Why Game Design Students Often Have A Hard Time With LARP.
Live action roleplay is a peculiar kind of design problem.
It is not just a ruleset, a story, or a stage. It is a temporary society that players co-create in real time using a meta-design and system design to assist with the physics and conflict applications of the world. That distinction explains why talented systems-first game designers (card games, video games, RPGs, minis) can propose clever mechanics that look elegant on paper, yet consistently fail to make the live experience better. In LARP, complexity tends to buy you detail at the cost of presence, and presence is the point of LARP.
There is a recurring mismatch when it comes to game designers, game systems, and larp systems. If you have built or run LARPs for any length of time, you have likely seen the pattern. A designer with formal game-design training reads a system and offers post-hoc tuning: add a resource loop, gate progression behind a skill tree, add damage variables, increase informational asymmetry, reprice abilities for “balance”. These are valid levers in many different styles of games. In video games and RPGs this can be an artform unto itself in many situations. However, in LARP these changes often underperform because the medium’s core value is not systemic mastery. It is shared immersion, social relatedness, and the feeling that your choices land in a living world. The more often players must pause to parse exceptions or consult textual machinery, the less they inhabit the fiction with one another.
A game is a bounded system of rules with clear goals, explicit constraints, and a definitive outcome that can be resolved as win, loss, or completion. LARP is something different. It is structured play: a shared frame of roles, safety tools, and light mechanics that guide improvisation without forcing it toward a single finish line. Participants pursue meaning, connection, and story rather than victory. Scenes resolve, arcs evolve, nights end, but there is no final state that declares the experience over and scored. The point is not to beat the system. The point is to inhabit a world together and see what happens. So game design and mechanics focused participants often clash with the core design intent behind LARP.
And I understand why this conflict happens. The meta-tools or rules for a LARP appear to be a system of mechanical design no different than a TTRPG, CCG, or board game. But the fact is that the application of mechanical design for LARP has a different success goal than the vast majority of other games due to its co-creation, co-definition, and experiential design intent. This actual drives home a point that as a focus, more mechanics literally means a worse experience for people who are going to a LARP to engage in live action role playing. This is the scope issue that many traditional “game designers” have as they attempt to make a game better with a more complex or defined rule set. They are attempting to design a mechanical system, not a system to provide framework for an experience. And because of this difference in design focus, the live action and role playing in LARP actually gets worse with more mechanical definition.
Why game gets worse with more mechanics, and three lenses that predict you are going the wrong way with design.
Cognitive load. Every new rule, edge case, or conditional ability draws attention away from the moment. Players juggle more items in working memory and spend more cycles auditing compliance. That cognitive overhead pushes against the very state LARP tries to cultivate: being present in character, with others, in a believable world. The more you have to think ABOUT THE GAME the less time you are actually IN THE GAME.
Psychological needs. Live play thrives when it satisfies three needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Heavy systems can restrict expressive action, make outcomes feel adjudicated by a spreadsheet instead of the scene, and fracture attention away from the people in front of you. When autonomy and relatedness dip, so does engagement. System design conflict resolution breaks experiences and pulls away from the world instead of adding anything positive to the experience.
Experience mix. The experiences people remember best lean toward esthetics, narrative, and escapism. LARP is built to maximize both. Rules accretion nudges the experience toward education and entertainment modes, which can be interesting but are less transporting in the moment.
In live, collaborative LARP, layering more or more complicated mechanics tends to raise mental workload and depress immersion and relatedness, which lowers overall experience quality, even when the new mechanics are coherent in theory. This is actually a concept that can be made metric, measurable, and provide a key performance indicator for your system or meta-design. To measure this concept I believe all you need two comparable slices of play and one page of questions.
For years the debate about system vs narrative in regards to design choice has been coached in the framework of preference and schools of game design theory. This normally ends up being a circular argument that nobody enjoys and both sides feel that they are right. So to attempt to put this argument to bed I have created a game theory that leans towards narrative over system in regards to quality LARP design, a repeatable experiment that can be ran to prove this theory, and an extrapolation regarding the anticipated test results.
The Narrativist Focus Design Theory - M. Pucci
“In live, co-created LARPs, added mechanical complexity predictably shifts attention from shared fiction to system management, increasing cognitive load and reducing immersion, autonomy, and relatedness of a LARP. This means that simpler, legible rules yield a measurably better player experience and that there is a measurable balance point to system and meta design that maximizes engagement and minimizes complexity.”
The Narrativist Focus Design Theory Test
Two comparable modules or the same scenario in two versions:
Version A: clear fiction, generous player autonomy, minimal rules surface area.
Version B: same fiction, with the added or more complex mechanics you are considering.
Printed one-page survey (double-sided is fine), pens.
Clipboards or a table.
A timer and someone assigned as the survey lead.
Design basics
Players: aim for at least 12 total. If you have many, split evenly.
