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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. The answer is 'it depends'. Skills are defined as 'hard' (how good you actually are at swinging a sword/whatever) and 'soft' (how big the numbers are on your character sheet). Some combat systems favour one or the other. I used to play the system Camrath goes to (Lorien Trust) which has some hard skill but soft skill plays a big part. You can kill people with ranged magic, which in LT just requires a chant for a few seconds following by pointing and shouting the call at your target. Also, there is a huge power difference between characters statted for various jobs. A basic person in light armour has 2 hits on each of their locations, someone in heavy with extra body hits, magic armour and a ritual might have something like 10+ per location, so even if you are the best swordsperson in the world you are going to have trouble chewing through that many hits without going down yourself. The systems I play, Empire and Odyssey, are much more hard skill based. No ranged damage, so you have to physically hit someone with a weapon to get them with magic. The difference between a basic person in their pants and a full combat character is only a few hit points and people in general go down much faster, so a well-trained fighter can legitimately take out fully armoured statted warriors. Also you can get stab safe pikes and halberds which are a pain in the dick to fight against, gently caress.
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Aug 13, 2015 17:52
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Victory Yodel posted:How is bad behavior discouraged? So if I'm at one of these sessions and decide I want to kill some other guy do I simply walk up and jab a foam knife in his ear? Do I tell the GM that this is what I'm going to do and the guy can try to thwart it? Is it simply "you can't do that" or you'll never be invited back? So in 'boffer' LARP (quote marks because that term isn't used in Europe - latex weapon larps are the norm) you could just try killing someone by walking up and stabbing them. Basically a bunch of things depending on the ruleset will affect how likely you are to succeed: 1. The dudes mates might beat the gently caress out of you 2. Some systems have a police or militia who can arrest, punish and maybe execute you. Their effectiveness drastically varies from system to system. 3. If you have some kind of special skill, item or magic that drop the guy on the stop, make them stop moving or make them not be able to talk 4. Your own faction/nation/group/whatever might punish you for breaking the law 5. How tough individual players are in the setting - sometimes it's just not possible to drop someone quickly since they have so many hits. There are other options to just murdering people in the dark though - causing people to have 'accidents' on the battlefield is common, and a lot of systems have poisons that you can put in people's drinks or use as vapour bombs. In pretty much all cases you need to get a ref to be on hand when you are doing the killing though, people running LARPs tend to look down very heavily on people murdering other characters with no refs around due to the high risk of cheating and players getting buttmad about being killed. Some settings and rulesets have built in plot reasons for why killing other players is bad. Example: At a system I play called Outcast, the plot was 5 nations retaking back a continent infested with a supernatural plague. In order to fend off the plague, the players had to use teamwork to power magical banners to protect them, thus players were encouraged to work together and not infight or 'bad things' would happen in the story. Alternatively you get a setting like the defunct LARP 'Maelstrom' where killing characters got you a soul which you could sacrifice to your god, which let to the most murder heavy system i've ever been to. There's a reason going for a slash in the bushes at night was a 'danger piss' at Maelstrom. You do definitely get trolls and griefers at LARPs who are just out to kill people for fun. How effective they are depends mainly on the system and whether the organisers want to foster that sort of attitude.
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Aug 13, 2015 22:58
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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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LARPing is destroying my life and soul because the pictures just came back from the last event and i'm eating in pretty much every one of them. I am the fat LARPer stereotype
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Sep 15, 2015 09:57
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Xenocides posted:One other thing I have found. Jesus christ, this. The amount of Dunning-Kruger at social LARPs is pretty incredible, especially since you have to work out the people who are cool but are playing idiots for fun or to cause drama, and the people who actually are complete idiots. At the larger systems you also get the 'big fish' in a small pond issue, where people will have come from their local system of 15-30 people having been king poo poo of gently caress mountain, only to find out that they are hopelessly outmatched in wit and charisma to get ahead in the game. Imagine when Ned Stark moves to King's Landing and gets poo poo on by pretty much everyone and that will give you a good idea of what I mean.
