[UA] UA larp

[James O'Rance]

"Gareth Hanrahan" <hanrahag at iol.ie> said:

 >>>Eh. It's still a bit clunky. Better than dice, though.<<<

Cards have the advantage of being usable by pople who are stading with no 
nearby surfaces to roll on. They are also quick. You can use a taort deck if 
you want something that looks nice.

That said, freeorm mechanics don't have to be randomiser-based. Cthulhu Live 
has no randomisers, and it looks like a playable game (if a bit too detailed 
for my preferences). It's purely base on stats - either you are good enough 
to do something, or you aren't. The challenge as a scenario designer would 
be to make sure that you don't create any impossible situations, although I 
guess that would suit the genre of CoC.

Over Easter I ran a freeform where each character started out with a certain 
amount of play money. If you wanted to do something, and another character 
didn't want you to, whoever bid the highest amount of money "won" (there was 
a minor complication for the sexy characters). I'm glad that "Very bad 
Things" was run indoors, because it looked like drug deals were continuously 
being made.

 >>>I'm tempted to tie skills directly to stats - you don't have a firearms 
score of 30, you've just got the firearms skill and use your speed when you 
need a number. Skills become more of a binary thing - just to cut down on 
the complexity of the character sheet.<<<

Good idea - noted. It would mean that a high Speed character will always be 
good at shooting, unless there's some benefit in taking a skill "multiple 
times" (as you can do in MET).

There could be somewhat less differentiation between characters due to 
similar skills.

 > Magic would be annoying, because there are so many different effects to
 > remember and I hate games where people have to carry around books. It
might
 > be neccessary to prepare one-page cheat sheets for each school.

 >>>I'd boil it down to three or four effects per school, and make most
charge-building happen outside the larp.<<<

It might be okay to assume that PCs can get minor charges whenever they want 
during the game, as long as they don't break taboo. Essentially, minor 
effects would not be limited.
I agree that other charge-building would happen outside of actual play. Most 
activities would be too disruptive to the game, or would be difficult to 
administer in a live environment.

PoMoMa has some guidelines about how many charges an adept can gather in a 
period of time, iirc; I'd look into using that as a guide.

 >>>it's as good as any ideas I've had, but it still relies on cards, and 
I'd love to get rid of them too, somehow.<<<

Get rid of randomisers completely, and you don't need cards. I have an idea 
that this may not be a popular answer with some, though.

I hate paper-rock-scissors (it's the silliest looking thing, makes me feel 
like I'm in kindergarten) so I'd rather have a mechanic that was 
thematically tied into UA.


James O’Rance
“Divine being creates petting zoo. It gets out of hand.”
- The Bible (summarised by John W. Mangrum)

http://www.geocities.com/dragon-dreamer/


_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.


_______________________________________________
UA mailing list
UA at lists.uchicago.edu
http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua