 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and LARP is like love. You never forget your first. And part of the reason for that, just like love, is because some LARPs are bad ideas from the start. They may look fun at first, but they'll ruin you for any future LARPs that you meet at a bar. First impressions are important, so today I want to touch on the good and bad of what this hobby has to offer, so that you can spot the warning signs of a bad LARP before it's too late. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if you already know why good girls like bad LARPs, feel free to play your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So, LARPing is a hobby that, despite being around for decades, still hasn't found its footing over what is and isn't acceptable within an individual game. D&D used to be some kind of Wild West, where you had to be packing heat when you joined a new table in case somebody tried rolling to steal from you. D&D has since experienced a renaissance of popularity, and with that popularity came normies who won't be impressed with a table that doesn't know what consent is. LARPing is still in that Wild West stage, and going to your nearby hodunk fantasy game is a dangerous decision if you don't know how to spot the warning signs of an unsafe play area. A bad LARP doesn't mean that the people are out to get you, but LARPing is an expensive hobby and you deserve to have your time treated fairly. For instance, if a LARP lacks any form of introduction for new players, as in telling them the basic rules and supplying them with a starting point to build off of, it's a bad LARP. I don't need to know what every skill in the game does, and I'll forget if you tell me, but if I'm not told basic things like how to deal or take damage, or what the safe word to pause the game is in the case of an emergency, then I'm gonna feel really awkward for the first day and a half because I'm failing a test that nobody taught me. LARPing is already an intimidating hobby, and I will always suggest reading the rulebook before trying out a game, but rulebooks are just books. They don't talk to you on a human level, and they will leave you in a dark alley if you ask them for help. So especially if you're a new LARPer who's trying to understand the entire hobby at once, every game should be working to make the initiation process as easy as possible. Both of the local LARPs that I go to have their own way of introducing new players to the game. One of them keeps staff members posted at the entrance for game-related things, including having a breakdown of the whole game memorized for any stray wanderer who stumbles upon the play field. My other game gathers everybody up just before the game starts to give their crash course so that everyone, including older players, are always getting refreshed on the rules every game. Both of these ways are good, but one requires staff members to always be available at the front desk and have an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules, and the other requires players to show up right on time or else be fed to the wolves. But they're both a million times better than just going to your first game with a nebulous grasp on what to do, getting booted onto the field without a second thought, and then getting yelled at for not understanding the rules of a 40-page document that uses Google Doc formatting. That actually leads into my next topic. If the players at LARP belittle or take advantage of you for being new, that's a bad LARP. One LARP I used to go to supplies its new players with five gold when they start out, which is a lot of in-game money, and the older players who had sheets of fitted chrome from soaking up years worth of XP realized that these new players were A, walking around with a lot of money, and B, really easy to beat up. So the opening experience at that LARP boiled down to making a character, getting your five gold, taking two wide-eyed steps into a land of adventure, and then someone throws a tennis ball at your cornea and shouts 30 fire damage! And then you die. This happened for years until the data showed that being awful to new players made them not want to come back, and rather than completely die out, the culture of the game changed because evolution is survival, and you need to get new player money if you want to afford outhouses. That is an obvious case, but less obvious ways that new players are harassed include aggressively suggesting that a new player put their points into specific skills, either because an older player is trying to turn you into a skill mule for themselves to use, or because they're that one nerd with a hyper-fixation on rules because they have no social skills and need to prove their superiority on the field of made-up bullshit by telling you how it's wrong to take carpentry when you can just stab somebody and steal their chairs. Not everybody in the hobby is going to be like this, and LARPers are predisposed towards helping people, so finding the line between kind suggestion and pushy know-it-all is important. Because the latter will harass new players out of a game, whether they mean to or not. And if you're the new player being harassed, the first thing you should do is tell them to back off and then speak to a staff member, because the reaction will tell you right away whether it's worth staying. People with good intentions tend to feel apologetic if they didn't mean to offend, while people with bad intentions get defensive and vocally wonder where they went wrong as they move on to bother the next person. And speaking of the safety of your fellow man, if a game does not have safety checks in line, that is a bad LARP. This is a surprisingly controversial take, but actually it's good for you to be able to say, hey, stop the game, somebody out of character is feeling