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Sep 16, 2015 11:56
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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. This is definitely an element yeah. One of my biggest pet peeves is LARPs where you are basically expected to turn up to as many events as physically possible and if you don't, you aren't worth the time of day for the people in charge regardless of your other merits. This is a big problem for fest LARPs where each event is a weekend affair that might be several hours travel away + the cost of a ticket, which is usually at least £50, and you might be expected to go to 6+ of these a year. So that's 6 weekends of your life, probably at least 6 days holiday (more if you live a long rear end distance away) and around £450+ in tickets and food a year just to be in with a shot for being considered for stuff. Granted this isn't always the case and sometimes people who don't turn up to absolutely everything get stuff...at which point the lifers start pitching a shitfit and saying its not fair, they put in all this time and effort etc. You can imagine how this is pretty impenetrable to new people coming in who just want a sniff at some of the cool stuff, only to get stonewalled because they 'haven't put the effort in'. Fest LARPs also tend to have stringent rules on internet roleplay, usually to the effect that you cannot use forums or IM to discuss matters as your character between events, to avoid the problem of people camping on forums 24/7 and deciding everything outside of the game itself. I've seen what happens when this gets out of hand and it's ugly to see the lifer clique develop and shut everyone else out, since they dedicated the time to staying up till 3am on the internet and roleplaying pouring cups of tea on a messageboard.
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Sep 17, 2015 11:46
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Anoia posted:Towards the end of the night (and the fight took ALL NIGHT), the rule lawyering in a desperate attempt to save themselves got pretty bad. One of the vampire players who started in a full suit ended up pacing around with his sleeves rolled up, his tie loose, the MET book in his hand. It was like the nerdiest courtroom drama ever and it ended with his character getting his head punted across the room Someone should post up the MET rules on Fatal and Friends cos godDAMN those are some lovely rules for LARPing. There is a terrible, terrible habit for people to create LARPs based on whatever their favourite tabletop RPG is, ending up with 250 page monstrosities for a game that you are supposed to play in real time, on the fly, and having no understanding of why their game doesn't work very well.
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Sep 30, 2015 17:24
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Camrath posted:Now, Evan Omigod I know this guy, he is such a shitstain At a different system you got bonuses for having a bigger group, so he bought himself a ticket and then paid for 25 sockpuppet characters to turn up, who were 'totally his friends and were real people, they just couldn't make it to this event you see'. So that's like £1300 on tickets for fake people in order to say he was king poo poo on the field, essentially. Eventually he trashed a several thousand pound tent and got banned.
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Oct 1, 2015 17:53
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Puppy Time posted:As a huge dork, I tend to put a fair amount of LARP elements in tabletop gaming just because I really like adding character details like body language and (occasionally) clothing choice. Though from my fleeting experience with playing Camarilla stuff in someone's house, it's kind of more boring than regular tabletop for the reasons you cite. Part of the reason for that is that from the Vampire LARPs I have seen, you don't have costume requirements. You can just wear a nametag saying "I look like this" while continuing to exist as a fat, sweaty neckbeard in a trenchcoat. Also the fact that you have a big choice of skills and a character sheet means you don't actually *need* social skills, you can just dominate people to get around that problem!  Puppy Time posted:Boffer LARPs are pretty ace, if you can find a decent one. I've got fond memories of my youth spent hiding in the woods at night in winter, or getting beat up with glorified nerf weapons. I dunno about immersion or anything, it's just a lot of fun to run around acting like someone else with a bunch of other dorks. Immersion is something that is evolving over time as LARP matures as a hobby. A lot of 'boffer' (we don't use that term in Europe as combat LARPs are the norm) LARPs are taking more cues from the Nordic style and making immersion more enforced. So for example keeping in character canvas tents in a totally separate field to the out of character plastic sleeping tents, so when you are wandering around the in-character game area there is a minimum of distracting out of place poo poo. A number of games are also moving from having game referees in high-vis yellow jackets to more in-character things like spirits that you can interact with, or at least less obtrusive uniforms. LARP in the UK is going through an interesting period as there has been a crop of new, high quality LARPS while the biggest 2 systems (Lorien Trust and Empire) have pretty opposite viewpoints on a lot of important stuff, so you are seeing a bunch of changes in a short time.
