# Intro
In tabletop gaming there is only one grouping of players that needs to be considered - the party, which encompasses the entirety of the player base. It is natural for some amount of the game time to be given over to interparty drama and roleplay - how much will depend on the game being played and the relationship of the players - but the dominant interaction tends to be between the players and the Game Master. On the whole, tabletop generates story by having the party interact with the game.
It is tempting to draw comparisons between tabletop gaming and LARP, but these comparisons can obscure a fundamental difference - LARP generates story by having players interact with each other. This is a necessity purely from a perspective of numbers - while a tabletop game will have an average of four to six players to a single game runner, a LARP may have as skewed a ratio as twenty players to a facilitator. Asking a game runner to provide an engaging scenario that will entertain twenty players for an hour is a difficult task, and won't get you even halfway through a game. In a LARP the game runner does not create the story that players engage with, rather she *facilitates* the story that is created between players. <u>The difficulty in maintaining a healthy balance of facilitator initiated story that keeps the game from becoming stale and player initiated story that doesn't require facilitator oversight is one of the key challenges every game has to solve.</u>
Why is it so difficult to maintain this balance? One of the key problems is the complexity of even a small game. Imagine a game of thirty players, with a well staffed team of three facilitators. This game has a fairly favorable ratio of ten players to a facilitator - yet the facilitator team has very little hope of tracking every relationship in their game. Again, the numbers are against us: each player has twenty-nine other players that they can engage with, and our team of facilitators cannot possibly listen in on every dramatic speech, every furtive conversation, every backroom plot. Nor, when writing a game with pre-defined characters, can they possibly replicate a true social web between the characters of their game. To solve this problem, most LARPs will arrange in 'crews'.
# Crews
Vampire the Masquerade has players arranged in coteries or packs, Myriad groups them by Holding, many blockbuster LARPs require players to sign up in groups of two or more. All of these serve to simplify the social web that facilitators need to track tremendously - now for our game of thirty players there is just the relationship between a handful of factions, and where each player fits into this set of factions. Even the step of arranging players into units of two or three dramatically simplifies the work for writing staff - in a room of N players, there will be N(N-1) / 2 unique possible relationships to consider. Even grouping players in pairs (so that we consider N/2 groups instead of N players) cuts the number of relationships a facilitator needs to keep track of to a quarter of the original. (Editor's Note: Sorry, he's a physicist)
# Case Study
The Vampire the Masquerade: City of Providence game has a core player base of approximately 35 players. What are the factions that have formed, and what do they tell us about how facilitators should engage with the game?
The factions:
- The Church - organized by an Elder Malkavian, built up of characters who fall on the outskirts of 'society' within the game. This faction provides *safety* and *community* to its members, uniting against exterior perceived threats. These threats leave this faction tightly knit, very stable against attempts to split them. It also leaves them slightly isolated from other factions, as they stray outside of the norms the game defines.
- The Board of Directors - organized by an Elder Ventrue, is built of characters trying to *build* and *control* elements within the game. Players may join because of ambition, greed, or because they are attracted to those with a well-defined vision. This is distinguished from the Directorate by the constructed community - members of the Board receive and provide assistance towards the ambitions of other members.
- The Directorate - organized by the Elder Prince Tremere, largely a decentralized faction of 'agents' who hold membership in other factions. Characters tend to join for *political play* or *access* to characters of high social standing. This faction still has goals and conflict with other factions, but in a far more nebulous sense then the factions above - something entirely appropriate in a game about political machinations. Factions are not necessarily fixed points, or built with firm boundaries.
- Minor factions - smaller groupings of players will form, to provide a more intimate form of play, with similarly simpler and more intimate goals. One coterie provides its players with safety, another provides players a particular lens through which to view the political events of the game. These minor factions may work within or across the major factions.
How do our facilitators view this web? Immediately there are a few decisions that should become obvious - members of the Church expect to be under a certain amount of pressure - facilitators should engineer situations that apply that pressure to its members, justifying the precautions taken and allowing faction members to engage in the kind of community building they are looking for. Members of the Board of Directors are looking to build things within the game world - facilitators should encourage their own attempts to do so, and present challenges when appropriate.
Add to this, there are tension points that a facilitator can exploit to create conflict. The Board will seek expansion, always drawing on larger pools of resources for their projects - the Church will naturally close in and hoard what it can. From the beginning, these factions are in tension with each other - all they need is a little bit of encouragement to create a conflict that can define an entire game. Guiding the Board towards a project that the Church resists will lay groundwork for a fight that can occupy a game for months.
## Consider the Individual
Even factions in conflict do not necessarily have rigid lines - and this is a good thing. Consider the hypothetical character Lucy, a relatively low level member of both the Board and the Church. Lucy considers herself a protector - she is naturally drawn to the Church and to groups that need to defend themselves. Lucy is also extremely concerned with self-preservation, and so is closely attached to a number of projects among the Board, doing work for its members and extracting a number of favors in exchange. This dual membership is appropriate for a character who is not highly ranked in either faction - Lucy is able to fulfill her obligations to both without ruffling feathers.
Eventually, as tensions between the factions build, the character finds herself in tension as well. The Church acts to remove a member of the Board from play, and the Board calls in an owed favor from Lucy. Lucy is forced to make a difficult decision - does she betray the Church and see herself cast out of a community, or betray the Board and find herself locked out of a room filled with important clients? In the moment Lucy walks a careful tightrope - fulfilling her debt while giving members of the Church opportunities to bypass her protection, but she is now aware of her precarious position. Dual membership here has enhanced her story - where an insistence that the character clearly belong to one faction or another would have made it far less compelling. At the same time, very little personal facilitator attention has been required to produce this story - they've just created the circumstances in which it can happen.
## Themes
In the case of the City of Providence game, the factions also become a powerful tool for enforcing the themes of the game. City of Providence invites players to attempt to build a new world, and then challenges the things that they create. Over the course of the chronicle the founders of the major factions all perish or withdraw from the world, leaving other players to take over factions that they didn't create. What will they do, inheriting these legacies? What will the factions create as they are turned over to new hands?
The author will consider those questions when the City of Providence game concludes, and he publishes his retrospective.
# Conclusion
The job of a facilitator looks similar to the job of a DM from a distance, but the two are very different. The DM can craft an individual story for each player at their table - trying to do the same for a LARP is doomed to failure. Instead it is the job of a facilitator to craft not just an abstract world, but a setting and environment that guides players into the kinds of interactions that the game is about. The 'LARP crew' is one of the stronger and more robust tools for planning out those interactions before play ever begins.
*Author:* [[Jacob Shpiece]]
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