I read a system that had locational damage. Weapons did 1-4 damage. At zero a location stopped working and at negative the amount of hp it was chopped off (for example a 3hp arm was chopped off atr -3)
I thought as I read it. WTF? How can anyone keep track of all that crap?
It’d work for a RPG (in fact it was almost a direct rip off of RuneQuest II)
I suspect most larp systems that are written never actually get played…
This is fairly standard in UK club larp. Where “clubs” are local games with under 100 players or so. A lot of people there think any system with global hit points is downversion from one with locational damage.
In UK fest larps (500+ players) overall body hit points have become the norm, I think. But damage is still between 1 and 4, using calls of “single/double/triple/quad”. And in some cases also “blunt/sharp”. So “doublebluntdoubleblunt”. Apparently combat can sometimes sound like"dubdubdubdub".
In NZ, Lateral Worlds had locational damage I think. I remember when we were writing Mordavia you urged me to base it on the LW rules so it would be easy to crossover. Glad I didn’t take that advice… we did borrow a lot of stuff from LW, but not the combat system. Then again, all weapons in LW did one point of damage, and Mordavia eventually went that way as well. That was definitely worthwhile.
Can’t remember if Gateway was locational or not. Don’t think so, just lots of HP and high damage calls.
If Lateral Worlds was what Anna and Patch used to run at at Uratiti then I’m pretty sure it didn’t have locational wounds.
Yah me too, that was my first introduction into larping and i dont remember that.
Nibelungen has locational damage.
But only on the ship…
And all the rules are handled by software…
So you never have to count anything! 
We had the discussion that inspired that choice about a year ago on these boards. We were talking about high powered “laser strike” firearms solutions. By letting GMs write complex config files they can keep rules simple and simulate things pretty easily.
Counting stuff is what software is good at and humans suck at. Is that the fifth generation style “electronics” you were talking about, Alista?
have to say, getting curious… have you been buying those backpack and headgear thingy’s that overlay a FPS environment over the real world? 
those will be fun when they get more advanced, at the moment they’re kinda just wireframe… altho you’ll look like an idiot to anyone who isn’t playing! 
Yep, Lateral Worlds was Anna & Patch’s weekend system.
It was definitely possible to lose a limb. Remember there was a necromantic spell for putting severed limbs back on? I don’t think they had separate hit points for each limb, but I can’t actually remember. I think maybe when you were down at 0 global HP and took a limb hit it was severed. I’ve got the rules at home, might have a look.
On a different note, they definitely had all kinds of counts in there. Spells you could cast once every minute, death counts, etc. I’m not keen on counts in larp, for one thing they’re very subjective and for another they distract you from playing your character.
I think the rules may have evolved away from location based. There were certainly spells like “wither limb” though.
I remember the Bretonian Knights from those games. They all had French accents and were very cool.
The various rules were labelled by those generations as they were the chronological order they were created or seemed to appear around the world.
To the best of my knowledge no system has been labeled 5th generation. Our suspicion is it may have some vitual component to it or at least a computer interface for damage etc. That is a guess, but I look forward to the technology.
Note, Maquerade was called third generation before it was called “abstract resolution mechanics”.
Ryan Wrote :
Quest runs a global hit points sytem. All weapons do the same amount of damage except Rune Swords and some creatures that do double damage. In 16 years of playing we have seen Rune Swords 3 times. There are none in campaign at the moment. To the best of our knowledge we are unique in the fact that a limb shot counts as 1HP and a Torso shot counts as 3HP. When you are at 0HP you are down. The only exception is the fighter skill Die Hard. Armour just counts as HP added to the global total. Hit points that a player can have ranges from 3 for a starting level Elf to about 30 for a 10th level fighter having spent all their XP on Hit Points + Plate Mail armour + Magical Protection[/list]
By who? I’ve never heard anyone use these generation terms before, and I get around on line a lot.
The usual distinction drawn in the USA before Minds Eye Theatre came along was between “live combat” and “theatre-style”. Theatre-style uses abstract mechanics (which existed before MET) and encompasses the old MET rock-paper-scissors mechanics as well as the card-draw mechanics in the new MET. But “theatre-style” is a pretty crap name.
