 Howdy, how's it going? My name is Davy Chappy. I'm going to be stealing CritCrab's content by talking about something that I've always wanted to touch on. LARPs. Specifically, an experience that one particular LARP-er had where the social contract of roleplaying was not only ignored, but set on fire and thrown out the window. My original intention was to find a story on Reddit, but apparently there isn't a Reddit for LARP horror stories, regardless I put a link to the story down below, written by Neil Litherland with a link to his Patreon because we're here to lift people up. But without further ado, let's pop in some background music to mask the noise pollution and get right into the story. I don't know how Crit talks like that. We've all had bad games. I've had my share and a few of them have wound up on this blog before, the blog being taking10.blogspot.com. However, I've never been to a game that left as bad a taste in my mouth as the first LARP I ever attended. And while I'm not going to name names and point fingers, I will relate my experience. My hope is that folks who read this one will walk away with a list of questions to ask, and that staff members for LARPs will have a whole new set of red flags to avoid. In the long ago and far away, I was working at a temp gig at Walmart over the summer. I was taking a break from college, and I'd only been gaming seriously for a little over a year. I'd made a friend at work, and at our short breaks, we'd swap gaming stories. After I'd known him a few weeks, he invited me to an upcoming LARP. At the time, I'd never heard of LARPing, but once I got the sales pitch, I was curious. I was a fan of RP heavy games, and adding in costuming and real-time combat struck me as a unique opportunity. A few days before the game, my friend drove me out to the site and introduced me to the staff while they were getting things ready. I was given essentially the same spiel about the game's broad strokes, as well as a basic rundown on character creation rules. I was shown how combat worked, in that I was hit about the shoulders with a buffer sword while I was unarmed, and that was about it. And then I asked if there was anything else I should know, and I was told, no, not really. There was apparently an event for the next game, and I was assured it would be a good opportunity to bring in a new character. So, tentatively excited, I dug through my closet to assemble a costume. As to my character concept, I went as basic as possible. Scarred mercenary for hire, my character was a swordsman named Ulrich, known in his homelad as The Mad. He'd left for unspecified reasons, and was now seeking work and security among a new community. I figured keeping it basic would help me avoid problems. I showed up early to game site, paid my fee, and tracked down the storyteller to make sure that there weren't any last minute things that I should know. I didn't want to be that guy who dragged down the game because of his newness. I was told my concept was solid, no problems with my character, but the storyteller wanted to have me arrive with another PC who was an established guard captain, and thus I'd have instant bona-fides and introduction. Problem was, that player wasn't on site yet, and likely wouldn't be for a few hours. So, to kill time, the ST suggested that I play some monsters. When I tried to politely do more, I was informed this wasn't optional. Every player had to NPC a certain number of battles every game, unless they were on staff. Not an uncommon practice in LARPs as I found out over the years, but it definitely something that fell under the things that I should have been told before I showed up question that I asked earlier. Uh, Davi's note, he's right, a lot of LARPs have mandatory NPC time, but they usually don't tell you when you can do it, and I've never found a LARP that forces your character not to play until you've done your NPC time. I shrugged, and decided to be a good sport. If nothing else, it would help me get a feel for combat, and give me something to do. That was when the next hiccup came up. I'd asked my friend, and the storyteller, if I would need to bring my own weapon. As I wasn't crafty and had never done this before, I didn't know how much time and resources I wanted to invest. I'd been told no. For the first game or two, I could use a loner weapon from the staff. Sad conversation had apparently been forgotten, though I was begrudgingly given a weapon for my first time as a monster. Uh, Davi's note, as to the weapons thing, every LARP has weapons, otherwise NPCs wouldn't be able to do their thing, so there's no reason why the storytellers should have a cow over one player taking one weapon for one game. It was after my time as a goblin, an orc, and a dead body during a scene with a dragon, that I was told I had to play the role of a commoner NPC whenever I was walking through the main site, as my actual PC had not been cleared to show up. Again, I just nodded, because there were a bunch of players, and I didn't want to make too many waves. I was, however, able to see the end of my patience, not all that far from where I was standing. After about four or five hours after official game start, I finally walked up to the storyteller and asked when I was going to be allowed to start actually playing. I didn't necessarily begrudge being an NPC, but I'd done my volunteer time, paid my fee, and I'd like to actually play the character I'd had approved. The ST told me that it turned out the player they wanted to introduce me wasn't going to show up until the second day of the game, so sure, it was probably safe for me to actually show up in character. When I asked what cover story I should give, and who I was actually looking for since I assumed the in-character reason was that I was meeting the other PC in the town, but happened to show up early, the ST just shrugged and flapped a hand at me. I'd been NPCing for a few hours, I should know all I needed to. Uh, Davi Note, if you're a plotrunner and can't create a quick introduction for a PC or an NPC, then you don't know how to do your job. Dismissed, but given permission to actually start playing, I grabbed up the parts of my costume that I'd left off for NPC purposes and strode off-site to don them. I took a moment or three to get into character, walked on to site, and I managed to talk to about