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[Geppetto]

Question on Character/Player Meetings

[ndemeter]

Live events are one of the core tools of every ARG. I have participated as both a player and an actor in quite a few of them and they are a blast.

To answer your questions:
1. Yup.
2. Absolutely.
3. Protect the veil. The actor should remain IG at all times during the event. This is essential since the players have often traveled quite a bit to be at your event. They have earned the right to an awesome experience.

Also, reward your players that made the effort to be there. Their prize is not only that they get to interact with a character in person but also the fact that they get to talk about the meeting here. Always use live events to progress the story and not just cause.

Those are my thoughts.

[krystyn]

Oh, definitely. In fact, the Beast used live events as part of the game experience: A.R.M. rallies were held in three cities (the very night I joined Cloudmakers, actually, and I chickened out of the Chicago rally, much to my regret), involving actors for each city to lead the rally and disseminate parts of a larger puzzle.

Protect the actors for your live events by giving them an exit strategy: the Chicago rally didn't quite go as planned, as players followed the poor actor out of the bar where the meeting was held, and he also took the book with him that the players needed in order to solve 1/3 of a puzzle. This had interesting consequences - check out the RUR 14 puzzle explanations at Cloudmakers.org to get the nuts and bolts of it.

Make sure to give clear directions to your actors, give them leeway on improvisation, and make sure you are in accordance with local laws for public spaces, or permissions/permissiveness for private locations.

Give the players reason to trust you, and do not violate that trust. That's pretty generic, but if you go over every aspect of your event and apply trust tests to all facets, you might uncover weaknesses/additional strengths for your narrative.

Other ARGs I've played or worked on where characters and players have met:

- Art of the Heist
- Omnifam
- Last Call Poker
- Stop the International
- Why So Serious?

[Geppetto]

Thank you both for the responses!

In terms of trust, are you speaking more of story/actor believability, or more in terms of confidence that we're not trying to scam them?

[krystyn]

Both, I guess, is the easy answer.

But really, the trust should be running through the entire experience, so that when it comes to the live event, people feel comfortable participating. It's not even the idea of being scammed that may put people off. It's sometimes something as simple as not making them feel stupid for playing your game.

I remember Mike Monello asking me in a post-game interview why I got on a boat with a crazy consumptive German and several mimes in the middle of the night in the industrial corridor of Chicago, and for me it was two things: a) Audi (the client) would have a lot to answer for if something weird/bad happened, and b) I trusted that Nisha (one of the main characters in the game) would 'protect' me from any real harm, and would guide me and the other players in a useful and fun way.

[konamouse]

This wifi in Balad is too slow or I would find the link, but Eldritch Errors did an entire WEEKEND camping experience in West Virginia with actors meeting players.

It's very doable - but your actors really have to know their characters and be comfortable with improvisation....cause the players will ask questions about stuff that has happened in the game so far (and want to know what the characters thinks about stuff they have learned about the circumstances of this mystery/event/whatever the story is about).