One of the innovations we tried with this larp was to make each potential participant fill out a questionnaire which would give us an idea of what character they would like to play. Once we had that information for a reasonable number of players, held a casting meeting and suggested several characters to each player with a brief precis. If the player was happy with one of the choices offered, we marked them as cast, if unhappy we offered several new characters until a choice was made. I found this very helpful, because it helped us tune our larp by putting people in parts that worked well for them and for closely related characters. It also meant that with some of the storylines, particularly those involving romance, depression and same-gender relationships, we could be far more relaxed about casting players whom we knew would be fine with the experience. And, of course, it gives me the opportunity to anser the vexed question: what do larpers really want?

The questionnaire (see Appendix) had a broad-brush approach. We were interested in how people felt about the staples of theatre-style larps: politics, romance and combat; we were also interested in how much work they were willing to put in before hand in costuming and helping us out; how much perserverance they would provide in carrying out their character goals; if it would bother them to be cast into a same-gender relationship; and a few other bits and pieces that were specific to slotting them into place in our particular larp.

In terms of overall attendance, KapCon itself had 119 people passing through its doors, of which nearly a quarter (27) were female. Sanctuary ended up with 62 players, of which just over a third (21) were female. We had a total of 70 people expressing interest at some point, six men and two women did not attend after expressing interest, three of these let us know before the event, one had to leave early, three didn’t show, and one was turned away half an hour before the start time because we hadn’t realised that the no-shows had left us some vacant characters. Our size was comparable to the previous year’s larp, Flight of the Hindenberg, which had 60 people. Interestingly, we didn’t have a significant increase in numbers from the previous year, which I would have expected from the increased KapCon attendance (up by about 20).  This may have been in part a self-selection out of Sanctuary by people who disliked our themes, it may also mean that we weren’t advertising well to the new people coming to KapCon.

The specific statistics relating to the questionnaire were interesting.[1] In some cases, they confirmed my gender preconceptions, in others they refuted them. I will note, however, that in all questions which had a range of possible answers there was a healthy middle ground held by both genders, so any conclusions I make from these numbers relate to tendencies rather than pigeon holes. (I hate being told what games girls/boys ought to like just as much as anybody.)

Political interest was reasonably balanced across the sexes, with a slight bias towards men. 10% of both men and women ‘called themselves Machiavelli,’ the middle range answer was the choice of 68% of women and 85% of men, the low range answer was more popular with women, 21% women instead of 5% men.  Fighting and swashbuckling were far more popular with men: 33% of men wanted to buckle their swash compared to one lone female, just over half of men chose the middle range answer and only 15% of wanted the low range answer. In contrast, women were equally divided between the low and middle range answers at 47% each. Goal difficulty was slightly more attractive to men than women, but not by much, 30% of men and 20% of women said that struggling against uncertain fate was just part of the fun. Both genders tended to be in favour of achievable goals (63% men and 58% women), but for the low range answers, of the six people who asked for easy or no goals, three were women.

I had expected romance to be far more popular with women and it both was and wasn’t. No female participant selected the low range answer, 74% opted for the middle range ‘romance would bring a little spice’ answer, and 26% were looking for true love. Men had a wider spread in their answers – 13% wanted nothing to do with it, and nearly half chose the mid range option. I was surprised, however, by the number of men seeking true love, 40% of men (16) selected the high end answer. Romance lives! On a related note, when questioned about how players felt about roleplaying a same-gender relationship, 65% of men and a whopping 84% of women were fine with it.

Costuming was another field where women were keener than men. As with romance, no women selected the low range option: about two thirds wanted the middle range and a third wanted the top range. In contrast, a quarter of men said ‘Meh’ to costuming, 55% wanted the middle range and only 20% wanted the top range answer. Women were also the leaders in emotional hard-coreness. Over half the women asked for wailing, angst, and gnashing of teeth, 42% chose the middle range answer and only one wanted the low range answer. Men were a little more likely to have stiff upper lips at 15% with the low range answer and only a third with the high range, however both genders had a significant number choosing the middle range of angstiness.

