KSena's Journal

I tried Vampire: the Dark Ages at a convention once and didn't really get into it. I think the nail in the coffin for my interaction with it was one of the writers boasting that they didn't do historical research (which I very much doubt). If I recall correctly, he said that he had once passed a history test entirely by reading the Ars Magica sourcebook and that that made him lose respect for the game. (Which is logic I really and truly do not follow.)

I played in a Mind's Eye Theater based LARP at one point that was a weekend long thing. Unfortunately, the folks who put it together didn't balance it very well (it was all pre-generated characters) or make sure that everyone had something to do.

What's needed for a one shot or weekend long LARP is very different from what's needed for an on-going campaign. For a one shot, giving each player the feeling that they're playing a central character is really key. In a campaign, people get the chance to build up connections and influence in a way that doesn't work in a short game.

I played in a single session of a Vampire LARP at one point, as a guest of one of the GMs but without a defined role. A couple of players were disappointed that I wasn't sticking around because I had ideas for ways for them to move their particular agendas forward. I wanted to get a feel for what a LARP campaign felt like because we were dealing with someone who really, really wanted to figure out how to make an In Nomine LARP (we tried but it's a poor fit for a LARP because it generally needs human characters as plot tokens without including anything that would make playing one at all fun).

I ran a single session LARP several times that adapted Vampire stuff to our home rules system. It worked, but I'm not sure it would work for a campaign at all, not without altering our base rules heavily (for the campaign aspect rather than for the Vampire aspect). I'm pretty sure that I wrote and put that game together simply to prove to myself that I could do it. The players all seemed to have fun, so I count it a success. I wouldn't want to do it again, though, because it's a lot easier to manage a game, both in preparation and running, when none of the characters have more than a handful of special abilities.

I'm always interested in trying different LARPS. I've played some very good ones and some real stinkers. There was one where one character's entire plot was that he had a headache and was pissed off about it. Which I take as an indication that the folks writing the game put in way more characters than they should have.

Some of our friends wrote a LARP as a wedding present for us. They ran it the day after our wedding (we didn't go on a honeymoon because we couldn't afford it). I thought that was the sweetest gift. They even specifically wrote me a character who couldn't die because, at that point, every LARP character I'd ever played had died before the end of the game. (That's in large part because I'm not that great as a player. I'm okay, but I'm not spectacular. When I started playing, I'd already written and run four games, so people assumed that I must know what I was doing when I played. It's a whole different skills set, and people kept giving me difficult characters.)