Boffer LARP: Investment and Return

I said I'd be back to this subject in next post, so here it is.

The problem with a limited time LARP is that a lot of people invest so much time in a LARP, so much effort into a character that letting go is HARD. These investments include:

• Background- LARP is live, and weird questions can come up. Well fleshed out characters with quirks, relatives, events in their lives, etc. are useful to roleplaying well.
• Costuming and Weapons- It takes money to put together a good LARP costume. While LARPs very in their degree of needed detail and authenticity, good costumes lead to more immersion, which is arguably the most important aspect of LARP.
• Time & Experience- The longer you play, the more XP or other bennies you get. It may be magic items or character ties, but generally, playing a LARP means you become more powerful than other characters... which brings me to...

Loss of Investment: So we take a lot of time, money, and effort to bring a character to life. When a character dies, we lose some of that. Now, if the journey was fun, hey, its all gravy. A few cool events and interesting stories may be all we were looking for. However, if you put in a lot of effort and die after a single game, you find yourself out all that investment, then told "Them's the breaks."

I don't like to view roleplaying as some kind of crap shoot, where fun is an accident and you gamble a whole lot of effort with a chance of having it utterly wasted within a single game. So, just like character death, a limited time campaign can leave a person feeling cheated of effort- unless, we find a good way to reward that effort.

So, here's the basic layout in my mind, for a Limited Time Campaign:

We have one world, with a campaign planned to last anywhere from 2 to 4 years. We track the maximum and minimum character XP throughout the game. New characters start at the minimum, and old characters who miss some games get boosted to this amount. That way, even when reaching the Climax, newbies and lowbies aren't useless, just not as powerful as the big characters.

Outside experience, there will be a number of Special points, RP Experience or some such, only awarded for participating in plot goals, for roleplay, and such. This allows people to get some extra advantages for the game, but also creates a log of how much a person invested themself into the game plotwise, effecting it. When the game wraps up, the setting is kept but the time line is pushed forward. Using these RP points at the end, players can help to decide how the NEXT campaign will go, alleviating a lot of the hurt of losing a character. After all, if your character becomes a permanent feature of the setting in some way, and you get to decide how the next chapter goes, thats kind of cool right?

At least, thats the theory. It would keep stories from ending in eventual character death or failure, avoid the lowbies being treated as NPC peasants, and hopefully create richer stories that people will tell years later.

Some of the investment issues, like clothing, might be helped by holding a 'swap meet' for generating new characters. Trading garb, playing ancestors, etc. allow for new costumes with less overhead.

Anyhow, I have a rules set wrote up as well. I'll put it in next post.