Category: LARP

Goetia: A Damned Good Time

On By ArthurIn After Action Report, Goetia, LARP1 Comment

Goetia was an event run by Omen Star – the team of Kol Ford and Rebel Rehbinder. It took place at Ingestre Hall over the 19th to 22nd October; that was its first run, and as of the time of writing Omen Star have not stated definitively whether or not a second run will take place. It is, however, definitely Omen Star’s intention to keep running other events, and the Goetia concept included some experimental features worthy of note, so a review can both serve the purpose of analysing the Omen Star house style and considering lessons learned from the experiment.

The Seal of Solomon is, purportedly, the sign used to command the demons of the Goetia.

The concept of the game runs as follows: somewhere in the 1930s, a clique of occultists is gathering to carry out one of the boldest magical operations ever attempted. The majority of the attendees have cultivated or obtained, wittingly or otherwise, an ongoing relationship with the spirits of the Ars Goetia, the most brimstone-infused section of the grimoire known as the Lesser Key of Solomon. The secret society which has organised the gathering consists primarily of people who have ended up in a similar relationship with the Fallen – those who were not cast out of Heaven for participating in the original revolt (as was the case with the Goetia) but who were ejected subsequently for procreating with humans and siring the Nephilim.

By purposefully allowing themselves to be possessed by the Goetia and the Fallen, the gathered occultists hope to stage a re-enactment of the Second Fall – the time when the Fallen, cast out of Heaven, purchased for themselves a place in Hell. What they do not realise is that in the world of the supernal and transcendent, time is an illusion – and what will transpire in the house will not only be a re-enactment, but the actual reaching of the deal itself. And the deal will be sealed with their lives…

How this translates to a LARP is as follows: each player ends up with not one but two characters, their human occultist and the Goetic demon who will possess them. (The Fallen were NPCs played by members of the crew.) As structured by Omen Star, the story pans out over two days (following OOC workshops on Thursday evening and Friday morning to early afternoon): in early Friday afternoon you play your humans, having just arrived at Hoxton Manor. After nightfall, a mass ritual is roleplayed and the characters are all possessed by their demons, who from this point are in command; the human being is stuck as a passenger in their body, able to act only to the extent that their demon chooses to let them out.

Come Saturday morning, your human character has reasserted themselves (though your demon can jump in whenever they wish), and must deal with the emotional fallout of what happened last night – and the dawning horror that nobody can leave the grounds of the house. Saturday evening sees the demons return in force to enjoy a seven-course banquet served up by the Fallen as part of their bid for entry into Hell, the forging of the pact between the Goetia and the Fallen, and the abandonment of the humans by their demons, as they cast aside their mortal vessels and abandon them to their ultimate fate.

Continue reading “Goetia: A Damned Good Time” →

On Ending a LARP II: When It’s Out of Your Control

On By ArthurIn Chronicles of Darkness, Crucible, LARP, Storyteller/Storytelling System, Vampire: the RequiemLeave a comment

A while back I wrote an article mulling over the various ways one can conclude a LARP – both in terms of bringing an individual event to a close, and rounding off a campaign. Specifically, though, I was talking about planned endings – endings intended to be exactly that – because as a game runner that’s the type of game you want to design.

Just recently, though, a LARP game I had been playing has experienced a different type of ending – an unplanned one. Crucible was a Vampire: the Requiem LARP run by the Badgers and Jam referee team. It was designed to be a low-budget, low-cost, long-running monthly campaign. The format was structured around sessions taking place once a month in a hired pub function room, and lasting for a few hours of a Saturday afternoon – allowing for a much lesser time commitment than many of the weekend-long LARPs I’ve written about on here previously.

The “ageless creatures in the modern day” concept meant that anyone could come kitted in normal clothes or push the boat out on costuming to the extent that they saw fit, and also meant that it wasn’t incongruous for characters to use smartphones; the latter point meant that the referees could deploy a handy little web portal to manage the use of vampiric Disciplines mid-session, freeing them up from having to referee such things. All of this was supported by a much more simple system than Mind’s Eye Theatre – partially to enable the phone-based resolution in the first place, but also to scale back the barrier to entry and to declutter gameplay (since Mind’s Eye Theatre tends to import a lot of tabletop game mechanics and complications without really thinking about how social LARP games actually play out in practice).

