Among the usual slushpile of projects I’m working on are two horror games (one of them positively a game, the other leaning slightly towards game instead of play). Games that are really, legitimately intended to scare my players. One of them is slightly comic; the other is designed to start out as a serious factions game but build towards “work together and some of you die, or compete and you all die.”

There’s that word. “Die.”

Whether or not people die frequently in LARPs depends largely on your area. Some cultures positively encourage huge death counts, with boffer-based combat, foam-projectile guns, and little if any consequences for eliminating rivals. You can usually tell just with a glance at the rules sheet whether you should expect a high body count.

In other cultures it’s damn near impossible to die. After all, no one wants to be responsible for making someone have to sit out the next three hours (or two days) with nothing to do. Players rarely if ever go for weapons; they deliberately give opponents opportunities to escape; in extreme cases I’ve seen players deliberately spare the villain when killing him was the primary goal of the game.

You can probably imagine the fireworks when you get mixed groups at an Intercon, particularly if you salt in some players who belong to cultures somewhere in the middle.

This, of course, leads to some rather serious problems when writing horror games, where at least theoretically death is supposed to be a major motivator and, yet, the opposition is fierce. How can one write horror games that work for players that take death nonchalantly and players that find every excuse not to kill?

I’m not sure I have any kind of answer.

(more…)

On long bus rides to field trips, my friends and I used to play a game called Weird Wally Wombat. It was a test of creativity, in particular the fiendishness of your imagination.

To start, decide who’s going to go first.

The game begins when the first player intones the ritual invocation: “Weird Wally Wombat didn’t know it, but today would be the unluckiest day of his life.” The first player then goes on for at most four more sentences, narrating a story. The first player should quickly establish a genre, give Weird Wally Wombat some kind of goal, and put him in minor peril — early on this probably shouldn’t be a deadly peril, but the risk of embarrassment or other loss.

“Weird Wally Wombat didn’t know it, but today would be the unluckiest day of his life. When he woke up that morning, all he planned on doing was going down to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes and a racing form. As he stepped onto the early morning rain-soaked streets of Chicago, he pulled his trenchcoat tight. The clerk in the store was brusque and rude, and when Weird Wally Wombat reached in his pocket to pay the man he found his wallet had been lifted.”

Once the peril has been established, the first player chooses who goes next, and they have, once again, four sentences to continue the story. The successive players must, each time, either extricate Weird Wally Wombat from his current situation or make it denotatively worse. There must be a constant escalation; each peril must be more perilous than all previous perils or otherwise make the situation more desperate, but still allow room for things to get even worse.

“Surrounded by Znorgian invaders, Weird Wally Wombat reached behind him in desperation and found a zapgun! He opened fire on the Znorgians, cutting a hole in their ranks through which he could flee towards the ship’s only remaining escape pod. His feet pounded along the metal floor with the squishing sounds of his pursuers close behind. Finally he reached the escape pod berth and threw open its door — revealing a Znorgian warrior-king with a chainsaw!”

At the beginning of the game, you can only point to a player who hasn’t gone yet; once everyone has had one go the turn order is established and play must proceed in that order.

You score one point each time you:

1. successfully continue the story and increase the danger level; or
2. make one or more other players gasp, wince, or laugh.

You lose one point each time you:

1. violate the genre enough to annoy the other players;
2. contradict something already established in the story;
3. fail to increase the tension level on your turn;
4. designate the wrong player to go next;
5. go over the four-sentence limit; or
6. refer to Weird Wally Wombat as “Wally” or otherwise shorten his name.

The game ends when a player is stumped and can’t continue, when more than one person starts to get bored, or when you are about to reach your destination. At that point, whoever currently has the most points gets to wrap things up, resolving the current peril (potentially with Weird Wally Wombat’s death or destruction, at their option) and bringing the story to its conclusion. It’s stylish to do it in four sentences, but not required as long as you keep it BRIEF.

“Weird Wally Wombat gasped and fell backwards against the wall in a swoon. His Dierdre, dancing with another man at the summer cotillion? It was all too much for a Southern gentleman to bear, and Weird Wally Wombat was a gentleman to the end. He clambered back upon his horse and rode off to the North to join the front lines and cure his pain by giving his life for the South he loved.”

Needless to say, a bunch of ten-year-olds primarily leaned towards horror, mad scientists, alien invasions and Indiana Jones adventures in preference to Civil War romance, but nevertheless the point remains. Weird Wally Wombat has had a sad life and will probably have a sad death, but at least there is symmetry.