LARP Design: A Further Five Field Battles

It has been more than two years since my last post in this series, in part because we spent two years not LARPing. We’re back at it now, and that makes it easier to write. In the first two posts, I talked about ten field battle models I’ve seen. Today’s challenge: five more, without just repeating myself.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

11. Wild Hunt

This is a model I haven’t seen since the early days of the second Wildlands South campaign. It’s much less of a field battle and much more of a Climactic Action on a Saturday Night, and I think it’s good to break away from the battle model on the regular. In Wildlands, one of the player races is Children of the Hunt, divided into three main groups: Predators, Prey, and Scavengers. Since that’s just a small portion of the playerbase, additional PCs got roped into this when they were marked by the Hunt and assigned to be Hunter or Hunted.

“Why are we even doing this?” is well explained by the Master of the Hunt and boons to the winners – in the low-powered, very deadly Wildlands campaign, you’ve gotta take what you can get. The idea is Hide and Seek, all over the game site, with boffer combat. The Hunted got a bit of a head start, while the Hunters got unlimited uses of Arcane Torment (this tagline is innately Voice Effect) Hunted. So, you know, it’s site-wide Marco Polo, with teams. This is great for getting the players to be both “sides” of the field battle, and – at least for some campaigns – keeping the stakes fairly low. Unless you have the kind of PCs who would use that chaos to avenge slights and political grudges, I mean.

The Scavengers, in the meantime, go around to make sure Prey that get beat up aren’t also robbed. You don’t want to get caught robbing the prey.

Another approach to this action-scene model might be keeping a small number of PCs hidden from an NPC force that can go anywhere and that the PCs can evade but not really fight – but you’ve got to give PCs good tools to use and be prepared to roll with a lot of oddball creative ideas.

12. Carnival/Goblin Market

To an even greater degree than the Wild Hunt, this isn’t a field battle – it’s Climactic Action on a Saturday night. (This kind of event is also ideal for times that aren’t Saturday night.) The core of the idea is creating a field or building full of NPCs who have interesting interactions for lots of different players. Then you wind the whole system up and let it go.

The hardest parts about this are the writing workload, and also the work of briefing everyone. Carnivals and goblin markets are also likely to involve serious prop creation and set dressing. Also – and this is always true, but especially so here – you want NPCs who have an innate sense for how to improvise exciting, dramatic choices, since even the best writer can’t (and shouldn’t try to) predict everything that the PCs might do in a complex system.

Anyway. The goal here is to push interaction – both one PC interacting with a series of NPCs, and PCs interacting with each other, negotiating and strategizing their goals. It’s probably best for everyone’s fun if you don’t have too many goals that can be solved with the outlandish application of money, because there will always be one player or team at the extreme upper end of the bell curve of wealth distribution – you don’t want to just let them walk away with the whole scene, unless it’s to the direct benefit of all of the players.

But seriously, the secret here is encounters that provoke reactions and innately spawn more content. Giving very combat-focused players a chance to engage in duels or pit fights, or to hire themselves out for future combat content, is a good general practice. Midway games where you know the game is rigged (but it’s the only game in town) add a lot to the scene as well.

I probably don’t need to explain to you that goblin markets thrive on other mediums of exchange. Coming up with good ways to handle this is a design challenge, a narrative/characterization challenge, or both. For carnivals and goblin markets alike, there’s a pretty good chance you have amateur and semi-pro performers in your community that you could invite to perform. Lean into the sense of spectacle.

13. Creature Feature

This is a model for a single, much-larger-than-human opponent. Some games have built dragons onto cars, or made massive dracolich costumes that are still light enough for a single person to wear and control (this one I heard about, but never saw firsthand). For Eclipse, it was a hydra – three heads played by NPCs, each attached to the building behind them by long necks. I’ve also seen and heard of games fielding massive, multi-NPC slimes, centipedes, or sandworms.

Even the “lightest” implementation of this is typically a memorable set-piece. NPCs are crowded together and break off to become adds during the fight, or spawn during an adds phase in the fight (after the PCs deal a certain amount of damage, of course). Tracking the actual damage values is… notional at best. As a player, you need to just go in knowing that. Unless you definitely have the marshal’s undivided attention, save the Death and Dismemberment spells for when smaller creatures spawn or break off of the main mass.

You’ve got hundreds or thousands of MMO raid bosses to draw from here. Nothing in this list is more like an MMO boss fight than this one – not even Don’t Stand in the Fire, a model literally named for a raid boss trope. When designing this, though, keep in mind that unlike MMO players, your PCs can’t learn the fight’s mechanics through wiping and retrying. They’re always picking it up on the fly, and they might never see some of these mechanics again in your campaign.

14. Cover Shooter

This is a niche appeal battle type, and generally better for sf or science-fantasy games than fantasy per se. The core of the model is everyone, or almost everyone, having ranged weapon and/or spell options, and a reason they can’t just use their melee weapons. If you have a group of players whose characters have no ranged options, recruit them to NPC that battle and put a crossbow or spell packets in their hands.

A chasm longer than melee weapon reach is a classic approach here. You can also do something with a wall of force that allows projectiles but electrocutes you if you swing a melee weapon, or whatever. Another way to do this is to borrow the Kraken Up concept (in Part Two, linked above) to place the PCs on one large “vehicle” and the NPCs on smaller “vehicles.” Some NPCs leap over to your vehicle (“witness me!”) while others hang back and shoot while steadily moving together along the side of the larger vehicle. I’ve seen this done at smaller and larger scales, to exciting and dynamic effect that makes ranged combatants feel like superstars.

