On Ending a LARP II: When It’s Out of Your Control

A while back I wrote an article mulling over the various ways one can conclude a LARP – both in terms of bringing an individual event to a close, and rounding off a campaign. Specifically, though, I was talking about planned endings – endings intended to be exactly that – because as a game runner that’s the type of game you want to design.

Just recently, though, a LARP game I had been playing has experienced a different type of ending – an unplanned one. Crucible was a Vampire: the Requiem LARP run by the Badgers and Jam referee team. It was designed to be a low-budget, low-cost, long-running monthly campaign. The format was structured around sessions taking place once a month in a hired pub function room, and lasting for a few hours of a Saturday afternoon – allowing for a much lesser time commitment than many of the weekend-long LARPs I’ve written about on here previously.

The “ageless creatures in the modern day” concept meant that anyone could come kitted in normal clothes or push the boat out on costuming to the extent that they saw fit, and also meant that it wasn’t incongruous for characters to use smartphones; the latter point meant that the referees could deploy a handy little web portal to manage the use of vampiric Disciplines mid-session, freeing them up from having to referee such things. All of this was supported by a much more simple system than Mind’s Eye Theatre – partially to enable the phone-based resolution in the first place, but also to scale back the barrier to entry and to declutter gameplay (since Mind’s Eye Theatre tends to import a lot of tabletop game mechanics and complications without really thinking about how social LARP games actually play out in practice).

The campaign had started shortly before the COVID pandemic – the first session I attended was the last one before the game went on hiatus as a result of the virus making it dangerous to run sessions and lockdown making it illegal. Whilst many outdoor LARPs opened up again somewhat in 2021-2022, due to outdoor events being more COVID-secure and thanks to the vaccine rollout, Crucible was specifically meant to be a game played in pub function rooms, because that was key to making it widely accessible. As such, the referees decided to wait a bit longer to restart the game – not just to the point where suitable venues were starting to reopen again, but also to the point where they had at least some confidence that we wouldn’t be going back into lockdown after a brief easing, forcing the game to go into hiatus again.

It was therefore mid-2022 when the organisers started to seriously talk about reviving Crucible, canvassing the player base to see how many people were still interested, whether people wanted to keep using their old characters or start fresh with new ones, and so on and so forth. They appeared to have sufficient numbers to make a go of it, and scheduled a return session for the 1st October – but then decided to postpone the return because despite a good number of people saying they wanted to return, an insufficient number of those signed up to actually attend the first planned revival session. (Apparently just enough people signed up to cover the venue hire, but not enough to functionally run the game as envisioned.)

Unbowed and unbroken, Badgers and Jam soldiered on. Deciding that in November-January people were likely busy, they decided to run a poll and see who was still interested despite this latest setback, and which of several possible days for a return session people could say with confidence that they would be able to make. The first Saturday in March seemed to have the numbers, and so a first session was planned for then, with a “first Saturday of the month” schedule going forwards from there.

In fact, I can jot down the actual numbers here – because the referees levelled with us about them afterwards. I was at the March event and enjoyed myself, but I did notice that attendance seemed a little light, and some players I’d had the impression were among the most keen participants in the campaign weren’t there. In fact, although 22 players said they were interested in the game and could make the March date, only 13 actually showed up. The referees had accounted for something like a 25% drop-out rate, which would have left things within the range they considered viable, but 13 players wasn’t quite hacking it.

This put the organisers in a tough spot. They seriously didn’t want to put a guilt trip on people or try and make people feel that they were compelled to attend – players who aren’t specifically enthusiastic to be at your game aren’t going to get anything from it and won’t give their best contribution – and they specifically designed it as a game where it was possible to simply miss a session if you weren’t feeling it in a particular month. At the same time, a certain attendance level was needed to make the game viable in its current design. This was why they disclosed those numbers to us post-event – rather than trying to brush the issue under the mat, the refs took what I thought was a sensible move by being honest with the player base about the precarious situation the campaign was in, and explained that they wouldn’t be able to keep running if we weren’t able to get regular attendance up.

