The Coming Crisis in Casting in
Theatre Style Campaign (TSC) LARP
Main differences between 1997 and
2003:
The Revolution in Casting 2000 -
2003
"Settling" of Player
Attention
Hesitancy to Enforce Consequences
Lessons Learned in the 1936: Horror
Campaign
Some people want to Roleplay, some don't
The Typical Theatre Style Character Sheet is not ideal in getting
information to Cast
Ways of Getting Information to Cast
The Importance of Extroversion
What Specific Tasks Are Given to
Cast?
Basic Methods for staging Cast
Theory - Spreading Cast and
Monster/UC
Reading the Background in Advance
Beyond preparation, what is mutable?
Other Elements towards a Solution
Splitting Costs Towards the Extremes
"Keeping Covenant" on Cast
roles
Tracking of Cast Credit System by
Database
Better Staff Organization and
Response
Tracking Grid to do fair assignment
of roles
Organized training and basic
guidelines
Better recognition of individual
preferences
Casting as a field in TS style LARP was introduced in the late 1990s. In the past three years there has been intense growth, maturation, and fluctuation in this area of LARP however, and rapid changes threaten to precipitate a crisis in the coming three years.
Definition of a Crisis - the logical
definition of a "Crisis" in LARP is where instability in a system consistently
undermines the ability to produce an event satisfactory to all the
participants.
Definition of Cast - participants who come
to the event not to play goal-oriented characters, but to undertake roles that
support the framework of the event - usually roles written, or described, by
the GM.
Other Terms as Used Here:
TS - Theatre Style
TSFL - Theatre Style Full Length
TSC - Theatre Style Campaign
CC - Continuing Character (what most games call a
"PC" or "Player Character"
Cast - Used here as a generic term for all the Non-GM,
Non-player, staff at a LARP
NCC - Non Continuous Character (what most campaigns call
an NPC, or "Non Player character, but specifically a fairly developed NPC
type character).
Do We Need Cast? - by definition, TSC relies on complex and sophisticated plots - that's the nature of Theatre Style. By definition the lead time on TSC is too short to do the sort of 'per character' writing that allows these plots to resolve on a player v. player basis, especially given the generally destructive effect of player v. player on Campaign LARP. Thus the only way to have TSC is to have competent, and involved Cast, in fair numbers, so that complex plot can be staged quickly by an external source.
What actual Events will this Effect? - I
can't honestly answer this question.
Certainly it is germane to the 1948: Signals Campaign, which is
my primary concern, and functions as a strong "hub" event for the
Baltimore-Washington area. Logically it
will probably have some impact on Dark Summonings in New England. Potentially it could impact Brassy's Men,
though low use of cast may make it a minimal issue. It may or may not affect ARC, as that event runs by a more
strongly Live Combat paradigm. It will
likely affect other games that run on a TSC paradigm similar to 1936.
Ultimately however, I think that our issues are the local
- and possibly leading and most sophisticated example of changes that will
eventually be felt in all LARP that utilizes cast, and is not primarily driven
by a "monster" dynamic - that is where the cast's primary reward and
motivation is to take part in an LC event as fighters. To the extent that a event has cast elements
that are not driven by this dynamic, I think it will eventually grapple with most
of these issues.
The concept of "Cast" is a very old one. It is probable that very early LARP did not have "cast." Dagorhir Battle Games, for example, relied on player v. player fighting at least in the early 1980s. The Live Ring Game was presented as an activity for a group of players in which one or more were the villains. In early Assassin games, everyone was a player, co-equal in freedom of movement and plot.
In the Theatre-Style paradigm descended, with many other influences, from the SIL Rekon, and MIT Assassins' Guild games, "Cast" characters were unusual. Some need was seen for players who fulfilled the roles that Cast are called on to fill, however such roles were typically filled by "GMs" or "Assistant GMs" (who in some cases were virtually full time cast), or other assorted friends of the GM on an informal basis. When cast roles were sharply defined they were most often attributed as "AGM" roles.
"Cast" was a more integral part of most Live Combat LARP, though cast were usually called "Monsters" and casting was "Monstering." Where it does not seek to strong TS qualities, LC has already developed a stable paradigm for handling cast, but it relies on an inherent quality of LC which TSC lacks - the fact that to a substantial number of participants, fighting in combats is in fact a substantial goal and reward unto itself.
In the 1990s, Chris Welsh, Andy Looney and others introduced a group called "Role Playing Machine" or RPM, which offered to bring a pool of experienced LARPers to a game, to play "bit parts, villains, color characters, etc." This was likely the first serious implementation of cast, and RPM saw use in the early and mid 1990s. However the group was "self motivated" and many GMs who wanted tight control of their own productions were uncomfortable with bringing in an outside group with a strong style of its own.
In the late 1990s, Dirk Parham, Mike Young, and several other GMs from the Baltimore-Washington area, including myself, began playing XPI: Horror (then Lovecraftian Horror). In July of 1997 for The Four Aces, John Corrado, Stephanie Olmstead-Dean and myself assembled a GM driven cast, and for the first time had a cast room, with properties, etc. The idea was explicitly and directly borrowed from seeing XPI: Horror's use of a LC cast in a somewhat TS fashion. The cast was a very successful addition to the game. By May of 1998, John Corrado's Pax Romana, featured a cast fully comparable to anything being fielded by LC groups of the day.
So from a perspective of 2003, the very concept of TS Cast is really only seven years old. Predictably, "Cast" is hitting the same point that TS LARP in general did in 1988-89 - the demand for a shift from more or less random production, which is fun simply because it has never been done before, to a more measured and consistent type of handling. It is no longer just fun for its own sake - it has to work well to be appreciated. In short, the honeymoon is over, and in the same way that "second generation" productions such as Arabian Nights¸ Enchanted Rendezvous, and Covention I, heralded the end of the first generation of LARP, the first generation of casting is drawing to a close.
Circa Pax Romana cast seemed to be the golden solution to all that was wrong in roleplaying. Mike Young played a cast character who was "The Odds Maker," and accepted bets on Chariot races. He pointed out very cogently that a few years beforehand he would have been given the same character - with a longer writeup and some minor thread of plot - as a full weekend character. The Cast system allowed him to play the character only when it was useful, then to pass along to something else.
The dynamics worked well. There were always a certain number of people who wanted to come to weekend games and mostly be hangers-on, and would trade doing some minor roleplaying for getting in free. However the dynamics of Casting were very different.
1) At a hotel game, it was advantageous to give some players free admission if the game was rather large, because warm bodies swelled the room count. This is why Intercon can generally afford - and profit from - "Free" GM memberships. Making the room count (to garner free function space) is financially more important than collecting a fee. In addition, only one meal was served. Thus it was cost effective to admit cast for little or nothing.
2) While Four Aces had a huge cleanup compared with any previous TSFL event (two cars crammed to the gills with materials) it was trivial by modern standards. Four Aces was cleaned up in less than two hours. Thus very little real "work" was involved in Casting/Support
Even so the type of roles and cast sheets that were handed out in Four Aces are probably not too much different than those that will go out for a similar modern event - Las Vegas. Much of what casting is had begun to be defined.
However, because of the ease of offering low cost or free cast memberships, there was no feeling of obligation to provide strong cast roles.
Differences in what Cast amounts to, and what is expected of Cast in a TS event can be seen in comparing the state of casting at the beginning of the Mersienne Medieval Fantasy Campaign, in 1999 with Casting earlier (c. 2001) and later (c. 2003) in the 1936: Horror Campaign.
Costs - Outdoor or Fixed Price Site (Blue Mountain or Robin Hill for example) games have a uniform cost which is not reduced by simple attendance. Thus any additional warm bodies at a discounted price represent additional cost. If the uniform cost (the cost if everyone paid equally) would be $60, then every Cast member paying $40 has to be balanced by someone else paying $20 in order to make expenses. Because there are generally about twice as many Players as Cast, this can result in a reasonable markup of about $70, but is still not insignificant. Drastically low Cast costs become unsupportable.
Complexity of Characters - in a TSFL (Theatre Style Full Length), predictably, all the significant lead characters are Player Characters. In TSC, a need develops for fairly significant, or recurring characters who are similar in many ways to standard TS characters - partially or largely self-motivated, enjoying a large scope of freewill, and relatively important to the game.
Workload - the physical work involved in staging The Four Aces seems trivial next to an outdoor TSC game. The level of props, materials, etc. is staggering. Thus TSC has more need for "tech" type assignments that involve work, or crafts.
In the late 90s casts tended to be small, and casting could often be a dismal affair - waiting tables while one player got to play the "big adversary." As the 90's drew to a close most groups began to recognize the need to provide better cast roles. XPI: Horror began a concerted effort to produce better written games and Cast Roles, which based on reports and experiences was at least partially successful.
Starting in Pennsylvania (Sept, 2000), with 1936: Horror Adrienne Amerman and I made a conscious decision to bring about a change in the way that cast roles were handled - specifically to recognize that cast were "equal to" players in their need to derive gratification (a term we use here to denote "an experience they would find satisfying" - as distinct from the more common buzzword "fun" which is often not actually appropriate) from the game.
Our reasons for doing this were fairly simple:
Thus: If we could
not use CC Players to drive complex plots, we would need a large number of
competent roleplayers as cast.
There were four obvious ways to recruit competent cast:
Pay Them - fiscally out of the question for a community based game. Ford Ivey's Isles Campaign was charging in the $195-$215 range for such an experience.
Let them in free - this simple solution had worked to some extent at hotels in the late 90s. But at hotels, it was advantageous to allow some people in free - they took hotel rooms and lowered the rate for function space. With the group paying for meals, and space, the resultant rise in cost at a cast:player ratio of 1:4 or 1:3 was exhorbitant. At very best we would have to dramatically prune our budget in all other areas - food, props, etc. Later surveys revealed that only a very small percentage of our players supported such measures.
Offer discounts alone - this helped, but money is not the end-all and be-all of LARP, nor was it our plan to recruit exclusively the financially impaired, and retain them as cast only as long as they had no other financial options. Discounts provided an incentive, but not a solution.
