How I Learn to Stop Worrying and Love to LARP

LARP.

It stands for Live Action RolePlaying.  It is a special type of roleplaying game where you do more than sit around a table and roll dice.  You get up, you move around, you act in character, and heck you might even dress up in costume.

Among nerds and gamers of all types there are various hierarchies.  Some level of nerdom are considered better or worse than others.  Which has always struck me as pretty silly, but that's the way it is.  LARPing has always been one of those forms of gaming that has been looked down on and derided.  Mostly because of a large number of bad examples of the hobby.  All the Dark Lords of Dennys have given this type of gaming a bad reputation.  I shared this opinion to a degree, making fun of LARPing in the past.  Thankfully I have now had the chance to experience what LARPing can be when done with skill and awesomeness, and my opinion has made a total 180.  I am completely in love with this form of RP and I am super excited to do more of it.

At Glitch Con this weekend I got to play two LARPs, a Legend of the Five Rings one on Friday night and a Houses of the Blooded one on Saturday night.  Both of them were run using the Blood and Tears system, the  system that John Wick came up with for LARPing in Shan'ri, the world of HotB.  The system is really easy to learn, and is beautiful in its simplicity.

First off, the L5R LARP.  Like I said this one was on Friday night and lasted about 3-4 hours.  This was my absolute first ever LARP experience, so I went into it fairly nervous, but also excited and ready to try out something new.  For those not familiar with the L5R game and universe, John described it as "Rokugan is to Japan as Middle Earth is to Europe."  It is a fantasy world based on feudal Japan, filled with samurai, magic, honor, and swords.  The players all belonged to one of the major clans that form the political and social scene in Rokugan.

For this specific LARP we had folks play members of the Phoenix, Crab, Scorpion, and Unicorn clans.  There were also a few members of the Lion Clan present, at first only the in character host of the game was a Lion Clan member (played by Chris Colbath) and then a couple more got added in when people joined the game as it went on.  Each of the Clans has a very distinct theme and flavor, and is fanatically devoted to the Emperor in their own way.  This feeling of being "turned up to 11" really makes the world feel awesome, and makes folks love their Clans.  I chose to be on the Phoenix Clan for this game, and played a courtier named Mugen Isawa.

In the system your entire character sheet is composed of a Name, a Profession, four Advantages, and a Secret  That is it.  The thing was barely bigger than a Post-It Note, and it is really all you need.  The Profession and the Advantages both provide color for your RP and character, and give a simple mechanical benefit during the few times you actually need to engage any sort of mechanics.  For instance, I had the advantage of Making Friends.  If a situation had come up where I was not able to make friends by spending Style Points, which I will explain in a second, I could use this Advantage to force the issue and Insist on my agenda.  This did not happen during either LARP, and according to John barely ever happens in general.

Style Points.  Probably should have explained them first, but it is late and my brain is crazy.  This is the main currency and mechanic of the game.  You get a supply of them at the beginning of the game and can earn them throughout play by other people giving them to you or by doing awesome things and getting recognized by the Narrator (GM) for it.  Why would other people give you style points you ask?  Well because that is how they get you to do things and how they make things true about the world.  Want to say that you and the lady from the Crab clan are having an affair?  Walk up to her, hold out a style, and say "Isn't true that you and I are having an affair?"  If she thinks that is a good idea for developing your characters she can say yes, and she gets the style to add to her own supply.  If she says no you can try and give her more style to sweeten the deal.  If she refuses three times, that is when you can Insist and use the mechanics, but people don't refuse all that often.  And when they do it is usually more enjoyable to try coming at things from another direction or renegotiating terms instead of insisting.

That is pretty much 90% of the game.  There were a few mechanics for things like duels and the like, but I won't go into much detail on them, both because they can be summed up really easily and because they may have just been worked out on the spot and may not be the exact ways you do things under the rules.  It all comes down to this idea though, one player chooses to win, the other chooses to be awesome.  Not that both can't be awesome, but it is more about making losing awesome and enjoyable instead of crappy.  Oh and it usually seemed to be the case that the "loser" was the first role chose, someone spoke up and said "I will let my opponent win."

So back to the specifics of the L5R game.  I enjoyed the game, though I enjoyed the HotB one a lot better.  This was both because of my nervousness and because I just did not latch on to the character or the setting as strongly.  I ended up making it true that an evil spirt had possessed me.  I lost the spirit over the course of the game, but ended up getting a book that allowed one to switch souls with another person, and getting it delivered to the Emperor.  Not a very in character move, and not the best LARP plot.  It was too solo focused and kind of a bit of wankery.  But it was my first time.

