[Temple]

So I suddenly find myself interested in larps..

Finding onw may not be a problem, as I am moving to a bigger city in teh near future.

But I am very intrigued by the form stories in larps take. That is to say, I don't understand it.
In Vampire for example.. Does all larps take place in some form of Elysium? I mean, seeing as how all the attendants woud need to be there for it to be an enjoyable experience, meaning that the setting and story is very stationary when compared to a tt game, how does a typical larp story (if there is such a thing) play out? How are they usually structured? In short, what happens in a larp, apart from dressing up and acting out..

[zenten]

It is a different sort of story. A tabletop game is like an action movie, or a suspense thriller, or something like that. A larp is like a soap opera.

And most games do have "downtime" (which means something a bit different from how it usualy means in tabletop), where you can have more tabletop like interactions, but that's not the focus of the game.

[Dolston]

Temple,

That is a very, very complicated question or series of questions. I will take a stab at it when I'm not falling asleep at the keyboard.

[Dolston]

Hey Temple,

Told you I would be back to naswer your questions! Have time and energy now.

I'l start by agreeing with what Zenten said. MET is much more like a soap opera than an action movie or thriller. A good MET game will have multiple storylines going on at once that involve different characters.

Another key component of MET that is very different from Table Top is that it is a player vs player environment. This means that the players need to understand how the game is suppose to work. Vampire, for example, is not superheroes with fangs. It is a game of politcal maneuovering where final death is rare. If you don't think that kind of game would be fun then MET probably isn't for you.

Games are often set in an Elysium type location. It rarely makes sense for all the vampires in a city to get together in one place. This is generally considered to be a conceit of the game. It has to happen to make the game work. This also means the players and Storytellers must not abuse this conceit less the game become bad. To mitigate this fact, if the game does not run in real time, you can choose to meet only at specific times - like high festivals and rituals in the Sabbat.

Finally, you need to realise that there will be a large difference in power levels between player characters. In table top, the PCs are generally around the same in XP. In MET you can have wildly varying levels of XP on character sheets as PCs will fill out the vast majority of positions in game. This means key positions like Prince, Primogen and Sherrif are in the hands of other PCs. That can be extremely good or exteremely bad depending on who the players are.

Hope you find a game you can enjoy. Good luck and have fun!

[OffWhite Knight]

I'd have to agree with what's been said before. A few things that I'd add about stories would be...

You need to be a self-starter, for the simple reason that you don't have a ST watching over your shoulder like at a TT.

But if you are, you might end up in 10 different plot lines.

Something I've noticed about LARPing is the heirarchy. It's hard for some people to get, but at the TT, you and your group are roughly equal. But in the LARP, you have to be aware of who is who and who is in charge. And you have to follow those rules. Don't dare mouth off to the Bishop for example.

I know it's not an obvious part of story lines, but it is a very important part of the stories of most LARPs.

So during the game, you might be quite busy, talking with the Sensechal one minute, then hanging out with the unbound gangrel later, then having a covenant meeting after that. Some talking might just be in-character small talk (which doesn't happen at most TT, and is quite fun), some will clearly be with an agenda.

In between games, you set up your Out Of Game Actions, which are typically groundwork for what you do during the LARP. And often, if enough folks want to do a common OOGA, then you can do a TT session.

I hope I'm making sense, I'm a bit out of practice here...