I am, in some respects, a grim person. One of these respects is that I tend to respond to the conclusion of a project by introspecting a while on what went wrong. (I try to stay positive, but this generally means an occasional ray of light among the grim. (This is why I never publish my postmortems of anything; they’re depressing. And vulgar.))
Anyway, last weekend I was on staff for a LARP, and I’ve been mulling over places I erred. Out of the internal discussion, I’ve noticed a few distinct types of failure in assembling a LARP. And never one to resist a taxonomy, I share them here.
Failures of Conception: Sometimes, an idea that seems clever just isn’t. Or sometimes there are bits of gameplay that would never have worked, but you didn’t manage to put two and two together. Case in point from the game just past: in game, there were two ways to learn a new skill. You could brew a potion using the alchemy system, generally having to pass through three to four intermediate steps and using up consumable resources. Or you could find a tutor and spend ten minutes getting taught the skill. Individually, both mechanics seemed reasonable. Side by side, I feel like a dope.
Failures of conception are frustrating, because you can’t really explain them away — you screwed up, no two ways about it. At the same time, they’re the easiest to learn from. The error is usually clear, and often you can draw some nice principle to blog about, which is pleasant.
Failures of Implementation: Sometimes bits of gameplay didn’t work because they didn’t work like they were supposed to. You ran out of time, someone else on staff misunderstood the packet, the crucial prop broke, whatever. It didn’t work right. The classic example, in my experience, is the political mechanics for The Bear in Winter, the Victorian steampunk game a crowd of us ran in January of 2004. I got caught up in making really badass maps, ran out the clock, and failed to finish the asset lists. It was basically unplayable. It’s possible that the mechanic would have proven a terrible failure of conception — it was a little avant-garde — but I don’t know; it never got its chance. (To this day, I want to run a game where I can take it for a spin. If you’d like to play in a small-scale experimental diplomatic simulation, bug me about it and maybe that can happen sometime.)
Another example, to my mind, is the combat mechanic from The Camel in Summer (the game from last weekend — yeah, there’s an Animal in Season motif going on there (huh, now I want to run a 1920s expatriates game called Coq au Vin)), which I realize some people feel was a failure of conception. The original idea was an attempt to make hand-to-hand combat, which was not really appropriate to the Arabian Nights bazaar setting, vaguely embarrassing. It was akin to your generic non-boffer LARP combat mechanic, but in place of rock-paper-scissors, we were going to use Rockem Sockem Robots. At the last moment, we couldn’t find Rockem Sockem Robots, and used a travel set of Hungry Hungry Hippos instead. Unfortunately, the table we used didn’t stay level, which made it sort of pointless; Hungry Hungry Hippos is very easy when you have a slope in your favor. It’s possible the mechanic would have been problematic in any event, but we don’t really know; the tilt pretty much spoiled it.
Failures of implementation drive me nuts, because there’s not much you can draw from them other than “shit happens”. They also cause arguments; I get most defensive when someone is critiquing a failure of implementation as if it were a failure of conception. I can’t really defend the gameplay in question — it didn’t work. At the same time, I don’t feel like we can say much useful about it other than on a theoretical level based on what we instinctively feel ought to work, and purely theoretical arguments about LARP are best resolved with nerve gas. (See? Depressing and vulgar. Well, violent, anyway.)
Emergent Failures: Intrinsic to the form, emergent failures happen when the players behave in unanticipated ways that cause gameplay elements to collapse. Arguably, this is a subtype of failures of conception, because in theory you should have been able to anticipate that the behavior at issue might happen, but if you can anticipate everything the players might do, there’s not much point from where I’m sitting in running the game at all.
An example of emergent failure is the underutilization of the alchemy system in The Camel in Summer. Many of the potions you could make affected the combat system — healing, powerups, etc. The dysfunction of the combat system, therefore, meant there was no demand for a lot of what you could do with alchemy.
Emergent failures are one of the things that I realize really aggravate me about the essentially interactive-literature-style games we’ve been running. I used to run boffer games, with large staffs and an essentially players-vs.-staff narrative structure. When things went wrong in unexpected ways, it was possible to roll with it. The biggest game I ran, a weekend-long piece called Mysteries of the Sunken Hundred, went horribly awry on the second day. The players had failed badly at one plot thread, and were basically unwilling to do what had to be done to avoid catastrophe. So my co-GM and I sat down (after cursing a bit), brainstormed a few minutes, and drafted an entire new slab of gameplay to get the game back on track. We slotted it in, and none of the players ever realized we hadn’t meant to do it that way from the get-go. I can’t do that in an IL game. I don’t have the staff to make more than subtle changes to the flow of the game, and even if I did, the PvP narrative structure of the style makes it hard to help one player out of a hole they’ve gotten into without possibly screwing over another player.
Failures of Aesthetic: I almost hesitate to put this last category in, but I’ve seen (be honest; I’ve done) things that made the players absolutely miserable, but worked *exactly* the way the GM intended them to. I hesitate because I think the first three categories are more or less objective, while this one depends on the common but not universal proposition that if a player didn’t have fun, that is by definition a gameplay failure. Now, there are certainly times when players create their own unfun, but I find it useful to distinguish between gameplay that didn’t work and gameplay that did work but wasn’t fun. Case in point: I wrote a game once where the entire player group was killed by fiat halfway through and spent the rest of the game on the run from the spirits who collect the dead. There were a few players who felt, either in or out of character, that all good people ought to embrace their eternal reward, and were pretty upset about the whole thing. I think, on the whole, the conceit was worth it, but I still consider it a failure in part for that reason.