Welcome to the first-timers’ series, where a panel of seasoned gamers and experts from the US and beyond weigh in on topics pertinent to the larp newbie.
Part of enjoying a larp is finding a game you enjoy, but there’s huge variety when it comes to the hobby, so knowing what you don’t like can be helpful. As Claus Raasted put it,”There are plenty of larps that don’t appeal to me, just like there are plenty of books, movies and poems that aren’t really my thing. Larp is a way of creating and experiencing stories – and not everyone likes the same kind of story.”
In other words, no one sort of larp is “the best,” but some will be more or less fun to particular people. To give a sense of the scope of games and preferences, today the experts answer the question: What sort of larp does not appeal to you, and why?
Mike Young doesn’t enjoy physical fatigue:
As I’ve gotten older, fatter, and slower, pure live-combat larps really don’t appeal to me anymore. I’ve swung my share of padded weapons, but I have absolutely zero desire to do so all weekend long, camping out in the great outdoors. I have become quite the fan of indoor plumbing and air conditioning/central heating.
But I’ll play any genre and any style. I love to try new types of larp just to see what they are about.
Because Michael Pucci desires physical immersion, he loves physical fatigue but theater-larp mechanics:
Wow. Talk about a question that could gain me some hate mail.
I personally no longer enjoy theatrical style or card pull larps. I have played and story told for theatrical style larps for just about a decade, and as a whole, these sort of larps are designed in such a way that the system gets in the way of the immersion and enjoyment of the environment. The breaking of character to resolve conflicts, the reliance on pure mechanics for physically oriented tasks, and the unbalanced ratio of storytellers/NPCs (non-player characters, aka, extras) to players makes for a lacking campaign game.
I want to feel and experience a full range of emotions and events when I am at a game; I don’t want to avoid conflict because the resolution of a physical contest may have me out of character throwing chops or pulling cards from 15 minutes to multiple hours. I don’t want to wait for half an hour for a storyteller to narrate my experience walking to someplace other than the one room assigned for game, I want to walk the 2 miles to a new location in real life. I love waking up as a character, going to sleep as a character, eating as a character, and having a full range of all my interactions from my character’s world view. I don’t think I can get that with a theatrical style game any longer.
Sarah Lynne Bowman wants the best of Young‘s and Pucci‘s worlds— a rules-light game that doesn’t feature combat:
I definitely do not enjoy heavy rules-based larps or games focused on combat. Games with excessive rules, in my opinion, take away from the immersion into character and story, which are the aspects I most enjoy. In rules-heavy games, people often spend more time out-of-character contemplating or debating rules than they do actually role-playing. I understand that the gamist-type players find this sort of activity pleasurable, but excessive rules discussion makes my interest in the game instantly wane.
As for combat, I am, by nature, a pacifist, so I never feel the urge to “best” someone else in physical battle. However, many people feel a strong release from this sort of activity, both physical and emotional. Though I do not enjoy these sorts of games, I still play in games that feature these aspects and respect others who like rules and combat.
Avonelle Wing has practical, DIY concerns:
I don’t like games with a steep startup investment – of time, energy, money, materials. Give me something I can jump right into with what I have on hand, and I’m a happy girl. Games that become a flashy show of who spent the most at the costumer’s or the weapon smith? no thanks. A game that encourages crafting and creativity? perfect!
Frederik Berg Østergaard wants meaningful stories and creature comforts:
Two things: Any larp that confuses setting for story. That pretty much excludes most vampire larps and fantasy larps. I prefer larp that is ABOUT something. Also I play very badly when I’m cold, hungry or tired, so strike those larps as well. Oh, you can also put actual violence on that list. I don’t like getting hurt.
J. Tuomas Harviainen wants player freedom:
I dislike larps that are so obviously railroaded that they don’t leave room to actually role-play. And I have no interest in attending games where the game masters overrule player decisions in order to push their own inevitable agenda. Fates and such are fine, but telling players they can have an impact while actually blatantly preventing it is boring. Beyond that, I am open to all sorts of larps, and have written them as well.
Kate Beaman-Martinez finds unicorns and goblins boring:
I am increasingly not a fan of sword and board larps, meaning high fantasy. Larp and role playing in general really got their start there. With Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy games, they were the ground floor and to me that feels tired. I cut my role playing teeth on Werewolf: The Apocalypse and for me going back to that just doesn’t give me the role playing jollies I get when I play a modern day supers games or CyberGen.
But in the end, I’ll try anything if I know there is a good GM team or if there is an interesting angle being used.
Geoffrey Schaller prefers noncompetitive larping:
I am personally not a fan of larps that encourage PvP (Player versus Player) activity, without it being a specific, pre-determined, and well-communicated part of the game beforehand. The point of a larp is to enjoy having fun with other people in a communal environment – if I want to gank other players in a competitive environment, I’ll play paintball, or otherwise be involved in a competitive sport. The only exception to this is a larp that is designed to be competitive, and makes its intent clear from the get-go, such as warring factions or such – and even then, only if it’s a one-shot. I don’t want to invest time, money, and energy into a game and character that someone else is trying to bump off.
