Jeramy Jeramy Larp Larp

Content Warning Note: This article will mention sexual harassment and sexual assault.

The Missing and/or Broken Stair concept is prevalent in many communities, specifically larp communities.  For those unfamiliar, the Missing Stair is, generally speaking, a sexual abuser who is tolerated by a community.  Those within the community know how to avoid this person.  Those new to the community are often left to find out on their own about this individual, or specifically told to avoid them.  Before going further, I encourage you to read the following articles.  

The Origin of the Missing Stair Abuse, Your Local Larp, Missing Stairs and Broken Ones

I’d like to talk today about other types of stairs, and bits of architecture.

The Rickety Stair

This is effectively the same as the Missing Stair, except that their toxicity does not come in the form of sexual harassment or assault, rather they are toxic for a variety of other reasons that can be and often are, just as potentially damaging to the community and its members.  This includes racists, extreme sexists, and unrepentant internet trolls, among others.  Unlike the Missing Stair, their activities rarely dip into the realm of the explicitly illegal.   Also unlike Missing Stairs, the Rickety Stair is not always beyond repair.  Larping can be a culture shock.  I’ve seen people enter a community on the fringe of what was acceptable, and through simply being immersed in a culture they had not experienced, change their world view.  It is rare, but it does happen.  Larp communities are sometimes magic.  

The Stair Case in Another House

There is an upper limit at which humans are able to connect with one another.  Most of us have a small to mid-sized core group of friends, then a great deal of people we are friendly with.  We tend to form micro-communities within our communities.  For some communities there is enough cross pollination to prevent these micro-communities from becoming isolated.  But for others these micro-communities might as well be playing another game for all the connection they have to anyone outside of their micro-community.  In fact, the micro-communities in question often become either dismissive or outright hostile to outsiders.  But they tend to isolate themselves so completely you would never encounter this unless you attempted to bridge the gap.  

You may or may not be aware of the condition of their staircase.  You may be told that there is a missing stair over there, but then told that they just keep to themselves, so it isn’t a problem.  

It is a problem.  The existence of isolated unwelcoming micro-communities within a larp is a bug not a feature.  Larp is a collaborative effort.  Certainly groups will form.  People tend to like certain people more than other people after all.  But when they stop interacting, they perpetuate a system of exclusion and discourage inclusion.  Humans tend to learn best by example.  

The Creaky/Loose Floorboard

To be blunt, not every person in this world is great.  I have a theory of thirds.  One third of people are simply terrible.  There is no hope for them.  One third of people can potentially be terrible.  Generally due to a lack of perspective or apathy.  The last third of people are actively trying not to be terrible.  This is a rough completely non-scientific theory based purely on watching American Politics and personal bias.

There are people within our communities that we tend to avoid.  Not because they are physical or emotional danger, but because they are simply a drain on our personal resources.  They are often a drain on the game’s resources as well.  They can be cheaters, those who actively prevent others from enjoying the game by expressing their displeasure in a public space, or those who simply cannot be made to listen despite repeated attempts by multiple people.  You might prefer if they didn’t come to your game, but they also haven’t done anything to justify their removal.  

I don’t have an answer for the Creaky Floorboards of the world.  The amount of time needed to keep them in a state of constant repair is generally not worth the effort, and the condition of their creakiness can often be avoided/doesn’t appear every time you run an event.

However the Creaky Floorboard can develop into the loose floorboard if you are not careful (or even if you are).  The Loose Floorboard is someone who is such a massive drain that they become toxic for the community as a whole, and often become just as much of a problem as a Missing or Rickety Stair.  If someone is routinely making other people actively miserable just by being there, you are completely justified in removing them from you community.  Not everyone knows how to play nice.  

The Pristine Stair

This last one could perhaps be an article all on its own, but given how often I update this blog, I will delve into this concept now.

Most of us have been in toxic communities.  If you’ve campaign larped more than 5 years, you have almost certainly been in at least one.  Why did you stay?  What kept you going?  For me, I simply didn’t really think about all of the problems.  I ignored things I should not have ignored.  They didn’t effect me.  It was a different time, a different culture.  I was absolutely in the wrong...but I’m not here to tell you a rosy story of the past.  

We’ve come a long way since then, and most of the change has been for the better.  We don’t suffer things that we used to.  We recognize problems more easily, and if we are doing it right, we address those problems.  But not all larps operate this way.  There are a lot of Missing and Rickety Stairs that have been grandfathered in.  People who by all rights should not be allowed to be a member of a community, but whose tenure or connections within that community make them more or less immune to accountability.  

And yet, many of us still see all the positive pieces of these communities.  They shepherd new members, show them the ropes, tell them what Stairs to avoid.  These are the Pristine Stairs.  There is nobility in being the Pristine Stair in the otherwise missing staircase.  You are the lone outpost in wilderness, sheltering people, and trying to show them what you love about your larp.  But you are also sort of a problem.  

If you recognize all of the negative pieces of your community, realize that there is no reasonable expectation of change, and still continue, you are as responsible as anyone else for perpetuating the community...in fact you might be more responsible since you are actively trying to keep something alive which should by all rights simply be allowed to die.  Being an oasis doesn’t make the dessert not exist.  Being a Pristine Stair doesn’t justify the rest of the Missing Staircase.  

....

I believe in running a larp as an open operation.  Historically, the larp community at large has a habit of sweeping uncomfortable pieces of itself under the rug, or ignoring things that should be addressed immediately as opposed to when they have gotten so bad you have no choice but to address them.  However there are times when a degree of judicious secrecy is required.

When a larp community bans someone it is not in either the best interest of the organization, nor the interest of the person who was banned to state publicly the reason for said ban.  The only instance where the nature of the ban should be public is if you literally had to get the authorities involved in the matter, or if the thing that got someone banned was so public that to say nothing would be a disservice to everyone and is likely a matter of public safety.  Most of the reasons people get banned from larps happen behind closed doors, out of sight, and often outside of the strict confines of the larp itself.  We stay silent to protect all involved parties, and, to put it bluntly, because we might open ourselves up to legal action if we actively sought to burn someone’s life to the ground.  

[I should really put this disclaimer at the beginning of each post...my experience and focus in general is in Campaign Larps, and more specifically Campaign Larps in the Northeast.  Anything I say here is from that perspective and with that focus]

Running a larp costs money.  Playing a larp costs money.   Two of the main comment threads from my last blog post were, to put it succinctly and with all due respect to the commenters...

“Larps are too expensive”

“Larps are too cheap”

As both a larp runner, and someone who was once a broke ass college student...I completely understand both of these.  As I said in my very first blog post, larping locally, should cost a lot more than it does, but the market can’t bare the expense.  

As a larper and larp owner, there are a lot of hidden (and not so hidden) expenses on both sides of the equation.  From the larper side, while you might pay $45 for the weekend, the actual cost is closer $75-100 per event if you factor in gas, costuming, food, and the like.  From the runner side, I can tell you that unless someone buys any of the extras beyond the base admission, we are seeing perhaps as much as $2 of profit at the end of the day per person.   In most games, the few people who pay for extras subsidize the cost of all those who do not.  For larpers, a lot of people have to scrimp by just to make the baseline cost of the game...for those that play monthly, it is in all reality a monthly payment that is part of their budget.  It is like owning a second cell phone.  

So there is a call for larp to be cheaper.  I get that, and some larps do cost less than others.  I’m running a parlor larp next weekend where we are charging nothing, but the players still need to pay for the place we are using, and the other incidentals of attending.  I suspect that the average actual cost for a player is somewhere around $30.  There are some campaign games that run for $35 for the weekend, simply because their overhead and production budget is so low.  When you say you want cheaper solutions, they exist, they are out there and ready for you to play them.  There are often less frills than the more expensive games, but as they say, “you get what you pay for” (this is not a dig at the quality of cheaper games from a pure “did you enjoy this” end of things). I run a relatively high production value larp on a (mostly) monthly basis.  We have a sizable monthly props budget.  We provide food. Our camp accommodations are nice.  It is the sort of larp I want to run, and that comes at a price tag.  We keep the costs down as much as we can, but we run at a very tight margin, especially as business entity looking to make a profit (because artists should be paid for their art...this is not a discussion).

Some of the “Larps Should Cost More” commenters indicated feeling that the volunteer army that allows larps to run is little more than slave labor and that they should in all reality be paid in real world money.  When we started on this crazy journey, I agreed with that sentiment, I still agree with it in theory...but in practice it just doesn’t work.  As one of the business owners, let us say that we make a profit...we usually do. This profit varies wildly from event to event.  Sometimes we are barely breaking even, other times we might see $500...it is all based on a lot of mitigating factors.  If we are paying Staff Members directly out of this, we need to factor in a few things before we do...

First, Staff Members don’t pay for the game (at least at our game).  And yet, each Staff Member still consumes the resources that every other player at the game does.  This mean that each person who doesn’t pay costs us approximately $45 an event...because that is the cost of them being there split between camp costs, food, props, insurance, and other expenses.

Second, if you are going to pay people you have to be able to pay them consistently.  We swing between 60 and 90 people per event on average.  If we have a snow storm the day before an event and 35 people show up, we have to dip heavily into our coffers to cover the loss, even more so if we paid people.   Third, any amount of money we’d be able to give out would be merely a token.  I have been on Staff at a larp before, and worked for build, service points, free events, and self gain.  If the larp owner said he was going to suddenly give us all $50 a month for our work...I would laugh at him...and this was during a time when I could really have used that $50.  

Fourth, as soon as you bring money into the equation, you turn a volunteer position into a job, and if you are running legally you can’t just pay people under the table.  So the cost to pay people has a lot of other attached costs that again...a larp can’t really afford.  Certainly bigger larps can afford to pay some people, and if we ever break 100 players on the regular, it is something I would be willing to explore, but most larps live and die in the margins. I would be remiss if I were not to address the elephant in the room regarding volunteer positions.  Something that a few conventions, Magic the Gather Judges, and a few other groups within the sphere of gaming and nerdery ran into is that unpaid volunteers exist within questionable legal territory.  But the simple reality is, larps can’t exist otherwise.  Even if you paid Staff, the Marshals and others still fall under this questionable umbrella [For the sake of the reader, most local larps run under Owners > Staff > Marshals paradigm].  Volunteers are not, by and large, helping us wealthy yacht owning larp runner, prop up our fortunes to allow us to live extravagant life styles.  I have a day job.   There are exceptions.  I have been on Staff at a game where I probably should have been paid given the amount of work I did, and the financial reality of the larp itself.  Bigger larps should have a few paid employees, even if they are only part time employees.  But volunteers will always be a necessity for larps to function.  

[Note: If you, as a volunteer, feel like you are being unduly taken advantage of, you can and should leave.  I’ve seen games that run that way, it is terrible, and no one should stick around and be abused.  This is a real problem in our industry]

The fully professional, everyone gets paid, larp model simply does not work for campaign larps, and unless a lot of people can pay $100 event for a ticket it never will.  

But I digress...

Larps cost money on both sides of the equation.  Larpers have to respect that larp owners are generally charging far less than the actual value of the game in both money and man hours.  Larp owners have to respect that people are often spending what little they have to be part of the world they created.  

So yeah...larping costs money.

