Games tend to thrive upon progression. If we look at the most successful fantasy game franchises of the 20th and 21st century so far, we see a pretty constant thread, progression. Continuing growth and development of characters through equipment, levels and story. With this formula flaring at us from behind the computer screen, how is it that LARPS have not caught on to this need? The lack of high end content in LARPs leads to player stagnation and eventually, player departure. Lets look at a couple of ways that LARPs could continue their progression without Beverly hampering others fun, and what they would do for high end players satisfaction levels.
One concept that can be easily ported from MMORPGS is the "Raid" Mechanic. Difficult modules with skilled NPCs and repeatability can be built into your plot lines for groups to try out. They can be given story incentives and treasure incentives and set free. There are a few requirements for this concept to work properly; the "Raid" should always be the same, every plot person should run it the same way this allows for measured success against others, the "raid" should always be appropriately challenging, if it is intended for high level players lower level players should not be able to complete the tasks required, the "raid" must be appropriately treasured, preferably with things that can ONLY be found on that particular module. If these three things are implemented, a high end repeatable module with unique treasure can allow for players to measure themselves against other high end players, it can be self rewarding and if it is challenging enough it can increase player turnover, these are all great things in a larp. The downside is of course that once the raid has been in the field for awhile, a new one must be added to continue challenging players, the old one may still be essential as well for those players who are not yet ready to move to the new one. This can be a plot intensive solution.
Character development is another avenue that can be actively pursued in larps. An argument can be made that players continuously develop in most games but as the experience yield curve maxes out the advancement is almost to slow to notice. Another argument would be that not all advancement is through skills some can be through roleplay and that is true, but players who do not get plot based roleplay advancement will feel left out. Mechanics are non partisan they do not play favorites and that is their importance in games. Implementing character advancement outside of the experience curve can be challenging, one way that NERO handles it is through transforms. Transforms allow for advancement beyond a characters level but only effect game balance in specific instances. They can be written to be as powerful or game breaking as you desire as long as you are also willing to put the time in to scaling for the transform powers. An important note, if you are using transforms for high end development of characters, there should be places that you can go in your game world were transforms are always useful. Combining this with the raid concept above, in your high end repeatable modules, the spending or configuration of your transform should be essential for success. This allows for the extra power granted by a transform to not be superfluous but rather an integral part of character development. It removes it from the "pretty neat" and adds it to the "totally necessary" category. There are other ways to handle character advancement as well, retirement incentives are one that has been discussed a lot, for a team that can scale well allowing high level characters to continue playing provides incentives for lower level players.
Equipment advancement is the simplest form of end game. There is absolutely no reason that new and better equipment cannot be added to the game and taken into account with scaling. The equipment can be made available only through the aforementioned high end modules and can be essential for the completion of the harder modules. The equipment can be linked to the transform advancement, items that are specific to certain transforms or items that enhance certain transform abilities. NEROs scare of item hoarding was met with a shotgun approach of expiration dates and an item limit cap, the item limit cal alone would have been enough to accomplish the goal. Itemization, the proper selection of items for members of a party and team, is a huge part of every roleplaying game and it is missing in NERO. It is missing because we have a very limited number of items available so everyone gets whatever we have available. This is not optimal for high level players.
By implementing some combination of these three things into your LARP or NERO game, you can better entertain high level players. The track record of a system like this is strong 10 million people play World of Warcraft, and it uses a high level system very much like this. The best solution would be to implement something like this on a national scale allowing for high level competition throughout the game. The training and logistics would be complicated but the rewards for the game would be staggering.
I guess the biggest concern I would have is that there's an extreme variance in NPC skill, so it would be hard to achieve something that could be run the same way at every chapter, and have it have the same difficulty level.
ReplyDeleteAnd how do you get around the fact that transforms are often picked by character personality, and many transforms wouldn't go on these modules with their opposite paths?
Teams should probably have transforms that are compatible, this concept puts emphasis on the team NERO game.
ReplyDeleteI'm really intrigued by the idea of a consistent, repeat-able "raid" style mod. I imagine it would be possible to build up a binder or computer file full of such mods, with pre-written monster cards, plot notes, treasure handouts, and even brief scripts, if necessary. At that point, anybody wishing to play through the raid could request it, staff at a given event could pull it out and give it to NPCs, and they have a pre-set script or plot progression to follow.
ReplyDeleteWrite the same mod with three sets of monster cards scaled for a different level range (i.e. 1-10, 10-20, 20-30) and you can bring players back again and again over a long period of time, since what you're essentially doing is creating a mini-game with an easy mode, a normal mode, and a difficult mode.
