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I have LARPed on and off for several years. I know you said people would say they doubt your stories but I do not. Some of the people I played with were refugees from the bigger WOD games you describe and they had stories like what you shared. I was lucky with good GMs who enforced rules and were not afraid to boot people and tell them not to come back. Oddballs and deviants rarely lasted more then one night. We always met at someone's house and never had more then one or two new players a night so we controlled the group. I imagine at a con you can't turn people away. Most players were leaning more towards late 20s to mid 40s in age with the occasional older guy or gal or young person. The sweet 60 year old lady who played a Tremere and always brought cookies to game was one of my favorites, she could go from her sweet grandma persona to "It's not a Masquerade Violation if you kill everyone involved" in seconds. It was kind of scary how good she was at taking on the persona but she didn't take it too seriously once the scene ended. She was just a good actor. Then again I did not obsess about it. It was my fallback plan on Saturday nights if I had no other real plans. I could see how it could suck people in and I am glad you got out of it.
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Aug 11, 2015 07:08
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faarcyde posted:I've read this whole thread and have no idea what actually goes on at one of these. Could you describe your standard LARP? Is it like what civil war reenactors do? A WoD LARP is usually Vampire. You basically take on the persona of a vampire (or possibly ghoul). Usually the game revolves around a neutral safe space called Elysium where Vampires politic, try to get others to kill each other or kill them themselves. Sometimes you try to suck another vamp dry and eat their soul to consume their power. Usually groups split off with the equivalent of a GM to get involved in adventures. You have things like rival Vampire sects, Vampire hunters, really old vampires up to who knows what, werewolves, breaches to the Masquerade (veil of secrecy for Vampires hiding them from mortals), etc. One player is the Prince and in theory has almost absolute power but others play the "Elder Council" (called the Primogen) who check him or herto some degree or sometimes even make him or her their pawn and there are other offices like Sherriff (enforcer) and Harpy (social status judge). You also compete for boons to get ahead, hunting territory, position, whatever. Conflicts are decided by paper, rock, scissors with various stats influencing the results. Basically your goals are for you to decide. Some people costume; some do not. Official rules are usually no physical contact or actual weapons (fake or real) and no actions like biting or the like. They were enforced at the games I played but I have heard stories of games where it was a free for all.
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Aug 11, 2015 07:16
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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? Nothing. One of the meta plots of Vampire is that the old fear the young because they have numbers and one form of killing vampires gives you their power. The old manipulate the young to keep them off-balance and divided. In most games I played the bastard elder vamps that threatened death or heaped abuse on the young were ambushed and killed by large groups. A friend told me of one game where the elders (read long running players) were a united cabal. The young got tired of it and forged a pact with the Sabbat (enemy vampires) and joined them en masse and then led an invasion and used all their information on the older vamps to pull off a clean sweep.
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Aug 11, 2015 23:26
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mlmp08 posted:Mario Party owns, though, except for those nasty blisters the N64 version would give you if you were committed to winning. One other thing I have found. LARPing (without physically skilled combat) and tabletop RPGs in general are some of the few activities you can participate in that everyone can convince themselves they are good at. There are no overt winners or losers. You end up with socially deficient idiots convinced they are machiavellian masterminds, uncharismatic dolts convinced they are masters of dark sensuality, and on and on. It is like the dumb kid who found Doom, turned on God mode, and assumed he was a skilled video game player. In most other hobby activities if you are bad at something you will find out quickly. You can't windsurf or play tennis, play a tabletop boardgame, without eventually finding out how good you are at it. Most people take their amateurish status in these activities in stride with a dose of humility and get better or not and just enjoy the activity for the sheer fun of it. With RPGs and Vampire LARPs that never comes up. I enjoy LARPing and RPGs but dread joining a group I don't know because these kinds of people are drawn to it. You are worried you will end up spending time with an idiot that thinks rolling high numbers on a die is a mark of his genius or that having attended longer means she is adept at playing a Toreador Primogen. I played a one-shot game of Werewolf (closely related to Vampire) LARP once with some friends. We decided to keep it PG-rated and a lot of people brought kids and teenagers. We decided to invert the social structure and made the kids and teens the elders and the adults played the young pups out for glory. It was great fun. I think some kids even learned how hard it is to parent as their parents took an almost perverse pleasure in causing trouble. No one cared about how powerful everyone else's character was. We just created a great story, ended with an exciting climax, and went home happy. That gets lost a lot in Vampire (and some other LARPs) as people show up to guardedly bask in their insecurities and issues instead of having fun with it. It's a shame because they can be amazing if done right with the right people.
