For my many and various sins, over the past few weeks I have been looking at a lot of job applications. What many of them have in common is that they are nowhere near as good as they should be. Some of these have come from people who have very shiny degrees from supposedly shiny universities. Some have come from people who appear only to have a very vague idea of the purpose of a C.V. or what a Covering Letter is for.
So, in order to prevent the further spread of incidents where I run from the building, weeping at yet another six pages of total irrelevance, here's my quick ten point plan to applying for jobs.
Read the Job Description. Not the job title, not the salary, not the "how to apply" section. Read the Job Description. Slowly. Be honest with yourself. Is this the job for you? Can you do this job? Does it fit in with where you want to go? If I see an application from someone who wants to work in Field X and has applied to work in Field Y I will put it in the bin. I do not want to hire someone who does not want to do the job. It is a bad idea to hire someone who cannot do the job. You must prove to me, using the methods of a C.V. and a Covering Letter that you want the job and that you will be awesome at it. That will make me happy.
Read the Job Description, again. Seriously. Now, summarise what the job is about. In your own words, as my English teacher used to say. If you can't do that, then either they are not explaining themselves properly (quite possible - and if so, do you really want to work for these people?) or you don't understand what they want. If you don't understand what they want then you cannot apply for the job. If you still want the job, despite not knowing what it is (Why? Why?) Find a friend and ask them. Any decent Job Description should have a list of skills and experience they want from a candidate. Copy and paste these into a new document. Shorten them or rewrite them until they make sense to you. Congratulations, you now have a framework for your Covering Letter.
Write your Covering Letter. Never forget to do this. The C.V. is not enough. The Covering Letter is the sell. That's the thing that makes me want to hire you. I have no idea what half of these places, jobs or experiences on your C.V. are - you need to explain them to me in your Covering Letter. And you need to explain them to me in a way that matches the things I've asked for in my Job Description. Remember those points you took from the Job Description? Those are your headings. Under each one, add a few sentences about how you have done these things. If I want an "Experienced Events Manager" give me examples of several events you have managed. Preferably different sorts of events, large and small scale and with different companies and audience groups.
Tell me why you will make my life easier. I want to know how you work. I want to be able to see how you tackle problems, how you have improved things, how you go about resolving issues. I want to see what impact you have on people around you and on the final product. For each thing you said you have done make sure it is relevent to something required from the job description and tell me how you did it, and what the end result was. Make it impossible for me to look at my Job Description without thinking of all the cool things you have done that make you perfect for this job.
Re-write your C.V. Every time you apply for a job, you will need to re-write your C.V. Seriously. Find a good template online, or borrow from a friend. Make sure that you include the most up-to-date and relevent experience. Put the most recent first. Bullet point the specific projects you worked on to give me a feeling for what this job was about. Unless this is your first or second job out of school, college or University focus on work. Keep the education section brief. I do not really care about awards you got when you were thirteen, unless I'm recruiting for a project about awards for thirteen year olds.
Shorten It! I do not want to wade through hundreds of pages. I want to be able to understand what you are saying. Read over your Covering Letter. Check your C.V. They should be a maximum of two pages of A4 each. I have hundreds of documents to read. I will not read the long ones, especially if they ramble and I can't see quickly how they are relevent to the Job Description.
Be Honest, Be yourself. Do not Lie. Do not try to be cool. Please, really? I mean, we all make little tweaks and that's fine, but theatre and the arts industry is a small, incestuous bunch of people. If I see you have worked somewhere and I know someone there I will call them and ask them about you. A word of warning on "personality" in applications. It's good to give them a flavour of you, and no-one wants to work in a place where they cannot be themselves, but don't overdo it. It is a sad fact that applications for work in the arts try to look interesting and inventive, and can tend towards the "kooky". Now is not the time to be kooky. Now is the time to be professional and look like you can get shit done. Do not put smiley faces. Do not add an animated gif to the bottom of the email. By all means, use a nicely designed template, perhaps with a photo, but keep it sharp and stylish. Just like you.
Get Someone Else To Read It. You should now have spent hours on this. You are bored of it and you are probably a bit stressed. Good. That means you've put in the work. Now, get someone else to look at it. At the very least, run it through a spell checker. Make sure you send your friend the Job Description so they can check you have answered all the things on it.
Send It In On Time and To The Right Person. Applications that arrive at three minutes to the deadline are annoying. They may not get read, especially if there are many applicants. Remember, it is unlikely that there is a special, magic person specifically waiting to read your C.V. They are, if they are me, trying to do a million other things at once. Also, if you are asked to send a C.V. into a named contact, whatever you do put their name at the top of your Covering Letter. There is nothing more annoying in the world than receiving a generic "Dear Sir or Madam" letter. It instantly puts my back up.
Don't Give Up! I know getting work is tough, but please take heart. I've read a lot of bad applications and the good ones really shine through. So send them in. Don't be shy! If you've put in the work and you've written a good application. Even if you don't get the job, do ask for feedback.
Good luck!