Around 8 years ago, I began telling people I thought that larping was about to break into the mainstream, and that we’d see a large influx of new people coming into the hobby.  While I think that larping is more well known, and there are more people playing now than there have ever been...the explosion I anticipated never came to pass, and what’s more, I am no longer certain it will. Oh, I certainly hope it will, but after 8 years, I have begun to grow skeptical.   Like many of us, when I started larping, I would avoid describing what I did...not so much out of embarrassment, but because it was a secret cool thing I did, and honestly I just didn’t want to have to explain it...I didn’t know how.  This has not been true for a very long time now, and I will talk larping at little to no provocation with complete strangers.  With the movie Role Models, and the publicity garnered by large scale larp productions, most people at least have a vague concept of what larping is.  It has gotten easier to sell people on this crazy thing we do...but they aren’t biting in the way I would have expected. As someone who is relatively connected to the greater larp community, especially in the New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania area, I am aware of a lot of projects coming down the pipe.  There are at least 6 organizations, that I know of, opening campaign larps within the area in the next year.  To put it bluntly, not all of them will survive.  The local market is saturated, and has been for a long time.  I could rattle off 20 larps that play within 2 hours of my home, most of them monthly or semi-monthly.  Unless one or more of these new games has cracked the code on drawing in new people into the hobby, only a few of them will likely survive beyond the first few events.  We are all drawing from the same pool of players, we aren’t bringing in enough new blood to sustain this kind of growth.   When I talked about the larp explosion, I was expecting to see regular games pull in 500+ people.  At the time I was playing a game that was seeing 200+ every event, during an era of far less visibility, so this didn’t feel like much of a stretch...and yet, it never happened.  Even the biggest larps in my area, Knight Realms and Dystopia Rising, don’t really see those kind of numbers (with the exception of national events).  What’s more, after some initial success, we’re seeing increasingly lukewarm responses to blockbuster larps in the US.  It has me wondering if we are merely a novelty for the wider world, one whose appeal is starting to wear off.

Part of my concern is the average age of a larper today.  When I started 15 or so years ago, I’d say the average larper (in my area) was around 19 years old.  Now I think the average age is somewhere closer to 30.  We’re not pulling in younger players in the numbers the local larp economy requires.  No one is ever more excited to be part of a new thing than they are when they are in their late teens and early twenties...but by and large these are not the people who are coming out to play our games.  Larping has aged along with me, and while I appreciate some of social advantages of that, I can’t help but worry about the long term sustainability of the hobby...or at the very least campaign larping.

One of the very first pieces of advertising we ever did was going out to a local comic con.  It was a small con, perhaps 500 people walked through that door all day.  We got face time with a few dozen.  Not a single person ever came out to play.  We had better success at later convention, but for that first convention we did everything right, had incredible contact, and none of that turned into someone showing up at an event.  Why?  There are a few likely causes.  1. Every group of people needs a catalyst, someone who pushes them to try something new...it is always easier to do nothing, even when you are excited to try something new.  I am that person sometimes.  I understand.  2. People who go to a comic con have already sort of decided what their time consuming hobby is.  I suspect this is part of the reason why there isn’t as much crossover with the cosplay community as one might think.  

Another piece of the greater puzzle may have to do with attrition.  Larps are notoriously awful at retaining new players, even good larps have a more than 50% attrition rate.  I remember one event a long time ago when more than 20 new players showed up one event for a larp I was attending, not a single one of them ever returned.  This was a game that was pulling an average of 80 people per event, and suddenly 20 people show up and not one of them was ever enticed to come out again by the experience.  So, it could be some of the numbers I was expecting did materialize, but never quite got more than a toe into the water before a larp piranha bit it off.   I live between 2 major metropolitan areas, Philadelphia and New York.  Between the two of them is the highest population density state in the country.  There are around 20 million people living in the area.  Of that 20 million, maybe 5000 (if I am being generous) are regular larpers.  This means that roughly .025 percent of people larp, or 1 out of every 4000 people.  That is...disheartening to me.   When larp infects a group of friends, the contagion spreads quickly, but does peter out eventually...after all, most of us only have so many connections.  I’ve seen this happen so many times.  This is the fundamental way our hobby grows.  Friends help you stay excited about the thing you just did, they keep you invested, keep you going back, provide you with support.  But we need to get better at spreading the infection, find those groups of people who have this unnamed desire to explore, meet cool people, and hit their friends with plumbing supplies.  Bridging this gap, and finding a way to make these initial connections is what we need to do in order to expand our hobby, and hopefully see the explosion I dreamed of all those years ago. 

I was born in 1980.  I’m 36.  As I write this, I’m a few days from my birthday.  I was born a few years too late to be considered Generation X, and a few too early to be a Millenial.  For a short period of time, we were referred to as Generation Y, but that never stuck.    I started larping in 2001.  According to my friend Josh, that was the mid period of Second Generation larping.  Things were exceptionally different back then, in ways that I have spoken of in previous entries.  But to bring everyone up to speed.  We didn’t have the social structures in place back then.  Things got swept under the rug, or ignored far easier than they do today.  The internet was still relatively young, and social media wasn’t even a term yet.  There were aspects of social responsibility that were not on my radar when I started.  I certainly always held the belief that people ought to be free to live as they want...but there were aspects of what that meant that I had yet to experience.   I grew up consuming a steady diet of 80′s cartoons, Cheers, Night Court and MTV.  I don’t think I knew what racism was until I was 12 or 13.  It just wasn’t something I was aware of.  Then again, I’m a white middle class guy, so it is easy to grow up blind to such things. I grew up on a larp culture that served as a sort of social crucible.  There are so many things that happened back then that would never fly today...and rightly so.  While I was able to find myself in that culture, there are many aspects of 2001 era larping that I would not and cannot defend in the slightest.   When we built our larp.  We were aware of all the things we wanted to change when it came to the rules, and our approach to storytelling...but 5-6 years ago, a lot of the social aspects of larping simply did not yet exist.  The language and standards were developing, but we didn’t build our game with those standards in mind.  They became a late edition to our enterprise, and ultimately a welcome one that has allowed our community to flourish.   The strangeness of all of this is, while I’ve been busy running a game, I never really got to PLAY a game while this transition was happening.  I’m still a child of an older era of larp culture.  I understand, support, and pursue social innovation...but I still have a foot in the old ways more by habit and upbringing than desire.  If I could do it over again, growing up in this larp generation I suspect would produce a much different me.   As a mid generation larper, I get frustrated at times with the use of social mechanics.  I’m glad to have the mechanics, and I endorse their use.  I just don’t think I’ll ever get 100% used to them.  Asking to consent for physical roleplay should be the standard, but I still have to flick a switch in my head every time I hear it...even if I am always glad to hear it.  It’s not normal to me.  I wish it was.  But I grew up in a different era, and while I have been slowly retraining my brain...change becomes more difficult as we get older.   On the other hand, I do think that social innovation goes a bit too far sometimes.  Even when I employ said innovations, I do so because I know that they are ultimately reasonable and correct on a logical level...but emotionally there are times that I just can’t quite get there.  Logic tends to win with me.   I see this divide a lot with larpers.  Those who grew up in games where it was reasonable to let serious, often illegal, things pass for months or years without them being addressed.  People who grew up in not just the wild west days of our hobby, but prior to our modern sense of social responsibility.  I can see from the viewpoint of those who sometimes feel as though we are being too sensitive...but I also see that we are better creating an environment where people can be safe, and the responsibilities that come with being a steward of that, and that while I might get frustrated in the moment, on the whole, we are better off.  

For me, the most infuriating thing about being a mid generation larper, is feeling like I really don’t understand the new language.  I can use the language, and comprehend it...but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to entirely think in the language, and understand it with the thoroughness that someone coming up today might.  I muddle through.  

These days, I feel like I don’t quite belong to either world.  Then again, I’m a dark and mysterious loner, so it is likely at least partly the result of some blown mental fuse.  I want to be part of what is to come, and I am working toward that every day...but I doubt I’ll never exactly connect to it in a way that is absolute.  I’m still a creature of 2001.   But I’m trying...

I’ve been reading horror stories lately about people being kicked out of larps for reasons that are...dubious at best.  This is not to say that there aren’t legitimate reasons to be suspended or even banned from a larp, only that illegitimate reasons seem far more common.   In almost 5 Years of running a monthly campaign game we have banned only one person.  They were banned for stealing.  The proof was incontrovertible, and backed up by so many trusted sources as to leave no doubt of the offense. Since then, there have been a number of people that I would have banned, had I the power...except...I do have the power.  I can ban people on a whim if I wanted to.  We could go from playing a sci-fi game to a fantasy game tomorrow if I really wanted to run my game into the ground.  I usually do not want to run my game into the ground. It is perhaps trite, but it is true...”with great power comes great responsibility”.   Within the community I run, I have the power to do anything I want.  The only limitations I have are those I impose upon myself.  To that end here are a list of some of the limits. - I don’t play my own game.  As I said in my last post, I feel like it is a conflict of interest.  If you want more about that, go read said post. - I listen to my Staff and grant them authority that supersedes my authority in certain areas.  For instance, I am probably not the person you want talking to someone having breakdown.  And you certainly don’t want me running the kitchen.  If I’m in the way, it is perfectly reasonable for my Staff to ask me to leave.   - I don’t deal with certain things at events.  First and foremost, don’t bother asking me a rules question.  I don’t know the rules to my own game.  I wrote them down so I don’t have to remember.  If you want to know where something is, don’t ask me, ask Jenn, she is the place I keep a great deal of my memory...also, she probably put the thing in the place where it ought to be.  If you need tape though, you should probably ask Kitt.   - I don’t kick out people, or hand out punishment of any sort without cause that extends beyond my own petty desires, or for reasons that don’t involve the safety of the community. As the final one is the true subject of today’s post...let me explain in greater detail.

There have been a number of times that I would have liked to suspend or outright ban someone from our game.  In only one of these cases, I may have acted, but that person self selected them out of the community, so I was absolved of that responsibility.   Here are some examples of times when I might have acted, or perhaps wanted to act. Speaking to that person I might have kicked out.  They were toxic.  They made half the community miserable.  They were a stickler for the rules except when it came to their own use of them.  They ruined or brought down at least one mod per weekend.  For an entire year, 80% of the trouble I dealt with came directly from them.  My last straw came when they yelled at my partner of a matter that was entirely their fault.  I suspect that if they came to another game after that incident, I would have had a serious discussion with my Staff over their removal. There was someone who played one event.  They came to the event sick, wearing a cool but entirely impractical for combat larping costume.  They were miserable the entire time.  Their car broke down on the way home.  They complained that no one took the time to explain to them what was going on, or came to help them when his car broke down...both of which were verifiably untrue.  A few days after the event they publicly posted a long diatribe about how we might fix the game.  It contained several diagrams.  They never came to another game.  Though they did attempt to put together a revenge larp.  I never discussed banning them, but would have loved to...they were just the worst.   I had a falling out with a friend.  I felt betrayed on a fundamental level.  They were a regular player.  I never considered banning or suspending them...but I would have preferred to not see them for a few months.   We have several players whose worldview is not entirely inline with our community at large.  I don’t know what anyone expects me to do about that.  There have been times when action of some sort has been required, and has been done quietly behind the scenes, but I can’t control for worldview.  If someone brings that to an event, I can act...but I can’t control what people do online, and as long as that doesn’t effect what happens at events, doing anything is an incredibly slippery slope. There is a person, they came to a few events.  They don’t really understand larping.  You know the sort.  I’d prefer if they never came back.  But aside from rumors, I have no cause to ban or suspend them.   There is someone I loathe.  They’ve never done anything particularly wrong at our game.  I have just have a long and sustained loathing of them, and would prefer if they stopped existing altogether.  Not liking someone on a fundamental and almost primal level does not mean that I should ban them. In all of these cases I had the power to act.  I had the power to completely remove this person from the community, or at the very least the game.  But there are repercussions to every action.  I suspect that I would have been broadly supported in a few cases, had I decided to act.  I suspect that I would no longer have a game, if I had acted in other cases.   I don’t live in a void.  Just because I am in control doesn’t mean I’m immune to consequences.  Sometimes these are simply moral consequences that I have to deal with on my own.  I am the final judge, not just on the decision to act, but more often than not, on the rightness of inaction.  I can certainly ban someone because I think that they will cause problems...but I don’t.  I have to wait for that moment to come before I can act (I should like to say for the record that this would not apply in the most extreme cases)... But...more often than not, the problem takes care of itself.  I have an awesome community, and we don’t tend to suffer the sort of people who are truly toxic at events.  Those sorts tend to self select out of the community.   Just because I want to do a thing, doesn’t mean I ought to do a thing.  Out of game bullshit is usually not a good enough reason to ban someone.  My personal feelings are never a good enough reason on their own to ban someone.  Unsubstantiated drama is certainly not a good enough reason to ban someone.  Friends asking you to do it for them independent of anything else, is not a good enough reason to ban someone. When it comes down to it, if you own the experience, you are the arbiter, and your power “not to” should be wielded far more often than your power “to”.  