Offer Quality Entertainment - This after all was what was drawing our players. By offering to put as much effort into cast roles and make our cast a real part of the game, we had the potential to attract quality roleplayers who would otherwise CC. Ultimately that became, and remains our goal. To remove the stigma that Casting "isn't as fun" as CCing, or that it is "CCing's poor cousin." To be able to attract good roleplayers who wanted a challenge, not simply those who felt they did not have time or interest to do anything else. Our intent was to build a quality cast, not one composed mostly of people who "aren't interested in the event or the period, so I suppose I'll cast." But to do that, Casting had to offer an experience that compared to CCing. Not necessarily the same experience, but a valuable one.
Eventually we chose to split our efforts - recognizing that the discount was a motivation for some attendees who were not overly interested in the game, but wanted to help and socialize, while the chance to play multiple roles and roleplay in a challenging situation was a motivation for others.
Our first efforts at this were relatively modest. For Pennsylvania we produced fairly detailed characters even for short vignette scenes. During the ensuing three years we learned a great deal about Cast, including the fact that TS character sheets are not the best possible way to convey information to Cast.
At the same time we began to fight an ideological battle. It was a battle that we really didn't choose to press until mid-2001. There were a small but rather ideologically determined group of players who felt very simply that promoting the concept that cast should be treated equally to players was a bad idea. I have a wealth of quotes, but the fundamental point of view was that cast should largely be cannon-fodder and window decoration. CC's (Continuing Characters - a term similar in use to "Player Characters" in most games) should never have to defer to cast, never have to be in positions inferior to cast, and never be beaten by the cast.
I tend to put this down to a couple of things. The first is the mistaken idea that the systematic organization of LC Casting could be carried over into an environment where combat was essentially "unfun." In LC, Combat is a sufficient reward for casting. In TS, it is not, because combat itself is not very exciting.
The second is a desire for an event which was mostly what hardcore larpers describe as a "bug hunt" - a combat oriented event in which most of the action was a struggle between two well delineated sides, with the CCs on the "good" side. Basically the desire was for a Star Wars type universe in which good and bad are abundantly obvious. Such a universe does not require strong cast roles and in fact they only serve to muddy the waters. A few strong villains are required, and these can be comparatively good cast roles, though it has to be considered they will tend to get fairly little "camera time" without careful contrivance.
From mid 2001 to spring 2003, we fought ideologically to establish the idea of full cast participation - that Cast were "players" in the game, not hired help or second class citizens. Logically the reason is apparent - we needed to charge them money and we needed them to participate. For them to be willing to do this, they must get something from the experience.
By our Third Season Survey, the issue had been largely decided. We had been aware that a majority of players did in fact favor a cast-rich event, and were aware that whether the players favored it or not, necessity of having any cast would drive the events in that direction. Our Third Season Survey was, by open admission, a referendum on our GMing policies. We asked players to choose between two extremes:
Pro -
"The event is about all the participants. CCs and NCCs should
interact on a fairly equal footing, as long as this doesn't make CC characters
unplayable"
Con - "The event is about the CCs.
NCCs should appear only in support roles or as villains"
75% of participants in the event responding (100% of cast
responding and 67% of players responding) gave us the "Pro"
response. Despite some rearguard
actions as 1948 was being put together, by and large the issue was closed. The event was about cast and players both - not
just players. Or rather, as we
preferred to phrase it - everyone was a player of some kind, whether they
played one continuous character, or cast roles.
It is an inherent problem in LARP that each success sets a high water mark for future successes. Unfortunately the difference between a fortunate one time success, and developing a methodology to achieve the same success consistently and with a manageable degree of effort is a rather wide gulf, and the time it takes to cross it has doomed many LARPs, especially those that were willing to experiment.
More than anything else, it is my feeling that this trait ultimately led to the effective demise of TSFL after "unsatisfactory" games in 1996-98 followed occasional "good" games. Often the "unsatisfactory" games met standards that would have led them to be considered highly successful in 1995. However audiences demanded that each event meet, if not the most recent high-water mark, at least a fairly recent one, and to a considerable extent every event suffered from every success. By the end of that period it was difficult for a group that was less than extraordinarily experienced to have any chance of staging a successful LARP, and the comparative workload and expense of the games left no room for a learning curve.
Essentially 1936 suffered from its own success. During the first season, the Campaign delivered a number of games that were fairly good for Cast, compared to what had gone before. Those games set a subsequent "high water mark" which became necessary to beat. Thus a first season event which was clearly inferior in depth and breadth of cast roles to a third season event might have been received comparatively better.
It is also the case that many of the 1936 Cast did not have any extensive experience casting for a group which did not make any particular attempt to supply rich cast roles, such as XPI: Horror, where casting might consist entirely of monstering and being a "person in the sceene." Their tendency was to compare our cast roles not with Cast roles in previous campaigns, but with Player Character roles in TS LARP.
1936 took reasonable care to attempt to write at least moderately complete cast roles for most of its early games. Lieutva had a generally good esprit-de-corps among castmembers, with a fun climactic scene. Spain had particularly strongly developed cast roles and esprit-de-corps.
New Orleans had two sets of fairly strong Cast Characters,
followed by Cuba, in which cast roles were essentially Player Roles, with the
Cast maneuvering to screw the CCs.
Palestine also set new high water marks. So during this time period the positive aspects and work put in
continued to raise the bar on what was expected in terms of cast roles.
Whatever the cause, it is not plausibly deniable that player reactions to cast and to new plots in general began to decline in the second season. I've advanced various theories as to why players appear to "get lazy" in regards to following plot, interacting with cast, and generally doing things. I have found that other GMs in radically different genres have the same perceptions. I think the jury is still out on the whys and wherefores, but the impact is fairly indisputable. Between January 2001 and August 2002, the level of attention that players paid to the event environment - on the average - dropped dramatically.
This led to a building curve of resentment. The first event with a really noticeable problem in this regard was Eilean Mor. Several Cast characters were put into event in roles very similar to players, and they were roundly ignored, to the point of having nothing to do and no-one to talk to. Notable cast players like Mike Harrington playing a strong character with party connections and background were ignored and nearly forcibly excluded.
Lietuva was good for Cast esprit-de-corps, but began to serve to underscore the "Cast/Player" rift. Safari, run by different GMs and using cast much more along a traditional LC paradigm is more difficult for me to assess. By Spain, we were actively aware of Cast/Player tension, and part of the point of Spain was the necessity of cooperating with the Cast. The end proved satisfactory enough, driven by good performances by several strong roleplayers on Cast.
New Orleans through Orient was a period of decline after the promise of Spain. By Cuba, there were Cast who actively gloried in being allowed to "screw" players. In Palestine the cast were militantly proud of holding a "secret meeting" which excluded players. Romania was an aberration. Because one of the two Primary GMs was very sick, most Cast - and players - tread very softly. However, in Ophir we saw the fruits of crisis. Cast who were prejudicially inclined against dealing with players almost to the extent of making success impossible (this is not to imply that success was impossible, merely that certain cast were radically disposed against it).
It is very delicate, even at this remove to discuss the role of individuals in this regard. However it needs to be said. The problems would probably have occurred anyway, but were exacerbated by radicalism on both sides.
I am purposefully being rather vague, and concentrating on the behaviors, not the individuals that caused problems. On one hand, I don't want to focus attention on anyone, or dilute the point of this dialog with personalities. However, I think it is important not to underrate the impact that a few personalities can have on an event.
On the cast side, there were Cast members - mostly without prior experience - who promoted disharmony. These people were for the most part activists who needed to be players and generally by the end of second season had dropped out of, or been forcibly excluded from, the cast pool, or even dropped out of the campaign.
Along the way, these people picked up legitimate GM gripes about players "not interacting more with cast" and took them up as a cross of crusade. In some cases I think this was to have a reason to complain, in others as a convenient explanation for "not having fun " in a situation where the problem was a basic unsuitability to cast roles. Not every cast member who complained was being unfair of course - but many of the ones who began complaining without giving the CC's a chance were motivated - consciously or subconsciously by these things being a convenient excuse for a failure that came largely from the fact that Casting wasn't something they enjoyed.
On a few occasions we had cast posting rather bitter public notes, sometimes immediately after games. While the first occasion of this would provoke some sympathy, we had it taken too far - cast who took upon themselves the GM role of telling the players "what they did wrong" in a scene - in some cases when the players had done exactly what the GMs expected and felt was desirable.
While understandably direct, the accusatory nature of these notes sometimes tended to accomplish the opposite to the desired result. They made Players more defensive and less understanding of cast concerns, largely because they addressed what was for the most part a general neglect in terms of an active attack - something that the Players could readily enough dismiss and consider themselves not guilty of. - they after all hadn't for the most part conspired to ignore the cast - they'd merely done it. But conspiracy and malice they were genuinely innocent of, and accusatory attacks merely made them feel justified in feeling they had done nothing wrong.
As early as Cuba, there was a distinct drive on the part of some cast players to "screw the players." By Orient one could see some cast beginning to complain about the players behavior almost on contact, before the players had even a reasonable chance to get settled. And this led to problems. A good portion of the cast simply wouldn't take the floor with any conviction and attempt to play. They were either already dead-set determined the players were ignoring them, because someone had told them so. So cast sat on the porch and smoked and failed to engage, and turned early predictions into self-fulfilling prophecy.
By the end of the second season, the GMs had managed to effect some impact on this. The cast who felt more commonly and frequently ignored had moved on to playing, which was probably the best place for them - they'd been frustrated, in many ways simply by not being included as CCs.
On the other side of the coin, the situation was driven by players who exacerbated bad relations. The two groups in this regard were players who had ideological differences, and gamist players who wanted to "win the game" without any real regard to the roleplaying element. While there was some overlap in this, but the different motivations were discernible.
On one hand there had been, since the beginning of the campaign, players who were uninterested in cast, and primarily wanted to see cast play low-level adversaries for them to kill. In particular these players were hostile to the concept of cast "upstaging" players - that is to say taking center stage, or behaving in a fashion that made them, rather than the players the "heroes" of the piece. Logic would dictate that these players would be supportive of cast playing color characters, because enjoyment at "low level" color roles would tend to increase cast satisfaction without encouraging cast to press for roles as major protagonists. However, in practice this was not the case. The same CCs who deplored Cast who could challenge them on home ground spoke disparagingly of dealing with petty concerns of minor cast characters, and gained a reputation among the cast as being particularly unwilling to deal with any cast players.
