LARP
2010 – A year in gaming
With KapCon now behind me I’m starting to look forward to what kind of gaming experiences I want to have in 2010. Essentially a list that I can look back on later in the year to see how I’m going.
So with out any further ado. The List!
- Actually finish my KapCon SDC entry this year. I’m going to tidy up and polish Still to Come.
- Stop being so soft on the players in the A Song of Ice and Fire game I GM. It’s a tough world and sometimes, people die.
- Continue to overcome the distrust I have of LARPing.
- Play more of the games I look at and think “I really want to play that!”.
- Blog more, not just re-posting cool stuff from elsewhere.
- Get a new PC so I can play all these awesome CPRGs on the platform they are meant for.
I think that’s it really. There are other things, but these are the main ones. What about you? Do you have any gaming goals for the year?
But Nobody Loses an Eye… aka, How I was re-introduced to LARPing
A few weeks ago, I spent about 3 hours in a local pre-school pretending to be a 5 year old. Normally this sort of behaviour would see me carted off to some sort of institution. However it was all in the name of utterly sane LARPing. An oxymoron? Possibly, but regardless it was stupidly good fun.
My last LARP experience was a couple of years ago at the annual KapCon LARP. I didn’t have a great amount for fun, seeing as I had no idea what to do and my character goals seemed very hard to actually achieve. So I was put off LARP somewhat, and decided it wasn’t for me.
However a friend of mine has recently spearheaded the establishment of a NZLARP chapter down here in Wellington, and the first game on the schedule was a fun 3 hour game called “But Nobody Loses an Eye”. The set up is simple. All of the characters are 5 year olds at a birthday party. It’s meant to be fun, silly and high energy and it certainly delivered.
I was Sally, the highly competitive almost marbles champion, who at 5 and a 1/4 was convinced that today was the day she was going to knock her arch-nemisis Roland off his marble champion perch. I had a bunch of other goals but that one, along with trying to convince Evelyn to take me to the Super Sparkle Princess Ice Show, where the two I focused on the most.
However having lost my marbles (in the literal sense) before the game even started it seemed that beating Roland was going to be tough. However I stuck at it and while narrowly missed out on the Ice Show I did manage to reclaim the marbles and I think convince a lot of the other kids that Roland was too much of a scardy cat to face me on the field of war!
I’ve been thinking a lot about why this LARP seemed to work for me and I’ve decided that it’s the small scale of it. The goals were clear, and seemed very achievable. There weren’t too many characters to get confused with and I was able to just channel my inner 5 year old. Though I have to admit that I don’t remember 5 being that tiring!
Will LARP now become a regular part of my gaming life? I don’t think so. But I will no longer dismiss it out of hand if the format is similar to this one.