and its still going too… I think there is lots of scope and most players or newbies are intelligent enought to handle a few rules or even a largish amount
Because we want to make something bigger than Mordavia, not the same.
Rules are overrated!
You only need two rules:
1.) If someone role plays with you, role play any plausible reaction. Role play anything, but role play!
2.) If you play with someone, don’t expect a specific reaction. Accept what your counterpart is role playing!
The rest is history… ^^
I reckon in games of this size you don’t need short rules.
I think you can massively reduce the size of rules if you get rid of a lot of dross like XP and knowledge based skills. I’m not sure why larp games seem to use XP, but I think it’s an RPG hangup.
Interestingly, none of the NZ medieval combat groups I’m aware of need XP or hit points and they just do combat. We must be able to use rules at least as simple in a game that isn’t just about combat.
I think if you can convincingly role play a skill, you can have it. Ideally, people will only RP skills appropriate to their character. If you RP a doctor, you’ll have appropriate medical skills, social skills and play a mean game of golf - you may also be a pacifist. If you RP a 14th century archer, you’ll be able to sneak, fight and cheat at dice.
Magic, combat and wounding are the only area I think could need rules. But even then, games can happily be played without formal combat rules.
Nightmare Circle (NMC) springs to mind here. While there IS a ruleset for NMC combat, I’d have to say that most of the combat I’ve seen the players have been far harsher on themselves that the rules require. On one foggy night, I accidentally shot and killed a PC running out of the fog during a particularly exciting episode with Jack. If the player had just played to the rules he would have lived, but for the sake of the game, he decided death was a more interesting option.
Which reminds me that I have actually PK’d, but it was an accident guv!
Because we want to make something bigger than Mordavia, not the same.[/quote]
you miss my point, i was trying to point out that players across the country easily accepted the rules, as for wether changing to a smaller set of rules (ie one page) thats still open to debate. I merely tried to suggest that the idea was feasible, even with having more than one page.
as to wether that would inhibit a huge game, i don’t believe so.
I think a game systems basic rules probably could be condensed down to a single A4 sheet. This would be enough for a new player to play an entrant character. I think this is quite a healthy thing to do.
They come to a small scale, introductory game (such as thos being run once a month by Quest now) are given the basic spiel & sheet & let go to explore.
Before the next game, they request detailed information & create their character, sweet as.
For a battle system, as I think Derek likes, we don’t need a hell of a lot of rules BUT it becomes more like a battle re-enactment & much less like a fantasy larp.
I mean it’s fine to have a system where the first blow basically kills you, because in reality that would happen, especially if you’re unarmoured.
But does everyone want that?
You can still have complex games with simple rules. Try playing Go some time…
For example, magic could be something like:
“Nobody starts with any spells, but they may be learned during the game by copying spells from scrolls into a spellbook. To cast a spell the caster must follow the instructions included in the spell. Spells may include components that are necessary for casting.”
Simple, a complete “rule set” for magic in a paragraph. You could have scores of spells in the game and the game “grows” as the players gain experience and slowly introduces more complex and powerful spells.
I’m quite intrigued by this idea. Its “simple” and yet “complex” enough to allow vast amounts of variation with very little background knowledge. Buffs might be easy to explain but offensive spells might be harder. Nikki had some trouble convincing people they had been circle bound when she cast it on them in combat and that was with a spell people supposably knew about. With a spell you have in your book but most people don’t know it might be even harder to “circle bind” them.
A problem with offensive magic is that they puts one of two burdens on a game:
- Everyone needs to know all the offensive magic well enough to determine what happens to them when the spell is cast.
– or – - People need to trust each other enough that when a mage says “I’ve cast circle bind on you, you can’t move outside this circle” they just believe them and act accordingly.
I’ve played in games where it’s expected that you knew the rules but the targets often asked the mages for a spell explanation anyway.
I also think that you could probably get rid of most of the zap spells anyway without great loss. I don’t think they add a lot to larping anyway. Most offensive spells I’ve seen are a variation on “we’ll kill you in a minute” (sleep, entangle etc) or something that you could do with a couple of thrown rocks…
Here we go, simple rules but the ability to have a complex game, on one side of an A4…
The game is bigger than the rules of course. Spells and magic items would need to fit within the rule set.
Hear hear. I can adapt to play within almost any ruleset, and it’s certainly not the ruleset that gets me to go “Hey! That’s neat! I’m prepared to spend time and money and energy on this game!”
I honestly can’t care less about the rules. It’s the story that’s got to hook me in. And the biggest problem is that fantasy has a habit of falling into the generic.
So what I’m saying is that the rules alone won’t make or break a game, the game’s gotta hook people in, it can’t just be another off-the-shelf fantasy.
Here are some example of some spells. I think it is desirable they live “outside” the rules.
Life Beyond Death
After death, the caster will return as undead. They are immune to any weapon that isn’t silver but can be wounded and killed by holy water or sunlight. Armour will still work against silver weapons
Components: the fresh heart of a virgin of the casters race - to be eaten by the caster at midnight under a full moon.
Generic Buff Spell
The first wound delivered to the recipient after this spell is cast will heal itself after 30 seconds.
Components: fresh (i.e. gathered in game) rowan berries gathered with a silver sickle.
Holy Sword
Turns a normal sword to silver one for a week.
Components: a sword that has been prayed over by a person who has abstained from food, alcohol, sex and drugs for at least 24 hours.
It’s pretty easy to dream this stuff up. Spells could be longer and should probably include a verbal component.
I like the way the spell requirements can be anything at all. It’s much like what you’d probably find in “real world” magic practices - a wide variety of weird conditions and methods.
I wonder how long it will be before someone says “but how can you be hurt if you’re completely covered in armour?”
