*The Plot kind, not the Vartach kind
This is part of a series of posts about game design, and how we see Five Oaths from the event team side.
The distinction between “Plot” and “Setting” is one that shapes both how the event team approaches content, and how we expect players to approach it. But it’s not always a distinction that’s very obvious in Five Oaths, or LARP in general, compared to other mediums.
We look at Plot as things we have written to present to you that you will then interact with, make decisions about, and move on to the next steps of. They are deliberate, have anticipated (but not exhaustively so) outcomes, and once we present them to you, what happens next depends largely on your choices.
On the other hand, we look at Setting as things we have written, or decided about how the world works. These are still presented to you, in some cases alongside Plot being delivered, but these are things we don’t necessarily plan for you to poke at, or have a planned response to you doing so.
To take an example from another medium – let’s consider “The Terminator (1984)”. The plot here is that a Murderous Robot has been sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor, so that her son can’t lead the resistance against Evil Future Robots. Over the course of the story, the player party (Kyle Reese & Sarah Connor) will work to resolve their Murderous Robot Problem.
The Setting, however, is that Evil Future Robots are going to take over the world within 40 years or so, and that Sarah Connor’s son will lead a resistance against them. Sarah and Kyle could choose to focus on how the Evil Future Robots came about, however doing so would not really have helped with the whole Murderous Robot thing.
But that analogy brings us nicely into the third piece of this picture – Hooks. These are pieces of setting that can become plots if they are poked at. Think about T2: Judgement Day, where A Plot is once again a murder robot, but via poking The Setting, Sarah Connor gets access to A Plot about preventing Evil Future Robots.
So let’s go back to our game – we’ve written a lot of Plot, and a lot of Setting. Some of that Setting contains Hooks, tidbits that, when Players started to show interest in them, generate plots. An example of this is the nature of the Weeping – this isn’t something that was originally a Plot, but once players showed a lot of interest and sunk research into it, then we began to treat it as one.
That being said, not all Setting is Hooks, and so we want to caution players not to expect that everything that an NPC says, or that’s written in a Location description is the beginning of a plotline that you can poke at to start. Sometimes it’s just a weird quirk of the setting!
I’ve been using the word “Poke” a lot, and you may be wondering what exactly I mean by that – In the case of plot, it means talking to the NPCs/talkies that we run out, doing rituals, physically messing around with props, solving puzzles, working out a monsters weakness, etc. Crucially, we think of poking Plot as being an Uptime Activity.
Poking Setting, on the other hand, can come from the above, but also includes the Research Action, which, and I’m gonna put this part in bold, interacts with Setting, not Plot! That’s not to say that Research can’t help move a Plot forward, generate Plot from a Hook, or even be used to give a hint or nudge when a Plot is stalling out.
But crucially, it’s not about progressing Plot, it’s how you can learn about Setting – when someone submits a research question, we uncover or create a little bit more Setting to allow us to answer it. That doesn’t indicate that the answer is in any way important, though – If you travel to deepest Siabhal and use Local Informants to ask what’s in Eoghan Ua Whatsit’s shed, we will answer that question, but this does not mean you have uncovered the secret Eoghan’s Shed Plot. It only means you asked a question about the Setting and it was answered.
Finding the right question to ask and the right place to ask it to get the information you want, is intended to be a hard skill, much like combat or stealth are – and so is solving mysteries and puzzles. To that end we don’t write Plot such that “Do the Research Action” as an intended next step when it comes to interacting with it..
That’s not to say that you can’t accelerate a Plot by asking good research questions to expose Setting elements that serve as clues, and which we might not have exposed for a long time – or equally, that you can’t start a plot by asking good research questions. But it’s never the intended or only solution to moving the Plot forward. Research is intended to give characters information that empowers them to take action, not to be the action they need to take.
Looking at things this way can help to explain why something has seemed to hit a brick wall:
- It could be that it was just a setting element you have now found all there is to find about.
- It could be that it’s a Plot that you need to figure something out to progress
- Sometimes this can be due to multiple people having parts of the answer, or just it not being as obvious as we thought it was.
- Or it could be that you’ve “caught up” to that plot, and the next step is to wait for something to appear in the field that progresses it.
- Just like Sarah Connor couldn’t progress the “Don’t be killed by robots” plot for 11 years when there were no robots trying to kill her (Look, they’re very good movies)
It’s also worth noting that Five Oaths has no “main plot”. There is no one thread that the band is “supposed” to be following or any particular story they are meant to progress through. The main plots of Five Oaths are the stories of the individual characters, their time with Cumhacht na Réig, and how it changed them or they changed it. The setting and plots that we provide are intended to form the venue, context, and impetus for those stories.
Hopefully this helps shed some light on how the team see this messy collection of Facts & Mysteries we call Five Oaths, and how you can interact with it in a more satisfying way.