Until recently this is a subject I never would have tackled.  I was 100% against people playing the game that they run, and that was the end of the discussion for me.  But like so many other matters, over time I have softened on the topic.  Not enough that I’d really consider doing the same at my own campaign larp, just enough to provide what I hope will be a reasoned discussion on the topic.

Con: Abuse

If you run a larp you have a position of power.  If you read my last post I inferred that you might have some minor degree of divinity.  In most games, the owners have absolute authority because they have ultimate say in whether the game happens or not.  This translates to being able to play a Character that doesn’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else.   You want to play a merchant Character?  You can start the game with all of the money, you control the supply after all.   You want to play a fighter?  Put a lot of imaginary numbers on your card, or just swing what you want, no one can really stop you. Want to play something that isn’t even in the Rulebook?  Sure, you hate whenever anyone else does it, but you run the show, you can be the most special snowflake.   Most abuse is not blatant, most owners realize there is a cost to be paid for breaking their own rules.  I’ve seen games that have folded in part because the owners were, by all appearances, running the game for the benefit of their characters.  Still, even subtle abuse is a problem.  It is just too easy to break the small rules you can get away with when you have a position of authority.  And even if you are 100% on the up and up, the perception of possible abuse will always be on the minds of people like me who can’t help but look for every fault and crack in a foundation.  

Pro: Connection

This is probably the reason I’m writing this.  It is my reason for lightening my position on the subject.  

I am disconnected from the game I play, because I don’t play my game.  There is a common joke that goes “I wrote the Rules so I don’t have to remember them” when it comes to asking me a Rules question at an Event.  But it’s true, I don’t play my game, so I don’t really know the Rules of my game.  I’m not out there reinforcing the Rules for myself.  I know the spirit of the Rules...usually... but I really lack for practical knowledge.  

I also sort of lose track of how the player feel about things, since I’m not one of them.  With my game Doomsday, it would be impossible for me to really get involved at that level since I am about 90% aware of everything that is happening plot-wise.  The mystery is gone.  

I have to play other games to really understand what’s gone wrong in my own game.  Perspective is important, and you while you can see everything in panorama from a lofty perch, you miss out on the fine details that matter.  

Con: You Never Stop Being the Owner

There is never a time when you are not the owner of the game you run...unless you literally turn over ownership to someone else.  As the owner you have a certain gravitas.  People will be friends with you who would not otherwise care about you simply because you are the owner of the game, and the director of a not insignificant portion of their social life.  

People treat you differently because you are the owner.  This doesn’t stop when you get a Character Card and put on a costume.  You are always seen as an authority figure and things will be made easier for you in game because of it.  You will benefit from people who want to court your favor.  Your game experience will never be the same as a normal player because you are not a normal player.  

Pro: You Never Stop Being the Owner

You know what i can’t do?  Go to any larp and not be overly critical.  I can’t help but see the flaws.  Even great games are never going to be the same for me after running my own game for the past 5 years.   I’ll still be pulled out of the moment because one small piece of gristle is stuck in my brain teeth.  Maybe this is just me though...this could be one of my rare personality flaws.   Every owner needs a break, needs to unwind and not be 100% in charge all the time.  It doesn’t matter if you consider this as a job or a hobby (it’s a job), you need a break from the demands running a game puts on your.  Playing your own game can provide you with that respite.  It can also (I’m speculating here because I don’t) allow you to get a grasp on things you simply couldn’t otherwise.  Come down to Earth space man!

Con: You Are the God of this World

If you are the owner of a game, there is no mystery for you unless you have distanced yourself completely from plot.  But as plot is pretty much the game, if you aren’t paying attention there, you aren’t really running the game anymore.  You might be running the community, which is arguably more important, but you aren’t running the game.  

The problem is, your player base is unlikely to know that.  You might tell them that you are just a player this weekend, but it is unlikely that they will really believe that deep down in their core.  Yes Zeus, of course you are simply a swan, nothing strange is going on here.

The thing is, at any time, at any moment, you can reclaim your godhood and find out exactly what is going on behind the curtain.  And if you play your game, you probably will do this from time to time.  Find that the mortals are not enjoying themselves to your satisfaction, go behind the curtain and release the kraken (provided you have a pre-built kraken, or a player base with a big imagination and a few NPCs willing to stand real close together waving pool noodles for a few hours).  

You can simply deny the existence of something that has displeased you and poof, it is gone.  It is a power that no one else possesses.  And it means that while you can play your game, you can never exactly be a player...mighty Zeus. 

Con:Clusion

Yeah, I’m still mostly against the practice of playing one’s own game.  I understand it, and even sympathize with it...boy can I sympathize with it.  But the reality is that there is an inherent conflict of interest.  Owners and Players are different species, and while they might go steady, they’re unlikely to produce a viable offspring (I apologize for that terrible metaphor).  

[Disclaimer: I am a campaign larper first and foremost, and my statements here primarily apply to that type of larping.]

I grew up in the Catholic Church.  I went to Catholic Schools for much of my education.  I even contemplated the priesthood.  After I began to question a lot of the fundamental ideas of the religion, the idea of being a “heretic” priest remained appealing to me.  It still does.  And, as I write this and think back, it is possible that I’ve been wandering in that direction my entire life. In the strictest terms, I stopped being a Catholic after I left home, probably before then, but that was certainly the breaking point.  I continued to attend church with my family on Christmas and Easter, but that was more out of tradition than devotion.  I spent most of mass trying to get my brother and sister to laugh.   I don’t know where exactly I fall right now when it comes to religion.  I’ve had experiences in my life that have been religious in nature, and have lead me to accept that there is something else out there.  I’ve studied a fair amount, and was one or two classes away from my Bachelors in the subject.  If I were to stick a pin on the religious map, my country is probably somewhere between Taoism and Gnosticism.   I say all of this to lay the foundation of where I am coming from when I say the following...Larps are Religions.

Let Me Explain

The parallels are obvious.  I suspect that you began making the connections already, but for the sake of thoroughness, and because if I don’t there isn’t much of an article, I’ll go into detail. Fundamentally larps are communities before they are games.  The game opens the door, the community is the reason why people stay.  Larp runners don’t tend to go into this thinking that way, after all they set out to develop a game, not a community.  The community is a side effect. More modern games (or 4th Generation Larps, as a friend referred to them) build themselves knowing that the community is the primary point of focus.  Prior to that I suspect we were mostly casting about in the dark, hoping that our content and rules would court strangers and convince them to come out and try this crazy thing we do.  Aside from a few social rules, I never built my larp with that stuff in mind. As a community, we gather regularly, for a purpose, with a lot of ritual and rules attached to it, our leaders have influence over the community, and set the agenda, and provide us with a wacky mythology we all consent to accept.  The community provides a social outlet for likeminded individuals.  We accept donations.  We manage a volunteers.  We have traditions of greeting and parting.   We are straight up a religion in everything but name and aim.

Devotion

Only in politics have I seen more blind devotion in the face of all reason.  And perhaps politics is also close to a religion, though I’d argue that our regularity puts us a bit closer to religion than politics.  The regular “practice” of politics happens but once every few years, when we cast our ballots, and that practice is not communal, nor, by its very nature, are we united by ideology.   In my younger days, larping was what I did, and defined who I was...moreso than it does now that I run a larp.  For 3 Years I attended a monthly game without missing an Event, and the only reason that streak was broken was because my car died on the way to an Event.  I put going to the game above and before anything else.  It got in the way of things I wanted to do professionally at the time.  It got in the way of the fragments of personal life that existed outside of the larp community.  Letting larp get in the way of life is not uncommon, I’ve seen people more or less give up and become larpers, because once upon a time I was that person.  Larp, for good or ill, almost always came first.   I was never as devoted to religion as I was to larping.   Only when I excommunicated myself did I get a chance to step back and put my life in order.  Devotion can be a scary thing.

Faithless

While I’ve been writing this, I’ve been thinking of ways that larp is not religion, to offer a counterpoint.  Because, this whole concept is rather bombastic.  Of course larps aren’t religions.  Religions have hundreds or thousands of years of tradition to fall back on.  They have history and gravitas, and...are tax exempt.   Except, that’s not universal.  We have religions that spring up all the time.  Often these are a reinterpretation of older religions, but their application is new, or at least new for our time.  Often we refer to these groups as cults, but I think the only thing separating a cult from a religion is public legitimacy and level of devotion.  One may well refer to any religion as a cult.   Perhaps then, if we are looking for differences, we might take apart my notion that both share mythology (that is to say, both larps and religions have mythology, not that they have the same mythology).  Certainly no one believes that the things I write are literally true.  You would have a hard time convincing a judge to let you swear a testimony on my rulebook (though, if you ever do, I believe that will be the closest I’ve ever come to winning at life).  But I think this is matter of degrees and perspectives.  Growing up Catholic for me was far more about tradition than faith.  There was never a time when I believed in a literalist view of the Bible.  The Ten Commandments was for me, just a really entertaining film.  And I know this is true of many of those I grew up with.  I’d even argue that it was at least partly true of my parents.  Still, I cannot deny that this is the only major point which I can find where the parallel breaks down.  While those who take the Bible as true Gospel are easy to find, only rules lawyers take a literalist view of our rulebook.  

What’s The Point?

If you are looking for reason, you might try opening  a holy book, because you’re not likely to find it here. This all started when someone pointed out that I had written “banned from the community” rather than “banned from the game” in a recent post.  My response was simply that “larps are religions, so you are not incorrect”.  Even before that this post was brewing in the back of my mind.  It simply took someone to prime the pump.   Many of us are without a path to follow.  We are looking for somewhere to belong.  We are looking for meaning in a world that often seems meaningless.  We are just looking for a place to put our time.  We are looking for value.  Both religion and larp can provide these things, or at least provide illusions of these things.  

