Sunfall, Killer, and the like.

[Levi]

I played in a game last weekend - just for one day of it, but enough to make me pause and really, really think.

The name of the rules-set is Sunfall; it's a local system. And the thing about it that made me really start thinking was this...

In Sunfall, if you have the ability to pickpocket, you get little stickers. Stick one on someone without them noticing, and you've picked their pocket.

Poison is little stickers, too - you can poison food and drink and such.

The "hypnosis" ability is a staring contest between players.

...It's not all stuff like that, but it prompted me to ask:

Why isn't it all stuff like that? Why do we have things like RPS and the like at all for stuff we can find a fun "shortcut" to acting out?

I mean, for combat, there's boffers. And I can see why some people don't dig those, but for all the other stuff, the question remains.

SJGames Killer had stuff like this in it, too, didn't it? And Passion Play has "20 questions", right?

What else is there that does this? How does it do it?

[komradebob]

Lots of those mechanics work on player skill. Which partly means that a player may not get to play any sort of character, merely characters that are a reflection of themselves and their RL skills.

RPGs have traditionally promised players the ability to play any character available in the setting.

[Ryan Paddy]

My larp used to have an endurance test where the player had to hold their breath. When you couldn't anymore, you fell unconscious. We used it for a combat poison that restricted breathing IC.

It worked, but I found it too gimmicky.

I'm happy for pickpockets (or thieves in general) to have to actually steal the item without being noticed. That way there's no OOC moment where you explain to your target what you've done.

Of course this means the skill is totally reliant on player ability. That doesn't concern me, but then I'm firmly on the Hard side of the Hard/Soft skills debate.

[David Mandrake]

Understand that Sunfall was my first experience with LARP, and my experiences and discussions with its designers shaped my opinions about this style of play.

Coming from socialist Saskatchewan, I feel LARP should offer equal chances to play "let's pretend" as much as possible. I think in terms of what I call "the wheelchair test:" can someone reliant on a wheelchair play any given role? Sunfall's combat system, being dice-based, passes the test (and I think it significant that this Canadian system, first devised in the wayback days, didn't use boffer weapons). Some of the other real-world skills don't, necessarily. Hypnosis...my two experiences with that suggested it's slightly flawed in its implementation. The thieving? That fails the test, but it's so cool that it marks where the wheelchair test meets the line of reasonableness; it's an elegant system, and certain people, being the RL humans they are, are not going to be able to perform that skill effectively.

(Of course, no one would suspect the guy in the wheelchair of being head of the Thieves' Guild, hiring others to do his dirty work...hnee, hnee, hneee...)

[angelsorayama]

The thieving? That fails the test, but it's so cool that it marks where the wheelchair test meets the line of reasonableness; it's an elegant system, and certain people, being the RL humans they are, are not going to be able to perform that skill effectively.

At the same time, not every thief steals in the same way... some are simply looters who steal from the dead/unconscious which doesn't require much skill in pick pocketing.

It has been my experience (more of a side note, this) that while we are given the opportunity to play any character, most roleplayers, especially in live, fall back on characters that are reflections of themselves.

I think Sunfall's system is fabulous in many ways because it removes a lot of the need to stop and drop out of character to explain things and it is one of the simpler systems to learn, which makes it newb friendly. It has a decent combat resolution system as well.

[David Mandrake]

It has been my experience (more of a side note, this) that while we are given the opportunity to play any character, most roleplayers, especially in live, fall back on characters that are reflections of themselves.


True. I think there's a certain threshhold you have to cross before you depart from that. A lot of the principals, such as Tom Cantine, got past it and would start doing more...interesting things for one-off adventures.

The one weird semi-meta-game thing I remember was his making an incorporeal character. (For those not familiar with Sunfall, it meant you would wear a certain colour/pattern of armband.) He made a game object of this large bone, like a cow jaw or something, labelled it as such, and left it in the environment. Someone inevitably picked it up; Tom followed five paces behind, never getting far from the bone. So here you've got an invisible character you can't normally interact with--a ghost, essentially--hanging around this bone. It was great because the player wondering, "What the hell is Tom up to?" was the perfect meta-mirror for that person's character: they don't notice anything, but get an uneasy feeling when they carry the bone around...

[Levi]

It was great because the player wondering, "What the hell is Tom up to?" was the perfect meta-mirror for that person's character: they don't notice anything, but get an uneasy feeling when they carry the bone around...

It's that whole Juxta thing again...