The next night was the Houses of the Blooded LARP.  This one also lasted about 3-4 hours, and was awesome.  Both because I was more comfortable and because I am in love with the world of Houses, with House Fox, and the Ven (the powerful nobles who are portrayed by the player characters).

The plot of the game was basically a big party, an opera performance.  The Ven consider Opera to be the height of art.  In this game I played Baron Pando Yvarai, a noble of House Fox.  My character valued Beauty and Cunning, though he was woefully blind in the area of Wisdom.  He was a Courtier and a Rake who was as the opera with the goal of breaking a heart by the end of the night.  I only asked for a Fox character, and when I was handed this specific one it felt like fate, I loved this guy already.

I was much more proactive in engaging the other players and pushing my own story into the spotlight this time around.  I was largely inspired by a Rumour I saw on the two hosts backs.  Awesome new mechanic that, Rumours.  Basically you pay one of the Narrator's to create a rumour and they put a name badge sticker with it on the target's back.  That way they can't see it, but everyone else can, and they must depend on others to find out what it says.  I LOVE this mechanic.

I saw a rumour on the hosts' backs that said that they were both secretly in love with the same person.  So I decided that the person whose heart I would break would be theirs, by killing the target of their love.  I talked it over with Chris and Rob who were playing the hosts and got them in on it.  I decided my character thought that Emily's character was the target of their affection, and that I needed to get rid of her to break their hearts, in order that I might pursue them because I was in love with them.  Chris suggested that it would be more interesting if I was certain of that but that I was wrong.  Which was a great addition.  We got Emily in on it and she thought it was a great idea as well.  So the machinations began.

I got a rumour started about the target of the hosts' affection being Emily.  Then I went up to one of the more militant, warrior type characters, played by a great guy named Mike Curry, and asked him to kill Emily for me.  I was trying to be a bit clever with my words and stumbled around, but he was thankfully patient enough to help me get to the heart of what I was saying.  He said that if I could retrieve proof that another Ven was responsible for killing his Lord then he would kill her.  I accepted and was able to very quickly acquire the proof.  He then told me we had a deal.  After it was all said and done I was informed by him that he immediately double crossed me by going and telling Emily someone had just hired him to kill her.  Well played sir, loved it.

I felt like my plan was well set at the time, so I relaxed a bit and just mingled.  I was also serving as a Herald for Emily's nephew Gabe, since he was ed having small and soft-spoken, so I helped him out a for a bit, announcing his desire to duel with Chris' character.  It was during this time that I noticed quite a few people had created Romances between their characters.  I was once again inspired and decided to loudly and publicly announce a Romance with Emily's character in order to deceive anyone who looked at me as a possible source of her death.  She agreed and so at the next break in the action I loudly called everyone's attention to myself and announced that in light of all the crazy stuff going on at the opera that night, I had to proclaim something immediately.  I pulled Emily over, knelt down, took her hand, and professed my love for her character.

We were immediately interrupted by one of the other Fox player whom I had told about my character's true love interest.  She loudly proclaimed our love to be false, and a wonderful argument broke out between her and Emily.  Apparently their characters' were enemies, lucky chance there.  I had to step up to defend Emily's honor after they had argued for a bit, and called for a swordsman to represent me.  None answered. I was luckily saved by the Narrator at this point when he decided that spirit of Talia Yavari, the patron of House Fox, descended upon the room and proclaimed that there must be a Court of Love to decide the truth of mine and Emily's characters' feelings for each other.

The Court of Love had a jury of five members that would decide our fate.  None of the jurors were people that I had any alliance with or trust in, so I was pretty much doomed.  I got first argument, and used it to say my character dipped Emily's character into a long passionate kiss, and then looked at the jury saying, "For love need there be any other argument."  Got a few "ahhhhhs" and  wistful sighs out of that one.  Emily also made an impassioned plea.  I should stop here and state that the mechanic for the jury was that there would be two piles of Style Points, one for yes and one for no.  The jurors would split the Style in the pile that corresponded to the way they voted.  So folks could hope to sway the vote by adding more and more Style to one pile or the other.  Me and Emily added quite a bit with our pleas backed up by our character traits and advantages.

