Live-action game groups deal with all of the pitfalls that any social group must confront, be it favoritism, rival cliques, or competition for attention. Fortunately, game groups can benefit from the same techniques that help other social groups to thrive. Players in live-action games don’t have to be enemies, nor should they be. A game is a hobby and a craft, and players should feel that they receive fulfillment from their investment of time. It’s up to the organizers of games to develop the structure that allows people to enjoy the game and feel that their time is well-spent.
While many players believe that the most important way to promote fun is to create a solid set of rules, rules alone cannot tell you how to have fun. Following all of the rules for chess will not guarantee a good time playing if your opponent is abrasive, abusive, and determined to make sure that you don’t enjoy yourself. By the same token, the rules of a live-action game can’t protect players from participants who’ve decided to treat other players as adversaries. That means that shutting down bad behavior relies on the game community, and it’s up to you, the organizer, to create that community.
The First Step The earliest step in building a community is a simple one: make friends! People naturally form social groups out of families and friends. Groups that form around friendships allow people to play the game from a position of mutual trust. Without that trust, different groups become adversaries and compete with each other for fun, for victories over each other, and for the spotlight in the game. Playing with friends affords the opportunity to engage in reciprocity—the trading of favors in a constructive fashion.
Playing with people you trust means that you trust those people to give you opportunities and to play with your fun in mind, instead of treating you as a means to the end of their personal entertainment. Playing with adversaries causes negative reciprocity to appear: players attempt to cheat each other, or try to take more play opportunities than they give, because they don’t trust the other players to give them a chance to enjoy themselves. If you can’t make friends with the people with whom you’re playing a game, why are you playing with them?
Reciprocity: The Back-and-Forth Reciprocity is the anthropological term for the trading of favors and gifts among members of a community. In small groups, people often engage in positive reciprocity, in which they give gifts to each other because they have a vested interest in helping other people out—the group as a whole benefits, and you never know when you’ll need someone else’s help and approval. In very large communities like cities, people engage in negative reciprocity, in which they try to take advantage of one another and then vanish before retribution comes to pass.
Somewhere in the middle lies neutral reciprocity, in which you give and get in equal measure, because you need to at least be tolerable to the people around you if you don’t want to be kicked out of the community. This concept features in live-action game groups because your players are trading an important commodity: fun. Players engage in a give-and-take of who will feature in the spotlight of a given scene, and it’s up to you, the organizer, to decide who to feature, when to shift the spotlight, and when to step in and arbitrate a change of pacing.
More important than setting this pacing, though, is setting a good example for your players. Instead of waiting for your players to engage in reciprocity—letting them approach other participants and ask, “Hey, do you want to be in this scene?”— you need to promote this behavior. Tell your players in advance that you want them to engage other players. Tell them that the problems you’ve presented aren’t there to be solved alone. Tell them to give other players a chance to shine and to ask for the same favor in return!
Without guidance, the natural habit is for players to compete for dramatic space. Everyone wants to snatch up as much fun as they can have and nobody wants to trust anyone else to give them that time to shine. Experienced players may have learned that the give-and-take of gameplay works best when they bring other people into their stories and everyone at the game has a good time. After all, when other players have a good time, they come back to play again, and that’s a key to a successful chronicle.
As a Storyteller, though, the burden falls upon you to train other players into this behavior. Players will be naturally suspicious of the motives of other players, especially in antagonistic games like MET: Vampire The Masquerade. Part of your job is to teach them that it’s acceptable to work with other players even if that’s to further a story that works against each other’s characters. A Guide to Encouraging Community Building That’s the point of talking about reciprocity. It’s not enough just to set a game in motion and tell the players “These are the rules and this is the setting.” You need to also give them guidance in how they interact with each other, which means setting expectations for behavior.
Your players need to know not only what not to do—“don’t be that guy”—but also what they should do. That means reminding your players that they should try playing well together, by giving each other leeway, story hooks, and character time. Some examples of ways to encourage this cooperation include:
• Reminding players that their characters should act as mentors for other new characters. You can reinforce this behavior by providing valuable social credit—status, boons, positions, etc.—to players whose characters serve as mentors to new characters.
• Encouraging players to talk to their characters’ competitors and stage their antagonism beforehand. Instead of springing a surprise on another player and relying on rules and traits to resolve the conflict, have the players meet beforehand and decide what kind of dispute they want to play out and when they’re going to do it. This way, both players have their opportunity to participate, without anyone having the conflict “sprung” on them and derailing their evening’s entertainment. As a Storyteller, you can promote this by creating plotlines in which you invite players beforehand to stake out how they want to participate via public discussions, rather than managing lots of secret side-conversations. The characters might not know what their enemies are doing, but the players are working to build a story that’s satisfying to everyone.
