Dreams of Deidre, a California larp collective, have published their theatre-style larp rules as L.A.R.P.S: the Live Action Roleplaying System.
Reading through the preview, it has stats. And skills. Why? Why, Great Cthulhu, do people keep making this mistake and trying to bring the worst features of tabletop into larp? Wasn’t RTLB enough of a warning?
Skills are not nessaceraly a bad idea…it allows the ST’s to guage what knowledges your character may have that you personaly do not and allows them to slip “info packs” into your game packs.
Sure. But you’d expect them to depend on the specific game. What we have here is another attempt at a generic system, with all the klunk that involves.
Rules in theatre-style larps should be kept to an absolute minimum. If your character sheet has a stat block on it, then they’re doing it wrong.
Amen.
Also, it’s been at least six months since we debated this, let’s have some fresh opinions. 
Idiot I know you are a strong rules light proponent, but that does not mean that it is the one true way.
Some people like mechanics in what ever they do. it does not make it an inherent bad thing.
The proponents of immersion in larps are also very keen on their “mechanics” in their own way."Everyone MUST have quality costume and props etc. "
We have used skills in a lot of games in the past for a short hand for GMs and players to get a idea of capabilities, they are also a good hook for players of tabletop to another section of the hobby.
[quote=“paulie”]Idiot I know you are a strong rules light proponent, but that does not mean that it is the one true way.
Some people like mechanics in what ever they do. it does not make it an inherent bad thing. [/quote]
No. But bad rules which are a poor match for the game being run are a Bad Thing (or at least, show poor game design). You wouldn’t want to run a lighthearted fantasy comedy under RoleMaster, and you wouldn’t want to run Ars Magica under KickArse. So why would you want to run a game about social interaction under a pile of clunking irrelevance? Why would you want to waste time generating stats when you could be writing characters?
Larps need rules. But those rules need to be designed for larps. And there’s no point burdening a larp with irrelevant rules-load when you don’t have to. Sadly, that is exactly what most published larp rules systems do.
The obvious solution would be to find a system you like the look of, use however much of it is appropriate for your game and ignore the rest. That’s what most people do in tabletop; no reason it wouldn’t work in LARP.
Please don’t make much complications with stats and skills 
You GMs write those cool long rulebooks, and us, players and crew, have to remember all that stuff.
It’s good to have some amount of those things to create the settings, but be reasonable. You are lucky if all your participants read those rules you create (usually you’d have a few who didn’t), but reading rulebook of 30 pages even couple of times wouldn’t make one remember it all.
As for hooking tabletoppers - make it clear to them that running through the night forest with five monsters chasing them in larp is not the same as sitting in comfy room with GM saying “you are being chased by five monsters” and they take their time to check their cards to find suitable monster repellent skill. For me personally the big turn down with White Wolf games are those tremendous stats. Other people tell me the stats are fine there, maybe they are experienced tabletoppers who can juggle hundred of stats easily, but please remember that some of us never done tabletopping, and it’s hard to find our way among the stats if there are too many.
My main problem with highly complicated rules isn’t the intent behind the rules it is the problem implementing them. I can understand that people want to be able to play a great fighter even though they lack the physical skills to do this and I can understand that people try to get around this by adding more rules.
The problem I have is that the rules as written and what happens at a game is not often the same thing. Adding more rules to a rule book can in some ways be futile.
At combat training on Sunday, for the first three weeks, everyone trained as though they had one hit point and all weapon did one point of damage. This is pretty much the simplest rule set you can have. All you have to do is:
• Recognise a good hit.
After three weeks, we changed the sparing so that everyone has three hit points and all weapons did one hit point of damage. This is still a very simple rule set, all you have to do is:
• Recognise a good hit.
• Count to three.
At this point, it was pretty obvious that people began to lose the ability to apply the rule set. Fights would happen and people would frequently say “I’m not sure if I have been hit two or three times”. Logically, this shouldn’t happen. I think we all intellectually believe all adults should be able to apply a rule set that simple. But we can’t. The complexity of running around, attacking, parrying and dodging, being struck and making decisions about how good a blow is means that you can register “I have been hit” and “I have been hit more than once”.
So whenever I look at complex larp rule sets I think that there is a disconnect between theory and practice. In theory, we should be able to apply these rules, but in practice we really struggle to do do.
I agree with Derek re how hard it is to implement any kind of complexity in a combat system. It all happens very fast, and it’s easy to forget to decrement your hit point total.
In Skirmish, we include two things to assist this:
Even with all this extra memory-jogging mechanics in the game, we still found that people couldn’t keep track of their hit points.
So we added a rule:
Then again, I can see a time in the near future when we can implement complicated non-physical mechanics by means of smartphone apps. For this we would need cross-platform apps that use blutooth (or similar) to handle the computations for PvP interactions.
Do we have any iOS or Android developers ? I’ll handle the Metro (Windows) version of the app, and if we get corresponding versions of the app then perhaps NZ could lead the way in futuristic larp development. The trick, of course, will be in solid, extensible design. And free open source is the way forward for this kind of thing as well, so the greater larp community can take advantage and extend.
I wrote the KiL Quest system in 1995 as a one page LARP. Since then, many recomendations were made and KiL Quest II was borne as a disucssion document. Now there is KiL Quest III. It has skills which can be used in non-combat situations, as well as combat rules. The idea of each weapon does one point of damage is part of that rule set, and basic rules has everyone on 5 Hit Points. Craracters can be created by a set of character creation points called Option Points, which are also rewarded as experience points. There are six classes that can be chosen from for normal characters. For those that want to be extravagent in their costuming there exists The 'Bot character class. Baically a big bad robot. These rules are availible on DriveThruRPG, and an update is due in September as well as a companion book that features races other than human and an enlarged magic system. The system is designed as a hack and slash with extra taste (skills). 
I remember Craig/Exquire saying something at St Wolfs about wanting to run a LARP with no rules. I wonder if he ever did do that…