Larps, Megadungeons, and party on party action.

[Tyndmyr]

So, I've learned a lot from DMing and playing in a few sorts of non-traditional games.

First, I dabbled in some larping. One I hit up turned out to be effectively a very large standard roleplaying game. Everything was resolved exactly per the rules, with dice and such, but there were multiple DMs, piles of players, and frequently changing groups and such, as we all interacted in a relatively small geographical area in game. I like. It's interesting being able to assess the party makeup and recruit new people, or bail out of your party on the fly. A lot of metagaming goes on for party oriented games to work together...and it often becomes second nature. It's interesting to see that subverted.

Secondly, you have solo or soloish campaigns. The Arena, TED, TND, etc. Interesting. Lots of DMs, organization, and lots of continuity. They offer something substantially different from the standard party adventure, and people apparently love it, given that there's generally a waiting list to sign up. Of course, the flip side of this is, it's hard for a single GM to keep up with a lot of players.

Thirdly, we have megadungeons. Oh, sure, they CAN be a simple campaign outline for a single party...but they don't have to be. In particular, I knew of one DM that ran multiple parties through the same dungeon at the same time, and frequently, actions of one would have effects that might later be encountered by another. This DM is not unique of course, others having done this beforehand, but nothing is quite the same as personal experience to tell you something works.

So, what prevents people from mixing these non-traditional elements together more often? Imagine a massive megadungeon in which you could just...adventure. You could go in with a party or entirely alone. You might encounter others doing the same. Multiple DMs coordinating the whole thing. Would you play in such a game? How would it all work, even?

[Ozreth]

nevermind.

[Psyren]

"X on X action" is an odd phrase to put in a larp thread title. :smalltongue:

I am glad you had fun, but I'm curious on how the "megadungeon" worked. Did you actually have a large bit of real estate to explore in groups? How did the DM coordinate the various teams and know what they were up to? Did he have help?

[Axolotl]

Thirdly, we have megadungeons. Oh, sure, they CAN be a simple campaign outline for a single party...but they don't have to be. In particular, I knew of one DM that ran multiple parties through the same dungeon at the same time, and frequently, actions of one would have effects that might later be encountered by another. This DM is not unique of course, others having done this beforehand, but nothing is quite the same as personal experience to tell you something works.You know that's pretty much exactly how the very first DnD games were played? With one giant communal dungeon.

I've always wanted to play a megadungeon campaign myself but I've never gotten the chance.

[SiuiS]

LARPing can be a good experience for a pen and paper role player. You get your eyes opened to a lot of things.

I've been in a LARPing megadungeon. Well, dungeon. The trouble is recruitment of NPCs, prop amount, and pacing. You have to have one DM per party, at least one monster per party member (discounting boss beasties) and you need side paths to allow NPCs to maneuver around the party when they are out of game. It was a blast though.

Pacing deserves it's own special mention. In a game where your actual skill matters as much as your character sheet (so, not all LARPs, but some) you need to be able to have certain NPCs rein it in. The goblins are supposed to die, but heat of the moment, that one player decides to up the ante and wail on the PCs. Or he ignores some shots, or something. He tries to be a player rather than an NPC. And that can ruin the experience.

[Urpriest]

Such things are beautiful, but there's so much...effort...involved in setting them up. For the most part you'd have to have a completely dedicated DM and some really dedicated gamers. And the only unemployed DM I know only does FASERIP. :smalltongue:

[Tyndmyr]

You know that's pretty much exactly how the very first DnD games were played? With one giant communal dungeon.

I've always wanted to play a megadungeon campaign myself but I've never gotten the chance.

I've heard this, but unfortunately, I didn't start playing till 2nd ed, and there was already a transition to the party style we see dominating today.

You do need a pretty good system of managing the massive amount of material, yes. Is such a system already out there somewhere?

[gbprime]

Larping without dice is much more fun. You have whatever abilities your character has, and whether you can pull them off or not is totally up to skill.

I've been involved in Amtgard for 21 years now. It's a bit light on roleplay in places, but it is the finest swords and sorcery larp combat system out there. And it's spread out across the US and Canada (with a rare few chapters on other continents). There's a PDF rulebook available HERE (http://www.electricsamurai.com/main_page.pl) in the upper left.

Bar none, the finest large scale event run by that larp is Knoblander (http://www.knoblander.webs.com/). And yes, the logistics are huge, which is why that event is only run annually. But by the end of it, you're beaten, bedraggled, exhausted, and armed with a dozen stories of the awesomeness you got to participate in.