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Oct 16, 2015 15:28
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Everblight posted:I've been playing in or running a Vampire LARP for almost 9 years now, and I've come up with one very simple metric for if someone is just a cool person generally who likes to play Vampire High School Politics and be a fangdork, or whether they're a terrible person generally who takes this poo poo too serious and/or is a nutbar: Also, if someone's greatest achievement in life is something that they have achieved in a LARP they are a double tryhard and will definitely make your LARP life aggravating and are someone to avoid in real life since they will never shut up about their LARP character goddamn I am just trying to have a smoke No YOU'RE the one who's sending people letters so you can get elected General in a LARP next April, shut up
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Oct 23, 2015 15:09
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Puppy Time posted:I think it depends on whether the story is an ACTUAL story, or whether it's basically "I rolled a good number and was happy." It's typically along the lines of 'my character had bigger numbers than the other guy, you should check out how big my numbers are  '
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Oct 24, 2015 10:04
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hxcorpse posted:This is exactly loving why larp and non-larp social circles have always been a terrible mix for me. I do a vampire larp, have for a few years, and it's 90% awful 5% intriguing like a train wreck 5% absolutely worth it, but getting these people to socialize and NOT talk about their goddamn make-believe vampires is loving impossible unless it is explicitly and repeatedly stressed that HEY GUYS, THERE ARE VISITORS HERE FROM REALITY, PLEASE TALK ABOUT THINGS OTHER THAN WHO IS THE NEXT PRINCE OF BUMBLEFUCK VAMPIRE LAND. Are you me (except replace vampire with another LARP)
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Oct 25, 2015 19:15
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Milky Moor posted:But, really, I can't think of anything that positive to say about LARPing. I think it could be that, a., it promotes physical activity in people who need it and, b., it can help teach some people skills like tailoring, prop-making and so on. Like, this thread is specifically about LARP horror stories. There are plenty of people who go to LARP because it is fun and good and do not get into super weird incestous gently caress webs. You sound like you need to relax. Here, have a war rhino: 
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Oct 26, 2015 16:36
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Camrath posted:I'm soo sick of seeing that loving war rhino everywhere.. You seem to be allergic to good things silvergoose posted:Decent point; if your character would hit another player's character, you just do it and they fall down and then you tell everyone they are evil and you deathstrike them and then they have to leave. The downside is it leaves you open to griefers who like to kill people just for a laugh and steal their (in character stuff). Going for a piss in the bushes at night is a lot more exciting when someone can stab you in the back in the process which means you have to buy new clothes for your character 
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Oct 27, 2015 15:34
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Re. Paintball Guns in larp instead of padded crossbow bolts/arrows, a lot of the poo poo you wear is handmade, fragile, expensive, impossible to wash or most likely some combination of all the above. For example my current armour setup involves brigandine, which is small steel plates sewn in between two padded cloth layers. There is no easy way for me to wash that, and there are plenty of people wearing more expensive poo poo than that to battle like velvet doublets under their armour. There was a big problem at the main system I do with archery, as bow and crossbows were considerably better in this system than any other large system previously. It also had a looser tolerance on what arrows you could use - a lot of UK LARPs require you to use 2-layer foam heads, while Empire allowe to use re-enactment arrows that are harder, smaller and rubber tipped. This, combined with a lot of inexperienced people taking up archery because it was mechanically good meant a lot of accidents in the first year and a bit, with someone losing sight in one eye, and 2 people I know personally getting black eyes and a scratched cornea respectively. A lot of that came from people picking arrows up off the ground which would be covered in dirt, sand and splinters, and that getting into people's eyes when it was shot at them. There were also people full drawing and aiming at people's faces from point blank range, which suuuuuuuck. They've since cracked down on people being assholes with bows and banned reenactment arrows which has made things a lot better thankfully! Also talk about the cop incident, we need more horror stories here
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Dec 16, 2015 16:34
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Sion posted:I dunno, I think their emotional state was pretty loving clear. Has anyone played in a LARP that actually has poo poo like alignments and detect Good/Evil? Because that sounds like the loving worst
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Dec 18, 2015 17:04
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Anoia posted:I wish I could say I was surprised, but that's exactly what I'd expect from marines who also LARP.  The only forces guys I have met while LARPing just had the advantage of actually, you know, being in shape
