Righting wrongs...

I think I did this last year around Rosh Hashana, but in any case I think it's a good idea. So, with acknowledgement to my Jewish friends whose tradition I'm horning in on, if there's something I've done or said to hurt you, I'd like to know and at least offer an apology. Comments are screened, and heck, anonymous is on as well (I think), in case there's just something you think I should know for future reference.

Tales of Pendragon (or, "Tonight on TL;DNR Theater...")

Continuing my attempts to summarize the bigger LARPs I play in and reflect on what I learned as a roleplayer, few notes about Tales of Pendragon, the game I played in at RPI this weekend...

First a spoiler-free mini-review:

Tales of Pendragon is a fun and novel game. There are others that follow a similar format, but to my knowledge Pendragon was the first to do so. In the game, everyone plays a base character who has some dilemma they need to make an important decision about, and who has strong opinions about what a couple of other characters should do with their dilemmas and the goal of influencing those characters' decisions. That part of the game is pretty straightforward. The novelty comes in the form of a band of bards (played by the GMs), who have come to town and will "tell tales" for those who ask. When a group of characters go to hear a tale, they are given an envelope with a mini-larp for the appropriate number of characters in it. Everyone takes a minute or so to read their new character sheets, and maybe runs to the room full of donated costume bits to throw on something new, and then improvs the new scene as their base characters imagining themselves into the tale. When the scene is done, everyone returns to their base characters and recounts to the "bard" what they learned from the tale, for which they are rewarded with stats or other bonuses.

This is where the game gets "interesting". In a lot of ways, Tales of Pendragon is a very broken game, in the sense that there are a lot of elements that are not just nonsensical from the characters' perspectives, but for which there are simply no reasonable in-game explanations. This has the effect of harming immersion because you can't really deal with such things other than saying "it's just a game" and rolling with the absurdity. For example, people involved in tales are encouraged to interact with other tales in the vicinity, so you end up with a tale of the formation of the round table that somehow involves three Kings Arthur, two of whom look strangely female, and two Gwenevere's, one of whom has a beard. Then the vikings show up.

Questions like "so, is this all happening in one of the character's heads and everyone else is just a figment therein, or is it some sort of shared hallucination due to the bard's magic, or what?", are answered with entreaties not to think about it too hard. The interesting thing is that despite so many of the game's most fundamental conceits being unapologetically ridiculous, Tales of Pendragon is a game that succeeds not in spite of, but because of its flaws. If you can get past needing some kind of in-game explanation for what's going on, the game has a quality I can only describe as "cracktastic fun" in quantities that few others do. By eschewing tedious things like plausibility, it boils LARP down to what is, for me, its essence: grown-ups playing make-believe.

It also has, I think, one of my favorites challenge/combat mechanics I've ever encountered. The stats are a simple set of virtues: Honor, Wisdom, Piety, etc. An example challenge might go like this:

Character 1: "Sir, you have impugned my family's honor and I cannot let this stand!"
Character 2: "Your pride prevents you from hearing the truth. I would council you against such impiety."

With this exchange, a challenge of Honor vs Piety has been initiated, all without breaking character (yay!). The players each add their Honor and Piety to arrive at a total, and continue the exchange, which might go like this:

Character 1: "My lineage goes back for 15 generations of noble service. We have earned our pride!"
Character 2: "You should study your scriptures more, my son, for I could recite at least 17 tales of such hubris, and they end well for none."

Since the second character's total of 17 is higher than the first's of 15, the challenge is resolved in favor of character 2, allowing the victor to do different things to the loser, depending on the virtue involved. I loved this system because in all my years of playing in theater-style (ie non-boffer) games, I've never encountered as transparent a mechanic. The author pointed out to me that in a normal game it would be flawed because it lacks a randomizer, thus making the outcomes of challenges predictable, but everyone's stats are constantly changing as they "learn" from the tales, so this isn't a problem here. Even if a simple rock-paper-scissors throw were added for a random bonus to one side, the biggest thing for me is that ability to issue, respond to, and resolve the challenge with in-character dialog.

So ok, that review turned out to not be so mini after all.


Player Appreciation:

Big thanks to everyone who played in the game. Your creativity and willingness to just be silly for a weekend led to a grand, grand time for me. Special thanks to the people who played my family, though I don't think any of them are on LJ. When I showed up to the game I really felt my character was a little bland. There wasn't much on the sheet that made him very interesting to me and I really wasn't sure how I was going to characterize him. Fortunately, my good lady wife was played by one of the contingent who fly out to Intercon every year from London (read: friggin hardcore, though she recently moved to New Jersey), and from the moment she first spoke, complete with Authentic Brittish Accent, we started playing off of each other beautifully and got into this wonderful feedback loop of fopishness that only increased as the game went on. It was delightful, and one of the best compliments I received was the number of people who were shocked to learn that we'd never so much as spoken to one another before we began interacting in-character.


Things I learned about myself as a role-player:

This isn't really a new revelation, but I'm not sure if I've articulated it before or not: If I can make a character humorous, I will. It comes naturally to me, I'm good at it, and afterward people tell me I'm good at it, which I like. I usually make some kind of protestation when people compliment me, but that's more an act of trying to keep my ego from running with it and making me over-confident than actually not believing that this is something I'm good at. There are few things I enjoy more than laughing and making people laugh.

And yet, because comedy comes relatively naturally to me, comedic characters have become less and less fulfilling to me creatively and artistically. That's not to say I didn't have a great time making people laugh during Pendragon, but I tend to leave games like this thinking to myself "yeah, but what did you do that was new?", and not having a very good answer for it. Edit, just realized something-- dramatic characters are more likely to have to make meaningful decisions, and as I mentioned in my writeup for Dragon, making decisions in-character is particularly difficult for me-- so I guess if I improved that, I'd find heavier roles easier /Edit.

That said, this is reminding me that I should really finish my writeup of the last Threads game, where I did some heavy emo stuff, and to good effect, I think.


Another thing that was rather new is the extent to which characterization can flow from a prop. My character for Pendragon's health was failing and it occurred to me on my way to the game that it would be a nice touch for him to have a handkerchief to cough into from from time to time. I borrowed one from another player and tied it to the end of one of the arms of my shirt, and somehow having that little touch really made the character for me. Every time I moved my arm, there was this little bourgeois banner fluttering behind my hand, reminding me to stay proud, aloof, and to express that mix of delicacy and comical arrogance that so defines the particular nobleman archetype my characterization came to center around.

I'd never had a prop contribute so much to my characterization, and it's something I'll have to play with more consciously in the future.