Larp Information Revolution From Texas: Matthew Webb

Enlightenment in Blood will feature a system that the players will use online to customize their characters and find a good place for themselves in the game. To make that happen, Matthew Webb from the Texan larp software company Incognita Limited has created a system for us that we hope will have implications far beyond this larp.

In this interview, Matt talks about his background as a larper and the potential of the character creation tool.

How's your larp background, as an organizer or as a player? I picked up my first roleplaying game when I was 14, the Mechwarrior roleplaying companion for the tabletop wargame Battletech. My cousin had introduced me to the wargame a year earlier, and I was all: “what, I can play the little dudes in the cockpits of the big fighting robots? Awesome!”

As a larp organizer, I am currently running a science fiction larp called Planetfall. Planetfall is the world’s first augmented reality larp using mobile devices for almost all mechanics. It was built as a testbed for my ideas about how to enhance larp with technology. I’ve written and run a number of other games as well: a post-apocalyptic airsoft larp inspired by the Terminator franchise, an In Nomine larp, larps based on Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, and Mage the Ascension, and written a Nordic style one-shot called Shades this last year.

What's it like to work on the character tool for EiB? I really like the idea that we can use software to take the boutique personalized feel of pre-scripted Nordic blockbuster games and the open-ended character creation of traditional larps, and merge them together.

Luckily, a lot of the hard problems were things Incognita Limited had already solved with larp management software we’ve written. Handling creating and tracking characters, registering and keeping contact with players, providing staff members a view into what is going on in their player base - these we already had. The best thing about working on the project is the enthusiasm the Enlightenment in Blood team has shown for what we’re making here. We’re obviously on to something, and I doubt this is the last time we’re going to be working together.

One advantage we have at Incognita is that we are larpers too. We’ve played in games, we’ve run games. We have a really good idea of how things usually play out; and we know where the problems are going to be for any game organizer. I like making it so game organizers spend more time writing great games and organizing, and less time dealing with minutiae that a computer does so easily.

Do you see potential for this type of character creation system in other games?

Definitely! What we’re making here could be used for any large-scale event, blockbuster game, large scale battle game, you name it. Another version could be used in American-style campaign games - which is what I’m doing in Planetfall and also with some projects we’re collaborating on with other companies.

For the blockbuster or Nordic style game, you can still create a personalized written guided experience, but you get a better sense of what players actually want to play. You can see how groups are filling up; and the kinds of ties people want to have. You can adjust on the fly. You can write content quickly from anywhere and see all the interrelationships. You can communicate to groups very quickly; and when you need to adjust or add new content, it automatically propagates through the system and informs everyone touched by it.

When it comes to campaign games, a lot of games use a character sheet database, but this is at an entirely different level. The level of information, the amount of analysis we can provide and data we can draw from - imagine how useful those would be for someone running a 2,000 player game? They don’t know how bad their economic problems really are. They don’t know if certain character types are never being used or which skills are being bought out of proportion. Data solves problems.

We need good approachable ways to gather and leverage data easily in larp. If you run a game more than once, either as a campaign or as a blockbuster, and you aren’t gathering real quantitative data about how people are playing and what people want to play, you don’t really know what’s going on in your game.

Those are the kinds of solutions that we like making at Incognita. I want to see blockbuster games where all the busy work is sidelined and people aren’t running themselves ragged. I want to see campaign games where players are empowered and staff know what is going on.

Enlightenment in Blood is a multi-location 360° collaborative-style larp for a couple of hundred players over multiple urban locations. It will be run at the World of Darkness Berlin convention on May 12th.

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