LARP: Personal Entertainment or Shared Project?

[baron_saturday]

When you go to a LARP are you going for some entertainment and a chance to hang out with friends? Are you going to be part of a larger project that you take partial responsibility for? Is it the GMs job to entertain you? Is it your job to entertain your fellow players?

ambug666's YaYoG (You Are Your Own Gamemaster) idea explores these questions, as

Comments

[balthazar99]

This is pretty reminiscent of the difference between many of the newer "indie" tabletop RPGs and the more established "traditional" games. One of the characteristics of many of these newer games is to put more burden (or opportunity, depending on how you look at it) on the players to consider the story as a whole, and to participate by inventing plot, setting, NPC's and other things that have traditionally been a GM's job. (see Mountain Witch, Dogs in the Vineyard, Burning Empires) Some of these games even dispense with the role of GM altogether (1,001 Nights, Polaris

[baron_saturday]

Nice thought. I really like the new idie RPGs, but they will never compete with d20 (or even GURPS)for popularity. Likewise, community style theater LARP is unlikely to get the same kind of numbers as a medium-popular Boffer LARP.

I wonder if the same game can appeal to Imemersionists and Participantists.

Please forgive my lame attempts at coining terms.

[sophistbastard]

For reference: GNS and Other Matters of Role-playing Theory.

[balthazar99]

You may be right about market acceptance. On the other hand, I think that some of the indie RPGs have the potential to leapfrog the standard gaming market and do what traditional RPGs have sometimes failed to do - attract new non-gaming blood. I don't have a huge amount of experience with this, but from what I've read it seems like some of the indie-rpgs have a much lower barrier to entry for someone who has never gamed before. Primetime Adventures, for example, has apparently been successfully played by lots of people who have no gaming experience, but who do happen to have watched television

[mikecap]

I don't know if that's true re: community style. I would submit that no real outreach has really been done - theater groups for example, especially improv groups would probably love LARP by another name, or with themes that might be of interest to them.

[ambug666]

The real problem I've had with outreach to theatre and improv groups is that they tend to have this attitude that they shouldn't need to pay to roleplay (act). If anything, it should be vice versa.

But those few we've managed to snag have always been excellent roleplayers.

[sophistbastard]

My general issue with narrativism in larp is that it requires a significantly higher level of trust and consensus between participants to succeed, and I happen to think that enacting a social contract which fosters that level of trust and consensus is functionally impossible to do in large, open-market events.

[balthazar99]

This may indeed be the case, depending on your definitions of "large" and "open-market". But I also believe that narrativist techniques can be applied at many different scales. At the small scale, all it takes is two players to break character for a moment and discuss how to make the next scene cool for both of them

[sophistbastard]

I think you see that happening in every LARP out there, but only between friends. Also it's generally done between events so as not to break the immersion of the scene. That's one of the advantages you can get from cliques in game, they bring some of their own drama like that.

That being said I'd be very hesitant to attempt this with someone who I don't have that level of trust with. A pure-immersion player will hate me for even thinking about it and a pure gamist player will take advantage of me for having said it.

To get that to work throughout an event it would have to be invite-only and probably not much bigger than a dozen people. Finding a group larger than that to be so completely coherent seems... difficult.

[balthazar99]

I think at this point that your statement that this would work only in small invite-only groups is an untested assumption. No doubt it would be easier to introduce new techniques into a well-controlled environment, but I don't believe it follows that it would be impossible to do so in a larger or less filtered group

[sophistbastard]

Well look at it this way: all you have to do to prove me wrong is prove me wrong. :)