The campaign had started shortly before the COVID pandemic – the first session I attended was the last one before the game went on hiatus as a result of the virus making it dangerous to run sessions and lockdown making it illegal. Whilst many outdoor LARPs opened up again somewhat in 2021-2022, due to outdoor events being more COVID-secure and thanks to the vaccine rollout, Crucible was specifically meant to be a game played in pub function rooms, because that was key to making it widely accessible. As such, the referees decided to wait a bit longer to restart the game – not just to the point where suitable venues were starting to reopen again, but also to the point where they had at least some confidence that we wouldn’t be going back into lockdown after a brief easing, forcing the game to go into hiatus again.

It was therefore mid-2022 when the organisers started to seriously talk about reviving Crucible, canvassing the player base to see how many people were still interested, whether people wanted to keep using their old characters or start fresh with new ones, and so on and so forth. They appeared to have sufficient numbers to make a go of it, and scheduled a return session for the 1st October – but then decided to postpone the return because despite a good number of people saying they wanted to return, an insufficient number of those signed up to actually attend the first planned revival session. (Apparently just enough people signed up to cover the venue hire, but not enough to functionally run the game as envisioned.)

Unbowed and unbroken, Badgers and Jam soldiered on. Deciding that in November-January people were likely busy, they decided to run a poll and see who was still interested despite this latest setback, and which of several possible days for a return session people could say with confidence that they would be able to make. The first Saturday in March seemed to have the numbers, and so a first session was planned for then, with a “first Saturday of the month” schedule going forwards from there.

In fact, I can jot down the actual numbers here – because the referees levelled with us about them afterwards. I was at the March event and enjoyed myself, but I did notice that attendance seemed a little light, and some players I’d had the impression were among the most keen participants in the campaign weren’t there. In fact, although 22 players said they were interested in the game and could make the March date, only 13 actually showed up. The referees had accounted for something like a 25% drop-out rate, which would have left things within the range they considered viable, but 13 players wasn’t quite hacking it.

This put the organisers in a tough spot. They seriously didn’t want to put a guilt trip on people or try and make people feel that they were compelled to attend – players who aren’t specifically enthusiastic to be at your game aren’t going to get anything from it and won’t give their best contribution – and they specifically designed it as a game where it was possible to simply miss a session if you weren’t feeling it in a particular month. At the same time, a certain attendance level was needed to make the game viable in its current design. This was why they disclosed those numbers to us post-event – rather than trying to brush the issue under the mat, the refs took what I thought was a sensible move by being honest with the player base about the precarious situation the campaign was in, and explained that they wouldn’t be able to keep running if we weren’t able to get regular attendance up.

They were also clear about the criteria which they would now start to use to decide whether the campaign was still viable: at the start of each session going forwards they’d take a headcount of everyone who’d made it to the event (and anyone who’d messaged in to say they were running late) and see if they’d hit 14. If they had those numbers, fine, the campaign would keep going. If they had 13 or less, and there wasn’t some form of significant mitigating circumstance intervening, they’d put the campaign on hiatus, taking a vote of those attending on whether to play through one last session or just end it there.

As it happened, at the April event there were only 10 players. The refs had told themselves that if we came in just a little but under expectations, they’d overlook it, but they couldn’t ignore that much of a shortfall – especially when the number of people who said they planned to come, even accounting for possible train strikes on the day (which if I remember right were called off anyway), was substantially higher than that. We near-unanimously voted to play through a session (which you’d expect, because the people present were generally those who were most enthusiastic about the campaign anyway), and then we were left to console the referees and ponder what had transpired.

It is a real shame that this has happened; Crucible was a good game, and may indeed still be a good game if the refs decide to retool, reconfigure, and continue in another form, and if they get the support from the player base necessary to make a go of it. It’s certainly the case that dropouts from LARP events seems to have become a little endemic in the UK scene, and whilst it had increased post-COVID it did happen pre-COVID as well. Sally Poppenbeck did a good guest post over on the LARP Experience blog thinking more about general reasons why COVID may have led to a shift in habits in this respect, but I do want to put some consideration into factors which might or might not have affected Crucible specifically.

