April LARP: worked out pretty well

Didn't work out perfectly by any means, but most of the players enjoyed themselves a lot, reportedly.

As is the standard operating procedure here, all LARP relevant documents are up online for you to view and/or use for your own purposes.

Since this game was less GM intensive than the previous one, I will try to write up GMing notes so you could run it on your own, if you wanted.


There was a pretty good quantity of awesome in the game, as the hacked together mechanics for the game worked as they were supposed to and the characters interacted with each other. In particular, the poker mechanics meshed nicely into the rest of the game and subtly drew away the PC's ability to accomplish anything without killing someone. There were one or two mistakes on the character sheets, since plots had to be swapped around at the last minute. When two players cancel at the last minute, you have to scramble to adjust how the PCs fit together. But apparently I missed updating a few or the characters who were affected.

One or two players seemed somewhat dissatisfied with parts of the game. I'll see what we can do to rectify things in future months. Speaking of which, I should figure out what next month will be. At this point it's still almost entirely an unknown to me. I'd like something with less PC versus PC conflict, but still have to work out how to do that without increasing the GM workload.

Delayed thoughts and failure to write instructions

I tried to write up instructions on how to run the March LARP. I really did, but I don't think I'll be able to. The March game was a mystery game, see, and so it had a lot more stuff to it that wasn't on people's character sheets. There was another entire story, not directly spelled out anywhere in particular, that would need clarified and properly ordered for someone to be able to run the game themselves. And a lot of talk about the game's science fiction setting and then some conflict resolution rules.

You see, lots of stuff that wasn't already ready to be posted online. Which is a bit of a pity: by now I'm busy writing the April game.

(And if I ever get a chance and remember I should write a post about my mental boom/bust cycle writing these things, or one about the inversion of authority from how it works in a traditional tabletop RPG or lots of other things. But right now there's cowboys to write up... mainly cowgirls, actually, given the game's gender ratio.)




So while I don't have any new deep thoughts for you today, I do have some thoughts I wrote a month or so ago, regarding the scifi mystery game, tropes caused by writerly laziness and the Disney Channel:



--------------------------------------------------


The original background for the March game went like this:

A science fiction research outpost found an alien artifact, which could be used to raise and lower someone's intelligence. One survivor of the research team has been turned into a bestial monster man by having his mind drained, while others used it to raise their intelligence greatly. Unfortunately, raising your intelligence thusly lowers your empathy for normal human beings, leading you to think of them as insects, or tools for a job. Or pests to be exterminated. One of the scientists used this item to raise their intelligence to amazing heights, then created a time-space anomaly to wipe out most of the crew.

I was a bit unhappy about the intelligence modification stuff, because I'm sometimes bothered by the fictional trope of intelligence = evil and being dumb is morally superior. You see this in various forms. The place it always annoys me most is in, of all things, Handy Manny, where the smart and almost always correct flathead screwdriver is looked upon poorly for pointing out how stupid the other, moronic tools are.

Moving on from criticizing anti-intellectualism in children's shows, I am happier with the new background I came up with. It's mostly similar (research outpost, alien artifact, crew member made half-human, wiped out by guy who experimented on himself) except the artifact does not raise or lower intelligence. what it does is store someone's personality in little crystal things. One of the crystal things found contained an alien intelligence, stored by one of the race that made the thing. This alien is very anti-human, and its motives are unclear except that it wants humanity off its damn planet. Possibly, the alien was some sort of alien psychopath, imprisoned in a mindcrystal as punishment for something. Or maybe all the aliens would be this violent and anti-human in such a situation, I don't know.

Either way, it removes the moral qualm/aesthetic problem I had with the initial plot. Not that anyone else would have even likely noticed or cared.