Animosity between traditional gamers and LARPers?

[Seule]

I am a confirmed tabletop player, I have been playing D&D since 1981 and have tried many other systems as well.
I am also a LARPer. I played in my first Vampire LARP in 1995, have assisted in the development of rules for several cyberpunk-themed LARPs. I have run both Mind's Eye Theatre (yuck) and homebrew Cyberpunk.
I like both.

In tabletop play, I pick my tablemates carefully. Who will be playing a game means far more to me than what the setting is, or what the rules are. Likewise in LARPs, I attend a few times to see if it is worth my energy to become a dedicated player. I have found that the LARPs I have actually enjoyed have been run by older people, that come into LARPing with tabletop experience. LARPs that are overrun with younger players generally do not appeal to me, as do LARPs with numbers of players that I wouldn't want to know outside of that setting. I try hard to actually get to know the people in my games, particularly when I am involved in running them, and I find that that makes the experience far better. I don't tabletop with people I don't like, why would I LARP with them?
I think by the end of the Vampire LARP that wrapped up for good last weekend, we had no Goths in the game at all, out of 30-40 players. People were there for the play experience and the roleplay, not to live out some twisted fantasy of being a vampire.

Oh, and the Mind's Eye Theatre system (Vampire, Werewolf, and so on)? I hated it as a player, I hated it even more as an ST. I'll never use it again if I can possibly avoid it. It's clunky, oversimplified and overcomplicated at the same time, and almost impossible to avoid cheating in any reasonable game. Almost nobody can actually properly keep track of depleting traits, and only having three trait categories means that if someone is better at you in one physical area (strength), they are also better than you in all physical areas (speed, stamina...). Stupid. But that's another rant for another thread.

Basically, in my area, most LARPers have at least tried (and liked) tabletop play, and most tabletoppers have tried LARPs, and sometimes liked them. Unfortunately, in the bigger games that LARPs need, any problems with the game get magnified many times, along with the good parts.

--Seule

 

[Old One]

Tacky...

One of my friends went to a LARP thingie -- Fantasy, not Vampire -- and came away with an interesting take on it.

He said that he didn't have fun, and the reason that he didn't have fun was that everyone was too cautious. In the campaigns, the not-one-shot stuff, everyone was so attached to their character and so into being dramatic and cool that the end result was a bunch of people standing around being guarded and saying things ominously and trying never to actually make a real choice.

*****

Does any of that hold water, or am I unfairly branding all LARPers based on what I've seen in one guy and heard from another guy? Are there LARPers who will voluntarily make a stupid choice -- who could actually say, "Well, if YOU think you disarmed the trap, that's good enough for me!" and trot on through the doorway without a second thought? Who would make choices that they the PERSON know will result in their character going down in flames?

-Tacky

I can only speak from my own personal experience with a NERO variant...

In Wildlands, you have a finite number of deaths the character can return from (similar to "raise dead" or "resurrection"). The first 2 deaths are "free", then you go to the Bag. The Bag has 10 stones in it. For every death over two, one black stone goes into the bag along with the white ones.

When your friends call you back from the dead, you have to draw from the bag. If you draw a black stone that's it...end of character, please create a new one.

I would say that ~ 60%+ of the players don't hold back with their PCs. In 2.5 season, my character died 4 times (twice in one event), so my odds are starting to get pretty long. I know players that have gone through 3-4 characters in that same time frame because they died so much.

OTOH, one of the players in our group is ULTRA-cautious, which is weird since he plays a fighter-type. He doesn't put his neck out, hangs back in fights and seems worried about his character dying. Interestingly, he doesn't play that way in tabletop.

Most of us, however, are pretty bold...we don't play recklessly, but we go all out. We consistently field one of the bigger "teams" at most events (out of 75 players, 10-12 usually come from our "House"), so when something major is afoot and big baddie is menacing the town were are always in the thick of it!

~ Old One

 

[Mistwell]

You know, there are only six boxes in there I don't qualify for, at least marginaly or at times.

Okay, gotta know which ones. I mean, the bottom 3 are all furry-related, and you are not 13 years old. So, which are the other 2? Tell me you didn't get married in Klingon grab!

 

[Umbran]

Does any of that hold water, or am I unfairly branding all LARPers based on what I've seen in one guy and heard from another guy? Are there LARPers who will voluntarily make a stupid choice -- who could actually say, "Well, if YOU think you disarmed the trap, that's good enough for me!" and trot on through the doorway without a second thought? Who would make choices that they the PERSON know will result in their character going down in flames?

Unfortunately, yes, you are unfairly branding all larpers. Common enough fault, so we forgive you

Who would make choices that the person knows will result in their character going down in flames? Simple - one who wants a good story.

The folks who play live combat larps can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but in live combat games the NPCs and monsters are usually played by a special squad of folks helping the game masters. The monsters are "throwaway", the the people whoplay them don't really lose much in losing. I'm told that, since there's usually fewer helpers than PCs, they also get a lot of bruises

In most theatre style larps, there are few or no NPCs. The antagonists are your fellow players. They have as much ego invested in their characters as you have in yours.

