I have been ill all week and it’s not looking like it’s gonna get better so here, have a rant about a LARP event.
At the end of September I attended the penultimate event of a modern-day LARP system. It’s one of my favourite systems, and one of the few I always make an effort to play, so I was really looking forwards to seeing how the story played itself out, especially with how the characters themselves had progressed.
But it quickly became apparent that the event itself wasn’t being written by the event runner, it was being written y someone else. And The new write was terrible.
New writer (NW) had been a player in this system for a while before his character got caught in an esoteric explosion. His character, IMO, should have died, and he should have generated a new one.
No. What he did was somehow get the runner to turn his character into an NPC, and then he took over the plot. And he took over the plot in such a way that he aimed to make his NPC the hero of the story, whilst everybody else watched him have a show down with the Big Bad.
We, as players, are not there to be spectators to our own damn story. We’re there to live the story ourselves! If you want to showdown against the Big Bad, pay for a player ticket!
The pacing of the event was terrible, so much so that we had long periods of doing absolutely nothing. Now, lulls in the game happen, they’re unavoidable, but 3-4 hour long gaps of absolutely nothing? With not even any talky NPC’s being drip-fed in, with hints for us to puzzle over? Just leaving us to our own devices with absolutely no clue what we should be doing (having used his NPC to shout at us the Friday night because apparently a lot needed doing and the fate of the world was at stake so this was supposed to feel like a high-tension event)? No, that’s rubbish. I helped crew a low-combat event 2 weeks later and there weren’t any lulls like that, so it was just poor running.
My friends and I are used to making trouble for ourselves when these kind of lulls happened, we just let a ref know what we’re planning and away we go - 9 times out of 10, the ref will be glad we’re doing something as it gives them time to rest the crew and prepare for the next encounters.
Even with our own brand of distraction, we ran out of things to do. Our whole mood got dragged down with how bored we were, we found it impossible to stay in character, and we weren’t the only ones. We figured you know what? There’s no sense in dragging everyone down, let’s just take ourselves out of the game for now, and if we change our minds and something exciting happens we can always join back up.
We didn’t change our minds. The Original writer (OW) stepped in later that night to up the ante and pick up the pace, and from what I heard it worked, but by this point my immersion was so thoroughly broken that getting back into character would have taken more energy than it was worth. We sat out the remainder of the event, the Sunday morning as well.
I wrote a little bit of in-character fluff after the event ended, to give an in-character explanation as to why my character had vanished. It’s quite a good bit of writing and I was quite pleased with it, and it meant that if OW decided to end the system there and then after a bad event, then it’d be a good footnote, and if he didn’t, I could still get involved as either a player or as crew.
Fast forward to this month. The Grand Finale is approaching, and with this particular system we all tend to write little bits of in-character fluff at the start of the event, to catch everyone up on what our character have been up to and get everyone excited for what’s to come.
Well, guess what? NW wrote a bit of in-character fluff beforehand, that basically put a massive target on mine and my friend’s characters. It rendered out characters unplayable.
In-game, the reason was that our characters had broken some accords, very important things, which would be fine except I couldn’t think of how we had? We hadn’t killed anyone from other factions, after all. So I asked.
NW told me that we’d broken the accords by leaving mid-mission at the previous event. He took an out of character decision, and punished us in-character for it.
And honestly, I’m still - STILL - fucking seething over it. We wouldn’t have left the September event at all if he hadn’t been such a shitty writer who was using the system as a way to play out his self-insert masturbatory fanfic! But we left the event so our mood didn’t impact anyone else’s game, and he punished us for it by doing the LARP equivalent of god-modding our characters. He didn’t ask if he could do this, he didn’t even give us a heads up, he just fucking went ahead and did it and then got really arsey when we understandably got upset. He still hasn’t apologised, and still sees nothing wrong with what he’s done.
So fucking angry. he’s such a self-important twat.