At a recent game I decided to play a male character, there were a few reasons driving this, the golden rule (the rule of cool), the fact that I've done a lot of short-term drag king performance and photography and would love to try something more long-form. But the deciding factor was that, when I thought about the type of character I wanted to play for Rockets and Rayguns he was absolutely, definitely, male. Not a boyish girl, or a tomboy, or a transgender character, or a transvestite character, or a girl dressed as a boy for plot reasons (the Viola option). But a boy. Just a boy.And so, "just" Jack was born, or rather made. And it's the making of the character I want to write about here. First, a quick thought on gender as character. We use stereotypes as shorthand when we play and perform characters. Gender is one of the oldest stereotypes in the book, it varies from culture to culture, and largely ignored or unexplored as a playable character varient in LARP. We are assumed to be the gender we pass for. In my case, female. Yet masculine/feminine is a treasure trove (or minefield) of tropes for an actor or larper to explore. Many of us will play with them, even unconsciously, without realising we are doing so. The things that we assume are natural, are in fact, taught and learned. So they can be re-learned. And performed. For more detail on the theory, don't read me, read Butler. The character was written quickly and easily with the aid of two friends, group concepts being a fun and easy way to ensure interaction at a game. He was - without apologies - an assemblage of stereotyped young, male "bad boys". The sort your mother warns you about. The nutshell concept was a morally grey twist on "plucky assistant" and therefore he was designed in contrast to the pulp action, square jawed squeaky-clean hero of the 1950s universe. Personality-wise he was designed to be charming, conniving and a "user/manipulator" which came from my desire to play a smart, but not book-smart character. I use avatars and references from pop culture when building characters and this one was in varying degrees: Pinky from Brighton Rock, Charlie from The Vesuvius Club, a terrible take on Tintin, a young Brando and Kenneth Halliwell. Finally, the stats. Easy enough - I just picked as many combat skills as I could afford. I like roleplaying flaws a lot, and often feel they give more characterisation than advantages (which tend to be more mechanical and gamist) so I added a violent streak a mile wide, impatience and vindictiveness, none of which were rules-based flaws, but made the character sing to me. The personality was in place, the next stage was the physicality. I am lucky to have a few friends in the queer and trans community who shared with me some useful tips, websites and links on how to pass as male, including the excellent ftmguide.org. To be male means different things over time, so I also used a lot of resources on 1950s male fashion and haircuts. My build is tall but slim, with some muscle, so that's a good frame to work with for presenting as a youthful male. A chest binder vest gave me the right silhouette, and a "softie" inside my underwear was a curious sensation yet absoulutely altered my sense of balance, centre of gravity and the way I held myself. The clothes were bought from charity stores or borrowed from my partner. The most difficult thing to find was a pair of dress trousers that fit me, especially around the waist, and dress shirts with a small enough chest and collar. Once fully dressed, the transformation was not shocking, but certainly looked masculine, if not male. My main concern was that I would be taken for a girl-dressed-as-a-boy, based on the fact that this would be a common enough in-game concept. This meant, to my mind, that I had to over-extend the masculine behaviours in my performance in a way that a cis-gender male would not, whilst also not coming across as ridiculous. A difficult tightrope to walk. I would also have to be prepared to correct people if they used the wrong pronoun. The clothes helped. Having the right shape, and having clothes that were quite thick and well made - have you ever noticed how much more substantial men's clothes are than women's? - gave a certain sort of gender armour to the character. The straight lines and bagginess of men's clothing hid curves and big, heavy boots gave me ballast. Giving my hair a boyish cut and style also helped as it emphasised any squarness in my face. I went backwards and forwards on the subject of facial hair and thickening my eyebrows. In the end, I opted to look clean shaven. Partly this was to emphasise the youth of the character, but a lot of it was about my own dislike of facial hair on men and the fact that when I applied fake facial hair as a test I felt too much like a fake male or drag artist. I had to be natural within the character so I needed to do everything to feel as realistic as possible to myself. Next, movement. How would I sit, stand and walk? Because most of my experience is from photoshoots or stageshows the change was in learning how to be in role for an extended period of time when I'm not conscious of people watching me and not posed. Relaxing into the role was crucial so I didn't give off that sense of being "on show", especially as the character is very comfortable in his masculinity and is a physically powerful and capable character who doesn't care what other people think. So my job was to practice until I didn't have to think about it. Movement was helped by the clothes and I developped my own simple internal checklist of how to sit, stand and walk. Wider than usual, and with a swagger that started at the shoulders - dropping a shoulder before I started to move helped. Sitting with legs wide and generally taking up space and being very physically confident within that space. I spent the few weeks before the game observing men with similar builds to mine and how they moved. Fortunately I was not arrested. Smaller movements such as holding cups and cutlery, smoking cigarettes and personal tics were layered on during the game itself. They were more about giving me something to do with my hands so I didn't fidget, which would indicate background anxiety - as opposed to when I wanted to actually indicate IC anxiety. Playing the character involved a lot of un-subtle extended "masculine" behaviours: lots of flirting with female characters (to the point of having a quick OC check-in on the issue), being physically aggressive, unselfconsciousness and IC sexism. These were both about playing the character and about playing the gender of the character - itself a part of the character. There were also other mannerism that were gender-derived, but perhaps not as obvious. Jack is a "strong silent type" so doesn't talk as much as my other characters. His face is blank and less expressive, tending towards scowls, leers, sulks or barks of laughter and eye-rolls. This reflected the fact that his emotional range was pretty limited (EQ being a dump stat for the 1950s teenage boy). There's a photo here, in all his glory. Note trademark scowl.The reaction to my presentation of a male-gendered character was interesting and worth commenting on. The people I roleplayed most closely with, all of whom knew OC that I intended to play as male, all reacted and responded as if my character was male. I am not sure whether this is a reflection on their willing suspension of disbelief or my performance. I imagine it's a combination of the two. From conversations afterwards, people have been quite flattering towards my depiction including wondering whether they themselves - as a cis-gendered male - look and behave in that way. It is no coincidence, in my opinion, that those who interacted with me more felt more strongly that I came across as male. Those who saw me from afar or only talked to me briefly, tended to assume I was female dressed as male. All good characterisation in LARP is a slow-burn performance, the more you do it, the more your character comes across. The same is true of gender.