Then the parade of negativity followed.  Everyone who spoke up spoke up against us, saying such awful things.  Mike was awesome when he walked up and loudly proclaimed that I had hired him to kill Emily.  Great moment.  Gabe had some amazing moments where he just walked up and threw a bunch of Style into the No pile.  It was dramatically wonderful and brought me to my knees in laughter.  As all this was going on Bobby walked up to Emily and handed her a glass with some Style in it and a card underneath it.  She turned to me and asked "Did you really hire that man to kill me?"  I looked her right in the eyes and said "Would you really trust the word of that Bear over one of your own House?"  Apparently since her enemy was another Fox as well, that gave her her answer and she handed me the glass.  The card underneath it said Posion.  AWESOME!!

So the Court of Love voted against us.  I was not surprised.  I stepped forward after the decision, proclaimed that the spirit of Talia had been insulted and dishonoured, and that I must drink to drown my sorrows.  I showed the crowd the Poison card, upended the glass, "drank" the "poisoned draught" and then began to pantomime not being able to breath.  Whirling around I gave Emily my best betrayed look and then collapsed to the floor.  She verbally spat on my corpse with some awesome cutting remark that I wish I could remember, and Chris commented "I do so love the Opera."  With that John called the game, the LARP was over.  I got quite a few congrats and kudos for the performance, and was on Cloud Nine.  Hell I was on Cloud 11.

This post is already really long, and I'm going to do another one on lessons I learned from Glitch Con, so I will just wrap up quickly.  Like I have said over and over I loved this experience.  I now respect and enjoy LARP.  I am in love with Houses of the Blooded, and I can't wait to play more.  It looks like we are going to be starting our own HotB LARP here in the area, and I am super excited.  This was the most in depth and character filled RP I have done in years.

Finally, remember that you can always trust a Fox, we love you too much to lie to you.

A Look Back At Glitch Con 2012

Over the course of this past weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to attend Glitch Con 2012 over in Bentonville.  This was a fan run and oriented convention that focused on Sci-Fi, Anime, Steampunk, and Gaming.  For those of you who do not know what this means, it was basically a big gathering of hundreds of various fanboys and fangirls of all types and ages.  We all came together over the course of three days, Friday through Sunday, in order to hang out, buy and sell awesome products, listen to various experts and celebrities in our beloved nerdy fields, dress in crazy costumes, dance, laugh, talk, and play games.  It was an amazing experience and three of the best days of my life for quite some time.

Let me run you through a quick overview of what I did and saw during the convention.  A few of the things I did and the lessons I learned will merit posts of their own, which I'll get to soon.  But for now I'll try to capture as much of the awesome as I can without making a novel long post.

On Friday I arrived in the early afternoon and started things off by having a look around, purchasing a few books, getting them and some more than I brought signed, and just really getting a feel for the place.  I grabbed a few gaming books from John Wick and a couple of paperbacks from Kevin J. Anderson.  I loved spending time with both of these guys over the course of the weekend, but more on that later.

After that I went to my first panel entitled "Creation of LARP" which was run by the aforementioned John Wick.  LARP stands for Live Action RolePlaying for those that don't know.  In the panel he talked about the LARP games he has designed and played, including Houses of the Blooded and the Legend of the Five Rings LARPs (both games that he created btw).  He also talked about his opinion and views on LARPing in general and how to design a good game.  There were some good things there that apply to any type of RPG in my opinion, like allowing players the freedom to take risks, encouraging emotional investment, and realizing that the other players are an audience.  I enjoyed the talk and it made me very excited about the fact that I would be able to do some LARPing at the con.  In fact I kinda threw out my plans for the rest of Friday in order to do just that.

After the panel I joined a group of about 20 or so folks in the LARP room, which was basically the outer living room area of two joined hotel rooms, and the emptied out bedroom of one of them.  These were John's room btw, and I felt it was quite awesome of him to host the games in what amounted to his personal area for the weekend.  I'm going to do a separate post on the LARPs that I played in, both the L5R one that night, and the Houses of the Blooded one the next night.  For now I will just say they were tons of fun, and the Houses LARP was the single best gaming experience I have had in years.

After the L5R game I had the privilege to play test a new card game that John is developing.  It is called the Houses of the Blooded Card Game, and is obviously set in the game world for that game (which I'll do another post on probably).  The game was very fun and employed some mechanics that I loved.  Since it is in play testing and it is now my property I am not going to divulge any real details here.  I will say you get to play one of the six noble houses, that each one has a wonderfully unique thematic feel, that the game feels like it should based on the inspiration, and that House Fox is best.  John will be bringing the game to the public via Kickstarter at some point, and I'll be buying it definitely.