In fact these players felt ideologically threatened by the paradigm of 1936 - that the universe was fairly realistic and inhabited by many active forces other than the player characters. We endeavored to create a universe in which the players could aspire to be - and became - "movers and shakers" but were not the only "movers and shakers." To the Live Combat paradigm, emanating directly from "party oriented" D&D, this was a threatening and unpleasant ideology. CCs should not only be the heroes, but must be heroes unchallenged and unrivalled.
For all the ideological conviction of these players, they served little role other than making a bad situation marginally worse. Cast wishing to show how bad the players were could always use these players as examples to tar-brush the rest.
Much worse were those players who simply embraced a gamist philosophy in which Cast was an alien concept, and quickly began to suss out that it was possible to "win the game" by ignoring not only the cast, but the plot.
These players found a weak chink in the armor of 1936. The GMs were genuinely committed to pleasing
the players, and as we'll see below, dealing them stinging defeats did not fit
in with this intent. The
"gamist" players, having realized we were unprepared to hand the
players a defeat reasoned, quite correctly that no matter what they did they
would be handed a victory.
They proceeded to lead a "sit down strike" against roleplay in which they not only stopped the event in its tracks for themselves, but encouraged others to do very little. After all, if victory can be gained without risk, why take risks?
Of course this defeated the point of the events. The events revolved around the willing suspension of disbelief, and to a considerable extent, the GMs were presenting victory as a reward for making an effort. As effort fell off the GMs became hard pressed to have and excuse to continue to award it.
The situation became worse, because as "settling" took effect, the group's better roleplayers were increasingly engrossed in their own character to character affairs, and tended not to pursue the plot. But the influence of a few key players in actively discouraging both gainful interaction with the cast, and pursuit of the plot cannot be underestimated.
And the GMs made things worse before they got better
Understanding why it took nearly a full season for the GMs of 1936 to begin to enforce consequences for failure to roleplay with cast and pursue the plot of the event requires digging considerably back into the past.
As I built enthusiasm for the launch of 1936: Horror in summer of 2000, I was in a politically difficult position - under what one might call "a cloud."
I had never had a strong reputation as a "crowd pleasing" GM. Compared to Mike Young, or Don Ross, my reputation was for running edgy and challenging events like Lifeboat, or Body Count, which appealed to "pure roleplayers" and "damn everybody else."
It is true that I like that sort of event, but since the early 1990s, I'd felt a desire to be a more well rounded GM, and develop events that appealed to a general audience. Le Soiree Finale was an early take on that, and other events had followed. But my reputation was still largely for experimental events often with a rather adult edge. Our harmless crowd-pleaser The Second Circle of Hell¸ was deemed "too adult" by some purebred LARPers.
I felt working with John Corrado and Stephanie Olmstead-Dean on The Four Aces had made my reputation as an "all around" GM, but it was tenuous. I'd done enough to attract a following for the Mersienne Medieval Fantasy Campaign, in which I intended to do nothing more than present a moderately serious historical fantasy that, based on what had worked well in TSFL LARP, I expected to be quite a crowd-pleaser.
My dismal discovery was that the player v. player elements of TSFL were a source of terrible rancor in a TSC. And I'd come under a great deal of pressure to please various players - at the obvious expense of others. My unwillingness or reluctance to do this had led to a lot of accusations of being a "purist" who cared more about the event background and "realism" than pleasing players. In practice I couldn't please some players without totally disenfranchising others. Without going into great detail, I faced players whose mentality in regards to war was shaped by the "total victory" era of the two world wars, with a medieval world that simply could not tolerate a "total victory." The problem was not merely the realism of the world - it was the fact that the world was never designed to allow a faction of the players to utterly defeat the others. The event was designed to mirror the ebb and flow of medieval politics - lucky in war this week, unlucky the next.
But I'd run into demands for unconditional victory, and unwilling - and unable within the rules - to deliver them, I'd been accused of being the sort of GM who cared little for individual players - a purist "artiste" with a "high concept" to protect.
Coming into 1936: Horror with that baggage, I was teamed with a Co-GM who was a relative unknown. Adrienne Amerman had a good background with XPI, but had parted on political grounds largely because it was not at that time a good environment for a strong-willed woman to seek a career in. However she was an unknown quantity in our community.
With that in mind, and the collapse of MMFC on my record, I
was in no position to begin dealing out "lessons" to players.
During the last months of MMFC, I had been engaged in an almost constant struggle with strong-willed players for control of the momentum of the campaign. I saw those challenges being renewed, and that was a battle I intended to win before I began any "teaching" to the CCs at large. The first lesson I would "teach" was that Adrienne and I were in control of the momentum of the campaign, and would not allow that to be undermined. Thus even at the risk of deus-ex-machina we did not wish to deal a defeat that would give any "ammunition" for the point of view that we were coldhearted purists who cared nothing about player enjoyment. Before we could handle the issues of player enjoyment, we'd need to take firm control of the campaign so that we could regulate its momentum.
In Pennsylvania¸ and Georgia, and through Relics, Adrienne and I were primarily concerned with making sure that we had control of the campaign and could serve as its directing forces. It was not until R-101, that I think we really felt that we had enough credibility as GMs to do anything other than hold our own and try desperately to please the players and convince them that we did, indeed, want to give them a good time.
In choosing our fights wisely, we waived some fights that would come back to fight us later in the campaign - particularly on stats and character concepts. In retrospect, I still think we made the right decisions - by the time those issues became real problems, we had the clout and authority, and support from the player base to deal with them. They would be a thorn in our side, but no more.
By Eilean Mor, we began to feel the need to consider consequences to poor player choice, or situations in which players ignored Cast, or Plots. Eilean Mor is significant in being the first event in which either of those situations was widespread. Eilean Mor was also the first event in which the players had to be "handed" a victory by Deus ex Machina. However the situation was not universal. A few players had failed to pursue a specific line of plot, and it was reasonable to assume that other players had believed that they were doing so, and had not backstopped them. We actually considered a "loss" scenario for Eilean Mor¸ but concluded that the majority of players had done a respectable job and would take poorly to being dealt a "loss" because of the failings of the few.
The next two games Lieutva and Safari were not under our control, so it was not until Spain that we had a chance to grapple with the issues again. At this point we ran one of our more successful Cast games. It is difficult to determine what went right with Spain. To some extent I think we simply scared and awed the players into compliance. We presented a strong, well organized cast, in a war-zone, where they were obviously in charge and competent. However we were to present cast in other such situations later and find them less well received. Be that as it may, the players did deal with the cast in Spain at least on some level, and to a certain extent I think we thought our problem solved. Plot wise, we had no intention of closing our first season with a stinging defeat. The event was "unlosable" and had no "fail" scenario. We did work out a rather nasty scenario if the players failed to interact with the cast or cooperate with them, but it would still allow them to win the game, though it would have been substantially more miserable.
Both Adrienne and I agreed, however, that there were still problems overall. In particular the players were beginning to think that they could not lose. Looking at the schedule for the next season, we decided to set the record straight early. New Orleans would have a strong potential for an unpleasant "loss" scenario, which would teach the players something about the universe, but leave them no question they had "flubbed it." It would take good, solid, playing of a sort that we did not really expect to see based on our perceptions of the games since Eilean Mor. The event would not be unwinnable - it would merely be a tough and fair contest, and we expected to see the players lose.
New Orleans went to final print with the expectation of that scenario. However, the event was scheduled for Sept 14, 2001, and the attacks on Sept 11, 2001 put a pall on our players' attention, and threw most of the U.S. into emotional chaos. Adrienne and I quickly decided, and I think our decision was correct, that most of the players would not appreciate a "loss" scenario in the prevailing gloomy mood, and that any point we chose to make would be lost in the general emotional disquiet.
Ergo, New Orleans ran to a confused and contrived conclusion, in which the players fulfilled some rather random criteria to "win the game." It was frustrating as a GM to hear proud players crowing "we saved the world again" when in fact this was neither the case, nor had they played well enough to accomplish a win.
Our problem became more serious, but there was little we could do about it. San Francisco could not be made to accomodate a fail scenario easily. Along with Orient, both games had a structure whereby most of the elements that the players had tended to do badly at (cast interaction, embracing and following plot) were aimed at leading to an adventure sequence. A loss during the adventure sequence would merely be a combat defeat. A loss prior to it would leave a totally unsatisfying event with no climax or conclusion.
The players indeed suffered defeat in Cuba, however since the event was a mixed track game, and the losses that occurred did so for the precise reason that the players had ignored the plot, the result was not clear. The players didn't succeed at something they had paid no attention to in the first place, and absent the end of the world, this made little impression.
We were also still disinclined to be anything other than cheery and positive. Gloating at the end of the event about how "we screwed you" is something that is graceless and divisive coming from cast, and the losses had been cast driven. Ergo, we were not inclined to trumpet the situation.
As mentioned, San Francisco and Orient were not structured well for a meaningful "fail" scenario. The players performance in Orient was a new depth. Most plots were dropped and the players fixated on a secondary plot, while refusing to deal with the main plot, requiring a fantastic deus ex machina to even reach the endgame.
Again, Palestine was not our game, and Romania was not really a strong event for cast by design. The players behaved reasonably well, however, my Co-GM was in the hospital with a recurrence of a condition that had nearly killed her a few years earlier. To say that everyone was on "best behavior" would be an understatement. Cast roles which should have been stronger were not, because the author wasn't present to stage and coordinate them. The CCs received the character of Nadasdy well, however he was played by a player. The other major NCCs were villians.
Ophir was our next opportunity to deal with the issue of consequences. Ophir was an apalling low point even next to Orient. Once again faced with a complex cast situation which required investigation and interpretation, the CCs chose to ignore the cast in toto. The problem was not only one with cast - by ignoring the cast the CCs were effectively ignoring the plot as well.
