Photo by Allana Marie
Larp is about making meaningful decisions: your character is presented with a challenge and you have to decide how to act. During a war game like our June Premiere event, Dogs of War, you’ll be given the chance to make choices that will decide the Battle of Requiem.
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Photo by Shawn Smith
We’ve just released a Save-The-Date for our June Premiere Event, The Dogs of War, where we’ll spend the entire event telling the story of the Battle of Requiem. While this is far from the first time a Dystopia Rising chapter has simulated a battle, we want to approach this event differently. Often, larps about war focus on big battle scenes… that’s not what we’re going for. We want to bring you the tension and intensity of a wartime scenario, punctuated with brief and brutal episodes of violence.
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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 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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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.
Before we talk about the dirtiest word in Dystopia Rising, let’s call out one other problematic larp behavior: splitting (also called black-white thinking). Splitting happens when we look at something as “all good” or “all bad” instead of realizing that the thing is actually a mix of both.
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Photo by London Belli
During our May event, you’re extremely likely to experience the conclusion of the Jones War and the end of the Anarchy (we say “extremely likely” because you can always throw us for a loop). But what about June? And our premier event in August, Honor’s Fall? Role-play is a collaborative activity, and both the storytellers and players should work together to guide the narrative. To do this, we want to talk about three things: steering, pacing, and agency.
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