So, things change

Over the last several months, the local gaming community's been slowly redefining itself. The local LARPing scene is dying out, and most of us have come to realize just what a steady decline it's been on over the course of the last several years. When cama_sotz and I started LARPing here, just over seven years ago⁰, ToD had just split off from One World By Night. Later that year, following the Time of Judgement, the local Camarilla chapter dissolved.¹ And since then, the LARPing community has been this self-contained group that erupts into an explosion of drama about once a year and as a result has lose people to erosion with almost no infusion of new players. And for most of this time, we haven't had a Local Gaming Store nor have we had a Friendly Local Gaming Store in even longer than that.²

The community's tried to sustain regular LARPs in the meantime, but they've been thwarted by a combination of drama and a commonly-held mentality³ that a LARP is "a self-sustaining chronicle that'll go on whether I show up or not because half of it is the players trying to eat each other in between Storyteller-run plots and thus I don't have to take it seriously or consistently show up." This mentality was held even after people started realizing that we just didn't have enough players to accommodate that sort of thing and STs started taking a more active role in running plots to compensate.⁴ Even when the group is small enough that you're basically running a tabletop game standing up, people keep that mentality

What the hell? I wasn't trying to go into yet another rant on the local LARPing scene. Okay, let me try this again.

LARPing in Morgantown is pretty much dead.⁵ The only reason why I haven't run the last session of my Hunter LARP already is because there were one or two stories I wanted to do first, ones that I'm not confident I could repurpose and run in another game down the road. Especially since people around here are pretty much burned out on Storytelling system stuff altogether because it's been the staple for so long. And the various drama-based factional splits we've had in the area⁶ have made it hard to put together a tabletop group made up of people we actually want to run games for (not just for drama reasons) and can actually make it to a session consistently. It doesn't help much that WVU's got a lot of tabletop gamers who've maintained some childish 'D&D vs WoD' rivalry and sneer at folks who LARP because the one great human pastime is finding any flimsy excuse to look down on other people and make yourself feel better.

There's a local role-playing club that's ostensibly trying to fix this but so far we're not really seeing a lot of action outside of meetings to decide when we're having more meetings and taking up space on Facebook (which I'm still not using, just for the record). There's also an actually decent gaming store run by some cool guys that's picking up (which I've discussed before), but we haven't quite made contact with the people who've been playing at the store there because they've all already got their own groups and haven't really gone to a lot of trouble to reach out to us either. But then, it's simply possible that they don't know of the club's existence (see the aforementioned lack of doing much of anything).


Anyhow, long story short (too late), I'm making plans for what I'll be running after the Hunter game wraps up. I'm working out notes to run a Pathfinder game⁷, because sometimes you just have to go back to the dual wells of "systems players already know" and "the ease of having a monster manual." Besides, when the options for offline gaming are "put a little extra work into a D&D game to make it more than 'I kick in the door and charge the first orc I see'" and "run something else, probably something I have to teach the players how to play, and then spend extra effort to keep them from just trying to turn it into D&D", I'd just rather go with the former. In the meantime, Sean's trying to get a tabletop game going as well, but he's still sorting out what he'd like to run.

The big problem is finding players who:

1. Are capable of reliably showing up to agreed-upon game sessions
   
2. Will actually let me know ahead of time if they can't show up
   
3. Will find ways to play that don't involve simply tearing pages out of the books and masturbating with them
   
4. Will actually tell me if they perceive something with the game as a problem
   

Requirements 1 and 2 are actually a lot harder to manage than you'd think, for some reason.

Anyhow, I've gone on long enough. Not really sure what else to get into here. So I'll wrap this up with the random announcement that I'm finally starting to acknowledge that 2010 officially counts as "last year."

Mahalo.


⁰-- Jesus Christ.
¹-- And given that the industry has enough trouble getting people to actually buy their books nowadays, asking folks around here to pay a membership fee to play is just right out.
²-- Until Four Horsemen came about, the last gaming store we had in the area was openly hostile to anyone who didn't play WH40k and the store before that was openly hostile to anyone who wasn't a Magic player (while not exactly being friendly to Magic players).
³-- I dunno if this is strictly a local thing or if it's seen in other LARPs elsewhere.
⁴-- Which, natch, resulted in people bitching about how they were expected to do more than circle jerk. Sadly, some of the folks most dedicated to LARPing just really wanted a version of GTA that was run by real people so the stories could be improvised on the fly.
⁵-- I'm not really counting the local boffer LARP in this. I've got nothing against boffer LARPing, but having seen how these people handle it it's pretty hard to take it seriously. Maybe it'd be easier if they didn't actually say things like "Technically we're supposed to be role-playing but we're really not." It's pretty clear that the appeal is a combination of "Whooo, we get to hit each other with foam swords!" and "Dude, check out this immaculately-crafted foam penissword I've built to masturbate onhit you with."
⁶-- And just for the record, I'm not going to pretend to be some gleaming beacon of innocence and reason who's innocent of the worst of it and has actively tried to fix things. Honestly, at this point, most of my interest in the drama is to not have to deal with it at my game.
⁷-- I'd like to get that L5R game going again, but quite frankly it's going to require some 'recasting' and such and I'd have to feel out players who'd be willing to learn a new system and setting.