A couple of weeks ago, Harbinger Readers JohnKazuo and Ms. J replied to my post on PvP design to specifically address the dynamics of PvP in LARPs, and now I’m returning to the topic. To state a few things up-front: this has a lot to do with pure aesthetics, and I […]
I’ve been thinking a bit lately about some of the high-level principles of PvP design. These principles readily apply to video games and LARPs. I want to be clear from the start: this is not master-class level stuff – for that, you want to talk to Stands-In-Fire. Quite seriously, the […]
In many live-action games, there exists a mechanic to represent the players’ actions between events, since otherwise players can only take part in the world and its goings-on for maybe twelve (for some games, as many as twenty-four) days out of every year. Since the plot committee is dedicated to […]
It’s interesting to me how conversations about specific topics sometimes crop up in multiple unconnected places at the same time. Just as Ryan Macklin is discussing disadvantages and experience points in his blog, there’s also a lively exchange on experience points going on in Google Plus. The G+ conversation is, […]
Several weeks ago, a Conscientious Reader commented that I have a long history of giving a lot of design consideration to spellcasters of every type, at the apparent expense of fighter and rogue characters. My Swordplay series of posts aside, I’m comfortable calling this an accurate observation of a blind […]
A little while ago, a friend of mine started a conversation in G+ about the Next Big Evolution in LARPing, without getting into specifics of what he thought that change might represent. The idea has been knocking around in my head since then, and I’ve come up with a number […]
There’s been a lot of discussion lately in Eclipse‘s Rules Forum about invisibility and powers that counter invisibility. This is a very complicated topic in LARPing; we spent the better part of a year (off and on) discussing it while designing DtD, and I’m going to try to summarize the […]
Shortly before our most recent Dust to Dust event, we released rules for wizard dueling. In this post, I want to talk about some of the design considerations that drove this project, some of the ideas we set aside, and some of the problems that we didn’t discover until after […]
So, for non-LARPers in the crowd, I want to explain culture packets in a few words, so that the rest of this post will make a damn bit of sense. A culture packet is a document describing one of a game’s cultures, organizations, or races, with details on a variety […]
For people who don’t play Eclipse, this post may not hold a lot of interest, except in the area of theoretical design for boffer LARPs. For people who do play Eclipse, and especially for those who run it, this post may be controversial, but I will studiously obey the second […]