On a final note, when we began writing characters, one of my fellow organisers said airily: “I think women are more organised than men, we’re probably going to get a higer proportion of female signups than male in the early months. It’s horrible gender stereotyping, I know, but it will help us with planning.”[2] Actually, my co-organiser was wrong. In the first two months after we opened registrations, the numbers of male and female registrants as a percentage of their final numbers was so close that the difference is barely visible on a graph. In the later months, November to January, there was more variation in the ratios of women and men signing up, however I find no evidence to suggest an echelon of predominately female keen first-off-the-mark signer-uppers – men seem just as likely to make us happy by being organised and signing up early.[3]

How is this relevant to other people’s larps? Well, it depends on your audience, really. KapCon is a well known convention which has been running for 17 years. It predominately caters to tabletop roleplayers, and the Saturday night larp was introduced as an event eight years ago, so it’s been around long enough to be considered a fixture. I don’t have statistics on the demographics of KapCon as a whole (beyond the male: female ratio of this year’s attendance), but to my eye there are very few teenagers. Most of the participants are in their 20s and 30s with a few older. There is a wide range in the games being run, from old school to indie, many home brew games, and a strong thread of experimentalism, which is a roundabout way of saying that I think the potential audience for our larp was both mature and sophisticated in its roleplaying tastes. The statistics I’ve presented here I expect to be most of use to future organisers of the KapCon Saturday night larp, but also to be of interest to other larp-writes. I expect that the trends I’ve found here will probably vary from audience to audience – for instance, a student club run out of a university might have very different overall tastes – however, at the least this discussion might provide some food for thought for people in the planning stage of their own events.

We used a number of technological assists in the writing process. I think that the biggest one was the internet. We loaded all our in-game material onto a free wiki site (called PBWiki) which had user-friendly editing facilities. This meant that it was easy for the different organisers to keep track of the characters the others were writing and add our own extras to the content. I found the edit history feature very helpful, as well as the hyperlinks which made it easy to move from character to character. When it was time to send out character sheets we used a PDF converter that was part of the wiki site to make files that were printable and emailable. One surprise I got after we had started emailing the sheets out was realising that the hyperlinks survived into the PDF format and that several people had clicked on the links to see what was said about people their character ought to know. Fortunately (phew) the wiki was also password locked so the players didn’t find out what they ought not before the larp.

We made use of a Google Group as an emailing address for people’s questionnaires. This meant that all three organisers could see and comment on the information as it came in. The main problem I had as the person who was doing most of the emailing was that if I hit “Reply to Author” to an incoming questionnaire, unless I put a CC address to my own email account or the Google Group itself, I lost all record of the email I’d sent out. We also set up a couple of Google Groups as faction specific fori for some of the players who had asked to be put in touch with other players. This was very successful – people got more comfortable with each other on an out-of-character level and started their in-character roleplaying sometimes several weeks before the event. For the next larp I run, I’ll be setting up a specific mailing list or forum for all factions and inviting all the players as soon as their characters are assigned.

Let’s face it. GMs are evil. That’s why we GM, so that we can get the sick twisted pleasure of watching hapless players dance at our bidding. We had a few psyche outs going on in the period before the larp. One was listing a character on people’s character sheets as someone they knew and liked and not mentioning that the character had died shortly before the game started, so that they would find out in play and be upset about it. Another was ‘accidentally’ leaving a particular player off the public list of characters, because his character had a secret that would become obvious as soon as people knew who was playing the part. A third was the presentation of a sheet of rumours to a character who was ‘special’ for five minutes on the morning of the event and not giving it to him again – when the larp began, his character could remember what he could remember. (Good times.)

Some things that I wish we had also done include: not telling some players about a particular traumatic event on the character sheets previously mailed to them but giving them a piece of paper describing the event five minutes before the larp started; making a sock puppet of the ‘dead’ character and interacting with other players in the weeks before the larp and doing more to keep in-character secrets truly secret until the game started.

