LARP style

LARPing is not really my normal playstyle. Most of my gaming is of face-to-face tabletop roleplaying games (like, you know, Dungeons and Dragons or Polaris or Traveller or something). Why I chose to write a dozen LARPs is therefore an interesting question which I might explore later on at some point. But I mention this for a reason:

It often happens that I am sitting around talking to some guy that I know in a tabletop game that I mention LARPing. And they say something about how they don't like LARPing. Which seems weird to me, since they're already sitting around a table talking in a funny voice pretending to be an elven necromancer or whatever. How is it any different to do it while standing up?

So I pry into this (or sometimes my wife pries into this in my stead). And it almost always turns out that the person's live action roleplaying experience comes down to one of A) NERO, B) The Society for Creative Anachronism or C) White Wolf LARPing.


I'm not going to talk shit about any of these groups, though none of them are hobbies I personally enjoy. But it seems to me that these and similar entities represent the primary Gateway Games into LARPing. You know, the games that introduce people to the general idea of LARPing, from which they can then find other LARPs they might like better. And they are notably bad at it, since every one of the aforementioned tabletop only players who has attended one of our games enjoyed it and is willing to attend more of the LARPs I have done in the past.



But the fact of the matter is that "LARPing" as a hobby contains a huge variety of possible pursuits. The three big things linked above are all very distinct from one another. Beyond these there's a variety of other possible forms LARP could take, ranging from crazy Scandinavian "Jeepform" games to historical reenactment to who knows what else.



So what, specifically, am I interested in? While LARPing is a big field, and i am interested in exploring it more thoroughly over the course of the year, I have a history of running self-contained oneshot LARPs for 7-15 people, with varying amount of rules involved. Generally, all the conflict has been between player characters, and NPCs have been all-but-nonexistent (the hostage negotiator showed up for perhaps five minutes in the bank robbery, for example). In fact, my ideal so far has been to have the GM be largely superfluous once the game starts: the situation is wound tight enough that the character just interacting with each other will create a memorable evening. No NPCs or other outside help required.

Rules structures used vary considerably, ranging from the complete Unknown Armies rules to published LARP rules to stuff I made up to nothing more than "If someone shoots you, decide if your character died. Otherwise, LARP it out."

Costuming and props have been encouraged, but decidedly optional. This is largely a practicality matter: among other things, I am reluctant to hand out characters until the day of the LARP, in case someone's availability changes and I have to recast key parts. Boffer weapons and physical fighting haven't been featured at all.

The best examples would be to either A) read the information from the Bank Robbery LARP, or B) see some similar games: in the past we ran multiple events published by Interactivities Ink, or used the Unknown Armies scenario Jailbreak!. Those are the games most directly comparable to what I am trying to make: several player characters, in conflict with one another, with secrets and varying motivations. The situation is simply wound tight enough that letting the player characters interact will inevitably make fun things happen.


No idea how much of that will be true across all the LARPs I write this year. I might try selectively violating these rules for each game as we get to them. But so far those guidelines have been true most of the time in most of the events I have run or written.

So maybe you have some idea what I mean when I talk about LARPing.