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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8837128" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 126: October 1997part 2/5Perspectives - Tabletop vs LARP: One big area of roleplaying the RPGA has consistently underserved is LARPing, due to old TSR grudges against the medium. Stuff from White Wolf has also been neglected due to the strictness of their Code of Conduct. (and probably just general competitiveness as they rocketed to 2nd place in the roleplaying world so quickly) Those rules were one of the first things WotC looked at and decided was complete rubbish - it's time to embrace the future instead of fighting it. So here we have a big article from WW developers Rich Dansky, Nicky Rea & Jackie Cassada talking about the differences between LARP & tabletop. You have larger groups, events usually run a whole weekend rather than being crammed into 4 hour slots, because those costumes are a lot of expense and you want to properly wear them out. Carrying dice around to resolve conflict proves awkward, so conflict resolution uses other methods like rock paper scissors battles instead. Dungeoncrawling isn't too effective a playstyle, but modern day with hidden magic and SCA medieval stuff are pretty popular, along with murder mysteries, wild west, and other historical recreations. The big limitation is on overt powers like flying, teleportation or blowing up entire buildings, and on playing characters of the opposite gender, which unfortunately doesn't tend to get taken seriously however much people say they're staying in character. One would hope things have improved at least a little on that front in the intervening time, but I'm not overly optimistic, and of course LARPing has been hit harder by the pandemic than tabletop so there are fewer events in general to test that in. So this is a little basic, but it's an instance where it's excusable as they haven't covered this before and they have a lot of ground to make up. Another strong indicator that WotC is going to be making big changes around here, trying to open things up and work with former competitors, until they get bought out by Hasbro and become all about promoting their own products only all the time. Now it's all a matter of finding out who is willing to work with them, and how successful those collaborations will be. Prop Talk: Continuing straight on from the last article is obviously the health & safety talk about constructing props for your LARPs. You never EVER use real weapons, and unless you're playing completely indoors in a private venue, it's a good idea not to even use convincing replicas unless you want an unexpected police appearance ruining the evening. Instead, you may want to use foam, rough shapes covered in tinfoil, basic household implements with a label on them to say what they represent in game, or even just the cards on their own to represent equipment. (although you may wind up carrying more that way than encumbrance would realistically allow, but hey, that problem turns up in tabletop too.) Once again they're showing that there are a wide variety of LARPs, which solve this fundamental problem of the format in different ways. If you want to run one, you need to think about which one to use, as it'll save you a lot of trouble in the long term.</blockquote>

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