Personally, I’m more interested in whether a name is good than its providence.
Sounds playable enough. Personally I’m going off hit points in general, but as hit point systems go that seems reasonable to me.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of a “3 points for torso shots” system before, don’t know if it was parallel evolution or came from the same source as Quest.
Skirmish has an interesting system where unexpected strikes (from behind, generally) do extra damage. Adds a bit of purpose to sneaking up on people.
Didn’t know about theatre style before. Only been doing LRP 16/17 years. You miss things occasionally. It was always hard to track down systems before the widespread internet.
We put in the 3HP for the torso before we had seen or played any other system. There have been a few splinters systems from outs that have “borrowed” the 3HP for Torso rule and "improved " the rest.
We also have Back Stab, Knock Out and Silent Kill rules.
Alista, I’d be keen to hear what your experience is with NO rules. As you can tell I’m massively pushing my “rules are for pussies and crybabies” agenda here. I had a player-character once that got shot in the head point-blank. There was no “back stab” type rule for that, but of course I played through instant death. If I’d been following the rules I could have fought them with my knife while they unloaded another three shots into my brain…
In short I think the answer is to play game instead of play rules. But that doesn’t seem to have a generational distinction here.
Also.
Who made up the generational distinction? Is this something you’ve read somewhere, or your own observations?
Forgive me if I’m jumping in late here, but the Norse and SCA aren’t RP groups, they’re historical re-enactment groups.
EDIT: Ah, yes, I am a bit late with that…
This whole thread is very confusing.
Kinda
The SCA is big and it is a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
Many people in the SCA focus on one small part of medieval something and could be tossed into the living history camp.
However, we also have about 14-15 made up Kingdoms that have no basis in history. People fight to become King and Queen, we have tournaments, battles and wars that aren’t based on any medieval battles. The Kingdoms even go to war against each other.
Many people take on a “persona” that they kind of RP. Court is often held and this is usually role played. People role play some ceremonies like being knighted or swearing fealty to the Crown.
So, there are aspects that are larpish and some that aren’t… Charatcers don’t “die”, we don’t have magic or hp and you don’t generate a character.
In the SCA I’m Sir Inigo Missaglia, a knight of the Kingdom of Lochac and Baron of Ildhafn. My wife is the Baroness and I have three squires who are very skilled soldiers and men of valour and reknown. I travel around to different events where most people have no idea of my real name and fight in tournaments. Last year I led an army against the Baron of Ynas Far (Tasmania) and we kicked butt in a series of battles with about 160 warriors on the field.
This is certainly LARP.
We don’t do “death” and we don’t do magic, but I can assure you that we get as more “pressure” in our tournaments than I’ve seen at something like Mordavia. When you get to the final round, you could hear a pin drop as the fighters square off. The Knights, heralds, marshalls and squires role play their parts very seriously and for the most part very well.
I must admit I do not have a lot of experience with “No Rule” systems of LRP except for widegames and such. Just a few random thoughts that will probably be totally wrong and show my misunderstanding of the concepts involved.
All human life is governed by rules. To quote, “Man is born in freedom but he soon becomes a slave, in cages of convention from the cradle to the grave.” Whether these be laws of the land or laws of physics. Laws of the land include such basic things such as though shalt not kill, laws of physics are thou shalt not fly under your own power. Most LARP rules are to overcome these limitations. When done well the rules and system should be almost transparent.
For example, we belive that skills fall into several basic catergories, action skills,knowledge skills and interaction skills.
Action skills often just allow you to do something in the game, i.e., disarm traps lets you physically disarm a trap, if you do not have this skill then it automatically fires when you try, Light Weapons allows you to fight with a dagger. These skills should as much as possible be physically carried out. Magic skills present a real problem in this area, but you just got to pay the piper. Combat skills should always be action skills.
Knowledge skills are useful for getting information to a player that the Writer thinks is vital to the module and represents the many years of knowledge that a character has of living in the world. Sometimes it’s as obtrusive as “Monster Lore : what the hell are you?”, “I’m an Ogre”, but most of the time it is fairly invisible. even the monster lore thing seems to take a few seconds to play and nobody seems to care about doing it while they are fighting for their lives.