This weekend I played in Rockets, Rayguns and Really Nice Tea. The game is run on the same rules system as Victoriana (as well as being at the same site) which gave it a similarly immersive, high story low mechanics feeling. I remember being very happy to see that it had those rules because it meant I already knew them and I already knew that those rules produced the kind of gaming experience I enjoyed. The focus was very much on skills that reinforced character and roleplay, with the primary character creation mechanism being archetypes such as Scholar, Thug, Engineer etc and tweaks added on top. The pre-game briefing confirmed my hopes when we discussed “the rule of cool” (if it looks cool, and sounds cool, chances are that something cool will come out of it, regardless of the mechanics) and the importance of overacting. Playing the rules and using skills, such as those for hand-to-hand combat, rely on heavily telegraphing what you are about to do to the other person, so that they may react – preferably overreact – appropriately. For example, a posh character could shout “Queensbury rules!” before putting their fists up, whilst a lower class character might sneer “Come and ‘ave a go, if you think yer ‘ard enough.” There was a rich, rewritten 1950s history game background that mixed Quatermass, Dan Dare and various boys own adventures. As an era, it worked really well. Just retro enough to feel like a strange, unusual place, but also at the very edges of modernity. The history was handily taped up on the bathroom doors so we could refresh our memories every so often. This was backed up by lots of lovely little touches - swing music played from the kitchen whilst a red-lipsticked military dressed lady served the tea and flirted with people. Cigarettes and cola were recommended by doctors for whatever ailed you. Passports, with different colours for different nationalities gave a lovely way of keeping track of your character's skills and abilities and the ref team were beautifully, immersively dressed as flat-capped Janitors. All of this gave a lot of scope for playing story rather than game – my own personal preference. There was a game, there was a plot involving aliens of two different types and any manner of mad science and politicking for other people to get involved in. What the game excelled at was the fact that one could choose to participate in it or not. There were incidents that coloured the experience, but aside from punching some space aliens they played second fiddle to the storylines that my character was embroiled in. I intensely dislike games that are "on rails" - where something has happened and suddenly everyone is compelled to get involved. Aside from the fact that it makes for awkward, hamfisted plot with a capital "P", it also runs counter to how I enjoy LARP - I want to have time to develop my character's personality and having to do something which they would never do in (as opposed to something they are being forced to do, or have been coerced into doing) can be immersion breaking. I was particularly lucky in that I was playing with some people who I knew well, and who I trusted as players to give good game so I could attempt a challenging character (I was playing a male character, for a start, more on that in another post) and know I was being supported. It was a very good place to "find oneself" as a character, and find myself I did having been double-teamed by two friends who had conspired to play my character's long-lost parents, a revelation on the Saturday night I had not at all expected and was still reeling with the consequences long after the game had ended. Admittedly, such soap-opera theatrics might not be to everyone's taste, but it was certainly my cup of tea.
