Upwick Manor Post-Game

One of my motivations behind creating the Upwick Manor LARP was to find out whether I could learn from my previous game - LA Confidential Live - and so write a better role-playing experience for the players.  Not that I regard LA Confidential Live as a failed or even particularly flawed game, but it gave me the chance to see what worked well and what caused problems.

I learned a lot about tightening up the setting of a game.  The Player Characters in LA Confidential Live all had disparate lives and interests inside a big city.  As a result, the idea that their lives would all intersect as frequently as the game required became contrived.  I learned that a LARP often needs in its premise a single, physical location where the characters all have some sort of business, and for all of the players to understand its relevance from the beginning.  One re-watching of Gosford Park later, I was convinced that an English Manor house was a great setting for a game, with the upstairs / downstairs divide being something that could be replicated using the two staircase-linked rooms in Englefield Green's Social Hall.

I also wanted to move away from needing much of a game system.  The Dirty World system that I had used in the past was obscure and clunky - not very accessible to the players - even after I had chucked out Greg Stolze's accursed and pretentious One-Roll Engine.  Elle Clegg, Elle Bullimore and Martin Hornsey's "Corporate Weekender" game in Gosport taught me a great deal about what a game could achieve purely with soft role-play.  So, I went looking for a premise that would require as few rules as possible.

At first, I spent weeks in 2013 mulling over ideas that didn't work.  I considered a game where an aristocratic family's fortune could be tied to a Faustian pact, and the rich family members would have to decide whether to re-new a deal with the forces of darkness, or see their wealth crumble.  The problem with these fancy ideas was that I could not see how such a plot would engage the "downstairs" players and give them as much to do in the game.

I realised that the problem was trying to make a game with a supernatural element.  So many of the LARPs that I have played over time have had science-fiction or fantasy elements that I was trying to use them just out of habit.  I had not needed LA Confidential Live to have supernatural things, and they were actually limiting the way that I was thinking.  Once I ditched the fantastical, I soon hit on the idea about executing a Will - a weird blend of Downton Abbey and Brewster's Millions.

I can remember when I approached Elle with the concept and my request that she co-ST, because we were at Ross and Pam's summer barbecue in 2013.  Some guests were talking about their Requiem characters at her, and this gave me the perfect opportunity to offer her a change of subject.  I already knew from things said in passing at the Doctor Who tabletop game that she liked the idea of preparing food for a LARP set in an historic period, and I fully intended to exploit *cough*, I mean pique her interest in doing that.

The premise also appealed to another interest that Elle and I have in common - making players squirm on the horns of a dilemma.  Plotting with Elle was very useful; it identified a number of things that the game should include, and tightened up the story.  She determined that the Will should be a winner-takes-all dilemma, foreseeing that giving the executor power to divide up the inheritance in any way would make it too easy to negotiate a happy ending for everyone.

One thing that I liked about the LA Confidential Live game and wanted to keep was that it had a wide range of possible endings, and the Storytellers were not at all invested in any specific outcome.  Tom and I did not have any preference for what would happen, and this helped to keep us from nudging the plot and taking away from player agency.  Similarly, neither Elle nor I were pushing players to choose a particular winner during Upwick Manor.  The only push that we gave was to make an obnoxious NPC with bad intentions the person who would win if the players simply defaulted and failed to make any decision.  However, this was merely a device so that the players would come to a resolution within a time frame, while still giving them a lot of options.

The first game of Upwick Manor was deliberately slow to develop.  The idea was to let players get used to their characters and to get to know each other.  I also hoped that the upstairs players would get used to treating the downstairs players as servants - although I was a little surprised at how quickly and naturally the guests fell into the practice of taking the staff for granted and acting as if they were invisible.  Still, this seemed useful for setting up the twist that would drive the rest of the story.  In order to shake up the balance of power between the rich and their servants, a little time was needed first to establish how that balance of power would normally feel.  Frances' speeches in the first game about the "servant problem" were golden material to that end.

Of course, this meant that the downstairs players had to do a lot of... well, being servants in the first game, and I feel like I should apologise for all the genuine manual labour that their side of the story entailed.  I am grateful for everything that they did, and I hope that it added to the atmosphere of the game.  When Norwegian LARPers talk about the drawbacks and benefits of "bleed" - where in-character issues have meaning for players out-of-character - they are probably not thinking about the amount of washing up that Ross had to do....

I must admit that I enjoyed the style of LARP in Upwick Manor because the Storytellers did not need to offer any solutions for the players; we just had to seed the entire plot piecemeal among the players, and let them sort it out according to their whims.  If done right, I think that this approach is good for the Storytellers, who don't have to take on as much work during play, and for the players, who get a lot of agency and can rest assured that the ending will not involve a "NPC ex machina" plot.

In so many role-playing games, whether live or tabletop, the Storyteller often has to be an authority figure, telling players what they can and cannot do, and whether they succeed.  By contrast, being a Storyteller in Upwick Manor and  LA Confidential Live was about sowing as much chaos and unclear choices as possible, while giving no answers.  I'm starting to appreciate why the tricksters in mythologies seem to be having the most fun.

However, even sowing chaos actually requires orderly planning.  In order to make sure that the game was not straightforward, Elle and I had to ensure that the different possibilities in Upwick Manor all had an equal chance of being revealed and considered.  This meant that we had to think about ways to ensure that no particular choice was clearly superior or easier than the others.  We also wanted to ensure that the game fostered interaction, and one of the main ways to do this was to plan so that, if one character had a problem, he or she could not resolve it without talking to other PCs, usually the ones on the other side of the social divide.  For example, if one of the staff was the Lord's illegitimate child, we made sure that the proof of this was in the hands of a family member.

I've had a lot of thoughts about both Upwick Manor and LA Confidential Live.  One thing that has struck me and makes me happy is that I had no control in advance over what themes would emerge from these games.  For example, I did not know that a major theme in LA Confidential Live would be man's inhumanity towards women - that emerged organically from player's ideas and choices.  Upwick Manor could, depending on the player's decisions, have been a completely different game, not just in outcome but also in tone.  Due to the players, I think that it was a comedy-drama story about manners, tradition and sympathy, but all the ingredients were also there if the players had wanted to have a less-gentle game about intrigue, shady deals or class warfare instead.

This makes me happy, because - when I can see a web of storylines that could just as easily have been, but did not happen, then I know that the game's direction was genuinely driven by the players' interest.  Plus, this is the second role-playing game with multiple episodes in a row that I have been able to run to its intended ending, and that feels positive.

Any comments or thoughts below, and I'll do my best to answer any questions.

Opening Post

This is my first post in a new blog that I have created for my nerdy interests, particularly role-playing.

G+ is great for short entries, but its compressed presentation style does not really work if I want to write extensively on a subject.  If I have enough material in my head to produce an article, I'd rather just create an entry with a link to a blog, than showing people the first line or two, with a tag at the bottom that says something like "read more (300 lines)".

I could use Livejournal, but I tend to restrict my posts to LJ to friends only, and few of my friends still use it.  Besides, the point of this Blog is not to be about my life or personal matters, but more about the details and thoughts that go into my hobbies and interests, especially the ones that I share with friends.

I rarely write about my feelings, angstings and other emotions.  This can be my place for scheming and plotting.