Embiggening the hobby of LARP
One of the bigger challenges I find in running a LARP that is fair and fun is managing time dilation during sessions. It’s my belief that by establishing precedents you can create a culture where players know what they can and cannot get away with regarding time in your game, and ultimately reduce the amount [...]
The mechanics of role playing games allow us to be faster, smarter and stronger than we are in real life, so why shouldn’t they also let us be more persuasive? This is an old discussion in RPGs, but it takes on a different life in LARP, where it’s far more likely for social mechanics to [...]
I think a lot of LARPs get downtime wrong, so I wanted to talk about it. The principle purpose of downtime is to give players something to talk about and do at sessions, but many games I see insist on keeping downtime separate so that their players seem to be playing a LARP once or [...]
Whenever an ST makes a rules call they alter the mechanics of a game. Rules in established systems can be poorly written or simply not achieve the storyteller’s thematic needs. These ‘house rules’ can drastically improve the cohesion of a game so long as they are created with intent, with a mind to precedent and [...]
Hello and welcome to my 10th article. This time we’re doing something a little different — we’re looking at Wrapped In Grey, which was a LARP chronicle run by Ryan Elias. It is quite unique among LARPs I’ve known in that it heavily emphasized story, had few rules, no character sheets and a collaborative conflict resolution [...]
Let me preface this article by mentioning how disappointed I am at the offered descriptions of Gamism on the internet. It’s my belief that the rampant egg-headism in theory circles has created a environment of unrecoverable negativity for the term and further that in order to even begin any kind of legitimate debate we need [...]
In issue 006 I’m going to tackle some of the difficult questions about mechanics in LARP, namely what are mechanics and why would we want them? Ultimately I’m going to state a theory on why we have them and how they can be seen through the different lenses of GNS theory. First I should probably [...]
