Tuesday, May 12, 2015

A Range of Neat Links from Tumbler

Five Ways To Move Like A Soldier
A wide range of tips and tricks for moving like a soldier.  I especially like this line " Treat your physrep like a weapon and other people will start to do the same."

Cooking in a Field

Very useful if you go on those big weekend (or even overnight) LARPs and you don't want to pack an Esky.  A good point on going vegetarian so that you don't give people food poisoning.  There's a number of ways to make fake meat these days.

How to Be IC Insulting not OC Insulting

This has some pretty good gender-neutral insults you can use against other characters but what I particularly like are the advice on how to approach someone when their choice of words has upset you as a person. 

HANDY TIP: Generally female players will react badly to words said in anger that include c##t, bitch or anything pointing out unattractive facial features or body weight (even if you, as a person, actually like those features).  Men may be the same.  Also when dealing with Australians, know that our friendly insults are often relationship-specific, i.e. we prove that we're easygoing friends by insulting each other and letting the other get away with it.  Therefore a stranger may not get the same cheery reaction when they try those same insults.  When in doubt, ask.

http://odyssey.profounddecisions.co.uk/Playing_the_Ball

This one is a particular LARP's comments to their own players on using homophobic and sexist language and basically using lazy IC trash talk as an excuse to cover mean and hurtful comments that affect people's real lives and reminds them that in many spheres of life ... they are not wanted.

How to Act like Medieval Nobility

Some pretty cool guidelines here and certainly some I'd never have thought of doing.

Portraying Mental Illness in LARP

I'm conflicted about this myself, especially in terms of NPCs.  I understand that people generally reach for stereotypes and that's just compounding the problem that the media already provides and generally most forms of mental illness are played for laughs.  World of Darkness used the term "derangements" as a punishment for behaving immoral while Call of Cthulhu has some truly random options of "insanity" that spontaneously occur when someone sees the wrong thing. 

On the other hand, if you don't include them in the games you're basically negating an entire sub-set of people.  A kind of "neurotypical-washing" of the environment, particularly if NPCs as well don't have such mental illnesses.  Personally I think it can be done but more because it's a natural expression of a character ... and therefore it doesn't need to be a diagnosable label.  It's far easier to play "an anxious postman" and get it right than a "postman with an anxiety disorder" as the former seems to permit greater range than the latter which would send most players / GMs straight to the DSM to do research and is likely to lead to a stilted stereotype.  Just a thought.

Playing a Second-in-Command

I'll bet a lot of PC military leaders will enjoy passing this link around to their immediate subordinates as should the player incorporate this advice the leader will have a much easier time.  The bit of advice on "imperiously ordering them to fetch you a coffee the second you’re off the field and OC may help" you stop instinctively relying on them for orders is a good idea.  Especially if you've been there 2iC the entire weekend.

Playing a Butler or Servant

It's this kind of thing that would make for a great group ghoul game if I had enough players to do a downstairs ghoul / upstairs vampire thing.  So much good advice here.  Especially with the whole creating a class divide and showing two different sides of yourself in the two different arenas.

How To Fill Slack Time

A fantastic article for all LARP players and really REALLY important!  It's a rare LARP that will have you going non-stop all the time and making your own fun by finding plot can be difficult or even mean and isolating for uninvolved players.  So it's a really good idea to have something that your PC can do when they don't have anything else to do.

Ten Shortcuts to Being a Good Officer and Ten Shortcuts to Being a Bad Officer

Always a useful one to know if you're going to be in charge of a team of people as, let's face it, most of us are not in management positions and those who are generally aren't in dangerous outdoors managerial positions.  I especially like how in the latter article the writer goes into detail that taking some of those traits doesn't make you a terrible officer as most people would have a couple of those traits and still be pretty good.

Small Squad Leadership

The leadership theory here is also valuable to GMs trying to make for a better OC LARP environment.  Giving folks the chance to feel like they have achieved something both IC (character actions) and OC (volunteer / craft efforts) are fantastic ways of building a positive sense of community.

Five Tips for a Medic

It's a good way to add extra realism and fun factor into the game!  Much better than just ringing it in with a simple count off.

Guard Duty

Basically how to take an otherwise boring role and make it far more interesting for the players than just leaving one guy at the door for a day.  Some really good points within.

No comments:

Post a Comment