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Dec 21, 2015 17:50
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HEY GAL posted:were they marines though Nah, RAF or Army guys. They would still gently caress anything though because *squaddies* The real motherfuckers are riot policemen though, like 2 generals (of ~30) are riot police. Turns out beating the gently caress out of unruly mobs in formation with batons and shields is somehow applicable to mass LARP fights, who knew
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Dec 21, 2015 18:50
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HEY GAL posted:like i said, a bunch of the guys i knew in reenactment used to be antifa street brawlers That's the difference between LARPers and reenacters, reenacters use their powers for good Except for the guys who keep getting their dongs out clearly
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Dec 22, 2015 11:04
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The Endbringer posted:This thread is fascinating. I'm currently on page 6, so sorry if this has been asked between then and now, but has anyone ever thought of character expiration? In a local University system i've helped run, we force people to play new characters every year for exactly this reason. As its a lot of people's first time LARPing the last thing we want is a clique of overpowered people who all already know each other in-character blocking any new people out of the interesting stuff. A lot of LARPs are relatively short run affairs that only last a few years tops, but for the long running festival LARPs this is a bone of contention. A lot of comes down to how powerful new characters are compared to old ones. Some systems have diminishing returns on character advancement, so you effectively have to spend more XP than a starting character to get better at stuff. This means its effectively impossible to be really good at everything since you don't have enough points, but you will still likely have an edge on 'younger' characters. Other LARPs take their notes more from pen & paper RPGs, where the more XP you have the more options open up. This can lead to situations where older characters are basically untouchable to new players and can effectively render other characters obsolete. There is also the fact you allude to that some systems end up with a 'lunatics running the asylum' situation, where powerful, old characters are the ones making key decisions for everyone, and unfortunately are pretty unlikely to take a hit to their own power for the good of the new guys.
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Feb 5, 2016 11:40
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Doctor_Fruitbat posted:I play another UK fest system called Curious Pastimes, which has given me 15 drama-free years of good friends, good times and fond memories (seriously, this thread has been like staring into some hideous negaverse where everything I love has been horribly corrupted), and it does an excellent job of stamping on special snowflakes and egomaniacs. I'll see if I can write up an effort post about its mechanics later on. I'd be interested to hear what you have to say, because the stories i've heard from the (admittedly few) CP players I know paint a pretty different view.
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Feb 5, 2016 15:39
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Camrath posted:Well, I've never run into anything like that. Tbh if I have a problem with LT it's that you can become so much more powerful than normal characters as opposed to what you described upthread.. But at the same point that's also one of its charms. Wow, that's unusual. I personally have a tonne of experiences of just being plain stonewalled on things we had planned, and I would say most of the people I know had either had similar experiences or have become plot reps themselves. I think the big issue here, at least for me, is that often the answer is simply 'No, you can't do that.' with no explanation and no recourse. It's really jarring to just be told you can't do something without an actual in-game reason for it or any consistency and just to be left with your dick in your hand to show for it. As an example, me and my group were a bunch of people whose hometown had been wrecked in-game by a snake demon who had since become a god. Naturally, we were setting ourselves to kill said god, and had spent some time finding out several methods in-game to do so, and had checked that these were indeed legit and not people bullshitting. When we had something of a plan and went to a ref to see how mechanically that would work, and what we would need to do, we were just told 'You can't kill gods. It would set a bad precedent'. That was that, good game, try again. Camrath posted:I only started in '06 so all the drama is years before my time, but i'v had a lot of CP players majorly bash the LT to me, which I have to admit is a turn-off (it's also one of the multiple issues I have with the stereotypical empire player). I strongly believe in 'live and let live' when it comes to the differing systems myself. I think a big difference here is that a lot of people got their start in LARP through LT and had actually had bad experiences, while I know a lot of LT players who bitch about Empire via things that they have heard but have never actually gone. Like, I know I almost certainly would not like CP since it is not my bag, but I would not complain about it the same way I would about LT where I had actual multiple lovely encounters.
