A big appeal of Dystopia Rising is hitting your friends with foam swords. It’s a fun activity: if you hand non-larpers a bunch of foam swords, they’re probably going to start playing around and swing at each other without worrying about hit points or genre. However, it’s also a tremendous tool for immersion, and one often overlooked by larps with more expensive designs. Because combat is so hard to simulate, but so integral to many of our narratives, boffer larp offers immersion unrivaled by other forms of role-play.
What Is Immersion?
In larp, “immersion” is one of those words often used and rarely defined, so here’s a description for this conversation: immersion in larp happens when a person can keep playing without actively thinking about the fact they’re in a larp. It’s spectrum, not a binary state, and the degree of immersion changes from moment to moment. To have immersion, you need two things: verisimilitude and acclimation.
Verisimilitude is the quality of seeming real. It’s not the same as being realistic, as often our perceptions of reality differ quite a bit from what actually is (particularly with science fiction, where people’s experience with fiction exceeds their experience with science). When something has verisimilitude in larp, it seems real in both appearance and in function.
Acclimation: when people see something different or new, they immediately realize it… and then begin to forget about it. An example of this are new smells: people generally only recognize a smell for a couple of minutes, and then forget about it. The smell doesn’t go away - they become acclimated.
When a designer introduces something that isn’t real into a larp, they try to make it seem real. The degree to which they succeed determines verisimilitude… but then time acclimates the players to the difference between the larp and reality, and they get used to it. They become immersed in the environment, and forget they’re role-playing with something that’s not real.
Why Combat Works
Combat in Dystopia Rising is not like real fighting. People don’t have hit points, the techniques for lightest touch aren’t real, guns don’t work that way (and neither do knives, for that matter). But compared to other other role-playing games, it has a lot of verisimilitude:
There’s not a call for initiative or shift in narrative context… combat flows from other activities without a shift. There’s no break in acclimation when it begins or ends.
The physical activity resembles actual fighting. While swinging a boffer in a 90 degree arc is not the same as actual knife fighting, they both involve footwork, positioning, hand-eye coordination - the type of skill is similar, even if the skill itself is different.
While boffer combat is a simulation of fighting, the tactics surrounding boffer combat can be extremely similar to real world tactics.
Combat is a continuous flow, as opposed to turn-based or negotiated, meaning players experience it in the same timeframe as their characters.
A majority of role-playing games focus on combat mechanics, with good reason: a player can lie to another player, buy an item, and even have a romance without anyone necessarily getting hurt, but combat simulations come with significant risk. Further, the importance of combat to many of our narratives (particularly genre fiction, such as sci-fi or fantasy) make it an important part of a larp. Because boffer larp handles it so seamlessly, it offers immersion one can’t find in other larps.
However, one of the big strengths of boffer larp might also be a side-effect of the style. Because you need a lot of space to have a boffer larp, they’re often located at campsites for weekend long events. Combined with the episodic nature of boffer larps, players enjoy hundreds of hours playing throughout a year. This acclimation makes things like hit points and rules calls seem less disruptive (and hence more immersive), until the simulation feels just like reality.