LARP Design: Character Creation Goal-Setting

If you’re the kind of person who reads my LARP design posts, you probably already know about Citadel LARP (but I’ll link it just in case). This post isn’t solely about Citadel, though, as I’ve also started playing two other games recently, Alliance Atlanta and Resurgence LARP, and those games also factor into this post.

One of the challenges players face when starting a new PC in a campaign boffer LARP is setting goals for themselves. I’m not talking about XP-advancement goals; in most games there’s nothing they can do during events, other than survive, to advance that goal during play. Survive is a good baseline goal, don’t get me wrong, but in general you don’t want to prioritize that over engaging with the game, and these are games where characters can die (and probably come back). Help my team prosper is likewise about the same as just playing the game, unless you have a particular approach, like leaning hard on playing a merchant.

I’m inclined to categorize goals:

Perpetual

Perpetual goal might be something like “keep [Kainenchen’s PC] safe” (because I am playing a bodyguard. This doesn’t have a point at which I can check it off as Completed, other than failure (the character permanently dies), the campaign ending, or the characters’ relationship changing so that the goal is no longer valid.

It’s good to have some perpetual goals, as day-to-day operating routines, but I don’t recommend having those as your only goals.

Competitive

A competitive goal is something like “become the best swordsman/wizard/whatever in the game,” or even “become the local Baron” (let’s imagine that in this setting there can be only one of those). To such extent as everyone has an equal chance and some people aren’t just going to be better swordfighters or whatever, the odds are that someone else is the best.

Now, a game can have lots of warriors who Have Arrived—who are recognized for excellence, even if “which one of us is The Best” is never fully resolved. That’s what happened in King’s Gate; my character, Cassio, was indisputably among the best, was going to be in the final rounds of elimination tournaments, but I don’t think I ever won, because I was up against players who were (and remain) just better than me. What I did get was enough of a sense of respect for my ability that I felt like I’d accomplished my emotional goal, even if a material victory never happened.

What I had, then, was a long series of small, completable competitive goals (each tournament), which as a rule I didn’t win. (I might have won an event or two in larger tournaments over the years, but it’s been many years and I don’t recall exactly.) I was doing well enough in my competitive goal to satisfy the more-important-to-me social goal of earning acceptance as a capable fighter.

The other kind of competitive goal is one that’s openly antithetical to other players, often in an off-camera way. I don’t recommend these for 95% of all players (remember, that means “incredibly unlikely to be you”). These are things like “secretly become the lieutenant of the BBEG” or “become the captain of the evil pirates and begin a reign of terror after the campaign ends.” You’re stating an intent that would put you in overt PvP. Testing the lines of other players’ willingness to engage in PvP is, in many communities, bad behavior in itself.

Social

A social goal is about changing your interactions with other PCs and NPCs. “I want to be recognized as among the best” was a social goal for my Shattered Isles character Balthasar (who wanted status as a sorcerer and scholar), my King’s Gate character Cassio (as described above), and my Altera character Cinna. Cinna wanted to be the Archmage of Verinfall, a title of his own invention, even when he was explicitly not the highest-tier wizard in the game. Instead, he wanted to receive recognition as Archmage in exchange for sharing everything he had and working to support other wizards, as well as other kinds of spellcasters.

The good and bad side of social goals in a social game is that things you do at an event are only a portion of the work. How you conduct yourself on the game’s Discord (in-play or out-of-play), message boards, or whatever, as well as work you do to support the game’s community like throwing parties between events, can have a huge impact on building the connections with other players that make progress in social goals. Even things like hospitality at events and engaging warmly with the game staff make a difference here. Maybe they shouldn’t; maybe it’s unfair. But if you’re setting a social goal, it’s reality.

Isolated

Isolated goals can be completed, but only involve NPCs from your own backstory, so you can only act on them when Plot stages an encounter about them specifically for you. They range from “avenge the murder of my father by [NPC I just made up]” to “find my ancestral magic weapon [that I just made up].” I’m not trying to say that this kind of goal is bad; that would be unfair. I am trying to say that getting this kind of goal to be less isolated is one of the big things I want to address with this post.

Isolated goals require Plot to read your character history (this should be a low bar!) and spend time and game resources staging something about that goal (this cost is real—those resources could always go to a wider group of people). As a result, isolated goals are a kind of explicit request for Plot favoritism, especially if they can’t be resolved in a single encounter. If they can be resolved in a single encounter, you need it to set a new goal for you, or tie you into another storyline.