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Feb 11, 2016 13:40
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Camrath posted:At the Lorien Trust games I attend there's little kids in every faction, dedicated kid's plot to keep them occupied (best to wear a cup if you monster for them though.. Yowch) and the entire field is amazingly protective of them. Only time I've seen everyone drop whatever they were doing instantly is when a missing child call came through on the radio. That's cos kids have foam hammers and are at knee/groin height. In Empire there is basically an IC school run by OOC teachers, and kids can take an exam to become fully fledged players if they pass (before that they can't hurt/be hurt by adults or hold in-character property and skills etc.) This leads to grown adults having earnest conversations about having to kill a 12 year-old's character because they passed the exam, then managed to convince the school to magically curse someone and gently caress up their income for a full year. LARP is weird
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Mar 31, 2016 19:20
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Camrath posted:Triggered as gently caress.. One hand went straight to protecting my family jewels at the sight of that picture. A pack of kids (i'm talking like 20 here) tried to crucify me as a monster once Also kids are smart, they know that if they knock you down and physically sit on you, you can't get up and respawn to fight them again. Clever girl
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Apr 1, 2016 11:28
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BiggerJ posted:So, is larping EVER anything but a bad idea? If someone wants to try larping, what should they avoid, and what should they keep in mind? Or is larping something literally nobody should ever do? (The answers to these questions would of course very depending on where one lives.) I'd avoid anything World of Darkness related like the plague, which is mainly Vampire but less often Werewolf and Mage. The almost all the people I know involved in them are insufferable nerdy dickheads, anyone with an ounce of sense tried them and got out as soon as possible. Fest LARP is cool, especially if you have a bunch of people to with as a group. One of the nice things about fest larping is that you can really do as much or as little as you want - I know a fair amount of people who treat it as a camping and barbecue weekend with the occasional break to beat up orcs. Or you can be a tryhard like me and attempt to get in characters positions so your name can be on a wiki. YMMV! Liquid Communism posted:Like any nerdy hobby, what you get out of it will depend on how low you set your bullshit tolerance. Just don't put up with the crazies and you'll avoid 90% of the drama. Yup. Also, like any nerdy hobby the moderation is important. Some systems will ban remorseless dickheads and will tell others to tone their activity down, while others are much more hands off and so tend to be populated by more griefers and arseholes. MikeCrotch fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 10, 2016 13:52
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Milky Moor posted:My Facebook feed has been filled with people histrionic about the fact they have 'post-LARP depression' after a weekend away. A lot of LARPers seems to suffer from Zak Snyder syndrome, where stuff can only have gravitas if it is DARK and GRITTY. Too many emaciated nerds who all want to be Batman. I once went to an in-character party where you had a fill in a form at the door covering all the details of your DARK AND TRAGIC BACKSTORY. Like "Check the box corresponding to each of your dead relatives" and "Check this box if you are on a lifelong quest to recover a family heirloom".
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Apr 14, 2016 16:39
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Doctor_Fruitbat posted:Backstories are loving worthless unless you're an NPC involved in some plot that the players are trying to unravel. No-one cares about a tragic backstory except their own, it isn't needed for you to play your character however you want and Reasons I Invented For Why I'm Super Cool Vol. 795 is the worst topic of conversation both IC and OOC. We once had a person in our group who had, no joke, 30 A4 pages of backstory. As you can probably guess, they were one of the most milquetoast, timid and risk-averse players I have ever met. They had a whole little clique who would spend fests literally sitting around talking about all the cool poo poo their characters had done outside of the actual game.