Firstly, I suspect games like Crucible need to plan for a higher dropout rate than is average for, say, a weekend-long LARP event (for which the 25% drop-out rate feels like a reasonable tolerance to plan for). Weekend-long events tend to involve more commitment both in terms of time and money (even if the organisers undercharge, travel costs are a thing) and in terms of sheer personal effort than events which unfold over a weekend afternoon.

On the one hand, you would expect people to find it easier to come to an afternoon event than to a weekend event – but I suspect there’s a motivational paradox here. Precisely because it takes way more effort to go to a weekend LARP, I think people tend to be more invested in them. You aren’t going to book for such an event if that weekend is not clear, and once you have booked you are going to keep that weekend clear if you can; once you’ve decided to commit a fair amount of time and money to it, you’re probably going to show unless some dire turn of events prevents you, or if you have some sort of catastrophic loss of confidence in the event, or a mental health wobble makes you not want to leave the house, or whatever.

Conversely, if a game is happening every month on a Saturday afternoon, showing up is easier, but brushing it off is also easier. If you bail on a weekend-long LARP event that’s an entire weekend where you are suddenly at a loose end. However, if your weekend is looking busy with lots of smaller-scale activities, it can be tempting to drop something to leave more space for the rest of the stuff you’re planning to do. And if a game is not a one-off, and happens reasonably regularly, you can expect to blow off a session and be able to come back. That’s what the refs kind of wanted Crucible to be – but it becomes unviable to run the game if the proportion of people who blow it off is so high so frequently.

In addition to all that, I do wonder if the “we’re going on hiatus if we don’t make quorum” announcement accelerated the hiatus a little. I’m not saying that making the announcement was a mistake; quite the reverse. In general, I think it is good and healthy for referees to level with your player base about this sort of thing, both because it’s the honest and transparent thing to do and because trying to put a brave face on things and pretend there’s no problem is rarely the right call when it comes to mental health and morale.

In this specific instance, I think providing clearly-understood criteria for what a viable Crucible looked like was not just honest and transparent, but also a great aid in expectation-setting, as well as a challenge to the player base – it let us all get a picture of how much of a knife-edge the game was on, and helped stimulate us to try and recruit new participants.

Equally, though, if you tell a player base your game is in a fragile state it can be a risky move. In some cases you may find the players rally behind you, re-commit to the game, and pull out the stops to help get things back on course. In other cases, you could find that the player base become more disengaged, not less – if they start expecting that the game might go away, they may become less committed, because they feel less inclined to invest time and creativity in something which might evaporate suddenly.

What’s more likely than either of those extremes is a mixture of reactions – some players become more committed, some begin emotionally disengaging, and some have a more complicated reaction. In my case, for instance, I found I was more determined to make the monthly events because I didn’t want the event to disintegrate because I happened to fancy a lie-in one month, but I also found myself wanting to adapt my approach to the game, because my initial character concept was designed with an eye to undertaking long-term projects, and since I didn’t 100% trust the rest of the player base not to flake I didn’t want to get overly invested in those projects when they might never yield any payoff.

As a result, levelling with your players like this can be a gamble – it might be the prod your player base needs to stop taking the game for granted and do their bit to keep it alive, or it could further sap their morale. Nonetheless, I think it’s a gamble which is worth it because it not only explains the problem, but opens up a basis for conversation and constructive engagement. Several times during Crucible‘s restart, from the initial seeking of expressions of interest to literally the minutes before the final session, I checked in with the referees to calibrate my expectations, explain where I was coming from, and generally make sure they had a clear idea of what level of commitment I was intending to give the game.

Some of those conversations involved saying slightly awkward things. When you’re talking to someone running a game the people-pleasing thing to say is “of course I love your game, of course it’s going great, and of course I’ll definitely make sure to make the next session”. The awkwardness comes when one or more of those things isn’t true – for my part, I thought Crucible was a solid game, and I wouldn’t deliberately want to arrange something which clashed with it, but there’s LARPs out there and other things which I am or might be more enthusiastic for, and whose scheduling isn’t under my control, and which I would probably prioritise over Crucible.