 I’m presenting the following as an open blog post rather than as something presented exclusively to the Doomsday Community.  Firstly, the format of a blog is more appropriate for a topic of this nature.  Secondly, this may offer an informative glimpse of the inner workings of a campaign larp.  If this is of value to you, I invite you to continue reading.  That said, this is written primarily with Doomsday Community in mind, so there may be terms and ideas that simply don’t make sense if you’ve never been out to one of our events.   You have been warned.  

Enjoy.

The Inception of the 5 Year Plan

There were many principles that served as the foundation of Doomsday.  One of the big ones was to write 5 Years of plot before we began Event 1.  This patently insane goal never happened.  I barely had Event 1 written in time for Event 1.  With so much else in need of doing, actually sitting down to write out 5 years of plot, in detail, was not going to happen.

What I had instead was an outline.  I knew where the story began, and I knew the possible outcomes.  I knew there would be a major crossroads moment toward the middle of the campaign that would put everyone on a semi-fixed path toward End Game.  This was necessary, as each path required a fair amount of planning and prop building that were mutually exclusive.

As of this writing, I’ve been co-running Doomsday for a little more than 4.5 years.  There are many things I’ve learned and unlearned in that time.  While the bones of the beast have remained intact, no one looking at my original outline would think it truly representative of the game I have presented.  No plan survives first contact with the enemy.  

If I may digress for a moment.  I think that people have all their best and worst ideas when they are in their teens and twenties.  At that age, you don’t really know the difference between the two, but you have all the energy of creation, so you explode with half formed concepts, most of which ought never see the light of day.  The rest of your creative life is spent parsing through all the ideas of youth, with the wisdom of age, and deciding which ideas are worthwhile.   I created Doomsday with the enthusiasm of youth.  I like to believe that I now run Doomsday with the wisdom of age.   The 5 Year Plan has held me to a standard, it has put me on a course.  In the early days when the long term viability of the organization was in doubt, there was never a time when I faltered in my goal to provide 5 years of story.  It is likely that the very concept of the 5 Year Plan kept Doomsday together.

Why the 5 Year Plan?

My first larp and first larp home was a fantasy game.  By and large it was a good fantasy game.  But from very early on I was bothered by something I saw as problematic with the structure of the game.  No matter what we did as our Characters, at the end of the day, everything had to reset back to zero.  You couldn’t blow up the town because the town needed to exist for the next event to happen.  You also couldn’t effect the gameworld, because what was written was written, and could not be altered.  When I made attempts to effect the gameworld, or provide far reaching consequences when I was running plot, my efforts were always stymied.  That was simply not the game they were running.  But it was the game I wanted to play.  In lieu of anyone offering quite the game I wanted to play, I decided to create my own.  

After a fashion, all campaign larps are revenge larps (perhaps I’ll do a post about the concept of revenge larps at another time).  We want to put right all the wrongs we’ve seen at other games, be they social or structural.  

For Doomsday, giving players control over the gameworld is a fundamental part of our design.  Few things were entirely out of reach for those with the will to overcome obstacles.  We’ve had players become world leaders, sacrifice themselves permanently to save entire civilizations, create a massive tsunami from the unintended displacement of vast quantities of water, claim dictatorial power by popular assent, become the hero of a doomed people only to die a villain...and so much more. it has been both infuriating and delightful to see the community overturn my ideas, or come up with angles I had never considered.  Ours is a hobby of improvisation, and in improv the foundational principle is “yes, and...”.  To take the reality that someone else has crafted, accept it as cannon, and add to it.  Now, it is not always possible as a game runner to “yes, and...” every crazy idea...so there is the added principle of “no, but...” that I’ve learned to fall back on.  If something doesn’t work, give them a hint as to why, and perhaps offer a direction they might go in that does not entirely undo everything you have worked toward.  

The 5 Year Plan was designed to provide a framework for all of this, and it has worked and failed with equal measure, and we’ve patched the holes and kept the ship afloat.  Now the ship is pulling into shore.

What Happens After?

A few months ago I made a non-blog post that caused a fair amount of concern among the community.  I used far fewer words than I needed to fully explain what I had in mind.  This lead to some believing that Doomsday after the 5 Year Plan would be an entirely different game.  The primary purpose for this post is to allay some, but not all, of those concerns.  

The game can’t continue to run as it has.  I vastly underestimated the task I had before me when I turned the ignition half a decade ago.  Responsibility for Rules, Gameworld Lore, Marketing, Plot, and Community Organization, all fell directly onto my shoulders.  Over the years I have divested myself of many responsibilities, owing much to the assistance of our incredible Staff and Marshals.  But it has not been quite enough, and I’ve gotten burnt out on the Plot side of things.  I don’t think it shows that often, but I’ve been burnt out on Plot for a while now.  If I were to continue on as I have in the past after the 5 year plan the quality of the game would suffer for it.   The core philosophy regarding Plot after the 5 Year Plan is to have Plot Teams handle 3-6 Event Arcs.  They would be responsible for the overarching Plot for the duration.  After that, it would switch to a new team.  For the period directly following the end of the 5 Year Plan, Senior Staff will serve as the transition team, and will be handling the first next Arc (Summer to Winter 2017-2018). Regarding said plot, we’ll be jumping ahead 10 years in the gameworld to allow for the passage of time following the May/June finale.  There will be one event in between that will take place 5 years after the finale, and serve as a bridge.  The necessity of this time jump was always part of the 5 Year Plan, as the finale would set things up for what was to come, with the intervening years to allow for certain necessary changes to happen in the gameworld (and to account for how the game might continue after certain possible very explody endings).  

The larger point of concern of life after the Five Year Plan regarded an offhand comment I made saying that it was possible that the Rules might change to reflect a less combat oriented game, and moreover that combat itself might become a rarity.  This is not exactly what I meant.   Doomsday will absolutely change.  Were I to do it over again, Doomsday would not even remotely resemble the game it does today, at least not from the Rules side of things.  But to take what I’ve learned, and use all of that on Doomsday, would make this a fundamentally different game than the one I set out to make 8 years ago.  While I think that it would likely be a better game, and there ideas that will absolutely be implemented, making those changes would be unfair to our community, and I just don’t think they would work.  We all have preconceived notions of what Doomsday is and what campaign boffer larping in America is...these notions are not easy to dismiss.  Moreover, I’m not certain I’m the right person to build that game...I’m a bit too much of the older generation.   For boffer larps, our rules tend to focus on fighting, because that is the thing which most needs simulating.  However that focus also leads to people believing that fighting is the focus of the game, that the primary thing most players are doing is fighting NPCs or each other.  I want to shift that focus.  I’m not going to massively change how the Classes or Skills operate (though I may do a bit of streamlining)...but I am going to add in Skills that allow for more manipulation of the gameworld. In the past I’ve avoided most Social Skills, a Skill like “Charm” takes away a player’s agency, and forces them to roleplay in a way that rarely makes any sense...and all too often leads to questionable situations.  The next edition of the Rulebook will not be adding such Skills, but may offer other Skills that provide a similar impact while keeping player agency intact.   Say you are playing a Space Army Captain, and you’ve long been at odds with a certain Consul.  You’ve managed to discover that the Consul desires the removal of some hazardous wildlife from his homestead.  So you use a Skill, and send in some of the troops under your command to clear out the wildlife.  The Consul finds out what you have done, and may well treat you with a bit more deference...but that is up to the player.  That players is not forced by rules to treat you like their best friend for the duration of a Skill, but they might feel obligated to help you in the future because your Skill effected their life.   Will there be missions that send people out to fight each Period?  Almost certainly.  Will there be a few events a year where the focus for the Period is on the social side of things with little to no Combat?  Absolutely.  But that is hardly a change from the way we do things now.  During any given Event we usually have one shift where the focus is on non-combat or minimal combat encounters.  We’ve just never really been loud about it.  The shift has been happening quietly for years.   To sum up, combat will continue to be a major aspect of the Doomsday experience after the 5 Year Plan, it just won’t be our primary focus after the 5 Year Plan.  What we are seeking to create is a more well rounded play environment.   

Coming Through the Airlock

If you would, please indulge me a bit of future-spinning.  Here is the post 5-Year Plan vision of what a new player (or new Character) might experience coming into their first Doomsday event.

You’ve been wanting to play for a while, but heard about this crazy 5 Year Plan thing and wanted to wait until after to get your start.  You check out the website, and find that Terran Field Medic appeals to you.  Before you click on the link to submit your Character, you notice a link for “Needed Character Archetypes” (name needs work).  You click.  Here you find a list of Character Archetypes that have ready made connections to the gameworld, and existing characters.  Choosing one of these Archetypes will allow you to come into game with a purpose, an actual reason for visiting the Capital.  But you still want to play a Terran Field Medic.  You find a few Archetypes that require a “healer type” that might fit, and one of them requires a Terran.  However, there is one Archetype that really peaks your interest; Personal Physician and Aide to Consul K’orreb of the M’kai Consortium.  This role would require you to play a M’kai (purple aliens) or a Cryo (if Mr. Freeze were an alien species)...you check out these Species, and think it might be cool to play a Cryo.  You click on the Archetype, and submit your Cryo Medic.

Arrive at your first Event, you pick up your Character Card and Starting Items.  After Opening Ceremonies you are brought to the Airlock.  You start the game as an emigre, arriving at the Capital via a shuttle.  You are met at the airlock by Station Security, given a cursory search for contraband, then you are brought to a table for an interview with a fellow PC playing the role of an administrator.  They ask you a few short questions as to the nature of your visit, determine where you belong, get you a temporary ID badge, and take you on a brief tour of the Station. 

During your tour you meet Consul K’orreb.  She’s long been expecting your arrival from the Pleasure Dome.  At the moment she is on her way to a meeting with her fellow politicians, but she gives you her contact number, and bids you to contact her when you are done with tour...you have much to discuss. 

Your tour ends in Medical.  There you meet with the Medical Staff.  They’re already hard at work, trying to resolve the mystery of the Beloovean Flu.  The Team Lead fills you in on the progress and asks you and a few others to procure blood samples from the infected in Gray Sector.  

On your way to Gray Sector, a hatch gives way, and a swarm of humanoid insects come pouring out.  Security arrives moments later and opens fire.  The battle is fast a furious, and by the end of it you find yourself tending to the wounded with your fellow Medics...you’ve only been here an hour.

This is my vision for the future of Doomsday.  This is the world I am going to create.  At times I’m going to try some weird and experimental stuff, and it isn’t always going to work, but as an artist, I want to create art.  I want to innovate rather than iterate.  And I hope you’ll join me.  

Society has changed a lot in the past 20 years.  We have grown more aware and accepting of other cultures and lifestyles...for the most part.  Technology has advanced at a frightening pace.  If you brought an iPhone to 1995, it would look like magic...now it is part of the everyday.  

I was born in 1980.  I lived a significant portion of my life without internet.  My first real connected experience was via X-Band, the archaic modem for the Super Nintendo.  Most of the people that play my campaign larp, Doomsday, don’t have strong memories of a world without the internet.  Indeed, there people who can now legally drink in the USA, who have never existed in a world without.

We live through innovations, and while they might impress us, we don’t have an outside view on what those innovations mean.  We don’t actively realize how game changing they are.  We are too inside.  And yet, we can recognize that innovation leads to certain technologies becoming obsolete.  

