"Ah, how you promised, and ah, how I lied"

[clauclauclaudia]

I NPCed for a second run of thekinginyellow's The Dance and the Dawn LARP (from locke61dv's RPG) and it was just as much fun as the first time, though harder to photograph (because tighter quarters). New pictures and old are up. It's quite possible to scrutinize them for plot points, so if you aren't spoiled for it and might want to play it at Vericon, well, don't scrutinize them like that!

Seeing the same scenario played twice with different players was really interesting. saxikath and I did that with Live-Action Clue once upon at time, but that was partly a way of debugging the rules of the game. Given that some of the characters are heavily based on Utena characters, thekinginyellow noted early on that it was like watching the TV series of Utena and then movie of Utena. Variations on a theme.

The players are mostly trying to find their true loves by the end of the game. Unless they're just trying to screw things up for potential true loves. I am simply fascinated that essentially the same pairings ended up happening this time around, though in some cases for different reasons. Emergent TDaTD behavior? If it happens a third time I'll be inclined to suggest that the GM is wrong about who should end up together. ;-)

Now I dissect the end games some. LARPfic! No, no, not really. That would be truly scary.


So, the Lords except for the Prince have no choice in the end game. They can woo the Ladies, but in the end the Ladies choose. I can *almost* reconstruct the sequence of choices for each game from the photos and knowing which flowers I delivered. If anyone can fill in the gaps, let me know.

In the first game, Lady Kassirin chose Lord Selle first.
Then two things happened, I'm not sure which first: Lady Clara chose Lord Kieron, and Lady Viridian chose Lord Samangelov. Between them, Lady Elia chose Lord Armster. (So either Kieron, Armster, Samangelov or Samangelov, Armster, Kieron. Given the characters, I expect Clara got to choose Kieron first.)
Then Lady Gedra chose Lord Mirabilis.
Lady Jade chose the Prince, and he accepted.

[EDIT: or not... lemme check my notes again]

[EDIT May 27]In the second game, Lady Elia chose Lord Armster.
Lady Kassirin chose Lord Selle.
Lady Gedra chose Lord Mirabilis.
Lady Clara chose the Prince, who rejected her. (Burn!)
Lady Viridian chose Lord Samangelov.
Lady Jade chose the Prince, who accepted her.

I'm not certain where in this sequence Lady Viridian's choice came. But you'll see that all the player couples in game two are the same as in game one!

In both games, all the ladies successfully avoided Lord Tachrymon. But in one game Clara and Kieron got the happy ending, while in the other they were left lonely--but took over the Isles as the Queen and Duke got their happy ending. So even there there's some symmetry. Clara is probably the best qualified to take over the Queen's job, but I fear for the tender hearts of ladies entrusted to the care of Duke Kieron! In each case the Prince chose the same lady and left his mother at last.

I think that if you leave aside the Utena-related mappings, then Prince & Jade works perfectly well. Why *shouldn't* she have a Prince? And why shouldn't a Lady who demands respect and a peer work her way through the Prince's facade?

Or at least, reasoning somewhat circularly, any Prince who would say yes to Jade works as a partner for her. This is not at all what I thought initially after seeing the character sheets, but it's what makes sense to me after watching some of the game play out. And Gedra and Mirabilis was my early guess, and still makes more sense to me than Gedra and the Prince. I don't see how a fragile thing like Gedra can get the Prince to break through his emotional armor, basically. Whereas it makes sense to me that Jade can demand an equal from him, and, after some tussling, get one.

So, suppose Jade / Prince and Gedra / Mirabilis. I think I buy all the other intended pairings, though: Clara / Kieron, Viridian / Armster, Elia / Samangelov -- and those last two pairs just got swapped in each game. I'd love to know what their players think of the "correct" pairings versus the ones that happened in game.

Unfortunately that leaves Lady Kassarin with either Lord Selle or Lord Tachrymon. I'll say this--I don't think Kassarin would bore Selle very quickly. ;-)

Comments

[thekinginyellow.livejournal.com]

Just so it's out there, this was the GM thinking that went into the (controversial) pairings:

Prince/Gedra:
1) The Prince is used to playing off of Ladies' weaknesses and expectations. It's what he's been doing his whole life. For all that Jade is strong-willed and likeable and awesome, she has simple character hooks, and that means that she's vulnerable to his standard manipulations.
("Oh, sure, I'm not like those *other* horrible men--I respect you and your desire to go play with swords. Aren't I just wonderful?")
This means that she's as much a toy for him as the others are, and as easily crushed.
The thing about Gedra is that he can't actually do anything to her that hasn't already been done. He can't play with her expectations, because she doesn't have any. The idea is that she can actually force him to be genuine through sheer passivity.
2) Gedra is really far more the anti-Queen than Jade is. Jade is loud and willful and has an agenda, while Gedra is weak and shy in all the ways that the Queen is loud and manipulative.

Kassarin/Mirabilis:
In both games, Mirabilis has been played as a Parsifal figure whose naivete just underlines his moral perfection. If you read his character sheet, that's really not what he's supposed to be. He's a romantic, but part of the baggage there is that he has Expectations: he needs a Lady who wants all the tremendous attention and affection that he has to give. On some level, he really is a stalker. Gedra, with her horrible history, would be traumatized by it.
Kassarin, on the other hand, wants exactly that. For all that she's outre and sexual and scary, she has one of the most traditional desires: she needs someone to love her tremendously and unconditionally. Mirabilis is really the only one who can do that for her, given what she is.