The crisis broke after Ophir. We had cast - not the radical cast of earlier in the Season, but conservative, rational cast, complaining bitterly about being ignored. The players essentially won the event by fulfilling minimal criteria. To our credit, Ophir was not a complete victory. The players themselves began to doubt they had the strength to win, and for the first time in the Campaign accepted a negotiated ending, rather than pressing their luck, Orient style into a fight they should lose.
Ophir defined the first crisis point. The next Season would define our lessons learned, and buy us time.
War of the Worlds was an admittedly weak cast game, and again we saw players ignore cast, to an extreme that was almost unbelievable to us. However we managed to entertain the cast somewhat, and the lousy weather and cold dampened everyone's spirits. The end of the event was fun for the a reasonable number of the cast in that they played enemies operating our tripods. War of the Worlds was an event that strained our technical resources, and the cast seemed content to sit and wait.
Atlantic Clipper laid down a serious lesson. At this point, we had put a great deal about cast-player behavior on the line in plain writing, and we expected better performance. We also knocked ourselves out to write a top notch set of cast characters to challenge the players. In general the experiment was successful, players rose to the challenge and incorporated the cast into the game. Good for the players, but again we run into the consequence problem. The players won Atlantic Clipper fair and square. But because they did, the players who had interacted with the cast had no disaster that they could point at as evidence of the harm of not doing so.
Ireland once again was not our game, nor was Cathedral. Briton was a complex game, and followed Atlantic Clipper as a major cast success. However, like Spain, Briton was not a circumstance that could easily be recreated.
With Lake Constance and New York we had fairly positive cast experiences. Plot wise, neither event had complex plots that insisted on being solved. The situation remained out of crisis, but it wasn't getting dramatically better.
Worldcon I hit a new low. Whatever else can be said about Worldcon, my summary would be that it was as strong an event for cast as any of the First Season games other than Spain. That it was not well received seems to me to be a serious argument for Escalation of expectations. The Cast expected Briton or Palestine, and failing to get it, were sorely disappointed. Like Orient, Worldcon had myriad factors which made it difficult to determine exactly where given problems lay.
India was the season closing game, and saw reasonable cast roles, however the good cast material was front loaded, in the expectation that as the event drew on the players would - for good reason - have less and less interest in anything but the final goal. India saw some new cast, but also a return to a certain degree of carping not unfamiliar from the second season.
The Campaign reached its first cast crises with Ophir, and successfully survived to end without an ongoing crisis. However the problems wait, unsolved, in the wings.
Saying
it is one thing, doing is another
Alas, it's
a long way between saying the event is about the Cast, and producing satisfying
Cast roles. We had several early
successes including Palestine, spearheaded by Mike Young and produced by John
Corrado, Rebecca Corrado (then Ellis) and others. We had high hopes for Ophir, but found that we still had much
basic groundwork to lay. It was not
until Briton that we achieved a firm and satisfying success with cast. And Briton included many elements that could
not be recreated in every game.
Along the
way we learned several things.
It is
probably fortunate for the world of LARP that some people really don't care
that much about roleplaying - their friends roleplay and they come to hang out,
and socialize. But they would just as soon do "Tech"
work - working behind the scenes to make the event go off. In the sense that "Cast" is every
non-GM person who is staff for the game, these people are vital, because they
support the basic infrastructure of the event without making demands.
However, a decent percentage of people who are not "hard
core" tech seem to enjoy doing support work about as much as they enjoy
playing.
These people are the pool from which Tech and Monster/Utility Cast
roles can be created. They don't mind
coming out and don't mind not "playing a character." But they are not inclined to pay full rate -
or even close to full rate - for the privilege of working and watching.
This realization led to the creation of a distinct "Monster/Utility
Cast" rate for people who did not want to let themselves in for the very
hard labor that sometimes accompanied Tech, but didn't want to play at a full
rate, or close to it.
In a standard TS game, players receive a narrative sheet that
typically begins "You are so and so..." and contains a more or less
detailed account of their background, motivations, and characteristics.
This does not work well at all in TSC for conveying information to
cast, and third season experiments with this type of information were a dismal
failure. Early on the cast was
gratified to 'have character sheets,' because they associated this with getting
some individualized attention and a 'better character.' As this wore off, and expectations rose, we
found that merely presenting the cast with a character sheet was not a magical
talisman. Of course there is, as often
in LARP, a caveat. Some TS trained Cast
simply cannot handle the concept that they are playing a character without a
sheet beginning "You are so and so," and will flail in ways that seem
comparatively ludicrous. That is to say
that given a character sheet that beings "You are so and so" and then
recapitulates a Bluesheet (information sheet), they will succeed, and given a
sheet that contains a dry listing of name and other traits and then refers to
the bluesheet, they are convinced that they do not have a "real
character" and will fail.
In practice though, there are numerous enough problems with such
sheets that we have largely abandoned them.
It is entirely possible that they aren't even a very effective way of
getting information to players in conventional TS. It is simply the case that players in such games are motivated enough to use them.
We have identified seven basic means of getting information to
cast on where to go and what to do. The
first three methods are "non written" and have traditionally been
used only in emergencies or for "horde" scenes (where many cast
portray members of a group for a short time, without any distinct personality -
for example "a group of policemen").
In this situation, the Castmember is expected to simply figure out
what character needs to be played and play it.
This method bears mentioning, because it is in fact used, though
primarily by GMs. Some senior cast may
be trusted to simply "extrapolate" characters as needed.
The simplest form of Cast utilization. Very simply put, a senior cast member or GM knows what is going
on, and tells the other cast where to go and what to do. Experienced cast tend not to like
"follow the leader" for a number of reasons which we'll go into in
greater detail later. However it is a
very effective way of deploying cast quickly for scenes that require minimal
preparation, and where minimal characterization is desired. It is probably useful to explain the utility
of "follow the leader" to cast in general and make them aware that
some scenes may be run on this basis.
This is probably the least desirable form of Cast utilization,
because it implies a more specialized need than Follow the Leader, without any
documentary information. However it is
often necessary. Specifically any Cast
role conceived after the event begins, when there is not adequate time to
access a printer, or write notes, will probably be handled by verbal
briefing. And Cast roles are often
conceived after event start, as a response to player actions, etc. "They
have called a plumber!" In general
this is a fine method for very simple character roles which a) require no specialized knowledge, or only
one piece of information b) do not have to be on camera for any great length of
time, and c) are largely "connector" characters - that is to say they
do not have much plot themselves but are actually just delivering information
or "filling a gap." "Be
the Guard and stand here. You have
orders not to let them pass" is a fine Verbal Character. However, use of this form for longer
characters indicates an emergency. GMs
should put some thought into it though, because it will occur from time to time.
Not the same as a purely extrapolated character. This is a situation where the GMs have
defined a fairly rich background, but not assigned specific characters. For example the GMs have described in detail
a military unit and stipulated that everyone is a soldier in it, but have given
no details on the individual members, because it isn't terribly important what
specific role a given NCC has.
This is a format which I am convinced is workable, but requires some training. It has proven disastrous in actual
play. For example, players given sheets
which had the name and age and a brief (generic and largely meaningless)
paragraph and unit background on a solider were able to give portrayals,
however when simply given the same background as a bluesheet, then asked to
pick from a list of names and simply invent a character, they were unable to
give even a marginal portrayal and generally refused to speak, or answer
questions. Since the information was
essentially identical, I feel this is to some extent psychological.
It is my belief that it would be useful to train cast to utilize
this sort of background, because it would be less labor intensive, however it
may also prove that the availability of more labor to write characters means
that it is simply not worth the effort to bother with such training, and is
easier simply to subcontract simple writing.
The skill that seems to be lacking to use this sort of method is
training in impromptu theatre. I've
always been good at this, so it comes very naturally to me. However, experience in College leads me to
believe that it can be taught at some level to almost anyone, in no more than
an hour.
It is probably critical to this method that Cast understand they
are empowered - within the limits of the background - to be creative. Presented that way this should actually be a
pretty fun method - a limited "choose your own character" game,
giving the Cast character a chance to be creative within limits set by the
GM.
Traditionally this technique has been presented rather apologetically
"Sorry we didn't get time to write real characters." I would like to try, in the future to
present this technique constructively with some preparation, and create
excitement about it. "We're going
to hand you a background, and you will have ten minutes to think up a character
based on it....other people can help you out if you are stuck." I think much of what makes this technique
fail is simply expectation and perception, and no previous experience in
impromptu theatre.
Cast
should see this as an opportunity like a Jazz solo - a chance to
"riff" and "freeform" a character, not a lack of
characterization. This won't intrigue
every cast member and should not be how every role is defined. But as an occasional changeup, it should be
fun.
It would at least be useful to accustom Tertiary Writers to
writing characters from such background, producing simple one page
"stock" characters quickly.
The Gangsheet is an informal term for a method that combines the
expedience of Extrapolation from Background, but incorporates a method of
overcoming the inherent psychological barrier against just "making
up" a character. The Gangsheet is
a situation background, usually in the form of bulleted points, or at least
priorities, followed by a list of people with short descriptions. In its simplest form it is a "Who's
Who" stapled to a Bluesheet.
The Gangsheet was admittedly an emergency measure - essentially
rushing a background and a Who's Who out as a complete event - probably my
first use of this was at Arrival in October 1994.
However with some thought it occurred to me that the format could
actually be made to work fairly efficiently, and after a few experiments
including Orient, (which misfired for reasons other than the Gangsheet),
we produced a format for Friday Night of Briton which I felt was actually quite
workable, and seemed to work reasonably well.
The primary disadvantage to the Gangsheet is that it disallows
"surprise" elements. Everyone
knows that Mrs. A is cheating on Mr. B, including Mr. B. However for short scenes, this can actually
be a strength, since the GM can describe appropriate reactions both to
individuals and the group "At 9pm, Mrs. A will be caught with Mr. C....Mr.
B will start a fight and everyone else should act to restrain him."
It is also possible to add a few "secrets" to this with
Contingency cards with much less physical effort than producing a number of
near cookie cutter sheets. Even
better, Gangsheets can be printed in the Castbook for the game.