That’s not an easy thing to say, but it is an honest thing to say, and just as player bases deserve honesty from referee teams, so too do referees deserve players who are honest in turn. The whole reason the refs undertook all the labour involved in trying to revive this campaign not once but twice is because people kept telling them that they wanted to participate, but when it came time for people to make good on that… too many of us didn’t show up.

It stings badly enough when you throw an idea out there and, for whatever reason, you don’t get a critical mass of people behind it. In some ways it can sting worse if you do have an apparent critical mass, but then a chunk of the player base didn’t actually mean it when they said “yes, we’ll go out of our way to help you make this game work”.

Sure, some of the drop-outs from the March and April sessions may have been due to illness, emergency, or some other factor outside of the control of the people who dropped out – but I know for a fact that this doesn’t account for 100% of them. Some people simply opted not to show up, prioritised some other game over Crucible, or double-booked themselves with activities whose timing they absolutely did have some level of control over. No one individual is wholly at fault here; this isn’t a situation where I can point the finger and say “That asshole ruined Crucible for the rest of us!” Collectively, however, we as a player base turned out to be shockingly unreliable, and that speaks to a problem with the culture around the game.

It’s entirely legitimate to want to run a game which is easily accessible and doesn’t demand the investment of time and money a weekend LARP does – it’s a good thing to have, and London surely has enough LARPers and gamers to support many such things. At the same time, it’s hard to do that if people are going to treat your game as being utterly disposable. There is surely a middle ground between “blow my entire weekend on this game” levels of commitment and “I simply cannot be bothered to keep the day clear for this LARP” levels of detachment, and it’s frustrating to me that many of my fellow Crucible players don’t seem to have been able to find it.

Conflict and Flavour

On By ArthurIn LARP, Philosophy of Refereeing, Reginae Regis, Tabletop RPGsLeave a comment

This is a little thought which struck me when filling out the casting form for Reginae Regis. That game’s a LARP in which all the player characters are prewritten, with briefings designed by the referee team; I think the concepts that I’ve hit on here have somewhat wider application than that, though they will land differently in different contexts. In particular, I think the factors I’m looking at will function quite differently in tabletop games and in LARP, and in games where you have prewritten characters vs. games where players generate their own.

The Reginae Regis casting form includes a bit where it asks “What are you most interested in getting to do at the event?“, and points you to the very useful “Where Is My Fun?” page on the game’s website. Under the question on the form there’s a series of categories like “High-stakes politics”, “Rivalries and grudges”, “Family drama”, “Romantic drama” and so on, and people booking are asked to express how interested they are in each of those axes.

Guess who didn’t read the costume brief?

The issue I ran into was that the general slant of all of these categories was largely directed towards the major axes of conflict – and therefore gameplay – at the game. At the same time, I realised I needed to reach out and clarify with the refs that my casting preferences were a bit more complicated than that – namely, that I was interested in some of the categories less as sources of gameplay and conflict and more as sources of background flavour, something I could do low-stakes roleplay around in quiet moments during the game but weren’t necessarily a source of major drama.

Think, say, of the distinction between a character whose briefing involves a lot of the “Family drama” and “Romantic drama” category, and a character who happens to have family and romantic relationships which inform their background and personality (and so may appear in a briefing), but who are experiencing relatively plain sailing as far as those portions of their lives are concerned. One player might prefer playing the former character and would be disappointed with the latter, another player might be very keen for family and romance as low-key flavour aspects of their brief but not be especially keen on them being major sources of conflict. Both of those participants would probably appreciate having some content in their character briefs relating to family or romantic relationships, but they’d need those aspects of the brief to have a decidedly different tone – and a hypothetical third person who actively doesn’t want such content full stop would want a brief that has neither.

Continue reading “Conflict and Flavour” →

On Ending a LARP

On By ArthurIn Anarchy, LARP, Philosophy of Refereeing1 Comment

This past weekend we ran the concluding event of Anarchy, a historical LARP set in the Stephen-Matilda civil war of the 12th Century. I learned a lot of lessons about running LARPs over the course of the campaign – as happens whenever I run a game – but I was particularly gratified with how one experiment we tried at the weekend panned out.