 After a late night playing that card game I went home, crashed for a few hours, and then came back to the con mid-morning to run a game of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.  I had four players, and made up a fun little scenario where Dr. Doom used the Sinister Six (my version of it) to steal some items from safety deposit boxes and help his crazy, evil plans.  The heroes (Iron Man, Storm, Spiderman, and Colossus) took down the Sinister Six, and even managed to defeat all the Doombots that came in to try and help, including the one that was actually masquerading as the Dr. himself.  It was quite a bit of fun for me, and everyone else seemed to enjoy it.  John Wick even added a bit to the end by asking if Dr. Doom had called anyone a cretin, to which I responded by having the real Dr. Doom show up and do that very thing.

After that I went to my first writing panel with Kevin J. Anderson titled "Things I Wish A Pro Had Told Me".  His co-panelist was his wife, Rebecca Moesta (another author).  They talked about some of the various tips and advice that they wish they could have received early on in their career.  They told us things like Heinlein's Rules of Writing, and ways to be professional.  I enjoyed listening to these two very talented writers and was definitely feeling a bit of fanboy-ness towards KJA.  After that I went to a great panel about Game Design with John and followed that up with a panel on Media and Literature with KJA, Moesta, John, and another author named Richard Knaak.

After that panel it was time for another LARP and some more hanging out with John, his wonderful wife Ro, and a group of his other friends, who were all cool folks that I was super happy to meet.  Seriously one of the best nights I could have ever hoped for.

Sunday morning brought me a bunch more panels to attend.  The first one I went to was "Collaborating in Writing" with Wick, Moesta, Anderson, and a romance writer Claire Ashgrove.  The panel was a bunch of anecdotes and stories about the subject, and was great.  I followed that up with a panel on "Exciting Seconday Characters" with Anderson, Moesta, and Ashgrove.  Very informative, and I learned that KJA almost killed off one of my favorite characters back in the day, and thankfully his wife stopped him.

The next two hours I sat around and listened to John talk.  The two panels were titled "L5R" and "Collectible Card Game Design".  He talked about the L5R world and shared stories of designing it in the first one, and then talked about card games design and his upcoming HotB card game.  He also shared some fun general stories and talked about how Pro Wrestling related to Roleplaying Games.  After that he and his folks were pretty much done with the Con, so I bade some absolutely amazing people goodbye for now and went upstairs to the gaming room for a few board games before I left.

As I said over the course of this post, I had an amazing time and the convention was wonderful.  I was able to get a lot of great advice and information for some awesome people in the fields that I love.  I learned a lot about game design, writing, and storytelling.  I made some new friends, and had some great new experiences.  The con was very well run and had tons of great content.  They are moving locations next year and are going to have even more room, so I'm looking forward to that.

But I think the biggest and most important moment of the whole thing came during one of John's panels.  I can't remember which one it was exactly, but someone basically asked him why he got into game design, and he said "A lack of desire to do anything else."  At first that seems a bit joking or flippant, but it really resonated with me.  I am never more excited, happy, or alive than when I am playing, designing, teaching, and building games and stories.  It is something I have loved doing for years.  I have never really taken it seriously as a possible career path until just recently though.  After all it isn't something that you'd normally think about as a job, and as John also said "there is no money in game design."

Now I know I can't do anything crazy like quit my job tomorrow and start trying to make a living as a game designer.  I'm fairly certain that unless I become very lucky I will always have to have some other form of employment.  I'm working on figuring that out.  The realization that I love explaining things to people, learning things, and telling stories makes me think I should very seriously look into teaching.  But beyond that I now feel that I'm truly okay with the concept of trying to make games for people on a serious and professional level.  That and writing.  I may never become a best selling author, but I love telling stories and creating worlds and characters, so I'm going to do some sort of writing.  I've got a whole lot of ideas, some of them are even in progress right now.  I'm certain it will be a bumpy road, but it is wonderful to feel like I'm actually on a road instead of just wandering aimlessly.  I look forward to the journey.

One last little note, I befriended John on Facebook, and these posts get cross posted over to there.  So, while I do not really expect him to read this, if for some reason he does I just wanted to say "Thank You."