In general I consider Gangsheets to be a very desirable method for
handling short scenes.
This is the standard TSFL form as described above. It is rapidly becoming my opinion that this
form is somewhat of a shibboleth even in TSFL, and is definitely out of place
in TSC. At best, it is the background
component of a sheet that contains other information.
The only real advantage to this sort of sheet is that it allows
for an in depth development of character that the other formats do not. It is still my feeling, however, that it is
a relic of a bygone era, suitable at best for the occasional character who will
be in for the full game, and is more or less a "player character with GM
goals." The Character Form, can if
necessary incorporate the full background of the Character sheet, in a less
verbose format.
This is probably the most common format for handing out characters
in TSC. It gives basic information in a
structured format, with a shorter or longer descriptive paragraph. It is very much like the sort of short
"character sheet with goals" that was common circa "Newklone
2b" in 1988. Ironically, such
sheets have utility in games where the emphasis is on a text that can be
absorbed reasonably quickly and is not too time consuming to produce. Arguably that isn't a coincidence. The "short sheet with bullets" was
the pinnacle of First Generation LARP and was a solution to needing to write an
event with too little time. Since too
little time is a fixture of LARP with a 6-8 week turnaround, it is not
surprising that a similar format works fairly well.
Bulleted sheets can be more or less sophisticated, approaching
TSFL sheets in length. The major
distinction is that they include a very clear summary of points that are
important to the character.
The Character Form has been experimented with since the first
Season, and was even used to some extent in MMFC, however the first
sophisticated example was produced by Scott Mohnkern for Cuba. Since then we have just recently created a
dramatically improved version, drawing on our experiences of the past year and
recent discussions including a suggestion by Rebecca Corrado as to the four
points that need to be addressed for every Cast Character.
I am reasonably convinced that the Character Form, with background
as extensive as is needed, will be the mainstay of the next generation of
casting. Its principle strength is that
it keeps the GM from overlooking information the cast needs to know.
The concept of the Character Form was to take the questions cast need to know
the answers to, then construct the most common answers, which apply in probably
75% of all cases. The GM can handle
most cases by simply checking the correct box.
Obviously every choice must allow "other."
Cast need some training in reading the Character Form, and it would
be desirable (and fairly easy) to make it a Word or HTML based pull down
form which wrote only the correct response to the sheet, so that the Cast do
not see all the unselected blanks.
Further experimentation is necessary, however I feel the Character Form is at
present the most highly evolved form for conveying information to the cast, and
that as the form evolves and is standardized and perfected, it will become
easier for cast to know when and how to deploy.
Who am I: Name of the
Character
Age: Age, generally
written as Young, Middle Aged, Old, unless the exact age is relevant
What is my Social Status: Expressed
in terms meaningful to the genre. For
military characters this was rank. For
Indian Characters "high caste, low caste" so forth. For modern characters it might be "Blue
Collar," or "Middle Class."
What Groups of people do I
know? Here we put specific
groups the Character knew, referring if possible to the name of the Bluesheet
about them.
Note that if someone turns out to be in your group (for example "Masons"), whether they are a CC or NCC, you know them automatically. You may need to coach CCs by saying "you would have met me before," because they often don't realize this. Many NCCs have one "group" like "Tribesmen" and don't know anyone else, but know all the other NCCs who are Tribesmen, or who know that group.
This note is a permanent part of the form. We have often found that NCCs are extremely reluctant to identify themselves as knowing other members of their own group unless those people are specifically listed, by name, on their sheet. Since this adds a degree of complexity and cross referencing, it is desirable, when group relationships are obvious, to eliminate it.
_______ I don't already know the CCs (unless they are in the same group as me)
_______ I know of the CCs but haven't met them, or haven't met most of them
_______ I already know the CCs
_______ I have been played before by: ________________________________
How I feel about the CCs
_______ I actively dislike them
_______ I actively like them and want to be helpful to them
_______ I am neutral but generally disposed to be helpful
_______ I am neutral but generally disposed to be unhelpful
Any Special
Notes about feelings about the CCs, or reactions to specific CCs:
What is my level of
interaction likely to be
_______ I am largely a color character, most of my actions will be posing or acting out in front of the CCs - I should try to be in front of them and as demonstrative as possible, as I am supposed to be an example of my type or culture and provide "dressing" for the game.
_______ I am largely a color character, most of my action will be playing off of other NCCs - I don't have to worry too much about being seen by the CCs or dealing with them, and am free to play off other NCCs.
_______ I have a plot or plot elements, and it is designed to resolve primarily with the PCs. I am "aimed" at them in some way, and need to focus on getting my points home to them and getting them to interact with me.
_______ I am more or less the same as a CC, and just happen to have a GM produced background and instructions. I need to be accepted by the CCs, and need to approach specific CCs and the GMs if I am not able to get the CCs to deal with me as one of their group.
_______ I have event critical plot or plot elements, and it is critical that I interact with the CCs in order for the event to be able to resolve
_______ I have plot or plot elements with other NCCs, most of my action will be playing off of other NCCs - I don't have to worry too much about being seen by the CCs or dealing with them, and am free to play off other NCCs.
_______ I am largely a one trick pony with some specific shtick. If I am not doing that, it is okay to be out of character as long as I am alert so that I can come if needed.
_______ This is a "filler" character, primarily provided so that I can be present at a given scene or move with the group. I do not need to put much effort into it.
What is my level of free will
_______ I need to play very close to the instructions in this sheet, and ask the GMs about any major changes. I am not free to "mess" with the CCs, or conspire with other NCCs.
_______ I have reasonable free will, but should avoid doing anything that is likely to have major event effect, such as conspiring with other NCCs against the CCs, stealing things, attacking the CCs or so forth.
_______ I am completely self willed, and for all practical purposes, aside from any other special instructions below, can act with all the free will of a CC.
Special Notes
_______ I may be asked to
drop this role and switch to another character
When do I come into game:
_______ You are associated with a scene. It isn't critical that you be present the
minute the scene starts, but you should be present during most of the scene
_______ You must be present "on camera" when the "scene" you are slated for starts.
_______ You are tied to a location. You will "enter" The Playing Space when the CCs get to that location. You will go to the location early, and be present when they arrive
_______ You will arrive as part of a group with other NCCs
_______ Your entry into the The Playing Space is time sensitive, and you'll need GM guidance, and to be prepared to be patient.
______ Once you enter game, you travel with the players until the time for you to leave game
Where am I:
This contained a specific
description of exactly where the NCC started.
Why am I here, specifically:
This contained a description
of exactly what events had brought the NCC here. For example, for locals there was a description of the events
they had all come out to see, and an explanation of how people in small towns
tend to congregate to see strangers and watch interesting things.
What the GM's want me to accomplish:
In this area we detailed in
general what we wanted them to do. Push
plot, get certain information across, etc.
Specific detailed information that you must get across to the CCs:
Often this says "none" but the idea is that if there is some specific phrase, or key information they just HAVE to get into play it goes here.
Any special instructions on how the GMs want me to accomplish this:
For example "you need to
go up to Joe and whisper this information into his ear." We also used this
area for special restrictions "whatever you do, don't kill Joe."
How do I leave The Playing
Space:
_______ Remain "on camera" until the "Scene" you are slated for is done, even if you have accomplished everything
_______ Return to the Cast Tent/Cast Area/Staging Area once you have completed the items above
_______ Return to the Cast Tent/Cast Area/Staging Area
______ Ask a GM before leaving The Playing Space and give a full report on what has happened
______ Die in play
_______ I need Makeup or Prosthetics described in the General Cast information
_______ I need Makeup or Prosthetics described below
_______ I need special Costuming described in the General Cast information
_______ I need special Costuming described below
_______ I need a special Prop
This is a new technique that we have just begun to experiment
with. Often we find that we are
creating a character based on a story we have read dealing with the event
background. It occurred to us that in
most cases, instead of trying to give a poorly written amateur description of
what the character was like, it is more expedient to write up a bulleted sheet
for the character and say "you are like the character in this story,
except for X and X." The only
exception would be when the work is really long, and in those cases, it should
be possible to pull a few "flavor" passages out.
This is never likely to be something we make widespread use of,
but it works well when we are writing an event heavily based on primary source
material. Really this is similar to the
technique of 1988's Arabian Nights.
In initial trial, this was reasonably successful, but it is only
suitable for specialized uses.
The other major method of
communicating with Cast is through background materials - things designed to be
read by more than one castmember and not targeted individually. Usually communicated via e-mailed files, or
a website, Background is principally comprised of:
Primary Background -
Background information that is designed to be read by all castmembers of a
certain group (or all castmembers) and that conveys critical information core
to the game
Secondary Background -
Background that is "optional" for castmembers who want to deepen
their portrayal. Often this is the
websites, or primary source documents the GMs developed the Primary Background
from.
E-mail Background -
Communications delivered directly to the Cast in the form of E-mail. Cast usually read the first paragraph of an
e-mail so this is useful for elements conveying specific very important notes.
Reference Background - This
sort of background isn't meant to be read at all, or is at most meant to be
skimmed, but is meant to be available to Cast who need to look something up
during runtime.
Cast are significantly less likely to actually read background
materials, and more likely to have given them a cursory reading. We have found that stressing the importance
of certain particular background documents does help in getting Cast to read
them.
Background needs to be carefully prioritized. Most cast simply won't read a large amount
of material, so care needs to be taken to 'flag' the important material to
read.
Accessibility is also an issue. HTML
information on an easy to read website is more likely to be read than a Word
Document to print out. Even the serious
Luddites are generally able to use a web browser now.
Getting background out early is useful, though not as useful as
most people would think. For example,
it matters to have background out two full weeks in advance, and helps to have
it out three weeks in advance. But four
weeks in advance doesn't help much more - people don't read event material till
it's urgent or they have time. It
doesn't hurt badly, but it doesn't help a lot.
Secondary background - reference websites, etc. - are even less
likely to be read than regular background.
Background provided at runtime should be only for reference. Realistically nobody has time to read new
background material at runtime.
At Palestine, we ran an experiment designed to determine the best
format for getting information to Cast.
