I’m on a bus back to Prague¹ after playing the larp Avalon over the weekend. So I’m tired, apparently tick-free, sore, vaguely hungover, and flying off tomorrow. So I’d like to talk about the larp, but before I do that I have to talk about how I want to talk about the larp, and the reason why is something called the “Week of Stories.”

The “Week of Stories” is basically an attempt to provide some sanity to the organizers of these events, to give them an opportunity to rest and recover before they start getting slammed with complaints. Players are asked to restrict themselves to sharing stories about their game and not to provide criticism for at least a week. On the one hand, this feels a little ridiculous to me; playwrights don’t get to ask theater critics to hold off after their opening, and restaurants don’t get to embargo bad reviews for a bit. But the larp community does have a problem with organiser burnout, and it’s significantly driven by the player base. No one organizes these things hoping to get rich,² and after sinking six months of writing and meetings and sleepless nights followed by a weekend of nervous terror trying to make a game come off, it’s incredibly disheartening to immediately afterwards get a dozen people whose primary public communication about the game is complaining about the fact the coffee ran out on the second day.

All that said, I’m publishing a travel blog here³ and for some god-awful reason there’s no way to manually set the date of posts.⁴ As far as I can tell, I literally can’t embargo the post or post a placeholder and edit it later without screwing up the publication dates. My compromise? I’m going to publish this but not advertise it until the Week of Stories is up.

So, if you’re part of the organizing team and still feeling deeply emotionally vulnerable about the game: feel free stop reading until you’re ready. If it helps, know that I thought the game was good, I had a good time, it was incredibly well-organized, and it feels to me that most people really enjoyed themselves. And if you find yourself compelled to keep reading my hot take anyway, I’m going to spend a lot of time contextualizing what didn’t work for me, and I’m mostly interested in using it to talk about styles of larp, not to suggest that these were necessarily flaws in the game. No complaints about the coffee here.⁵

I think a lot of larp criticism online conflates four basic questions:

• Was the game fun?
• Was the game worth the money?
• Was the game well designed?
• Was the game well organized?

Questions 1 and 2 are fundamentally subjective. Questions 3 and 4 have objective elements (Did we sell more tickets than we had spots on the bus?) but they’re secretly deeply interwoven with #1 and #2. If the larp culminates in an epic game of chess and you hate chess, you’re probably going to think it wasn’t well designed. Similarly, if the larp culminates in an epic battle with foam swords and you hate foam swords, you’ll feel the same way.

If you’re trying to cater to both people who hate chess and people who hate foam swords, you have a problem. You can try and find a different epic finale (Riddles? Polka Dancing? Pie-Eating Contest?) or you can try and provide two different epic finales (Sword fighting on the left, board gaming on the right). But the more accomodations you try and make, the harder the design challenge gets. And you’re always likely to make someone unhappy.

The upshot of all of this is that people’s feeling about a particular larp design is wrapped up, in a myriad of ways, with all sorts of personal preferences which generally don’t have anything to do with the design. Maybe that’s kind of obvious, but it’s a little weird to think that our appreciation of King Lear depends on whether the bathrooms have been properly stocked with toilet paper. Although if you find yourself trapped in a stall at intermission without any, I’m sure that’s pretty self-evident as well.

So, what did I think of Avalon? Well, it’s complicated.

Avalon is trying to be a lot of things. On one level, it’s simply a replication of the College of Wizardry experience built around explicitly British myths and Druidic traditions. On a deeper level, it’s an examination of the tangles of oaths and duties and traditions which bind and constrain us, and the ways the forces of destruction and creation combine to forge our beings. On a very practical level, it’s an attempt to marry the narrative, rules-light, emotion-driven play of Nordic-style larps with the plot-heavy, camping-and-foam-swords-in-the-woods style of more action-oriented larps.

The plot (and wow was there a lot of plot) involved students returning to Avalon after the summer break, coming back to the island with a bunch of new students who needed to be initiated. Avalon is a brutal place, where the terrors of the island — beasts, fae, spirits, and others — are encouraged to attack the students and pick off the weak ones, where your survival depends on your ability to learn from the largely indifferent teaching staff. This year one of the students brought cold iron onto the island, breaking of one of the oaths of protection sworn to the fae, and in retaliation the protection provided by the fae began to fade from the school, setting off a hunt for artifacts of protection and negotiations with various forces and deals being struck and battle lines being drawn.

