Observations of the Fox

As it stands, the "Dust 2 Dust" LARP system seems pretty good. it's got a lot of the things I'm going for and if I was a lazy designer I'd just hack the current set up to push it more in the directions I'm aiming. I try not to take the lazy option. Personally, I think that hacking an existing game is like writing fan fiction...not bad if you can't write something original for yourself, or can't be bothered developing a whole new mythology and setting, but it's not really a stretch of creative muscles. Hacking a system is like a writer's exercise before the real work begins. I prefer pulling bits and pieces from various existing systems, and welding them into a unified whole....not a hodge podge of random components flung together (I've had rants on that before), but more like an engineer pulling the engine block from one car, fitting it to the chassis of another, attaching a custom built superstructure, then making sure all the wiri...

Upon recommendation, I've had a look at the rules for the Amtgard Boffer LARP system, it's got some interesting ideas in it, but it's exactly the kind of thing I'm trying to avoid in almost every sense. The combat is quick and nasty, 2 hits and you're down (a hit to a limb immobilises it, two hits to a limb or one hit to the torso takes a victim out of the conflict). That means a lucky strike will down someone, more so than a sequence of skilled hits. It does this to avoid complicated hit point issues, then throws in hit points when armour is applied. The system is all combat and magic (in the core rule book anyway), in indie/storytelling game design circles, some migt say that this leaves the rest of the world as a "fruitful void"...personally I call it crappy game design, it also throws all the burden of storytelling and entertaining players onto a limited group of GMs...that's a one way trip to bored players and burnt out GMs in my experienc...

You can get some awesome props (and semi-functional weaponry) for LARPing.  Case in point, this 10-shot repeating crossbow which fires rubber tipped bolts. I picked this one up yesterday, and can fire off a bolt every two seconds (I could probably go faster, but I don't want to break it). It's got decent accuracy up to about 6m (20ft), and could seriously poke an eye out if fired point blank.  Or, you could suitably repaint a nerf gun as an alchemical/black-powder projectile. Items like this are relatively cheap, if you know where to look, but they could seriously unbalance a game if handled incorrectly. I got this for much the same price as a foam sword just under a metre long. Being able to shoot at a swordsman without them being able to get a swing in is a serious advantage...being able to fire off half a dozen shots in the time it takes them to close in on you, that could be devastating. A single (skilled) marksman with one of these could take down two...

Ther are some pretty standard things that you expect when you go to a Boffer LARP. First...foam weapons (melee and ranged). For the purposes of safety, these are slashing and bashing weapons, because they typically have some kind of rigid core and if you thrust with such a weapon the core could expose itself and literally impale someone. As an added safety function, head shots are either banned (with serious repercussions) or seriously deterred and frowned upon (in which case they don't count toward damage, but the players are mature enough to accept that accidents happen). Secondly...the combat is fully enacted. If you hit with your weapon, your opponents takes a hit of damage...you don't suddendly stop things to see if that hit managed to get through armour, or how much impact it had. There's an honour system to this, but in conflicts pivotal to the storyline there mightt be 'impartial adjudication from an umpire/GM'. I like the quick description of co...

Now that we've got some general design boundaries, we can start looking at what the game is about, and then we can move toward creating mechanisms for play that address those ides while working within the boundaries. What do people expect from a Boffer LARP? That's pretty simple. They expect a bit of escapism whe they can bash one another with padded weapons. If they didn't want that, they'd play a tabletop game, or a parlour LARP, or something else. So this needs to be the crux of the system...it doesn't mean everything needs to focus around combat, but it certainly can't be ignored and can't be one of the unwieldy aspects of the game. How do people interact in the game? We're basically looking at those same big questions that come from designing any game...what do the players do?...what do the characters do?...what does the GM do? When it comes to player interactions, the will cetainly be the combat between characters (or characters and monsters), but ...

It looks like I can't get the concept of a decent "Boffer" LARP system out of my head. That means it's time to exorcise the demon by puuting some ideas down for the world to see. I always figured that the most important parts of game design are just like any other design methodology. You set yourself some ground-rules, then you let yourself run while with those core factors as a grounding point to measure progress against. I do this with a process of defining positives and negatives, then dividing these into negotiables and non-negotiables. Positive Non-negotiable: The design needs to accomplish these before it can be considerd successful. Positive Negotiable: These be great if the design accomplished them, but they aren't deal breakers. Negative Non-negotiable: If the design strays into this territory, it's an instant fail. Negative Negotiable: These aspects don't destroy the design, but we'd rather not have them around. The catch is,...

Shouldn't have watched this. Now I want to write a decent LARP system. Most of the ones I've encountered are atrocious.