Annie

Well I get to be the most boring person in the world when it comes to my screen name.

I'm Anna, but I'm often called Annie.

Yawn.

Damn international shipping. It's about time someone invented a teleportation machine.

And my advice about how to deal with players who flange....

......let them flange. Then #### them over big style, because they deserve it. That'll learn them.

Hmmm. You own a gaming store??

Any chance of freebies???

Please?

I think you're really quite cool......

Fair enough.

Yeah, well said Rain.

I'd really like to be involved in a LARP game with minimal/no rules/stats/skills, but I don't think it could work. The reason is that players will always try to f*ck things over, and a no-rules system would allow them to flange and powergame too much. Not all players are like this admittedly, but too many are. I remember a couple of times (skipping classes at uni and being very bored) I wandered into roleplaying chat rooms, and the conversations tended to go a little something like this....

"Maxim the All-Powerful walks in and sits at the bar. He is powerfully built and carries 42 different weapons."

"Rhianna waves her hand and produces a huge fireball, she throws it at Maxim and he falls to the floor in a heap of charred ashes."

"Maxim leaps aside at the last minute and grabs Rhianna, slicing off her head with his big shiny sword."

"Rhianna wrestles with Maxim and because of her superior strength manages to stop him from drawing a weapon and picks him up and drops him in the nearest bottomless pit."

"The bottomless pit is not really bottomless, Maxim lands on his feet like a cat and uses a rope to climb up."

"Rhianna cuts the rope and Maxim plunges to his doom, landing badly and breaking his neck."

I think you get the idea.

Are you trying to suggest that you are some kind of deranged lunatic in need of restraint?

Because although I seem to disagree with almost everything you say, you seem fairly sane to me.

In fact even my dog is far more mental than you. (With respect! )

What a shame I live in a society which has removed so much of my freedom that I cannot even recognise the fact that I am so restricted.

Is fewer restrictions on gun ownership really the only thing that makes the US so much better than Britain?

As a side point, to pick up on the comment that people need guns for target shooting, well I have shot at targets on quite a few occasions with pistols and rifles. I have also shot with a BB gun (in fact i own several for LARP purposes) and I fail to see that live ammunition is any more fun, or challenging, or in any way superior to BB's. I like the fact that BB's are cheap and reuseable, and in general don't kill people.

What freedoms do you have there that we don't have in England? I'd love to know what earth-shatteringly important things I'm missing.

Why I dislike the MET system:-

1) No phys reps. Okay, I'm a responsible adult, and I'm pretty safe with a latex sword or a fake gun or whatever. And I'm just not impressed by a piece of card with "fecking huge axe" written on it. And some set dressing would be nice, instead of just "Oh I know it looks like a shitty function room but imagine it's an ornate palace....", I mean how much effort is it to get hold of a chair that looks like a throne and hang up a few bits of material on the walls or whatever.....

2) The dodgy paper, scissors, stone thing. Apart from the fact that it looks sad and pants, take the following example into consideration......

Mad Jeff the Malkavian attacks Poncy Boy the Toreador. Jeff's attack skill (whichever one it is, I don't care) is 9. Poncy Boy's defence is 2. They do paper, scissors, stone. Jeff has a 2/3 chance of winning the challenge (if he wins or draws) and Poncy Boy has a 1/3 chance of winning, and not getting hit. Right?

Mad Jeff then turns on Eric "The Brick", another Malk, who had a defence of 8. Same situation, Jeff hits him 2/3 of the time, and Eric defends 1/3 of the time.

Anyone else see the problem here? Shouldn't Jeff find it easier to hit Poncy Boy than to hit Eric? Surely that would make sense.

Anyway, if anyone else cares, I'd love to hear what they think.....

Okay, this month's LARP was the Mind's Eye Theatre vampire game in Sheffield on November 10, 2001.

Rain talked me into going to this game. I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the system, as I had studied the rules before when I was considering running a MET game myself and wasn't particularly impressed. Apprehensive as I was, I thought I'd give the it a go and see if the system was better in practice than on paper.

We did arrive at The Queen's Head a bit late, so everyone was already there. My first critisism was that no-one particularly paid me much attention, as a new player I expected to at least be introduced to the important people and bullied into generating a character. As it was it required Rain asking 2 people to help me with a character to get anything done, and even then we only got started a couple of minutes before time-in, so I ended up missing the introduction.

I also missed about 30 minutes of play while doing character gen even though I had a very clear idea of what I wanted my character to be like, as the bloke insisted on explaining every single skill even though I told him I knew the system quite well. So nil points for actually listening to the players.