This related to how we handled the end of the event, which was also the end of the campaign itself. I think handling the finish of a LARP event is a very tricky thing; there is no widely-adopted one-size-fits-all solution, and whilst many games put a lot of thought into climactic, final encounters, I think there is a difference between “how do we do the climax?” and “how and when do we declare an end to the event?”

To be clear, I am not talking here exclusively about how you end a campaign – though obviously this will be relevant to this article – so much as how you end an individual LARP event – whether that be the last episode of a campaign, or a preceding one, or a one-shot event. There seem to be three models which are particularly widespread; what we did at Anarchy constitutes a fourth. I think this sort of thing genuinely merits significant thought, not least because of the “LARP drop” experienced my participants post-event; a little attention to getting an appropriate sense of closure can’t eliminate that, but I would be willing to hypothesise that it might alleviate in some cases. Here’s those three common methods, followed by the Anarchy experiment.

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We Don’t Want Any Adventures Here, Thank You!

On By ArthurIn After Action Report, EyeLARP, LARP, Second Breakfast3 Comments

This past weekend I had an extremely good time at the second run of EyeLARP’s Second Breakfast. This was a charming little game set in Middle-Earth, in which the Wild West town and Viking village at EyeLARP’s site stood in for the little village of Frogmore, a hobbit community in the Shire. The basic concept of the game is that it’s the weekend of the Mayor’s birthday, there’s going to be a lovely party, the four extended families of the village (the Thornburrows, the Greengawkers, the Kettlebrights, and Puddlefoots – or is that Puddlefeet?) are engaged in some light-hearted rivalry when it comes to baking delicious pies and/or cakes for the big event, but are all united in one thing: they don’t want anything so exciting as an adventure so any meddling dwarves or wizards showing up trying to coax right-thinking hobbits off on one can move right on, thank you very much.

As you might expect, this was basically a fairly light-hearted, easy-going sort of event, but I think there’s still some interesting points of LARP design which arise from it. In particular, it’s a great example of a LARP which managed to deliver a great event on the strength of pure ambience, after dialling back on more or less every other factor LARPs usually go out of their way to provide.

There was basically no peril to characters, and no real combat, In theory, Second Breakfast worked on EyeLARP’s usual “FilmSim” principle, which includes as a feature a systemless combat system: rather than fighting being a genuinely competitive process, you basically die or get injured when you think that it would make sense or be dramatically appropriate for your character to be. In practice, we were briefed not to expect or initiate genuinely life-threatening combat, and indeed none happened. The biggest outbreak of violence that happened during the second run was a massive food fight, in which a party of annoying dwarves were pelted with LARP-safe “food” (basically sponge balls in different food shapes) to make them go away. EyeLARP’s approach to combat already sets aside their LARP from the vast majority of old-school games which try to make a satisfying tactical game out of the combat system, but usually still includes combat on some level to add an aspect of power fantasy (or, if someone elects to get killed, tragedy); Second Breakfast didn’t even have that.

Continue reading “We Don’t Want Any Adventures Here, Thank You!” →

Serendipity and Scale

On By ArthurIn After Action Report, Heathen, LARP1 Comment

This past weekend I participated in the fifth event of Heathen, a LARP campaign based around a historical fantasy take on King Alfred’s war against the Danish invaders of Dark Ages England. I had a great time, in part because I came in with a different player character type which meant I could better target the parts of the game I found interesting than my previous character did.

Specifically, I was playing a character in the “cunning folk” archetype, a practitioner of pagan-tinged magic. (Some PCs in the system are outright pagans, some are Christians, I am specifically choosing to play a character who’s a bit of a syncretist.) One thing which impressed me with how the referees ran this part of the game is how they gave it sufficient rules and structure to feel like it wasn’t totally arbitrary, whilst at the same time being very open to what effects your ritual might bring about and adopting what in tabletop circles is called a “fail forward” approach a lot of the time: even when rituals went awry, it seemed like the referees made sure that something substantive which could prompt further action still came of them, even if it wasn’t as helpful as a successful ritual would have been.

The way you are encouraged to construct rituals in Heathen is that you are meant to find a suitable Focus for the ritual – an object or place appropriate to the ritual being attempted – a Connection to the target (an enemy NPC was cursed by the player characters using his hair, blood, and teeth acquired through various means), and a source of power like prayer, blood, or the sacrifice of a soul.

