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I don't, and not for lack of trying. I did a few LARP events and I worked one summer at a LARPing camp for kids (where my job essentially boiled down to "nanny in armor").
I think LARPing just falls into the uncanny valley for me. I have no problem holding a mental image of Negara, the fearsome barbarian my geeky friend in playing in my Pathfinder campaign. However, I just can't seem to take it seriously when some kid in a robe and fake beard is hurling plastic balls around and shouting "fireballs!".
I can't reconcile what I see in front of me with what it is supposed to be in game. If some overweight dude swings around a foam sword and his character is supposed to be the best duelist in the realm... I lose my ability to connect with the story.
I recognize that that's an issue with me and not with the hobby though. I'm simply not well suited for LARPing, I guess.
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Well, where I play, you actually have to possess skill to support your backstory. So if a dude is a stealthy rogue, he HAS to be stealthy. If not, well, tough.
But I understand. Sometimes it's really hard.
Isn't that somewhat of a harsh restriction, though? nobody I know could never even come close to pretending to compete with the characters they create for tabletop roleplaying game, and that's part of the fun...
For example, which types of characters do you play?
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How do you measure if a person is stealthy? I guess I'm in the same boat as Lord Snow. I can sit at a table and let descriptions and artwork do the work to keep me immersed in the experience. Once I step away from the table that immersion is easily lost.
Another issue is that game rules work at the table because there is a certain amount of meta-element to the experience. I would find game rules to be too much of a distraction from the LARP experience to enjoy it. I could on the other hand get together with folks for some improv acting. I think that would be fun.
To me, if I have to personally in real life be what I am playing, fast, strong, charismatic, etc, it absolutely destroys the fantasy of it. I roleplay to be someone I am not. So I suppose LARP wouldn't work for me, because like Lord Snow, I cannot disconnect the player from the character when they're physically acting, as opposed to the mere description of tabletop.
I have acted in more than a few amateur productions, and I can get in character, and improvise, and such, but it isn't really as fun to me as tabletop has been. I wonder why that is. Probably because most of the time I'm playing a character someone else wrote, and while I have no problem getting in their head and reacting as they would, it's still not my creation.
Sadly we don't have any LARP's in Sydney Australia.
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In Vampire LARPing, cooperation seemed key for abilities like Obfuscate (stealth / invisibility) and Presence (super-charisma / charm). If other experienced players are willing to willfully ignore the guy whose supposed to be invisible in the corner, then it's helpful to the newer players who haven't quite 'bought into it' yet. Similarly, the best 'Ventrue' (super-political charming vampire) I'd seen played was someone who had a few friends among the other players who would act at least somewhat respectful of him (always stopping to let him enter a room first, or opening doors for him), and give the impression to others that he had some sort of supernatural aura of command.
Since I usually played a Nosferatu or Malkavian (two of the vampire groups able to move unseen), I found that most useful, as both the storyteller characters and the more experienced players blithely ignoring my 'invisible' character wandering around places he shouldn't have been made it easier to convey that impression.
I'm also at least a little bit stealthy, it seems. I've walked through paintball games with people on the enemy team pretty much ignoring me until I shot them, so I'm not sure what's up with that. :)
I found LARPing to be awesome and fun, and yet, like tabletop playing, you will occasionally find someone who is 'not getting it' and perfectly able to ruin it for everyone else (and with the larger group sizes for LARPS, it seems you are statistically more likely to get 'that guy'). And so, in my experience, some of the best LARPS are invitation only, and some of the worst are 'pick up LARPS' at conventions or whatever, where you get the LARP equivalent of that person who just has to be a jerk to the king (or even attack him!) who is giving your group the mission, and get the whole party thrown in the dungeon / geased to serve for the 'reward' of not being executed, instead of a fat reward and his daughter's hand in marriage.
I've played in a few Vampire larps, and I enjoyed them.
