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1500quidporsche posted:To be fair to the nerds I think the lifer thing applies to any sort of pseudo-competitive make it up as you go along activity. my school has an f1 team that doesn't allow female members. or more like, the team lets them in, but doesn't let them work on anything or drive the vehicles, until they get fed up quit. larp people... racing people... its crazy
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Aug 15, 2015 08:26
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Your stories suggest a much more sexual culture than I would have expected from my idea of LARPing. Is it due to these people using this as a medium to depart their everyday lives and act on these impulses? When questioned (assuming she was confronted about this at all) why the woman was blowing guys left and right, did she just respond with "that's what my character would do"? I assume there are rules against such behavior but maybe not always? Or was this all done out of character and just some freaky nerds who don't know how to lock the door? I usually envision more the "meet in a field and bop each other with foam" LARPing than what you seem to describe. Your system(s) seems a lot more political and inter-personal than the former which definitely can open some eerie doors in the psyche. Have you seen the episode of Supernatural where they are LARPing? Is that a mildly accurate portrayal of LARP or more the glorified ideal? From the way you're talking it sounds pretty horrifying. Between the high rank players borderline assaulting people who show up to wanton sexual trists in the woods (not necessarily horrifying in and itself, but still almost certainly out of place) it sounds like a pretty weird time. I think the level of intrigue plays a big part in that though. I can't invasive the same things being as common in the more "military- based" game structures.
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Aug 17, 2015 14:38
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Crazyeyes posted:Have you seen the episode of Supernatural where they are LARPing? Is that a mildly accurate portrayal of LARP or more the glorified ideal? Don't know. I honestly don't. Don't get me wrong, I see what you're asking, it's just there are an entire subsets of LARP no one has talked about yet. We can only go on about what we have experienced. For all we know that whole thing could be based on an actual thing that happened at a Supernatural themed convention minus the actual haunting. Like Kripke was just like "This is weird as poo poo, I'm gonna put it in an episode!" 
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Aug 17, 2015 15:09
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Skunkrocker posted:Don't know. I honestly don't. Don't get me wrong, I see what you're asking, it's just there are an entire subsets of LARP no one has talked about yet. We can only go on about what we have experienced. For all we know that whole thing could be based on an actual thing that happened at a Supernatural themed convention minus the actual haunting. Like Kripke was just like "This is weird as poo poo, I'm gonna put it in an episode!" Oh I meant the Felicia Day "Queen of the Elves" episode not the "role play Supernatural" episode in the hotel or whatever. I forgot there was more than one. Still may be tough to answer.
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Aug 17, 2015 15:39
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Crazyeyes posted:Oh I meant the Felicia Day "Queen of the Elves" episode not the "role play Supernatural" episode in the hotel or whatever. I forgot there was more than one. Still may be tough to answer. Oh I forgot about that. Uh, well, again boffer wasn't my thing so I know very little about it. Most of the people I know who do boffer I consider dumb but harmless, as compared to the psychos who did MET.
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Aug 17, 2015 15:45
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This whole thread is fascinating, and I want to thank everyone who is giving me a look into this strange subculture. It sounds like the lifers will spend huge amounts of money on whole wardrobes. Does this mean players who wear cheap costumes looked down on? Is wearing the same costume every event acceptable? I would guess a lot of the "fun" from these things comes from playing dress-up, but are there any consequences to having too much fun? Would they ban someone for dressing up like Count Chocula, or would they just work around it? Also, I don't know much about Vampire, but I played the video game. Do people RP as the crazy vampires? How does that work?
