LARP as a team, or Winning at LARP

Many fantasy novels and stories focus around the concept of a lone wolf. A hero, singular in his pursuit of justice, with no friends or companions to assist him. I am going to come right out and say that this is a horrible idea in a larp setting. There are a number of reasons for this, but when you boil them all down you come to an inevitable conclusion, LARP is a team game. Roleplay, combat, treasure and fun all increase when players play with each other.

The lone wolf as the basis for a character feels like positive roleplay. It is a concept, somewhere to begin. It is archetypal, there are many characters to base your actions on. It makes players feel powerful when they accomplish objectives all on their own. LARP does not lend itself to the lone wolf for roleplay, because larp is largely a collaborative game. In order to make others in the story aware of your roleplay you must interact with them. Brooding in the woods by yourself may sound like fun when you consider it at home. It may be fun to say in a tabletop game that your player broods in the woods between sessions, but when you get to an event and immediately head for the woods to brood you miss out on all roleplay that takes place, if you do not head to the woods to brood then you have no opportunity to express your character concept. This divide is almost impossible to cross, you cannot both express a lone wolf concept and be involved in the fun collaborative rolplay that separates a larp from a combat game. In essence you give up the best part of coming to the game for your character concept or you give up your concept for the game.

The lone wolf does not function well logistically. If you consider a normal event that you attend, the plot and staff personnel are generally outnumbered by the players. At an excellently staffed event you may have a 2 player to 1 NPC/staff ratio. This means that every NPC must entertain at least two players at any given time in order to maintain constant entertainment, we literally do not have time to entertain lone wolf characters. Generally plot people will try to make some accommodations and run small things for people doing things on their own but there is absolutely no question that playing alone wolf character will limit your interaction in the logistical portion of the event. Combat effectiveness wise a game cannot be scaled to allow both teams of characters and lone wolf characters without breaking a portion of the suspension of disbelief or breaking the overall power level of the game. If every character could function by his or herself without the need for supporting character, most tactical encounters would be impossible. One of the primary tactical resources available to event runners is resource allocation questions, how many ____ do we need, do we have enough____. In order to make these questions viable, every character cannot have every _____ , therefore lone wolves will never have all of the resources necessary to participate in a module designed for a team. You can scale every module to the composition that is present, but that also removes the tactical question of resource allocation.

In a game with a crafting system it will always be easier to collect the components necessary to build things with more than one person looking for them. More people= more treasure - a greater variety of treasure = build more cool stuff. Lone wolves will never have as many collectible resources available as team based characters.

So what do you give up to play your lone wolf character? You give up on the roleplay, the combat, the logistical focus and the treasure distribution...Sounds like you might as well NPC!