Man has a horrible first LARP experience - Larp Horror Stories 

Here’s a link to the article so that you can read along: taking10.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-first-and-worst-larp-i-ever-attended.html?m=1 Here’s a link to the author’s Patreon. He didn’t ask me to do this, I just wanted to be supportive: www.patreon.com/theliterarymercenary

Davvy evolves to crab at last

This best part is you mimicking Crit Crab's pacing and diction at the beginning, so fucking good

If this is in SE Texas, I think I went to the same fricking larp. The place was awful, the STs had no idea how to do their jobs, the staff was utterly hostile, I was told never to go outside the tavern without others because the game was for high level players and my new character would instantly die (I was one shot in the tutorial module for all new players), and my friends even ditched me early on so I couldnt play with them. I told them "I felt like I got ditched in the woods for a weekend." and their response was "it hurts me to hear you say that" well it hurt to experience so ya.

Yesssss! I want more Davvy Larp content! I'd love to see you do an advice video for folks transitioning from DnD to LARP! :>

It has begun, Davvy must now make rpg horror stories for the rest of time and never stop. This will become a 100 part series. It is inevitable.

“…meet hot LARPs near you…”, yeah I laughed aloud. Well done.

My first Larp experience was being sent out on NPC duty for an encounter designed for the new player characters. I figured that would be fine I'm new, they're new, we can all figure the game out with a rules marshal right there. Me and 4 other people get sent out to a field as skeletons and the story teller goes off to get the new player while we wait in a pitch black freezing cold field. All of a sudden the guy comes sprinting back to us and tells us "actually the whole town decided to come, quadrouple all your stats and keep respawning until I tell you". Needless to say us 5 scary skeletons got wallaped by a bunch of way over zealous nerds screaming abilities I had never even herd of.

Have been interested in LARP since I started playing D&D and watched the web series LARPs. I will definitely keep those questions in mind when trying my first one.

Whoa, is that Crit Crab?

I appreciate the lead in, using CritCrab's tone and delivery for the intro it's a nice touch

Listen it's not ripping somebody else off, it's just Homebrew

Really good video Davvy! I don't normally listen to the 'horror story' style of videos, but this one really had me. I like that you've been breaking out and changing as well. Loving the content you've given us so far! Keep it up!

Davvy, have you done, or considered doing, videos on the major cities of the Sword Coast and their lore? Neverwinter, Waterdeep, etc? There is so much D&D lore, I'm not sure where to begin. Keep up the excellent content my dude.

This is because Hawkeye had an episode with Larping isn’t it?

LARP content! Before I got into TTRPGs, that was the biggest thing I wanted to try. Looking forward to more of this!

Good job on the CritCrab impression at the start Davvy, now never do it again, it’s painful to listen to.

Really liked this! I'd love more larp content in the future if you're up for it!

Great video! I am amazed you are still willing to LARP after this experience!

My first LARP experience was also a doozie. I was the one who found it online and checked out their site. Was a 6 hour drive away, but both myself and my roommate at the time were quite excited to go. We made our accounts, asked a few questions, read all the rules, all that, and we had a decent picture of what it would be like. Hell, I even made my own pants and vest. The day comes, we make the drive, and get there early to introduce ourselves. The first night really isn't pivotal to the story, but I will say that 5 of us were brand new to it and, after going on the newbie mod where we learned how combat works, they just kinda... Left us, so we hung out and tried to RP with one another. Out of the 5 of us that showed up to that event, only 2 of us kept coming, that being myself and my roommate, so I guess we were more willing to put up with what happened the next morning. We get up, get in costume, and head up to the meeting area for our first real mod. It was... Lackluster. We were tasked with getting an item from a cave, but we get there and there's a bunch of bookcases filled with books, so some folks start reading them? The weird part wasn't that, but that the books caused seemingly random effects to happen to those that read them, which you think would be a hint to, ya know, not do that, but we just stood there for 15 minutes while people kept pulling books off the shelves. Then we were attacked by vampires? There wasn't even a hint of that along the way, but, sure. We finish the fight and move on to an area that's filled with poisonous gas cause the cave is somehow connected to a sewer system... In a medieval fantasy setting... In the middle of nowhere. Anyways, we end up just setting the gas on fire and burning it away, then move on to the next room through some water and encounter a golem made of poop, who's guarding the item we're supposed to collect, which is a mirror that's actually a portal to another region. Again, win that fight, and then head out, only to get ambushed by more vampires and have the item be stolen from us. It was never brought up again nor bore any relevance to anything from that point on. In reality, we had simply inadvertently selected a mod written by the absolute worst writer there. Well, both he and his wife are tied for that position. But, in the moment, we only had a sample size of 1 and didn't know that there were multiple writers and that all of the other ones are leagues beyond them. The reason there were slots open for this one is because all the regular players had chosen mods written by those better writers. Both he and I felt like it was a big slap in the face, though, to have such a miserable first experience that we considered never going back. We gave it a second try, came back the following month, and had a good time. Now I'm in their promo video right on the website, but haven't been back in 5 years just due to life stuff taking precedence. One day I'll go back, though!