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Aug 17, 2015 16:44
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I kinda feel like I'm answering more questions than the OP at this point. Is that a bad thing?ScratchAndSniff posted:It sounds like the lifers will spend huge amounts of money on whole wardrobes. Does this mean players who wear cheap costumes looked down on? Is wearing the same costume every event acceptable? ScratchAndSniff posted:I would guess a lot of the "fun" from these things comes from playing dress-up, but are there any consequences to having too much fun? Would they ban someone for dressing up like Count Chocula, or would they just work around it? ScratchAndSniff posted:Also, I don't know much about Vampire, but I played the video game. Do people RP as the crazy vampires? How does that work? To put it into perspective, imagine if you told a furry to act crazy and he started doing human poo poo. Yeah. It's a bit like that.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:02
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ScratchAndSniff posted:Also, I don't know much about Vampire, but I played the video game. Do people RP as the crazy vampires? How does that work? I played a Malkavian as a one-off, and it worked fine. I just wore blue rubber gloves and refused to touch anything "dirty". But there are apparently people who play them full time, and most of them are the style derisively called "Fish Malks". They play as the random-wacky-monkey-cheese kind of crazy, which really doesn't fit in with the supposed theme. I don't know where the fish part of the name comes from. No one has mentioned historical reenactments much, but I do have a friend who does that for the NYC tenement museum. She was into LARP stuff when she lived here in Ohio, but despite this, I don't get the idea that she'd be up for regular Cam meets. Historical stuff seems to be for people who like to LARP, but grew too mature for the insanity of Vampire.
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Aug 19, 2015 03:50
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In Vampire computer game, I remember them talking about an awesome bad-guy who had an organic castle with floors paved with the screaming people. It was hinted at and, admittedly, I never could beat the last medieval level so I never saw what they were talking about. What was that dude about and how would something so badass work at lower levels? Biomancy is an awesome concept and video games do precious little with it, but I figure some random RPs might.
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Aug 19, 2015 05:11
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Shbobdb posted:In Vampire computer game, I remember them talking about an awesome bad-guy who had an organic castle with floors paved with the screaming people. It was hinted at and, admittedly, I never could beat the last medieval level so I never saw what they were talking about. What was that dude about and how would something so badass work at lower levels? Biomancy is an awesome concept and video games do precious little with it, but I figure some random RPs might. There's a whole clan of vampires in OWOD called the Tzimisce who are like that. It isn't really biomancy as it is blood-magic fueled flesh shaping. They do nasty, nasty things, like making bus-sized amalgamations of screaming innocents called War Ghouls, and performing Menegle-level human experimentation for fun.
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Aug 19, 2015 11:26
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As a boffer larper, I can say that in the group I run with we don't have anyone this bad, our lifers are the ones who spend two evenings a month writing games and helping schedule game dates, though one game every month or two and little ooc communication about ic stuff. We all live normal lives outside of game weekend. As for the inappropriate behavior, we warn them once, and bounce them quickly if they continue to act up.
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Aug 19, 2015 15:15
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bunnielab posted:This is hilariously over dramatic. Like, if your mental state is so fragile that some nerds in capes can gently caress you up this much then something, anything, was going to get you. I guess at least if it was like model trains you could sell them to get some money back out of it. I had to chew on this one a while. What I decided was - you're absolutely right, on several fronts. My mental state was fragile, and something/anything WAS going to get me. I am very grateful it wasn't drugs, or porn, or anything else that might have a lifelong consequence like a disease or mental trauma from which I couldn't recover. However, I did this A/T specifically BECAUSE this is a coping mechanism not often discussed or analyzed. I doubt anyone would be curious about my battle with alcohol. Maybe the porn would've gotten attention. I dunno. And the second part that I want to thank you for is the "some nerds in capes can gently caress you up this much" bit. This is exactly the general opinion of LARPing, and it's also completely incorrect as far as the kind I did. It's not a good idea to pass off the unhealthy as harmless. Dorks are dorks for a reason. I'm not saying that reason is at ALL their fault, but to think nothing bad can come from a group of people because of who/what they are is dangerous. Especially people with grossly stunted social skills, who have weathered years of bullying and unhealthy lifestyles, and have submerged themselves in a culture where there is not only no accountability for their behaviors, but encouragement and reward for them.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:13
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joat mon posted:What would stop the inept detectives from role playingly sticking a stake in the high ranker's chest? The mechanics of the game. If the detectives wanted to do that, there would be rules for combat that the Storyteller (the person overseeing/running the game) would employ to resolve the situation. And since the high-ranker far outstrips them in level/stats because he's been playing longer and has accrued more experience points, there's little hope the newbie detectives could actually stick him with a stake. It'd be like a Level 1 character trying to fight an End Boss.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:15
