Month: February 2017

Top 21 Tips for Joining a new LARP

When you’re thinking of joining a LARP for the first time, it’s important to consider a few things. Firstly, everyone was new once. While some people have gained some experience in tabletop roleplaying games, re-enactment or improvisational theatre, many have walked in without that experience. The grand majority of players are eager to welcome in new faces, introduce you to the game and get you started with your character.

1.       If you’re feeling a little shy, perhaps you could arrange to meet a few players outside of the game first so you have some familiar faces.  ARC Inc. runs a number of social events, many of which are open to the public, which could provide a great way to introduce yourself.  We also have a forum and several Facebook groups that would give you an online method of saying hello.

2.       Contact the Game Master *BEFORE* you attend the game to let them know you’re coming.  Typically you can find the contact details on the LARP organisation’s web-page or message them on Facebook.

3.       Let the Game Master know if you have any previous experience in roleplaying and what sort of games you have played before.   This will help them give you the right amount of advice tailored to your needs.

Continue reading “Top 21 Tips for Joining a new LARP”

LARP Design Principles, Part 3

No LARP can be all things to all people. Each decision affects every other decision and trims away certain opportunities in favour of highlighting others. It’s always worth keeping your game’s design principles in mind so that you don’t inadvertently contradict yourself — such as if you have a “simple mechanics” design principle that you only pay attention to intermittently in the combat and magic sections, making certain parts far more complex than others.

In line with this, I have spent the past few articles considering my own LARP design principles while making the Multiverse campaign.  This article will touch on the last two principles.  You can read up on the other principles in Part 1 and Part 2.

Town-based roles typically reserved for NPCs would be given to PCs.  Also known as, let the PCs do it!  There are incentives for players to have their characters run the banks, merchant stalls, hand out quests and manage the law.  Some of the roles are given funding that they can use to hire other adventurers to accomplish certain tasks.  Suitable PCs will also be tapped on the shoulder with further information or experiences that they can bring to the session.

Continue reading “LARP Design Principles, Part 3”

LARP Design Principles, Part 2

A creator’s LARP design principles should affect everything they do which is why an article I’d hoped would be written in one post will likely be done in 3!

If you’d like to check out my overview of the processes of creating a LARP you can see where this all came from.  Otherwise you can find Part 1 of this series over here.

Now without further ado, here are my next two principles:

Low, mainly social, PvP became of interest to me because my previous experiences have all been in games where the focus is competition — often both between and within teams.  Characters were typically designed not only with personality flaws but to be selfish, cruel and sometimes even downright villainous.  These were great games but they were wearying and they only told certain kinds of stories.

Continue reading “LARP Design Principles, Part 2”

LARP Design Principles, Part 1

I figured I’d talk a little about how my existing player base and LARP history informed some of my later decision making when creating a new LARP campaign. You see, I’d run a few dice-heavy theatre LARPs in the Vampire: the Requiem setting and I had a number of players who didn’t come from a boffer background. I didn’t want to lose them, and I didn’t feel that I needed to. I also knew how much fun you can make from adventure-style games involving clues and NPCs despite a dice-based combat system and figured that surely I could use some of the lessons there to make the Multiverse campaign even better.

I also didn’t have any co-GMs in mind so I had to build it in such a way that it could be largely self-run.  I’d likely get the occasional person willing to run a module or two, but nothing more intensive than that.  All the GMs I did know had their own LARPs to run or would prefer to be a player in this one.

So I had a few design principles in mind as I refined the rules:

Continue reading “LARP Design Principles, Part 1”