Green Book Play reports

Here are some reports of play experiences from the scenarios in the Green Book, written by players.

Remember the book includes all three complete and replayable scenarios.

Play Reports for Passion Fruit

--  Denmark, April 2010
"A live-action role-playing game with peeling a piece of fruit as a game mechanic? Well, more like a ritual, really, which also describes the game itself. Passionfruit is a structured freeform game that exposes the hard choices at the center of a love triangle in an intuitive fashion. Two partners encounter a third interloper, with one partner seduced away from the other, at which point they must decide whether or not they end their prior relationship for this new one. The fruit is a mere signifier - the temptation that you eat as a prop. Like I said: a ritual, in which the major suspense element is that of any real love triangle - should I stay or should I go? What has become of "us?" Where did all the time go?

The scenario we tried troubled some of the love triangle clichés: an unmarried, live-in hippie couple on a goat farm one day encounters a religious Hispanic cop who reintroduces religiosity into the female partner's life. Not expecting this sudden change of events, the male partner turns mildly jealous and eventually drives her away into devout Catholicism. Our odd little tale felt very theatrical, with recurrent motifs (i.e., the goat farm, having coffee at a certain time) that came to symbolize larger aspects of the relationships at stake. And this was without using the game's so-called "hyperfocus technique" - a way of role-playing "love" by way of the player obsessing over some aspect of the other player - which seemed to cross a few boundaries of comfort, at least for the two American players. Nevertheless, I still remember vividly not only the character I played (I was the goat farmer), but also his mannerisms and emotional state within each improvised scene. This for a 1.5 hour game can already be seen as a commendable accomplishment on the part of the designer.

Passionfruit is a game that would be excellently deployed in writers' workshops, theater groups, and social psychology seminars, providing otherwise limited appeal outside of settings such as InterCon, Fastaval or other conventions in which intimate LARPs such as these are the norm. We can only hope that other spaces for serious play like that of Passionfruit will offer themselves shortly."

Play Reports for Black Dog
 
-- Denmark, Feburary 2011
"I had read the scenario before the game and wanted to try it out to see how the mechanics of the game really works. Though the game mechanics seemed to be a kind of complicated while being explained it worked perfectly simple and in no way disturbed the game feeling.

I really enjoyed having lots of freedom in defining the storyline and it was great fun both to design and to play the scenes. The players were very open to the game and to each other and I had the feeling in any single moment of the game that no matter how cruel my idea of what should have happened to the protagonist was, it wouldn’t be actually considered as improper. It was in someway pretty liberating to design the way to destroy character’s life and to be allowed to behave mean to other players while playing side characters.

The game was very emotional, though it was not a close to home story for me. It was interesting to see how the game story was taking its shape and the players were immersing deeper and deeper into the characters. Some side characters soon started to be very life-like and it soon made very little difference if one played the protagonist or a side character in a scene. For instance, I found myself crying in the forth scene while playing a side character. On the other hand, I think every player associated themselves with the protagonist. I remember one of the players speaking of a protagonist using “I” though we were designing a scene for another player.

Concerning the depression which was the main topic of the game I really found myself having this special feeling of absolute despair a couple of times during the game.

The only critic point I have is a very shot de-briefing. I guess we needed to talk much more about what had happened in the game as it was in some way stressful if not traumatic experience. I needed the rest of the day to sort the whole thing out for me and we spent some ours talking about the game with the other players some days later.

All in all it was a great game and I consider running it as a GM on one of the German event."

--  Finland, September 2010,
""Four players. One had played it once, two others had jeepform experience and one had never player jeeps. We used monologs and fast forwarding, both worked well again.

Our protagonist was Sara, a 25-year-old theater student, trying to finish her graduation work while working part-time. Identities were Friends, Relationships (we specified that she has had problems with commitment and trust before), Studies and Money.

Most of the ideas came from the players after a few scenes, ending the game with a few special scenes: we decided that the character is really getting depressed, jumped a month forward and played several scenes with her not present. First we had her friends asking her out for lunch and played the scene with the protagonist sitting in the middle while the other players played what the protagonist thought that her friends were talking about while she didn't get there. The control was constantly on the protagonist's hands, since the player suggested most of the topics of the discussion they were having. We repeated the same with her studies, having her teachers and a school counselor talking about her dropping out. I had them do monologues after both scenes.

Mood was set from the beginning, where I decided to specify that they were going to play serious scenes and how I was going to direct the game. Some laughs were had, but most of the time it wasn't light.

Four players was enough to play the game, but I decided to continue it after having done three scenes in all the identities - we started a bit slow and wanted to go deeper into the despair in the game rather than stop short."

--  Finland, September 2010,
"OK. My run was done in the main room of a big apartment. Six players plus me directing. All of them very good, experienced roleplayers. I was nevertheless really impressed by the way they played, and the outside-the-box thinking many of them used.

Our protagonist was Markus, a dancer/modern dance instructor in his early thirties. Traits ranged from health and teacher-student relationships to identifying with his neighborhood and his need to show others he was straight, despite the sterotype.

The spiral consisted of an ailing leg, a colleague who had to cancel their shared performance, a cocky student he had to recruit to replace the colleague, and so on. The trait-cards worked just fine, I threw in some ideas, but most of the stuff came from the players from both in- and outside the scenes.  Like last time, we used inner monologs (started and ended by clapping hands once) and fast forwards (like "let's move to five minutes later, when you have said something that offended her") to very good effect. All in all, I was very pleased with the run, and so were my players, as that status quote I sent you shows.

Again, at the start the mood was light, as people had fun thinking about potential obstacles. And likewise, the laughter started to die down as things got more serious and the protagonist real enough so that the players started to emphatize him. Very powerful."