Coulda, woulda, shoulda, didn’t…

In a sea of justified froth, a friend who played Empire was on Facebook expressing disappointment they’d not taken every perfect decision, and my knee jerked…

Lrp is *built* on regret. Regret for what was not done is the price we pay for astonishing memories of what was.

Tom Jenkins wrote a little more eloquently at slightly greater length…

Despite every effort to purge it, we all fall foul of The Sin of Scripting.

LARP allows us for organically forge moments that end up playing out with a narrative that is grander and more beautiful than we could conceive of if we wrote it ourselves. These are moments of legend that stick with us (and others!) forever.

However, the flipside of this beautiful chaos is that sometimes we have “perfect moments” in our minds eye that never materialise.

And our characters can be fantastic creations that feel so much more real than the scripted characters of fiction,

Yet, they are also bound by the fact that we have so much other shit to live with in our lives when we’re not pretending to be wizards in a field.

And then we feel we have failed at this duty of providing others with an awesome beautiful creation to interact with.

So… my unsatisfactory answer is that the very thing that makes LARP so awesome, is paid for by sometimes disappointment.

Neither of us actually answered the question, which was “What do I do about this?” beyond these (variably written) versions of “Tough”.

Bryony Baines did better.

My advice, perhaps, if there were things you wanted the character to say – write fic of their death, write the internal thoughts that they were thinking but never got to vocalise. Write flashback scenes for moments that flash before their eyes before they die, the people they thought of. Purge it, and let it out.

I understand the feeling that you have let your character down, but – you didn’t. Dying people are not super coherent and stories don’t have perfect endings where everyone is in the right place. That jagged realness is what makes the emotions more real and spontaneous and the stories that come out more precious. Give yourself space. You didn’t fuck up, and neither did she.

Which is a lot more helpful.

There – a post in three pastes. Easy, this blogging lark…