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Depends on the venue. For Vampire - yes. A lot of politicking and social maneuvering. Again, a huge disadvantage for newbies. Lifers know the game inside-out, they know how to build their character sheets to maximize their powers and abilities, and they have the OOC connections (lame as that sounds) to ensure they start the game with in-character allies and clout. The Lifers are also the only ones allowed to play the most powerful, oldest Vampires. They don't HAVE to, but every one of them did. Even the ones who were claiming the game could be just as fun and successful if you played a brand-new vampire. I think this is a good spot to elaborate on how games went, generally. Like someone said earlier, there's a period of arrival and out-of-character chatting, getting your character sheet in order, all that. Then the Storyteller calls everyone together, does a recap of the last game and tells us the in-character setting for the game tonight. Then we all go in-character. For Lifers playing old vamps, Vampire is a lot of standing around bantering and trying to use social and mental skills to gain information, climb the Vampire hierarchical ladder, and get minions to go out and do your nefarious bidding. For non-lifers, it's more adventurey. The Storteller will take a group off into another room and run a plot usually involving going somewhere in the city and fighting something, or collecting something. Toward the end of the night, Court is called into session and the Prince of the city makes decrees/announcements, transgressors are brought forth to receive punishments, disputes are addressed and that sort of thing. Then the Storyteller calls the game closed, there's more chatting out-of-character, and folks leave.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:25
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Side Effects posted:Do you think documentaries such as Darkon and Monster Camp are representative of LARPing as a whole or did they just strike gold and find some of the saddest people imaginable? Both of those are boffer, which I've never done, so I can't say for sure that they're spot on. BUT, the people in them are familiar, and they're very much real and true. I'd like to see a documentary that explores the aspect of disease, though, in LARP. Sad people are there, yes, but there's also the folks that are really using the games to excuse wretched behavior - sexual harassment, stalking (I've been stalked. Made bad decisions and picked the wrong dude to try and seduce and it went very badly), anger issues, cheating, compulsive lying, all sorts of stuff. As the testimonials in this thread show, it's out there and not as rare as people might think.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:30
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Jeherrin posted:N'thing the 'excessive immersion in role-play is indicative of a deeper problem'. My ex-fiancée was heavily, heavily into written RP; she'd stay up for hours crafting posts, she invested herself into it utterly, and it became a fundamental replacement for real-world emotional and physical intimacy. Not just with me, but with anyone. It would, literally, reduce her to tears. The fights and fall-outs she had with RP partners were of an impossible, ludicrous nature. Man, I know folks like you, bystanders who didn't even wanna deal with this poo poo and it ends up costing them so much. What a mess. I'm really sorry you had to go through all that. It's a poo poo coping mechanism, it doesn't work, it makes you worse and it's the wrong choice. I'm sorry your ex-fiancee didn't get good help and avoid all the crap.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:32
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Victory Yodel posted:Interesting thread and thanks for the description. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. I played D&D like every other nerd when I was in high school so I get the general idea of roleplaying, but how are things actually resolved? In the example above where someone is going to "hack into the tv station's computer to get employment records", does the character in question simply have "hacking skillz"? Does it automatically succeed or do they have to do something? (In the tabletop games I played, someone would have to roll a d20 or something to see if it was successful). Does the GM arbitrate? The characters have skills on their character sheet that they can use if the situation applies to that skill. So, maybe they have a Computer skill with a specialty in Hacking. You're SUPPOSED to roleplay anything than can be, and use your sheet only for things impossible or unsafe to do in real-life (fighting, flying, shooting lasers out your rear end), but no one does. They use their sheets for everything, so it ends up just Stand Up Table Top. Anyway, they system uses a set of cards from 1-10 (playing cards are generally used). You pull a random card, add the number to the number of points you have in the skill you want to use, and see if it's successful. Just like rolling dice, but cards are easier to hold and use when moving about. There aren't foam knives or physical weapons at a theater LARP, like there are at boffer. You would let the person know 'I'm attempting to stab you in the ear' and then follow it with card pulls and combat skills that are on your character sheet. Victory Yodel posted:Is it simply "you can't do that" or you'll never be invited back? Oh, my sweet summer child. No, you can attack anyone you want, and kill their character if you have the skills/sheet to do it, and your pulls succeed. You can also do things like beat them with a motorcycle, set their house on fire and kill their wife and children, and shove a tire iron up their juxie without any protest from the Storyteller. So long as you succeed in your pulls, it can happen. Which is why so many of them use in-character stuff to get away with being horrible to people.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:42