"I couldn't be in charge." I make an anxious face, and look up at him, fiddling with the gold wedding band on my finger, trying not to cry. "I'm not smart like he was... and I'm only a woman." The part of me playing the role was trying not to laugh. The feminist within me was screaming. There was also another part, watching the other players' reaction, seeing the flicker in his eyes as he realised what he was doing, letting him take charge, lead me, rescue me. I'm playing a non-standard role in a Vampire game - there are some details on how I wrote the character in a previous post here. Writing characters is very different to playing them, and I'm finding the experience of playing someone who is not very smart, not very ambitious and entirely comfortable, even confident, with those choices a chance to explore some new aspects of gaming.The obvious one is about learning to play support roles, and the pleasure you can get in giving other people lots of game, like in the example above. My character does not jump into the limelight, and actively removes herself from it. She sits down a lot, she doesn't always speak up, she waits until someone comes to her. The other, equally, obvious one, is about playing with stereotypes of female frailty. I've done this a little in the past with a seductive, unhinged character, using the ideas of "tart with a heart" and "hysteria" then taking them to their unnatural conclusions (this is a Vampire game, after all). But sexy, crazy ladies are exciting and powerful in their own way - certainly powerful in a game about sexualised power, which Vampire often is. The difference between the two is more than looks. Both of them were traditional interpretations of female weakness, but they play out in opposing ways. The first was very overt in her weakness. She took centre stage, had fits, wore daring costumes, was blatant and over the top in her ramblings. She was also clearly distressed by her own failings. This character is subtle with her weaknesses, and she is not upset by them. Instead, they are part of who she is. She does not feel bad for, say, being unable to read, it's just a fact. Similarly, she is happy being in the background and avoiding a leadership role. In the game, the time I roleplayed being visibly upset was when my character felt she was about to be forced into a leadership role. She is grounded, sensible and pragmatic. But she is also sexist. She believes she is limited by a number of things: her upbringing, her social class, her intellect, or lack thereof and also the fact she is a woman. Now, I chose to play this role and as I play her I realise how interesting I'm finding this aspect of her personality.Start with the things I find hard. I find the costume hard - it's unflattering, clompy and frumpy. It also has a pink cardigan. I find not taking charge hard and not immediately jumping on big bits of plot and exploring them straight away very difficult. Yet conversely, I'm enjoying some of these things too. I like not being flirted with, being treated with care and concern but without implied desire. I also like being able to offer up pieces of the plot to other people a great experience, it's the difference between saying "I have the magic knife of X" and saying "well, I heard this rumour about a magic knife, does that make sense to you?" - one gives my character (in-game) power, the other gives me as a player the power to give other players plot. I like the way that her "weakness" makes game for other characters, by being unable to do something for herself, she creates the need for someone to help her. This is an extension of the social roleplay rules - cowardly characters help brave characters look braver, for example. Here, my character's belief in her inadequacy supports other characters who, being equally old fashioned, seek to be gallant, or even more blatantly sexist. Her naivity allows others to be manipulating, and letting oneself be manipulated is a secret joy of roleplaying - as a player I know that their intentions are not entirely wholesome, but it is fun to be part of their plot, albeit in an unconscious fashion. Too often, as a female roleplayer, there is the tendency to play outgoing, exciting characters with strong personalities. Part of this is the general freedom that roleplay confers on everyone - the chance to be a hero or villain. When we all live generally mundane lives, this is very liberating. For women, it can be doubly so, add the day to day grind of a still sadly sexist society and the chance to play gloriously powerful women is extremely enjoyable. What this can mean, is that I can sometimes feel guilty for playing a weak woman. I feel in part as if I am "letting the side down" because I am confirming a stereotype in game, of something I find personally upsetting out of game.When we play, we are characters in a story. Disposable figures. Safe (assuming your roleplay group is good and supportive) places to explore these ideas. There is a strong element of trust involved. I trust that people understand the character I play is not the same as the person I am, and that, as the disclaimer notices run, the ideas expressed here do not reflect the views of the management.
A recent convesation on Facebook got me thinking about personal tastes and character in theare performance and LARP. I said that one of my characters was a two bottles of wine character. This was partly about the fact that a little inebriation helps me roleplay this bombastic wildchild, but also that she drinks wine. I made a little joke about how it was essential to my characterisation, then realised it was true.
Roleplaying a character's tastes and attitudes goes far beyond how they act and sound. Let's ignore movement, voice and actual behaviours for a moment, Off the top of my head a few come to mind - namely costume, food and drink choices, posture, "relaxed" facial expression. I'm sure there are lots more. All of these things contribute towards how your character is perceived by others before you have done or said a thing. And that's good roleplay.
We can't all play the Pirate King all the time, and nor should we. There's a lot of fun in being the power behind the throne, and a lot of subtle, supportive roleplay to be done. You are in the background, someone else is doing the talking, or the fighting and your character is not really engaged or interested but you are still roleplaying. Otherwise you become one of those terrible people at "open mic" events who bugger off when they've done their bit.
There are other ways of roleplaying rather than being active and engaged at all times. These elements of personal taste all convey your character even when you are not working directly with the plot or with other characters storyline.
Here are a few examples of how personal taste can be reflected without saying a word.
A rich character may enjoy caviar, have good quality clothes, with expensive looking jewels. A physically powerful and aggressive character may swig from a hip flask, wear armour, or heavy leather jackets or big boots. A sweet and meek character may wear pastels and drink weak tea, not too hot.
All of these elements, and more, combine to give us a sense of who this person is. If they are a devious sort, they may merely give us a sense of who they are pretending to be. But if they are a well-written (or well performed, or well roleplayed sort) there will be subtle ways in which these elements of personal taste give us an insight into who they really are underneath.
So we can go a bit further. A character who is secretly wealthly might dress in rags but have a real taste (and understanding) of champagne. Or a hidden gold pocketwatch he consults when he thinks no-one is looking. A character who is secretly a spy might never actually drink the alcohol offered, even though she is pretending to be a careless bon vivant. There's a pleasure in planning such a breadcrumb trail for other characters to "find you out", just as there's a pleasure in playing detective.
This is important in collaboratively creating good game, because it also allows you to play a rich and detailed secondary role. In film, theatre or television where supporting characters are generally made quite obvious by their inability to have names, backgrounds or anything beyond acting as functions of the plot rather than part of it. In LARP everyone is part of the story at all times, it's just some people are more obvious than others.