• Working out ways to provide closure for characters who’ve been in the story for a long time. Characters played for an extremely long time amass so many resources that their mere presence shuts out participation by other players. It’s important to give other characters their chance to be involved in the game, and that means encouraging very powerful, very settled characters to step aside and let the new blood play a part of the scene. You may meet with resistance from the players of older characters about this, but when it’s your game, it’s your opportunity to make sure that everyone has a good time—not just the one player who’s played the same character for ten years, amassed every possible power, and dominates every scene in which she participates by sheer weight of experience. The Contested Resource: The Economy of Cool Almost everyone in a live-action game is competing for the resources necessary to have fun. Different players enjoy different aspects of the game, but most commonly, players want to interact with other players, to take part in the story, to use their characters’ abilities, and to feel like their participation was meaningful. Players will chase this satisfaction by using their character abilities and their own force of personality. For some players, the contest for fun is a zero-sum game: “In order for me to have fun, other players cannot.” This kind of adversarial play will drive away other players who can’t find or make their own opportunities. To overcome this, a game community needs to focus on three principles. Characters are Adversaries, Players are Not Mind’s Eye Theatre: Vampire The Masquerade games often focus on the politics of dysfunctional social systems—Kindred engaged in cutthroat competition for blood, territory, and influence. As a game organizer, it’s key to recognize that this kind of adversarial relationship is in the context of the game, not an excuse to play out rivalries between players. This means that players should be encouraged to play out their rivalries with the advice and consent of the rival. Making a secret plan to overthrow the Prince of the city may satisfy the goal of “I want to be Prince,” but approaching another player and working out an idea for a conflict between the Prince and an upstart is a means to satisfy the goal of “I want everyone to have a good time.” If a player’s satisfaction comes solely through trumping other players via rules mastery, this behavior will drive away anyone who doesn’t approach the game the same way. For the health of the game as a whole, it’s important to focus these types of play in constructive directions rather than destructive ones, by making sure that players always interact with the goal of promoting enjoyment for everyone involved in their scenes, not just for themselves. A corollary to this principle is that organizers must be ready and willing to eject players who are damaging the enjoyment of the rest of the game. Adversarial players will eventually drive out everyone but their own friends or people who are so heavily invested in the game that they would rather have a bad time than leave. This includes players whose only recourse is escalation—pressing every dispute into a rules-moderated battle to the death—and players whose excuse for bad behavior is “I was just doing what my character would do!” These players are placing the burden of reaction to their bad behavior on everyone else in the game, and as the overseer of a game, it’s your job to recognize that kind of antagonistic behavior and put a stop to it. Players Come in Many Forms While many players simply want to enjoy participating in the story and using their characters’ abilities, some players have fun through other avenues. Costuming, pageantry, pursuit of immersion, and playing against type are all equally valid ways to pursue fun. Building a successful game community means finding ways to foster those forms of engagement. Players need to feel that their choices for entertainment are valid. This task falls on the Storyteller, to make sure that these goals are recognized. Conversely, it’s important to establish what your game is not, so that players don’t come to the game expecting something that they’re not going to get, and so that they don’t try to change the game in ways that might be difficult for other players. Letting players know what they’re getting from the game up front makes sure that the players who show up have reasonable expectations. It also lets players know that if they do something you don’t want in the game, they’re going to be asked to change their behavior or find another game! Learning what your players want goes back to another facet of anthropology: observation. It’s fine to poll your players and ask what kind of game they want to play, but keep in mind that self-reporting is unreliable; players may feel pressured to report with answers that they think are cool or socially acceptable, or they may not recognize what they actually enjoy and mistakenly report, or they may simply lie. (The latter case is common among problem players, who will happily report that they come to games for “story and camaraderie” when they actually come to games to “defeat other players and prove my superior rules mastery.”) Instead, you need to watch what your players do, how they react, and to what stimuli their characters respond. Don’t just throw out an antagonist and then ask the players what they’re going to do. Listen in on the players’ conversations and focus on what the characters are trying to get or trying to avoid. Watch how they treat one another and what abilities they use. Read their character sheets and see where they’ve spent their points—chances are, if a player’s spent a lot of points on something, the player wants to use it. This is a lot of work, but nobody said that being a Storyteller was going to be a gig that you could sleep through! Once you have an idea of what interests a player, you can craft story elements that will engage this player. This in turn helps you to build your game community, because you can create elements that will give every player a chance to engage in the game. When no single player can monopolize the spotlight, everyone has an incentive to give-and-take with the other participants in order to share the chances to develop their character stories and take part in the action. Get ‘em Early It’s easier to create a culture for a game community at the outset than to change a