Our cultural viewpoint is much the same.  Culture changes and evolves.  There are things that I might have said, or jokes that I would have laughed at 10 years ago, that I would balk at today.  There were also things I put up with, turned a blind eye to, that I was wrong to ignore.   Larp has changed.  We are more aware, more socially conscious.  We write games differently, and most are not written in a vacuum.  We write rules, and create communities that seek to correct the problems we’ve seen at other larps. 

Now, I’m going to take a brief aside here and say that I am primarily talking about campaign larps.  It is what I am both primarily involved with, and primarily interested in.  This is not a knock against other types of larping, but this is where my experience lies, and where I can speak from some degree of authority.  

Unlike other technologies (using that term real loosely here), when larps innovate, the obsolete technology remains intact.  Most dinosaur larps (dinosaur in regard to age, not in regard to actually having dinosaurs) persist, despite innovative alternatives.  

As with any innovation, there are those who do not want to adapt, who think that what they have is perfectly fine, or perhaps even superior to alternatives.  I myself have a particularly robust collection of vinyl records, and if prompted, will go on at length as to why vinyl is a superior format for sound.  And I suppose that for people who are not seeking innovation, dinosaur larps are perfectly fine to keep lumbering along.  

However, as I said, this innovation has more to do with just rules, and modes of play...it has a lot to do with the social side of things.  For most dinosaur larps I have been to, the majority of players have evolved, and like me, I suspect many of them might have said shitty things 10 years ago that they would never say today.  They’ve been exposed to the queer community, and polyamory, and cultural sensitivity...all of which existed 10 years ago, but was not in the public consciousness 10 years ago, at least not as they are today.   And yet the core of the game has not changed.  One of the oddities of larping is that a lot of games have been created by extremely socially conservative people.  And while their game might change in some ways to serve the time, they have not.  The core of many games is still run by an old boys club mentality that is almost impossible to dismiss.  By choosing to support these institutions we are allowing the dinosaur mentality to persist, to infect our culture by association, and keep us tied to obsolete technology.  

Most dinosaurs attempt to adapt.  They patch rules, but the patches always keep the power dynamic of the game relatively intact, and they tend to add complications that make the game more inaccessible.  When I went back to my first larp a few years ago, I found that I had no idea how to play the game I grew up in due to the changes they made to patch but not fix the underlying problems.   More troubling is the inability to adapt to social changes, and to really address the fact that “be excellent to each other”, ought to be the law of the land.  Yes, there are concessions.  Most games have gotten away from using Gypsies, or have rebranded to be less offensive (yes, Gypsy is generally considered to be a racial slur, no, this is not a universal viewpoint, but do we really want to get into the middle of that?  It doesn’t matter if you don’t see it that way, some people do, and it is better to change than to continue being seen as a racist shit head). Most games recognize the principles of “be excellent to each other”...but these games came to that after realizing they couldn’t get away with saying anything else.  This is not to say they were actively being awful before, they just didn’t care about the social side of what they were doing.  They were created during a time when few people cared about that side of things.  Now larps are created with the social side of things in mind.  They are built from the ground up around the concept of “be excellent to each other”.  Even if it is not directly reflected in the rules, the social character of the game is entirely different.   Now in saying all of this, you might think I’m putting my larp above all of this, but the reality is, we were built on the cusp of old and new generations.  Were I to do it over, the game would hardly resemble what it does today, simply because I’ve learned and grown, and now understand things all too clearly that were simply not on my radar when we began.  I wouldn’t call us a dinosaur game exactly, but we were perhaps built during the paleolithic period...almost 5 ancient years ago.  We live in a time of rapid innovation. So, what am I saying in all of this? It is all too easy to bury our heads in the sand.  There are games I cannot morally justify playing because I know that the institution has hurt people I care about, and for reasons that are beyond justification, reasons that are often about who a person is, and not what they’ve done.  I buried my head in the sand for a long time when I was a player.  I simply didn’t care to think that the institution I supported was at odds with my moral character, and with my sense of justice.  We become addicted to our institutions.  We all love things that are difficult to justify.  It is all too easy to ignore the problems, just so you have a home to go back to.  Believe me, I know the feeling.  Despite knowing that I can never go back, part of me still longs to...then I remind myself that I’m trying to do better, and I sincerely care about what larping can become.  

We don’t need a gray brick cellphone from the 80′s in order to operate an iPhone.  We don’t need aging institutions to remind us of what we’ve done to move beyond them.  We have those memories, we’ve learned the lessons.   Maybe it is time for your larp to die.

I was going to stay away from the topic of larp rules for a bit, but after this past weekend at the excellent weird west larp, Dead Legends...I was struck by a number of thoughts regarding larp rules...BEGIN THE NUMBERED LIST!!!

1. What are you trying to do?

This is something I covered at least in part in another post, but is bares reiterating and expanding upon as a conversation starter.  Rules Matter because they allow you to shape your world, they show the boundaries, give people an understanding of what they are in for, and hopefully act as a source of inspiration.  

Different worlds require different sets of rules.  While I pride myself on having written a good campaign larp rules system for Doomsday, I recognize that this system is not universal...it wouldn’t serve for every game.  Even the fundamental underpinnings of the system (aside from perhaps at a conceptual level) would not carry over to a game like Dead Legends, nor should it.  They set out to build a sort of weird west survival horror game, I was building a science fiction game...our goals were different...and thus our rules by their very nature out to be different.

2. Social Rules

Something that simply was not in place when I was younger, were social rules for Larping.  The culture has changed a lot, and mostly for the better, and many modern larps have embraced the active culture of consent.  They’ve provided safer spaces for people to express themselves without fear of persecution...not just that, but many larps actively work to help foster an environment where everyone is welcome.  

It really doesn’t take much to say, “be excellent to each other”...but I’ve been to so many places where that ideal just isn’t in effect.  For good or for ill, there are a fair amount of dinosaur larps out there that probably need to die...but that is a topic for another day.

One of the things that has started to happen among more progressive games is finding ways to integrate out of game rules into the game world.  I remember someone asking me some innocuous question about male/female disparity.  As I’m running a sci-fi game, my answer to them was, “oh, I just assume that humanity resolved that issue a thousand years ago.”  We play around with gender role concepts in regard to aliens, but for humans, that is simply not an issue.  

We recently introduced the idea of “Phase Out” into Doomsday as a replacement for a “Cut” mechanic.  Cut, allowed you to remove yourself from a scene, but it was an out of game mechanic that could make someone feel as though they were doing something wrong, putting their hands up in surrender and defeat, and perhaps ruining the scene.  The nature of the mechanic might cause someone to hesitate using it.  We introduced “Phase Out” as an IG mechanic...your character is literally phasing out of existence and appearing somewhere else...you can even phase back in if you so desire.  This transformed a jarring out of game mechanic that took away power from the player, into a skill that allowed a player to take control of their destiny.  

3. Social Rules Part 2

If nothing else, social Rules are perhaps the most important aspect of any rules system.  You can have a game without much in the way of mechanical rules.  Indeed, I think you can have a game with only one mechanical rule...but you need a fair amount of rules regarding the social aspects of your game.

You need to let people know what they will and will not expect to see at your game.  You need to lay the groundwork for social interaction, and explain what is and is not acceptable.  Not everyone intrinsically know what it means to be a good community member, or be a decent person.  Larping is a strange social beast, where the majority of players are some form of introvert.  Many new larpers are socially awkward already, and coming into a new world, they can be expected to make mistakes even if you have the rules clearly laid out...but to not have those rules at all makes you morally culpable for a share of their mistakes.   Now, a good social rules system doesn’t let you off the bat.  As with all rules systems, they must be enforced in order to matter.  Often that enforcement is far simpler than you might imagine...sometimes people just forget they aren’t shit heads.  

4. Don’t Make Gods Unless Your Game is About Gods

A long long time ago I spent about 6 months as the main character of a larp.  I wasn’t THE main character, but I was one of perhaps a half dozen of main characters.  These were the players who resolved every plot, and stood at the center of ever piece of information.  

As a character, there was no good reason for me to be at the center of plot...other than the fact that I was a sorcerer, and there were only two sorcerers in town.  The other one was my teacher.  Together we responsible for some key piece of plot almost every event.  Usually because we were the only two people in a game of over 100 that could turn the key.  If we opted out, plot simply wouldn’t happen.  

Now, this was almost as much a failing of plot as it was of rules, but when you put a set of game world integral rules behind a barrier, you create main characters.

This rule also applies to systems where numbers have no cap...if you can laugh off the heaviest attack in the game without calling a skill, or can do your taxes in the time it takes for a horde of enemies to take you down...there is something fundamentally wrong with the game system. 

That sort of system is just defeating for a new player.  Certainly there will be a share of people who will look at that person and say “someday that will be me,” but there are far more who will say “why bother”.

5. Corollary?  I Might not Know What a Corollary Is 

It is okay to break any rule in the moment.  It is okay to make gods in the moment, so long as they don’t remain gods after the moment is over.  It is okay to say yes to players in the moment, so long as they understand that your yes applies only to that scene.  

It is okay for someone to be the main character for an event...just not every event.  Share your agency.  

6. Finish the Rules

When I started Doomsday I had 5 years planned out, roughly...I knew the big moments, and had a fair amount of background, but the game has grown and evolved beyond what I had originally intended.  This is as it should be.  Now that we are coming to the end of the 5 year plan, I’m looking very much forward to be done with Rules.  

This doesn’t mean there won’t be errata and subtle changes if something proves to simply be broken.  But there will be no more big changes after the 5 Year Plan.  Most larps exist in a state of almost constant revision.  The first larp I ever played changed so much, that when I went back for one last hurrah a few years ago, I no longer had any idea how to really play the game.  

No writer is ever 100% satisfied with the finished product.  A novelist cannot read a novel they wrote without wanting to correct a few things, but at some point you have to accept that there is a “good enough” and publish the damn thing.  So it is with larp rules.  So long as you fixed all the plot holes (broken ass rules stuff), just let it go.  

I am so ready to let it go...and I am one of those strange people that actually enjoys writing game mechanics.  

A Meandering Conclusion

This was not intended to be a comprehensive post.  Nor was it entirely intended to be on point.  There were a few items here that I’m likely to expound upon in the not too distant future.  Eventually I will gird myself to write the “Why Your Larp Should Die” post, that will surely win me friends, that I hinted at here.  And likely another about empowering others, that will perhaps be slightly less contentious.

Disclaimer: as per all larp reviews, my focus is on the positive.  I will talk primarily on things i liked, but will offer one strong point of criticism.  In addition, expect numerous side conversations where I go entirely off track from the discussion.

Summation for Anyone Who Doesn’t Like Reading

Dead Legends is a weird west larp.  It is also the best larp I’ve been to in a very long time and everyone should get out to it as soon as biologically possible.  

The Awesome

The Rules

Rules matter.  Dead Legends rules fill a slim volume; 52 dense pages, which is like a pamphlet when it comes to american campaign larp rules.  This is to the advantage of the game they are trying to create.  There are hard caps, and low health totals, which makes fighting brutal and deadly, but never unfair.  Every time a fight breaks out, survival always seems like a close thing. 

In most games, I find myself hating lore skills, they tend to be vague and largely useless, but here the game employs a research system which puts the lores to a hard and specific use.  I spent a fair amount of time with my fellow researchers trying to unravel mysteries.  We were able to put questions directly to the one with the knowledge, and that knowledge produced tangible results.