Yeees larp content! What a terrible first experience for them, I'm glad they were able to find better games to be part of afterwards. gonna grab those questions for later use~

And then this guy shouted Lightning Bolt and shot me with a sandbag.

Woot more LARP vids man. Your right we don't have a big online presents and good stories/poor stories seems like a neat way to spread the hobby along with ideas for games other organizers could use. B)

Diffrent from your normal stuff Davvy! Nice to see you do some LARP stuff as you mentioned you have been wanting to do some for awhile!

YESSSSSS! I’ve been waiting you to steal CritCrabs content because you and JoCat are the only DnD RU-vidrs whose voices I like.

Woo! I would very much like to hear more LARP stuff, it’s hard to find LARPS online as much fun as a well done one sounds.

Fun facts: Michigan gets precipitation on about 130 days each year. So about 1/3 of the time. In 25 years of LARPing in Michigan, roughly half of each year’s events see either rain or snow, regardless of location or genre. It is statistically improbable how often it rains on Michigan Larpers.

The carcinisation continues. Also, I need to have words with Zoneri about stealing my top spot.

I love critcrab stories and I personally am curious about LARPing so these kind of stories would help me make up my mind. Weighing good and bad lol. Please bring more of these!

Yo Davvy, I'd love to see a video in the future of you giving an introduction to LARPing, similar to your videos introducing different systems.

I would love to see more larp-content in future.

This was interesting thou the speed was a little slow. Its took a little bit for my brain to adjust as I'm so used to your other videos pacing. Still, I would love to see more of these :D

Was a good video! Definitely do more

Lmao, the picture of the samurai throwing a javelin is my unit-mate Daichi! his armor do be sexy though!

So I am in the process of creating a Larp and this along with a few of your other Vids are helping me to avoid some pitfalls that other Larps have done that ruin the experience for their players, I have to state that I also took the questions from the blog and quickly used them to ensure that I answered each for the benefit of any players that decide they want to participate in game testing of what I am creating. If anyone is interested in more information (Including you Davvy Chappy) about the Larp I'm doing feel free to let me know and I'll do my best to get back to you BTW we'll be attempting to do our First play testing in September in Toronto Ontario.

I was very happy to get the first reaction to this video on the discord

As someone actually planning to start a LARP in the Kansas City area soon, I value this insight

larp it up! i'd love more larp content

Is there going to be a place where we can submit these stories because I know some people... Either way, glad to have content like this

That's really useful. More please?

Wait a second... this isn't the Crab Overlord! Still a good time, though.

The LARP I belong to has an online rule book that goes over basically everything you'll need before, at, and after the weekend event

The one dislike is the dude in question. Prove me wrong.

Here in NL I have never been told "you have to npc" there is a usually a cheaper ticket price if you do, but if you don't then its fine. For the rest, yeah pretty much same, though hand-on-head is usually hand raised high above your head

Wohw NICE finaly someone how talks about Larp!

