LARP Writing, Intro

I went over to Brandeis for a bit last weekend to play some LARPs. Brandeis is nice enough, lots of space, not really anywhere decent to eat. Kind of the opposite of WPI. Lots of very interesting people, definitely less homogeneous than WPI's gaming crowd.

I actually don't like playing in LARPs. I always regret whatever I did in-game, because I tend to short-circuit the game, even if I try to avoid doing so. I can't stop solving problems whenever I see them, rather than waiting until the end of the LARP... I don't know if it's just me, or what. I play many fewer than I run, but I make sure to play a few every year.

Anyway, I want to write a guide to how to write LARPs. I may not be the best writer of LARPs, and I don't think I've ever made a game without flaws, but I think I've learned enough over the past decade that my viewpoint should be interesting.

So I'm going to spend the week posting a how-to-write-LARPs series of essays. Starting with the fact that Live Action Role Playing Games are very different from other kinds of games, so you have to break out of thinking about them as a world, or a story, or a central party surrounded by NPCs.

If you have any interest in LARPs or in learning a bit about a kind of game you don't have any interest in, keep your eyes open this week. If you're stumbling across this post in the future, click the tag below.