The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [121]
Death is an awkward condition in live-action games. The player is obviously still alive, so removing him from the game requires physically relocating him to another location, usually outside of the play area. True Dungeon eventually abandoned this mechanic so that the deceased can now follow the party as a ghost, present but incapable of affecting the game or helping the party.
This solution, which is popular on MUDs, MMORPGs, and first-person shooters, enables the player to remain somewhat social without completely disengaging the deceased character’s play from the game. In RetroMUD, we used a similar ghost mechanic but eventually abandoned it for a confined afterlife area. Ghosts were only capable of observing and incapable of speech, but they were otherwise free to roam. As a result, ghosts often scouted ahead for their adventuring party, relaying information using out-of-game tools.
In True Dungeon, roaming ghosts are much easier to moderate—referees can clearly tell if a player is speaking or otherwise interacting with the environment. Players who violate these rules are asked to leave, and if they must leave for other reasons (bathroom breaks or real-life emergencies) they are permanently deceased. Another advantage is that if the deceased player’s character is brought back from the dead, he can immediately rejoin play rather than wander the dungeon to find his compatriots.
In Darkon, characters that are killed cannot move, speak or perform any actions for two minutes or at the discretion of an Elder (a referee). The character is then relegated to Hades, where he must spend some time before returning to the game. He will not have any memory of the last five minutes immediately preceding his death, including who killed him—this is presumably to prevent a perpetual stream of vendetta killings as players attempt to attack their killers in an act of revenge. If a player is resurrected through magical means (within 12 minutes of his death) he retains all of his memories.
Hades is a designated area considered out of play, in which players spend time to repair equipment, heal wounds, and restore life. Combat is forbidden in and around the Hades area. A referee known as the Hades Elder records the names, times, and reasons for players entering and leaving Hades. Dead players hold their weapon overhead to signify that they are ghosts returning to Hades, incapable of communication with players beyond a nod of their head to confirm death. Death in Hades is 12 minutes long (Darkon Wargaming Club 2009:85).
Roles
LARPs differ from tabletop role-playing games through the addition of physical reality to construct diegeses (Montola 2003). In a role-playing game, when the game master describes a rock, he does not provide the million little details that instantly convey the rock’s physical reality. He only creates the impression of the rock. In a live action game, the rock is an actual rock, and thus the texture, size, physical space, distance, color, smell, weight, and so on are all instantly accounted for.
Because physical reality’s complexity is beyond the scope of any one person’s ability to catalogue all of its intricacies, this can create some peculiar disparities, such as elements in the physical world inappropriately intruding on the game. Contrast this with the diegesis created by MMORPGs, where every object and character in the world is catalogued and indexed.
Renaissance festivals are another form of live action game, although the level of engagement of the characters and players varies according to the festival. Characters play roles and some have goals to be fulfilled either by actors portraying the characters or by the visitors themselves.
Perhaps the ultimate passive live action role-playing game of this style is Medieval Times. My wife and I