Some thoughts on some rocks LARP design often seems to run into, and possible ways round them.
A lot of people find playing a combat-healer fun. Not nearly as many people find playing a healing character who does most of their healing between encounters fun. Under some rulesets, there isn't much gain to doing the former rather than the latter, and the extreme form of this is situations where mechanically optimal play would involve lurking one field back and joining the party between fights (although I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone actually do this, because it would be Silly).
- Also if the ref running the linear is observant they will send a couple of monsters to spoil the day of anyone who tries to lurk one field behind... --ChessyPig
There are a number of ways to avoid this. One that I like a lot is to have all PCs fully heal up automatically between encounters (making attrition a matter of resource depletion only). This enables combat healing to be balanced much more competitively against other types of abilities without making a healer a must-have for a linearing party, and also means that you don't get the situation where a PC goes into each encounter on 1 hit, immediately goes down, gets healed up again at the end of the fight, rinses and repeats.
- There was a Conan LRP once which had the rule 'between fights you may heal up by taking a swig from your waterskin'. This is very in-genre for that kind of Wading Through Endless Enemies setting and also encourages hydration. OTOH it really depends on the feel you are going for - many people specifically like LARPs where they feel their characters are getting worn down and bloodied but heroically going on anyway, rather than being so awesome that it's always Only A Flesh Wound. --ChessyPig
- I'm one of the people who likes that, but I think you can probably supply it through resource depletion, if you give players mana pools or per-day abilities. This also creates the "do I use it or save it for next encounter?" subgame, which I like but some people dislike, and the potential to scream "NOOOOO" and spend all your mana at once when someone announces that they are your father, which again I like but does have potential drawbacks, especially in PvP?, if not capped. --Jacob
TT Alchemy is a good example of this. Because of the long skill-use times for healing potions, it's better to use the big ones after fights. There was an idea I was tossing around of a relatively short "bleed time" (60 sec or less) before you get some form of penalty but are still alive. -1 Hit, Traumatic Wound, etc. So keeping people up in fights is a much better plan than "rinse and repeat". Adds some worry to combat even in a system where you won't bleed to death on zero hits. You could even combine this with "heal up after a fight" so that the point of a healer is to ensure people don't collect a pile of broken limbs/missing eyes etc. Without one you can heroically go on, but you're going to be a wreck until you can get someone to see to you. Making it less "Shit, we're out of Stuff and there were no healers" and more "Can we afford to be broken for even longer after this linear". So rather than succeed/fail, you can succeed, but with costs. And that creates game. -Jim
- It does create game, but I would argue that it does so better at small fest larps, where resource management is more of a feature. For a heroic linearing system (arguably TT), the question is whether extra complexity makes the game more fun than the ability to go into the next fight. Depends what you want out of your game. --TimB
- You can make traumatic wounds / consequences that don't impact your short-term fighting capacity to the extent that you can't go into the next fight. Things like 'your shoulder has taken to regularly dislocating' or 'your wound looks infected, from tomorrow you'll have a terrible fever and things might get worse if you don't find serious treatment' or 'your knee joint is screwed up, you can use it now but by tomorrow the swelling will have locked it right up'... --ChessyPig
The basic idea of scouting is that everyone else waits while one person goes ahead to see what's there. There are any number of reasons why this is a bad thing on linears. So if you want to have a "scout" archetype, then at a bare minimum they need to have lots of stuff other than scouting that they can do (and that seems to be a hard system-design problem to solve), and they probably need to be actively discouraged from doing any actual "scouting". I don't have any great solutions for this one, I'm just highlighting the problem. Not-great solutions include:
- Don't include a mechanical scout archetype in your system; let people who want to play that type of PC use it as a free skin for other skills.
- Make all your stealth skills party-wide. But this runs into the problem that either people will skip your key encounter, or they'll feel that their skill is devalued when it doesn't work at lots of the times it would be most useful.
- Make stealth skills stationary or short-distance-movement only.
- -Scrap stealth skills, they always look a bit shit. Include track skills, allow PCs with those to have some idea of what's ahead. Possibly allow them to skip some encounters where there's "an alternate route" which you can always DM fiat as non-key ones because the key ones always have enough open ground that you'd be seen. -Jim
- Achieving things in interactives.
- It is easy to accomplish things in linears: a meaningful goal has been provided, and you fight your way to it. But there is only one linear a week, and not everyone can go on them, and if you have a specific IC goal then getting it turned into a linear is a big step.
- It is easy to accomplish things in downtime: it is possible to interact with the whole world, in whatever way you feel like, to achieve whatever goals you have. But downtime is very ref-intensive, and a lot of players don't like it being a big part of the game.
- It is very hard to accomplish things via interactives. Most of the universe simply doesn't exist, and the bits that do are all in plain sight of all the other PCs. But interactives are likely to be the bread and butter of any game much like TT.
- I don't really have a good solution to this one, but I think it's probably the single most significant problem anyone trying to propose a successor to TT needs to answer: you need to arrange as many different sorts of thing as possible that can be accomplished in interactives. Most weeks there is enough interPC soap opera going on to keep at least some players entertained throughout an interactive without the need for more, but that's seldom true of everyone. It's also desirable to maximise the percentage of likely PC goals which can *most sensibly* be accomplished in interactives, rather than by doing something in private.