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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 325776" data-attributes="member: 259">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 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> 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</blockquote>

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