First things first. The kinds of boxes I'm going to be talking about here are perfectly suited for containing a group of characters. They're not a good tool to retain players. Players cut out of games for all sorts of reasons - the unexpected intrusion of real life, insurmountable problems with another player or GM, or merely a sense of boredom. Some of these you can combat, some you just have to plan for. But if you've got a player who decides that he just has to catch the 7:00 kickoff, then making a big deal out of the fact that he's supposedly trapped in a cave-in is just not going to help. So I'm assuming here that your players are having a good time and want to stay, but that their characters, for whatever reason, want to beat feet. What can you do to keep the game cohesive, while not forcing the players to play their characters like idiots?

It basically breaks down, like most things, into three categories: Sticks, Carrots, and Sticky Carrots.

Sticks

A box made out of sticks is pretty easy to spot. A character wants to get out, and something stops him. Only in the most extreme circumstances should this actually involve hitting the player with a stick. It's a metaphor, people.

Some LARPs are built almost entirely around the box of sticks concept. An environmental box of sticks presents a clear physical barrier to re-exit. A grounded submarine. A snowed-in ski lodge. Space stations or space ships are always good - by definition, you're pretty well cut off from everything else. Biosphere 2. (BioDome, if you really want them to try to get out.) A pirate ship. A stuck elevator. (See upcoming article, "LARPing for Two"...) The advantage of having an environmental block like this is that the GM can pretty easily corral the characters without an awful lot of clawing at the inside of the box. If you set up the scenario such that everybody's in a space station, there's one escape pod, and the only guy with the password to it died, then you're probably not going to have a lot of players wasting energy thinking of other ways out - you've pretty clearly sent the message that this is a closed-box game.

The weaker the sticks, the more the players are going to push - at least the ones who have good reasons to be anywhere else. If you're surrounded by a snowstorm, expect that the survivalist character will strap a couple of tennis rackets to his feet and set off for help. If you're in a prison, expect that the guy with mob connections will try to pressure the guard to let him out, once the Unearthly Tentacled Horrors start appearing in the laundry room. This can be part of the game - if escape is a goal for some of the characters. But if you're just throwing up a box of sticks to simplify your life, do yourself a favor and spend some time thinking about how the characters are going to try to get out. Either make it part of the game, or make it really clear to the players that it's just not going to happen, and trust them to not make your life hell during runtime by building a life raft out of toothpicks.

A variant of the environmental box is the common custom of having a bunch of badass take-no-prisoners Sticks wandering around outside, just out of range of your peripheral vision. Make 'em a couple of notches up the power scale from the characters, and give them some motivation to make salad out of anybody who walks through the door. Werewolves in the forest. Hell's Angels in the parking lot. Papparazzi outside the theatre, and not a limo in sight. Whatever. The important thing is to again make clear to the players that this meta-threat is not something to be taken lightly, and is not something to spend a lot of energy trying to get around - unless that's the point of the game. The characters can relax a little if they know that the patrolling Sticks are there for a Limited Time Only - just wait until dawn and the vampires go away. That way even if they're not actively working on another problem, they won't feel like frauds for ignoring the wolf at the door. Another important point - if you're going to have the characters trapped by malicious Faerie, please don't make one of the characters Mr. I-Eat-Faerie-For-Brunch (except these guys, who are way too strong for me). In other words, if you're going to manipulate the situation to keep people in one place, don't do it at the expense of some character's concept. You're the one who put the Faerie out there, and you're the one who made up that character, so it's not his fault if he doesn't have fun. (See "Players Leaving", above)

Carrots

Everybody loves carrots. If sticks are what keep you from leaving, carrots are what keep you from wanting to leave.

Basically this comes down to goals. You do give your characters goals, right? Good. Now you just have to arrange it such that the bestest way for the characters to achieve their goals is to stay in one place. Specifically, the place that you're running this game. This is not necessarily as easy as it sounds. Players are notorious for not doing what you expect, and it's quite possible that they'll come up with some really good solutions to their character's problems which don't involve hanging around Old Uncle Eddie's Haunted Mansion at all. I'm here to get funding for my research into the Iguanas of Dawn? Cool. Well, I bet getting the hell out of here with this blackmail information I've stumbled across and then contacting Miss "I've never even met that orangutan" would be a whole lot easier than sticking around to see if I can get one-twentieth of the treasure chest that's supposed to be around here somewhere...

A good start is to tie the goals to something which is fundamentally immobile. All of the players are really interested in investigating the newly unearthed Tomb of Ipecac, and it ain't moving. Two of the players are art thieves, and they're not leaving the party without that Rembrandt. Somewhere in the town of Drybelly Gulch is the man who shot my paw, and doggone it, I'm not leavin' until he's swinging high.