When I actually got to play, I found myself involved in a small amount of plot every quickly and easily, as I was playing a Gangrel and there are quite a few Gangrel characters there, including the prince. A couple of times I was forced to used skills (which for those of you who are unfamiliar with the MET system involves playing paper, scissors, stone), and found myself unable to keep a straight face when faced with grown men and women playing such a silly little game with such earnest expressions on their faces.

As I've probably said before, phys-reps are not allowed at MET games and this severely hampered my enjoyment of this session. It really does look silly when someone attacks you with a piece of card with the word "sword" written on it in biro. I must be too used to the old rule "No phys-rep, no effect", but it really doesn't help me to feel in character. I know the official reasons for this no prop, no contact thing, ie it's not safe, and could scare "civilians", and people get sued/arrested/whatever, but I fail to see why this applies to "set dressing" type phys-reps. For example, at the beginning of the session the surroundings were described to us - apparently there was a lot of fake fur around. Now my character is a fairly animalistic eco-warrior type, and if there had been actual pieces of fake fur lying around the room it would have given me a great opportunity to pace around sniffing at the fur to see if it was real, and hopefully provoking a reaction from someone......but this was denied to me by lack of phys reps.

The game wasn't particularly visual anyway, especially when it came to costumes. The women almost all wore black leather strapless corset type tops, and black skirts, except for a couple who wore black velvet. Hardly original, in my opinion, I felt quite out of place in my blue velvet "hippy" skirt and tie-dyed shirt. And most of the players didn't seem to be very in character, most of the conversations I joined in were out of character.

As people, I actually liked the players a lot, they were pretty friendly and nice to me, but they didn't appear to be making much of an effort, which struck me as pretty strange as a lot of them travel all over the country regularly to go to games.

I'm sure that most people who do MET have a lot of fun, but it really isn't my type of game, and I wasn't overly impressed.

That said, I did enjoy the game, and I will go back again. But I won't take it seriously.

As Amrath mentioned, I was there at the last vamp game in Sheffield, and it's the official November LARP of the Month, which I will post when I've finished this......I'd appreciate people's views of the system, so tell us what you think when you've been to a game Golgotha.

And anyone else feel free to add their bit too....

Do me a favour. If you really want to discuss this, start up a new thread.

This is about live action roleplaying, as at least two people have already said, and been ignored.

It isn't that I want to dissuade you from discussing guns or whatever, as I find it quite interesting, but you've taken over this thread. I wanted to hear people's views on LARP here.

Let's all try to keep each other happy, okay?

You're all wrong. You're thinking of poetry.

Nice one Pammy, that slang stuff made me laugh for ages.

Spudfairy - Person who is extemely annoying and/or offensive, but without whom life would be much more boring.

I actually managed to get to a MET Vampire game on Saturday, and while I'm still forming a proper opinion of it, within the next couple of days I'm going to post a review of it in the LARP forum.

I'm really not impressed with the system though. I like my phys reps too much.....

Hmmm, nice safe LARP with latex LARP weapons.

Doesn't matter how "safe" you make it, and what your weapons are made of, you're still always gonna get people who get carried away and hit you just a bit too hard. Believe me, after being hit in the kidneys a couple of times by a mad over-enthusiastic Scottish bloke with a latex sword, I can say that any LARP which involves actual contact cannot be described as "safe".

Saying that though, I much prefer the occasional injury to sad girly LARPs where you can't even touch people, or have phys reps, or even look at people in a certain way. IMO it isn't really Live if you can't have contact with anyone.

Quote:

Well no-one in LARP pretends to be an actual real life person who actually existed. At least not that I know of.

We do the character thing. You act, speak, look, whatever as your character would.

Spud? Off subject?

Never.

I think he actually means paediatrics.

I'm struggling to find another LARP for November, since several appear to be cancelled. Any ideas anyone?

Scarily enough, I did actually understand all of that. Does that mean I'm on amphetamines without even knowing it??

Sounds pretty cool, actually. Scarily similar to certain fantasy LARPs I've been to.......except we mess about pretending to do magic as well.

I wish we had SCA over here, sounds like a good time. Do you have any clowns??

And by the way, anyone who comes near me in a clown suit should prepare to have their arse kicked severely.

Especially if they are also carrying a porcelein doll.

Respect to SCA. Sounds to me like it's about as close to LARP as you can get....looks pretty cool. And don't you play actual characters and everything?

Mixed feelings about Vampire then I see. Okay, another question which i may have already asked.....is the paper, scissors, stone thing really as stupid and pants as it sounds?

Admittedly snails are pretty cool.

I wonder how long before chips are implanted into slightly more complex animals? I'm going to be optimistic about the whole weird situation and look forward to the fact that this sort of technology could help a lot of people. It still scares me though.

Apparently Rain knows someone who can give you a lift, Spider. If that's any help at all.