PVP in larp

[Anglachel]

What are your thoughts on the impact of PVP in larp?

Do certain systems encourage PVP more than others? Is PVP more prevalent in boffer or in a system like MET?

Does PVP turn away some players from games?

Should players be discouraged from causing other players PCs to die?

I'm interested on your thoughts on this subject.

[Attila-IV]

I've never found any system that outright encourages or discourages PvP, although in my experience PvP crops up frequently in MET games. Personaly, I encourage the potential for PvP. Our group typicaly uses premade characters in our scenarios. you can bet that in one of our games if your character has a specific goal there will be at least 2 othr characters with goals that will come into direct conflict with yours. We then leave it up to the players weather they want to acomplish their goals through trickery, diplomacy, violence or some other tactic we haven't planned for. As far as character death is concerned, every LARP needs a backup plan to deal with character death requardless of how it comes about. When PvP become prevelant it can become a real headache. Sometimes 1/3 of the players will be creating new characters half the time, often designing their new characters to avenge their old. We deal with this by having auxilury characters in our scenarios. People who die early on never have to worry about being out of the game. They return as NPC, backup characters and often villains.

[mrlost]

I haven't had any bad experiences with it, and I have had several VtM characters meet their end at the hand of other players, but conversely I have also arranged for the deaths and takeover of the whole city.

I did invite a friend to come LARPing, but when his character got slaughtered by a pack of Sabbat, while my character talked his way into joining up with the pack, I think it soured my friend to the prospect.

Basically it depends how honest the ST/GM is being when it comes to the PC conflict style that they subscribe to. If they expect to see the character sheets fall where they may then PVP solutions become more attractive whereas if they spell out in no uncertain terms that their will be no killing of other PCs then obviously PVP is impossible.

[DariusSolluman]

I haven't had any bad experiences with it, and I have had several VtM characters meet their end at the hand of other players, but conversely I have also arranged for the deaths and takeover of the whole city.

I did invite a friend to come LARPing, but when his character got slaughtered by a pack of Sabbat, while my character talked his way into joining up with the pack, I think it soured my friend to the prospect.

Basically it depends how honest the ST/GM is being when it comes to the PC conflict style that they subscribe to. If they expect to see the character sheets fall where they may then PVP solutions become more attractive whereas if they spell out in no uncertain terms that their will be no killing of other PCs then obviously PVP is impossible.

This is one of the reasons I wish White Wolf would come up with a more clear and coherent system or set of guidelines for using the world via Influences/Allies directly against others. Cause, as is, it's left to ST interpretation, and often fiat, how effective something is.

It's easier, in MET, to play by the book where having super strength makes you deadly. It's harder to justly rule how much Police Influence you need to use to be safe from daylight raids.

[Lost Demiurge]

PVP happens on and off in boffer-weapon LARPS. In the one that I play in, NERO, character death means going to the circle and resurrecting, but with only a 10% chance of retaining your memory of the last hour.

So, unless you get very lucky, you are not going to remember your killer.

This makes the occasional professional assassin very nasty. And if they take the right alchemical precautions, they can give people fake memories before they kill them, to take care of that inevitable 10%.

The tricky part is that you're depending on your victim not to metagame. In chapters where anti-metagaming is less rigorously enforced, this can be a real problem. Those chapters aren't generally worth playing in, I've found. (A few cliqueish powerful groups tend to rule the roost, or the storytellers play favorites.)

Some people kill for money and items, and find themselves caught when they suddenly get richer or use a familiar looking sword or artifact. Others kill for revenge or in professional duels, and there may be a trial or punishment for it meted out by the town. Some people kill for the challenge, and their characters usually spend each event camping out in the woods, skulking furtively around each town at night. Some people, the worst kind, kill when they're bored. These people tend to find themselves ostracized and shunned wherever they go, both in and out-of-game.

I don't bother with PVP, and my character has a whole lot of friends who'd get annoyed if I got ganked, so it rarely affects me.

[Yessod]

One of the best unofficial systems I've seen for dealing with the consequences of PVP was that if you killed anyone's character, you had to buy them a drink after game and listen to them talk about their character's greatest moments.

One recurring problem in games is the Inigo Montoya problem. You know, they roll a new character with combat abilities, and then its "You killed my previous character, prepare to die." One long-running game I played in had the equivalent of a 1 point merit called "Heir." Basically, if your character died, your next character could have all of their notes, library, journals, etc, you could buy their title and lands during character creation, and if they died in questionable circumstances, it was socially expected that you'd do something about it. It was a very excellent rule.

[Bradford C. Walker]

PVP on the floor is the sureshot for getting the job done in MET. Nothing else is guaranteed to work, which is why it's rarely done unless the STs go out of their way to establish an umambiguous set of rulings regarding downtime actions and other indirect actions such as Influence uses.