Interestingly, when you chose to be more obvious, these "secondary elements" become even more important. You risk looking one dimensional if you do not fill out your character with quirks, tastes and interesting habits because they are so observed and so easy to see. You become Angry Fighter or Nasty Wizard. The layering of subtle and not-so subtle parts of a performance creates a detailed character with nuance and internal contradictions. Try Angry Fighter Who Likes Delicate Fruit Tea (a secret love, a taste for the finer things?) or Nasty Wizard Who Never Drinks Hot Things (a phobia of getting burnt, an affliction caused by an enemy?)
Of course, there are players who like delicate fruit tea and never drink hot things, but it might also be a part of there roleplaying.
Like me and the red wine.
"How did you think I did?"
In notes very similar to an anxious actor, seeking praise for a recent performance, we gathered around the bar and discussed how we had played our characters. Last weekend saw the first game of Restitution, a new WOD game written by one of my friends, and indeed, played by a lot of my friends.
One of the things I was struck by was the similarity between how we felt and how other, more traditional performers might feel. Almost all of us were nervous, in some way or other. One of my friends didn't turn up because she had stage fright, another, new to the whole experience of live gaming admitted to being very worried about doing it right. I was concerned that I had been too quiet, that my desire to play a non-aggressive, somewhat lazy character had come across as merely boring.
We drank our drinks and mollified each other. Throughout the conversations we talked about our intentions in creating these characters - the type of person we had wanted to play, film or TV references we had used - and sounded each other out over whether we had come across loud and clear or whether further work was needed.
I'm interested in the value we placed upon our performance of these characters given that we are not actors, this was not a show and we did not have a paid audience, neatly divided from ourselves by gleaming footlights. We were all in the same boat. No-one in the room was outside of the "show", we were all playing the game, together.
And perhaps that is where the anxiety is rooted. Our performances rely on each other and support other people's characterisations. If we do not play our parts correctly, other people will not be able to play theirs, and they won't have fun. And when the other characters are being played by your friends there is an additional pressure of not letting your friends down.
My quiet allows someone else to be loud. One person must play a lawkeeper in order to have dramatic tension with a criminal. LARP performances are characterised by conflict: one player decided in the moment that his soldier chartacter must have been a marine in order to capitalise on the antipathy towards marines voiced by another soldier character.
We create each others fun because our roles create game for each other. That's a very different, but still very palpable, pressure to that of the actor. We are not scripted, we do not rehearse, we do not know what is coming next. Our actions "work" because we have created good, solid characters who behave in interesting ways with respect to other characters.
But like stage actors, it's hard for us to see our own performance, we must ask for feedback, not only because we want to be reassured that we did well, but because that way we can actually get better. When we talk to other roleplayers after a game we find out which bits of what we said and did had an impact, and why. We can use this knowledge in future games, as we change how we play our characters to suit how we think they should be.
This isn't the same thing as changing tactics in order to better manipulate or control another character - technically that would be "cheating" if you found this information out Out Of Character. This is about learning how your character is perceived, deciding whether they should actually be like that, and changing accordingly.
LARP Characters evolve with time, as things happen to them over the course of the games. Unlike plays where the same plot, the same emotional arc is performed each night and an actor strives to be more realistic in their portrayal of that same thing, LARP characters learn from their experiences. They may behave differently if they encounter a similar problem in future having learnt from it (they may not, of course, just as some people do not).
These experiences are reflected in XP or "experience points" but more than that they become part of the character. The things that we have said or done whilst playing that role are how we are perceived. Which is why after a game we will always be looking for that running commentary on how good or bad we were. So be nice, because it's our egos, but also be honest, because we will be better for it.
I always find Christmas a really good time to write plots and stories. Perhaps it's the darker, longer nights that make us all feel in the mood for a "once upon a time", plus writing is a pleasingly indoors activity and something that can be done almost anywhere. I do a lot of thinking on the train, for example, and usually have a notebook or laptop to hand to get the ideas on paper before, dream-like, they slip out of my brain. It's also a good time to tell stories, to gather round with friends and get some serious (or not serious) roleplaying and gaming done. I love being able to settle down to a really immersive game session, even better if it is a dark and stormy night. There's paralells with Victorian traditions of ghost stories or parlour games, I suppose. These continue in some form in childrens' rainy day games like "word at a time" stories where you write specific nouns or phrases and fold the paper as you go, passing it on to the next person. It's the one time of the year when gaming stops being quite such a nerd related activity and becomes part of "family fun" - which normally results in not a lot of family fun, bordering on family arguments. I think that's possibly because of the type of game. A lot of so-called family games are agressively competitive rather than collaborative. They are, generally, quite non-creative and process driven. You go around a board, a square at a time, there are right and wrong answers, spelling is involved. There are winners and losers, and they are also structured around knowledge (Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit) or entirely random chance. Both of which tend to cause arguments around "fairness". Roleplay games and shared stories are social activities and experiences in the way that absorbing non-participatory culture is not - such as TV, films or theatre. Everyone has to get involved and "put something in". The more each person contributes, the better the experience. You don't passively receive games or communual storytelling, you are part of it, together, which can make for a genuinely bonding