Standing Guard in a LARP

At our games we plot monkeys have a designated "morning plot" guy because generally speaking there should be a plot monkey ooking around whenever monster camp is officially on-hours. There should always be a butter bar, I mean guild member at MC during those times too, but that usually sorts itself out, usually.

As for PCs, that article is pretty spot on, especially from my military experience. I highly agree with it.
 
As someone who has played in a game where there were no "safe sleeping" areas, standing guard sucks. It blows. You get to not sleep and then expected to perform at the peak of your performance all weekend (and when you return to work). I use to sleep about 2-4 hours at game and be up until the sun came up.

Now Im not saying that some of the best things happened during those hours, Im just saying they sucked lol.

As Guild, I would love to see rotation. I would love to see 2-8am plots coming out. I would love to see craziness like that go out because the world and evil doesn't just stop because its a certain time at night. But that may just be me...
 
NH chapter is game off in the very wee hours, because of housing logistics and the fact that most of us are old gray mares who ain't what they used to be. However, I have played other games that are 24-hours, and even those games tend to be super light between, say, 3am and dawn.

It seems to me that the majority of the issue with running super late night/pre-dawn plot is that most humans are diurnal until they get to LARP, and then they run themselves to exhaustion, and then they realize that they are too old for that s*** and start actually going to bed. How do you sort out and assign NPCs and plot members to the graveyard shift?
 
You can do exactly like the link tells you, rotation. You don't have the same people doing the same shift every game. You have some NPC's have the 8pm-2am time off to sleep. If there are people who just don't think they can do it, don't force them. They are coming to have fun and play (even as NPC's), let them have fun.

I'm not saying that every plot team and story arc should apply this. But I do feel that if you are trying to run a scary or dark campaign, you can better implement it by cutting out some of the lulls that happen and the darkness of night makes a great time for the thing that go bump in the night. I think this also requires more biata to be spread around to the different cabins :p
 
I find that finding your morning people comes in handy. I'm up by seven AM naturally most mornings. Don't ask me to stand guard late at night, but I'll totally get up at 5-6 AM to let the night owls pass out.
 
stonegolem said:
NH chapter is game off in the very wee hours, because of housing logistics and the fact that most of us are old gray mares who ain't what they used to be. However, I have played other games that are 24-hours, and even those games tend to be super light between, say, 3am and dawn.

It seems to me that the majority of the issue with running super late night/pre-dawn plot is that most humans are diurnal until they get to LARP, and then they run themselves to exhaustion, and then they realize that they are too old for that s*** and start actually going to bed. How do you sort out and assign NPCs and plot members to the graveyard shift?
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I mean, my question is, WHY? Why do that? It does create a sense of "always on" RP, but in the end I would honestly like to be left the *expletive* alone when I'm trying to sleep. It's not FUN for most people (in my experiences) to just have to stay awake or have the threat of being woken up at dumb-thirty in the morning. The cost of having people stay up super late, or setting aside your already hyper-limited reserve of NPCs so that they can get up at 2am and go fight some dudes, does not justify the reward of "It sure does feel real" in most cases.

Whyyyyyyyyyyyy
 
Maybe it's just because I'm an old guy now, but I totally agree with Frisco.

I used to be the guy, back in the olden days of college, who was up all weekend, with maybe a 2 hour nap or two or just some pool time and was good to go the whole time.

Now, I'm in bed by 2 am, maybe 3. If some guy comes busting into my cabin after I'm in bed, well, that guy is a jerk and will be treated as such.
 
Undrask said:
I mean, my question is, WHY? Why do that?
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We don't in NH, and I think that's true for most Alliance chapters, but not all. For the sake of those chapters that ARE interested in 24-hour game on, it's a useful discussion to have.
 
Getting people up in the middle of the night to fight stuff is rarely fun for my players. As a general plan late at night (assume 3 AM or later), I let people that are sleeping sleep, and if people are up, I gauge how willing they are to be in combat situations if I were to send out something to attack them. My creed when it comes to my plotting is that if someone is up and would like to be entertained, I'll stay up and run plot for them (though I make it clear to my NPC crew that this only applies to me and they are welcome to go to sleep for the night whenever they want). This being said, I am consistently the last person on site to head to sleep, and if someone wants to have the kind of experience where they're excited to stay up and keep watch, I'll stay up even later than usual and make their effort worth it, even if it's just a non-combat NPC role that only the guard PC gets the chance to interact with and get information from.

If people don't want to stay up all night defending their place of rest, cool stuff. I'm more than okay with that. More sleep for me!
 
A monster kicking down your ward at 4:30 in the morning isn't fun. Waking up to find your cabin was covered in traps at 4:30am can be fun (or so I'm told). If I've got somebody feeling frisky after everyone's gone to bed I'll give them something to do, but I shy away from big loud combat in the pre-dawn hours.
 
stonegolem said:
We don't in NH, and I think that's true for most Alliance chapters, but not all. For the sake of those chapters that ARE interested in 24-hour game on, it's a useful discussion to have.
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Yeah, I didn't mean to piss in anyone's cornflakes, and you're right.

