Don't fear personal plot

by Martin Gill

What’s your favourite film?

Is it the one with the awesome special effects where the heroes spend the entire time scratching their heads, wondering why people they've never met before are attacking them? The one where the heroes have deep, complex back-stories involving the lust for revenge, unrequited love, long-lost friends and deep, dark secrets, but none of that is ever referenced in the movie and the whole thing is shallow and lacks motivation? Or maybe the one where none of the heroes have any emotional link to the villain, and really don’t care one way or another whether their evil plan works or fails?

No?

You wouldn't watch those movies, they’d be boring. The characters wouldn't tie into the plot and there’d be no emotional investment in either the hero or the villain living or dying, winning or losing.

So why do so many LARP events play out like this?

I'm constantly stunned when I hear (and I have done frequently) experienced, established event organisers make comments like “I don’t want personal plot, it gets in the way.” To me, that’s a ridiculous position to take. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what engages audiences. It’s a flawed and even arrogant assumption to assume that just because you've written an uber-complex backstory and a wicked plot with some cool set-piece encounters, anyone is actually going to give a crap about it in- or out of character. 

Not every event has to be deeply interactive, but every event should be engaging, and the players should feel linked to the plot and able to impact its outcome in some way. Otherwise, it’s just fancy-dress sport. The best props, set dressing and combats in the world mean nothing if none of the players care why they are there, and worse still, often unfathomable plots and uber-NPCs mean that the players are unable to influence the outcome of events, so feel even more disenfranchised. Amy Farrah Fowler eloquently describes this phenomenon in Big Bang Theory…

“Indiana Jones plays no role in the outcome of the story. If he weren't in the film, it would turn out exactly the same… If he weren't in the movie, the Nazis would still have found the Ark, taken it to the island, opened it up, and all died, just like they did.”

Personal plot doesn't have to mean that every player has a set of richly described and acted NPCs. It can, and often that makes the experience even richer for the player, but it can be as simple as tying players into the main events of the weekend so they feel as if they can influence the outcome of the story in some way. You don’t have to re-write your entire plot – just tweak it so that it’s personally relevant to your players. Orcs killed someone’s family? Well then make the orc baddies members of that very clan, not another random bunch of orcs. Give the chieftain a one line, throwaway comment at the start of one of the combats as he points at said player and yells “Ha, I killed your father, now you die.” It doesn't take much, but that minor change suddenly makes that entire plot ABOUT that character, rather than it HAPPENING TO a bunch of characters that are really neither here-nor-there about it. 

Personally, I believe in going a hell of a lot further when it comes to immersion and personalization of the LARP experience to your players. I’ll write more on that in the future. But for now, here’s my rallying call to event organisers everywhere.

Don’t fear personal plot.