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Sep 16, 2015 07:06
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CheeseThief posted:That one shot sounds like a lot of fun! It gives me the feeling that there's a lot of unspoken context information involved in LARPing that is both a product of what a game is and what it will grow to be, something like "younger players get to play the eldest characters" sends a certain message to players and how they interact with the game. So when you've got a lifer running the show the message and context of the game will carry their, uh, I don't have a good word here. Politics? Basically I'm saying LARP suffers from feedback loops where lifers will consume the game due to their dedication and then cultivate an atmosphere that breeds lifers. Things get as bad as they do because their microculture will become increasingly self serving and appealing to people who want a slice of that. And Vampire LARP is probably one of the worst games for it. In most tabletop RPGs the players are relatively evenly-matched and are expected to cooperate on some level. In Vampire Pen and Paper there is a little more oneupmanship but it usually develops a kind of family dynamic; the "I can mess with my siblings but if anyone from outside does we all come down on you". In a LARP it is more 'dog eat dog' and characters are very unequal in power. This can add to the game so long as the people with power are adding to the fun and, while playing a character, act to keep everyone involved. Too often they are not. I found when I was an Elder one of the best ways to get new players involved was to give them what amount to side-quests with rewards. Tell them to try to recover something at a site they would visit, get a piece of information about another character, get a copy of some files, etc. I would often just make up what I wanted off the cuff. What was really funny was when they started sharing with each other what I was after and trying to figure out what I was up to. Occasionally I actually asked for something I wanted but there were so many false leads that they could never put the pieces together. The Vampire game rewards survival over fun when it comes to being able to participate in those kinds of games. It is like playing an MMO with permadeath. Sounds like it would be fun but the people who scrabble to the top are the ones who never take chances, never go out on a limb, and never explore for fear of the consequences and no one enjoys it. I was in a Vampire LARP and was expecting to have to quit or at least heavily cut back involvement due to other commitments. I had a teleevangelist Elder on the Primogen and decided to go out with a bang. I talked to the Storyteller/GM and started building a compound, siring childer vampire, creating ghouls, and getting my hand on heavy firepower. He started dropping clues and the whole thing eventually led to a big battle at the compound while other vampires tried to fend of the FBI and local law enforcement so that the Masquerade was not blown wide open. It was great fun and they pulled it off with a few casualties and defeated me and I got a great death scene. Almost everyone had a great time. One of the players though was almost visibly distraught at my stupidity. He asked why I would throw away a character with so much power for something this stupid and then explained to me how my plan to take over the city was flawed and how he would have done it. I explained that I put the flaws in intentionally to make it more interesting for the other players to find and exploit and that I had fun and that bad decisions (even intentional ones) can lead to great stories. He didn't get it. Incidentally while everyone else was having fun gunning down religious fanatics, mind-controlling the FBI, running from fires, and generally having a blast, he was sitting back in Elysium annoyed that no one cared about his petty politicking all night. Lifers also have a problem with self-selection. Games riddled with people living out their weird power fantasies can't keep new players. No one wants to play in a game where the established players do all the fun stuff while the newbies are their pawns. Avoid games like this. A rule of thumb for Vampire LARPs: If the Prince and the Primogen spend more then an hour a game in a council meeting instead of having fun then the rest of the players should band together and burn down the building where they are meeting. You'll be doing them a favor; they need the excitement.
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Sep 17, 2015 06:36
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Sion posted:I think he only had dots in Auspex. And he didn't aura read the cops?
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Dec 18, 2015 08:23
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One good way of telling how much fun a LARPer is going to be is their backstory. If it is long and miserable and involves revenge, trauma, etc then they are probably going to be insufferable. If they keep it short and actually give some positive motivations for being where they are in the game they are more likely to be fun and engaging. In a fantasy LARP the guy who is adventuring in order to feed his otherwise happy family is more fun then the guy who claims to have been victimized by three enemies and lives to kill them all. This is another reason World of Darkness LARPs tend to go wrong. Everyone is supposed to be a victim of something in the game no matter which of their games they play. In tabletop this is mitigated a bit by the players usually banding together to rise above the generally oppressive atmosphere. In a LARP everyone's goal tends to be to amass power and create the oppressive atmosphere.
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Oct 15, 2016 02:11
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Liquid Communism posted:99% of why Werewolf was the only good OWOD game. "gently caress it, we're just going to be superheroes." works there. Changeling could be too. While they have the tragic dying out thing similar to Werewolf it also had the fanciful air of fae only being able to go on if they make the world a bettter place or, at the least, a more exciting place. I have fond memories of a Buffy Whedonesque campaign where we played a bunch of High School students who wandered off to slay dragons and quest for our noble baron doing great deeds between class periods. Just good fun.
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Oct 15, 2016 06:08
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Skunkrocker posted:As someone who thinks anthro animal characters are really keen I'm not a huge fan of Werewolf, or Changing Breeds. However, that said, I notice the majority of furries REALLY like Changeling. And they all play as Pooka.
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Oct 17, 2016 18:07
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Werewolf is one of those games that just plain doesn't work for LARPing. The setting is great if you do it right but god drat do people tend to never, ever do it right. I mentioned the only successful Werewolf LARP I played ran on one-shot adventures and ignored a lot of the rules to streamline things. The best game was one where we invited everyone to bring their teenagers and older kids and had them play the tribal elders and veterans while the parents played the young wolves who were encouraged to do stupid things. Watching young teens chew out their parents for irresponsible eco-terrorism was one of the neatest things I have ever seen. I found few of the old WoD worked with LARPing. Mage was too overpowered to monitor without way too much staff. Werewolf is a combat-fest game which usually means the same thing. Wraith loses the Shadow mechanics which was one of the few neat things in that setting. Vampire and Changeling were the best for LARPing even if the players were, in general, not good for LARPing. Xenocides fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Oct 20, 2016 |
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Oct 20, 2016 17:28
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Ghogargi posted:Thank you for the advice. She and I have started joint counseling, and the focus has been how she's going down the same path I did. I think it's hard for her to accept it, because adolescents by nature want to state unequivocally that they are nothing like their parents. But we're slogging away at it. Take some comfort from the fact that you got through it and out of it. Hopefully your daughter can too. I hope it all works out.
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Oct 26, 2016 07:05
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