They were also clear about the criteria which they would now start to use to decide whether the campaign was still viable: at the start of each session going forwards they’d take a headcount of everyone who’d made it to the event (and anyone who’d messaged in to say they were running late) and see if they’d hit 14. If they had those numbers, fine, the campaign would keep going. If they had 13 or less, and there wasn’t some form of significant mitigating circumstance intervening, they’d put the campaign on hiatus, taking a vote of those attending on whether to play through one last session or just end it there.

As it happened, at the April event there were only 10 players. The refs had told themselves that if we came in just a little but under expectations, they’d overlook it, but they couldn’t ignore that much of a shortfall – especially when the number of people who said they planned to come, even accounting for possible train strikes on the day (which if I remember right were called off anyway), was substantially higher than that. We near-unanimously voted to play through a session (which you’d expect, because the people present were generally those who were most enthusiastic about the campaign anyway), and then we were left to console the referees and ponder what had transpired.

It is a real shame that this has happened; Crucible was a good game, and may indeed still be a good game if the refs decide to retool, reconfigure, and continue in another form, and if they get the support from the player base necessary to make a go of it. It’s certainly the case that dropouts from LARP events seems to have become a little endemic in the UK scene, and whilst it had increased post-COVID it did happen pre-COVID as well. Sally Poppenbeck did a good guest post over on the LARP Experience blog thinking more about general reasons why COVID may have led to a shift in habits in this respect, but I do want to put some consideration into factors which might or might not have affected Crucible specifically.

Firstly, I suspect games like Crucible need to plan for a higher dropout rate than is average for, say, a weekend-long LARP event (for which the 25% drop-out rate feels like a reasonable tolerance to plan for). Weekend-long events tend to involve more commitment both in terms of time and money (even if the organisers undercharge, travel costs are a thing) and in terms of sheer personal effort than events which unfold over a weekend afternoon.

On the one hand, you would expect people to find it easier to come to an afternoon event than to a weekend event – but I suspect there’s a motivational paradox here. Precisely because it takes way more effort to go to a weekend LARP, I think people tend to be more invested in them. You aren’t going to book for such an event if that weekend is not clear, and once you have booked you are going to keep that weekend clear if you can; once you’ve decided to commit a fair amount of time and money to it, you’re probably going to show unless some dire turn of events prevents you, or if you have some sort of catastrophic loss of confidence in the event, or a mental health wobble makes you not want to leave the house, or whatever.

Conversely, if a game is happening every month on a Saturday afternoon, showing up is easier, but brushing it off is also easier. If you bail on a weekend-long LARP event that’s an entire weekend where you are suddenly at a loose end. However, if your weekend is looking busy with lots of smaller-scale activities, it can be tempting to drop something to leave more space for the rest of the stuff you’re planning to do. And if a game is not a one-off, and happens reasonably regularly, you can expect to blow off a session and be able to come back. That’s what the refs kind of wanted Crucible to be – but it becomes unviable to run the game if the proportion of people who blow it off is so high so frequently.

In addition to all that, I do wonder if the “we’re going on hiatus if we don’t make quorum” announcement accelerated the hiatus a little. I’m not saying that making the announcement was a mistake; quite the reverse. In general, I think it is good and healthy for referees to level with your player base about this sort of thing, both because it’s the honest and transparent thing to do and because trying to put a brave face on things and pretend there’s no problem is rarely the right call when it comes to mental health and morale.

In this specific instance, I think providing clearly-understood criteria for what a viable Crucible looked like was not just honest and transparent, but also a great aid in expectation-setting, as well as a challenge to the player base – it let us all get a picture of how much of a knife-edge the game was on, and helped stimulate us to try and recruit new participants.

Equally, though, if you tell a player base your game is in a fragile state it can be a risky move. In some cases you may find the players rally behind you, re-commit to the game, and pull out the stops to help get things back on course. In other cases, you could find that the player base become more disengaged, not less – if they start expecting that the game might go away, they may become less committed, because they feel less inclined to invest time and creativity in something which might evaporate suddenly.