Aaron Vanek is omnivorous:
I learn something from every larp I participate in, even the horrid ones (learning what NOT to do is invaluable). I want to know how each designer and player approaches and deals with the art–what key are they in, how many beats per minute, what effect pedals, etc. My biggest restriction is my time, so the only larp that doesn’t appeal to me, I guess, is one that would be all weekend long, every weekend, where I play the same character in the same venue with the same game master and other PCs/NPCs (player-characters/non-player-characters). Although now that I wrote it out, maybe “Shawshank Redemption: the larp” spanning decades would be cool…
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Kate Beaman-Martinez has been acting since she was 11 and started gaming at 17. She cut her teeth on White Wolf’s Werewolf: The Apocalypse and naturally got up when there was a heated debate on the proper uses of torture in her weekly table top group. Shortly thereafter she joined The Avatar System and hasn’t looked back. Through larping, she has found her partners, and moved to New York. Kate is currently a full time student and the Executive Assistant for Double Exposure, Inc.
Sarah Lynne Bowman received her PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2008. McFarland press published her dissertation in 2010 under the title The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity
J. Tuomas Harviainen comes from Finland, and is one of those pesky professional larp researchers. In addition to studying larps, he also designs them. His mini-larps have so far been run in at least 14 countires and translated to seven languages.
Frederik Berg Østergaard is a Scandinavian game designer and jeepform evangelist. His work has mainly focused on taking the medium further and farther away from its tabletop roots into an adult oriented form, that has more in common with performance and psychodrama. He also holds an M.A. in History of Religions from the University of Copenhagen.
Michael Pucci is the CEO of Eschaton Media and the creator of multiple larps, tabletop books, scripts and gaming-related media. He has more than twenty years experience storytelling for larps, tabletops, and convention games, and spent five years in the business side of the gaming industry. He proudly holds the title of ‘Zombie Lord‘ while looking for more inventive approaches to modernize gaming.
Claus Raasted (32) claims to be the world’s leading expert on children’s larps, and so far nobody has challenged that claim in earnest. He’s the author of six books on larp, is the editor-in-chief of Denmark’s roleplaying magazine ROLLE|SPIL and has been a professional larper for nearly a decade. He also has a past in reality TV. But these days, who hasn’t?
Geoffrey Schaller is a gaming gypsy, having wandered into and out of tabletop RPGs, Collectable Card Games, Miniatures, larp (WoD, boffer, and other), Board Games, MMOs, and countless other forms of gaming, as a player, play tester, demo-runner, author, and staff member. He still dabbles in all of them when he gets the chance. He is the Technical Director of Double Exposure, Inc.
Aaron Vanek has been playing, designing, running, and thinking about larps for 25 years. His larp publications include the illustrated essay “Cooler Than You Think: Understanding Live Action Role Playing“; “The Non-United Larp States of America“ in the Talk Knutepunkt 2011 book, “Predictions for Larp” in Journeys to Another World, the Wyrd Con book, and the blueprint for “Rock Band Murder Mystery” in the Do Knutepunkt 2011 book. He hopes for at least another 25 years of larp.
Avonelle Wing is the Senior Vice President of Double Exposure, Inc. Along with her partners and a team of friends, comrades and co-visionaries, she works to produce two full-sized gaming conventions and a variety of other gaming related productions each year. She is a larper at her core – collaborative storytelling is her art form of choice.
Mike Young has been writing live roleplaying games for over 20 years. His award-winning larps have been run across the world, and many of them are available for free download at his website.
I don’t like larps where some of the characters are important, and some are not. It may be due to out of game social networking leading to one main group and other folk on the side, it may be due to GMs having favorites, or in Theatrical games, having some characters who are part of the main plot, and some who are not.
I actually once told a first time GM that while I thought his game had some neat ideas, my character, as he worked in game, could have been replaced by a sign on the wall…
I like games that utilize every class and profession they allow. What I don’t like are games that offer professions and classes then never require their skills. It’s an easy way to make someone feel useless and ostracized in and out of game.
Hatred of certain types of larps and resolution mechanics is sometimes really productive on a creative level — it forces you to rethink how to resolve the situation otherwise.
For me, I dislike incoherent systems. If a game environment tells me in advance to do one thing (“be” this character, come up with elaborate schemes to achieve X) and then actually requires me to do another (solve this silly puzzle, gather this number of unique items) then I feel manipulated by the larpwright and the GMs, rather than whatever the character is supposed to feel. The best larps are those that take the logics of certain types of fiction (i.e., socialist realism, horror, adventure, etc.) very seriously and evolve the larp organically out of those logics.
Good question.
– I dlsike complex off-game rules (the first larp I played had to call a time out after combat to ‘battleboard’ – count off the hit points), but I’m fine with complex in-game rules.
– I dislike inconsistency. If there are supernatural elements they should be a coherent underlying meta-physics (even if the player characters don’t know it). This especially applies if am playing an intellectual character (like a hermetic mage) who will try to figure out those meta-physics and use them.
– I strongly dislike railroading; it goes against the medium’s nature as interactive.
– I dislike shallow settings, especially in terms of cultural depth. It creates all sorts of problems and makes it impoosible to imemrse in the cultural mindset. Maelstrom (the second biggest UK larp) for example defines the culture for a it’s continental sized countries on 2 sides of A4.
Larps that focus too mich on an overall plot that isn’t well put together are not much fun. The focus ends up coming off the players and really ends up becoming about the story-teller. I think there are some great ways this could be avoided, but from my experience it isn’t done well.
I much prefer larps that focus on player decisions and those decisions drive where the story or experience of the players (sometimes in groups and sometimes the larp as a whole) goes.
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