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Apr 15, 2016 12:58
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ScratchAndSniff posted:When I think griefer, I think of video games where fat ogres stand in doorways so nobody can pass or teamkillers in FPSs. Some are dumb and some are really funny, but they tend to be people going out of their way to get other players mad, particularly the ones who take the game too seriously. LARP griefers are people who will kill people 'for the lulz' basically, which is particularly annoying in LARP since playing a character is both a financial and emotional investment, not to mention the fact that you might have spent some time trying to work your way to a position of power which is now wasted. Now for most games PvP is part of the system and being able to kill another player is an important check and balance on people getting too much power, so being killed in a contract hit or whatever is usually taken in good humour. Getting killed by some randomer who has no idea who you are and just wants to loot you (or not even that) sucks though, and really sours some people on a game. Really it all comes down to how willing a playerbase is willing to put up with that sort of activity, and how willing event organisers are to letting it slide. Some systems will take particularly extreme measures, such as going to known PvP players (the LARP community, at least in the UK, is small enough to allow this) and basically telling them not to kill too many people or they will be banned. I've also heard of players getting killed in PvP and the event referees just telling them to go back on the field, since having too many PvP deaths can tank a system if they don't feel safe. As for the funniest griefing story, at the penultimate event of a system called Maelstrom (notorious for having a tonne of griefing and PvP) I was in a short-lived group of snake dudes and chicks who were apocalypse cultists. We had a great time, going around banging drums, chanting and scaring the poo poo out of people by telling them the world was going to end, so we attracted a few stragglers whose characters had died and wanted some new people to play with. One such person had a bunch of awesome looking dragon props - wings, a head, tail, huge stuff. Turns out that he was originally playing a dragon character, for which the minimum costume requirement was an 8 foot long full body prosthetic with wings. As you can imagine that is not a cheap costume. Dude had made his character for the first time that event, walked onto field in his cumbersome dragon gear only to get jumped and stabbed to death by some guy 6 feet inside the entrance to the playing area. RIP Captain Narwhal posted:Have you LARPers watched the movie Role Models? I loved the LARP scenes and from the way the community is described itt, it sounds like they got a lot right. Role Models is much more about US LARP than European LARP, which tends to be more 'serious' and about immersion. While Lorien Trust (the system Camrath is talking about) would probably allow you to dress up as KISS (if not encourage it), a lot of other systems have strict costume and style guides, and you would get taken aside by a ref very quickly if you turned up dressed like KISS or something else inappropriate. Here is an example of a style guide for what people would call a 'stricter' LARP. Other LARPs will just go with something like 'No jeans, no trainers, no brand t-shirts'. Some LARPs will just say gently caress it, we're all running around waving foam swords, who gives a poo poo what you wear?
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Apr 16, 2016 00:20
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Doctor_Fruitbat posted:Yeah, there'll always be a certain amount of inspiration/plagiarism in LARP - my faction is called the Jhereg, which is nicked wholesale from a book. And you're right, there were plenty of Legolas' for a while. In Empire you have the Navarr, who are the woodsy tribal tracker/archer nation. It's basically the Legolas Ghetto.
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Apr 17, 2016 11:10
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:The League's brief might as well be "Hey have you seen the Borgias at all?" FTFY ScratchAndSniff posted:In the stabber's defense, it sounds like this guy griefed himself. If I'm roleplaying a hero dude and a dragon shows up, that dragon is going to get stabbed and looted... That's what dragons are for, after all. Not videos that I can recall, but UK Larp facebook groups and forums periodically explode in racist arguments now and again. The most recent and infamous was 'Drowgate', which began with someone pointing out that maybe playing a drow, which involves wearing literal blackface, is not the most cool thing to do in TYOOL 2016. The argument pretty quickly spiralled out of control, with one side calling the other SJWs and the usual, and the other side saying literally every LARPer was racist. It was not the most dignified thing I have seen on the internet. The worst thing I have seen in person is someone unironically calling my black friend 'half-caste', and then doubling down 
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Apr 17, 2016 16:11
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M_Sinistrari posted:Needless to say the friendship was over at that point and from what I later heard, she really got deep into the LARP thing until she ended up having to move out of state. I'm loving the image of someone getting so into LARPing they have the leave the state, Poochie style. Also I still maintain that WoD LARP is is the source of the most vintage cat-piss known to man.