We wanted to see which of the formats discussed above allowed cast to
get their information out most effectively.
Our surprise result was that self identification as either an
introvert or extrovert roleplayer mattered dramatically more than any of these
factors. Essentially whether a
castmember was more introverted or extroverted determined their success in getting
information out to CCs and making an impression, to an extent that eclipsed any
other factors.
This was at once a fascinating and frightening result. We had always been aware that we had some
cast players who because they were neither outgoing nor loud, had trouble
making an impression on CCs. Did this
mean that they would never be effective cast.
This was troubling because introverted players who were quiet and not
outspoken made up a significant portion of our cast pool.
Our finding since Palestine has been that introverted players can
be successful cast. But that they will
not tend to succeed in the same roles as extroverted players. This is an area where we are still learning,
but it is an important lesson, because it is the difference between being able
to utilize - and not being able to effectively utilize - half of our available
cast at any given time.
From 1985 through the mid 90s, tremendous effort was put into
coming up with good instruments - questionnaires - for casting. During that time fitting the right player to
the right character became a reasonably developed art if not a science.
Oddly very little along these lines has been done with cast. To some extent this is because it hasn't
been convenient. Cast roles are often
limited and GMs tend to cast based on personal knowledge. But we found in 88 and 89 that this worked
poorly for LARP. It leads to
favoritism, and underuse of people who are not strongly outspoken.
So why should we continue the process for Cast? Largely because we haven't yet gotten well
enough organized to have the time to do it, and haven't made a study of what we
are offering so we know what to ask.
We need to develop instruments that allow us to ask Cast the right
questions to be able to quickly match them with roles. Knowing not just what we think the personal
characteristics of our cast are, but what they respond, will give us a lot more
information to use to match the correct cast member with the correct role.
Broadly speaking "Cast" includes all of the non-GM staff who are participating in the production. We've tried to create some distinctions to classify the types of opportunities we have for Cast most often in our game.
The "crisis" in cast mostly pertains to the issue of handling NCC Cast. Monster/UC and Tech Cast more or less "get what they pay for" and despite occasional shortages, it has been possible to populate these groups out of cast who like to handle behind the scenes production. There is always somewhat of a crisis in finding people willing to work, however driving a successful implementation of NCCs should help ease the problem.
These are basically assistants who put the event together. In practice, very few people sign up to Tech, because it is hard work and can expose them to anything. When non-regulars do sign up to tech, they are often not very useful because lack of experience limits them to jobs that could be held by Monster/UC cast. In practice we've begun to use Monster/UC as a non-specialized pool for work assignments, and Tech as a specialized pool for directing work assignments. Very often the Tech staff on our games is only two people - Shane Amerman and Ken Brown.
These are people who sign up with the understanding they probably won't get "glitterati" roles in an upcoming game. This provides a pool of people to undertake odd jobs, support the Tech staff, and play roles which are not terribly exciting as roleplaying challenges. Members of groups, quick walk ons, etc.
This has been a very valuable category for us in terms of taking pressure off of our writing staff. Often before introducing this category we felt obliged to write "full" roles for Cast who had only marginal interest in roleplaying.
However, there have been problems with this category.
Other individuals sign up for Monster/UC but shirk work shifts. They depend on the notion that there are some people who will always come forward and pick up a great deal of the work. The problem is that this wears thin and slowly these people get burned out.
Another inevitable problem is that there is a wide discrepancy in when people arrive, and leave, the event site. Cast who arrive at 2:30 put in effectively an entire extra day of work over cast who arrive at 12:30 at night. However not everyone can reach the gamesite early. Breaking charges up has been proposed, but there is a limit to how thinly one can slice discounts in this direction without creating excessive administrative issues and giving the impression of "needledicking." Too many rates makes it seem as if the GMs are money grubbers, avariciously charging by the hour. And any attempt to subdivide the length of an event in regards to fee raises the inevitable prospect of players using that as precedent to suggest they should only pay for part of an event - wanting essentially to pay half price to only play the "good parts." The basic fact is that the amount of money we charge Monster/UC is trivial, and that any significant subdivision of it is so small as to appear silly.
One plan we are looking at is to raise rates for Monster/UC slightly, while offering reduced rates to players who pull a specific work assignment - the concept being that we will reduce the amount of work to split between Tech and Monster/UC cast to make it less onerous and more desirable.
This is our attempt to create a cast pool of players who are essentially players who do not play the same character all the time. Of course this is a difficult pool. It requires a player whose temperament runs towards pure roleplaying. Often cast are enemies (who will not get to achieve their aims) and who will also not be given the opportunity for a "glorious and meaningful" demise in the PC sense.
I do not have a doubt that we have NCCs who should be PCing, and that we have PCs who would be better off NCCing. However, until we can consistently produce good quality material for this class of Cast and leave them satisfied, PCing will continue to be the avenue of choice for most good roleplayers, leaving us a sparse pool, often arbitrarily composed of newcomers to the Campaign who have not yet identified what they are "good at."
NCCs are really only supposed to be impressed into work
assignments for "all hands" situations - in which players are
theoretically subject to impression as well.
In practice, NCCs are sometimes delegated to do work assignments if they
are willing, due to staff shortages.
It's worth taking a look at what sorts of things we have Cast do in games.
Cast Tasks fall into the following areas
It is also worth reviewing how we stage Cast in games. Over the past three years we have arrived at about four basic methodologies for entertaining cast in Games.
This certainly bears mentioning, though it hasn't been a primary avenue for 1936. In this sort of staging the cast have little direct communication with the players and primarily remain off camera while waiting to attack, individually or in groups.
With Palestine as a primary example, this handles the cast by building essentially a full featured TSFL event for them to play. There are up sides and down sides to the "Cast Game" concept. Ultimately it runs into the problem of quality. Very good TSFL games, which put months of work into pleasing all the plotted players, have had disappointments. Can a TSFL, which has to operate within the strictures of being background to a different game, satisfy Cast repeatedly? Or does it stand the risk of building cast expectations to a TSFL level.
It is also to some extent "writer inefficient." It puts a major writing effort behind entertaining the cast, without necessarily meaning that the effort put into entertaining cast conveys into entertaining the rest of the game.
The concept of the Cast game is "indirect" entertainment. If the cast are all occupied and have something to do, they form an active backdrop that gives the impression of a "real world" scenario.
This can be successful in some circumstances. Palestine worked very well along these lines. However there are many things to take into account. In particular the endgame must be considered. A TSFL requires a good endgame. What is the end scenario for the Cast. It is particularly important that it not be "everything you do is invalidated by the Players because they destroy the area, the political system you are fighting for, etc."
The Cast Game concept is a good one in situations where it can be appropriately used. However it is not a holy grail and not an end all and be all that cures all Cast problems. It is in many cases a milksop, and sometimes a rather lame one.
Like most LARP devices it has its place, mostly when trying to portray complex indigent societies which are not strictly speaking reliant on the players.
The bottom line is this. Providing an event that is "good compared to most other cast roles" but would be considered second rate compared to other full weekend experiences such as playing 1936, or Drink Deeper cannot be considered adequate in itself to entertain cast.
Using elements of a "cast game" to help make certain blocks of the event more interesting or colorful is certainly feasible, of course. It is my opinion that except in rare circumstances the "Cast game" works best in combination with other approaches as only part of a full weekend TSC LARP.
There is no reason that elements of the "Cast Game" concept cannot be combined with the idea of Cycling Cast, or other concepts.
Another approach to cast is "Cyclic" Cast. In this approach - one which has been used heavily by 1936, cast are left "onscreen" for a limited time, and are pulled for a new wave of cast, in the theory that the novelty will spur new action or at least prevent boredom
This works well, to the point of being necessary if the event isn't at one set location.
A typical example would be an event where the CCs are going to travel into the wilderness. On Friday night, the NCCs mostly represent the locals at some civilized staging point. They may have ways in which they could help the CCs, or be able to interfere with their progress. In India for example, the CCs arrived planning to take a railway train to their final destination, only to find that the North Indian Railway was on strike, and that they needed to resolve the strike in order to get where they were going.
On Saturday morning, the Cast might represent natives at some waypoint, and on Saturday afternoon and evening locals - or antagonists - at the place the CCs were traveling to.
There are downsides to "Cycling Cast." The CCs have less time to form strong attachments to the Cast, and we've heard that there has been some tendency to try and metagame on the basic supposition that "the Friday night cast aren't important."
On the other hand, there are many strengths to Cycling. Many cast roles that are very poignant deal with characters who are essentially pathetic - that is in the dramatic sense they invoke pathos. For example a character in India was dying of consumption.
Most cast can appreciate playing dramatic psychological roles for a few hours. However such a character over the course of a weekend becomes boring. The suicidal "Willy Loman" type character in Pennsylvania was a great dramatic bit. But after resolution it has no real potential to "go anywhere."
Cycling cast can be written in ways that would not be "fun" to be doomed to play for a weekend, but are poignant to play for two to four hours.
Adventurer Cast are those cast characters who are written with the idea that they will play through the event pretty much as an adventurer, and generally follow the adventurers. We've already learned a good bit about how to stage these cast effectively.
1) They must be linked with more than one good, social, roleplayer, who is not currently more engrossed in one-on-one roleplay with another CC than with the event at large.
2) The "linked" CC must have some genuine interest and tie to them. We've seen many examples of "oh you're my long lost cousin. Whatever. Have a nice time! Bye!" Characters with a potential romantic tie, played by someone the link CC does not dislike, are often one of the best forms of tie in.
3) They must have something to offer that does not entirely duplicate the CC ability pool. If everyone goes to Joe for Healing, or Lockpicking, introducing an NCC with those abilities is as useless as it would be to introduce a new CC with a redundant skill. We conjecture that high level NCCs that could teach a new skill could find a place in game, but the reward probably must be fairly immediate and tacit. CCs are inherently very jealous of their "niche" and will fight an NCC even more strongly than another PC.
4) New CCs have pretty hard going their first game. It's fair to expect that NCCs might too.
5) "Adventurer Cast" that are part of a subgroup of their own can work well if they have some interesting personal dynamic that makes the group fun to roleplay, and have some link to the other CCs.
