Running a Dystopia Rising game is a balancing act. On one hand, you need to give people something to do - it’s a boffer larp so there has to be some sort of challenge or, at the very least, an enemy to fight. On the other hand, every challenge that you put in the game is an obstacle and that obstacle takes effort to overcome. If the challenge is too little, the players get bored. If the challenge is too great, they don’t engage. This goes beyond combat threats, however, and when you put in role-play challenges, you always make it more difficult to engage with your story.
For example, in Requiem we have Murder Inc factions and, to promote the setting and feel of Dystopia Rising New York, we want Murder Inc meetings to happen in disguise. However, this is hard! First, disguise requires Proficient Stealth, which is a skill that costs build (and has a minimum build requirement on top of that). We make various items available to allow players who haven’t purchased the skill to be able to go to the meeting in disguise, but there’s still other obstacles. Putting on a disguise requires extra clothing, which not all players will have. We’ve told those players to come to ops and we’ll help them out with our NPC stock. But knowing we have items for you to use, and out-of-character clothes for you to wear, requires information you might not have. And even if you get that information, it still takes time to go get your other costume and put it on, and it’s probably not as comfortable as your other costume… and…
Well, you see, there are a lot of obstacles created by setting requirements.
Sometimes, people use the word “gate-keeping” to describe these obstacles, but that’s not entirely accurate. Gate-keeping involves removing a player’s access to a plot. By themselves, these obstacles don’t do that… although if there’s enough of them, it is de facto gate-keeping. Instead, they simply slow down access to a story element. Because of that, we’ve taken to calling these “speed bumps.”
Why have speed bumps? We’ve got a few reasons:
To make a plot element more exclusive. This is the classic “golden ticket” design: there’s only five tickets to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Anyone can find a ticket (although some people have advantages)... but finding a ticket is an obstacle that has to be overcome.
To make a plot element more interesting. For example, having disguises at the Murder Inc meeting makes it distinct from the Criminal Influence meeting. Because the Criminal Influence meeting has no speed bumps, it’s going to take some sort of obstacle to make the Murder Inc meeting different.
To emphasize an unused plot element. Sometimes, an obstacle makes an unused plot element more enticing to players by making it a challenge.
An example of this last one is Requiem’s ban on preaching. While faith-based role-play is vital to Dystopia Rising, outside of the Tribe of Seasons and TeeVee programming, there’s very little ritual and almost no preaching. This isn’t a knock against our players, as much as an observation (the most common group activity we’ve noticed for faiths is “holding a meeting.”) In an effort to make it more interesting, we put a pretty big speed bump there, and it attracts player attention.
Of course, speed bumps are problematic, because they’re often unpopular. They are a way of telling people “no, you can’t do that unless…” and often, they only hear the first word. This is a legit response, particularly when it’s too late to even engage with the speed bump (i.e. all the tickets have already been given out). As such, each speed bump is an important give-and-take between players and staff to make sure the speed bump doesn’t become a stop sign.