Stop Treating Your LARP Mechanics Like CCG Rules.
LARP Is Not a Competitive Game, Even When Your Characters Compete
LARP is not Magic: The Gathering or chess. Its not a board game, a CCG, or a tournament-ready miniatures war game. There’s no codified win condition. No best-of-three match bracket. In the vast majority of scenarios, a LARP does not end when a single character reaches a point of power, a victory condition, or a position of authority. Because of this LARP does not require an airtight system that must account for every fringe case and rules exploit to preserve fairness. What LARP offers isn’t a balance of power across symmetrical matchups; it’s a curated, participatory experience. Mechanics serve to simulate moments, support immersion, and reinforce the narrative tone of the world. The rules are a tool, not the point.
In tournament-based games, the goal is precision. Every word in a card’s text is scrutinized. Every corner case must be considered, because players will press the system to its edges in pursuit of a win. Magic: The Gathering’s comprehensive rules are 292 pages long (as of June 2024), not because the game is broken, but because the format demands it. The expectation is that competitive players will seek optimal outcomes by any technically legal means available. That's the culture those rules are written for.
But that’s not LARP. LARP is built on improvisation and shared experience. Its systems are inherently porous, variable, and site-specific. Players have different gear, different environments, different levels of familiarity. There is no universal table or judge’s booth to appeal to. That doesn’t mean rules don’t matter. It means they are not the sole backbone of the experience. When something goes wrong in a LARP, the solution isn’t always to reach for a new rule. Sometimes the solution starts with the question: what kind of culture are we encouraging at our event?
The System Might Not Be Broken – Your Culture Might Be
When players start exploiting mechanics to edge out advantages in a game that doesn't offer any actual win condition, it's a red flag—not for the rules, but for the play culture. Systems get pushed to their limit when people treat LARP like a problem to solve instead of an experience to explore. When participants are more invested in what their character can do rather than why they’re doing it, something is off. And the knee-jerk reaction is often to patch the rules.
A player throws a stack of conditional effects together to become untouchable in combat, and suddenly there’s a new rule banning stacking. Another player abuses downtime submissions to powergame resource control, so a form gets changed. Then a third group exploits the economy by combining their actions across a loophole, and a pricing table gets rewritten. Again and again, the solution becomes more rules, more patches, more restriction. And every time, the game moves further from its original intent—not because the system was flawed, but because the culture prioritized technical leverage over communal storytelling.
Addressing this doesn't mean letting players run wild or ignoring system drift. It means being honest about what kind of play you want to support. Are you running a LARP that prioritizes clever mechanical manipulation, or are you running a LARP that values narrative immersion, tension, and emotional stakes? If you want the latter, then the fix might not be in the next rulebook update—it might be in the onboarding, the tone of leadership, the kinds of scenes you reward, and the way you frame success.
Encouraging the Right Kind of Play
You can’t patch culture with a clause. If players feel like the system is a puzzle to be cracked, they will keep looking for cracks. If they feel like they are collaborators in something larger than themselves, they’ll start behaving accordingly. That starts with how your game talks about itself. It’s in the expectations you set before the event, in the values your staff models, and in the way resolution is handled when tension flares.
Encourage players to treat the rules as the framework, not the prize. Give permission to step back from mechanical advantage in favor of better story beats. Make space for failure that is meaningful. Celebrate scenes that land emotionally, not just tactically. And be willing to say, out loud, that LARP isn’t about winning, it’s about playing in a way that creates something worth remembering.
No system is perfect. That’s fine. Every game will require adjustment, and some updates are essential. But if your changelog is full of responses to behavior that chips away at your intended experience, stop and ask: what kind of play are we encouraging, and why do we think it needs fixing? Because if the system works 99 out of 100 times, then maybe the issue is that you have built a culture where people are looking for that 1 out of a 100 for their fun.