[Peter Svensson]

One recurring problem in games is the Inigo Montoya problem. You know, they roll a new character with combat abilities, and then its "You killed my previous character, prepare to die." One long-running game I played in had the equivalent of a 1 point merit called "Heir." Basically, if your character died, your next character could have all of their notes, library, journals, etc, you could buy their title and lands during character creation, and if they died in questionable circumstances, it was socially expected that you'd do something about it. It was a very excellent rule.
Ack. I prefer to simply ban players from Inigo Montoyaing, by saying that new characters can't have any connections to the old one. This encourages diversity in game play, since people won't just be playing a copy cat of their dead character, and also means that if a character is to be avenged, it will be by their friends. Thus encouraging folks to have friends.

[Illithidbix]

I think the potential for PvP is one of the things that really differentiates LARP from Tabletop.

In Tabletop, for a lesser or greater extent there needs to be a certain amount of “party cohesion”, intra-party conflict can be cool, but it runs the risk of breaking the game, as the players just squabble. Very few tabletop games can really cope with that.
Having the party split up at times can be cool, but over a long time it gets dull as certain players have can’t influence the game. Also it’s damn hard to keep stuff secret from other players, even the best of players can’t avoid getting suspicious when notes are passed between players and the GM and people have to go outside to speak to each other, in LARP, it’s far easier to do, since you just find a quiet corner to do it.

I play in a local university club system called Shadovald, which runs a tavern night (for real RP) and a Sunday adventuring (mostly vs hordes of respawning monsters), basically the Taven nights mean you get to properly roleplay your character and gives you the reasons for going on this insanely dangoreous adventures. It’s in it’s 3rd year and is still going strong, it’s a relatively small club normally an average of 12 dedicated players and 3 Refs to run it and there have been a few cases of actual PvP deaths and many more cases of PvP tension. However the system's world is really quite nasty and resurrection is very rare (very few people have the chance to do it, and it’s only happened once), character deaths don’t happen all the time, we’ve been for terms without one, an average of about 10 or so/year, they tend to happen in pairs, or recently entire parties.

In Shadovald, the world is brutal enough to encourage adventurers to stick together for the most part, even if they don’t like each other. Who are viewed as a particular kind of scum, basically one step above an actual bandit, so they only get brutalised by the law, rather than killed. Most Sunday adventures are nasty enough that if PvP happened, the party would likely be weakened to the point that no-one would survive.
The 2nd case of TPK happened when in the middle of an important fight two disliked PC’s turned up and blasted a few of the seriously endangered party, then both sides died (bar 1 member who escaped to get reinforcements).
It's not viewed as being the point of the system, but if it occurs with decent IC reasons, then that's viewed as fair enough.

Never done it myself but I understand Vampire (and other WW) LARPs are mostly orintated around at least some PvP, although alot of it seems to be about brooding in a corner (all rooms to be used for vampire should have at least as many corners as players, and a few more for NPCs ;) )

The other LARP I do is Maelstrom (http://www.profounddecisions.co.uk/), which is a relatively new UK fest LARP it’s quite revolutionary cus almost all the characters on site (700+) are players, the NPC crew is very small, and it is almost entirely “Player led” with every action. This makes it feel incredibly immersive, esp since the Standard of Kit and Roleplay is amazing. Photo's Here. (http://www.disturbing.org.uk/images/lrp/pd/index.htm) It is set in a kind of Fantasy-Colonial setting, with a new world infested with natives and recent development of blackpower weaponry and magic.
It has pioneered some very innovative ideas to get a working economy with four different currencies and the need for many skills, such as combat skills to require the use of expensive “crafted items”, and a religion system where priests are actually priests dealing with souls rather than mobile healing batteries.
It relies upon complicated, automated downtime to make downtime actions count and help keep the system moving in uptime. For example a craftsman can make crafted items to sell at events, or spend their time researching superior items.
In this case the system relies upon PvP, and this has been encouraged by having certain cultures have a historic dislike of each other, as well as making resources limited so often the easiest method is to seize them of other colonies.
Maelstrom is also notable for despite having full combat rules, many characters rarely get into combat unless they are specifically looking to, I played a "pure combat character" (skills wise) for four events before acutually hitting anyone, and another two events before taking a hit myself. Despite this the amount of roleplay oppertunities meant I was almost never bored.
It’s really utterly awesome, and after an a bit of a slow start where it looked dangerously like everyone would just be nice and get on it’s kicked off with real conflict.

However as a general rule, most players do care about their characters, and most players view it as "bad form" to just kill another person’s character “cus they can/were bored”. Thats viewed as being a tad shit. Most LARPers try and wait until they have a damn good reason to kill the player, and then make the death, in someway at least, enjoyable. Respawning muggers are viewed as pretty much the lowest sort of LARPer in the UK, along with the people who turn up wearing jeans and white trainers with a really expensive LARP sword. Dying to a bunch of random muggers in the dark is often dull, having your character tried in public then executed is cool.

However taking a IC grudge OC is viewed as being exceedingly crap, and probably incates you shouldn't be LARPing in the first place. Most players do make an effort to meet up with their IC enermies and say "Damn! That was so cool!" afterwards.
I've never actually seen a clear case of the Indgio Montoya problem and in Shadovald at least the Reffs would really put their foot down on such behaviour (and please don't associate such crap behaviour with such a cool character)
If anything there is a tendency of groups at large fest events to offer any player who's character they've killed to join them as their next character, esp if they roleplayed the conflict really well.