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Apr 19, 2016 14:35
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Pharmaskittle posted:I've never LARPed, but I have a LARPer buddy tell me he mostly enjoys it because he's moderately athletic and has a little fencing experience, which mostly makes up for the fact that he's not super invested in it since he can outrun almost anyone and outfight some more experienced people despite not being nominally a level 40 assassin or whatever. He's not a jerk about it or anything, he's just like "Yeah I don't get a lot of prestige in the game but if some high level superman wants to murder me, they usually can't since I, the player, can run further than them without getting tired." When Empire started there was a huge outcry from a certain section of the player base, because the rules made a distinction between armour made of plastic/aluminium and armour made of steel, while in systems up to that point plastic would have counted as the heaviest kind of armour. Plastic plate would stop special sword blows but not arrows, while steel armour stopped both. Since arrows instantly take out a limb if they hit one or knock you out immediately if they hit your torso, this was a pretty big deal. Cue all the fat powernerds who had been used to wearing plastic plate and being combat gods due to their stats whining that it was unfair that they were being discriminated against, while me and my mates were rejoicing since we already owned steel armour (it's a lot cheaper than plastic plate) and actually did exercise.
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Apr 21, 2016 09:53
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silvergoose posted:Not lighter, cheaper; sounds like it was heavier but if you're fit you can handle that. Yeah, this. Since steel armour is used for more stuff than just LARP there are more people making it thus it's easier to get it cheaper. Don't get me wrong, you can still drop a cool £2000 on a set of steel full harnes if you want. But a breastplate/mail hauberk/set of brigandine alone will cost you around £100 compared a few hundred for the equivalent Norton torso armour.
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Apr 21, 2016 20:52
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Puppy Time posted:My main point is, once you've already sunk a significant amount of time and money (and energy and socialization) into your hobby, it can easily become your main priority in life, so further investments don't seem that big a deal. Haha, this just reminded me of the time a bunch of people got banned from Lorien Trust for setting up a massive lammy forgery ring, so they could give themselves massively powerful magic weapons for free. The main reason they got caught was because they got greedy and made stuff that was so overpowered that when they got checked by a ref (a pretty standard thing) the refs immediately clocked that something was up, reported the lammy and found it was fake. Adult Dress Up with Swords is Serious Business
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Apr 25, 2016 12:30
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Could be more influence from hardcore historical reenactors in Europe, there's a lot of kit overlap. Whereas the main reenactment groups in the US are civil war based, afaik. One of the ideas with the nation design for Empire was to try and attract re-enactors (and their cool kit) by having some of the nations draw really heavily on historical influences. The biggest examples are the Marches, which is essentially just War of the Roses England with druids, and the League which is a mishmash of renaissance Italy and the Hanseatic League, whose soldiers are basically Landschneckt. Another related goal was to try and attract foreign players by having countries outside of the Empire speak a different language, represented by a different real world language. So this means that if you are IRL bilingual/trilingual/etc. you can be hired to act as a translator for an NPC foreign ambassador who doesn't speak Imperial (English). Or you might be hired to listen in on the negotiations and make sure that the ambassador's translator is actually translating properly and not feeding him a load of horseshit and make the players look bad. It's a pretty cool little thing IMO.