Although I suspect that has alot to do with me allowing my manipulative impulses out in those settings. I began one game as a Sabbat (sort of the "bad guy" vampires) infiltrator presenting as Clanless because my clan would have given me away. By the end of the game I was acting Price. Everybody trusted me.
Natural ability can be really important in a larp, but effort can make a difference as well. Good use of props, makeup, attire, and basic acting can really sell a character.
Well, where I play, you actually have to possess skill to support your backstory. So if a dude is a stealthy rogue, he HAS to be stealthy. If not, well, tough.
Hoh,if by those rules I'd have to be a rogue or slayer I suppose. Could make for a fun new thread.
How do you account for clerics or wizards? Have you ever flat put denied anyone to play a wizard for lack of intelligence or looking too buff?
I don't mind the idea of LARPing but it's a bit too much for me to take seriousl, like op Stated.
A tiefling magus with messed up legs and a wakisazhi? I dunno, id be embarassed just looking myself in the mirror
Last weekend was event nine of Empire, by profound Decisions. It is the industry leading fest LARP in the UK. E9 had 1500 people in attendance. With two battles and some 20+ liniers it had its fair share of combat, but to say it is a combat focused event is pretty far of the mark. There are numerous games within it (senate, religion, magic [politic], magic [dealing with eternals], ritual magic, trade, crafting,international deplomacy,and the military.) I'll post some photos when I get home.
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There are no mental requirements and the rules are usually very very simple.
But if you go around hyping yourself as a great warrior of near legendary status, you better have the skills to back that up.
If your character gets easily beaten in combat, it's time to suck it up and practice.
As for stealth, you have to sneak and not be seen.
I played a LARP (FX in NJ) many years ago. It was fun but their are draw backs to a LARP that you don't find to often in Table Top games. I still have a few friends who LARP though...maybe one day I'll go back.
I'm far too lazy for LARPing. I have friends who try to get me to join the SCA with them; I don't want a hobby where I have to do things and sweat.
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SCA is mostly beating up other people in armor. Not really LARP.
We mostly do role-play. You can spend entire events simply roleplaying a wine-drinking noble. Never touching a weapon.
Another issue I have with LARPing is that it is very sandboxy in nature. No GM, just people playing out a situation and waiting to see where the game would go. I hate a sense of indirection in a story.
Another issue I have with LARPing is that it is very sandboxy in nature. No GM, just people playing out a situation and waiting to see where the game would go. I hate a sense of indirection in a story.SCA is mostly beating up other people in armor. Not really LARP.
We mostly do role-play. You can spend entire events simply roleplaying a wine-drinking noble. Never touching a weapon.
This really can be a problem. I was in a Star Wars Larp once, where myself and another player snuck into a restricted area of the space station... unfortunately there wasn't a narrator around to tell us what was supposed to be there, so it was just an empty lecture hall to us.
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Another issue I have with LARPing is that it is very sandboxy in nature. No GM, just people playing out a situation and waiting to see where the game would go. I hate a sense of indirection in a story.SCA is mostly beating up other people in armor. Not really LARP.
We mostly do role-play. You can spend entire events simply roleplaying a wine-drinking noble. Never touching a weapon.
We have GMs and an overarching story, and we tend to nudge the players in the right direction when the need arises. There is nothing more annoing than aimlessly wandering around. There are players who don't care about the story and just want to roleplay their characters, and there are players who want to move it along. We have something for both.
Also our weapons don't look like traditional boffers, because boffers look silly.There will be a massive international LARP in Bulgaria in September. You're all invited. Next year, it moves to Serbia, because we're a more centralized location.
I have been larping for ~10 years now. I think I've played in 3 games with boffer or nerf weapons, and never played in a Vampire game. We call it theatrical style larping in the communities I'm involved with. It has a tiny player base compared to boffer or vampire, though technically vampire would be a subset of the style.