Within that framework, you can ask for a wide range of things, but there’s obviously limits. There’s several examples in the current version of the rules calling out things which won’t work – making the sun rise at midnight, driving the Danes into the sea and winning the war in one fell swoop, turning invisible, walking through walls, or killing people with a mere glance – all come down into two fairly simple categories: stuff which would spoil the game by “solving” the entire plot or otherwise making it trivially easy, and stuff which can’t really be adequately physrepped. (Apparently the refs have had to say “no” at least once to the “sunshine at night” thing on grounds of it being impossible to meaningfully implement.)

Within those restrictions, though, you could achieve a lot, and what impressed me was how the ref team were able to very effectively take players’ spontaneous rituals and roll with them, both tweaking pre-planned plot stuff to help it reflect what the PCs had done and going the extra mile with what was possible. There’s two examples I particularly want to talk about here.

In the first example, I’d managed to intercept a letter between two NPCs (having blagged it off a faery herald), and I decided to do a solo divination ritual with it to see if I could discern information written between the lines – in other words, pick up details which were not written in the letter (I could just find someone who could read Latin for that!) but which were germane to its subject, recipient, or sender. I’d already had indications that a particular Celtic cross erected in the game area was something to do with my elf-lord patron, Mabon ap Modron, so I used the cross as a Focus, the letter as a Connection, and my blood as a power source (represented by fake blood, obviously).

All this was fine, and the ritual went off successfully, and I got some very useful information which I hastened to tell to others. But less than five minutes or so after I was done, Mabon and his entire faery court showed up in the game area, kicking off a memorable sequence in which the player characters had to contest with Mabon to gain certain prizes, including invoking the magic of the Celtic cross to communicate across long distances. They specifically made a bee-line for me, and Mabon was quick to tell people that I had summoned him.

Now, OOC, it’s obvious that Mabon and his court showing up was a planned encounter, which the referees had put together before they knew I was going to do that ritual – it involved a significant number of crew with fairly extensive makeup jobs, getting it prepared would have taken a good chunk of the morning prior to them rolling out, I’d only mentioned I was doing the ritual some 5-10 minutes before they showed up. The referee who adjudicated the ritual was doing some fairly intensive talking into his walkie-talkie at the time out of my hearing, but it’s not hard to guess that he was telling them to hold off on rolling out the encounter until the outcome of my ritual could be built into it.

So on the one hand, Mabon and his court were always going to appear, whether or not I did the ritual and whether or not I succeeded – but at the same time, the referee grabbed onto the lucky coincidence of me doing that ritual right as the encounter was primed to go out in order to give extra flavour to the encounter. It’s a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but for me at least (and quite likely for any other player who was trying to suss out my character) it made the encounter land very differently, and making the effort to incorporate the ritual like that was something the referees 100% didn’t have to do but enriched the overall story of the event by doing. It’s the sort of thing where if it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have noticed or felt short-changed, but because it did happen it was really cool.

The second example happened later. Many of the PCs were off on a combat encounter, but I was observing the Kabbalists at work. The Kabbalists are essentially the monotheistic-flavoured magicians in the game system, using magic along much the same lines as the cunning folk in terms of ritual framework, only with more use of prayer and saint’s relics (but not actually that much less in terms of blood). They had a bit more social clout, because in the setting Christianity is the default religion of the Saxons and pagans are either a) on the back foot or b) in the case of the Danish invaders, often our adversaries; this is balanced by, among other things, cunning folk having the ability to act as healers whilst Kabbalists don’t. That’s why I was sat to one side as they worked – rituals sometimes causing injury when they fail.

In this case, the Kabbalists were investigating a theft of an artifact from a sacred reliquary, and applied some lateral thinking. The artifact in question had exhibited a tendency to spontaneously appear back in the reliquary when given the opportunity to – so summoning it back felt like a waste of time. Merely divining the identity of the thief might be worth doing, but wouldn’t necessarily help get the relic back, and a previous attempt by me and some others to divine the identity had backfired. However, summoning the thief would not only identify them, but also get the relic back – either because it was on their person or because distracting the thief would allow the artifact to use its own capability to return.

