There’s a fair number of people in Auckland for whom Mordavia has been an influential larp experience.
In the UK, some of the early larps became very influential and a lot of later larps were based on them… often without consideration of other options. These derivitive games often seem ill-considered, as if they’re borrowing parts from various games without considering their purpose (or lack of purpose).
I sometimes worry that some of the weird/idiosyncratic/just plain bad stuff in Mordavia might end up becoming “standard” for ex-Mordavians who go on to create new larps.
So here’s a list of things that happen to be done one way in Mordavia, but could happily be done some other way in a new larp.
[ul][li]XP. You don’t need XP in a larp, there are other ways of allowing for character development. If you do have it, you don’t need to allocate it based on performace. XP allocation is a nightmare for organisers who want to be fair. [/li]
[li]Player/crew and PC/NPC divisions. The terms “player character” and “non-player character” are entirely arbitrary, as are their applications. They are taken from tabletop games, where they had a very specific use and meaning, and applied to larps where that meaning is lost. In tabletop RPGs, all NPCs are played by the gamemaster. In a larp, everyone is a player if they play any character(s). Only an administrative person or pure referee is not actually playing. The degree of guidance given to players by organisers is an important consideration of larp design, and simplifying it into “PCs” and “NPCs” doesn’t do it justice or allow for all possibilities. You can easily have a game where no-one has the level of guidance of a Mordavia NPC, or a game where all the players have as much organiser guidance as a Mordavia NPC. It’s a question of design style. [/li]
[li]A crazy mess of genres and setting elements. Mordavia has orcs and elves and gypsies and vampires, it has somewhat Cthulhuesque baddies and the realms of fairies and demons and whatever else all crossing over. In theory it’s a closed setting where everything fits, but in practice it’s a tangle of unrelated elements held together with fencing wire. It’s possible to have a cohesive larp setting. Mordavia’s not it. [/li]
[li]Combat-focused. While Mordavia puts a lot of emphasis on atmosphere and characterisation, the rules and the gameplay tends to revolve around violent encounters. It’s possible to have larps without violence, and larps that include violence without it being the central focus. [/li]
[li] The rules. Hit points, armour points, lists of abilities based on race or skills or social position, spells… all of it is maleable. You can have a larp without any rules. The rules of Mordavia, while simpler than they were originally, are still too complex to learn and use in actual gameplay. People frequently make mistakes, even experienced GMs. What’s the point in rules that don’t really get used? Larp rules should follow a design vision, not the other way around. [/li]
[li] Player-created characters and player-created setting elements. A lot of work goes into taking all the stuff that players create and trying to tie it together. It’s possible to run larps where the organisers create everything - theatre-style larps and a lot of Nordic larps are like this. Likewise, it should be possible to create larps where the players create nearly everything - far more than they do in Mordavia. It’s design style again.[/li][/ul]
I’m sure there are plenty of others, too.