The other part of this is, obviously, cover. Crates, upended tables, chest-high walls, machinery, or PCs with shields all contribute here. For bonus points, think about how you can let players and baddies destroy cover objects. In one Eclipse battle using this model, I was the one PC with a hand-held shield (a special plot item in a game that otherwise had no shields). This meant I was working overtime to be a safe firing position for our gunners – instead of being overpowered, I was overworked. (It was great fun.)

15. Hot Potato

I’m not sure I’ve seen this one firsthand; if I have, I’ve forgotten it. I’d like to thank Mystech for explaining this model to me. There’s an object that has to move from point A to point B, while also being kept away from enemies; up to that point it’s like #6, Long-Distance Escort. The thing that distinguishes it is that the object is small enough for one person to carry (for true hardmode, try something that requires two to coordinate in order to carry), but that object is deadly if carried too long.

The player carrying the object counts down from 10, and when they get to 0 it needs to either be in someone else’s hands or on the ground. Once you let go, you can’t touch it again, or maybe you have to go do [some other thing] to cleanse a condition to let you carry it again. In the meantime, you’re under steady attack from NPCs who also want to get the widget.

There are a couple of possibilities for what happens when it’s on the ground. Maybe the NPCs are just trying to swarm it so they can run off with it, or maybe a marshal stays with the widget and starts a countdown to a big, dangerous Voice Effect, or just starts exploding in deadly spell effects that are bursting out of the widget. In any event, things get worse when no one has the widget.

If you don’t have a way for PCs to carry the widget a second time, the maximum duration of your field battle is 10 seconds per player, so that’s… quite brief for most games. You can always make it so there are multiple widgets that have to get from point A to point B, one at a time, and when a widget is delivered everyone’s condition clears. It’s a little bit Murder Rugby, but that’s fine.

Treasure

This isn’t a field battle model, but a brief discussion on a difficult point in field battle implementation. To wit, should there be treasure in a field battle? There are three perspectives here, and I think they’re all valuable.

Enemies have individual loot. If you’re in the thick of a field battle, taking the biggest risks and raking in reward in coin and other cool stuff, individual loot feels great. It’s also comparatively easy to say that treasure outlay is commensurate to threat, if every enemy has roughly even amounts of treasure.

This has two big down sides, though: it concentrates wealth in the hands of only the front line, and only the front liners who stop what they’re doing to loot enemies; and it keeps downed NPCs on the field waiting to be searched, while they might need to go respawn. Games need to solve for getting money into the hands of healers and second-rank combatants, like archers and mages.

The field battle loot comes at the end. In this approach, there’s a treasure chest or other hoard at the end that everyone splits. The gamerunners presume the PCs will split that loot equitably. There’s enough cash in that hoard to make sure all of the survivors get something, even if not everyone gets something special.

Two big problems come out of this approach. If the players do split it equitably, someone has to actually do that math and track down each player to make sure they get their share. That’s a pain in the butt, and involves making valuation choices that won’t leave all that many people happy.

On the other hand, maybe the players don’t split it equitably. Maybe a small group of 1-3 players snag the loot that is intended for the whole playerbase, and they just pocket it and agree to never speak of this. I don’t know how many times this has happened, or in how many different games, but one big score like this means you’re probably wealthy by the game’s standards for years, if not for the whole of the campaign. To the rest of the playerbase, it looks like Plot just didn’t hand out loot for this battle. Oops? (Pro tip: sometimes, when it looks like Plot has made this kind of mistake, you actually just can’t know the whole story.)

The field battle has no loot. Field battles are a place to spend what you’ve accrued elsewhere, in order to advance (or at least survive) the plot. The narrative and mechanics give pride of place to the Climactic Action on a Saturday Night, so maybe the economy can too. This is what the crafters of consumables stockpile their goods for – the toughest fights where the resources are drained to their lowest point.

Since there are no normal payouts, the question becomes about expense, which probably isn’t shared equally among players. People who make consumables and rely on them for their combat gameplay – brewers, scribes, that kind of thing – face the steepest expense, along with any combatants who need consumables to boost their survivability (in Ro3/Altera Awakens terms, anyone leaning heavily on Skins/Shells out of a solution/alchemy bottle).

Even in this model, you might still have rare, high-value rewards. Maybe the boss has a sword or staff that the PCs get to keep afterward. Splitting that is, for obvious reasons, impossible without getting into a deeper system. For some playerbases, that can be handled by collective consent – for example, no one gave me a hard time when I took the staff off the demon boss and handed it to the only shaman present in Altera Awakens (shamans are the staff-based casters in that game). No conversation necessary, and she wasn’t so loaded down with cool gear that anyone could say she was getting “too much.” If it had been a magic sword… well, that would have had a lot more competition.

…let me recommend not making your LARP characters track DKP or SK rankings. (If you’ve never been an MMO raider, these are fairly involved loot-split systems. They’re fair, but a lot of bookkeeping.) Anyway, the biggest drawback of this model is that the game isn’t really engaging the players with material rewards. Relying on narrative reward is fine, but for players who aren’t invested in the narrative (or just don’t know what’s going on), material reward keeps them invested in the game and the action.

All of which is to say, I don’t have the answer for treasure and field battles, and there are tradeoffs whichever way you go.

In my next article on LARP field battle design, I plan to cover five best practices to keep in mind. If you’ve enjoyed this series, consider supporting my writing by becoming a Patreon backer! For as little as $1 a month, you can read all of my blog posts three days earlier.

Brandes Stoddard

Harbinger of Doom