Advice needed for a teacher on boffer (ish) LARP

Community Larp discussion
#1

Kia ora!

A teacher who works at a school I just had placement at has emailed me the following:

"[Mentor teacher] has passed on your email to me as I’m just about to kick off a BoxWars class at school and am keen to run it like a LARP event with students designing and making their own costume/weapons from cardboard. At this stage I’m keen for the class to come up with a genre and them work to create their own avatar’s, with race and classes etc, but still exploring ideas for how the system might play out in general.

I’m making contact as I’ve no experience with LARP and wondered whether you might have some suggestions/ advice that might help (for example wondering if there is a generic game play that would be easy for a beginner like me!)"

I have zero functional knowledge about LARP of this type, but I know a lot of you do! Any advice for this dude would be greatly appreciated, and I’ll pass it on to him via email. The kids in question will likely be years 7-10 and I doubt there would be more than 10 of them at maximum.

#2

Argh, races and classes… How about just making it professions instead? gnarf

If the kids are that young they’ll get into it like nobody’s business. I’d probably come up with a faction for each team and some visual guidelines to distinguish between them. If they can win something it’d make sense to come up with a minimal bit of plot around that item. And I don’t know how competitive BoxWars really is but in LARP it’s important to remember that the characters may want to kill each other but the players will ideally look out for each other instead. So there might be a bit of a metagaming/life lesson right there!

Oh, and have a quest of some sort. Quests are always good. :slight_smile:

Overall I have a feeling that everyone would save a lot of time if someone just sat down with that teacher for coffee, found out what ideas they’ve already got and then offered some comments from the LARP perspective. I’d be quite happy to do that but I’m not in Auckland, unfortunately.

1 Like
#3

They are a Cantabrian! But otherwise I agree, I think races and classes makes LARP mechanics for kids who don’t LARP a bit too complicated. I’ve emailed him back asking if he has any plans for an overarching plot i.e. factions and in-fighting, someone murdered the King, etc. Hopefully there is some sort of plan for a goal of some sort.

Those are some good points that I’ll put into my reply to him! Thanks :smiley:

#4

Something I wasn’t quite able to put into words earlier: I’d probably keep the LARP-related rules very light and focus on the improvised storytelling/character role aspects instead. I think that kids that young should once again get all of that in one.

#5

You could show them this very lightweight system to get ideas from? https://200wordrpg.github.io/2018/rpg/finalist/2018/05/28/RoaroftheCrowd.html

2 Likes
#6

That actually looks pretty perfect, I’ll forward that on to him now!

1 Like