This last example leads to the best carrot, which is really something you ought to have anyway - some reason for the characters to interact. If in order to satisfy your goals you need to deal with the other characters, who just happen to be here, then there's a ready-made reason to stick around. Particularly if this is some sort of special location which permits interaction that wouldn't normally take place. A flag of truce, or a neutral embassy, or the Graveyard of Saint George on the one night the spirits walk. Be careful about only requiring interaction with one or two other people, though. In many cases it would make real-world sense for the three captains of industry to hop back in their cars and discuss the merger downtown, rather than hanging out with the rest of this riff-raff.

One problem with carrots is that while everybody usually breaks out of a Stick Box at the same time, characters can find their carrots anywhere along the way. In real life, this would lead to a situation where not everybody leaves the area at exactly the same moment - people get what they came for, and they get on with their lives. There's no one solution for this. If you manipulate Fate such that nobody can solve their problems and achieve their goals until The Very Last Minute, it tends to feel a bit artificial. Not to mention rushed, as everybody tries to squeeze stuff into the last fifteen minutes of play. One thing you can do is scatter enough general-purpose carrots around so that even if a character finishes their main goals, they still have some motivation to hang tight. The Sword of Uranus is Mine!... but it would go really nicely with some shoes. Didn't somebody mention that the sandals of Hermes were floating around here somewhere?

Sticky Carrots

Or, everything else...

In a lot of LARPs your character isn't acting alone, but as part of a team. What if leaving didn't necessarily hurt the character, but did lessen the team's chances of victory? Or the character's goals might be all completed, but she made a lot of promises along the way, and is now honor-bound to hang out and help the ones who helped her? You don't necessarily need more carrots - you just need characters honorable enough to spend a little extra time pulling up carrots together. Aw....

Or make the obstacle to leaving inherent in some of the other characters. Don't put invisible monsters outside - give half of the players a vested interest in making sure nobody leaves, and back them up with the muscle to enforce it. Or make the act of leaving an admission of guilt - if there's been a murder, you don't need a cop to keep everybody inside. The appearance of guilt in front of the dead arch-mage's dimwitted but powerful golem might be just enough to earn your character a major shellacking. If the LARP's set at an Illuminati meeting, and three of your characters are Jehovahs Witness infiltrators, then let it be known that anybody who leaves before the ritual game of Pin the Eye on the Donkey at the end of the night might as well start handing out Watchtowers - their cover is blown.

How about a game that allows, or even encourages, characters to leave? Let them walk out of the door, then zap them and tell them that they're playing their own ghost. Give them a new set of goals and push them back into the room. Or a brand new, unrelated characters - there have certainly been LARPs ("Horde Games") with unending streams of minor characters pouring through the room. The trick here is to manage it so that the characters who stay are still able to do what they set out to do. If that involves significant ties to the woman who just walked out the door, then your plot may be in trouble, and a frustrated player is in the making.

What about a second, related, game going on in the next room? Something that allows for a slow start, with characters joining over the course of the time allotted. From a distance it could look like an hourglass, with players - or even characters - streaming from one game into another. It's easy to see this happening as a sort of life-and-death scheme, with enough external plot events or deadly NPCs to ensure a steady stream of spirits into the Nether Realms. And if you died early in Life, then that just gives you that much more time to prepare your stronghold in Death.

Related to the task of keeping physical bodies in one place is the problem of restraining communications with the outside world. Not a big deal in some pre-modern settings (although you might have to postulate random demonic activity keeping the crystal balls on the fritz). But in a modern or sci-fi game, it starts to strain suspension of disbelief if all of the cell phones, landlines, pagers, and Internet connections all go down and stay down for the duration. Any but the most antisocial character is going to have somebody they can call for help, or at least information. Again, there's no great solution, at least that I know of. If it isn't going to affect the game, let the characters go wild calling up their pals in Wisconsin to chat about the demon in the cafeteria. But let the players know that they're responsible for both halves of the conversation - you can't stop to roleplay every telephone or email contact that a character might try.

Or can you? Maybe in a situation like this you need a sub-GM just to handle external communications. Make your life easier - come up with some reason why there's only one cell phone around. If you want to be evil, have only a half-hour's charge on the battery so the characters can argue about who gets to call their next of kin before the zombies batter down the door. Get a pair of walkie-talkies and go to town.

This Side Up

You have to believe (or at least want to believe) that the players are on your side. Everybody wants to stay true to character, but everybody also wants to be there, playing your game. It's your job as a GM to give the characters enough rope to convince them to hang themselves. Unless the game is all about a prison escape, you don't have to plug every last hole. Just put up enough of a Box to help the players sustain disbelief. Just enough so that when the character says to himself "Hey, why am I still hanging around this place?" they can come up a reasonable-enough answer and get on with the task of having fun.