One of my favorite kinds of players are the larpers who are willing and eager to play a villain well. Don't assume the hero will win. Give 'em a run for their money. But, when it becomes obvious that they're going to lose, instead of whine and gripe, they play it up for all it's worth, lose with style. Go down in flames, and give as many heros as possible a good shot at them as they go. Not every player can do this, and it's good to see when it happens

 

[Old One]

Ouch...

Having participated in a good number of fantasy larps, I can explain this...

When you get bruises from fights, you tend to be less hack-happy. No matter how... safe... the rules seem, accidents happen, I assure you. And not all rules are really that safe... a foam covered fiberglass core can still hurt like hell.

Tsyr,

You got that right! Having been hit in the groin, throat, eye (scratched cornea), mouth, etc...it can definitely hurt. Of course, I have done the same on occassion. I have also seen lots of ankel and wrist sprains (running full tilt down a steep, rocky path with exposed roots in the middle of the night with very little light is not a good idea).

Most players seem to take it in stride, dust themselves off, wrap-n-tape and get right back into it. I think the systems that are based on hit location (Shattered Isles and King's Gate) remedy this somewhat by making combat slightly more realistic and less rushed.

~ Old One

 

[Mistwell]

Having participated in a good number of fantasy larps, I can explain this...

When you get bruises from fights, you tend to be less hack-happy. No matter how... safe... the rules seem, accidents happen, I assure you. And not all rules are really that safe... a foam covered fiberglass core can still hurt like hell.

When I was 19 (oh good lord that was 14 years ago!) I used to play in a home-brew LARP (though I never heard that term at the time) involving PVC pipe, padding, and tape for longswords (and various other weapons and armor). Some guy had a shortbow with padded-tipped arrows (though the arrows were wood). The shortbow was a very bad idea...

He shot someone, the tip came off mid-flight, and some guy ended up literally pinned to a tree by his, um, delicate area. Needless to say, we did not use projectile weaponry thereafter.

Of course, I can trace half my friends (and all my D&D playing friends) back to that old LARP 14 years ago (though none of them were directly in it, I met them all through people who were).

And yes, I recall it being a lot easier to meet (attractive) women during the LARP at that age than during D&D at that age.

However, the only person I know who has LARPED recently (and I do not count SCA or military reinactment groups - those are an entirely different breed of folks in my opinion) played vampire, and she is extremely stuck up, judgemental (about D&D any all things non-trendy), and DID play Vampire (and is an actress).

 

[Old One]

As a "Stick-Jock"...

Unfortunately, yes, you are unfairly branding all larpers. Common enough fault, so we forgive you

*****

The folks who play live combat larps can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but in live combat games the NPCs and monsters are usually played by a special squad of folks helping the game masters. The monsters are "throwaway", the the people whoplay them don't really lose much in losing. I'm told that, since there's usually fewer helpers than PCs, they also get a lot of bruises

*****

One of my favorite kinds of players are the larpers who are willing and eager to play a villain well. Don't assume the hero will win. Give 'em a run for their money. But, when it becomes obvious that they're going to lose, instead of whine and gripe, they play it up for all it's worth, lose with style. Go down in flames, and give as many heros as possible a good shot at them as they go. Not every player can do this, and it's good to see when it happens

For most NERO events, there is a small cadre of NPCs that provides the bulk of the opposition for the players. Oftimes, the number of volunteers are insufficient to handle all of the plots and modules (aka dungeon crawls) over the course of a weekend, so each player has to put in several hours of NPC time.

At Wildlands, we are very lucky to have a large, dedicated group of NPCs, so we get to play ALL weekend! These folks take lots of abuse (mis-thrown spell packets, hits in sensative locations, etc). They usually put forth herculean efforts over a weekend event, because they are heavily outnumbered by the players (although the player:npc ratio in our game is usually 1.25:1...not too bad).

I think a given LARP, just like a tabletop game, really hinges on how good the players (and, in a LARP, the NPCs) are. I have been to a couple of events outside of the well-controlled Wildlands environment and enjoyed myself much, much less.

~ Old One

 

[Pielorinho]

Please forgive a long, boring, self-indulgent trip down memory lane in advance....

I played my first LARP, a Vampire LARP, in early 1993, and had unbelievable fun. It was very rules-light: pretty much any conflict we had was resolved by calling a Storyteller over, having them look at each character sheet, and telling us what happened. Our character sheets had no background, no narrative, no contacts on them -- just a bunch of dots telling us our powers. I was playing a podunk nobody Vampire, and by the end of the game, around 3 am, I was breathless with exhiliration.

A lot of Chapel Hill's gamers felt the same way, and so different folks would volunteer to run a LARP every four or five months. Quality varied tremendously, from the awesome (a LARP set in medieval Europe, with the Inquisition as a major threat, with detailed characters designed to elicit slow political conflicts) to the terrible (a LARP with no plot but a bunch of characters who would kill each other on sight).