three people in character before it started raining, the sort of rain that, if you haven't prepared for it, you were going to have serious makeup and costuming problems before long, so pretty much the whole venue crawled inside their personal spaces and made small talk while we waited for the skies to clear. Davi Note, fun fact, for the first two years, every single ARP event I went to would rain. This isn't a real note, it's just a weird thing. The skies did in time clear, but that first day did not improve. I didn't wait around for a second day to see if it would be better. Some other red flags. There were several other details that I couldn't work smoothly into the above account of the day's events, so I thought I'd just list them here. First and foremost, this was not an 18 and over game. Call me insensitive to the needs of parents and younger players, but I felt like that should have been mentioned. Davi Note, absolutely this should have been mentioned, and underage players should always be marked off with some visual aid, because I could walk up to a 16 year old and hit them, and they'll probably take it, but I'm not going to risk having a really irritated parent come up to me asking why I whacked their child in the face with a rubber sword. Particularly since there were several 9 to 12 year olds there who were all the staff members' kids, and thus they had the unwritten special power of throw a tantrum in order to make a plot, combat, etc. go the way they wanted to. While I was fortunate not to have been directly involved with that, just witnessing it from afar was enough to make me seriously doubt this was a game I needed to be a part of. Absolutely. Secondly, this game had a rather unorthodox policy when it came to out of character talk. A policy I was informed of when I was out on a trail talking to my friend about my misgivings. One of the storyteller staff who was walking the other way glared at me and demanded I come with him. I was then told to get into a literal set of stocks that was set up on the edge of the game site. It wasn't so well constructed that I couldn't have just popped my head out, so I went along with it. I was told to stay there for 5 minutes and then the staff member walked off. The head ST walked along a few minutes later, at which point I asked for an explanation of what kind of practical joke this was. I was told that I had been drunk and disorderly, which was their code for out of character talking on site. A novel idea to be sure, but one I had not been informed of, and which I felt was rather extreme for a new player who had no idea what was really going on, and who had not been informed that he'd broken any rules, since I'd thought the trail was far enough away to be considered out of bounds. Dabby note, at pretty much every lark I've ever been to, if you put your hand on your head, you're considered talking out of game. That is not an issue in and of itself, it's only an issue when you're talking out of game to random people because it's very easy to break immersion. When you're talking to your friends alone on a trail, there's no reason for anybody to be upset with you. And I've never found a game that throws you in the stocks because you talked out of character. That's just weird. In addition to those big ones, there were a score of little mags that started weighing on me as a new player. It seemed that everyone on the ST staff had personal characters that they were playing, and that these characters always seemed to have some strange foreknowledge of what the plots they were playing through would require. There was no explanation given to me of what the site was, where the boundaries were, or what hand gestures were used for things like speaking another language, or whether a staff member was present as a staff member or as their PC. Add in the dozens of traditions and unspoken rules, and it really felt like I'd immigrated into a fantasy world, but in the absolute worst way possible. I never went back to that game after I drove off-site halfway through the weekend, and though I've been to several LARPs since, even the occasional buffer LARP, I have never, ever had that negative an experience at a game. Despite how negative this first experience was, I learned a lot from it. Mainly, I made a list of questions I wanted answered by the ST staff before I decided to dedicate my time, my resources, and my creativity to joining a game. While this list is an exhaustive, I would suggest that anyone running a LARP has answers to the following questions. I am not reading all of these questions list by list, this is a very good, comprehensive list of things that you definitely should have answered before you invest to go into a LARP. I would probably add in a bit about sleeping arrangements because that is another big thing that you're gonna have to worry about, but other than that, this is pretty exhaustive. Having clear, concise answers to these questions is a requirement for me to show up to a LARP, and I can safely say that I think this list has helped me find venues that I enjoy. So yeah, this guy had a weird experience. This definitely feels like a LARP that was created by a group of friends that only opened itself up so that it could have more people for that one small ring of friends to fuck around with. But still, there is no excuse for preventing a new player from going out on field as a new character because your entire goal should be trying to integrate people into your game, because LARPs, as it stands, don't have a very good online presence. It's hard to meet hot LARPs in your area, and the main method that LARPs use to grow is word of mouth. So if that word of mouth becomes sour because people are talking about how bad of an experience they had, then that LARP is most likely going to be avoided, and eventually shut down. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. I know that it is a huge departure from what I normally do, but I want to break into LARP content more often, so I'm using this as a bit of a test, something to dip my toes into the water, and hopefully it'll allow me to pivot into bigger things in the future. Special thanks to CritCrab for giving me his blessing on completely ripping off his format, and hey, maybe support me on Patreon so that I can rip off somebody else's format in the future. But yeah, Davy out.