Icarus Studios News

Modern graphical MMOs have evolved from text-based multi-user dungeons (MUDs). MUDs, in turn, owe a lot of their origin to tabletop roleplaying games. Yet another direct evolution of the tabletop RPG was into live-action roleplaying (LARP). The parallel evolution of LARPs to MUDs and MMOs explains something of the permadeath debate.

There are many different kinds of LARP, but the unifying element is that players physically portray their characters in a real space meant to represent the fictional world. Rather than sitting around a table and describing a character’s actions, the player takes on the role that an avatar plays in virtual worlds: through costuming and acting, the player becomes the physical representation of a character. There’s much more to it than that (available at the above link), but a short description will suffice for the topic at hand.

LARPs can be broadly separated into groups based on whether they represent physical conflict through actual player contact, or through non-contact game systems. Social interaction is almost always acted out in all LARPs, but, for example, do you attack an enemy with a foam weapon or with a hand gesture and a rules reference? In the US, non-contact LARPs are often referred to as “salon” games, as they most commonly take place in small, interior spaces, while contact LARPs are referred to as “boffer” games due to the foam-padded “boffer” weapons used to make contact without injury.

Beyond their difference in contact, salon and boffer games tend to reflect different genres as well. Boffer games are overwhelmingly represented by high-fantasy simulations, with rules that can be traced directly to Dungeons and Dragons. Salon games, conversely, came to prominence along with the modern horror game Vampire: the Masquerade, and modern horror games still make up the majority of salon LARPs. These origins have a profound impact on how the styles handle the issue of character death.

In salon LARPs, much of the conflict is social. They are often used to model political intrigue and investigation, with rules that make it hard to determine whether another player character, much less a game organizer-controlled antagonist, is an overwhelming physical threat. It is easy to make characters with no combat bonuses whatsoever. Further, because rules take the place of contact for physical conflict, fights commonly take much longer than they would in “real time,” and large fights tend to involve a lot of waiting around for others to resolve their actions. Because of the typical horror genre, a character dying is almost always permanent: losing your character means starting over with a new one, often losing all accumulated character advancement. In short, combat is something most players avoid because it is slow, unpredictable, and risks losing a long-term investment in the character. The players most likely to engage in combat other than for self-defense are those with new characters in which they’re not invested (and not afraid to lose) and those who have built up the combat capabilities of their character to the point that they are confident that they can win nearly any fight.

Boffer LARPs can be primarily social, but many are combat heavy. The speed of fighting with boffer weapons means that conflict occurs in real time. Because many of these games have rules designed to model high fantasy, magic is abundant, armor is prevalent, and it is hard to build a character that doesn’t have at least some utility in combat. Because everyone has fighting abilities, and magic can help protect someone from the consequences attacking a superior foe, it is much more attractive to engage in combat. Most importantly, boffer games almost universally have a respawn mechanic: if a player character dies and is not resurrected by another player’s magic, the player simply leaves play, travels to some kind of mystical resurrection site, and returns to play as the same character, reborn. There may be penalties to dying, but characters can usually die repeatedly before they are no longer viable to play. The meta-game reason for the respawn is straightforward: in a game atmosphere that encourages getting into fights with the expectation of survival, permanent death when you misjudged a fight with no help around would have a chilling effect on the willingness of players to fight, negating much of the fun of the system. It’s more useful to cheapen the consequences of death than to cheapen the fun combat systems already in place.

Part 2 will explain what all of this has to do with permadeath in MMOs.

-Stephen Cheney, Virtual Worlds Team