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EATIN SHRIMP posted:Who do I have to larp as to get the most chicks? Doesn't matter. Just mosey in there with an ounce of confidence and they're yours for the taking. Seriously, I saw some vomitous unwashed goobers get laid constantly because they knew how to work the girls with bottomed-out self-esteem. Which is lovely to do, but there ya go.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:47
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Hazzard posted:I recall a few years ago when I had a pile of free time and no hobbies my parents advocated getting into LARPing. I saw a few videos on YouTube and thought it looked like good fun. You have horny loser dudes mixing with girls that have -400 self-esteem. Yeah, there's a lot of sex stuff. Even if it never becomes out-of-character physical, lots and lots of sexual characters and interactions.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:48
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EATIN SHRIMP posted:How often do fights break out because people refuse to be killed in the sword fights? Like no bro you're sword attack didn't do jack poo poo and then I come back with a sword attack that fake chops their head off Fights aren't common, but the most popular trend were revenge characters. Ravyn Bloodmyst would kill Lord Crymsynfart and then Lord Crymsynfart's player would make a new character who just HAPPENED to have a hatred for Ravyn Bloodmyst, and go after the character. You weren't supposed to be allowed to do it; happened constantly.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:53
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Ghogargi posted:The mechanics of the game. If the detectives wanted to do that, there would be rules for combat that the Storyteller (the person overseeing/running the game) would employ to resolve the situation. I'll point you to all the Dark Souls level 1 play through videos of people essentially doing just this.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:55
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Whiskey A Go Go! posted:Is the combat system based more upon character skill sheets or personal skill? I kinda wanna see someone with a kendo background go to a LARP meet in their Bogu and wreak the place. It was all sheet-based. I never saw anyone with a real martial-arts background LARP. I DID see lots and lots of roly-poly sweatbutts who would try to one-up each other by talking about their extensive fight training. Oh! Oh! There was also something called 'Brazilian Rules', which meant actually using out-of-character physical fighting to settle an issue. Allegedly, a LARP down in Brazil had players beat a guy to death over something in-character. Became the stuff of legend. No idea if it's true.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:56
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Ghogargi posted:It was all sheet-based. I never saw anyone with a real martial-arts background LARP. I DID see lots and lots of roly-poly sweatbutts who would try to one-up each other by talking about their extensive fight training. That sounds like the best possible solution.
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Aug 19, 2015 17:02
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Domus posted:
I created and ran games outside the Camarilla that I am, to this day, happy with and proud of. They had no sheets, the plots were totally cooperative, they focused on collaboration, and the players spent months building sets and working together to make cool special-effects and getting the playspace to be as immersive as possible. The goal was to not go out-of-character for the entire weekend. It was lovely, and had those been my only experiences, I wouldn't be doing this A/T. I also created a weekend-long horror LARP targeted at non-LARPers, which was so good. The standard Five People Trapped In A Haunted House deal. The tech we had for it was very neat, and it was a blast to scare the poo poo out of people for two whole days while they tried to figure out how to escape. Again, no sheets, very basic character outlines (like those Host A Murder dinner party games), cooperative and totally immersive. All my stories from those weekends are great. Not a sad/gross one among the lot. They're the only LARP things I don't feel were wastes of my life and time.
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Aug 19, 2015 17:08
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Ghogargi posted:Man, I know folks like you, bystanders who didn't even wanna deal with this poo poo and it ends up costing them so much. What a mess. I'm really sorry you had to go through all that. It's a poo poo coping mechanism, it doesn't work, it makes you worse and it's the wrong choice. I'm sorry your ex-fiancee didn't get good help and avoid all the crap. It was what it was. She was offered help on many occasions; by me, by my parents, by her parents (though I think they had little conception of the true depth of her immersion into the whole thing, but that's perhaps another story). Looking back, I certainly enabled in it many ways. I could have been crueller to be kind, so to speak, but it's a very hard thing to do. She has crippling anxiety that either got worse, or simply became more evident, as our relationship went on. By the time it ended, the fantasy world had taken over her entire life. We would have hour-long blazing rows about her not doing the dishes for a week (we were supposed to share the housework. I cooked; she was supposed to keep the kitchen clean). She wouldn't put anything other than pyjamas on unless she had to go outside. She would shower once a week. We had separate rooms, because she spent her life in a nocturnal sleep cycle, sitting on the internet either typing RP posts, or playing Rift. It consumed her; fictional characters formed a large part of her conversation; IC fights would lead to days of OOC misery and stress, and the characters she created became more and more real. Faced with a fantasy world that I, and the real world, could never compete with, I withdrew and eventually ended it, some two years after I should have. If anyone wants to know what it's like to be the one on the outside, living with a Lifer, I'll answer (assuming that the OP doesn't mind me chipping in. I don't want to derail what is a fascinating thread, for me).
