[UA] UA larp

[Gareth Hanrahan]

>  >>>What I want is a system where two players can work out a minor
> confrontation or scuffle without needing a GM on-hand.<<<
>
> That's do-able. VBT was designed to be run with the absolute minimum of GM
> intervention. It ran twice, and I actually played the second session in
> order to replace a missing person. Apart from explaining the rules and
> making announcments every half hour or so (took about 2-3 minutes) I
didn't
> need to do any GM stuff.
>
> So it is possible, if you have people who play in the intended spirit of
the
> game. If you don't, well - even chess can be ruined by bad sports.

True. The problem, though, is that UA characters tend to be a bit
more...proactive than most other larp characters. In a lot of games, combat
is an impossibility or undesirable. In UA, guns are very deadly, yes, but
there's a good chance of someone blasting away at some point. Ideally, I'd
like the system to be able to handle that.

>  >>>I also want the system to have a randomiser, be appropriate to UA, and
> not rely on any physical objects or stupid hand gestures.<<<
>
> A randomiser that doesn't involve objects or hand gestures? You could use
a
> guessing game, but that seems a bit silly.
>
> I'd advise restricting randomisers to GM-only stuff. Maybe randomisers are
> only used when people do adept or avatar type magic crap. If this is
always
> handled by the GMs, then players don't need to carry any objects (a good
> thing).

That's one solution, but it increases the workload on the GM a lot, and
slows the game down.

> Interesting and workable ideas can be found by discarding your
assumptions.
> Cthulhu Live discarded randomisers (either you're good enough to succeed
or
> you're not), and it seems like it would work. I've thrown away ideas of
> "game balance" in freeforms as largely irrelevant, and been quite
> successful.

Oh, I know. Game balance is a joke in most games, anyway, it's story balance
that counts. Everyone should have an equal input, not equal power or
influence. I haven't run a larp with randomisers in it in ages, either, but
UA sorta calls for them....although I'm not sure if it calls for them loudly
enough to justify all this mechanic/soul searching we're doing. :-)

> Thought: personality mechanics in freeforms are a bit problematic; eg,
> humanity in Vampire. Madness meters in UA Live might be a similarly tricky
> thing to translate.
>
> Maybe they might work like Passions, where PCs would receive a numerical
> advantage for freaking out in stressful situations rather than
> ("unrealistically") dealing with it as though hardened. For example,
> panicking or freezing when confronted by the supernatural might give PCs a
> bonus to avoid or escape from its effects. This might motivate players to
> react as a character might, as opposed to how a cynical gamer might.

Possibly. In a multi-session larp, you could tie the personality mechanics
into experience (if you act like your character, you get experience points,
if you don't, you don't get xp and your passions are adjusted to match how
you've been playing the character).

> Cheers,
>
> James O'Rance
Gar
http://www.mytholder.f2s.com


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