XD That intro felt like a READ

I don't know if I'm super hot for the LARP focus but I do like the insertion of "this is not how it's supposed to be" commentary. Honestly commenting on others experiences with homebrew rules or other people's dnd horror stories is fun although I do know there are definitely other RU-vidrs out there that do that and stepping on their toes wouldn't be cool. While that comment sounded negative, I really enjoyed this video as much as the other vids you do Davvy! Keep it up.

I'm a second generation gamer, and was probably raised inside an historical re-creation society... So from an early age I was fully normalized on the concepts of both fantasy role-playing and in dressing up in funny costumes and pretending to be different people in the woods. Those were both normal to me. Yet somehow the idea of combining the two always filled me with intense cringe. And at the time both communities were mutually antagonistic to LARPers. RPG nerds thought LARPers were the crazies who give RPGs a bad name. And the historical dudes thought LARPers were just extra nerdy wishy-washy imitators. "They use foam swords, we hit people with sticks! They're so lame!" It's weird, but that's how it was.

I've tried LARPing 3 times in my life. They were all terrible, and I've decided that it's not for me.

He wait a minute, at 6:17 in the video, that image is of a larp I used to go to!!!! That's awesome!

PANR has tuned in.

the kid stuff is weird. In larps Ive been to, kids always had completely separate quests that had nothing to do with adults - they could not be fought with, robbed, killed etc, they had their own games and we had ours. There would be no plot skewing for a kids wishes because they had their own easy kid friendly stuff to do. Whenever fights broke out kids were forbidden from getting involved. The larp you describe sounds very badly run!

HEY! That’s me in the samurai armor! That’s down in Charlotteville virginia, Zorn Vongal. It’s more of a battle game than a full on Larp, but if you wanna check it out, i recommend it.

Now this is CritChap.

LARP seems so very different in (i assume) the US. In my 14 years of playing LARP I have never heard of things like mandatory NPC hours, putting ones hand on the head as a sign or such strict rules when a player can and cannot play his character. But then again i don't really go to events with heavy rules which are luckily very rare here anyway. Most common is the ruleset "You can do what you can portrait."

Never done a larp before and probably never will…but i would be interested in seeing a larp with Davy the Bard taking part. Just to see what all the fuss was about. Also any situation where davy sings and foes explode/fall asleep/fall in love, etc is a win for me ha ha :)

I could relate to this bad experience more than I would like to. I tried to join both LARP groups on my college campus when I attended and sadly I had bad experiences with both. Which is a shame since I wanted to like them, the combat oriented one in particular. I am not the best at explaining this but here is what I recall off the top of my head. The first I would mention is the World of Darkness group which I eventually found out had a bad reputation and it didn't take long to see why. There was a lot of in group politics that got toxic and though I can understand people being into roleplaying I thought they often took it too far. I was repeatedly told I was not roleplaying properly since my character was not different enough from my normal self and a couple times people jumped down my throat for what they perceived to be metagaming even if I felt there was a perfectly logical explanation in game for my actions (One example I attacked an invisible creature I could not see when I walked into a room and a group of players literally had it surrounded in a confined space and were attacking it and it gave audible shrieks which I felt was a perfectly reasonable indication oh look invisible creature let me help especially given how high my character's intelligence stat was). Not to mention a few players were playing with long time characters who outclassed my character so much I could not help but think why am I here? One example is a vet player, "My character enters his astral form and flies above the house and using my ability to see through solid objects I see the enemy and fire my gun which has enchanted ammo which phases through the walls and hits them!" Where me with my new character, "I walk up to the front door and open it." There were a few other things I could get into but still. There were a few other things but still. The other group seemed more promising since it was more combat oriented with foam weapons. To be fair it is worth mentioning that overall most of the people in the group were actually pretty cool. The ones who were not cool were a couple people who were officers and one in particular was sort of a jerk who made more than a few encounters so unbearable that it was just not worth dealing with them so I never came back. It was stuff like breaking unwritten rules that were never explained, not taking hits when I was struck (there were many cases where I was hit so lightly I didn't even know I was hit to begin with, combined with the fact that according to the rule book if we are hit too lightly it doesn't count because it was therefore not a solid hit), I have heard a few other people who went to the group when I said why I never went back they understood completely since they seen multiple people not come back because of that person and themselves admitted that they were sort of a tool. That guy who was the officer also continued to show up to the group after he was no longer a student and therefore could not be an officer but still caused a lot of drama. I genuinely wish these were not the experiences I had but that is not the case.