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Aug 20, 2015 13:56
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It seems that long term relationships and engagements being regularly destroyed by partners who decide their VTM LARP is the most important thing in life, is more common than I'd ever imagined. Same thing happened to me: seven years vanished overnight when she decided to break it off and get shotgun married to the LARP'er she'd been cheating on me with, and subsequently make pretending to be a vampire twice a month her entire reason to exist. In retrospect, much retrospect, the signs were clear where she'd lost touch with reality but I do not think there was anything I could have done to halt her slide into that bizarro world. Past a certain point, you and your actions just come to represent everything they're seeking to escape from if you aren't also head-deep in the fantasy. When you get down to it, there's little difference between drug-addicted trailer trash and full blown game-addicts, one just hasn't fully developed the same social stigma yet. Rime fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Aug 20, 2015 |
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Aug 20, 2015 19:20
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Rime posted:It seems that long term relationships and engagements being regularly destroyed by partners who decide their VTM LARP is the most important thing in life, is more common than I'd ever imagined. You're right, drug addicted trailer trash are still considered cool in some circles. 
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Aug 20, 2015 19:36
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Crazyeyes posted:Your stories suggest a much more sexual culture than I would have expected from my idea of LARPing. Is it due to these people using this as a medium to depart their everyday lives and act on these impulses? When questioned (assuming she was confronted about this at all) why the woman was blowing guys left and right, did she just respond with "that's what my character would do"? I assume there are rules against such behavior but maybe not always? Or was this all done out of character and just some freaky nerds who don't know how to lock the door? The girl giving the Blow-J's was doing it out-of-character, and she was never confronted. People talked about it, everyone knew it was happening right there, but no one in 'authority' addressed it with her. And that's standard. And one of the reasons it was so toxic. Again, because Lifers are so bloody afraid to stir the pot lest their membership be revoked and their addiction hampered, it was the most non-confrontational culture I've ever seen. I was complicit in it, absolutely. I had written and organized that game at the camp where it happened, and I absolutely should have walked into that cabin, kicked the dudes out, and had a Come To Jesus meeting with that girl. I was a coward and I cared more about not making waves than I did about what was right. I've learned it doesn't matter what system you're playing, or what the game is like. It's the formation of a culture populated largely by unhealthy people that makes it turn out the was it did. Rime posted:It seems that long term relationships and engagements being regularly destroyed by partners who decide their vampire LARP is the most important thing in life, is more common than I'd ever imagined. I know this may sound awful, and I hope you don't get upset, but I have to mention something. What she did was poo poo, and she absolutely deserves a Karmic kick in her cooze for it. She consciously made the choice to do wrong things, cruel and evil things, and there is no excuse for it. But I don't believe people in that deep can't be helped. Obviously, I got help. You're not responsible for it, because she cut off your support the moment she began cheating and being a bad girlfriend, and you should never continue to be abused by someone in the effort to help them. But I am heartbroken someone didn't try and help her, just like I'm heartbroken if no one tries to help the drug-addicted trailer trash, who I don't really believe is trash at all. No one wants to be evil. Well, I guess some people do, but most don't. I know I didn't. But I had issues that needed treatment, and I was too much of a coward and too filled with self-hate to work for healthy solutions. So I chose things that were easy, even if they were bad, and I found excuse after excuse to keep doing it. Eventually, like a drug, it started to be less and less effective. The validation and endorphins I received through my LARP misbehavior thinned out every time I used it, and by the end it was not doing anything at all. I remember feeling like I was outside myself, screaming condemnation at myself for what I was doing, and still deliberately doing it. And I'll tell you - I didn't think I was worth anything going into LARP, but I thought I was a full-on cartoon villain by the end. I hated who I was so much. I was with someone who was a Lifer at the same time. They knew I was depressed, clinically diagonosed. They watched me those rare times I had moments of clarity and said that the club was a bad thing. They saw me gain weight, saw me withdraw from my family, saw me spend ten hours a day on the computer roleplaying. But they didn't say a single word against it, because they were with a Nerd Queen type, and loved it, and wanted to keep things the way they were. I did so much work in the club and I was so involved, they had a continuous LARP feed for themselves. I'm not saying it's their fault that I was the way I was - I'm just saying they turned a blind eye to what was happening to be able to continue their own unhealthy lifestyle. So if she's still in that mess, I am so sad for her. I can guarantee you she's not happy, and that she is living in a hell of her own making. I am so sorry that you were a casualty in all that; you don't deserve it.