It would be great if players could integrate their goals with Plot’s plans and NPCs more, but first-time players have no way to initiate that. Games don’t, as a rule, tell you all about the NPCs who are important in the main game location(s), or even what’s going on in the game’s central storylines when the new character enters play.

If you’re on your second (or more) character, or if you’re revising a character history after the start of play, then sure, you might have enough knowledge to say that this NPC is a friend of my mother’s from when they were young, and thus is relevant to my personal goal. That might require some abrupt rewriting on Plot’s side, though, so it’s generally not the done thing.

Culture packets and Dust to Dust’s Historical Events are both ways of addressing this. They sketch out characters that Plot already owns and has some plan for, however notional that plan might be. For instance, in King’s Gate, Diego de la Rosa was a major name in the culture packet, as well as the direct ancestor of all of the PC de la Rosans. Likewise, Dust to Dust Historical Events gave PCs context with NPCs and each other before the start of play. For Citadel, I want many of our major in-town NPCs to get introduced in a Historical Event, so that PCs can have some prior knowledge to work with if they want.

Main Plot

Main plot goals are another one that first-time players can’t do very easily. Most games say almost nothing about the main plot, main villains, and PC allies on their website (or Discord, Facebook group, whatever). Very often, players learn the nature of the threat in the course of play, or each season’s main threat is revealed to be a mere servant of the next season’s foe. There’s nothing wrong with these choices, but it has to be Plot who says this villain is the one who burned your village. (This is a good best practice.) Shattered Isles managed to split the difference on this with characters like Latymer Renfred and Valerian Salvatore, but that was before my time and I can only assume they handled that through culture packets.

Outside of character creation, you absolutely want your baddies to build enough heat with the PCs that they invest in goals like dancing on that guy’s corpse, and you want allies engaging and sympathetic enough that the PCs want to help them and keep helping them. Goals fall under my “main plot” designation when it’s the core plot that the Plot committee has planned for the game from the beginning.

In Dust to Dust, many of the culture packets included some mention of major campaign villains. We wanted everyone who read any of the Akathia and Ophira culture packets to be out for the blood of Shahnaz, the Corruptor, the Putrescent, the Hammersmith, Bedrauglig, Toledread… man, that guy was a great crafter, especially of names. Well, that’s DtD for you.

Now, if you want to be the one to kill the BBEG, well, that can turn into a competitive goal pretty fast. Unless you as a player are very prepared to play through a disappointment story beat, be careful how much you invest in this, because boss fight showdowns in LARPs are nothing if not chaotic. (Last season in Alliance, one of the main baddies was finished off by an arrow from a first-event character on my team. Great moment for her—it’s important that no one else was salty about it.)

As a player, it’s great to get yourself emotionally invested in resolving the main plot, because there are going to be a ton of smaller goals along the way to the climactic resolution, and you can almost definitely play an exciting and satisfying role in many of those steps. Even if you can’t know enough about the main plot to write yourself an emotional investment before the start of play, you can probably add a bunch of goals relevant to the main plot during and after your first event. This has been the mainstay of campaign boffer LARP storytelling since “hey we should, like, have a story” became part of it.

Sidebar: Main Plot and Existential Threat

Especially in games that are intended to end after a certain number of seasons, but in continuing games as well, it’s common to see storylines where the game world or the campaign’s core premise are under threat. If the PCs lose, it’s all over, there’s no way to continue (or at least those are the stated stakes).

When it comes to goal-setting, your character’s other goals don’t matter much when the whole setting is in danger of crashing down around your ears. Once the world-ending threat is resolved, that’s often the end of the campaign, or of this Plot committee’s tenure in a continuing game. Your personal goals, possibly put on hold during The Recent Crisis, now have little or no time to be resolved before the campaign’s end.

My solution here is to point out to game-runners that ending every campaign with saving the world has been done, and trying something new would be great. DtD ended with resolving one of the setting’s greatest problems, so continuing the story would have meant a major overhaul in the cosmology.

Stuffquest

Stuffquesting is derogatory in a lot of uses, and I don’t intend it that way here. In this post I’m just talking about engaging with the loot, crafting, economy, and maybe Formal Magic (Alliance) systems to get a particular cool item. In a lot of cases, this does become a social goal, because (especially in Alliance) the haggling to reach those goals takes place between events with players from other chapters.