[Gnaeus]

Larping without dice is much more fun.

:smalleek:


But by the end of it, you're beaten, bedraggled, exhausted, and armed with a dozen stories of the awesomeness you got to participate in.

All the stories I have heard describe how much fun it was before friend X became severely injured and decided not to/was forbidden by SO from playing again. I have heard that particular story at least 4 times. YMMV.

[gbprime]

All the stories I have heard describe how much fun it was before friend X became severely injured and decided not to/was forbidden by SO from playing again. I have heard that particular story at least 4 times. YMMV.

Well, you make the rules system safe, the play area safe, the props safe, train the players, and you provide referees who are empowered to take unsafe players off the field. But ultimately, anything the actual players do that might land them painfully in the spotlight on YouTube is out of your hands. :smallwink:

It's all in the setup. Crossing a chasm on an actual suspended rope bridge while NPC monsters throw things at you might be highly cool, but simulating that rope bridge by using two lines of chalk or twine on the ground is a LOT safer.

[Tyndmyr]

Larping without dice is much more fun. You have whatever abilities your character has, and whether you can pull them off or not is totally up to skill.

Well, the flip side is that being limited by your skill can be annoying to some people. Personally, I've found that while I greatly enjoy roleplaying/complex rule systems and also enjoy smacking people around with padded weapons(I play Dag pretty regular), I don't really enjoy the two of them mixed together. Amtguard was mostly frustrating for me. Of course, this is heavily a preference thing, and there are still valuable lessons to be learned from other games.

Gbprime, the games vary greatly. Some are tap-only. These are extremely unlikely to result in injury. The full contact sports with national presence tend to have pretty solid safety rules and practices. They will generally have injuries comparable to other full-contact sports. People running around being active, things like sprained joints and such happen. I've known plenty of people who were not physically imposing that have played for years without incident, though.

[gbprime]

Personally, I've found that while I greatly enjoy roleplaying/complex rule systems and also enjoy smacking people around with padded weapons(I play Dag pretty regular), I don't really enjoy the two of them mixed together.

Yeah, it's all personal preference, depending on what you want your entertainment time to focus on. No LARP system does it all, nor should it IMO.

But I must say, I do enjoy shooting people with a crossbow. :smallamused:

[Analytica]

My main fantasy LARP experiences are from the scandinavian scene, which tend to differ in that they are rules-light, non-combat and non-adventuring based. The logistics do take a lot of work (people spending months sewing pavillions and clothing, mostly) but it usually feels worth it.

The typical setup would probably be something like a border negotiation between a pair of countries/temples/organizations or similar excuse for a lot of semi-important characters to camp out in the woods somewhere and interact. These main groups would contain dignitaries, guards, camp followers and so forth. Some of these will probably be traitors or assassins.Then there are usually smaller miscellaneous groups - barbarian nomads, highwaymen, cultists, traders or people setting up a temporary tavern. Some more hardcore styles involve army camps and actual battles, or people building a village and playing peasant families. There might also be faeries or monsters sneaking around the woods, depending on setting.

Most such LARPs might go on for a few days or so, with people ideally staying in-character all throughout. There is some overlap with SCA-style reenactment, but with more focus on building player characters and relationships between them that differ from the players themselves. Combat is usually resolved by padded weapons and rules saying that anyone who feels they were seriously hit becoming injured and then staying injured. Magic is similarly mostly ritual-based, so that the effects can be communicated behind the scenes. Generally, killing is avoided as introducing new characters is a mess, logistically and immersion-wise.

EDIT: To clarify, these LARPs effectively have no DMs while they take place. The organizers typically play fairly minor characters in the scenario with in-game reasons to move around freely, but basically do nothing but observe and sometimes take players aside to relay some secret information, but generally as little as possible as everyone aims to be in-character for as much of the time as possible, and breaches of illusion should never affect more players than absolutely necessary. Characters such as demons suddenly appearing are an exception in that the players might portray that character only for a short time, and if such characters should have strange magic powers, there are sometimes hand signs, like those used in Vampire LARPs, to indicate this.

Overall, the main thing I feel I've learned from these is the perspective that just "living" in the fantasy world, in the form of a character that considers it "real", is fascinating. The second is that the distinction PC-NPC becomes meaningless. The mooks, the servants, the cultists, the orcs - all of these are actual individuals and groups, with their own motivations, beliefs, relationships and habits, and they are actually there all of the time. Every group or faction must be internally believable with a coherent culture, because every character, even those with scripted plots, is played by someone. I think it has helped me as a (simulationist) DM not least.