I would definitely take advantage of these if they were available to play, especially if I knew that, if I failed, I could go back and play it again with a different group or a new strategy.
The more I think about this, the more I feel that this kind of activity should be reserved for a mod day/weekend and not brought into standard events.
ReplyDeleteThat way, you can be sure each dungeon is run with the same NPCs acting the same each time through. In addition, you be playing with the normal plot team's heart strings when you plan for your PCs to have spells/skills left for a giant battle, but the two high level groups decided to tap themselves out with an optional raid.
I do think it would be a kick ass mod-day.
I don't agree I think this kind of thing needs to be added to the regular weekends so that the normal plot can be more cetrally scaled. This will use some of the higher level peoples skills allowing the mid leveled people a better shot at being the heroes. Thats part of the point of high level content.
ReplyDeleteThat leads into a concept that Dan and I have been playing around with a lot lately, which is using different event formats. Nearly all Nero events follow the same model - there's the Tavern, maybe a Guild Hall, the PC cabins, and Monster Town. There's generally a "weekend plot" which is portrayed through a series of town encounters, hooked modules, wave battles, and sometimes "sheet in the woods modules."
ReplyDeleteHowever, there are lots of different ways to run a LARP event. You could break up the town into distinct "camps" or "factions" and assign "quest books" to each camp that they work through on their own. That was how Mythodea, the big game in Germany, ran most of their plot. (This model mixes really well with a "festival" atmosphere that includes vendors and entertainment, since you never "miss" anything while questing, since the quests are at your own pace.) The "persistent, repeatable adventures" model is another interesting one. One that I'd been just DYING to play with is the "full-town dungeon crawl" model where the entire camp is one giant adventure that the players progress through together - they start at the beginning and work their way to the end; rather than staying at a central location, traveling out to the module locations and returning back to town afterwards. I also like the "wargame" model where the gamespace is defined by a miniature war game that the PCs interact with both indirectly (issuing orders to troops IG/ moving the pieces OOG) and directly (by physically entering the "battle map" and playing through the battle themselves.)
And of course, any given event can actually utilize a combination of these models. Most of them can also be couched within a typical "sit at the tavern" format as well (with the possible exception of the "dungeon crawl",) so as not to completely throw the players off track.
So let's forget about using up skills/spells. You're still using up a significant amount of NPC resources (skilled NPCs, props, setup/teardown).
ReplyDeleteThats true, though they could be designed to require less NPCs or have scaling built in to make it work out. I like Noah's ideas too, I think we partially captured this with our persistent dungeon at the mod day. It can go further though.
ReplyDeleteThe key isn't to make it a sidenote that the high-level players go through to keep them occupied - you have to fully work it into the plotline as well. Make up some reason why the high-level objectives are in the raid location. You'd have to run content for them anyway, so you're using the same amount of NPCs. In terms of props, setup and striking set, you're actually *saving* time by leaving the set up and using it multiple times.
ReplyDeleteThink about it this way - if you didn't do this, how else would you run content for high level players? A series of smaller, separate mods? All of those will need a different set of monster cards, different treasure, different storylines, and their own setup and breakdown. The raid essentially "consolidates" your module logistics. Even though the module itself will probably be larger and more involved, in the aggregate you're saving valuable time and effort.
I don't have a problem with working it into plot, as it limits the effect and number of times that it can be run at a single game. I viewed the original concept was for dungeons that could be re-run by many people.
ReplyDeleteI generally discourage anything that a group of players can spam to keep themselves busy for long periods of time, as the less proactive players receive less. There are plenty of ways to limit it that would cause less of a problem. Just need to be wary of it.
Oh yeah, I could totally see that being a problem. One solution could be to make it amply clear to the players (both IG and OOG) that each group can only go through once per weekend, or once every 3 hours, or something like that. WoW had the same problem during development - how do you encourage people to do things in the open world when the instances are so much cooler and drop drastically better loot? Their answer - raid lockout timers. We could do the same thing, using any number of in-game rationales.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, it is a necessary game mechanic. People would whine about the metagame but then people whine about everything.
ReplyDeleteAt NERO Elkins, we've been planning on implementing a series of adventures that would be available to a group of 5-10 adventurers at any time between regular events. These adventures would be very much in the style of MMORPG "raid" events, whereby they are very similar each time. However, we haven't gotten to a point yet where we can actually offer the adventures. There's still a lot of writing and planning that needs to go into them, but look for them to appear in the next year or so. Such adventures would be dungeon crawl style mods and each one of the 3 we've started planning would be aimed at a different APL.
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