There’s a huge range in what different games build in as possibilities. On the low end, there’s very little of crafting (that we can see so far) that deals with lasting improvements—it’s all essentially consumables, as far as I know. At the other extreme, there’s Alliance, where players can create a vast array of magic items in the crafting and Formal Magic systems. The whole Alliance experience of playing on large teams or as mid-to-high-level characters is about chasing ritual scrolls and materials, then creating and maintaining high-powered items.

Citadel is squarely between these two in scope of what you can make through the player-accessible crafting system; the system of Named weapons, armor, and shields, as well as other powerful artifacts, makes some amount of pure stuffquesting a viable part of play if that’s the kind of thing that’s fun for you, but (I hope) not something you have to do if it isn’t.

The very best thing about stuffquesting goals is that they can potentially be definitively checked off. The worst thing about them—from my perspective as a gamerunner anyway—is that sometimes you might complete them without much (live) action or roleplay. That is, you might handle everything by handling in-game money and doing production math between events, or having only-barely-in-character conversations. What I need to keep in mind, then, is that it’s still engaging with the game and receiving the material reward gained from previous skill purchases and adventures.

Solutions

I’ve included a lot of advice along the way, but I’d also like to see games engage in up-front support. When we ran an invitational playtest for Citadel, we needed to get players up to speed on goals in a hurry, so we included this list of seventeen goals in the material we sent the playtesters.

You are a member of the Wardens of the Endless Road. After the recent expedition failure, you have been tasked to find out what happened, and locate any survivors.
You are a scholar, and your topic of interest is ancient Kyrie civilization. The previous team was trying to chart a path to the old Kyrie city, Pemmetil. You want to succeed where they failed.
The scout who reported the findings of the last expedition, Kaia Kaleo, died shortly after giving her report from a mysterious ailment that was unresponsive even to magical healing. As a healer, you want to investigate what could have caused it, and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The previous expedition claimed to have found an enemy stronghold. If there are Gograzhi to fight, you want to be on the front line.
A strange magical phenomenon was reported within the enemy stronghold. As a student of the arcane, you wish to investigate.
An expedition into Gograzhi territory is dangerous, but also lucrative. If the reports from the previous expedition are to be believed, you could turn quite a profit from the rare resources in the area.
Based on the strength of the Kal’inokh magic inside the enemy stronghold, you suspect it might hold a clue as to how the Gograzhi have corrupted the land in this area. You want to find out how they did it, and, if possible, reverse it.
You’re not here for the mission, you’re here to keep another person on this mission alive – no matter what the cost. (Get that player’s permission before selecting this motivation.)
Your village is very close to Gograzhi territory. You’re part of the logistical support for this expedition, not yet an adventurer – but something about the life of excitement and danger calls to you.
You’ve been studying the Malefic Artisan of Woe, going back to the destruction of your great-grandparents’ village. Revenge is all you have left.
Your older sibling said they didn’t think you had what it took to survive this, and you want to take something back home that you can use to wipe the smirk off their stupid face.
Courage and service are a family tradition. They’re also your family’s leading cause of death. You plan to come home with your shield, or on it.
If there’s treasure to be found, it must be yours. You’re gathering a fine nest egg for a partner and children.
Your children are grown, so you can relive the rollicking adventures of your youth. This expedition was the first chance you got.
Ambition guides your steps. Your mentor within your Order says that success here could fast-track you for promotion.
Your great-grandfather died on an expedition in this area. He wielded a magic shield that is your birthright. You hope to find and reclaim it, and this expedition was a good excuse to explore the most likely area where it could be found.
Someone here needs to speak to and for the dead, so Vonor sent you.

“The Malefic Artisan of Woe” is one of the titles of a major baddie from that event, in case that’s not obvious. Seeding information about what might be coming up in the goal text was part of the strategy here. One thing you’ll notice here is that there are goals for many different stages of life—our playerbase includes people in their late teens or college up through people in their 50s and 60s, and it was important to speak of all of them. I have ambitions of doing the same for the “real” events that start next year, just with an even greater variety of goals, and more things that directly hook into the major named NPCs that show up in town often.

Brandes Stoddard

Harbinger of Doom