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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Heard" data-source="post: 978551" data-attributes="member: 7280">OK, my experiences with LARP:I began playing tabletop wargames, evolved into tabletop roleplaying games, quit gaming for a few years in the early 90s so that I could devote more time to girls than my gaming habits left me time for. Slowly, as I got back into more or less constant gaming I found myself playing with more and more people who were talking about LARPs being ran in the area. Since I'm an open-minded guy, knew every game store owner for a 100 miles in every direction, and noted that there were lots more women attending these LARPS than even my Cyberpunk game I went.Thankfully, most of the people in charge of the games were people I was more or less familiar with or had gamed with before. Some of the folks from the Rocky Horror Picture Shows that I'd been dragged to in high school featured prominently in the management, which was both good and bad. They were familiar with organizing venues, patrolling the fringes of the playing areas and dealing with concerned citizens, but they weren't the best gamers in my opinion to begin with. After a few sessions where I was a bit uninspired, but willing to be liberal where it concerned the presence of attractive young women gamers showing cleavage, I decided to try my hand at organizing the game issues. Alas, months past, and quality control over a game with 50-200 players and a dozen moderators and game masters proved to be more difficult than I thought. Since there was money to be made by charging fees for entry, the people in charge of the games were reluctant to allow people to kick out disruptive players. Even though the games were fairly mature in tone, for some reason they decided to let in every player who showed up to the door regardless of age. Occassionally, given that games were held on Saturday nights and had an excess of younger players, alchohol and drugs would enter the mix with little acknowledgement from the folks in charge even to recognize that they might be held responsible for the player's activities.Given all that, the games weren't bad on the weekends where the storylines and plots were in sync. After a while I stopped thinking of them very much as a game, but as a social occassion to meet gamers. Very few of the folks playing the LARPs would resist sitting down for a good sit down game, and they've proven excellent at them even years later since I still game with many of them. Eventually I gave up the WoD LARPS and began attending SCA events, which I quickly decided weren't in any way a LARP but more of a sport with a built in excuse to drink homebrewed beer in kilts while camping. Unfortunately, even having been invited and attended some sort (excuse me, I have no clue what game it actually was) of boffer LARP, after my experiences with the SCA I couldn't get into them at all. I'm sure I just didn't get it, the immediate thing that came to mind the moment I picked up my friend's weapon and watched everyone engaging in combat without any real sort of armor on I cringed.The best thing I've come away with from LARPing, beyond the many excellent players I've met through it, is the easy way my groups can stand up and seamless go through the motions of a scene if it suits them. I've ran very interesting "dinner party" scenes right up until the moment everyone knows to sit down and get out their 20-siders. Even the most gamist members of the group have long since been indoctrinated.I think the pacing and management of most LARPs are where they suffer most. The "freaky player" problem is no more so in LARPs than in sit down games, except that almost no LARPs I've attended have ever successfully stressed or communicated the sorts of things that sit down gamers do every time they accept a new player onto the table. I find it interesting that so many gamers are so against it based on so few experiences though. I've played Rifts on more than one occassion and hated it each and every time, but I realize that one good game master could change that viewpoint tomorrow. I think with time LARPing might develop into something really intensely interesting, as people start gathering the sorts of experiences that they can share with each other to help each other make better games. D&D has had a much similar evolution, with I doubt very many DMs out there making the same sorts of tragic mistakes running a game as I did back in the 80s. I wish there wasn't the animosity factor that clearly runs between the two sorts of gamers, because I think both would do well to learn a thing or two from the other.</blockquote>

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