bad. I understand that people don't want to break the immersion, but this is a game. We are all playing make-believe, so if a person is feeling bad out of game, that game should have tools in place for that person to safely remove themselves from it. Dystopia Rising does a really good version of this, where if you are having a problem with the scene out of game, maybe things are getting too intense for you to emotionally handle, or it has some trigger that you didn't realize that you had, like perhaps the mod is filled with spiders and you have really bad arachnophobia, then you're able to just take your hand, put it over your eyes, and walk out of the scene. Your character is assumed to have had a perfectly valid reason for leaving, and nobody brings it up again except to ask if you are okay. Obviously, safety checks like these have to be monitored so that people don't abuse them, you can't just use the eyes-down mechanic to leave an ambush that was just sprung on you, but any game that doesn't take into consideration the mental and emotional well-being of its players, is a game that is not going to give a shit about you when you actually need it, and you're just gonna be hoping that your friends can help you when the rest of the game tells you to fuck off. Speaking of friends, having friends is important. It's the number one aspect of LARP and the reason why I give this hobby all of my attention. I went to one LARP and gained 50 Facebook friends. Get off of Facebook, you boomers. And such has been the case at every LARP that I've been to. You just cannot get away from the flood of friendly people who want to indoctrinate you into their cult of kindness. But there is a caveat. What happens when players decide that they have enough friends, and they don't need any more? Such is the nature of Klicks. What's a Klick? It's when a group of people hang out together. Oh, you mean like having friends? On the surface, there's nothing wrong with groups of people who only want to hang out with each other. Some nerds find the act of meeting new people exhausting, and that's okay. This becomes an issue when those players are also pushing other players away because they would prefer to be insular, and especially if those xenophobic players are the ones who make the rules of the game, or are close friends with the people who do, because that leads into preferential treatment. And once that gets involved, it's all over. Suddenly, everything in the story goes to them. They're the main characters, and anyone who disagrees is the villain of the story to be eventually defeated. Steer clear of these games. They are the plague that will bring disease upon your hobby. LARP is collaborative. Like it or not, you are responsible for the happiness of not only yourself, but your fellow player just as much. You don't get to pick and choose who is loud at your game, and there have been so many games where battle lines have been formed between out-of-game factions, and it takes the whole game down with it. The telltale sign that this is happening is if you find yourself unable to join or leave an in-game society, because you're worried about the pushback from other players, not characters, or perhaps you weren't worried about the pushback initially, but then once you make that choice, certain players become distant to you out of game. It happens a lot, and as soon as you see it, run. There is no saving this group. You can't convince these people that they should act differently because they've gamified real life. They are simultaneously touching and not touching grass, so there is no cure. Too often, new LARPers have wandered into games with stars in their eyes, and like Wanda said, when you see the world through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags. But as we wander ever further into the digital age, LARPing, just like D&D, is getting more homogenous. Games talk to each other, or they talk about each other, and with computers, major issues are made more present, and broken stairs are pointed out so that other people can avoid them. Unceremonious murder of your character is a behavior that existed in D&D when no one was around to question it, but now it's a telltale sign of a bad DM, and that's because more people can link up and share their opinion that, yeah, that shit sucked. So beyond all of this advice, the best thing that you can do to keep yourself safe is ask the community at large how they feel about the LARP that you want to go to. Rumors are rampant, and LARPers are gossipy bitches, but the rumors often come from somewhere, and when a ton of people warn me about the never-ending toxicity of one particular game, I'm inclined to trust the rumors more, not every LARP is a shit show, most aren't, and once you find the game for you, you're set. But the way we keep the hobby safe is by propping up the good games for what they do well, and not letting the bad games slide. It is hard, because LARPing leads to emotional investments, so if I hear that something is wrong with my homelarp, my first instinct is to think, okay, well, how are you wrong? And that's a pretty universal behavior that we have to unlearn as we get older. Take for instance my reckoning video, which was super tame considering what went on there, but passionate players dismiss my problems as me just not being self-motivated enough. It's true that different people have different experiences, but looking into why someone believes what they're saying is just as important as hearing it. Hopefully this helps you make an informed decision about the LARP that you want to go to, and hopefully it'll prevent your first experience from becoming a bad one, just due to your cardinal sin of guessing incorrectly. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford a restraining order on some of my ex-LARPs. But yeah, dabby out.