What’s more likely than either of those extremes is a mixture of reactions – some players become more committed, some begin emotionally disengaging, and some have a more complicated reaction. In my case, for instance, I found I was more determined to make the monthly events because I didn’t want the event to disintegrate because I happened to fancy a lie-in one month, but I also found myself wanting to adapt my approach to the game, because my initial character concept was designed with an eye to undertaking long-term projects, and since I didn’t 100% trust the rest of the player base not to flake I didn’t want to get overly invested in those projects when they might never yield any payoff.

As a result, levelling with your players like this can be a gamble – it might be the prod your player base needs to stop taking the game for granted and do their bit to keep it alive, or it could further sap their morale. Nonetheless, I think it’s a gamble which is worth it because it not only explains the problem, but opens up a basis for conversation and constructive engagement. Several times during Crucible‘s restart, from the initial seeking of expressions of interest to literally the minutes before the final session, I checked in with the referees to calibrate my expectations, explain where I was coming from, and generally make sure they had a clear idea of what level of commitment I was intending to give the game.

Some of those conversations involved saying slightly awkward things. When you’re talking to someone running a game the people-pleasing thing to say is “of course I love your game, of course it’s going great, and of course I’ll definitely make sure to make the next session”. The awkwardness comes when one or more of those things isn’t true – for my part, I thought Crucible was a solid game, and I wouldn’t deliberately want to arrange something which clashed with it, but there’s LARPs out there and other things which I am or might be more enthusiastic for, and whose scheduling isn’t under my control, and which I would probably prioritise over Crucible.

That’s not an easy thing to say, but it is an honest thing to say, and just as player bases deserve honesty from referee teams, so too do referees deserve players who are honest in turn. The whole reason the refs undertook all the labour involved in trying to revive this campaign not once but twice is because people kept telling them that they wanted to participate, but when it came time for people to make good on that… too many of us didn’t show up.

It stings badly enough when you throw an idea out there and, for whatever reason, you don’t get a critical mass of people behind it. In some ways it can sting worse if you do have an apparent critical mass, but then a chunk of the player base didn’t actually mean it when they said “yes, we’ll go out of our way to help you make this game work”.

Sure, some of the drop-outs from the March and April sessions may have been due to illness, emergency, or some other factor outside of the control of the people who dropped out – but I know for a fact that this doesn’t account for 100% of them. Some people simply opted not to show up, prioritised some other game over Crucible, or double-booked themselves with activities whose timing they absolutely did have some level of control over. No one individual is wholly at fault here; this isn’t a situation where I can point the finger and say “That asshole ruined Crucible for the rest of us!” Collectively, however, we as a player base turned out to be shockingly unreliable, and that speaks to a problem with the culture around the game.

It’s entirely legitimate to want to run a game which is easily accessible and doesn’t demand the investment of time and money a weekend LARP does – it’s a good thing to have, and London surely has enough LARPers and gamers to support many such things. At the same time, it’s hard to do that if people are going to treat your game as being utterly disposable. There is surely a middle ground between “blow my entire weekend on this game” levels of commitment and “I simply cannot be bothered to keep the day clear for this LARP” levels of detachment, and it’s frustrating to me that many of my fellow Crucible players don’t seem to have been able to find it.

The Recent Requiem

Over the last year or two, the 5th Edition of Vampire: the Masquerade has been embroiled in controversy – to the point where it literally caused an international incident and caused Paradox to step in and shut down their new version of White Wolf, reducing its functions to merely overseeing the IP and rubber-stamping the work of licensees, rather than being allowed to develop anything in-house. (Much like it was under CCP, in other words, except with the recent announcement of Bloodlines 2 it’ll hopefully be more productive on the videogame front.)

Meanwhile, quietly and humbly, Vampire: the Requiem 2nd Edition has been chugging along doing its own little thing. For those who, like me, can’t be bothered to dip into V5 at this point – oh, some of its system ideas sound fun, but ultimately I feel like its release has been so shaky that I’d rather wait for the inevitable V6 or V5.5 that’ll correct the ship, and I’m much more interested in the metaplot-agnostic version of the setting which V20 offered than the highly metaplot-focused presentation V5 has enjoyed so far. Let’s take a look at a couple of recent offerings in that vein.