activity. There is a stigma attached to certain sorts of play. Physical play is acceptable, playing with thoughts and feelings is not. I think we can be embarrassed about this sort of play - the realm of the imagination and creativity can feel quite intensely personal (which it is, and which is why it can be such a bonding experience) as opposed to other group or family activties such as going to the zoo or to the park. Dress-up and pantomime are consigned to childhood and the odd office party - but the exhuberance with which people will dress up should be taken as a sign that, given the change, people enjoy these kinds of things. We actually tell stories all the time: jokes, anecdotes, pub banter and "you wouldn't believe what happened at work". The awkwardness - for non-gamers at least - seems to come when rules and systems are involved. When we formalise the process and therefore foreground exactly what it is we are doing: presenting bits of ourselves to others. It's hard because we are not accustomed to it and we feel insecure. This is why story telling and roleplay (as well as various performing arts techniques) are used to such a good effect in leadership training and self-development processes. Getting over being embarrassed is the first step in become fearless in all sorts of areas of life, and having rules creates a framework to sidestep embarrassment - it stops being awkward and starts being "how things are done" It doesn't have to be serious though, not all games involve extensive storytelling or deep and meaningful characters. You can just have fun with some disposable tall tales. Now is a brilliant time to introduce a bit of casual gaming into your life. I've got a few recommendations below, that I have enjoyed, the first two are "pick up and play" games which have very little prep needed. The last one takes a bit more work, but is well worth the effort. Rory's Story Cubes - the cute little pictures on the dice provide cues for the ad-hoc story you will tell. Gloom - a Tim Burton inspired gothic card game. Like the dice, the cards help guide the story-telling process. Prime Time Adventures - an easy to follow guide to creating the "Greatest TV Show Never Made!" (TM), this one can be quite intense, depending on the sort of TV Show you choose to create, but the best bit is that the style is up to you. Gritty cowboy drama or cutesy indie rom com. It's perfect for rules-hating non-gamers who want to play with stories. Useful too for budding writers to hone their skills.
I've been running my WOD Changeling game for around two and a half years. It's given me a lot of food for thought on how I - and how my players - create the game together.
I'm going to order my thoughts into two rough areas, one is around "game" which is the technical aspect of what happens when, the rules, systems and how you go from stuff in a book to a shared activity that is fun. I'm also going to talk about "story" so thinking about the plot, characters and narrative. There will probably be some overlap. Them's the breaks.
The game, as in the rules, comes from the WOD book. Mostly. I say mostly because I've always viewed game rules for tabletop as guidelines around which the story flows. Rules are only of use if they serve the story. If we have to stop every two minutes to look something up or have an argument about it then we are not roleplaying, we're also not having fun. Agreeing on what is in, what is out and how the rules are going to be used in advance is important. There's situations where I have been liberal with the rules, and with the mechanics, to allow cool and fun things to happen.
I took a long time mulling over the rulebook to make sure I knew how most of the systems worked (this will come as a surprise to my players as I never remember what the atual dice rolls are). This wasn't about memorising them, it was about how they would impact on the game and the difference it made to the story setting. Here's an example. When Changelings (the magically altered humans that are my players' characters) get older they tend to get more powerful. This is reflected in higher dice pools derived from higher stats on their character sheet. Players buy these with experience points. My cast of background characters that I narrate to create the story (AKA Non Player Characters or NPCs) are of different power levels, they got these through their "natural" lives, things they they have done. What this actually means is they their skills and abilities are thematic and serve the feel of the story. Cold hearted characters have cruel abilities that cause heartbreak. Secretive characters have mysterious powers. Angry characters have fire powers and so on.
But more importantly, I needed their personalities, when taken together, to tell the story - each NPC is also a series of plotlines, the things that the players might get embroiled in. They have relationships with each other for the players to unpick, hopes and dreams for them to assist with and nefarious schemes to foil. My most important task was to create a rich and realistic set of people, which meant that if they were "evil", they were evil for a reason, or they only seemed evil. My story was to be an Epic Quest of Mystery and Magic. Capitalisation is important. The themes for the game were of loss, beauty and grey moral areas. Completing the quest would involve, as the best fairy tales do, losing some things which were important to you, so my player characters need to be offered challenges and opportunities that mean something to them. This means making the NPCs mean something.
I wrote the game over a month or so. Creating the characters, the setting and the basic plot. It started life as a notebook, with biro scribbles, then quickly became a spreadsheet. The plot is as basic as it gets. "There is a bad thing happening. You must stop it." The devil, as they say, is in the details. And for this game, the details is in all the NPCs. They hold the plot, between them, like a tapestry which needs unpicking. The unpicking is what creates the game. Threads to be pulled upon, which reveal more threads.
I spent Christmas 2009 writing short backgrounds (and some longer backgrounds), descriptions and motivations for around 40 characters. Some of whom my players interact with heavily, some of whom have been used very little. Many of them have evolved in play as the needs of the story have changed, or as players have had an impact upon them. This can be as simple as killing them - by accident or design, or in some cases, by suggesting ideas during the course of play that I decided would fit well with the back story. Most of these characters do not have stats, they are "dramatically" statted, so when it is appropriate in the plot for them to fall over and die / have a revelation / run away they will do so. There are some exceptions. When NPCs come into direct conflict (such as a fight) with players, then I use numbers and dice, just like the players do. This also adds risk and chance which makes the game a game as opposed to a story we all agree on.
