u/thecosmicgoose

▲ 213 r/vtm

The problem with Vampire LARPs.

Long time larper here. I've been a member of the Camarilla/minds eye scociety/whatever the fuck you wanna call it for over 20 years now, and I've noticed a pattern.

Vampire larps are prone to a particular kind of toxicity that makes the whole experience turn to shit unless very carefully handled. And in all honesty I've yet to see anyone handle it well enough to prevent any given game from detonating.

The first factor is intensity. All role playing can suffer from character bleed, where the player identifies a little too closely with their character. I posit that LARP as a format is particularly prone to it due to how immediate the whole experience is. Even veteran players will get just a bit to into it. It's inevitable.

The second factor is the main premise of the Vampire venue itself. It's expected that your going to be a bastard. Deception, manipulation, status games and betrayal are baked into the games very foundation. It's not just a option to play, its the default.

Combine these two factors and you get the toxicity that kills so many Vampire games sooner rather than later. Basically: your character is going to get stabbed in the back sooner rather than later, its going to feel very personal when it happens and generally won't result in a positive experience for you.

Looking at the history the the Cam/MES/whatever you can see this dynamic writ large. The club is crippled with dysfunction- cliques, vendettas, grudges and hard feelings. Most of which can be traced back to some in-character moment where someone got screwed over and took it personally.

Thing is, im not sure there's a way around this problem. The toxicity is baked into the premise of the game. Other venues like Mage or Changeling don't seem to have quite the same intensity of the issue, as their foundational premise isnt as antagonistic between players.

So what are we to do? Imho the first step would be to publicly (and loudly) name the damn problem. But after that I don't know.

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u/thecosmicgoose — 15 hours ago

Something thats always bugged me about the movie Contact.

So by the end of the movie Jodie fosters characters has passed through the machine and had her encounter with the alien disguised as her father. Her cameras all failed which creates a great deal of doubt about her testimony. Various political High-ups go after her as a fraud and do their best to destroy her reputation to score points. Some even go so far as to claim the whole thing was s hoax perpetrated by hadden as some last hurrah.

What im wondering is... why not reset the machine and send another person? The thing is already built, which was the hard part. It would be relatively simple to just do it all again and verify what Jodie foster was saying.

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u/thecosmicgoose — 12 days ago