I play mostly one shots, where the games are structured ahead of time with pre-written characters. Most of the time the GMs cast ahead of time so people can prepare. Games tend to be between 10 and 30 people, though larger ones exist. Combats are resolved through mechanics that vary depending on the game, but player's physical abilities never really come into play. The mechanics can be as simple as RPS or dice rolls, but some can get fairly complicated.
Games have a huge range. I'm playing a game in May based around being at an academic conference of Cthulhu mythos scholars. I've played games set in superhero, tribal societies, pirates, 3 musketeers, far future, and mundane games.
Where I am in the Northeast US, we have a couple communities based around colleges. I participate in games at RPI, WPI, and Brandies, which is having a larp weekend this weekend, and I know some people from MIT and Harvard. Intercon is the biggest convention for this style I know of, though I believe there are some similar ones on the other coast.
Wow...Hama, are those the weapons your currently using, or are they what your referring to as boffers? Because they are gaffers(short for gaffer tape weapon). I haven't seen gaffers in 20 years, and they where coming to the end of their life in british Larping even then.
Here in the UK we generally use latex skinned weapons, with a silicon coating. and [url=http://www.lightarmoury.co.uk/index.php/product-gallery]Light Armouries have some examples of entry level weaponry in the European hobby.
Only LARPing I do is the occasional murder mystery dinner. But not the heavily scripted ones, these are more free form, where each player has their own hidden motives for their character. In the last one I played a well known poet and philanthropist who was secretly a weapons dealer and information broker. My goals were to obtain plans for a nuclear device (my contact was the initial murder victim), buy the casino we were in, and evade capture by the police. Each character had connections to at least two others, for example my connections were to an assassin/bodyguard and a countess who acted as one of my intermediaries for my business dealings. It was a lot of fun. I got to wear all my fancy smoking jackets and waistcoats and so on (I decided that part of my persona was that I'd never be seem in the same outfit for more than a scene)
Conflicts in these games are generally done through a rock paper scissors system, with weapons giving an advantage depending on what they are.
Technically, yes. For the past four years.
It's called "urban gaming" in my area (Baltimore MD, US) but it is most definitely LARPing by definition.
Fall semester we would play a campus-wide nerf tag game called Humans vs. Zombies, which doesn't have very much roleplaying (and the much higher number of players in HvZ that aren't interested in that element make what there is less noticable), but there is. Afterall, we are pretending to be somethign we aren.t
Spring semester games were the real LARPs, though. For that one we could make foam swords and shields and people made character and all that. Usually they were scifi or cyberpunk themed, and there was a lot more plot.
Now I'm graduating and all that goes away ;-;
Sadly we don't have any LARP's in Sydney Australia.
I don't know if it's still running but there used to be an active Beyond The Sunset LARP community in Sydney.
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I play NERO which is a boffer LARP. It's a bit of an oddball hybrid of out of game skill and in game skill - you have a character, which has defined skills and grows as you gain XP. But a lot of your effectiveness is driven by your out of game skill. No character skill lets you sneak, for example, that's all on you as the player. You can buy skills that increase your weapon damage, but actually landing blows is again up to your real life ability. Spells are little packets of birdseed(think tiny bean bags) that you throw at the target and you really need to hit with your throw to affect them with the spell.
There are some non-immersive things. Every time you swing a weapon you need to announce your damage - "2 normal" for a basic sword swing, "20 magic" for an advanced fighter with a magic weapon, "3 paralyze" for a ghoul, that sort of thing. Spells have "incants" which hide the spell name in a fluff phrase - "I grant you the power of a magic armor," for example. You have to say the incant correctly or lose the spell, which can give you a little bit of appreciation for the concentration rules in Pathfinder. It is a distinct advantage to be able to enunciate clearly and quickly when spellcasting.
Players are encouraged to use costumes and makeup to look like whatever they are playing. You may not play a nonhuman race if you don't represent it with makeup - you must have pointed ears to be an elf, for example. You get armor bonuses for wearing costumes.