Lastly, I loved that about a third of the game carried no weapon other than their wits.  Most larps penalize this sort of play style, but here it felt natural that many people simply don’t walk around the weird west carrying weapons.

The Campsite

Camp Furnace Hills, about 30 minutes north of Lancaster, might be the best overall larp camp I’ve ever been to.  There is plenty of space.  The buildings are all well taken care of (which is something I’ve literally never seen at a camp), and most of them have electricity.  The entire camp feels like something that someone puts a lot of time into, making certain that it is not just running on life support, but is actively tended, repaired, maintained, and improved upon.  

As a larp owner, there is nothing that made me quite so jealous as the fitness of camp.  There were so many open spaces, so many sites to set up interesting encounters.  Well tended trails.  And everything fits to make this weird west setting sing.

I must kill the larp owners and take their camp.  It is the only way.

THE ONLY WAY

Coming in to Town

As a new player, we started off in a far flung part of the camp.  We assembled right out side the “train station”, where we were met by a grossly incompetent guide, who lead us, after a series of bizarre twists and turns, to an abandoned trade post.  There we heard the crazed shouts of a man who had trapped himself inside a building.  While others tried to treat with the man, I looked around for anything of value, and clues as to why this place was empty.  

Minutes later, a lone figure comes stumbling out of the darkness.  We try to speak to the man, but he seems to be bent on wordlessly tearing us limb from limb.  And his FACE...that is not the face of a living man, but of one who has spent weeks in the grave.  

Our group was not well armed.  The fight against this one GRAVE WALKER, was a battle for our lives...then more started to appear, from all directions.  I barricaded myself inside a building, but found myself trapped inside, unable to get out. 

After several tense minutes my companions distracted the grave walkers long enough for me to sneak out the back...but the distraction they provided was not proof agains the undead.  As gathered my bravery to leap across a small gorge, one of their number tore into me with its bone claws.  

When I came to I was being treated by another of my traveling companions...but still the grave walkers surrounded us.  There was no way out for us but to run and pray.

Then the dark figure of a pale woman, dressed in black with a black veil, came to our aid.  By the light of her lantern we were saved.  She guided us to the settlement, and bid us safe travels.  

This set the tone for everything that was to follow and was an incredible introduction into the game.

The Oubliette 

Late friday night, we started to hear rumors of a strange flickering light that drew people away to another realm.  I played a writer with a keen interest in such things, and made my way toward the disturbance...

There I was witness to one of the coolest mod set ups ever.  Tunneling laser and a fog machine was used to represent the entrance to the other world.  Inside everything was lit by blacklight.  Book pages were strewn across the ground, and blind screaming figured stumbled about, attracted by sound and smell.  

All of this was done in a space that serves, during the summer, as a large shower facility for the pool, but such was the lighting and set dressing that I didn’t even realize that until the next day.

The Lantern

I spent 2 hours roleplaying with a lantern.  This sounds really lame on paper...and is a sort of...you had to be there experience.  But trust me, lantern RP is A+.

Death Around Every Turn

There were so many times that made me really feel like we were just holding on for dear life.  So many times when I was rushing into or out of a place because I was just a writer with a dagger who was completely out of my league.  

It was fun to be afraid at a larp.  It was something I had not experienced in a very long time.  It was something that I dearly missed.  

The Not So Awesome

I started off by praising the rules, but one aspect of the rules, or something that the rules have allowed to happen, took me out of the experience at some point on Saturday night.   Let me explain by example...then I will get into details. If you are running a Star Wars game, there is a general principle that either everyone is a Jedi, or no one can be a Jedi.  Jedi are terribly overpowered in comparison to everything else in the Star Wars universe, so it is difficult to impossible to balance them for player use without changing fundamental aspects of the Jedi.   Dead Legends has something that skews toward this.  There is a somewhat open ended skill in the game called Dabbler.  It allows you to use magic to a limited degree.  There are all sorts of downsides of picking up Dabbler which offset some of the benefits...but don’t really offset the benefits enough to matter.   Dabbler allows you insight into things that no one else can touch.  It gives you powers that no one else can easily attain.  The downsides of Dabbler, are madness and a opening yourself up to the darker more secretive aspects of the gameworld...but these downsides are their own benefit.  They give the player more to do, more to work with, and provide more explicit roleplay opportunities.  They are downsides only because they are negative from a gameworld perspective...but are in general just fun and interesting from a roleplay perspective.  

Having Dabbler more or less turned one PC into the main character for a large portion of Saturday night.  He was the one person who seemingly (true or not) had to be there for everything to play out, it appeared as though without him, there was simply no way for us to defeat the big bad of the weekend.   The problem with Dabbler might not exist if there was something like it in other aspects of the rules, something that was available for people who weren’t playing Academic characters.  Dabbler ends up feeling too much Jedi.  

I went into the weekend thinking that Dabbler was never something I’d shoot for, and came out feeling like if I didn’t shoot for it, I was playing wrong.  

The Other Stuff

I’m glad I picked the right character to play this time around.  I played something that gave me access to the gameworld.  I was a writer with a background in the occult, who came to research material for his upcoming novel.  This gave me agency, gave me permission and reason to speak to people, to get involved, and to ask questions.  

And it was nice to have an excuse to wear my big faux fur coat at a larp.  

A Conclusion!

Dead Legends is a new larp with a lot of good ideas, most of which are well executed.  It is a game that cares about production value, for set dressing, for roleplay, and commitment to staying in character.  It also shares the sensibilities and values I consider fundamental to a modern larp, including rules for removing yourself from scenes that might push a bit too hard, rules for active consent.  All of it part of the fundamental culture of Dead Legends.   It is my hope that Dead Legends grows and becomes a larping institution, and sets a strong standard for what American Larping can be.  

[A version of what follows was posted elsewhere several months ago, prior to the start of this blog.  If this sounds familiar, you now know why.  There are some added bits.  And if you’re wondering why I’m pulling this out of mothballs now, let us say that I had an enlightening day.]

What follows is not the sort of thing I feel particularly qualified to write about.  I don’t always know the right words to say, or how to say them without giving offense.  I don’t represent a minority, or have any right to speak for a minority.  I’ve lived my life as a white middle class, mostly straight, man creature.  The struggles that many people go through are not my struggle…not directly.

Everyone should be free to live as they will, so long as that freedom does not infringe upon the freedom of another.  In short, be excellent to each other!

We as larpers are part of an emerging medium.  We are rapidly gaining public awareness.  When I started larping 15 years ago, I didn’t bother telling anyone what I was doing one weekend out of the month.  They had no reference for it, and I sort of liked the idea of having a secret place of magic that no one else knew about.  Also…I just didn’t want to have THAT conversation.  15 years later, I have THAT conversation about once a week.  I’ve gotten good at having THAT conversation.  We as a whole need to get better at having THAT conversation.  Never be ashamed of your joy.

Larp is entering the mainstream.  And it is time for us to decide what the public face of our hobby is going to look like.

For all intents and purposes we are a gaming culture…and honestly most of gaming culture is just awful.  Or at the very least, the public face of gaming culture is awful.  What are our first thoughts when we talk about gaming culture?

Being called a fag over chat?  Everyone suddenly amazed that a real live girl is in their match?  Women being threatened with rape for having an opinion?

These are my first thoughts when talking about in quotations “gaming culture”. AND THAT FUCKING SUCKS.  I’m part of gaming culture!  I’ve played video games since Coleco.  I used to wait with loud impatience each month for the next edition of Nintendo Power.  I once missed to results of a pregnancy test because I was too wrapped up in a WOW raid to pay attention (it was negative and no, I’m not proud of that).

But I’ve stopped playing a lot of online games because I just really don’t want to deal with a not insignificant portion of people who have mutually agreed upon a retrograde level of discourse.  I leave matches, and entire games over that stuff.  I speak up when I see or hear people doing that sort of thing…maybe help change the culture…but in my entire gaming career I’ve never seen anyone else do the same, so I feel like I’m screaming into the wilderness.

We are a new gaming culture that has had the fortune and misfortune of having been around for over 30 years.  We are new because the culture at large is waking up to our existence.

We need to ask more from our games and institutions.  No, larping can’t solve all of our social problems, but it should provide a place where anyone can be anything they want to be both in and out of game.  Larping is about the opportunity to explore, and that exploration need not stop with a bunch of words written on your Character Card.  

When I started larping, I played a character that was a sort of idealized version of myself...a person that I wanted to be but could never quite commit to in the real world.  Over time (for I played that character for many years) I discovered that I didn’t really want to be the person, not entirely, I liked to laugh to much to play something so dour.  So I found that my character became a bit more like me, and I in turn became a bit more like him.  Through larping I was able to test drive pieces of myself, find out what fit, and what didn’t...and I don’t know where I would be if I didn’t have that opportunity.

And yet, other opportunities for exploration were denied to me.  When I inquired about playing a character of another gender, I was informed that such a thing would not be appropriate...at least not appropriate for me.  You could do it if you were part of the old boys club, but not if you were a tolerated weirdo.  

15 years ago, we were a different culture.  And while that was not okay back then, we had not yet evolved to understand some of the things we take for granted today.  If this happened at a game today, I would advise everyone I know to steer clear.   Today I’m proud to run a game where people feel safe and welcome to be whoever they want to be, even if that changes, even if it is only for the moment. This isn’t just about providing a safer space, it is about normalization.  Larps by their very nature should foster exploration, should encourage people to find themselves, to find their level.  And our response should be, “cool”, “awesome”, “what can I do to support you.”  

We need to be the change we want to see in the world.  

We think of ourselves as games, when what we really are is communities.  

We are people of the modern age, with all the baggage of the past weighing us down.  We need to let go of the baggage, toss it overboard, watch is float away, but never forget...and upon further exploration of this metaphor...we should pull the bits out that matter, that fit, that make our lives and the lives of others around us better.

I’m not here to have a good time, but to have the best time possible for both myself and those that surround me.  

Part of that is being BETTER, and asking for MORE from our institutions.  

We need to agree upon our public face. We need to be a “safer space” for minorities, and women, and people of all shapes, sizes, colors, and orientations.  It is a very simple thing to say that your standard is “everyone is welcome”…it is quite another thing to speak about what that actually means. If this is important to you, you need to speak about up!  You can’t let someone on the outside decide what the face of your hobby looks like.WE NEED TO BE BETTER.  WE CAN BE BETTER.  WE CAN DECIDE TO BE BETTER.  WE HAVE THAT CHANCE NOW.  WE WON’T HAVE THAT CHANCE IN THE FUTURE.5 to 10 years from now, I want that public perception of larping to be, “Inclusive weirdos…mostly harmless.”But that’s just me…I don’t get to decide alone.

This is all of us.

Let’s do this.

Before I go on...let me warn you that if you are triggered by talk of sexual assault (not in explicit terms, but in a more clinical sense) please do not read any further.  Thank you.

You’ve probably sat next to a sex offender before.  The law of averages means that you’ve likely sat directly next to a sex offender on a bus, or in a theater, or on a plane at some point during your life.  You didn’t know, and unless it mattered, it didn’t matter.  Their crime was invisible to you.  

I suspect that in any large crowd, there are a few people who, if you found out what they had done, you might think twice before entering that crowd, no matter how many other people might be around.  In fact, the entire experience of the place might be tainted for you...if you knew.

But you didn’t know, and so it didn’t matter.  