[thekinginyellow.livejournal.com]

Also, in response to a couple of random things that have been said:

-Clara can also end up on the bottom of the Queen's pecking order, *if* she has the cojones to try and take over the court for herself. It is explicitly suggested.

-Armster's work is indeed religious in bent, at least in a sense. One of the reasons I wrote the part for Ada was that she understood how old-school alchemy worked; for all the playing with crucibles and such, there was a lot of writing very long treatises on the Nature of Providence or the Transmutation of the Human Soul Into Angelic Substance or similar awesome nonsense.

-Duke Kieron is totally sweet. (In Utena terms, I can totally see Touga and Juri and Miki and even Nanami graduating and ultimately finding their Happily Ever Afters...and Saionji, bitter and puzzled, eventually turning into an Akio figure and starting the whole thing over.)
My very favorite image from the second run, as I've mentioned elsewhere, was Kieron crumpled in the Duke's chair as the Duke was up dancing and having the time of his life.

[clauclauclaudia]

re Armster: I stand corrected! I don't remember that actually in the sheet as opposed to subtext, but I don't know enough about alchemy to appreciate that aspect. The part I tended to carry away about each character was the stories we told and not the rest of the sheet. (I *think* we told Armster's once in the first game, but I could just be remembering the rehearsal.)

Duke Kieron is a great ending for the character, but, again, I pity the ladies in his care!

[clauclauclaudia]

Much as I know, intellectually, the theory on the Prince pairing, I still can't feel it as emotionally truthful: the way I see it, the Prince can totally toy with Gedra, it's just not much of a challenge.

As for who's more the anti-Queen, I guess it's a matter of what attributes you look at. Jade has no patience with the niceties of court, while Gedra is willing to play along with them. I'm pretty sure that was Scott's perspective.

Maybe there should be something in Mirabilis's story hinting at how obsessive he is? I'm pretty sure we told his story more than anyone else's. (I think it goes roughly Mirabilis, Prince, Selle, Tachrymon, Samangelov, Kieron/Armster.) I think that particularly in the context of a dance where there's *supposed* to be wooing going on, it's hard to tell the difference between a gallant and a stalker, even well-played.

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

While the logic behind the pairing of Gedra and the Prince may make as much sense as the logic behind Jade + Prince, the first is really really difficult for even the best roleplayers to pick out. Cecy's definitely mentioned that Gedra's nature makes it very difficult to ever figure out that the Prince, of all the Lords, is her pairing. The meekness that supposedly makes her perfect for him also prevents her from ever guessing that a frickin' Prince is right for her.

Even if you argue that the first game lacked experienced roleplayers, Gedra didn't pick the Prince in the second game either, where not only did she get to pick first, but where most of the players had a lot of experience and skill in roleplaying. I bet that even if Gedra had an inkling that the Prince was right for her, she'd have a hell of a time letting him know that in-game, and thus he'd probably refuse her anyway.

Now, if you're going for perfect Utena symmetry, that's just the way things will have to be to make the story work. But keep in mind that pairings that seem to have perfect logic to you feel different to the players, and while the game is fun despite the really low success rate, you cannot reasonably expect players to come across these pairings during the game without a miraculous stroke of luck.

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

Also, to be perfectly clear, not all the pairings are strange or impossible to get. Pretty clearly, it's possible to get Clara + Kieron, or, so I believe, Armster + Viridian.

[zdenka]

("Oh, sure, I'm not like those *other* horrible men--I respect you and your desire to go play with swords. Aren't I just wonderful?")

The interesting thing there is that Jade's standard tactic for judging men (challenge him to a duel and see if he turns away in disgust) completely breaks down at the dance, because every single Lord, with the exception of Kieron, thinks that Jade dueling is just fine. At least, that's what they told me.

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

Agreed. It's especially difficult when you want to watch/be in duels and the GM warns you away from them *coughWarrenwhy??cough*.

[clauclauclaudia]

Was it Warren or the Duke? :)

[zdenka]

Oh, and I just wanted to clarify that nothing I'm saying here is a complaint -- I think the LARP was great fun, and it's interesting to discuss the possibilities.

[thekinginyellow.livejournal.com]

That's good. It would have sucked if I'd ruined the LARP with bad design.

As for the issues with Jade, dueling, and picking out suitable Lords:
The dueling mechanic can be abused to break the game. If they conspire, the players can set up a series of duels that reveal a number of the true-love pairings. There are a number of safeguards against that--one of which is the Duke's insistence that dueling is a bad thing under most circumstances. (Another is the Lords' Rule #1, which is that the Ladies never get to learn the dueling math.)
This disproportionately screws over Jade, as you both undoubtedly noticed. The counterbalance is that Selle, of all the PCs, has substantially the easiest time picking out his true love. If he's smart, he'll catch on quick that he's supposed to be with Jade, and spend the entire evening trying to maneuver that into happening.

[clauclauclaudia]

And goodness, I hope I didn't come across as complaining either. I thought it was lovely to be a wee part of such a lovely LARP. That's why I want to keep talking about it.