My character was written in stark contrast to most of the other characters. He had an idyllic upbringing, wasn’t petty or violent or cruel, and genuinely wanted to improve things. He was cheerful and friendly in an environment where most of the other characters were grim and distrustful. He was a blast to play. I had a lot of nice scenes getting yelled at by teachers for quietly refusing to participate in something horrible, or having other students be surprised and suspicious when he compassionately asked if they were okay.

But whether it was intentional or not, he didn’t have any relations written into the character, and with everything going on in my life I didn’t end up participating in any preplay or relationship building before the larp, so I didn’t have any of those generating play during the game. And I somehow managed to miss most of the plot going on. Many plot-heavy games kind of require you to just be standing in the right place at the right time in order for something critical to happen. If you’re not there, you missed it.

One of the ways they tried to tie everyone into the game was through warbands. One of the conceits of Avalon is, in this horrid, unforgiving place, the students have had to band together in groups to survive. I was one of the Ravens, the warband most interested in information gathering, negotiation, and plotting. I had a great time interacting with the other warband members, and it brought a lot to the game. But the first and second in command ended up getting entangled in a lot of what was going on, and the others had a lot of things pulling them in other directions. I kind of got caught in-between. It was difficult for me, as an individual, to find a way to fit in.

So the pattern that emerged was that some information would be gained by one of the Ravens (maybe through a divination, or trading a favor, or tracking down someone and asking point blank). This would be communicated to everyone, then I’d have to go to class, then when I got back some new information would have been obtained and had to be shared with everyone. With the sheer volume of information, it started to feel like people were acting out Wikipedia articles. It didn’t help that critical things happened regularly in the middle of the night. I was up until 1:00 the first night and 12:30 the second, and both times game-changing things happened about 15 minutes after I left.

I’m hesitant to say any of this is bad design; when you’re trying to generate plot for 80 players you have to kind of throw a lot of it out there and hope it makes it to everyone who needs it. A lot of it just missed me. I’m not sure the sorts of things that would have allowed it to get to me wouldn’t have unbalanced the game in other dimensions. But I didn’t end up with a lot of emotional interactions with people (owing to the lack of connections), a great deal of the plot ended up just missing me (owing to bad luck or bad timing), and since I’ve basically no interest in boffer combat or particularly physical challenges⁶ it was difficult to put more together than some isolated character moments.

I guess this is where it ties back to the style of game and your personal preferences. I had fun, I thought it was well worth the time and money and very well-organized, and while I would have done a lot of things differently, all I can say with certainty is that it would have been a different game, not a better one. I’d likely have enjoyed it more, sure, but I am at best an audience of one.

Right at the end of the game my character watched two champions slug it out on the battlefield for control of the island and realized he didn’t much care who won. It was just another onanistic spilling of blood in an empty ritual launching another cycle of violence and revenge. He left the battle, walked back to the tavern, and waited for it to be over. A fae wandered over and struck up a conversation. Not interested in the battle? No, not really. Would I perhaps want to make a bargain? No, not this year. Maybe the next one? Maybe.

I’ll take a lot about the game with me. Whatever else you might say about it, I was able to walk out into a clear meadow, tattered wizard’s cloak on my back, sun just going down over the horizon, with a circle of stones in the distance and the low chant of a ritual being performed in it barely reaching my ears. That is as pure a magic as I’ve ever felt.

As for the rest, I’m not sure you can build a larp around the hero’s journey and have 80 different heroes. Given how pure that magic felt, I’m not convinced you need to try.

Next: Prague (PRG) to Split (SPU)
Prev: Prague to Kopaniec

Footnotes

¹ At the moment people are singing Misty Mountains Cold, which pretty effectively sums up this crowd

² At least, I hope not. I can think of at least a dozen things someone with larp organization skills could do for significantly more money. Most games are lucky to break even. Fantastically successful larp companies right now means you make enough money for you to survive and maybe employ a few other people.

³ Really more of a life blog that talks a lot about travel, to be honest

⁴ Or rather, there wasn’t when I published this. I’ve since fixed that.

⁵ I keep mentioning the coffee and I feel compelled to point out that as far as I know there were no issues with coffee. It’s just an example.

⁶ Charging up a forested hill at a full run to snag our banner in the traditional warband-versus-warband competition notwithstanding. I was a lot more careful walking down.