Huge larps with massive battles?
0 voters
Following up on this, for how many people is a huge larp (with hundreds or thousands of participants) with massive battles an ideal to aspire to?
Maybe also mention whether you assume this means fantasy or whether you have other genres in mind.
I would love to see a huge event akin to Omega or maelstrom fest style play, complete with large numbers of players and the oportunity for larges battles for those so inclined.
For me it’s not the number, it’s theme and context. I wouldn’t participate in a big battle game if it’s in the universe I’m not interested in, but if it was, for example, a Star Wars or a Tolkien-based larp - big or small, I’ll be interested anyway.
Lost in battle or lost in character? Wandering in a dark park not knowing where the next horror lies or charging into the melee, knowing that death or glory awaits you? I think we all like some variation & a massive game would be cool but no better than other options available.
Still having a pool of hundreds of players might be nice to ensure all games were decently populated, something lacking at times.
While it’d be nice to have lots and lots of players because of all the extra bodies to talk to, that isn’t my main attraction to big games.
I love really big battles.
They have something that is missing in smaller skirmishes and one-on-one combat. Smaller skirmishes can too easily be decided by the actions of a single person, whereas in big battles it really is more of a unit thing. In a big battle, a complete ninja, who kills a person with every blow, can still be crushed by a unit and have the battle go against them.
It’s only really in big battles that you can get the “impending doom” feeling as your unit gets wrapped up by the enemy and there is nowhere to run. In smaller skirmishes there is almost always a way out if you decide to cut and run.
I think that the big battles complete the world in a fantasy campaign. At the least they are complementary.
Most historical periods (including fantasy) have the large armies heading off for the crusades or to conquer Wales or get a ring back. Not having the occasional large scale battle or campaign denies us the full LRP experience.
I think, but I’m not sure, that it usually happens the other way around. First a bunch of groups start running smaller games, it spreads around a lot, and then someone organises a big game and lots of existing larpers come to it. So the larpers already exist before the big events. At least, that seems to be the case in places like the UK and Germany where big battle events happen. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s the only way it can happen, but it does make sense as a big event mostly populated by newcomers would be pretty nightmarish in turns of safety, posession of suitable equipment, rules knowledge, grokking of the roleplay concept, etc.
I wonder if NZ has a concentrated enough population to support an ongoing game with hundreds of players. I suspect it does, but that a number of preliminary steps would have to happen first including the spread of smaller events building towards a larger event. Perhaps the cultural process preceding the large game is more important than how the large game itself is organised, and perhaps those preliminary steps can’t be skipped.
I wonder if what we need is a really popular larp game that is really badly designed. :wink: Like Treasure Trap and the Gathering in the UK and IFGS & NERO in the USA. It seems that the splitting off of groups that hate the design of a popular system does more to spread larp than almost anything else. Actually, the same might be said of the early spread of D&D, with the splitting being both internal with house-rules schisms and external with the creation of copycat RPGs. Unfortunately, this tends to mean that the copycats mostly have equally poor design as the original, so what you get is lots of larpers playing lots of poorly designed larp. But at least you've got a lot of larpers for a big game!Can we have a fourth option in that poll
Well, whether it’s possible or not is really a separate question. Sounds like you fall into option 1 or 2 in terms of whether you’d like it to happen, which is the current question.
I think it would be difficult to achieve but not impossible.
I’ve just been having a look at the size of big larps in various countries, as compared to their population size. I looked at UK, Belgium, Germany, and Quebec.
If the proportions of big larp size to population held true for NZ (which is a big if as it depends on travel time and level of interest in this sort of activity), then NZ could be expected to support a big larp event with somewhere between roughly 300 and 1000 participants, one or more times per year.
Note that all the big larps I looked at were fantasy with foam-weapon combat, using tents for accomodation (with the possible exception of Bicolline which has built a fairly large medieval town on a 140 hectare property) and factionalisation into player groups (typically also with sub-factions and cross-factions). All of them except Maelstrom seem to involve large battles. This seems to be the best proven model to attract a large crowd here as well.
It’s also notable in Quebec that most of their larp scene seems to revolve around that one big campaign, rather than having lots of separate groups who all happen to attend as in Germany, UK, etc. That bodes well for NZ where fantasy larp is not widespread at this time.
In my opinion the only thing preventing a big larp of this sort here is the lack of organisers wishing to take on such a large and daunting task with the vision, skills and follow-through to make it happen. A larp of over 300 players would be almost a full-time job to organise, especially if there were multiple or supplementary events each year.
I disagree. I don’t the player numbers exist here yet. It was enough of a mission to get 40 people along to St. Wolfgang’s.
I disagree. I don’t the player numbers exist here yet. It was enough of a mission to get 40 people along to St. Wolfgang’s.[/quote]
sorry anna but i disagree, the players are out there, we just have to reach them.
No.
What’s out there is potential larpers. We’ve been sitting here on Diatribe dithering for a year on how to reach them and have done, essentially, squat all. David, I am more than amenable to your action plans for “reaching” these people. I’m also accepting your donations of time for putting these plans into action.
The larping community, as it currently stands, does not have the numbers to do a 300 person game. Anyone who has organised a game in the past year will tell you that trying to find players is like getting blood from a stone.