I incorporate a lot of feedback and ideas from my players into the game, when we play I view it as more of a collaborative story telling experience than a game in which they can win and lose. I want them to do the lion's share of the narration, and add their personal colours and flavours to the world. Usually I will describe a scene and then take a metaphorical step back: I tend to lean back in my chair, drink my tea and eat a biscuit.
As important as the characters was the place. Brighton, which I know reasonably well, was the eventually setting for the story, although initially it was Edinburgh. Both are towns of a manageable, walkable size, with a wealth of history. I actually transplanted a few places from Edinburgh to Brighton, because they were convenient. Wikipedia is the plot writers friend, and full of little factoids that can be made more "real" by a few creative tweaks. The vast majority of my plot is based around genuine places and historical events. The fabricated, magical reasons behind these true things is the fiction of my story.
The other place to think about is where we play, and how. We play every fortnight for about two hours at a time, from 8.30pm-10.30pm on a Monday night. The time and place you play can become quite significant. We catch ourselves on the first day of the working week, so hopefully still refreshed, but given it is after work there is a certain amount of "decompression" and chatter that happens before everyone can settle to play. Little rituals evolve. Jake and Miranda always make the tea. Someone, usually Jake, will bring a cake. There is a special teapot. We play around my kitchen table - we experimented with sofas in the front room, but it spaces people out and having them sit nearer to each other creates less fuss over sheets going all over the place, as does having a hard surface upon which to take notes or roll dice. We are also able to close the door to the rest of the room thus annoying my flatmate a lot less. I like using background music, partly to drown out any "normal" noise such as pots and pans being rattled from next door, partly to add extra atmosphere. Candles are useful for this too although having enough light to read a character sheet by is important.
I tend to go "around the circle" when it comes to describing actions, prompting players if I think they haven't had the chance for enough input. Every now and then I might take someone out of the room for secrets. I don't like to do this often because it splits the group and removes people from valuable playing time. I often feel pressed for time during a session because we effectively get about 1.30hr of good quality playing time. This is about the length of a film and I try to stagger the plot events accordingly. Inevitably there will be things that suddenly occur, but having "quiet" events as well as more "action" events to throw into the mix allows me to keep the pacing of the plot.
I run the game from notes in an ever expanding spreadsheet, and tend to type as I go so I now have a file with the entire story thus far. It is split into the different chronological storylines, which are laid out similar to a TV series, another inspiration for how I run games - individual episodes or game sessions, linked by an overarching plot. I keep track of details where the players went, who they talked to, what happened as well as some more technical, rules based events such as deals made. It also has tabs for a table of all my NPCs, plus seperate tabs where I've needed to note things that certain player characters know but others don't.
Crucially, it also contains all the times the story has changed from my original. When something more interesting happened, when I realised that "this makes no sense" or "this is too obvious", or "this is not obvious enough", when the players became interested in something that was just a throwaway comment and then I suddenly needed to write a lot of background, or when a detailed plot point has been totally ignored and overlooked and is left to whither on the vine. And that's as it should be. The players lead the story, my job is to make sure that there is something interesting for them around the corner, whichever corner they turn down.
I'm very proud of what we have accomplished, together. I can look at the story, as I'm doing now, and see where it started, and where it is now. All the changes in between which we, as a group, have created. What I can't see, or perhaps can only see in the faintest of outlines, is where it is going to end up.
I'm looking forward to it.
In January 2012 (which sounds an awful lot like some kind of Sci Fi date as opposed to, say, in two months' time) I will be playing in a LARP based on Whitewolf's New World of Darkness games. I'll be playing a vampire. This puts me in the interesting position of playing a character who can look young but could quite easily be hundreds of years old. This means you have someone who grew up in a specific time period but has witnessed a lot of change whilst parts of themselves remained static or even, became more powerful. Unlike people who age and grow weaker with time, vampires generally speaking do not. It's a curious mix to roleplay, when you think about it - on the one hand you can effectively play a little old lady, set and stuck in your ways, with lots of "old fashioned" opinions and values. Part of the characterisation is about being a bit vintage, not precisely lifted from the pages of Jane Austen, but the ideas we are raised with are very hard to shake. On the other hand, a vampire character can (and should) adapt and change - it's unlikely that very old fashioned characters would survive very long. And as they adapt, they get better. Older vampires are more powerful. They are faser, stronger and have a whole heap of connections, resources and other skills accumulated with time. They can also get worse. Older vampires have had more opportunity to do all those awful, dreadful things that vampires end up doing. Throw in the supernatural strangeness of blood drinking, sunlight avoidance and a whole heap of emotional turmoil (vampires always have this, it's a vampire thing, I recently read Carmilla, it's clearly been a vampire thing since vampires have been written about). If "Stuff Happening To You" builds character then that's a lot of characterisation to deal with. My usual way of writing characters is to write stories with them in it. Often these are vignettes taken from especially important or significant points of their lives, usually in rough chronological order, and this was certainly where I started. However, this game is set in a small town in Scotland where the characters have been effectively trapped. Which means that a lot of them know each other, and in some cases have known each other for longer than most human beings have been alive.This is what I like to term a Roleplay Challenge. Something outside your usual frame of reference or comfort level. My friend Miranda is also playing a vampire and looking at our respective timelines we realised that our characters would have known each other for a hundred years. We both felt that turning up to the first game without any preparation would be very, very bad form: "Who are you?""We've been living in the same town since 1910.""Oh."