Theaters and arenas and restaurants don’t make people take a background check before entering their establishment.  It is intrusive, expensive, half useless and would drive away business.  Yes, it might serve a purpose once a decade...but the cost to benefit is not there.  There is no good reason to do sweeping background checks on everyone that enters your place of business.   People are there for a few hours at most, and their problems are so unlikely to matter there is no good reason to take preventative measures.

Most businesses work this way.

But larp is different.  

Before I continue, please accept that larp is a business.  If you take people’s money you are running a business.  Yes, there are exceptions to this, and there are a lot of people who don’t run their larp as a business, but I assure you, according to the laws of most countries, you are running a business.  

With that out of the way...

When you come to a larp event, be it a weekend campaign game, or a parlor game, you are entering into an activity that is fundamentally different from anything else.  When you go to a theater, you might laugh along with the audience, but you are unlikely to interact with them in a deeper way.  The only people you are likely to regularly interact with are your friends.  But most larps don’t work that way.  Unless you are running a game only for your friends, you are going to meet people who are not familiar to you.  Perhaps you will become friends, but more than likely, you will become facebook friends.  We only have room for so many people in our lives after all.

Larping is perhaps the only business that regularly policies its customers, and removes them, often permanently, from their establishment if they fall outside the line of agreed upon social behavior.  

And they absolutely have to...

Like most businesses, games don’t have the resources or cause to do background checks on their customers.  It is an unreasonable intrusion, and a cost that I suspect no game could reasonably absorb.  I know of one larp that attempted to do have people sign a piece of paper allowing the owner to conduct background checks.  That game no longer exists.

And yet there are times when such checks would have been to our advantage.  But the cost to benefit is not there, and it is the risk you run.  It sucks, but the reality is that you can only act reactively to such situations...to a degree.

Every larp is a culture.  Every larp is a different culture.  There is a lot of cross pollination.  Customs and attitudes carry over, mix, and create something unique.  Two larps may have very similar cultures, but unless they share 100% of the costumer base, they will have their differences.  It is fascinating and bewildering going from one game to another, and trying to adapt to a new reality.  I’m not certain if I’m terribly good at it.  I may have done too good of a job helping to create the culture I want to be part of...but I digress.  

The person running a larp has a lot of control over the culture, more so than I ever imagined going in.  During an early event, I arrived at our camp in a bad mood.  That Event was probably the worst one we ever put on...everyone seemed like they were in foul spirits, and nothing went right.  My mood was effecting the entire game.  Never again would I allow a bad mood to filter over to the community.  

When you create a world you set a tone, you craft a reality for people to live in...if only for a short while...and the tone you set matters.  The tone reflects across the community, and the ideals of that community.  If you cultivate a community where it is clear that sexual predators can’t get away with being sexual predators, sexual predators might still come to your game...but they won’t stay at your game.  They will take their business elsewhere.  And the problem is solved before it matters.

Is this foolproof?  Absolutely not.  You can create a safer space, but you can’t give people guarantees.  Sometimes you are left to be reactive, but you can absolutely create a culture where that is a rare necessity.  

Larp is different, and we have to handle ourselves differently than any other business.

We larp owners craft the world we want to live in.  

I want to live in a better world.  

Leading off my last post, I wanted to go into a bit of detail on Rules Heavy Systems.   While one might well think from my last post that I don’t care for such Systems, that is not actually the case.  A well crafted Heavy Rules System can do a great deal to help facilitate a good roleplay environment by giving the player choices that help to better realize their character, as well as create tools for that character to better interact with the game world. I built a Heavy Rules System around those ideas.  And I failed entirely. 

Let me explain.  While Heavy Rules Systems can be great at simulation, that simulation is by its very nature an artifice that stands in the way of interaction.  I don’t think I understood this at the time, and now that I do, there are very few things I would have done differently (philosophically speaking...I’ve rewritten vast swaths of Rules since we started).  Yeah, I failed at doing exactly what I set out to do, but only because my goals were at odds with what I was creating. Moving away from the obtuse, and into details, here are my 10ish Rules for Creating a Rules Heavy System.  If you want to do that sort of thing.  1. Only Offer Interesting Choices

We recently removed Weapon Skills (Skills that let you wield a Weapon) from Doomsday.  A few months ago someone made an offhand comment about Weapon Skills being a “new player tax”.  After a few days of trying to come up with reasons why that person was dumb and wrong I finally realized...they were absolutely right.  

Weapon Skills were not something you wanted to purchase, they weren’t a choice, they were a requirement...if you wanted to use a Weapon.  Removing Weapon Skills and just saying you can use whatever Weapon you want changed absolutely nothing.  It just removed an uninteresting choice, and barrier to entry.

2. No Unreasonable Barriers to Entry

One thing that is fairly common among Heavy Rules Sets are Prerequisites.  Skills you need in order to buy other Skills.  I think we had things like this in the very very early “we don’t even have a name for this game yet” days...but like so many things that are an assumed part of Heavy Rules building, we looked at Prerequisites and wondered why.  How is your game effected in any way when someone wants to purchase that one big Kill Skill that they can use Once Per Event, as opposed to a bunch of little Skills that give them a lot of utility?   

I understand what Prerequisites are intended to represent; someone learning, building up to something bigger and better.  But that rarely, if ever, comes across in practice, because the systems by which Prerequisites exist are arbitrary.  You need to be at such and such level, or have X skills, or have purchased the This many Thats.  

If you are going to lock a skill behind a door, you should only do so if unlocking that door is tied directly into the gameworld, and is a reflection of the growth of character beyond what is printed on their character card.

3. Create a Closed System

Limitations are important for balance.  Having a cap on how much damage someone can do in Combat, or how much health someone should be fundamental design elements of every game.  A game where you can purchase health, or damage, or magic points, without limit means you end up with characters who completely and forever overshadow anyone who hasn’t put in the years. 

It is entirely defeating to come in as a combat oriented character who gets one shotted by everything, because content has to be balanced against people who have hundreds of body.  Or seeing someone swing for 40 Damage, when you can only manage 4, and only because you sacrificed everything else when building your character to do so.  I’ve seen so many people just give up, not just on the game, but larping in general, when they encounter this.    

We developed a closed system based around the idea that any 5 New Players with a plan could take down any PC in the game.  New players should have impact.  Certainly not as much as someone who has been there since the beginning, but they shouldn’t feel defeated by the system before they’ve even had a start.  

As creative types, it is often difficult to accept limitations, but having restrictions more often than not promotes better more focused ideas.  Moreover, from the logistics side of things, such limitations allow one to avoid gating content...since everything you send out can, theoretically, be dealt with, but people who have just started playing...so long as they have a plan.

4. The Economy Matters

In game larp inflation is a very real fake thing.  I played a game that started off on the Copper Standard.  So swift was the devaluation, that little more than a year in, you couldn’t use Copper to buy the cheapest drink at the bar.  A year beyond that I found my first 5 gold piece and it felt like wealth beyond measure.  A few years later and people were selling pies for 15 gold each.  

When your monetary units get devalued, it becomes harder and harder to supply the economy of your game.  It become a financial burden out of game to buy enough “gold” to pour into the economy to make up for inflation.  

We got around this by connecting our Crafting System directly to our Economy. Every piece of “money” you collect in our game can be used to Craft items.  

Now, this is not a perfect system.  Larp economies suffer the same issues that real world economies do.  People really like to horde money and not spend it on anything.  Yes, even at Larps trickle down economics has been proven wrong.  

It does however completely eliminate inflation.  Because a piece of “Money” always retains the same relative value since the amount you need to Craft something never changes.  

5. Rules Set the Tone

You shouldn’t sit down to write Rules until you decide what you want those Rules to do...is something I should have said to myself a long time ago.  

It is a problem I’m struggling with right now as I begin to work on what is to be the “Final” (but probably not) edition of the Doomsday Rulebook.  I’ve long been planning to transition the game into a more political one following the end of the current storyline.  I want combat to be a secondary focus to the more social aspects of the game...and yet...most of the rules deal with combat.

And I’m not certain that I really have a good solution for that problem at this time.  

Larp rules are generally built to handle combat, and because of this, most rules heavy games are combat oriented.  Yes, you can certainly create a character who doesn’t engage, but even the most ardent pacifists generally pick up a stick at some point...if only to defend themselves.

Combat logically requires the most simulation.  You can’t very well have someone actually cut off one of your players arms and expect to be running a larp again the next month.  So it makes absolute sense that rules focus on combat.  But I think perhaps they do so to the detriment of the game, and larping as a whole...because it provides a point of focus that is out of balance with the experience you are trying to provide.  Unless that experience is a combat simulator.

Moreover, writing rules for social interaction is difficult.  You can do it in subtle ways, but overt player on player social skills lead to oddness and questionable legality.  I recall playing a game a long long time ago where a priest cast a love spell that caused the next person I saw to become the object of my affection...and the only other person around was a 14 year old girl.  So yeah...DON’T DO THAT.

Controlling social interaction via skills is intrusive and can easily go wrong.  

I might get back to this subtopic at some point, because unlike the rest of this, I don’t have an answer at the moment...but I am in the process of developing one.  Hopefully.

6. Foster Imagination

Your rules should make someone look at them and say, “I really want to play THAT”.  But they should also allow someone to come up with a Character concept, then look at your rules and say, “Oh, I CAN play that!”.

I find this to be a problem in general with many rules systems.  They either don’t provide concepts that I find particularly appealing, or if I have a concept of my own, they don’t really allow me to play out that concept through the given rules.

On the flip side, not all character concepts are viable, or should be viable.  You shouldn’t create rules that allow someone to play something you don’t want them to play.  But if the concept is viable, and you don’t have a way to support it, that is something you should look into.  And yet, even then there are times that a cool concept doesn’t play out well mechanically, or requires you to add an entirely new and complex system into your game in order to support it.  At that point you have to examine the cost to benefit, erring on the side of less complication is probably for the best...a piece of advice I fail to listen to far more often than I’d like to admit.

Everything you create should make someone feel awesome.  If your game has Cook as a class...that person should feel like an AWESOME cook.  If you look at a class or skill or anything and it doesn’t allow someone to better realize their character...kill it.  

8. Kill Your Darlings and Cull the Useless Complications

Don’t be afraid to let ideas go.  We all have lots of thoughts, and many of them are quite good...but we are not terribly good at differentiating the good ones from the bad ones, so I think we have a tendency to think all of our ideas are good in the moment only to find out they were quite terrible in hindsight.  

When designing Doomsday I had all sorts of ideas for Classes and and Skills that were just not viable from either a Rules standpoint, or in some cases a moral standpoint.  They were ideas I had to be talked out of, and if I had been working on Doomsday in a vacuum I doubt the game would continue to exist.

If you find an easier way to do a thing...you should probably do it that way.  I’ve seen rules systems that make figuring out how to do a simple thing like Create a Character...the most fundamental thing your rules should be designed to accomplish...into a herculean feat that involves scouring every inch of the rulebook, consulting professionals, and college level algebra in order to maybe get a grasp on what you should be doing.  

If your rules system requires me to know anything beyond 3rd grade math, and is not a game about math, you are probably doing things wrong.

9. Plan for the Long Term

If you are planning to run a one shot game, or a limited run game...you should in no way bother with any of this...because you should not be creating a complex rules system to handle something that people will be done with in a few events. 