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Aug 20, 2015 19:54
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No, no offense taken. I didn't mean to imply that there was nothing anyone could have done, only that I could not as I didn't have a clue what was going on until it was far too late and already long over. I thought the issues were coming from other areas and tried to address those instead, and sadly your bit aboutquote:But they didn't say a single word against it, because they were with a Nerd Queen type, and loved it, and wanted to keep things the way they were. I did so much work in the club and I was so involved, they had a continuous LARP feed for themselves. I'm not saying it's their fault that I was the way I was - I'm just saying they turned a blind eye to what was happening to be able to continue their own unhealthy lifestyle. proves to be brutally true here with all of her social circle, which at this point is entirely made up of the VTM LARP that she treats as a full-time job. Coupled with uncaring wealthy parents and a constant income stream from them, and, well, yeah. Not really anyone there willing to do anything, just enablers. Myself included, I suppose, since I thought supporting her hobbies and interests was the right thing to do. This all went down within the past year and she's still high on the perceived awesomeness of it, so I'll be hearing from our mutual friends about her continued decline in living standards for a very long time.  Sorry for the derail! Packed up all my mementos of us yesterday, so this thread struck a relevant chord in my head.
Rime fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Aug 20, 2015 |
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Aug 20, 2015 20:23
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Domus posted:"Fish Malks" Ok, as bad as LARP can clearly be, regular old 'dice in the basement' roleplaying can often be just as lame, silly, and/or horrible. In this case the silly explanation for fishmalks comes from one of the tabletop books for the Vampire game, there's a picture of two malkavian vampires, one is kissing a fish. Fish kisser became the mascot for people who wanted to play Looney Toons crazy and not 'dark, deep, grimdark' crazy. Here's the pic in question: 
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Aug 21, 2015 09:56
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Crazyeyes posted:I'll point you to all the Dark Souls level 1 play through videos of people essentially doing just this. But Dark Souls isn't a stats based RPG, it's skill based. In a pure DnD type RPG, like Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights, it is virtually impossible for a level 1 character to kill a level 20 one, assuming the level 20 one is fighting back. Error 404 posted:Fish kisser became the mascot for people who wanted to play Looney Toons crazy and not 'dark, deep, grimdark' crazy. I tried to roleplay a malkavian in my brief time doing table top WOD stuff and it was awful. The problem is that the setting says you're crazy because you have some deep insights into things that "Normal" vampires would never be able to understand, but of course I am a "Normal" person, so I don't understand it either. In the end I found the whole thing too tiring and character switched.
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Aug 21, 2015 10:51
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Gerblyn posted:I tried to roleplay a malkavian in my brief time doing table top WOD stuff and it was awful. The problem is that the setting says you're crazy because you have some deep insights into things that "Normal" vampires would never be able to understand, but of course I am a "Normal" person, so I don't understand it either. In the end I found the whole thing too tiring and character switched. This comes up all the time in LARP regardless of whether it's Vampire. People try and roleplay 'crazy' people and it always comes off as tasteless and tiresome, especially at a fest LARP where you will be around these people all day for 3 days. This is a common problem in fest LARPs, where people who are used to playing 'special snowflakes' in tabletop games try to do the same in a LARP setting, but can't fall back on dice rolls or a fully fleshed out character sheet and get discouraged because no fucker wants to talk to them. My advice to new LARPers is to play relatively normal people, or at least roleplay within a comfort zone for their personality so that people won't get put off by their weirdness and so that they can keep it up for three days. You do get cliques full of people playing characters with massive, multipage backstories, huge amounts and angst and weird personality defects all bouncing off one another. Trying to interact with these people is the loving worst. From my experience, almost all problems with a LARP come down to three issues: 1. The rules allowing for a big power disparity between characters, especially old characters and new characters. 2. No or little character death, so no turnover of old characters 3. OC stuff giving people IC advantages On their own, these problems can not be too bad, for example if you have big power gaps and people getting advantages from out of character activity but characters die quite a lot, things aren't too bad since the powerful characters don't hang around forever. WoD LARPs have all three of the above problems, which in my opinion is one of the reasons you get so many horror stories from the players.
