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 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.
This post is about transparency - we want to address the January event and how we’re managing risk in regards to it. Over the past week, we’ve released a number of policies to manage risk… now we’re going to tie our efforts together and explain how we will make our decisions.
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Cold-weather larping requires more work than just carrying extra socks: while larping in the heat can be rough, the cold offers unique problems that can wear you down. Huddling together in the dark can make for great role-play, but not if the player is uncomfortable or unhappy. Here’s some tips for staying warm enough to enjoy a cold-weather larp.
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Survivors fight for their lives. Photo by London Belli. Pictured: Michael Bruni.
In Part 2, we talked about explicit consent, and how it was required for fighting, theft and infection loss. But how do we signal, obtain, and confirm explicit consent? Luckily we have tools described in our rulebook to obtain them. They include negotiation, the Conflict Check-In, and the Wasteland. We also have the Survival Ethos System (SES), also called the Red Ledger.
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One survivor bests another. Photo by London Belli. Pictured: Victoria Gomez-Egger
Larpers (and people in general) like hard and fast rules that apply in all situations - it makes it easy to know what is allowed and what is not ok - but not all situations are the same. In Part 1, we talked about the different groups of people who have to consent to Character versus Character (CvC) conflict but we didn’t talk about how they signal, obtain, or confirm it. The key to any of those topics is this: consent should be appropriate to the risk of the action.
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Two survivors face off. Photo by London Belli. Pictured: Dan Carione, Dan Gower.
“Consent is critically important.” That’s what the Dystopia Rising Rulebook says about Character versus Character (CvC) conflict (page 159). However, the rulebook doesn’t discuss exactly what consent means, or how to signal, obtain, and confirm it. As consent has to be clear to all people involved, we at Dystopia Rising New York (DRNY) want to talk about how it applies to our game. To begin our three-part series on consent and CvC, we’ll focus on the different groups of people who have to consent to CvC.
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