An Old LARPing Anecdote

This isn't connected to anything too specific, but I was talking to someone about gaming earlier and they shared this fun little article that hits a little too close to home even if it is satire. And it reminded me of a story from my LARPing days that I occasionally share and figured "Why not post it here?"

So this was... well, longer ago than I can strictly recall, actually. I wanna say 2009 or 2010, but I could be wrong. But my roommate Sean and I were running a Changeling: The Lost LARP. This was first edition, and also the game that finally 'sold' the local gaming community as a whole on what was then called the NWoD.[0] At one point, one player whom I won't name here but with a reputation for not being terribly bright wanted to either change his character's Kith or buy the Dual Kith Merit, I'm actually not sure which (or which version of the Merit, as there were two). I wanna say the latter, but either way it was one of those 'if I'd known about this particular option at the time I'd have built the character with this.' situations.

Either way, there were guidelines in the book about going on a quest through the Hedge, possibly through a Trod (a special Hedge path), for something like that. So I came up with a little quest for him, pointing out that because of LARPs' often-complicated relation to real-world time, this would actually take his character effectively out of play for a while, or at the very least we'd be roleplaying off to the side away from the rest of the group for at least a full session. He was fine with that.

So I came up with an outline of a journey, with a list of obstacles and encounters he'd have to overcome. I didn't want it to just be a series of fights or anything with no context between, and I also wanted to give him the opportunity to travel well enough to avoid the worst of it. I put a lot of time and work into it, too. What I did was make it an extended test, and every so many successes on his test to travel would take him to another leg of the journey. Each segment of the trip had a specific encounter tied to it, and every so many tests he would deal with whatever was the designated issue for that leg of the journey. In theory, if he did well enough, he'd handle the journey in a minimum of tests and a minimum of encounters.

Well, this player is the sort who'd realize he's not especially optimized or prepared for a journey like this and shrug and try it anyways. Which is why his first encounter was in the first segment of this long journey I'd prepared.

So his character is making his way through the Hedge, and rule one of being a changeling (especially in 1e) is "Don't fuck around in the Hedge if you can help it," and rule two is "If you must fuck around in the Hedge, stick to the path and don't get distracted." So the first encounter was, paraphrasing 'you see a break in the Hedge and there's a side path with what appears to be gold coins on it.' And his first instinct was to wander onto the side path and look at the shiny thing. Which led him into a trap where a hobgoblin spider came at him.

And I'd have to dig through the books, because I believe I took the spider directly from them, but if I recall correctly this is a pretty minor beastie, the sort of thing that you don't throw at a changeling one-on-one unless you're taking it easy on them. (Which I was -- again, first encounter of a long journey.) But his combat stats were terrible -- I wanna say he brought a gun despite not having any dots in Firearms, but regardless of the specifics this is someone who'd have trouble fighting a stiff breeze, and he undertook a long journey alone with a weapon he wasn't any good with. And died.

All the preparation, all the effort I put forth, and he dies about ten minutes into the quest.

I didn't say this was a particularly uplifting anecdote. But it's a story I've shared enough times, I figured I may as well write it up here. Sadly, I have no clever lesson or moral for the story, other than to say that stuff like this is why I try very hard to carefully curate my gaming groups these days. Anyhow, that's my story. Feel free to stick around for my gaming write-ups while you're here.

[0]-- In a nutshell: First edition Requiem wasn't different enough from Masquerade to convince the locals to give up their Sabbat games, first edition Forsaken had a 'so what do the characters actually do' problem for a lot of folks, Mage in any iteration had mostly been ruined for the locals by a powergaming Storyteller (and also had a 'what do they do' problem in first edition), and Promethean was a little too weird and un-LARPable to sell the larger community on the setting/system as a whole. But Changeling scratched the itches just right.