I’m not fond of the metal restriction on magic. That’s so old school. Because there are no classes or skills the game is naturally balanced anyway, so why bother? If you end up with heavily armoured spellcasters then so be it. If you want starting character balance, then perhaps say that all characters can either start with armour OR one spell, but not both.
I think this system could work nicely in a setting that had a certain genericism to the races written into the world. Like the Lateral Worlds “beastfolk” and “treefolk”, who could be any sort of animal-person or plant-person. There would be a number of commonly-known versions of the races (dryads, ents, minotaurs, talking animals, etc), but everyone also knows that there are rarer things out there. This gievs you the advantage of a closed world in that you can define a history of who did what when that forms a backstory, but also allows random creativity.
I think the generic races commonly known in the setting could be things like:
Humans
Goblinoids/Greenskins (goblins, orcs, etc)
Beastfolk
Treefolk
Nightspawn (undead & demons)
Fae (elves, fairies, leprechauns, etc)
You could closely define a continent or several islands (probably with medieval-inspired cultures) where the play takes place, loosely-define further-off islands or continents (frozen, asian-inspired, somewhere hellish, etc), and also say that it’s thought that there are further-off places but only rumoured what lives there. Again that gives you the benefits of both open and closed settings.
The only issue here, and for me it’s a big one, is what I call the “Interaction Framework”. That’s basically the structure that the larp provides for PCs to have reasons to do interesting things. Because the rules are so simple, they do not suggest what characters do in play or how they could interact (besides learning spells from each other and fighting). It’s clear that it’s not an economic game, because there are no rules for economics (all economic goals can be written into a character’s background as already achieved and they can start with the physical resources, so motivation to achieve them through play is limited). The only thing that the rules provide a framework for is the collection of spells. Therefore, unless the larp events or the way the characters are written provide more structure (which I assume it would be), collecting spells would be what the game is about for a lot of players.
I think there’s an unwritten assumption that the organisers will provide the PCs with explicit or implicit goals and challenges, perhaps through NPCs. Or that it will all be inter-factional conflict like a fest. Otherwise, I think players are going to have that “what are we doing here” feeling.
I’ve always thought that a nice name for a somewhat open-ended generic fantasy system/setting like what you’d get if you combined Derek’s rules with my setting ideas above was Fantasia.
I think this also allows the idea of black magic being a concept rather than a hard and fast “school”. Technically, anyone can learn the “Life after Death” spell according to the rules of the game. However, within the genre, it may be a burning offense to own a copy of the spell.
I wonder how long it’ll be before I actually see a person completely covered in armour…
It is very old school. But I think it allows people to make a decision to not be a magic user and still have a place in the game. I don’t care either way. After all, it’s the same for everyone. I’d like to see players determining their character direction by role playing, not by following someone else’s ideas of character classes and races.
Absolutely. This is just the rules, not the genre of the game.
Yep, someone still has to have a setting and some back story and sow some seeds to get the game going. Throw a few people with agendas out there, some spells and magic items etc.
But I find most of the experienced larpers tend to develop plot anyway. They’ll turn up with a well thought out character and a few objectives which they’ll pursue as the game progresses.
[quote=“Derek”]Yep, someone still has to have a setting and some back story and sow some seeds to get the game going. Throw a few people with agendas out there, some spells and magic items etc.
But I find most of the experienced larpers tend to develop plot anyway. They’ll turn up with a well thought out character and a few objectives which they’ll pursue as the game progresses.[/quote]
I don’t really see it this way. As I see it the organisers needs to build a structure that the play hangs off. If you leave it up to players to make up their own objectives, there’s too much risk of a lack of integration in the setting (the objectives don’t relate in any way, so neither do the characters or their interactions) and for me it would feel too waffley. I like to go into a larp with objectives that I know are integrated into the setting and will meet with challenges, whether from other PCs or from organiser-driven adversity.
I also feel that a setting should have themes, not just be totally generic. That’s something that is difficult to arise naturally out of un-integrated player creation.
I’ll give an example. Magic items persist across events in your rules, so they can be used as campaign mechanics. E.g.:
-
the setting’s setup involves threats and challenges to the characters or their homelands.
-
the characters can interact with these challenges through the use and interaction of magic items and spells that they can gain during play, and perhaps by using special NPCs or places as well.
For example, let’s say two characters separate homelands are threatened by some mysterious ancient thing. The characters can quest for a way to solve it. They may find a solution through their questing, but it’s a single one-use magic item can only be used to help one of their homelands. Thus they encounter a built-in conflict as to who gets access and use of the resource.
If you just leave it up to each player to invent stuff, this level of integrated interaction is unlikely to arise. The two players might each invent a threat, but who invents the solutions? If it’s the players, not only does that reduce the mystery and problem-solving (and the integration with the setting) but what are the odds they will create something that cause players from separate factions to have reasons to interact?
If you have a good structure, then experienced players can enrich it with their creativity. But uncoordinated player creation alone can’t replace a good structure.
More usefull conversations! Excellent.
What happens in non wilderness areas, towns, villages etc. is where players make the best plot inclusions. This is where roleplaying is king. Social interaction unfettered by anything else. Anything can happen.
But thats not the end of it.
Players interact with plot lines in many ways, often completely the opposite way to how the organisers first imagined.
We had a saying (Quest, Alista), “the plot holds till first contact” & its not just players but crew also. Interpretation of goals is often very different from what was intended.
If you plonked 2 factions down in a larp environment, you might get war or peace or intrigue unimagined previously. Larpers are great like this.
So what else can we do to encourage it?
I’m going to start another thread on that topic.
For what it’s worth, Derek’s “one pager” was the first larp rules I’ve read in years.
I’ll concede to your experience here, given that Mordavia had much better plot than any of the games I ran eons ago.