Photo by Shawn Smith
The urgency of taking care of new players is typical - and admirable - across Dystopia Rising: people want to make sure newcomers have a good time, and this is a good thing. We’ve also talked about taking care of returning players: people who haven’t played Dystopia Rising for some time, and we’ve talked about travelers too! We’ve talked about just about every group of people who could buy a ticket for our game… except one.
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Photo by Shawn Smith
At Dystopia Rising, we often talk about our Community, and we’re proud of the group of people who create and attend our events at Dystopia Rising New York. But a community is more than a group of people with a common pastime: together, we create a culture, a collection of norms and behaviors that drives our events and allows us to come together to play safely and effectively.
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Photo by Shawn Smith
When you design a boffer larp, you’re not really making a competitive game: the players are going to win. Like a video game, there’s an illusion that you’re struggling against an opponent, but in the end, the NPCs are going to lose, and the storytellers aren’t really trying to defeat you. Instead, there has to be an “illusion of failure,” mixed with actual setbacks, minor defeats, and “reach goals,” to create the sense that you have agency, when actually, it’s really hard to lose. So the biggest challenge for designers is how much adversity should players encounter before they win… or “how much is too much?”
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Photo by Shawn Smith
A larp isn’t really an experience - it’s a chance to create your own experience with your friends. At Dystopia Rising New York, we offer many things to enhance that experience - antagonists, narratives and a beautiful campsite - and we have a lot of elements unique to Requiem. But what’s the core of the Dystopia Rising experience? When you and your friends get together and play Dystopia Rising, what do you expect? What about the game appeals to you?
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Photo by Allana Marie
Dystopia Rising has a lot of rules. Most of these rules tell us how to play the game: everything from how to swing your boffer to how to make a Red Mist. But not all rules focus on game play - some rules help us come together as a group and play together. While the rules of the game are all written down (and most of them available for free), the rules of play are a bit more complex.
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Photo by Allana Marie
Our May event, The Reckoning, concludes a plot arc that began in January. We’re very excited about what we have planned, including the final showdown with Jim Jones, and the return of Anton Anastasia. We’re extremely excited to see what our players do when he shows up. But as we prepare for the end of The Reckoning, we have to ask… how do we end a story in a larp?
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Photo by London Belli
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 larp.
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Photo by Allana Marie.
Running a Dystopia Rising game is a balancing act. On one hand, you need to give people something to do - it’s a boffer larp so there has to be some sort of challenge or, at the very least, an enemy to fight. On the other hand, every challenge that you put in the game is an obstacle and that obstacle takes effort to overcome. If the challenge is too little, the players get bored.
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Photo by London Belli.
As we approach The Anarchy, there’s a question about one of Requiem's most controversial decrees: should the faithful be allowed to preach their religion in Requiem and the Fold? Rather than answer that question, we’re presenting arguments for and against.
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A Yorker contemplates his life choices. Photo by Brittany Zwier. Pictured: Dylan Agan
“Player agency.” These words strike fear in the hearts of larp designers and often show up in the feedback of dissatisfied players. It’s a tricky subject, because it always comes up in the negative: players don’t think about agency when they have it and immediately realize when they’ve lost it. Giving players their agency, however, is a problem that can be easily solved: all an experience designer needs to do is offer players a meaningful decision. This begs the question: what is a “meaningful decision?”
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