Photo by Allana Marie
At Dystopia Rising New York, we have an amazing player base who’s always asking us “How can we help out?” Unfortunately, at events we’re often so busy we don’t have a good answer other than “Um, pick that thing up and put it down over there.” So between events, we came up with five things our players can do if they want to help out the staff.
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Photo by Allana Marie
The weather’s getting warmer, and all across the network we have premiere games and national events springing up. This means a lot of us will be traveling over the next few months, visiting other chapters all across the country. Travel can be one of the most rewarding things about Dystopia Rising - you have dozens of games to visit and thousands of friends to see. But it can also be stressful, challenging, and even disappointing. So how do you make sure you have an awesome experience, worth the time you put into it?
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Photo By Shawn Smith
At Dystopia Rising New York - and to a degree, the network as a whole - we think a lot about new players… how to recruit them, how to make them have a good experience, and how we can bring them back for more. And this emphasis is important! New players are the lifeblood of any larp, and there’s a good reason we focus on them. But sometimes, in our zeal to improve the experience for new players, other groups get left behind. And one group in particular needs some attention these days: returning players.
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Photo by London Belli
It’s finally here… Honor’s Fall is tomorrow! As you get ready to join us for our game of the year, we wanted to offer you some tips for how to prepare for the game. Some of these are very practical, while others are emotional: pre-gaming for moments of frustration or anxiety will help you manage your experience at the event, and help you enjoy it.
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Photo by London Bellie
Dystopia Rising New York is a Character-versus-Character (CvC) oriented game. Despite this, there’s not much more CvC than you might find at other chapters - even at Honor’s Fall, there have not been many instances where one character attacked and killed another. Instead, our CvC has many levels.
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Tips for Travelers
With over 100 travelers expected for Honor’s Fall, it’s possible the locals might actually be outnumbered by visitors. While we’ve designed our modules, such as the Hot Zone and the Bacchanal, to include people with little to no experience with Requiem, traveling to another game, particularly for the first time, brings specific challenges. How do you get involved when people already know each other, and probably already have specific plans? We have two tools to offer travelers, as well as a request for locals to help them out.
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There are games, and then there are games. A Dystopia Rising chapter typically runs between 8 to 12 games a year, and for the most part, they’re relatively uniform: a chapter has a typical level of attendance that remains constant, plots players can expect, and plenty of time for socializing. However, once a year we all get to host a premiere event, and when we do, we want to make it into an event. It is, after all, our game of the year. And so we’ll promote it, offer more build, and do everything we can to attract players. But doing so makes a problem for our players: with great hype comes great expectations. How can a large event live up to expectations?
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Photo by London Belli.
“Playing to Win” gets a bad rap in larp. Larp is a cooperative act, where we gather and agree to a common story and context, and yes, competition gets in the way of that sometimes. Approaching a larp in a play to lose manner overcomes this, and is a valid (even encouraged) playstyle. But many larps, and Dystopia Rising in particular, are games, and games have optimal and suboptimal outcomes. So when you play a larp where you can “win” or “lose,” you have to understand the game and how it affects you.
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Photo by London Belli
At Dystopia Rising, we spend a lot of time on our costumes, and they look great. We distress our jackets, sew all sorts of patches and accessories, and craft realistic boffer weapons. However, then we often pack those costumes into suitcases, cover our bunks in sleeping bags and spread out all sorts of non-genre items across our sleeping space.
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Photo by London Belli
A Dystopia Rising game has many parts: the economy, roaming threats of zed and raiders, and persistent NPCs (or “Casted Characters”) to name a few. One staple of the Dystopia Rising experience are mods; short stories that typically last an hour or so, using the players on NPC shift.
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