I think that if you're running a game where the players and staff have decided that it's a thing that you DO want to do, I think that it follows the same rules as any other use of NPCs:
How can you use the limited resource of NPCs and Staff to entertain as many people as possible? I also think that it would be a wise allocation of those resources to consider exactly who would have fun with a late late night mod so that you aren't A: wasting NPC hours and B: not pissing off your paying customers.

I also think that this question comes a bit loaded, because the way that each game treats late night is probably VASTLY different. A game like DR where you have a quadrillion PCs and mandatory NPC shifts has a lot more flexibility, whereas a game like Alliance usually has a handful of NPCs to throw at any given time, let alone at dumb-thirty in the morning.

I think targeted mods would be much better used in our game than just random monsters or crunch. Give the people willing to stay up that late something they'll remember, and not just John Q. Monster ambling down the lane like, "I'MMA EAT YOUR CHILDREN" because I don't see that pay off being worth the wait for those late-night players.

Maybe I missed something in translation, maybe I'm talking about the wrong things.
 
If someone is staying up to keep guard and I'm staying up to run plot for them, I would never just do a few crunchy monsters. That's not fun for the guard PC, nor for your plot team or NPCs. Whenever people are up late, I do my best to bring out interesting and relevant plot information, often with a one-man encounter so that my other NPCs can sleep. For example, I literally have a plotline that was originally designed as "Alexander's One-Man Interesting Plot for When It's Super Later At Night" which has since expanded to grow a bit into the daytime, though a lot of the new information usually comes to those PCs that stay up late at night and interact with my late-night NPCs: If someone stays up late to guard their cabin, they don't meet a couple of pointless, crunchy monsters; they'll likely meet one of the two key NPCs in that plotline, since both of them have a fondness for late-night strolls in the region.

Late-night isn't for meaningless combat; late-night is for interacting with unique NPC roles and gaining new plot info that that people that go to sleep earlier won't be able to get their hands on (which might include a little bit of combat). Anything I run super late at night is something that the PC(s) that witnessed it should be excited about informing the other PCs about at breakfast the next morning. If it's just fighting for the sake of fighting, then we're all better off sleeping.
 
My very first game a monster broke into the common sleeping area every hour and I spent most of the next day trying to find a quiet place to get some sleep as I didn't feel like adventuring at all. After that, and for years to come, I slept in my car at events and told plot that I was in the woods and if something wanted to kill me, just let me know the next morning I took a death. I finally invested in a period tent and then just left the main hot bed of killing. Would have one or two wandering encounters hit me every year but the staff realized why I was camping away from the town so respected my sleep.

I had one group of players at a game decide to listen to others and stand guard all night. Then when they drove home the next day, the driver fell asleep and totaled the car around a tree. People can decide to have a 24/7 game but I'd rather get 4-6 hours of sleep so I can enjoy the next day of mods with a good amount of energy.

As for the guarding thing, there are other areas where guards may be needed - such as around an immovable plot device or down the path a ways to alert the town to advancing hordes. I think that the info given in the article is spot on. The important thing though is to make the guarding worth something. If you have six shifts guard something and nothing comes to challenge the guards - well sure it can be realistic but it's rather boring and unfun for most.
 
What about non-predawn hours? Have any of your plotsters created scenes of "put some people in a remote location to guard a thing"? If you have, how have you gone about balancing keeping the players entertained while potentially subjecting the characters to "aaaand, nothing happened for X amount of time"?
 
jpariury said:
What about non-predawn hours? Have any of your plotsters created scenes of "put some people in a remote location to guard a thing"? If you have, how have you gone about balancing keeping the players entertained while potentially subjecting the characters to "aaaand, nothing happened for X amount of time"?
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I have not done this, but I have seen it done. Use sound machines. Or NPC's making noise. Or have a far off combat. All of these things make those people feel like they can be attacked at any time.

Also, random encounters wandering into your star gazing circle of power. That was pretty amazing.
 
For the record, you never got into that circle of power. ;) With that said I've had guard duty in game, with rotational schedules, in the snow/sleet, guarding a decoy. It was miserable. It was cold. It was wet. When the bad guys came and we low level folks were all that was between the bad guys and what we thought was the McGuffin... it was awesome. For those who were on the other rotations without the bad guys, it was terrible.

I'd say remote locations that need guarding are the best way to do this trope, and even then they should be used sparingly, and at the discretion of the players. Guard duty is dull work, and doesn't make good use of the limited time we have to tell a story. I might consider it for something like part of a full week long event, but even then...
 
We have had some in-game events (a yearly masquerade in October, a wedding at our season closer) that involved people on guard duty. The ~Event~ was generally in the tavern, fancy dress, no weapons unless you were one of the guards, and people involved in those events didn't want interruptions by monsters attacking the tavern. So they set guards.

The first year, Plot didn't send anything to bother the guards. This past year, we did... and by all reports, the guards really loved it. I was NPCing a roleplaying role in the tavern at the time, and generally wasn't even aware that there were attacks outside. There wasn't even a stir inside the tavern the whole event. But apparently there were disruptions for the guards, which gave them something to do, helped them feel needed, and feel (rightfully!) effective.

So I think the guard thing can be done even without "remote spot in the woods" guarding or "all night encounters" guard shifts. I do think, though, that if people are missing out on in-game festivities to do guard duty, that Plot should do their best to send the guards some excitement.
 
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