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Aug 21, 2015 12:02
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Ghogargi posted:All my stories from those weekends are great. Not a sad/gross one among the lot. They're the only LARP things I don't feel were wastes of my life and time. Tell us some cool ways you spooked people. And whose house was it? Did the players do anything cool?
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Aug 21, 2015 16:16
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Rime posted:No, no offense taken. I didn't mean to imply that there was nothing anyone could have done, only that I could not as I didn't have a clue what was going on until it was far too late and already long over. I thought the issues were coming from other areas and tried to address those instead, and sadly your bit about I am so sorry. I know the old 'it'll get better and you'll find someone awesome' doesn't work at this stage, but if you ever need to talk about it to someone who totally knows what you're going through, hit me up.
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Aug 21, 2015 18:40
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Calico Heart posted:Tell us some cool ways you spooked people. And whose house was it? Did the players do anything cool? This is a long one. The links are all optionally clickable - just for people who want to see/hear the actual events. It was a friend's house we wired and set up to be able to run scares easily. Raspberry Pi's were used to control the house's lights and TVs and such. There was a main storyteller (me) who was inside the house playing one of the characters trapped there - easy for me to supervise and guide things, though I didn't go out-of-character much. Then, in the workshop behind the house, two people were running the special effects via computer/LAN. We had hidden cameras in the main rooms (not bathrooms) and mics, so they could hear and see the game going on and be able to run scares at the optimal moments. The general plot was six people from different parts of the country all drove over a ley line at the same moment and were warped over to this house. It's raining, so they have to seek shelter in there. Looks like a normal house, but no one's home. As they wait for the rain to stop weird stuff starts happening. If they try to leave, they walk through the blinding rain and always end up at the house's front door (I taped a paper to the door describing this, so they could roleplay it without any of us breaking character). So! Trapped in the house, they start to experience scares based on the individual secrets of their pasts (one guy was a news reporter who found a dead body and sent a video of it to his station without contacting police or the family, one guy was a budding rock musician who's girlfriend killed herself after his drug habit made him lash out at her, that sort of thing). Things escalate and escalate, and they're trying to figure out how to stop it and how to escape, finally learning they have to perform a ritual at midnight. They do, the house quiets, and they can leave. Ta da. Everyone was sent a packet that included their character introduction (Sample: http://www.docdroid.net/8XkDLmB/eli.doc.html ) some out-of-character info about food and sleeping arrangements, and an MP3 or CD with a track they were told to play as they were driving to the game site ( http://picosong.com/uTas ) It basically narrated their in-character arrival and set things up so they could go right into game without having to break character. Ok, some of the best scares: *In the middle of the night, all the TVs in all the rooms came on. There was static, and a little girl's voice telling them to wake up. Then we filled the whole house with this moaning haunty sound effect ( http://picosong.com/uTzm ) - we rigged it so that the subwoofers would actually make the floors vibrate. It was awesome watching folks flee their respective rooms all groggy, and huddle together. *There were pictures hung all over the house - landscapes, portraits, lovely things. When I was alone, one by one, I peeled off the top picture to reveal another that was gory or scary. My favorite was this one -  which was right in front of the toilet, so every time someone took a poo poo, this thing was staring at them the whole time. * Before any haunting began everyone was sitting down and having dinner. We rigged a lightbulb shattering sound effect synced with all the lights in the house going off in one moment. It was a jump-scare, which I know is cheap, but all the lightbulbs shattering made sure the house stayed dark and they could only use candles, which made the atmosphere better. * There was a long hallway leading to the Little Girl's Room (focal point for the hauntings). We used a Pi to program the light in there to flicker intermittently, like it was on the blink. It was the only light in the house that worked. Looking down the hall and seeing the door open and the light flickering scared the poo out of them. Took a while for them to be willing to go in there. * We had an old 1940's radio, and wired it with a pi, so it played Fatal Frame-esque sounds every now and then. A girl saying she didn't want to kill, that she was cold, that sort of thing. * This came up on the computer in the den - http://www.aooa.co.uk/THEPHONE.swf