Amazingly, this worked. Sure, they drew a black bead (which usually means a ritual backfires) in the resolution, but that just meant they took some horrible consequences; as the ritualists were coming to terms with the curse that had been placed upon them, another PC walked in, a blind monk, and after a moment we realised from something he said that he’d been summoned. (As it turned out, he’d been possessed for multiple events, and had been acting as a traitor in the player party all that time, in a magnificent bit of play from the player concerned.)

The thing which impressed me about this was that the PC in question had been out on the combat encounter – which meant that the ref adjudicating the ritual had used his radio to contact the refs running the combat and get them to tell the player in question to go back to the main camp and enter the longhouse, due to being summoned. In more or less any other LARP I’ve played, that wouldn’t have happened; at a fest-scale LARP it wouldn’t even be viable to have the result happen that quickly (because at something like Empire there’s thousands of people on the field and only a fraction are in sight of a ref at any particular time), and at many smaller-scale games the refs would most likely have just waited until the combat encounter wrapped just to make it logistically easier.

Indeed, it’s entirely possible the Heathen refs would have had second thoughts about doing the summoning had the combat encounter been way over on the other side of the site – but things happened to line up in such a way to make it possible. As it happened, all this led to a really intense scene as the exposed traitor cackled and the blighted Kabbalists resorted to dire measures to resolve the situation, and it wouldn’t have been quite as dramatic if we’d all had to wait half an hour or so for the combat encounter to resolve.

What I think is interesting about both of these incidents is that they’re the sort of thing which is only possible in a game of roughly the sort of size of Heathen. Make the game much larger and your ref team is probably spread thin enough that they’re not going to be able to keep the same track of where everyone is and what everyone is doing (in terms of ritual use, at least) that the Heathen team were, and the less scope they’re going to have to delay things, change things, or work out a plan on the fly to take the effects of a ritual into account. But if the game were significantly smaller, these little techniques wouldn’t have seemed so impressive – if a game is of a scale where most participants are able to see where everyone is at all times, then it’s that much less of a surprise when these happy accidents line up.

One could argue, in fact, that part of the point of involving randomisers in tabletop RPGs is to allow for these serendipitous moments – because otherwise, in a tabletop session an attentive player can keep track of more or less everything that is happening in the game, because the action is entirely contained in the conversation at the table. At the other end of the scale, in very large fest LARPs and the like, such coincidences might be much harder to design for – but arguably they don’t need to be, because there’s so many people doing so much stuff in the field that plenty of interesting quirks of fate happen entirely organically. This is just one of a great many respects in which the scale of your game has such a big influence on your design considerations that it’s often misleading to treat the design of fest-scale LARPs and smaller-scale LARPs as though they were just larger or smaller versions of the same task; like relativity, classical mechanics, and quantum mechanics, different tools are called for at different scales.

On Pausing the Game At a LARP

On By ArthurIn After Action Report, EyeLARP, Land Without a King, LARP4 Comments

I encountered a situation I don’t remember running into at a LARP this past weekend (Land Without a King, run under the auspices of EyeLARP, as it happens). This was when the entire game was paused in order to deal with a breach of the conduct policy.

Pausing the entire game for this sort of thing is generally more common in tabletop, because it’s vastly easier to pause the game when every single participant is sat around the same table (whether in person or over voice chat). Various safety mechanics like the X-card have been developed for the tabletop context; whilst the X-card can be used in a way which maintains the flow of play (if everyone at the table is happy for that, and if the thing which triggered the X-card is unambiguous enough that it’s clear what content needs to be steered away from), the X-card writeup makes it clear that in some contexts taking a break from play would be necessary.

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LARPing Internationally At Short Notice

On By ArthurIn A Meeting of Monarchs, After Action Report, LARP3 Comments

Recently I took my first foray into the world of international LARP, attending the first run of A Meeting of Monarchs. This was a historical game based around the meeting of King Henry VIII of England and King Francis I of France at the Field of the Cloth of Gold; it took place in a scenic French chateau, with a player base from a range of European countries, and boasted an exceptionally good quality of both costuming and performance from the players in question, the majority of whom had booked for the event months in advance and had the advantage of spending a long time preparing for the game.