Used sparingly, Adventurer Cast can work, but it's a difficult task, not a panacea. At best the incoming NCC has as tough a time as a new CC, and that's something that many Cast aren't up to fighting their way into.
An important point to consider in Casting Methodology is the "point of irrelevance." At some point in the game, any Cast who are not either Adventurer-Cast or Antagonists, will cease to be relevant to the CCs. This isn't an absolute, but it is a facet of most situations in which cast are background characters.
This effects Cycling Cast and Cast-Game Methodologies equally. The concept with Cycling Cast is to be able to bring in a "new wave" of cast that is somehow relevant, with the last wave often being Antagonists who the CCs must fight.
It is important to think from the beginning about whether or not the event is Static. Many games work on the principle that the event will begin at one location on Friday night and run there until Sunday morning. This is a "static" setting - it stays the same for the entire game. That makes it more difficult - though not impossible - to run Cycling Cast. There has to be a good explanation why the original characters leave (or fade into the background) and a good explanation why new characters appear. One setup that works well for this is for the Full Cast to Cycle, while the Monster/UC and Tech cast maintain relatively low profile "local" roles.
In a non-static setting, the CCs move from one location to another. This makes it tough, though not impossible to maintain the same cast for the entire game, and maintain a "Cast Game" setting for the entire weekend (though it doesn't preclude doing it for an evening, or other block of time).
The fact is that some Cast Roles have more potential to be interesting than others. Anyone can have fun, and make an impression with "Soldier Number 3." But the fact is that "Lady Arzul the Vampire" who is also the inamorata of a prominent male CC, is somewhat more likely to be a memorable role.
This is something that GMs have to assess fairly and take into consideration when casting. Often roles of paramount significance have to go to the stronger roleplayers in the group - not only those who have good skills at communication, but those who can make the players listen to them, and who can get across complex concepts.
But it is important to be realistic about the significance of roles, and to make some attempt to apportion them fairly.
There is a time to look a situation right in the eye. The fact is that part of the crisis in Casting is that 1936 has not always been able to deliver what it promised for the amount of money it is charging.
By and large we've done fairly well. Until very recently Cast costs were uniformly low, with Monster/UC being almost negligible in some cases. But we need to keep in mind what factors drive our pricing, and we need to provide an experience that meets the amount that we charge.
Following the success of Briton, we began to feel some confidence in what had been our ultimate plan - to heavily split the cost of NCC/Full Rate Cast, and Monster/UC, with Monster/UC paying a rate closer to Tech, and NCC paying a rate closer to CC.
There are several reasons for this.
First, as long as NCC roles are substantially cheaper than CC roles, there will
be a certain amount of jingoism. After
all the thing that is less expensive must necessarily be inferior - why would
anyone provide a discount otherwise.
Realistically there are several reasons. NCCs are expected to do more work than CCs, in terms of reading out of game, and often have to assemble costuming on less lead time.
In a perfect world, it would be a viable argument that NCC roles should cost more than CC roles. After all you are talking about a GM written pre-gen that fits perfectly into the game, as opposed to the GM merely allowing you to walk your character in. And at some point in the future we may see that phenomenon. However at this juncture in time, we don't see a firm basis for that - we simply do not produce NCC roles with a level of consistency that can command a higher price.
Nevertheless, as long as it is clear that NCC roles are cheap walk on parts
where one must frequently double as busboy, I do not think that very many top
class roleplayers are going to decide to NCC out of preference. That a few have is a testament to their
ability.
In a close to ideal world - and we may be a bit closer to this - Players would divide themselves up into NCC and CC based on temperament and preference, and see both types of roleplay as "equal." We do see this from time to time, but it isn't a norm. If this were the case, then we'd probably have less problems all around. To some extent TSC is cursed by the fact that CCing is the "ideal" to which most everyone aspires.
At the same time, there are those who aren't as interested in the event itself, but want to work with and support their friends, or are, at least for the moment, not very well off. And there are also folks who just like to work hard. Perverse as it sounds, that is true. They are the ones we want at Monster/UC - getting more of their satisfaction out of the camaraderie of working with others.
It is important to consider the casting situation before setting rates for the game. Are there enough positions for NCCs In the future, it may be necessary to set a limit on signups as NCC, so that we will not have players signed up as NCC and paying that rate who we do not have a character or characters equal to the rate they are paying.
At this point it is worth doing a quick review of the overall problems with Casting, both as the GMs see the problems and as the Cast see the problems.
Ultimately the single largest factor is interaction. Players attend the event, and want to roleplay and interact with others. NCCs unable to interact with CCs feel frustrated. To remedy the problem by having NCCs interact exclusively with other NCCs works to some extent, but is not a solution to the entire problem. Ultimately NCCs drive plot and CCs must interact with them if complex plot is to exist in game.
Cast often do not know all the backstory of the game. The premium put on CCing makes Casting seem like a poor alternative. Thus often the cast pool is filled with novices who have "not yet started a CC" or "friends of" CCs who are along for the ride. So often the Cast knows little about what is going on in the game, and may not be able to comment on, or make useful suggestions about, elements in the event that seem simple to the players. This tends to amplify the belief that "the cast is useless."
It is extremely important that the cast who wish to NCC "follow the game" as much as players, and know what is going on. This should be supplemented with background sheets that give general purpose information about the game.
It does not help that because of the perceived "hierarchy" of roles, Cast is often the least experienced group of players.
A certain amount of what the GMs need cast to do is simply follow directions. This often engenders problems among the more competent cast, who want to be "in on" everything that is going on. Cast need to be able to moderate this need and understand that there are times simply to focus on doing what they are told - this is a part of casting and is not meant as an insult or humiliation - following directions well is an essential skill that experienced cast have.
The smaller the Tech pool, the more work falls on the shoulders of Monster/UC, and ultimately on the Cast in general. Many Cast do not want to be in an event where they have to do all - or in some cases even much - physical work.
Probably the leading complaint that cast themselves voice, after "being ignored" is getting enough information from the GMs. This is unfortunately a difficult area, which requires balancing three factors.
First, it is likely that the amount of information that the most information hungry cast want will never be available. There is almost no theoretical limit to the amount of information that could be provided, and the information that cast most often want locked down is information that the GMs themselves may not know - often scenes are called "on the hoof" or "as needed" - something which by nature cannot be defined well in advance.
Second, there are limits to the amount of information that many cast will read. At some point the GM is producing information for one or two senior cast members, and at that point, there may be diminishing return from a large amount of production work. Ideally all cast want to know everything, and want everything to be a page or less. In an game with complex plots, that's obviously not going to happen.
Finally, GMs have limited production time. There are limits to the degree to which cast information will be developed. Casting implies a certain degree of impromptu work, and a certain degree of flexibility. In a game with four weeks of lead time, there will be gaps which must be filled with ingenuity.
However, all this said, it is desirable to get the cast the most information possible in as digestible a form as possible. Our current thinking is that getting a solid format in which Cast information usually appears, so that Cast have reasonable expectations about what information they are going to get, and that GMs consistently meet or slightly exceed that expectation is the key to this area.
differences in the degree to which information is assimilated is a problem unto itself. There are a minority of Cast players who do not read any material, and who do not compensate for this by being excellent improvisationists, or worse, who are very good at improvisation, but do not understand the importance of inserting the GM material and sticking to it, and lead the game astray.
Senior Cast can be used to "ride herd" on these Cast players to some extent, but handling them is a problem. If someone will not or cannot recapitulate information, it becomes hard to hand them the same challenging and interesting roles that might be handed to one of their peers. So a discrepancy emerges between players paying the same basic rate, which can lead to jealousy.
A problem for GMs is a focus on the concept that a TS "character sheet" necessarily means a better and more important character. Some cast visibly dismiss out of hand any character that does not come with its own "sheet," and is presented, for example, as part of a gangsheet.
Cast players are generally anxious for the GMs to "delegate" to a "Cast Wrangler," the concept being that the Cast effectively have a full time person who knows what they are supposed to be doing. The problem is that this requires someone who:
This is further complicated by time considerations. The GMs know the event well because they invented it. Even presuming it all gets onto paper - every nuance, every element - someone who is not a GM has to absorb it before runtime.
Obviously it's useful to have a "Cast GM." However our observation has been that having someone who is underqualified, for the position is actually actively worse than having no-one at all in the position. Ultimately, like players, cast can wait. However having cast improperly instructed or deployed can be very time consuming and require spin control that is also beyond the ability of an underqualified Cast GM to deal with.
Worse, and underqualified Cast GM or "Wrangler" may feel that the GM is "going around" them in addressing Cast directly. Even a very well qualified Cast Wrangler may feel this way. This creates a problem for the GM, because unless it is possible to go through the Cast Wrangler at all times - and the setup of scenes tends to suggest it won't be - the GM cannot communicate with the Cast effectively if there are needed changes.
The important focus here is not on this job being impossible, or unworkable, but rather on the concept that it requires someone with the skills of a primary runtime GM, which is not an easy thing to find.
Short of someone with these qualifications, we've seen no specific disadvantage to selecting an available Senior Cast member (someone with experience and who is fairly respected) to brief on a Scene-by-Scene basis.
However, the concept of "Cast Wrangler" being out there, any failings or frustrations will be laid to the absence of the role. It is a good and important role to fill. But it must be someone supremely well qualified. Otherwise, you have the potential for putting a layer of insulation between GMs and cast which can make spin control very difficult.
one of the things which Cast are able to point out as an area of frustration is the phenomenon of "hurry up and wait." This means that there is often a great deal of pressure to get something ready, and then an intensely dull period of time when the cast waits for the players to get to it.
This is one of those difficult double-edge swords. Getting things ready early is a mark of organization and efficiency. However when the cast perceives this as inefficiency "we had to wait an hour...we were so bored" then the game's strength becomes a weakness.
Cast repeatedly and vociferously express their love of Cast meetings. In general 1936 avoided Cast Meetings for several reasons. The chief of these is that our very liberal policies in regards to both start time, arrival time, and lodging made it difficult to accumulate either our Cast or Players before the latest possible time at which we could begin running.