[angelicmadrigal]

Should players be discouraged from causing other players PCs to die?

I'm interested on your thoughts on this subject.

Hell no, if your PC does something that warrants other PCs wanting to gack them then by all means they should do so.

Though for me I prefer the option that causes the most suffering. Where you pretty much destory your enemy by taking everything they have, ruining all their plans, and just generally destroying them and leaving them in a hopeless situation that totally ruins their morale. But, I'm an evil bastard like that. ;)

[bink]

Playing lots of met, the larger the group the more common it becomes. Some times factions cause problems of wanting to exterminate the entire other faction beacuse of personal grudges. Normally it isn't a problem unless other things are involved like metagaming, flat out cheating and preying on new characters/players. Though killing people when their not there to defend themselves is really lame. Mostly by downtime actions or when players dont show up for a while and no one thinks their coming back. But sometimes they do.
Getting killed by other players is fun and I like it I've even taken actions that I knew were going to get me killed 100% by other players. One time I arragenged to do things with the storyteller, to get the other players to kill me. Though in being diablorized I did achieve my final goal to never be alone again. That was one crazy malkavain. I haven't actually killed anyone as a player yet, except the time I arranged it with the player first. But thats mostly beacuse I'm too pashient.

[Illithidbix]

Death in downtime = Teh Suxx
All the LARPs I play in catagorically state that you can't die as a result of a downtime action (you might suffer some other penelties for doing something stupid) but you'll at least have a chance to roleplay your death, if not actually escape it in uptime.

For me uptime > downtime.

[Peter Svensson]

Death in downtime = Teh Suxx
All the LARPs I play in catagorically state that you can't die as a result of a downtime action (you might suffer some other penelties for doing something stupid) but you'll at least have a chance to roleplay your death, if not actually escape it in uptime.
I've only seen two people die in downtime. That was kinda sad. They both shared a haven, and one of my friends managed to in game find out the location of said haven, and destroyed it. The ST tried so hard to get the second player to survive, asking "Are you SURE that you live with him?" But alas, they found out at game that "Oh by the way, you died. Make a new character. Sorry."

[Illithidbix]

Hmm, stories like that are the reasons I have little interest in ever playing Vampire LRP.

[Litpho]

Hmm, stories like that are the reasons I have little interest in ever playing Vampire LRP.It can happen with the wrong players in any LARP, of course, but Vampire seems to be custom-made for it.

[Illithidbix]

It can happen with the wrong players in any LARP, of course, but Vampire seems to be custom-made for it.

Well if Death by downtime is in the system, then you can't always blame players for using it. Certainly with Vampires getting them during the daytime in their haven is generally a damn good idea. If I was playing a centuries old, manipulative inhuman bastard, then it seems very IC to take such actions, and would almost appear out of character not too. I personally don't think I'd do it (my characters like things either more flashy, dramatic and public (i.e done in uptime) or else have code of honour against such acts), but if it gets to the point where you're really restricting your actions cus you're afraid of upseting a player, then maybe you're being rather too over cautious.

Personally, if I was the GM I’d rule that “You escaped, just, as your haven burnt to the ground, you’ve lost all the resources you had there and oh you turn up to next event physically wounded” (which actually happened to one of my friends in a game), it fucks their character up but doesn't kill 'em.
It might get a bit contrived (esp if it happened more than once) but, hey it's a game afterall. Also in my opinion such drastic actions would not be easy to do in downtime. It shouldn't just take a downtime that says "I get my ghoul minions to burn his haven to the ground during the day"

Still it does seem a part of the Vampire LARP that downtimes do have a lot of influence, far more than many systems which view it as fundamentally subservient to uptime actions. And this is generally accepted by most players when they play, and for some people, it's the sort of game they want to play.

[NERO Aeon]

PvP in any game has its advantages and disadvantages. Because characters are "free thinking" there is no reason that they should not be able to attack other players. The problems occur when these attacks are due to juvinile players, and do not have an In Game reason for happening.

When players decide that their characters "must" kill another player due to X/Y/Z that happened in game they are also making the desicion to attack another Players's character on an Out of Game level - this cannot be ignored. Players need to be responsible for their actions.

Generally if you have a mature player base then PvP isn't an issue; it doesn't happen or when it does happen everyone realizes that there were in game reasons for it and just carry on - no hard feelings.

This isn't the case when your players are being juvenile, or just want to stir things up Out of Game. This compounds when they feel that there is no way that they should be punished for their actions.

In my game I have very strict rules to govern PvP. If there is an In Game/Character based reason for the pvp, then it's good. If the PvP is done in a way that is degrating to another Player (not their character) then there will be Out of Game reprocussions.

There will always be a reaction to PvP; this doesn't mean that the person initiating pvp 'gets screwed' but it does mean that there will be a reaction. People generally want payback for being assaulted or killed (in NERO characters get multiple deaths), and to expect anything less means that the players in question have not appropriately thought things through.

Kevin Tjia
NERO Aeon
www.neroto.com