intentionally hadn't finalized the character list before casting, so I could get input on what people wanted before making the hard-and-fast decisions. Your request wasn't the only reason your character is in the game, but you probably tipped the scales there...

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Speaking of casting, I've been meaning to ask: Do you ever get anything like the casting of Ozma in the first run of The Future of Oz again, or are you far too sensible to allow for the possibility?

[jducoeur]

While I may consider myself slightly religious, I am *never* presuming on the divine like that ever again. Of all the dumb luck we had in the first run of Oz, that was probably the most remarkable...

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

That's what I figured, but I thought the answer might well be amusing :)