I, on the other hand, had picked up a ticket late – having acquired it following a player dropping out in early March – and, with other LARP commitments intervening, essentially had less than a month or so to prepare for the game. Here’s how I prepared, and how well that preparation served me.

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Sorties Into the Dark Ages

On By ArthurIn After Action Report, LARP, Mind's Eye Theatre, Storyteller/Storytelling System, Vampire: the Dark Ages, Vampire: the Masquerade, World of Darkness5 Comments

So, despite having been involved in LARP in some capacity for twenty years or so, for a good long while I’d never been to what you might call a “traditional” Vampire: the Masquerade LARP, despite the prominent role those have played in the field over the years. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to Vampire LARPs – of both Masquerade and Requiem flavours – but never one which used the venerable Mind’s Eye Theatre system as maintained by By Night Studios.

There’s various factors why that has been the case. I started LARPing in university; at the time, there was a local branch of Camarilla UK (the major Mind’s Eye Theatre-based World of Darkness LARP network), but there was also other options. If you were into a more physically active LARP, with combat actually implemented using pulled blows with latex weapons, Mind’s Eye Theatre wouldn’t be your thing anyway – that system has never used “hard skill” combat but instead uses game mechanics to resolve violence in an abstract fashion. There was a local system which ran frequent afternoon sessions of a Saturday, so if you preferred that, that was what you did.

Mind’s Eye Theatre-esque games are somewhat suited to games which put a strong emphasis on political networking and social skills – but for that there was also alternatives, with at least one (and often several) freeform games which delivered a similar style of play. These would run campaigns in short runs (since they were associated with the local university’s RPG society and so needed to complete their arcs within the academic year due to student turnover), and as the “freeform” title implies tended to be extremely system-light.

This meant there were not much in the way of rules you needed to keep in mind to play, and not much in the way of the sort of long-term baggage that any RPG campaign accumulates over the passage of time. By contrast, the local Camarilla UK game seemed rather unapproachable. The Mind’s Eye Theatre system provided a significant barrier to entry and seemed daunting to handle in play – whilst in a tabletop context it’s much easier to pause and look up a rule when playing a crunchy system, LARPs really thrive on pausing the action as little as possible, so a rules logjam in a LARP can be significantly more disruptive to the play experience than a difficult rules problem in a tabletop context, and needing to keep a large amount of rules information straight in your head to ensure smooth play is a perennial LARP system design issue.

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Lessons From the Dinner Table 5: LARPing, Blackballing, and the Price of Doing Business

On By ArthurIn Comics, Kenzer & Company, Knights of the Dinner Table, LARP, Philosophy of Refereeing, Referee's Bookshelf, Tabletop RPGs1 Comment

Welcome back to an occasional series of posts where the joke is I am taking a gag strip about tabletop RPGs entirely too seriously. Specifically, Lessons From the Dinner Table is where I like to look over old Knights of the Dinner Table compilations and ponder what sort of lessons applicable to real-world gaming we can take from them – whether it comes to storytelling considerations of how the issues themselves are written, gaming techniques used (or abused) in the comic, or ideas concerning larger gaming communities which the series touches on.

Bundle of Trouble 16

There’s two plot threads in this Bundle I want to highlight, one of which isn’t so good, the other of which pretty funny, and a lesson that can be drawn from how each of them landed.

The not so good one is an entry in the occasional “retro KODT” series of strips set earlier in the continuity, which are usually thrown in so that each issue can have a more small-scale story not bound to the longer-form storytelling in the main strips. In this case, they’re an expanded sequel to the old strip where Dave and Bob join a Vampire LARP and start acting weird. Back in the day, the original strip wasn’t so annoying, mostly because it was too brief to expose the weakness of the writing – and in particular, the comparatively shallow level of understanding of LARP on the part of the Knights of the Dinner Table team, which is exposed here.

This isn’t me being overly defensive – there’s some good satire you could do about the quirks of the LARP community, particularly the drama-prone world of Vampire-inspired games. But you need to really know the scene to produce something which isn’t outright shallow, just like you need to know tabletop RPGs to make something like Knights of the Dinner Table‘s usual fare. The plot here fails to convince me that it’s the product of sufficient research.

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