Larp is a very broad medium: Many kinds of games exist out there. In the interests of clarity and transparency, the Five Oaths team have been working on some short essays on the game design intents of Five Oaths LARP- What we’re trying to achieve, and how we’re doing it. Below, we’re happy to present the first of these- A post on difficulty and threat in Five Oaths.
On Threat and Difficulty
In our vision of Five Oaths the characters you play are powerful, but they face powerful enemies. Defeat is possible, indeed in some circumstances defeat is likely.
In Five Oaths we want encounters and battles to have meaningful threat, we want the enemy to be scary and the stakes to be high, and for that to be the case then there needs to be a real chance of failure. Winning should be hard, surviving should not be taken for granted.
Characters can die, the default assumption should not be that every character will survive to the end of every event, in fact if a group of characters goes into an encounter ill prepared, or even if they lack the correct skills, or even are just plain old unlucky, then every character managing to survive should be seen as a mark of skill instead of the expected outcome.
Non-combat encounters, including those flagged by the team as being suitable for players who can’t safely take part in combat, are no exception. Exploring forgotten tombs, delving into ancient mysteries and solving puzzles can sometimes expose your character to effects, wounds or afflictions that can be lethal to a character without endangering the player.
Sometimes speed is required, in some encounters the threat will be ever escalating, taking too long will result in the band being overwhelmed.
Sometimes strength and resource management is necessary, the enemy may be powerful or in great numbers and only tactical acumen or skill at arms will be enough to achieve victory.
Sometimes neither strength nor speed will be sufficient, in these cases limiting loss of Galloglaigh life or mitigating tactical failure is the only valid goal.
Sometimes the conservative approach will not be sufficient, sometimes you will have to take risks to win.
Sometimes the band will have to choose between achieving their goals, and coming home with everyone alive.
Sometimes the band will lose, and how they got there is not as important as how they pick up the pieces. Working together, sharing information and sharing resources are key to surviving the threats that Tirneach faces, and sometimes the best that the Band can do is mitigate losses.
The game we want to run is not a game where the Player Characters are the shining heroes who will always save the day, in Five Oaths you are powerful people facing an even more powerful enemy in a land fraught with political tensions. Victory is not assured. There will be risk, there will be setbacks, you may not survive to see victory over the Gwyllt, if victory is even possible.
By no means is the game hopeless, but if the Band is to succeed they will have to fight tooth and nail for every victory and when characters die, for they will die, then it will be a death which was fought to the bitter end, and when Characters win, it was bought with blood.
This does not mean that the team intends to create no-win “Kobayashi Maru” scenarios where total failure is inevitable. The intent is to run encounters with a spectrum of threat. All events will have some relatively low threat encounters and some which are relatively high threat. Some events will have a greater proportion of high threat encounters than others. The idea is that the pace of the game should be varied, providing the thrill of danger at times, and time for rest and moments of quiet interpersonal roleplay too.
In the interest of transparency going forward we will be labeling our events with a broad threat level, such as “Medium” or “High”, this is so our players can set expectations accordingly and so are not blindsided by unexpected difficulty. This said, this labeling system is a very broad, not every encounter will fall within that level of difficulty, it is possible that characters will have the correct tools at hand to easily overcome an otherwise difficult encounter, or that due to poor luck or planning the characters will be caught with their pants down and what should otherwise be a manageable encounter turns into a bloodbath.