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Apr 28, 2016 14:39
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Empire is okay if you have friends that already play. It's pointless and boring if you try to go on your own, as you'll never, ever find any plot. You might have an easier time if you specifically push the translation angle tho. Yeah, this is the biggest issue with Empire from a player perspective. There are so many parts of the game that require you to have a big support network of other players helping you and resources that trying to go it alone is just a huge pain in the rear end and not a lot of fun unless you are some charismatic savant or just want to fight battles and get drunk all day. There is also the issue that has been developing for a while that power is increasingly accumulating in the hands of fewer groups, since once you get positions its easier to hold on to the positions you already have. Challenging an entrenched opponent means wrangling a whole bunch of people to try and dig them out which can be a real grind and make you question why you turn up if you're not having fun. Go crew, crewing is cool. You can either play dudes in the city like foreign diplomats, angry petitioners or shifty otherworldy beings, or dress up as an orc and beat on people all day.
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Apr 29, 2016 11:28
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Liquid Communism posted:I think that's a thing in all LARPs. Regular old human politics, cliques form, gain power, then work to consolidate as much power as possible to themselves in order to 'win' the game. The setup of Empire is particularly susceptible to this though, particularly due to the way things like senatorial elections work. Early on in the game people were trying to figure out exactly how things would play out and it wasn't totally clear what the best way to spend IC money was. The smart players formed big groups, pooled their money to get more resources which they can spend in auctions to get more resources, which they can turn into money, which they can spend in auctions to get more resources etc. The fact that PvP is very frowned upon and you don't have to engage in battles if you don't want (unlike say Lorien Trust where monsters can teleport into your camp and kill you) means that it is really hard to boot someone out of an entrenched position if they don't want to leave. Theoretically the priests of the Empire have the power to fire people if they are blatantly incompetent/corrupt, but it turns out a lot of LARPers are pussies and too scared to pull the trigger. So the whole situation continues. Veskit posted:Do black people LARP? If so are they different than everyone else? I just don't see it happening. Yeah, black people LARP but not a huge amount as you can probably guess. It's a big ol' bone of contention in the UK LARP community at the minute as to whether PoC are not interested in LARPing because at its core LARP is pretty loving nerdy and therefore the domain of white neckbeards, or if the actions of the LARP community like having drow in blackface parading around is turning PoC off the game. A mixed-race member of my group was unironically called half-caste to his face by a white guy so clearly there are some unresolved issues, although that could just be because a lot of British people are big ol' racists whether or not they are LARPers.
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Apr 29, 2016 17:49
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Veskit posted:Jesus christ. He did get to put the shoe on the other foot though when his character became an undead wraith, and he got to make the event manager squirm while asking if he was expected to 'white-up' for the race. IC racism in LARP is a funny issue that seems to be able to go a few ways. Empire was supposed to have the Orcs be a downtrodden near-slave race fighting for emancipation and equal rights (the only two actual races being Orc and Human). However, things went a lot quicker than expected since most players weren't really comfortable with being blatantly prejudiced against people based solely on their race, even if it is fantasy.
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Apr 29, 2016 23:03
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trauma llama posted:I don't think liability plays that much of a part in it. I think most lightest touch/ story driven larders are just big whiny babies. Not only can you not hit them with anything but the lightest tap, but God forbid you call them out for being a lovely player/cheater/having terrible garb. In the UK at least this rings pretty true, at least for LARP communities that aren't moderated properly so that everyone's expectations are on the same page. Which is really the battle in pretty much any traditional gaming sector, board games, pen and paper roleplaying, whatever. Litigation isn't ever really a concern over here, and while getting injured sucks its not going to cost you anything directly thanks to the NHS. People running events are concerned about safety and not having people get hurt, but that's usually due much more to: 1. People not wanting others to get hurt, obviously 2. Organisers not wanting to get a reputation by word of mouth for running an unsafe system or going to unsafe sites. Quite a few people will not go to LARP event if it is being held at a site notorious for things like treacherous footing and being poorly maintained. It's a spectrum though - some LARPers like things to be really safe and comfortable - never fighting in muddy areas, no head hits, limits on things like archery - while at the other end you have systems that will allow shield barging, grappling and fighting full speed in muddy woods. To each their own and all that.
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May 2, 2016 17:50
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:This really drives home that here is absolutely no way to make LARP fighting look good. You can make it look better. But at the end of the day you're still wearing fancy dress and hitting people with rubber sticks.
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May 17, 2016 10:08
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