Interaction Skills allow players to interact, funny that. In LRP as in reality characters will have different ideas about what should happen, i.e. the vampire thinks you would make a nice tasty snack, but you think the vampire would make a nice trophy. This has to be resolved somehow. In modern society this is meant to be the courts, but we are trying to escape that world so we need another system. This is really the bit I can’t figure out for a “No Rules” system. Does this mean no bribery, torture, combat? Or do you really do it and say to hell with the inevitable deaths. Sounds a great system for sociopaths.
Any game system needs to be as close to as invisible as possible, however when you are running a fantasy system like us you have to accept there will be rules to allow people to do things they normally would not or could not. You also have to accept that 10% of your players are going to be rules lawyers, up to 20% are going to be power gamers, 5% are going to be be behinders, 10% cheats, up to 25% screaming me me’s and so on.
Oops forgot to answer two questions, so quickly.
The concept of first to third generation seemed to be popular amongst LRP writers and creators we were in contact 5 to 10 years ago. Maybe it is out of style. We snaffled the label 4th generation for our rule set because we believe we did something new and have shifted the concepth of electronic support from 4G to 5G.
On the Historical Recreation front. I am saying if you try and create a wourld based on medievil society or the Norse and you do not have magic, then you should not call it historical recreation. More plainly, SCA and Norseman are not historical recreation, they are a modern interpretartion of a historical society that has been edited to suit the wants of a certain group. By removing such asignificant feature as magic they should call themselves Psuedo Historical Recreation or Historical Recreation Lite. In our system we over emphasise certain elememnts of what was in historical times, modern recreation groups remove it entirely. In many ways Mordavia and SCA have a similiar aunthenticty when it comes to the claim of recreation.
Can you elaborate on electronic support? It’s an area of interest to me that I can see vast growth in… but there’s big challenges in seamlessly integrating the technology, especially for larps set in the olden days.
The “no rules” distinction is the worst one for sociopaths because in a no rules system your actions are constantly under social scrutiny. So if my character wants to seriously hurt your character I have to think through the repercussions in the game world and how best to physrep this without ending up locked away. It might mean that I take them to a cliff edge, tell them ooc that I’m going to try and push them off, then move to a safe place and act out the struggle. But like with any system you shouldn’t play with sociopaths (;)) so this point is kinda null.
But the point is that when there are no rules you have no precedent for bad behavior and noone to blame it on but yourself.
Do you have an example of a no rule system. I want to understand more.
I keep thinking the no rule systems that I would get banned from. Even Pankation (which only has two rules, no eye gouges, no killing) I would get banned from. Say you do take me to the cliff and then act out the fight else where, I am a second degree i black belt in karate, most of techniques I know will involve breaking at least one major bone in your body, what now? You pull out a knife (7 - 14 year in prison), I have an 80% chance of breaking your leg (1 Year), you pull out a gun (7-14 plus permanent loss of firearms liscense). As far as I see with some players it ends with serious damage to somebody. It is a case of when someones will gives out and if you have two very strong willed people it just gets really, really nasty. It stops when someone says this game just isn’t worth it.
“No rules” games have a lot of unwritten rules, like don’t hurt each other.
I think the LARP/LRP games that have no rules still keep the rules that apply in real life, such as the New Zealand laws and basic etiquette. “No Rules” means “No game-specific rules”
e.g. you come across a locked door. It is actually locked. You can’t get through it by using your “Lockpick skill”, you can only get through the door if you actually know how to pick the lock, or you have a key that fits, or you find another way past the door.
You could break the door down, because that’s what your character might do in that situation, BUT that is deemed impossible by your real life common sense.
If you wanted to fight someone In Character, you could keep the whole scene in character by showing off a move on the spot that looks really cool, then asking them to back down or you’ll kick their ass. If they keep coming, and make like they actually want to fight, then a bit of sparring/grappling would be ok, as long as you don’t break common sense and their leg.
It seems to me that games with “No rules” are designed not to involve a lot of combat, combat being something that is safer when governed by a hitpoints system rather than someone being actually incapacitated and unable to fight.