fatterSurfer

Good question, but unfortunately hard to answer. Some general advice I guess:

• Listen to directions and act as calmly as you can.
• Remember that they're people too.
• If you're injured, don't underplay or overplay what's wrong with you (this can be hard).
• For that matter, in healthcare in general, just be honest. We're not (supposed to be, not every egg basket is fresh) in the business of judging you. I got into healthcare because I wanted to make a difference in peoples' lives, not just their pulse or breathing. You don't do that kind of stuff if you're going to be a dick about whatever moderately embarrassing but we've probably seen worse thing is happening to you.
• If you're a bystander, unless someone explicitly asks for help, it's probably better to err on the side of keeping out of the way -- or, better yet, go track down some water bottles or snacks and offer them to command staff to give out.

In my experience:

• As a victim, you're explained your injuries, and what symptoms to present when the responders show up. This is really very important. Beyond that, you don't get much of a script. Although there are occasionally exceptions to that, such as "we want you to act belligerent enough that a LEO needs to restrain you" or "about ten minutes in (when LEOs were staging for entry), run/limp your way outside and collapse.
• As a responder, you know (ideally) literally nothing except that it's a drill, which radio channels are reserved for the drill, etc. Dispatch is sometimes in on it to help facilitate.
• As the perp, I had a handler and a general loose flow of events to follow, but otherwise was on my own. So, for example, the 90+ minutes I spent on the phone with a regional FBI hostage negotiator was all me, as was me "negotiating" for lunch when the drill ran over time because we held for a real call.

Hi Literally, I'm Dad.

Heh. No, like most beards, it started out of laziness and eventually started to grow on me.

No, that kind of stuff was way outside the scope of the simulation. The point of the simulations isn't to see what happens, it's to train response personnel.

I'd be personally interested in an open-ended scenario where it's less scripted and I had more room to adapt to what the responders were doing, however this is an absolute nightmare to coordinate and requires incredible, phenomenal trust in the perp. In that case the bad guy essentially becomes the event coordinator, on the fly. It would make for a much better training experience, and put much more realistic pressure on the responders, but the requirements on the facilitators and volunteers is just next level.

As it was, we were already incorporating a fake social media aspect to the whole thing (as in, we had fake social networks and had university PR, legal, LEO, press, etc all interacting with me, sometimes while I was on the phone with the FBI. At that point in the scenario I was holed up in a closed with 3 hostages, though, so I was pretty static and had enough mental headway to maintain those 2 conversations at once.