It also helps from a DM perspective, because it becomes apparent that it is literally impossible to control what will happen. You can give scripted hooks to people beforehand, and the organizers have to do most steering by being active in designing the characters' history, relationships and personalities together with the players. Then you just start the world running, and see where it ends up, basically like a sandbox where you can only control starting conditions. I find this a good experience in how to DM tabletop games, because it makes you always plan in terms of if-then, rather than then-and-then, and see the actual player character's goals and personalities as the starting material to work with when designing the story. Blurring the lines between PCs and NPCs is also fun, such as having the players switch to entirely different characters for an intermission scene, or playing out semi-railroaded mini-adventures instead of presenting, say, a diary as a document or just summarizing it.

Also, you can take cues from Vampire/WoD LARPing for tabletop as well, though that is harder to do for fantasy. Dressing up as characters, eating and drinking in-game, and the like. Learning to work with voices and body language improves immersion as well, as least for me.

[Tyndmyr]

But I must say, I do enjoy shooting people with a crossbow. :smallamused:

Mostly a longbow user myself, though I've considered taking up crossbow. You wouldn't happen to know of a place that makes reasonably priced crossbows that are authentic looking and of suitable power? They seem to be hard to find.

Analysis...I'd like to highlight the player driven nature of large systems like this...I think it's a massive benefit, and further, I think that it makes relatively low lethality systems easier to run in such a way. D&D inherently tends to have death as a probable outcome for a lot of conflicts, which requires either a lot of NPCs be created, or players be comfortable with routinely changing characters. Probably not ideal. Systems such as 7th Sea, where the default loss of combat is "knocked out" at worst, are probably more suited towards player driven events.

And of course, the more player driven events you have, the less load it put on the DMs, and the more practical this all is.

[gbprime]

Mostly a longbow user myself, though I've considered taking up crossbow. You wouldn't happen to know of a place that makes reasonably priced crossbows that are authentic looking and of suitable power? They seem to be hard to find.

Authentic AND powerful? Day trip to Pennsic some August. Only an SCA artisan is going to deliver on that. (that's what I had to do for mine. Custom made.)

Your other option is to try and find an old wooden-stock Barnett crossbow on eBay or someplace (they haven't made them in 30 years) and make some cosmetic modifications to it. But they tend to have too much draw weight for larping.

[Toliudar]

So, what prevents people from mixing these non-traditional elements together more often? Imagine a massive megadungeon in which you could just...adventure. You could go in with a party or entirely alone. You might encounter others doing the same. Multiple DMs coordinating the whole thing. Would you play in such a game? How would it all work, even?

As you allude, complexity and differences in timeframe make this kind of thing difficult. With a single group, it's no problem that the first two hours of real time play covers six months in game, and then a 1 minute combat takes another hour. I don't know how you reconcile that with many groups. I guess you dump everyone into a system that work a bit like a CRPG, with everything resolved as quickly as possible.

[Analytica]

Analysis...I'd like to highlight the player driven nature of large systems like this...I think it's a massive benefit, and further, I think that it makes relatively low lethality systems easier to run in such a way. D&D inherently tends to have death as a probable outcome for a lot of conflicts, which requires either a lot of NPCs be created, or players be comfortable with routinely changing characters. Probably not ideal. Systems such as 7th Sea, where the default loss of combat is "knocked out" at worst, are probably more suited towards player driven events.

I agree completely on the lethality issue. It appears in MMORPGs as well, for exactly the same reasons, and often with rather crude solutions. Vampire LARPs are practical in this respect, because the creatures are very hard to kill but can easily enough be incapacitated indefinitely by a stake through the heart. In the fantasy LARPs I am thinking about, there has been a gradual movement towards less and less lethality (originally when I started, a white armband meant that you are now playing a new character because the previous one died...).

Most of it runs by convention, people are expected to metagame a little, but only for the purpose of not ruining anyone else's experience. This involves both yielding, or going down as damaged or intimidated when a conflict should by rights end in your death, and acting like a Batman serial villain, leaving defeated foes for dead regardless of whether they are, not pursuing escaped prisoners as seriously as you could, and so on. I seem to recall, though, that Conan RPG also had rules for player characters being "left for dead" rather than being killed...