Order: counterbalance if you can. Half of players do A first, half do B first. If that is not possible, run A on Night 1 and B on Night 2 and note the order.
Time on task: keep playtime similar for A and B.
Run steps
Brief - Tell players this is a design test. Their job is to play normally and complete a 3-minute survey after each version.
Run Version A - Deliver the lighter rules game scenario version of a LARP experience as planned.
Immediate survey for A - Hand out the one-pager at module end. Collect all before any debrief or chatter.
Short reset - Quick break. Swap roles or locations if needed to keep conditions comparable.
Run Version B - Deliver the mechanics heavier version of the LARP with the same fiction beats.
Immediate survey for B - Hand out the same one-pager. Collect all.
Optional player quotes - Ask 3 to 5 players for one sentence on each version. Write verbatim. Do not prime the question other than to ask for one sentence otherwise you may prime the person giving you the answer to give the answer that you anticipate or would like for the question.
The one-page survey (ready to print)
Use a 1 to 7 scale for all items: 1 = Strongly disagree, 4 = Neutral, 7 = Strongly agree.
Header: Circle which version you just played: A or B
Immersion (3 items)
1. I felt absorbed in the scene.
2. I lost awareness of out-of-game concerns.
3. I felt “there” in the world.
Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness (9 items)
4. I could act freely as my character.
5. I could pursue my own ideas.
6. I did not feel constrained by the system.
7. My actions felt effective.
8. I knew what I could do and how to do it.
9. My choices had clear impact.
10. I felt connected to others during play.
11. I felt “in it together” with other players.
12. Interactions felt natural and face-to-face.
Workload (6 items)
13. I had to think hard to manage rules and exceptions.
14. I felt rushed for time because of system steps.
15. The system demanded a lot of effort from me.
16. I needed to track many details at once.
17. I had to consult or remember special cases.
18. Adjudication pulled me out of the scene.
Experience mix (8 items)
19. I felt transported away from daily life.
20. I was doing things directly in the fiction.
21. The world around me felt convincing.
22. Sensory and scene details supported the world.
23. I learned how the system works.
24. I thought about rules and numbers while playing.
25. I was entertained by clever mechanics.
26. I watched interesting things rather than doing them.
Open box (optional)
27. One moment that felt great.
28. One moment that broke the flow.
Keep the page plain. Same wording for LARP A and LARP B.
How to score in 10 minutes
Create four composite scores per player:
Immersion = mean of items 1 to 3.
Needs = mean of items 4 to 12. You can also look at the three-item subscales if you want: Autonomy 4 to 6, Competence 7 to 9, Relatedness 10 to 12.
Workload = mean of items 13 to 18.
Experience mix
Escapism = mean of 19 to 20
Esthetics = mean of 21 to 22
Education/Rules focus = mean of 23 to 24
Entertainment/Observation = mean of 25 to 26
Compute group means for each composite for A and for B.
Look at the deltas (A minus B). The hypothesis is supported if:
Immersion higher for A
Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness higher for A
Workload lower for A
Escapism and Esthetics higher for A
Education/Rules and Entertainment/Observation not higher for A
Pull two quotes that illustrate the numbers. One from A about flow or connection. One from B about “interesting mechanics” or “having to think about rules.”
What counts as a clear result
If A beats B by about 0.5 points or more on a 1 to 7 scale for Immersion and Needs, and B is 0.5 or more higher on Workload, that is a practical difference players will feel. Larger is even better.
If results are mixed, check order effects. If everyone did A first, try counterbalancing next time.
Pitfalls to avoid
Do not change both fiction and mechanics at once. Hold the fiction constant.
Do not let the survey drift into a debrief conversation. Collect first. Talk after.
Do not exceed one page. Short surveys get better data.
If my stated hypothesis is correct, Version A scores higher on immersion, autonomy, and relatedness, and lower on workload. Players report the fiction felt closer and the people more central. Version B may earn comments about “interesting mechanics” or “clever design,” yet still trail on lived quality.
What this means for design choices
Friction is not depth. In tabletop or digital contexts, additional mechanics can yield new strategic spaces that players can explore at leisure. In LARP, additional mechanics often manifest as extra moments of arbitration. Those moments interrupt scenes at the exact point where flow and emotion should crest.
Balance is a tool, not a goal. Pursue enough systemic balance to prevent frustration spirals or spotlight theft, then stop. Beyond sufficiency, each additional decimal point of balance usually costs you a degree of immediacy.
Expressivity beats intricacy. A small set of stable, legible rules that afford expressive action gives players the confidence to improvise, take risks, and focus on one another. The world feels larger because the people in it feel freer.
Design for attention, not just outcomes. Ask where players’ eyes and minds will be during a scene. If your mechanic pulls them into text parsing or private optimization, it is stealing attention from the social fabric that makes LARP matter.
