A LARP that is too big has all the same problems. Let’s say you are LARPing a king’s court. Someone is the King, they are probably having a grand old time. Lots of action. Someone else is LARPing as a knight’s squire. They play no meaningful part in this huge ass larp. Basically, they’re just an extra.
There is only capacity for so many characters and important players in a given scene. With enough time/sessions/episodes you could eventually give everyone their time in the spotlight, but nobody has time for that.
No matter what kind of game it is, ortho or RPG or whatever, there is limit on how much you can make any individual contributor matter.
Consider the battle royale games. They work because they have player elimination. The people who end up not mattering are gone quickly and they try to play again elsewhere. How else could the game handle so many players? It can’t, so it must get rid of them. If players weren’t eliminated, the ones that fell behind would have no reason to stick around. Even in a small game of Quake, if you’ve only got 5 frags and the leader has 30, why are you even there anymore? Elimination would be better.
I think maybe a mega game with elimination could definitely work. Everyone would be invested because at the start everyone has an equal chance to matter. Then everyone is either sent away, or they continue to matter more and more. I say go with actual theme from Battle Royale the book/movie. Nice and simple and fun.
That’s why you give the smaller bit players interesting interpersonal drama to deal with. It’s not real king and not real kings court so declaring wars and dealing with love triangles between nobles and servants can be of same level of interest. Depending on players of course, different people are interested in different matters. But main point stands, in good larp everyone has enough personal goals and relationships to have a good time for the full length of the game.
Isn’t that just nihilism? You’re saying “my life doesn’t matter because nothing I do will have any noticeable impact on the Universe”. My answer to that is “so what!”
Who says you have to measure whether you mattered in the game by your impact on the largest possible scale? Your impact is measured by the individual people you impacted.
The point of that kind of game is, a la the Nonmen, to do memorable things.
(What I just said pretty much matches what Apsup said, albeit from a different perspective).
Just cross the relationship web enough to make it one. And yes, sometimes there are basically separate things, but being in space where there is more going on than your personal bit gives the whole thing more life. Relationship drama in king’s court is vastly different when the king is actually there doing court stuff than when it’s just said to be king’s court, but has none of the trappings.
That’s basically like saying that big huge fight is not a big fight, but bunch of small skirmishes.
Yeah, but you do feel it. Sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big ways if you do a truly notable thing. The bigger story emerges from the little ones and you don’t always realize how, but it still does.
Also, for any “megagame”-type event a major part of it is being able to talk about and analyze it afterwards, so you can get more of a bigger picture of how everything fit together, as well as some of other peoples’ smaller pictures.
The big moments are when the submarine is on a mission to fight another submarine. Sure.
But the captain has sealed orders from the military to launch a nuke.
And one of the officers has a sealed order from the politicians to prevent the captain from launching a nuke and force him to surface before it happens.
The key to a game like that is the politicians are receiving incomplete information from the military and eachother, making decisions in the dark. The military knows what’s up mostly, and communicates selectively with the politicians.
And the subs? Sub drama. One sub gets ordered to defect rather than complete its mission.
Captain Sonar already has rules space for the special mission stuff.
This game is writing itself. I’ll never run it, but I’m going to write it.
This is not how it’s supposed to work. The President would give the order to launch the nuke, which gets relayed through the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who relay the order through the chain of command through the sub. Sure, there’s the two-key mechanism to prevent one person from launching the missiles. That’s to prevent some random nut on the ship from murdering the Captain and launching the missile by themselves. Generally, the two keyholders are to execute properly given order. You generally don’t see the XO go all Denziel Washington, then again the order to fire should not come written in crayon.
You’re not going to see “politicians” (Members of Congress) able to intrude on this process and have a military officer take them seriously. Unless you’re taking about some weird factional military dictatorship in Advance Wars/Air Combat-land.
This data is just base don people using Roll20, but it’s the best available to us.
The dominance of D&D continues to be a huge problem. Imagine if this was the case in any other genre or medium.
Imagine if over 50% of all comic books that people actually bought and read were Batman. Imagine if over 50% of all board games played were Settlers. Imagine if over 50% of all video games played were Mario.
Its actually even worse than you stated, I would list this as 60% D&D effectively though you could probably put it even higher (59.9 is D&D 5e, 3.5 and pathfinder combined). I think part of the issue is that RPG playing and running is still an “art” from the consumer perspective so D&D and its ilk capture this huge first mover advantage in the hobby still because the cost of entry in terms of time (but also money as well) can be so high that new players go with the “safe bet” to enter in and fail to diversify later. It doesn’t hurt that WOTC and Paizo have the largest organized play at Con’s and at local gameshops furthering it as the entry/casual RPG of choice for new players who don’t know how or won’t be able to GM.
Even worse from a gameplay perspective the majority of that list (percentage and just the named systems) is just straight up combat focused with little focus on narrative mechanics within the rulesets.
If, instead of Batman, you’d said DC and Marvel, it probably would be close.And if it’s just western comics, those two probably share over 90% of the pie. Not sure, honestly, but would assume.
Yes, but this is even worse. It’s not 50% playing games from TSR/WotC. It’s 50% playing a single game. That’s why I said Batman and not DC. At least DC/Marvel is two companies with lots of titles! It’s significantly better in comic book land!
Nobody is saying dnd isn’t fun. Continue playing and continue having fun with the blessing of everyone. Dnd isn’t the problem. The problem is too high a percentage of tabletop rpg’s being played are one game.
This would be a problem whether the game with 60% of games was Burning Wheel or Dungeon World or really any game.