If I pay to play something and got told to basically just watch for 5 hours before I can play I'd start smacking people with real swords Also 16 year olds with THAT kind of a parent? Geez I feel bad for them

I guess you could say this is larp time coming

ive been looking for lapr stories, theres not much! i have a few experiences, one of them was at a local comic shop that we were able to play in hours after close where i broke character cause i wasn't having fun, bu tNO ONE wanted to sit with me and break game so it was a very dull evening for me sitting in a corner. yeah that was my fault, but no one would break character for a MINUTE and it pissed me off.

I think I jumped to a parallel universe...

I've never heard anything about larping in a positive sense but negativity sticks around the internet forever. I am interested to see what comes of these videos going forward

This just made me angry.

All the things I'm scared of encountering in a LARP scenario lol

I'd watch many series please yes

This doesn’t surprise me, two Larps in a town I used to live in got shut down for this kind of behavior. I have a larp horror story I might share and post to the world. It was after being apart of it for about a year a half, coming back 3 years later to find its only gotten worse.

6:18 meanwhile me, who at the age of 13 convinced my dad to travel 80-ish kilometers to a con for 4 days, ALONE! Best days of my life.

I've never done LARP before because I have no idea where any groups operate in my area.

I'm sorry to hear such horror story for a LARP, seeing smiling player is what pay back us for all the long preparation! Helping new player getting in LARP is really important to us that's why we land all the equipment to start for new player! We have a LARP set in the Elder Scrolls universe, plus a web series!

never really wanted to be in a larp, I break immersion to easily and constantly and its occasionally really hard for me unless I'm in the right mindset

ah! the elusive crit chappy

There really should be a Reddit for LARP Horror stories because they're a distinct flavor of awful from the usual RPG horror stories.

I would love more davvy larp content

After watching a few videos. Larping in US seems absolutely horrible! I mean the use of storytellers, judges, npc's and fake foreign language seems commonplace. Like wtf?!? Its almost like a bad tabletop rpg but dress up. Aren't there more RP heavy larps? Here in Europe and Scandinavia in particular most larps are more like improvised theater without an audience, if you know what I mean.

I would be very interested in LARP content! I have never partaken in one so I'm curious about it. Just pls don't make it another "hey I'm reading stuff I didn't write" kind of thing. I've always felt like it's such a low effort kind of content that just reaps off other people's effort. Thanks for the videos as always man. Have a good day :)

Oh lol, one of my NPCs is a Fighter named Olrig.. sounds just like Alric

Dagorhir is not entirely terrible. Good amount of rp, but beware the stick jocks. Worth a look at least.

I already know my first larp experience might suck but idc, gonna give it a few tries at least.

Is it possible to do a video about finding a larp and a beginner's guide?

This is a big oof my worse experience was pulling some muscles and rolling down a hill after. I doubt I would have shown back up if this happened to me.

shouldve called yourself davvy crabby, missed opportunity

As a pretty successful LARPwright in Australia, this is a sickening style of game running, that is, it's not running a game at all... Jeeeezzzeeee.

Just got back from the local chapter of my border larp, sat down, and here this was....

I went to a LARP where members would fly flags that represented modern politics, and banned anyone who said politics doesn't belong in LARP.