It's a fairly creepy game. The phone numbers were used as a code in a DOS program, when they input the numbers, the radio turned on and Play Or Die came on (http://picosong.com/uTDG/ if anyone wants to listen ) Basically they had to talk about their dark secrets or die. * The ritual had them forced to hold onto this knot of ribbons and not move. So the house was dark, and then the two tech people snuck in using an attic passage, and stood there in black robes and hoods. They would creep closer and closer as the wind howled and the clock chimed and screams and howls went through the house ( http://picosong.com/uTzJ ). We ran this game three times - every single time, the players screamed bloody murder during the finale. It was fabulous. There's a ton more that went into it, but those are the largest scares we had. If you're curious, here's the document I used to run the game. It probably won't make much sense, but it'll give you and idea of what went on. http://docdro.id/5gBC8Wf The other one I created was a space game. We turned the whole house into a spaceship. It was madness.
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Aug 21, 2015 19:48
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Ghogargi posted:This is a long one. The links are all optionally clickable - just for people who want to see/hear the actual events. Some friends of mine run a modern horror game called SlenderLARP, and this sounds almost exactly the same as what they're trying to achieve, just rather more technically advanced. Kudos, I'd play that game in a loving heartbeat, and I normally get bored by zero-combat systems!
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Aug 21, 2015 21:55
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There was a zombie group that did some similar but much less technologically advanced stuff at Origins a few years back. I thought it was loads of fun. They made walls by stacking chairs and putting garbage bags over them. There was a door that was secretly of made of lots of velcroed together parts. It let the zombies either punch right through the door to grab someone, or just suddenly burst through what looked like a solid door. It was impressive. I don't know that it really counts as a LARP, though. There were roles like "Medic" and "Engineer", but no one had characters per se.
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Aug 22, 2015 03:06
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Fascinating thread. So LARPing is basically D&D without the little plastic figures, the dice and a drawn map? As an addict, an alcoholic and someone who suffers from depression, I'm amazed at the parallels between this type of addiction and the ones I use to self medicate. I've seen friends go down the loving rabbit hole with poo poo like WOW, lose their lives, and chastise me for drinking and smoking.
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Aug 23, 2015 22:44
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So me and my friends run a small LARP out of southern California every month. Our game is not any of the popular LARP systems, and most of the people we play with don't play any of the popular LARPs or have any interest in them. I think a big part of the reason for the famed toxicity of the general LARP community is that frankly, every single one of them has terrible loving game design. As mentioned by some other posters, almost every popular larp massively favors older players over newbies, encourages out of session scheming and has insanely complicated rules with terrible presentation. All of this combines to drive out any sensible people who aren't willing to be poo poo on for 2-3 years by the inner circle of people who've been in the game forever. Basically, the only people willing to stick it out in these terrible systems are people who don't value their time or self at all. So, the key to LARPing without having all this terrible poo poo happen is to make a system that is simple, friendly to casual/newer players, and naturally breaks up cliques that form. We accomplish this by having a system that: 1) Runs without a dedicated GM (thereby avoiding the problem of GM cliques and favoritism) 2) Has 0 accumulation of character power over time. This puts new players on the same level as experienced players, and has the side benefit of driving off the toxic shitheads who can't handle not being able to lord over the dirty casuals. 3) Putting a strict limit on how long we can make the rules document, so new players aren't put at a disadvantage through not being able to understand the rules, and lowering the barrier to entry so people without gaming experience can play 4) Rules that don't allow weird/disturbing roleplaying behavior such as seduction/mind control/sexual acts without all parties explicit consent. Our group isn't large compared to the really popular LARPS (Around 10-20 people each month), but they are all cool people, and we've never run into any really problematic behavior.
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Aug 24, 2015 06:14
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Holy poo poo I want to do something like that haunted house game. Or, exactly that.
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Aug 24, 2015 07:11
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