Role-playing Games Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for gamemasters and players of tabletop, paper-and-pencil role-playing games. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm designing a character for a World of Darkness parlour LARP who's supposed to be highly perceptive and observant. (A tad beyond human capability, at character creation.)
What are your strategies for roleplaying a character who's hyper-aware of what people are doing around them, how people are reacting to them, and what's going on in the environment?
Ask the organization-team if you are using MET rules, and which set. If yes, highly observant characters have specific rules in what they can do with it, and you don't actually need to play it out, you have to express that you got the traits to others using the mechanics of the game. I got the Revised edition of MET at hand, but most things are similar between different MET sets, just page references might differ.
In MET, the system has a test mechanic and with better senses, you just excel at those mechanics where senses are tested.
If you really want to max out your traits for perception, you need to prioritize mental attributes, then focus on Perception traits. Among those you should take Attentive and Observant
Among the Ability Traits, you might want Awareness (using perception traits in challenges).p.87
Among the Disciplines, you might want to look at Auspex.p.137
And last but not least, there's a merit:
Acute Senses (1 Trait Merit)
You have particularly sharp senses (choose one). In all tests with that sense, you are two Traits up on challenge-resolution. Combined with the Auspex power of Heightened Senses, this Merit can gift you with superhuman acuity.[...] p.112
As a LARPer, it can be very hard to roleplay something you can't express. In a MET context, I have experienced that a player would drop the keywords of traits they had in a conversation, at times stressing the word, to indicate they have such traits, even if it felt a little forced.
"Dear friend, I am so observant and attentive that I ought to have noticed if someone tried to sneak around the corner."
Talk to the storytellers first to make sure it's kosher, and then just make up details about scenes.
'Mud on the carpet - he wasn't much of a boot-wiper.'
'You smell that? Ugh. Someone nearby hasn't taken their trash out recently.'
'Eagle up there.' Gestures upwards. 'Coming in and out of the clouds.'
Crouches down. 'Heavy smoker. Second-hand clothes. What am I looking for?'
Details that are unlikely to affect the story can be made up with storyteller permission. If you feel like you may have made up a detail that is too plot relevant, you can inform the storyteller and they can decide to either retcon it or weave it in to whatever they're doing.
Ask the storytellers to generate a short cheat sheet of things your eagle eyes might uncover in locations that will come up in the game. To avoid metagaming, these should be short and without context 'in the blue apartment, strange patterns of white grease on the ceiling', 'very faint dueling scars on the hands of the gunman', 'the ship's captain's fat isn't real, it's stage padding and makeup'. Specific enough to know the place or individual when it comes up in the game (if it comes up), but not specific enough to give away plot.
Ask players to pass you a note before the game if there is something about their character you could notice - provide a list of examples, like a change in demeanor, a change in dress, a recent wound, a new concealed weapon, a change in attitude towards another character, or other things that they feel you could uncover with your super senses, auspex, what have you.
This works best with experienced and generous roleplayers as both other players and storytellers, like most dramatic techniques, where things can be rolled back if need be without fuss but still allow for those cool 'I can see things' moments for the auspex-focused vampire player.
