3. What is involved in participating in “The Game of Sunken Places?”
This game is going to be held over a Friday evening and Saturday day, February 24th and 25th, at Wyvern Manor in the city of Orange. The Friday event is a workshop event; it lays the foundations for the participants to discuss what will be going on and to formally select the roles they are going to play. (The location will also be negotiable, depending upon the location of the majority of the Contestants.) On Saturday, the Game will be designed by a portion of the participants, who will arrive in the late morning, and then played by the remainder, who will arrive around teatime.
What is this “workshop?” Do I really need to attend?
The workshop is a vital part of the game, most importantly to meet everyone before beginning the hard work of building and running a game on the fly. It is also helpful for you as players to help you determine the roles you want—and explain the duties you will have—and lay out how the event will go.
We will also have some activites planned to help in the roleplaying process; exercises and games to help the players get into their roles easily, and to work with (or against) each other effectively. These should be pretty entertaining.
Lastly, I very much want to talk to all of you players ahead of time about how you think about roles in larping—not the characters we play, but the roles we ourselves take on when we participate in larps.
I found the book “Sunken Places” appealing to transform into a larp because of how the all characters break down into the categories I see larpers taking on all the time:
• the game designers, who originate the idea, recruit players and helpers, and makes the game happen
• the helpers that the game designer recruits—assistants, refs, cooks, prop-makers, “crunchies,” and so on—who might have a strong effect on how the game goes, but aren’t in charge of it
• the roleplayers, who might play PCs or NPCs but in either case, they are more interested in inhabiting a role, living an experience, or influencing a narrative, than playing to “win the game”
• and the hardcore game players—the competitors, who play because they want to overcome challenges, either from the game or from each other.
These four roles turn into the four types of characters in “Sunken Places”: Designers, Builders, Automatons, and Contestants. Some of us make larps: some of us live them; some of us play them. And they’re all necessary.
Most of us have been in more than one role at one time or another, but generally we tend to gravitate towards some and away from others. What is it about these roles that appeals to us, or repels us? What do we take away from our experiences in larp? What are we looking for, and how are we finding it in this uncommon pursuit? No doubt there are more reasons than there are participants. I’m interested in hearing all of them.