This is a little thought which struck me when filling out the casting form for Reginae Regis. That game’s a LARP in which all the player characters are prewritten, with briefings designed by the referee team; I think the concepts that I’ve hit on here have somewhat wider application than that, though they will land differently in different contexts. In particular, I think the factors I’m looking at will function quite differently in tabletop games and in LARP, and in games where you have prewritten characters vs. games where players generate their own.

The Reginae Regis casting form includes a bit where it asks “What are you most interested in getting to do at the event?“, and points you to the very useful “Where Is My Fun?” page on the game’s website. Under the question on the form there’s a series of categories like “High-stakes politics”, “Rivalries and grudges”, “Family drama”, “Romantic drama” and so on, and people booking are asked to express how interested they are in each of those axes.

The issue I ran into was that the general slant of all of these categories was largely directed towards the major axes of conflict – and therefore gameplay – at the game. At the same time, I realised I needed to reach out and clarify with the refs that my casting preferences were a bit more complicated than that – namely, that I was interested in some of the categories less as sources of gameplay and conflict and more as sources of background flavour, something I could do low-stakes roleplay around in quiet moments during the game but weren’t necessarily a source of major drama.

Think, say, of the distinction between a character whose briefing involves a lot of the “Family drama” and “Romantic drama” category, and a character who happens to have family and romantic relationships which inform their background and personality (and so may appear in a briefing), but who are experiencing relatively plain sailing as far as those portions of their lives are concerned. One player might prefer playing the former character and would be disappointed with the latter, another player might be very keen for family and romance as low-key flavour aspects of their brief but not be especially keen on them being major sources of conflict. Both of those participants would probably appreciate having some content in their character briefs relating to family or romantic relationships, but they’d need those aspects of the brief to have a decidedly different tone – and a hypothetical third person who actively doesn’t want such content full stop would want a brief that has neither.

Continue reading “Conflict and Flavour” →