The second is the findings of very experienced Cast and GMs that these meetings spend a good bit of extremely valuable runtime accomplishing little more than handholding. Cast who haven't read the materials ask questions about it, Cast who have read the materials ask detailed questions that could have been asked on list, and eighty percent of the time is consumed by people who are not in fact in charge of pacing and blocking asking extremely detailed questions about things that they do not in fact need to know about, so that they will "know what to do." Often the basic question asked at Cast meetings is "I don't really know anything about the game. Tell me all about it." Obviously there isn't time for this, so the experience becomes frustrating for everyone.
Basically Cast Meetings run afoul of human nature. Uncertainty is anathema to us - we want to know where we are going to be and what we are going to be doing. Even if in many cases it will be perfectly obvious when we get there. Very experienced cast are much better at simply letting the event come to them, and relying on the GMs or designates to get them to the right place at the right time.
There are good arguments for Cast Meetings. They can help spread information to the non-readers, (though this could be accomplished by trying to encourage non-readers to ask a reader to mentor them - formally or informally), and they can help reach cultural agreements on how the group will appear and behave.
An agenda helps cast meetings immensely, and keeps them from being terribly slow. Endless questions about timing can be answered by referring the questioners to a senior cast member who knows, rather than answering the question.
Probably Cast Meetings are an exercise in handholding that is worth indulging in. After all, things less important are undertaken for players. But the Cast needs to understand that it is possible to function without then, and that increasingly much of what would have been done at a cast meeting five years ago will be done on the list. The list is a Cast Meeting, and one far superior to any forty minute block of time the GMs are able to hew out of a busy schedule.
The opposite of the Cast Player who takes their sheet, nods sagely, then walks around for two hours "being" their cast character without the misfortune of actually speaking to anyone is the Cast Player who leaps with ebullience into the game, making all manner of decisions, statements, and actions.
Many at odds with the written background, or at best well in excess of its scope.
Fortunately it is generally possible to identify the player who tends to have this tendency. The fact is that the Cast needs to be empowered - within limits. An important function of any Cast documentation must be to explore the limits so that motivated Cast have a good guideline of what not to go past in improvising.
With a four to six week turnaround, Cast roles are often written late. In particular roles that may qualify for a Gangsheet may be left till late, with the possibility of individual writing if time allows, and a Gangsheet if it doesn't. Cast usually emerge organically in support of plot, and so often are not fully - or even partially - written until after most of the plot is solidified.
GMs see the solution to this as publishing the event background in advance, so that Cast can read what everyone needs to know, and have a context for their characters. Cast often resent being asked to read anything that might not be useful, and a fair number of cast will simply be "on strike" - unwilling to read so much as a bluesheet until their Character information is posted.
Despite using hit counters it is hard to know how much of this is conscious, and how much is subconscious - when the Characters hit, the Players know that it is time to buckle down and finally read the scenario.
More work needs to be done - and inducements offered - to get CCs to read the background before individual characters are available.
And of course care needs to be exercised. Those characters who need to know nothing in the background need to be delineated early, so that the player is not asked to read a lot of material that is not going to be of any use.
Some things about Events are mutable, and some are not. While prep time is theoretically mutable, it is in fact captive to the real world to such an extent that it in practical fact is not. Years ago there were GMs who vowed "not to even bid games until they are full written and in the box." The world yet waits for their productions, while those who worked to schedule and did the best they could are working still.
One suggestion you will not see below is "be better and more detailed," which is a long way of saying "work harder." That's always a goal, but there is a presumption that the Campaign is spending as much time as it can working hard. The only viable solutions that are meaningful are how to work smarter with the time available. Not simply to "do more in the same amount of time." Obviously if the GMs had an infinite amount of time they could produce a perfectly written TSFL game for the Cast, every time. The nature of TSC is that they do not have that kind of time, and will not.
The campaign accepts as a fact of life what is all too often the reality in any TS event. There are only a few full weeks of undivided prep time.
The two most significant elements are Jobs, and Money. The GMs can divy up the workload and the GMs can charge more or less Money depending on the roles they have available.
Splitting costs, with Monster/UC being closer to Tech, and NCC being closer to CC should attract more CCs to consider being "permacast" NCCs, and enlarge the pool of Monster/UC slightly as those willing to accept interesting impromptu roles, or one strong role and several work shifts, float towards the logical points. The GMs can concentrate on writing really quality material for the NCCs, while being freed to produce reasonably good material within the level of interest for Monster/UC.
The GMs need to be consistent about pricing games so that Cast Roles match the prices and available numbers. An event where cast pay only a fraction less than Players for NCC roles must feature good, very interesting, NCC roles. If it is clear that an event will consist primarily of Monster/UC roles, then that needs to be stated beforehand, and the prices and any limits on type of character set accordingly.
Offering good cast roles to those who have paid for them is as critical as offering a good event to the paying players. Failure can and will happen, but it must be clear to the Cast that there is an overall effort ongoing to try.
1936 had a pretty good idea, which it was never really able to maintain. The idea is that each member of the group owed either some money, or some cast time, or something. The problem is poor enforcement. While a final glance at the charts shows most 1936 players fulfilled their requirements, a few probably didn't, or did so at events that really weren't "worth" the credits they pulled in.
By building the tracking into the Database, we'll be able to tell, and exploit CCs to take on many of the "odd jobs" that make Casting odious. CCs have tended to be favored when they cast, arousing jealousy in the regular or "permacast" that a CC was more important than they were even when doing a "labor" shift - getting a good role that could have gone to permacast, while permacast did dishes. CCs should draw primarily Monster/UC duties - a contingency that the system wasn't built to handle.
The workload on Monster/UC should be lighter than that on Tech. One way to accomplish this is to allow players to do a certain amount of useful work, by giving them a reduced rate, while holding rates for Cast who do not wish to do any manual work other than "all hands" jobs up to a level not too far from CC. Jobs such as "Fuel, Tiki Torches," and some other roles may be easily farmed out to CCs. This reduces the workload on GMs and on Monster/UC
It is not necessarily the case that "more staff means more attention." The larger a GM staff gets, the more inefficient it becomes. Some individuals are idle, others do not know what is going on. There is time wasted in communication.
However with some modularization, and good communications practices, a team of up to six to eight GMs ought to be significantly more efficient than a team of one or two. If the increase is not a perfect progression - that is to say six GMs are not six times better than one, it is at least consistent up to around that point that they are better than one.
It ought to be possible with a larger staff to allocate at least one full time Staff to Cast, and that should take care of a lot of issues with "Cast Wrangling" etc.
Part of the problem with Cast assignments being unfair is that there has thus far been no really good way of telling if Joe had four mediocre roles, while Frank had three kickass roles in the same event. With India we started developing a casting grid that weighted characters somewhat based on plots, ties, and detail and allowed us to assign a point value. Players should end up with a roughly similar point value across a given game, and a very close point value across several games. The concept is to make sure that:
a) full rate cast are getting their money's worth, not being pre-empted by talented Tech or Monster/UC, unless that is balanced by work shifts.
b) no one Cast person is dramatically outstripping the others in terms of role quality
A grid of this sort should never rule the casting or the
game. Its proper place is to allow the
GMs to discover gross discrepancies and repair them.
Cast need guidelines that outline basic GM expectations at
various levels. Cast also need training
in the basic skills that will allow them to interact with the players
effectively - particularly the ability to play impromptu roles, and to
improvise within guidelines. The GMs
need to begin to build "training" materials for cast. GMs must then meet the expectations they set
for Cast, and must do so consistently.
If Cast expect a certain type of guidance, it should be there. One element of training is what to expect
when a scene is described a given way in terms of information, and where to
find the written information. The GMs
now derail a tremendous number of time consuming Player inquiries by saying
"read the website" or "read the list." The same structures for finding information
need to exist for cast, be produced consistently, and once consistent, cast
need to be sent to them. "Read the
timeline"
1936 has come a long way from a TS style folder containing random notes, to an indexed Cast Booklet, which allows the Cast to carry and reference virtually all the information in the game.
We need to continue to experiment with the best way to convey information through sheets, while increasing cast understanding of methods other than the traditional TS "Character sheet." Sheets should be targeted for the depth of the character, and should focus on providing the relevant information, not an interesting, but not terribly useful, story.
We need Sheets that give cast the information they
need, and do not require them to read the information they don't - that means
prioritization of critical information over background detail that - however
rich, does not drive the game.
We need to assume that they typical cast player does not have unlimited
time to read sheets.
Very little attention has been given to "casting cast." Each Cast player has different preferences, in regards to what sort of sheet and what type of characters that they prefer. The nature of casting is such that individuals must sometimes play "what is available." But a much greater effort could be made to match "what is available" to a Cast Player's general preferences.
Some players like to read others don't. We can adjust literary or background heavy roles to those who enjoy reading, and more impromptu roles towards those that enjoy freeform roleplaying.
The GMs need to determine what they can do consistently and what they can't in regards to supporting Cast, and this needs to be clearly communicated, so that Cast and GMs have the same, realistic, expectations about what can and cannot be done. Recognizing Cast who have unrealistic expectations may help in getting them to move to another level CC, Tech, where they are more comfortable.
We have seen that the current crisis is not a decline in the quality of cast roles, but a movement of cast roles to a new and previously unexplored level - and that all such moves are fraught with the danger of expectations exceeding delivery to the point of severe frustrations. However turning back is not an option - frustration lies in that direction as well.
We have not invented
all, or even most of the ways in which we can improve the game for cast, and
head off the current move towards Crisis.
To flail through
this period by random fits and starts, without methodology, and without making
a coherent try with each new production both to perfect existing mechanisms,
and introduce new ones is to voluntarily agree to lose some - maybe many - of
our good cast to frustration before we are successful.
To move into every
event with a high level understanding of everything that has been tried before,
and with a conscious effort to use all the best practices we have learned and
to avoid previous mistakes - while understanding we may stumble and fail - is
the key towards resolving this crisis in a time frame.
Unlike the GMs of 1987, we do not need to be slaves to coincidence and good luck. We can make our own luck by studying and understanding the problems, and applying focused solutions.