LARP Design: Traversal Challenges

We’re in the run-up to the first full weekend event of Citadel LARP. The Citadel in the name is a dungeon for as much of that old-school dungeon-crawling feel as we can manage in a LARP, and one of the ways we do that is to lean into something that has been part of LARPing from the early days. A traversal challenge is an encounter (with or without combat) where the PCs need to cross through a hazardous area. In this post I’m going to talk about implementation and ways to put a twist on these challenges.

A traversal challenge usually isn’t the entirety of an adventure, though it’s certainly possible to make one so involved that it can stand alone. If it stands alone, it’s almost always going to involve combat, because people like action in their Live Action. It’s funny, though—there are whole game shows (The Floor is Lava, American Ninja Warrior) that are purely timed traversal challenges. The competition part isn’t necessarily a non-starter in LARPs, but it’s something we haven’t tended to favor. Time pressure… well, I’ll get to that.

Classic Traversal Challenges

This list is not exhaustive. You can help by adding to it. Safety, and the potential expense of making unsafe things safe, are the main constraints on things that could otherwise be fun.

Jumpystones

This is your floor-is-lava classic. You can only stand on a limited number of surfaces; anything else does some bad thing to you. What you use for the jumpystone itself depends on the rest of the ground surface, but you’ve got options. Masking tape or washi tape are great for wooden, concrete, or asphalt surfaces. Foam squares work well on natural surfaces as well as wooden, concrete or asphalt surfaces, with some danger of sliding out from under a player making a longer jump. I’ve also seen chalk on concrete or asphalt, and larger rings of glow-bracelets and the like on natural surfaces.

Some big questions in the scene design include:

What happens if you step off a jumpystone? Damage, forced back to the start of the challenge, a status effect? Something else?
How far apart are the stones—that is, how good do you have to be at long jumps to succeed?
Does your game have skills to mitigate the effects of failing or otherwise make the challenge easier?
Are there other complications, or are there things PCs can do to make the challenge easier?
- Complications: Time limits and combat pressure are the two most common. If you use foam mats for your jumpystones, some of those could get destroyed as PCs cross, making later crossings harder; alternately, killing monsters, shooting targets, or whatever could create new jumpystones.
- Combat pressure usually involves NPCs that can move freely while PCs can’t. This can be an incredibly effective technique for making low-statted NPCs effective against powerful PCs, especially if the PCs don’t have serious ranged firepower. Just the constraint to a melee fighter’s footwork can make life a lot harder for excellent fighters.

Webbing

For this one, you run something like paracord back and forth across a path or all around the target. Whatever makes it obvious that you have to engage the challenge, not just walk around the webbing. The PC takes damage or a status effect if they touch the webbing, so you create gaps big enough that a reasonably agile and careful adult can get through. People come in many different sizes and shapes, though, and this is an innately exclusionary challenge. My strong advice is to not require every PC to get through the challenge. Set things up so that just a portion of the team needs to get through to succeed.

Webbing doesn’t combine especially well with combat challenges, because the NPCs can’t actually ignore the webbing any more than the PCs can. Adding a timer component isn’t going to add to the fun of this challenge for most players—more likely, it causes them to decide to tough it out through whatever consequence you pick for touching the strands. Making the consequence so extreme that they can’t do that, and you’re just making a challenge that only a tiny number of players can enjoy.

Compared to throwing down a few jumpystones, webbing is also more involved to set up and tear down. I guess what I’m saying is, it’s pretty clear why jumpystones outnumber webbing in traversal challenges by 10:1 or more. You can improve the player experience here by giving them ways to modify the challenge. Maybe they have a single-use item to cut one strand (so they want to make a careful and clever decision), or maybe your game has sufficiently long-range melee weapons that PCs can provide covering fire from ranged enemies while one or two PCs belly-crawls under the webbing.

Whirling Blades of Death

“I sleep better at night just knowing they exist.” – Haran Roeh (written by Trace Moriarty)

I know of basically two setups for Whirling Blades of Death; I’m sure there are others. The versions I know about involve either boffer swords hanging the blades of a ceiling fan, and a contraption that Garrick Andrus built with boffers (or just pool noodles) connected to a central pole. The pole is turned by a hand crank, and supported by legs at each end so that the blades can go all the way around. I’m not doing a great job of explaining that, but then I didn’t build it. Anyway, what you get from this is a classic time-your-steps challenge.

Once again, you’ve got to pick a penalty for getting hit, and some amount of damage (ignoring armor, or enough damage that you wish you had more armor) is usually the most sensible thing here. That said, you could certainly change out the boffers to things built to look like tendrils of acid or tongues of flame and combine damage with other status effects. Like destroying armor.