A few nice things - there are no dice used for combat, exploration, that sort of thing. The in game lore your character knows is whatever you've managed to pick up as a player. If you want to check the woods for bandits you go out there and look around. Combats can be over in seconds, or they can take hours - and trust me, you know when you've been fighting a long time because it is exhausting. Good exercise though.
I played an event last weekend with my character that I've been playing for nearly 17 years. We had a war with an army of goblins, orcs, trolls, and so forth. We got to plan out a strategy, while also trying to keep it secret in case anyone in town was secretly a spy. Then we took a squad of adventurers to take out the goblin command structure while conceptually the war was occurring around us. We spent about an hour and a half fighting ever tougher skirmishes with the enemy. And that was a single part of a weekend long event. It's pretty fun.
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Yes.
I play "boffer-style" LARPs (such as NERO mentioned above) and have in the past played "salon-style" LARPs (such as the Mind's Eye Theater VtM games or many of the "convention LARPs"). I've been doing it ... well, longer than I like to think about (my LARP experience is legal to drink). I generally I prefer boffer-style LARPs as the game mechanics of conflict resolution are over MUCH faster.
From what I understand and have read over the years European-style LARPs are very different from what we do in the US in terms of how plot interacts with characters, when and how decisions are made, and the nature of the special effects & costuming. Given how diverse it is here in the US, however, I wouldn't be surprised if what I've seen and read are only indicative of a small subset of European LARPs.
RE: in-game vs. out of game skills - a lot of it depends on the specific LARP you play. There's a (paraphrased) maxim about no amount of in-game power being equal to out-of-game player competence in boffer LARPs for a reason. Some games require more out of game skills for certain mechanics than others. One of the now-retired games I was involved with used to require you to have both the in-game skill to pick locks as well as the ability to out-of-game pick the lock. That changed abruptly when it became illegal in our state to own lockpicks unless you were a bonded locksmith or in law enforcement. In similar vein, stealth skills may have in game mechanics, but most of it is out-of-game, even if you do have in-game mechanics to support them.
RE: Boffers vs. Latex, etc. Actually, Hama, if those aren't boffers in the link you provided, they look a LOT like the boffers I've been seeing for the last decade or so. Latex weapons look a lot better, but different games have different rules and styles of fighting. Latex weapons are not optimal for "hard and fast" combat styles in comparison with boffers as the chance of injury or breaking the latex weapon is much higher. Many "modern technology" boffers tend to use carbon fiber or graphite cores, custom cut/ molded foam and kite tape to make them incredibly light and fast, as well as reasonably strong. The longer graphite core weapons also don't have the "whip" effect that the old-style PVC weapons and some latex weapons I've seen have.
Those of us who have LARPed and enjoyed haven't found anything else quite like it.
-TimD
I do. LARP scene in Serbia is pretty decent, getting bigger.
We organize international events, usually with Bulgarians and Croats as well.
Next year, we are most probably going to make a really big event, a sort of Balkans Drachenfest (not nearly as big, of course).
I did some Vampire LARP-ing once upon a time. Had lots of fun playing the "dangerous" Gangrel (It helped that I was just out of the military and still buff). Eventually I moved away from it.
We use PVC piping, insulation foam and silver duct tape. Also lots of glue.
I was going to comment more about LARP weapon construction, but just got an email which reminded me that I need to finish writing a LARP encounter...
May PM you later so as not to spam the Paizo boards overly much about the nuances of LARP weapon construction :)
-TimD
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I did SCA back in the '80s. It was kind of fun, but not really my thing.
I did a few of those "How to Host a Murder" parties back in the early '90s. Those were kind-of 'LARP Lite' events, but got repetitious and seemed too canned for my taste.
In the late '90s I got talked into joining a Vampire LARP. It was interesting, but got really weird. I think a few of the players may have had some trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality... or were on something. It really wasn't my scene.
It's been more than 15 years, and I really don't have the urge to do it again.