Other things to watch out for: Does the game have a game on where everyone goes into play all at once. OR do players go into play as soon as they clear logistics. If it is the second you need to be careful as veteran players may camp the logistic site to kill new players as they process and go into play.

first thing i would ask them is how do i get my money back cause this was absolutely the worst larp i have ever heard of and I have been to many LARP's

About the NPC time thing: we handle that differently in Germany. When you sign up for an event, you either sign up as an NPC or as a PC. If you sign up as an NPC, it is significantly cheaper. One of the advantages of that is that you can know things that players should not yet know and the game masters can use you as a much more free agent because you know their plans. Another huge advantage is that you get an "outside" perspective on how players act. You often can spot frequent NPCs because they aren't unfun in some specific ways when they are players. As for Game Masters: while it does happen that they play some important NPC, most of the time, they wear modern clothing because they are busy with organizing everything - including witnessing rituals, being rules judges, mediating in out-of-character conflicts and pushing the plot forward. Another advantage is that there things like orc groups that put a lot of money and effort into orc costumes, have a lot of experience roleplaying as orcs and still can be hired as pretty much cannon fodder. About out-of-character talk: I would say that it is not totally all right since it basically robs other players the option to stalk you or overhear you - and it is just a huge immersion breaker. It still happens and it isn't the end of the world, but I do think it should be discouraged - of course not with stocks or similar bulllshit but by talking to the player in question. That said, there are legitimate out-time conversations, like if you are not sure if another player is acting or actually hurt.

*carcinization* "Davvy Crabby"

MORE LARP CONTENT!!!!!!

I want to try larp, but it seems too nerdy for me. Should I try?

I wanna tell about my first group, I was around 12. Where should I do it cause OH BOY looking back at it they fucked everything up.

what does ues mean in this context? google only gives me the followings: A section of NYC, something regarding the sphincter and the University in El Salvador

Speaking as someone who, back in the Dim Times was in the Current Middle Ages (S.C.A.)... It is very, very easy for a LARP to descend into cliquishness. Who you know. Who your little crowd is rival to. What everyone else's reputation is (because YOUR reputation is the gold standard, of course). It's something that the organizers, even of small single-site single-group events, need to be extremely wary of, and need to come down like a ton of bricks upon when cliquishness rears its ugly head. Cliques can't grow, and that drags everybody down. The instant that favoritism is even suspected, the damage is extreme. People aren't stupid; if someone is the king's pet, everyone will know it, and everyone will be talking about it. The fastest thing in the universe is a photon in vacuum; the second fastest is gossip. Favoritism, bullying from a position of leadership/authority, and all-around bad attitudes needs to be beaten down hard and visibly. Nobody will believe a visible problem is corrected if the solution is invisible. And there will be no deterrent without that visibility. And in a sport with physical contact (ESPECIALLY where the contact is "hit that bastard!"), conveying rules, safety procedures and hands-on practice are paramount. That's a deeply-ingrained part of S.C.A. combat; our insurance policies require it. When you have events like Pennsic (look it up, that's your homework) with as many fighters as were present at Agincourt hitting each other with heavy sticks full-strength, you don't get to mess around. Sites will demand insurance; insurers will demand procedures and policies and proof. And as Davvy pointed out, you'll get reamed dry in civil AND criminal court if Little Underage Timmy loses a tooth. And event coordinators playing their own characters with advancement when they know the storyline, and not being clear about it? We have a word for that. Several actually. Let's start with "cheating", work our way up to "malfeasance" and rest our butts on "corruption". Sure, it's a petty thing, but it's also a personal thing. People like that are people you shouldn't leave your wallet or phone near, or recommend for work to your employer. They're bad people. If the account of what went on is at all accurate, that was a LARP group that def needed to vanish. (And yes, S.C.A. is a LARP. We just hit LOTS harder, party harder, make cooler stuff, and are kinda anal about the meta.)

Fucking FINALLY

It's good to see a new video from Davvy Crabby.

I always wanted to LARP after hearing the tale of house Cerberus

I know it was just a sidebar but I had a similar experience with rain and larping. I have theorised that God just fucking hates larpers and hurls fuck you rainstorms at any event he can find.

So, I've never done LARPing before, so excuse me if this is a stupid question. Is there a way you act out being a spellcaster in a LARP game, or is that just not a thing?

I've had bad experiences larping. There is no cure for larpies.

How in the hell are you guys finding LARPs? We had a club for it in college but since then the only thing I've found is Mythodea, a huge yearly thing in Germany. Where are all the US larps?