This hazard needs a constrained area that PCs can walk in, whether that means bsetting it up in a narrow-ish area or just marking out the edges of a ledge. It combines well with monsters that don’t have to stick to that limited area, or with ranged attacks, and the pressure of a time constraint is usually a positive. In a recent Citadel playtesting incident, the time constraint (players being pursued) didn’t kick in until they had already gotten passed the blades once. Cautious the first time, rushed the second.

There aren’t a ton of other modifications you can make to this in the course of an encounter, just because the device is not quick to modify. You can change the effect of getting hit or the speed of the hand crank.

Balance Beam

This one doesn’t get a ton of use, for a bunch of reasons: it doesn’t accept a ton of difficulty tinkering, it can be sort of a pain to transport if we’re talking about an actual beam, there’s not that much to physically engage with, it needs very flat ground, and combat on a balance beam has increased safety concerns. What it does do is deploy incredibly fast (5-10 seconds, tops) combine well with jumpystones.

One thing a balance beam does well is grant access to secondary objectives, so that you don’t need the whole party to cross the beam. Maybe there’s a treasure chest out of reach on a rocky outcropping, or a button that the PCs need to push.

You can kind of fake this one with narrow-cut foam mats (jumpystones in a different form factor) or even paracord, which brings me to…

Rope Bridges

I’m not talking about a real ropes course, which takes more work and expertise to set up than many of us possess (though I’ve seen some things at Scout camps that could seriously mitigate this). What I’m talking about is rope or paracord fixed in place on the ground (often with clamps, but there are a dozen ways to do this) and treated as a tightrope, or accompanied by another line or two higher up and treated as a rope bridge. Citadel has used these to good effect, though we’ve had to spend disproportionate energy fine-tuning these rules, because there are so many combat implications.

The thing is, this traversal isn’t challenging on its own. No one is learning tightrope or slack-line walking for this, because we’re offering a notional representation of it, not the real thing. For this to work as a challenge, either the PCs need to do something to gain access to the rope bridge in the first place (like using grappling hooks to deploy it), or you use the rope bridge as a combat complication (see previous about fine-tuning our rules).

Even with all that, though, the situation has a great feeling of physical engagement, and it has been a lot of fun in the situations we’ve tested it in—up to and including making it a field battle element.

Mine Carts

Garrick inverted the traversal concept for this challenge, which we saw a number of times in Eclipse and then used in Dust to Dust (as whitewater rafting, more or less). Instead of the PCs moving across a room, the PCs stand on a defined platform and obstacles or attacking creatures move around them. The challenges tend to kind of go back and forth between being an unusual small-team fight format and being a low-impact physical challenge (to avoid things coming at you at various heights), but the response from players is consistently strongly positive. The tone of these challenges is usually more comical than other things in this post, but that invites players to be a bit Extra with their reactions in a way that really builds the scene.

Boating

This is a very different kind of “vehicle” challenge, and the materials needed are more involved. I think Garrick used, essentially, a wagon on casters rather than ordinary wheels? It was important that we could move in any direction. Anyway, the high-sided wagon was our boat, and we had to get in and pull ourselves across a “lake” (basketball court) while also fending off monsters, mainly with ranged attacks. This was enormously fun and I want to find more ways to change it up in the future.

Accessibility Concerns

Every traversal challenge needs to take accessibility into account. I’m not educated enough on this topic to speak knowledgeably, so I’ll submit the following:

Ask people with accessibility needs what their needs are and, maybe more importantly, what their capabilities are.
Not every moment of LARP content is suited for every user. It’s okay to have content that you gently guide people away from, as long as you’re also offering content that engages their capabilities.
If you can let PCs solve a challenge (even an alternate puzzle challenge or the like) to open a secondary pathway that meets accessibility needs, that tends to go over well.
Remember this core principle above everything else: all of LARPing works better if all involved can safely assume good intentions on the part of everyone else. Without that, things sour so fast.

A Funny Thing Happened at Occupational Therapy

One of my kids has been in Occupational Therapy for the past several years. Because it’s therapy for a kiddo, it needs to be engaging and entertaining in a way that therapy for adults doesn’t. (Uh, adults? What if we tried to have fun?) Anyway, those therapy sessions are all about physical engagement and use a lot of the same things we would use for a LARP, such as the Boating concept above. They also have gymnastics pads and a reinforced ceiling so that the kids can do things in cloth swings and the like. The therapist essentially describes traversal and ranged (“throw a tennis ball” or whatever) challenges for my kiddo.

The equipment is a bit out of reach for us to store, transport, and maintain, but I think there are probably some amazing lessons we could learn.

Conclusion

This post is for the benefit of whoever finds it interesting. Maybe it sparks a cool idea for someone involved with Citadel; maybe it passes on useful ideas to other LARP-runners; maybe it gets someone from another LARP to tell me about the traversal challenge their game used. I still have the vague dream of turning all these years of LARP Design posts into the foundation of a LARP-runner’s Guidebook (you know, a DMG for campaign boffer LARPs).

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Brandes Stoddard

Harbinger of Doom