Requiem In Different Veins

I’ve largely come to agree with the apparent critical consensus on Vampire: the Requiem‘s two editions: namely, that the first edition was an interesting first pass that was a little hampered by the commercial necessity of attempting to appeal to fans of Vampire: the Masquerade, which meant that it couldn’t quite diverge as markedly from Vampire precedent as it might have wanted to, whereas the second edition – designed in an era when Masquerade is continuing to be published – has done a much better job of carving out a distinctive new identity for itself and tightening up and modernising the design of the game.

Still, that isn’t to say the entire line was a wash – indeed, the core 2nd edition book recommends some first edition books as being worth a look. For this article I’m going to look at two books which seem to offer diametrically opposite approaches to supporting 1st edition – one big fat chunk of excellent advice and setting-design tools, and one thin tome of uninspiring fluff.

Damnation City

A sourcebook on the design of city environments as physical landscapes, thematic backdrops, and as political chessboards for the purposes of Vampire: the Requiem, Damnation City is such a useful toolkit that it could be used in any other modern-day occult game. Its major weakness is the designers’ insistence that there’s a Right Way and a Wrong Way to use the book, and you have to do it the Right Way; for instance, they talk a lot about how the book’s meant to be used as a dramaturgical aid, rather than as a toolkit for a more simulation-styled approach to gameplay, but in fact if you want to run a Chronicles of Darkness sandbox game there’s few better tools.

Likewise, whilst they offer “Barony” and “Primacy” play styles, in which you play increasingly powerful individuals within the power structure of the city, they work on the inflexible axiom that the Prince of the city must always, invariably be an NPC, and that a player character can never take that position. This strikes me as outright cowardice to me: if you’re willing to have the PCs become the powers behind the throne, be willing to let one of them sit on the ding-dong diddly throne already.

There’s other aspects where the book’s design suggestions just fall flat. For instance, altogether too much space is given to various ways of plotting out the power structure of a city, some of which are more or less useful whilst others are nigh-incomprehensible or utterly uninformative. Some of the power structures there make absolute sense; others look like the sort of thing you’d create if you liked the idea of making a diagram of this sort of thing but had never seen a diagram in your life.

Still, when the book’s on form, it’s great. Stuffed with ideas for NPCs, districts, locations, and so on, it’s a grand sandbox toolbox designed by people who absolutely insist that it’s not for that style of play. Well, deny it all you like, mid-2000s White Wolf: you’re the stopped clock that pulls off something useful twice a day and this time you hit the jackpot.

Mythologies

This provides a grab-bag of different urban myths that vampires tell each other, along with rules systems and tweaks to use if you decide they are true in your campaign. Fun in principle, but somehow I find the actual myths presented to be somewhat drab and uninspiring. Perhaps the issue is that the book tries to stuff too many into its limited page count, leaving the mysteries here shallow and underdeveloped.

Old Vampires, New Tricks

Thousand Years of Night is the shiny new supplement for Vampire: the Requiem focusing on playing elders. This is a smart love for the purposes of continuing the agenda of the 2nd edition core book (AKA Blood & Smoke: the Strix Chronicle) in terms of allowing Requiem to be its own thing rather than existing in the shadow of Vampire: the Masquerade. Masquerade had a very particular take on elders as being the uber-powerful vampire Illuminati, and this was largely reflected in the guidance offered for playing them in the Elysium supplement. On top of that, both the metaplot and various published adventures and setting books leaned heavily on the “elders pulling everyone’s strings” trope. If Requiem‘s elders could be distanced from this interpretation, that would establish some clear water between the two games.

Broadly speaking, Thousand Years of Night succeeds at this. Elders here are still quite powerful – they get a nice stack of Experiences depending on just how Elder they are at character gen, and of course you also have some nice new powers for them and guidance on what you can do with attributes and skills beyond the human maximum. At the same time, they aren’t the full-on vampire Illuminati they are in Masquerade – the much more fragmented nature of Kindred society in Requiem doesn’t lend itself to that, for one thing, and for another they aren’t so radically beyond other vampires in capabilities as to dominate the upper echelons of vampire politics.