community’s culture later. The Storyteller organizing the game sets that tone through written documents, announcements, and the choice of how to run and enforce the game. Establish your desired gameplay early; announce what you expect before you run a game, write it down in a game charter, and create characters and storylines designed to showcase what you want. If you wait for the game to take off on its own, the players with the most forceful personalities will shape the game culture, and they will drive the game toward what they want. Once the players have expectations about the game, it’s difficult to change those expectations without alienating people. If you build a culture early for a game, participants will spread that culture to new players. The game will establish an unwritten set of mores—behavioral codes—that are transmitted by players interacting with new players. If your initial player base has absorbed the culture that you want, they’ll pass it on to new players. If your player base has already fallen into adversarial behaviors, they’ll pass that on too, probably to the detriment of the game. When you recruit new players, make sure to impart your game culture to them early on. Your experienced players will do so simply by helping them to make characters, bringing them into the in-game social structures, and interacting with them in play, but you can nail down your expectations by talking to the new players when they first show up to join. Don’t just send them off with a staffer to make characters and jump into play; take a few minutes to explain your expectations about how they should behave, and also about what they should expect from your game. That way, they know that if the game isn’t going the way you’ve explained it, they should speak up instead of assuming that “it’s just how the game goes.” This is especially important when a large contingent of new players all show up at once. Groups like this will bring their own dynamic and they can represent a large culture shift if they bring their own style of play to the game. When a group shows up, make sure to set aside time to deal with them en masse so that you can give them all direction, rather than letting them divert the style of your game based on their own assumptions. Visitors present a special case for your game. Visitors to your game may not understand your local game culture. Set out your expectations early and make a priority of letting visitors know what’s accepted and what’s not; otherwise, they may bring bad habits from other games that disrupt your story. Visitors are especially prone to falling into negative reciprocity (as described previously), because what consequences will they face? If several visitors show up, murder their way through the characters in your story, and then leave that same night, never to be seen again, there’s no consequence for their antisocial behavior, but your game has to bear the brunt of it. You need to set the expectations from the start that you won’t tolerate that behavior from visitors, but conversely don’t let anyone blame you when someone else behaves badly. The blame lies with the offenders, and they should never get a pass simply by pointing a finger at you and saying that it’s your fault for not saying “no.” The Ten O’Clock Monster You’ve set down your expectations, explained to your players what behaviors you consider constructive and what you consider antagonistic, and familiarized yourself with your players’ character records so that you can tell what they want to be able to do. Unfortunately, you already have four different cliques in the game, and they’re all scrapping for supremacy (and for the chance to be at the head of the table when that juicy, delicious plot arrives). How do you bring them together? Now it’s time to deploy a little bit of social psychology dressed up as a game. In the famous Robbers Cave experiment, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif brought two groups of young boys to summer camp and gave them group identities and bonding activities. When the two groups finally met, conflict ensued; the groups competed for resources and established separate identities, with name-calling, derogatory songs, and flags to symbolize their claims to territory in the camp. Sherif attempted several means to bring the groups together with shared activities, but discovered that the groups only came together once they had a superordinate goal—a goal that they could only achieve by working together. Enter the ten o’clock monster (or puzzle, or plot, or…). You can bring your cliques together by pitting them against a problem that they can only solve by working together. Naturally, they’ll attempt all manner of clever solutions to get around this—but if your Vampire: The Masquerade story involves an enemy force that will ruin the city unless it’s confronted with Thaumatugical rituals, hard-hitting Potence, and a lot of Obfuscated spywork, your players will have no choice but to go to various groups for the pieces of the puzzle (unless there’s a player whose character has all of these powers, but you already know that this is a problem, right?) Putting your players in a position where they must work together to achieve their goals isn’t just sensible. According to realistic conflict theory, it’s the best (and possibly only) way to get them to cooperate between groups. Of course, there’s one final problem with this: You are then a new antagonistic group. The players are pitted against you. Fortunately, that’s your goal; you introduce the story, and the players take it and run with it. As long as you’ve established the basis of trust with your player group, they’ll accept that your goal is to give everyone a good time, and they’ll chew up the challenges that you craft while thanking you for it. Vampires have no reason to trust each other—but their players do. That trust, and the bond that allows the players to form a mutually-satisfactory game, is more important than any antagonism that should exist solely in the World of Darkness and never slip over into the world of gaming. Jesse Heinig is a long-time storyteller with experience as a White Wolf developer, a video game designer, and a LARP organizer. His current LARP focus is in bringing interdisciplinary knowledge to live-action game design.
Originally published in Mind’s Eye Theatre: Storyteller Secrets by By Night Studios. Presented here under Resources for chronicles and live play.