Article:
Approaches to LRP: Cinematic versus Sandbox

One of the many hats that I regularly wear has to do with writing and running freeform LRP events from a group of friends of mine. This particular group has a long-standing tradition of convening twice a year at a group of cottages in the Midlands for a long weekend of gaming which culminates on the Saturday night with a big freeform homebrew LRP event which everyone plays in and/or contributes to. Ten years ago when the group first got together it was only about 10 people. When I first got involved in these games the average attendance was about 20 people, Now however the group is pulling over 40 people each time, and this has had quite an impact on our collective philosophy when it comes to writing the central LRP game.

Our games used to be built around quite a tight narrative, with every pre-generated character having one or more sheets of background story and narrative goals which they were supposed to try and achieve by the end of the game. A lot of the games also involved a larger overall story arc which often involved conflicting factions, or some kind of external threat (such as a giant monster in the basement).Although this format of game was largely successful it did suffer in a number of ways.

- Losing plot information

When a particular plot is contingent on one or more players divulging certain pieces of information to the rest of the group, you can't always rely on those players to remember to do this. Or they will try to do this, but they will mess it up one way or the other. Either way, this leads to subsequent and related plot elements falling over like a row of dominoes, leading to some disappointment all round.

- Invisible football

When one or more important plots are happening simultaneously it can be difficult for a player to prioritise his or her actions - i.e. it can be tough to tell what things you should do which are important, and which are not important. This can lead to behaviour we have dubbed 'invisible football' where people are chasing all the plot threads they can find without knowing if they are moving their characters forwards or not.

- Feeling unimportant

In a cinematic narrative, although we all like to think that we are the centre of our own stories, the simple truth is that when it comes to 'big plot' not everyone can be involved, and some players will steal more of the limelight than others. The unfortunate side effect of all this is that, if you are one of those players which doesn't get to be central to 'big plot' you can feel marginalised to the extent that you are no longer motivated to pursue your own character's goals, as they seem to be less important by comparison.