What they are instead are people displaced far in time from their era of origin, and whilst they are more able than Masquerade‘s Elders to keep up with the times (in fact, odds are they’ve forgotten many of the archaic skills they used to have as they simply ceased using them and learned new skills in turn), they do need to face the problem of maintaining Touchstones when they’ve already seen entire generations of ’em fading into the dust. Out of the rules stuff here, perhaps the best stuff is the consideration of how Requiem‘s Touchstones system changes once you’re dealing with Elders of a particular vintage. You know that whole “Elder who becomes obsessed with someone because they remind them of someone from their tragic past” trope? You can do that way up to the hilt here.

You also get some consideration of how Elders interact with covenants, as well as covenants and conspiracies which primarily consist of Elders. (For instance, there’s a clique of Elders who specialise in a callous but effective method of Strix-hunting.) The book closes by rounding out the range of supernatural adversaries extant in the setting, following the lead of the main book of providing more examples of blood-drinkers and corpse-eaters from classical myth, as well as depicting some Elders and Methuselahs who’ve gone well off the deep end. For wilder character concepts, there’s also details on Clans which are supposed to have gone extinct, but which Elder characters could still viably be members of.

On the whole, I’d say that Thousand Years of Night does what Requiem supplements need to do at this point in time – expanding the range of play available in Requiem without obscuring or cluttering up the distinct vision and voice of the game line.

The Owls Are Not What They Seem: Redeeming the Requiem

I’ve previously talked on here about how I think many of the innovations of Vampire: the Requiem represent improvements over Vampire: the Masquerade – and yet, I’ve tended to find myself more interested in the older game’s 20th Anniversary Edition and its supplements than in the Requiem line. The problem is that Requiem, in its original presentation, manages to be just different enough from Masquerade to excite you with the possibilities of a different vision of vampires and vampiric society whilst not quite being different enough to avoid reminding you of Masquerade and feeling like a slightly fanfic-y remix of the more archetypal presentation of the concepts there.

This is probably an artifact of the way Requiem was originally published as an outright replacement for Vampire: the Masquerade, rather than as an interesting and novel alternative for it. This really put the original designers in an impossible bind; on the one hand, they had to make Requiem recognisably different from Masquerade to stop it feeling like a cynical cash grab, whilst at the same time they had to make it similar enough to the original so that those who liked Masquerade didn’t end up completely out in the cold.

Of course, these issues have been exacerbated of late by the publication of the V20 line, bringing the Classic World of Darkness back into the picture. Now that those who dig Masquerade have ongoing support for the line from Onyx Path, there’s no need for them to look to Requiem unless it’s for its unique selling points – which were not as strongly played up as they could have been in the original version. A second edition of Requiem, liberated from any need to pander to the Masquerade crowd to soothe their hurt at the old line’s termination, has been necessary for a while now, particularly in the light of the God-Machine Chronicle rules update which established some interesting and distinctive mechanical differences between the Classic and New World of Darkness systems.

However, matters were complicated by Onyx Path’s relationship with CCP, who were of the opinion that putting out official second editions of the New World of Darkness stuff would confuse consumers in the lead-up to the launch of their World of Darkness MMO. Frankly, I think CCP were kidding themselves there – most videogamers would not and would never be aware of Requiem in the first place, and those who were would understand the distinction between the MMO’s Classic World of Darkness-derived background and the New World of Darkness. Either way, they refused permission to put out new editions until after the MMO project was cancelled, which is why the God-Machine Chronicle exists in the form it does in the first place, and why Vampire: the Requiem 2nd Edition first hit the market as Blood & Smoke: the Strix Chronicle.

The Referee’s Bookshelf: Vampire: the Requiem

Hot on the heels of the core World of Darkness rulebook, I took in the core Vampire: the Requiem tome. I genuinely like the tweaks White Wolf have made to Vampire and think Requiem is a better game than Masquerade because of them, but I also think the book is quite alienating to people who just want to play Vampire with minimum fuss.