Most of them used White Wolf universe. This was before Mind's Eye came out, so we made up our own rules. Although there were plenty of goths around, by no means were all of us goths, and I never saw any problem with goths and nongoths getting along. We played nice with one another, whether goth, hippy, nerd, punk, military, or whatever.

I helped run two of them, with lead designer credits on one. One of them was set in the Storyteller universe, with equal parts Vampires, Werewolves, Hedge Mages, and Mundanes. The other wasn't a White Wolf game; instead, was set in an insane asylum under investigation for Mad Scientist Research. There were plenty of lunatics (ranging from Hannibal-Lector-type crazies to rock stars in detox), mad scientists, psychics, and government agents (we managed to come up with a plot that allowed for both the FBI and CIA to be present).

In running these games, we came up with a set of guidelines that made us happy:



-Storytellers should not have characters. In the LARPs I've played in in which Storytellers were major faction leaders, it inevitably created bad feelings when the Storyteller's faction won. If you're gonna be GM and have a character, it should be someone insignificant, apolitical, and/or doomed to die during the game.
-One-shots are more fun. Games that stretch on over time make it very difficult for new players to join in and lead to cliques. I've never played in a campaign LARP that I enjoyed.
-Characters should be detailed. People should know their character's history, their character's theme, their character's goals, and their character's contacts, in addition to knowing their character's powers. The richer a character you give somoene, the easier a time they'll have getting into the action. If you can give out characters several days in advance, that's ideal.
-Rules should be simple. We settled on a card-based system, in which every player got 4-6 cards. These would include 2-3 combat cards of varying powers, maybe an equipment card, maybe a funky power card, and maybe 1-3 luck cards. Each card clearly described its effect and how to use it. (E.G. "Lucky Escape: Tear this card in half to immediately leave a combat." or "Dose of Painkillers: Tear this card in half to use the painkillers. You can now use combat cards that you would have lost as wounds, but you must store them separately. If you ever convert all your combat cards into wounds, you still fall unconscious as normal.")
-There should be a way to involve players who are having trouble. In one LARP we ran, there was an NPC demon who could try to corrupt PCs who looked bored; if corrupted, they got scary powers ("Ooze: you may at will turn into a shiny, slimy, mobile puddle. While in this form, only fire can hurt you, but you may not initiate combat. You may only move at a slow walk, but you may move under doors, through cracks, etc.") and were given evil quests to fulfill ("Pollute the town's drinking water", "Kill everyone at Joe's Tavern and corrupt the place.") In the other one we ran, certain psychic characters were under a group-mind influence that GMs could occasionally use to give them strange orders; we'd use that to have the psychics mess around with bored players.
-Have a means to pace events. If you're doing a one-shot, you need to make sure the story reaches some sort of resolution over the course of 4-6 hours of play. You can do this by having NPCs (again, make sure that they're either minor players or else are slated to be on the losing side); by uncovering clues; by granting visions to oracular characters; or by other means. Just make sure that you have some way to move things forward.

Running LARPs can be a blast, although the way we did it was a huge amount of work (we spent months preparing for it, and the two weeks beforehand we had no free time for anything else). Playing in LARPs can be fun, depending largely on the GMs and on the other players.

Daniel

 

[apoptosis]

Played lots of LARPS...all vampire. Played lots of tabletop...

very different type games though many who play one have done the other (mostly many LARPRS have played table top).

The big advantage of LARPs (talking vampire) are the relatively large number unknown people that you get to interact with who form the basis of the antagonism and allies that you have. You get to have more unrehearsed type stories, more angst and more connection to your character than in most table top games. LARPing (if done well) is all about scenes. Good larping has good scenes bad LARPing has bad scenes or none at all. Done well LARPing can be better than probably the best table top..........

Unfortunately the disadvantage of LARPing is the relatively large number of unknown people that you get to interact with. Cuz many of them are really quite poor players. In tabletop you can generally pick who you play with, in LARPs that is not the case. The vast majority of people in LARPS (talking about vampire again) are quite bad, actually retchingly bad, wanting to stick forks in your eyes bad. They either are bad powergamers (and in vampire LARPS powergaming can be even worse than in table top or atleast the choads that powergame so badly never play in my tabletop games) or they do nothing and are pretty much moving scenery (not to be confused with SCENES).

So the extremes in LARPing (from my perspective) are much wider than in tabletop (based on the people i play with) but the mean and median for LARPING is generally much much lower than in table top.

All IMHO.

Apop

 

[Desdichado]

I suspect that, in general, LARPing and table-topping appeal to different personalities. Therefore, we shouldn't be too surprised that there exist some degree of marginalization, or sneering at the other camp, as there's fundamental disagreement about what makes the games fun at some level.

Then again, quite a few people are plenty happy doing both or either, so make of that what you will.