LARP woes... part 1. Written by PeterAmthor

Here is a little look back into the past of some of the LARP experiences that I've had in the area I live in. This also will probably explain why my hate of other gamers is in me and make many people feel better about themselves.

I'll try not to name names. Okay I will name a few names but if they are offended, oh well damn I don't know how I will sleep at night.

Sometimes you just want to scream. You set around and look at what you are doing and who all is involved and the thought crosses your mind “Why the hell am I here?” On more than one occasion this has happened to me. It was actually an accumulation of doing the same thing for a few months in a row that made me think that. This was back when I was still LARPing. That’s Live Action Role Playing for those of you who aren’t acronym savvy.

The game was Vampire, using the Minds Eye Theatre rules. Now I can get around the paper, scissors, rock mechanics. They work and are simple, something that is needed for this type of game. But when you are supposed to be the creatures of darkness that live for centuries plotting and scheming to gain more power however you can it’s hard to get in the right mindset at a public park on a sunny day. Why a public park? Well that’s about all we had. But we did it anyways.

Why did we do it? Well there wasn’t much else to do evidently. This was the game everybody wanted to play. Originally I showed up to get their support when I was helping put together a local game con. There I met Max again whom I had no contact with for a couple years, he was there trying to get them to play Sla Industries. Luckily he had more long lasting success than I.

So we had our group of players. The most dysfunctional group of players ever assembled in one place at any given time. We had the super Diablerie brothers who thought the goal of the game was to have as much combat as possible, Mr. “I have wolf claws!”, the guy who wants to play what nobodies allowed to play (can I be a mokole?), gother than thou and a host of others. Max and I were just there feeling our IQ’s drain. In charge of the lot there were two head storytellers, Dan the Music Man and Farkle Me Mark. Now I don’t remember the books that well but we called the act of playing paper, scissors, rock a farkle but that’s what it got nicknamed here. Mark got the farkle added to his name for reasons I will go into later.

If there were ever two people who needed to do nothing but play MMORPGS all day long they were the Super Diablerie Brothers. Story didn’t matter to them; the plots were something that others thought were neat character development meant nothing. But the actual stats on a character sheet were what really mattered. The better your stats the more people you could kill. The more people you killed the better your stats got. It all made perfect sense to them. Anytime they could they committed Diablerie, even though it usually ended up with them getting hunted down and killed they still did it. They also had a host of really bad characters. A female Swedish vampire hunter whom we aptly named Busty the Vampire Slayer, as played by the overweight male gamer. That lasted about a game and a half.

Farkle Me Mark was probably one of the worst Storytellers I ever had the misfortune of gaming with in my life. He made the games even more miserable than what they already were, a pretty tough thing to do when you think about it. He saw every action that your character wanted to take as a challenge and something that he should try to stop. “My character is smoking.” “Farkle me to see if you can get enough breath to do that!”. We tested to see if we had lighters on us, if our shoes were tied, if we could toss a cinder block through a simple house window (something that even a twelve year old can do). Plus he had the ego to think that he was the all knowing all powerful master of the game. This fact was simply untrue. Even down to not being able to remember to do a proper combat test. A truly sad individual.

Mr. I Have Wolf Claws! Was a very interesting addition to the group. We’re not sure if he ever bathed on a regular basis or if that bathing process ever involved washing his hair. This was one of the few things that made us happy that we were playing outside instead of stuffed into a room. His favorite clan was the Gangrel. Which he played ever… single… time. He always had a katana (which really didn’t fit his characters), a trenchcoat (black by the way), sunglasses and long hair. On top of that he let his fingernails continue to grow long trimming them only to have them come to a point. So now every time he described his character he would raise up his hands showing his nails, and the ever present grit beneath them, and say “I have wolf claws!” Hence the nickname.

We had our ever rotating group of weregamers, anything you can do I can do better games and dregs whom were probably doing this as a change of pace from their regular drug routines. It was a real class act I’m telling you.

The game continued to drone of through the summer and into the fall. Eventually it got cold enough to where we were playing and seeing our breath all the time. We stood around in circles with our hands in our pockets trying to stay warm while pretending to be the undead bloodsuckers of the night. Thankfully everyone agreed that we should stop the season until the next year. That decision probably kept several of us from loosing various extremities to frost bite.

The next year started up with some changes. That story is forthcoming if I can continue down this road of self-masochism and dredge those memories up. A changing of the guard with one of the storytellers, more players and an even more droning brain throbbing series of sessions.