Barring that edge case scenario, your rules should take into account that people might be playing your game for years.  While I covered this at least in part with the “create a closed system” it bares repeating here.  I’ve played games whose rules systems were absolutely wonderful...so long as no one ever got past level 30.  After players started moving far beyond that the rules broke, and continued to break no matter how they patched them.  There is simply no way to account for someone who is level 200 at your game...and my advice is to simply not allow people to get up to that level.  There are points at which even the most flexible systems break down.  

Characters shouldn’t last forever, it is bad for the community you are trying to foster, and bad for the game as a game.  This is coming from someone who played the same character for over a decade.  

10. Set Limits for How Much Money You will take to put Imaginary Numbers on Someone’s Card

A new player should not be able to come to your game, give you thousands of dollars, and then suddenly be just as powerful as someone who has been there for years, and hasn’t had the money to buy the extras.  Pay to win ruins games.

And yet, because we are talking about heavy rules systems, paying for a bit of a boost is inherent to the system.  If you don’t need the extra money that putting points on a card gives you...you shouldn’t be creating a rules heavy system.  

Your rules should take into account the fact that some people will pay more for a boost, and allow them an advantage that could never be described as overwhelming, and never make others feel that they have to pay extra in order to really get ahead.  

In Conclusion

While this post has been all about crafting complex systems...my biggest piece of advice is to find another way.  I think at times that our reliance on heavy rules systems in America is choking our hobby.  I’ve seen some newer games start to skew more toward a rules light ideal...but they often don’t go far enough...or they just end up feeling incomplete, as though someone never quite got around to finishing things, and you aren’t really looking at a rules light system after all.  

We need innovation, and while I don’t yet have the solution...I do believe the solution is out there. A friend of mine recently told me that she doesn’t go to any game where the rules are longer than the lore...and there is absolutely something to that...and I’m pretty sure that answer isn’t to write 500 pages of lore. See you next time!

For a while now, I’ve wanted to do larp reviews.  However, as someone who runs a monthly larp myself, it always seemed to be a bad idea.  I can never quite get away being the person who runs a game.  I can’t turn off the “this is how I would do it,” or the “I can’t believe you didn’t see this problem” or the “if only you made this little change it would have been perfect”.  With that in mind, I’ve decided that, for these reviews, I am going to focus on the positive, while offering only one piece of strict negative criticism.  Also...I’m going to try to avoid having that piece of negative criticism have anything to do Rules (a topic I’m going to cover in a more general sense with a non-review Blog Post). So here we go... It’s been about 5 years since I’ve been out to a Dystopia Rising Event.  I started playing at the very beginning, years before they became the juggernaut they are today.  I played on and off for about a year, before coming to the conclusion that DR was just not my thing.  This is not to say I thought that game was bad, I just never got into it.  

Still, in the vast wasteland of Tolkeinesque/D&D style fantasy games, I was glad DR existed a solid alternative.  It just wasn’t exactly the alternative I wanted.

This past weekend I finally got myself out to an event; Downfall, a big national yearly multi-chapter DR event that pulls in people from all over.  Somewhere around 1000 people all out for a single event.  I wanted to see the spectacle of something that big.  So, I got a costume together, built a Character, and off I went.   The Awesome Sketch: Just a few minutes of hobbling my way into the settlement, I was stopped by a woman who wanted to me to pose for a drawing.  I did so.  After a few minutes, she tore off the page and gave the drawing to me.  This immediately brought me into the world.

Big Ass Military Transport Missions:  On Friday morning I got into a massive military truck with 19 other people, drove across the camp in the dark (there were no windows), and was let out into a war zone.  For the next 15 minutes we fought a losing battle against Raiders.  Pulling down the gate with a hook and chain attached to the truck.  And ultimately falling back to said truck when our casualties became too severe.  Piling in the back of the truck was a fight against time as we Raiders continued to pursue us.  We lost three people, two of whom died defending us so we could all drive to safety.  

Jones Run: When I found out there was going to be an treasure hunting obstacle course, I decided to take Jones as my starting Class...because they alone had a Skill that allowed them to enter the course.  I teamed up with someone I met at the entrance to the run, and after a bit of waiting for others to have their go (as well as a few sticky logistical problems), we were off just as the light began to fail.  

We only had 15 minutes, or the radiation coming out of the area would have a severe and negative effect on our characters.  We shimmied through tunnels.  Navigated razor wire.  Jumped across slanted platforms looking over a pit.  About 5 minutes in...I failed when crossing the tight rope.  As I attempted a leap from the rope, I lost purchase, still nearly made it, but the back of my heel touched the muck...and I was slowed to a walking pace for the rest of the course.  When I reached the next obstacle, I realized I had no chance to continue and expect to get out safely.  So, while my companion continued onward, I made my slow way back, navigating all the obstacles in reverse.  

As I plodded back through the razor wire, my companion caught up with me.  He was badly wounded from an obstacle further down the course, and when he brushed against one of the wires, the wound was aggravated, and he fell.  I pulled him the rest of the way through.  Carried him to the low tunnel, the proceeded to navigate the tunnel backwards on my belly while pulling his nearly dead body with me.  Finally free, we stumble our way past the fallen branch that served as the entrance.  We got out with only a minute to spare.  

Costuming: I think DR may be the most well dressed larp I’ve ever seen.  I’m not bad at costuming, and I know my way around a sewing machine...but the few hours I put into building a costume the night before made me feel a bit embarrassed next to the incredible work done by most of the player base.  

The Less than Awesome

There are a few things I have in mind for my point of criticism.  And I’m going to preface this crit by saying that I was not able to be around for the entire Event.  I was there from Thursday until Saturday afternoon before I left, so it is entirely possible that some part of what follows fixed itself at a point in time after I left.  That said... There was a certain lack of focus.  I got the idea of plot early on, and it seemed in the first few hours that there was a lot of energy and coordination that went into making the kick off to everything go smoothly...but after Thursday night things just seemed to drop off.  We were at war, fighting for our very survival, and no one I spoke to seemed to have a very clear idea of how it was all going, how all the pieces fit together.  We knew that we were losing in some places, winning in others...but what this meant as a whole was lost.   When I went to the NPC shift, I got a view of this from the other end.  In the 4 hours of my shift, I was sent out as a variety of Zombies and Raiders, and none of it seemed connected to any sort of overarching plot.  We were just somewhat random attackers, going out to offer up some combat without any substance.   This is not to say every game needs to have a cohesive narrative.  Sometimes creating a world for people to live in is enough, especially if you a lot of work to make that world feel real.  But the overt explicit existence of a narrative, put me on the search for a story I was never quite able to find.

The Greatest Moment of Horror

Though I stumbled alone through the woods often, and at night, I never stumbled upon trouble, or ran afoul of anything that might do me harm, aside from perhaps the uneven terrain.

So it came as something of a surprise that I experienced mild terror upon taking a shower.  

I ventured to the mobile showers, set up in the overflow parking lot.  It was night.  There were two showers available.  The first door I opened offered only darkness.  The second door provided a welcoming light.  For a few minutes I struggled with exactly how to go about taking a shower.  While the basic mechanics of showering are well known to me through years of trial an error, I was a bit baffled as to how I might best disrobe, for the door from the outside lead directly into the shower.  I finally decided to divest myself of all non-critical items of clothing and leave them on the outside.  Then, I entered the shower stall itself, and removed my jeans, placing them on a nearby hook.

Next, I pressed the button, and a cold stream of water came from the nozzle.  At the same time a great rumbling began to issue from somewhere within the great machine...and then the lights began to flicker...began to strobe.  There, with the cold water pouring over me...I washed by horror movie lights.

I was never seen again.

The This is Almost Entirely Me

I absolutely played the wrong character.  Moreover I probably came to the wrong event.  

Let me explain in reverse...

Downfall is a loveletter to the fans of DR.  It is not meant for someone who is essentially a new player.  I had connections through a few friends, but outside of that, there was nothing really at stake for me.  It was an event designed to set the tone for the next year for a game I don’t play.  If I wanted to experience DR again, this was not the event I should have come out for. I also played the wrong Character.  This is a problem with me in general.  It often takes me a while to really get into a character.  Often I’ll have a good first few hours, then fall off a bit, then find my character’s sense of humor at some point then next day...after that I’m good to go.  The pattern more or less played out as expected.  I suspect that my nutty stump crown wearing woods person with funny voice would have found purchase at a normal event, but with 1000 people...I was a bit too lost in the crowd.

If I had to do it again I think I would have played a Tour Guide.  Spend the first night getting to know everyone and everywhere around down, then spend the next few days doing a series of tours, telling others what I know.  It would have given me a strong connection to events, and allowed me a chance to relate those events to others.  Cross pollination is important for larp communities.   Also I Suck

Hello out there.

Before I begin, let me say that I am only ever right from a certain perspective.  While I hope to broaden that perspective, I am writing this blog as an American larper and larp owner.  That is my experience, and that is my world as it turns right now.

I started building the groundwork of what would become Doomsday 8 years ago.  We went through nearly 3 years of creation and revision before we had something we were ready to show to the world.  We went through Rules Light versions of the game, and versions that had intricate and byzantine systems that would have worked wonderfully if people were computers.  

Ultimately we settled on a system that is Rules Heavy for one reason...money.

With a Rules Light system it is almost impossible to monetize the game in such a way that we could expect a reasonable return on our investment.  In our area, Northeastern US, the generally agreed upon price for larping is $45...give or take.   As a game, just starting out, our cost as business owners was greater than $45 a head.  We made up the difference by monetizing the Rules System.  Offer incentives to those who want to spend the money, that would allow them to get Skills faster.  It is a system that a majority of American Style games use.  And it makes absolute sense from the business side of things.  Of course I’ll let you give me money to put numbers on your card! And yet, it is not a system that is of any benefit to the game.  it creates a disparity between the haves and have nots, and while you can build a system to mitigate these issues, they will always exist.  

I wish we had been able to avoid monetizing the system, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that we would not have continued on beyond the first 2 years if we had not.  The players willing to spend extra made up for those who could only pay the base cost.  If we knew that we’d be seeing 100+ people coming out for our early events, our design decisions would have been entirely different. And very likely we would have ended up with more Rules Light style of game.

The sad thing is, larping should cost more.  The agreed upon $45 price tag has been in place locally for about 15 - 20 years.  As you may be aware, inflation is a thing!  Adjusting for inflation, a larp that cost $45 in 2000 should cost $63 dollars today (thank you internet for providing an easy calculator).  But it doesn’t...and for the most part it can’t.  With a local market flooded with larps, going beyond that price tag is not viable.  The few games I know of that are far beyond the $45 price in the area all seem dying a slow death.  

Beyond that, the cost of running a game has only risen over the years as the most expensive part of running a game, renting a site, has gone up well beyond the rate of inflation.  I know sites that were around $600 bucks when I started larping that are now going for more than $2000 a weekend.  This shrinks the profit margin remarkably.  If you consider that you need a bit more than 10 paying players for every $500 your camp cost, it is almost impossible to do anything more than break even if you have less than 50 people playing your game on the regular, at the current market price.  Fifteen years ago, a person could reasonably make a living off a monthly game that had around 60 players, now you require about twice that number to make about the same amount of money. We make due.  And we allow people to spend money to make their characters more powerful.  AND IT SUCKS.  And I don’t have an elegant solution for the problem. This is a problem that holds back innovation, stops games from going more rules light, and creates a disparity within our communities, but on the same token...as a business owner I can’t deny that it is a necessity.