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).

The kind of game you like is a matter of taste, of course, and I think it will be interesting to see how larpers react to a structure like this. I do think that there is a cost to immersion, and larpers in general seem to value immersion even more highly than tabletoppers do. The main benefit, to my mind, is a greater likelihood of evolving a story that interests all of the participants. A nice sub-benefit is that it decreases the amount of prep work required by the GM substantially. (This last part is true for tabletop; again I'm not sure how it maps to larp exactly.)

[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.

(I think that there's a side issue that indie games will never achieve the same level of financial success as d20 or GURPS, since most are not really set up to fit a publishing model which supports selling lines of supplements to the main game. Since larps are all money-pits anyway, this diversion shouldn't concern us unduly. :-) )

I don't want to extend the analogy further than it deserves, though. There's no guarantee that a similar sort of phenomenon will hold true in larp. But I think it's exciting to think about.

[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.

I don't think it's unreasonable to suppose that Doug could say to Jim, "Hey, Jim - I know your character is an incredibly strong but thick-headed bully, and you know my character is a conniving rogue. How about you catch him trying to pickpocket you and throw me around the bar some? You get to show off your strength to the other players, and I might get some sympathy that will let me advance my romance plot with Mike over there." To some extent, I believe that this is done in many games already, but perhaps on a different timescale, such as between games. Simple narrativist techniques can be as straightforward as that, and needn't involve any other players.

That's not the whole of narrativism, of course, just a quick example. But if it results in more fun for the people who are doing it, then others might try experimenting with the technique as well. All it takes on the part of the GMs is establishing that this sort of behavior is considered "okay" and not "cheating".

[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.

As with many things in larp, it comes down to setting expectations properly. I know players who are deeply into immersion who also happen to enjoy playing Betrayal at House on the Hill in a gamist fashion. I believe that if the structure of the game were made clear to participants in advance, with appropriate illustration, that it's not beyond most players to switch modes to a narrativist larp. Granted, it may be easier to test these concepts in a smaller sandbox first, but I think it's premature to rule out all other applications.

It seems the same sort of objection that might have been leveled at the idea of simulated combat, back when larps were largely boffer. And yet the introduction of simulated combat techniques allowed a great variety of larps that would not have been possible otherwise, albeit larps that were substantially different from the mainstream at that point. (I'm stretching a bit here on the history, and wouldn't be surprised to find that this sequence wasn't wholly accurate.)

[sophistbastard]

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