Mordavia never managed more than 80, and that had a huge fanbase and a shining reputation.
Could either of you tell me where you propose we find three hundred people who can be relied on to pay and turn up to a game?
Ryan’s part right, organising such a game would be a full time job.
However, I think most of that time would be spent “reaching people” - mostly on a qualitative approach and needing to explain the game right from the ground up.
There are way more than 1000 “potential larpers” in NZ, but organising the 20% of them in to the same game is a massively daunting task. I imagine the way to do it would be to include a massive festival, have stalls, live music, passive activities as well as active ones. You’d need professionals that were not involved in the game at all, and you’d need lots of support from all sorts of communities - re-enactors, gypsies, probably through to sustainability/ permaculture groups and performers.
That’s not to mention councils, media organisations, they’d all have to understand that, for example, they can’t use their regular plastic stall advertising, and that they need to do this whole “in character” thing the whole time…
Firstly, it would be generic fantasy as opposed to some sort of more specific genre. Generic fantasy appears to have the broadest appreal (notably, Mordavia was much more like generic fantays (with its orcs and elves) than Wolfgang’s). It wouldn’t have to have orcs and elves in particular though, many fests don’t. But it would need something similar.
Secondly, I didn’t say you could get 300 players at the first event. But I think you could get at least 100 and build up if you did a big advertising blitz, had the right game, and were telling people how big it will be. Size appeals.
Mordavia could easily have had much larger numbers (especially if we allowed younger players), we stopped marketing it heavily because it would have become unmanagable had it grown beyond 80 or so people. I wouldn’t recommend running a fest-style larp the way Moravia was run (which is similar to how Wolfgang is run and most of the larps we do). It would have to have less organiser involvement in individual PCs to be able to scale up.
I agree with Craig that it’d have to try new styles and allow for some passive entertainment. Most fests have stalls where traders sell fantasy stuff and food & drink for real money for example.
Also, I’m not saying this should be done or accusing anyone of failing to do it.
I just think that hypothetically, it could be done.
Part of me sees such a populist approach as a little artistically degrading. I think NZ larp is taking leaps and bounds in terms of finding really interesting and unique approaches to play, approaches that I place a lot of value in.
On the other hand, a lot of people would get enjoyment out of a big populist larp. I think a lot of people getting enjoyment out of something is also a good thing, even if in order to be popular it might not have exactly the qualities I appreciate.
I’m sorry Ryan, I think I misunderstood your first statement - I thought you meant that we could be having 300-1000 people larps right now if someone just put their back into it.
I agree with your expanded answer, and Craig’s points - that would probably be possible.
I think a populist larp could grow to hundreds of players in the space of a couple of years.
Some things that would help maximise growth:
I’m interest in the model you used to calculate the range. Europe and the USA have very large population bases and excellent travel options i.e. we can’t realistically expect players to attend from neighbouring countries/states, whereas this is feasible in Europe or the US.
So, the overall population base is about 280 million (Northern & Western Europe) or 260 million (US) so our population ratio is about 1.5%
So, a 3000 player game would scale down to about 50 players.
Not saying that a 1000 person game is unfeasible, but I think it may take proportionately more effort to develop that player base than it took to do the same in Europe or the States.
Sure, the convenience of attending larps in New Zealand is limited to a smaller set of people than in Europe. My calculations are very loose.
Europe is complex. I know that The Gathering in the UK attracts people from other parts of Europe. I imagine the two massive German yearly fests with 5,000 players each probably attract some people from places like Switzerland, Austria, etc. I have the impression the vast majority of people attending these events are nationals (because of the convenience of location and common language), but no proof of that.
An easier, and very encouraging, example is Bicolline in Quebec. I understand that it is largely attended by French-speaking people from Quebec (i.e. it is linguistically isolated as all materials are in French and the surrounding states are English-speaking), which has a population of around 8 million people. Bicolline has a lot of events through they year, the largest of which attracts 2000 people. This is the basis on which I calculated a possible maximum of 1000 people in New Zealand, which has half the population of Quebec.
Of course, some of my assumptions on Bicolline may be out. Bicolline has a massive medieval venue which must attract a lot of people who otherwise might not attend. And I imagine Quebec would have easier travel than NZ, because it’s blob-shaped and we’re long and narrow. On the other hand, nearly a third of NZ’s population is located in one city and NZ’s fourth largest city is a short trip away. Still, even if 1000 people is twice as optimistic as it should be that still leaves an estimated feasible event size of 500 people.
Consider Mordavia. We had little difficulty attracting 60-70 or so people twice a year. When we attracted interest from an enthusiastic high school player, we would suddenly be indundanted with their mates as well. Consider all the people who never even heard of Mordavia. Given the pull that we got from the small amount of marketing we did, I think 300 people would be an easy number to achieve if approached artfully and persistently.
NZ’s largest living history event NAAMA attracts at least a couple of hundred people. In Europe at least, I think numbers at large larps are comparable to living history numbers or outstrip them. In the US the opposite seems true, there is at least one massive living history event but no massive larp. I think it’s reasonable to guess we could equal or exceed the size of NAAMA with an event.