Larp for a paying audience

Community Larp discussion
#1

Here’s a description of an interesting event run in Connecticut:
salon.com/2013/08/18/the_obs … e_playing/

It’s designed for people who’ve never larped before and is focused around delivering a compelling storyline and memorable experience (so, simple rules by US standards, each small party gets an experienced larper who’s in on the main plot as a ‘guide’, and the goals of the organisers are pretty similar to Outward Bound courses.)

It looks like a cool idea - apparently the organisers got inspired to run these after an attendee at a more standard larp wrote into the organisers saying they’d changed her life (she had this moment of complete agency during a game which made her realise how crappy her real life was, and actually she could do things to make it better.)

#2

Yeah, I liked some of the concepts they use. The introductory nature is cool.

The guided adventure is something I have only ever experienced once here in New Zealand and that was with KilQuest 3 at last years Chimera.

It gives a ‘tutorial mode’ option to how we might approach some storytelling.

#3

What I get from this is a reminder that print journalism is the best way of expressing how it feels to larp.

Video journalism always gives wrong impressions and fails to express the experience of it. In text, a journalist can unashamedly say what they enjoyed about things and why.

Pictures, and video in particular, aren’t worth a thousand words here. Perhaps that’s because larp isn’t a performance. It’s an experience.

#4

[quote=“Ryan Paddy”]What I get from this is a reminder that print journalism is the best way of expressing how it feels to larp.

Video journalism always gives wrong impressions and fails to express the experience of it. In text, a journalist can unashamedly say what they enjoyed about things and why.

Pictures, and video in particular, aren’t worth a thousand words here. Perhaps that’s because larp isn’t a performance. It’s an experience.[/quote]
yes, this totally ^ :slight_smile:

#5

In terms of the game itself, I’m a bit put off by the apparent railroading. But there are lots of nice ideas in there too.

Like you say Steph it’s cool that they have a goal of inspiring people to have more agency in their lives. That’s a great motivation. Not sure how the railroading fits with that though. “You can do anything you want - so long as it’s one of the three things we’ve planned for.”

It’s interesting that they run repeatable “adventure” scenarios with very carefully briefed crew, who get comfortable with their parts over many runs of the scenario. It sounds highly choreographed, but something like that could also be very responsive. That’s a nice model, you could really polish a scenario and give it depth by having the same crew play the same NPCs in it multiple times. Because the crew would be so familiar with the situation in the game, it could be very complex. That would be different to a typical pregen, because the players could still generate their own characters. This would be an especially nice model if running a repeatable event for youth players.

#6

There could be good (well, ok. Well, perhaps some) grant money from a council or the state to start our own project here in NZ, if anyone was interested in writing and running one.