*awkward silence*So to avoid this, and because, frankly, it's fun, we spent a few hours last night going over a hundred years of history and attempting to write a hundred years worth of interactions. What we set out to do was write two non-stereotypical female vampires who had a genuine bond of friendship that wasn't determined by male figures in their lives. A bromance, but for women (we're using ladybromance at the moment, even though it's clunky). Imagine a buddy movie for 19 century bloodsuckers. Who are women. And don't waft around in corsets or anything even remotely diaphanous. Hard, isn't it? There was an interesting opportunity in the fact that both of them were women. Male vampires might find themselves curtailed by the set up of being trapped in a small town, female vampires are, by contrast, freed because the weight of society has, in part, been lifted. There are no longer overbearing families, no pressure to marry and without that they start to "live" very different lives. The only prejudice they have to deal with is that which they carry with them.And so those prejudices were where we started. I've chosen to play a stoic, insular, not-very-bright rural peasant character who was born in the 1830s. Miranda is going to be playing an outgoing, confident, educated urban middle class character from the early 1900s. Even if they had both been born in close proximity, in "real life" these two women would have never met. The gap between them was massive, we realised, and we needed to build some bridges. A lot of the resources we used were about social convention, which was of particular importance to women. We also used materials that we thought might be of interest to each of them: the suffrage movement was a natural choice for her politicised character, for mine it was more about thinking what a young woman with few life options would idolise or daydream about - stories about glamorous balls in large country estates became a feature. We needed to get to a place where these two women could be friends, despite the gulf of class, politics rural/urban prejudice. We had to invent ways around all sorts of hurdles starting with the fact that my character is illiterate and her character would send around a calling card before turning up. We also had to come up with ways in which they could rely on each other and actually need the other, above and beyond them being the only two female vampire characters in the town for a very long time. We wanted their relationship to feel natural, rather than a forced effect because it was a nice idea. Our process involved semi-roleplaying through a number of significant dates for the two women. We would describe how we looked, how we felt, then talk through a few sentences of dialogue in character and then discuss which way worked best. We spent a lot of time on their first meeting, then moved on to first argument and resolving the first argument. We added in their relationships with other people and how they came to find out significant secrets (or not) about each other. This all happened against a slowly changing landscape of political, social and technological advancement which gradually filtered in to some of things we discussed. Fashions allowed her character to move into trousers, something my character didn't do - we spent a long time talking over whether to skirt or not to skirt. The invention of the radio and then the cinema broadened my character's horizons and gave her a love of music and (what we would term "classic", she would term "modern") film. There's a lot of give and take in these scenarios and at times it felt something like a script writing workshop where we tried to imagine what would give the best effect, the most drama or steer the characters in the way we wanted them to go. The characters evolved throughout our discussion, becoming more rounded and deeper, gaining all those little tweeks and quirks that make a person a person. The output was a series of notes that we are both working on, and will no doubt continue to work on. We did not exactly create War And Peace For Two Dead Women. Although I imagine we may end up that way if the shared googledoc is anything to go by.
At some point in the future I intend to play a character who will wear plate armour. I want to look amazing, imperious, imposing and really, really hard. The kind of character who storms into battle, sword held high, shouting "charge!" The kind of character who is an inspiration to those around them, who is the staunch protector, the valiant fighter, the genuine "warrior" archetype. Proper hero quality. Or villain, depending on which side I decide to fall on. I've never played one before - I've been a paladin in japanese samurai armour, but there were *complications*. I've never done the "first into the fray" pure combat character. Partly beause the combat element of live gaming has, until very recently, made me nervous. I was not especially good at sports at school and whilst I'm physically pretty fit and can run fast the "getting hit" still bothers me, even though I know it's only latex weapons. It's something I'm going to work on, and in order to help me with this I'm going to do a very girly thing. I'm going to get the right outfit. And that means plate armour. I've been inspired a lot by this amazing tumblr - women fighters in reasonable armour. My problem is where to buy the stuff from, because a lot of it doesn't exist. And in fact, a lot of the armour for women is, in fact, rubbish. It appears to have been made by people who do not understand that armour is meant to cover and protect. There's a lot more emphasis on looking "sexy" than there is on looking like an unstoppable badass. There's a lot of exposed midriffs going on, and I don't know about you but I really, really want my stomach to be covered if other people have swords. Additionally a lot of LARP takes place outside, and the U.K. is not often blessed with bikini weather. Now, I'm all in favour of looking good - this is why I want some shiny armour, after all, but it's very sad that as a woman "looking good" equates with "not wearing very much". Looking back at my list of adjectives about who I want my character to be I think that some of the pole-dancer style options might clash with my desire to be taken seriously as a warrior. The best option at the moment seems to be to smaller versions of male armour. Or find a friendly smith who can make one for me.Anyone know any?
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