Dance, monkeys, dance!

This section is effectively a scratch pad of what I thought went well and what could be improved.

The single most successful thing we did for Sanctuary was to split the player group into factions and to put the factions into separate rooms for the first twenty minutes of the larp. This meant that everyone got a warm-up period of roleplaying with characters that in larp-space they ought to know well. From my point of view, in the five minutes between the players moving into their assigned spaces and me getting back from an outside errand the whole network of rooms had come alive: the priests were having a catechism session, the rulers were holding court, the beggars were soliciting money. To me it felt like people transitioned from out-of-character to in-character very quickly. The players also had strong group identities which they could gel with or bounce off which I think worked well for the story arcs of the game.

I’ve discussed the statistics that come from running a questionnaire above. Overall, I thought that this form of casting worked very well. We generally found it was easier to cast people who opted for extreme answers in either the high or low range. The comments people made at the end of the questionnaire were also very useful, and it was a lot easier when at least one of us knew the person we were trying to cast. The main downside to this method was the extra time this took, but I think it was worth it. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish we’d been more organised about casting and had held smaller more frequent meetings – we held three, and were trying to cast between 15 and 20 people a pop which meant that those unlucky enough to be considered last in a given meeting were given less scope for choice. At the third meeting, instead of suggesting two or three options per player, we were instead focusing on which parts we really wanted to cast which, again, gives people less scope for choice. I found also that the people who sign up on the day are as reliable as a leaf in a summer breeze. They might turn up and be excellent or they might reach 7pm and realise that their brains have melted and dissapear without letting you know that you have an extra space available. I think that keeping 10-15% of your characters as parts that you can live without casting – characters that have their own concerns but won’t mess up other people’s plotlines if they aren’t there – is a wise precaution.

In terms of guidelines for casting, I think that the most successfully played romance plotlines were between people who were at least moderately friendly with each other in real life but were not, had never and were not planning to be romantically involved with each other. This meant that they could skip the trust issues that you get with complete strangers but that they weren’t getting real life bleedover from their actual relationship. It was useful to cast strong roleplayers as the faction heads because they set the tone for their entire group. To me, the two most personally intense plotlines were from people who were cast only a few days before the larp, and I’m wondering if that’s partly because they were ‘supporting’ characters who weren’t plot critical, and so had a lot of room to move in terms of emotional immersion.

The other new thing we tried was getting head shot photos of people and putting them on the character sheets. This took ages. We got photos from about half the player pool and the effectiveness varied. The idea was to make it easier for people to identify each other but the feedback afterwards was mixed - some people found it very useful, others less so. Some things that hampered their effectiveness were that we didn’t get pictures of everyone and the people with few photos were disadvantaged compared to the people with many, that we printed the photos in black and white which were therefore less legible, that some people looked very different in full costume and makeup compared to a photo of them in mufti. In particular, we had a couple of characters who were in hiding and giving a photo of their undisguised state to the people who had known them before they ran off was less useful than I’d hoped, primarily because the disguises were so very effective.

Name:

Email:

1. How do you feel like costuming?

2. How do you feel about political plotlines?

3. What's your take on combat-oriented characters?

4. And what about romantic plotlines?

5. If you were to find yourself in a romantic plotline, what's your take on same-gender relationships?

6. How emotionally hard-core would you like your character to be?

7. Comedy or Tragedy?

8. What kind of background do you want your character to come from?

9. Ambition

10. Preparation

Comments:

Questionnaire Status:

- What is your gender?

- How central do you want your character to be to the big world-changing game events?

- Would you rather be?

- Are there any people you particularly want or don't want to be interacting with in the Larp.

Comments:

- What is your preferred name/handle for public character lists?

Comments:

- If you've played in previous Larps, what are things that you really enjoyed about the characters you've played?

Comments: