LARP Design theory: Part 1: Skills
By Nathan Hook

This series look at various different aspects of LARP design and theory.  This first one looks at something common to most LARPs – character skills, and different ways to handle them.

There are two core different ways to handle character skills in LARP events, soft and hard.

‘Soft skills’ are skills which the character can have without the player doing so.  For example the ability to create fireballs is normally a soft skill.

‘Hard skills’ are skills which the player needs to have to use. For example, walking and/or talking are normally hard skills.

What is a soft skill and what is a hard skill varies greatly between LARPs.  It can be argued that making as much use as possible of hard skills makes the LARP more immersive and ‘real.’  Use of soft skills is more associated with tabletop role-playing, or less kindly has been described as ‘hiding behind your character sheets.’

However a counterview to this is that excessive use of hard skills restricts what a person may play.  Should a person who is not very stealthy in real life be allowed to play a stealthy character? If you believe they should, then you need some game mechanic to represent stealth.

There are also combinations of these two approaches include:

‘Soft skills that permit the use of hard skills’ - where the player is required to spent character points to buy as a soft skill as well.  For example, a player may need to buy the literacy skill for their character to be able to read, but the player will still then be able (and allowed) to read for real.

‘Hard skills that affect the performance of soft skills’ – where how the player does something affects the results, even through it’s a character skill. For example, many big LARPs have a ritual system where players can buy a ritual magic skill for their character, but the outcome is also affected by how well they act out the ritual for real.

‘Soft skills that affect the performance of hard skills’ – use of foam weapons is considered a hard skill.  However some systems have soft skills that increase the damage caused by each blow, or allow blows to be negated by dodges.

I shall now give some examples to consider that should help to get you thinking about these issues. I pose them as open questions - there are no right or wrong answers - and how you answer will depend on the style of your LARP.

-         Juggling.  This is always a hard skill (as far as I know), because it’s considered so obscure and ‘harmless’ to make having a soft skill for it pointless. Also, having someone with only a soft skill declare ‘I’m juggling these balls’ may damage the suspension of disbelief.  However if a character is called upon to entertain a high status person, such a skill may suddenly become really useful.  Is this fair?

-         Lock-picking.  In many LARPs this is a soft skill.  However, I have seen a player take out real lock picks and pick a lock for real during an event.  If you were running an event how would you respond to this?  Wold you tell the player they can’t do that, or applaud their skill?  The same might equally apply to players breaking a code or solving a puzzle for real.

-         Romance.  I was once at a LARP where characters pulled a random coloured bead from a bag to determine how well they ‘perform’ with a forest nymph they met.  While not actually a game skill this is another form of ‘soft resolution.’  It’s worth bearing in mind that soft skills can be used for actions too dangerous or ‘in bad taste’ to carry out for real.  I also heard about a freeform LARP that used the game pat-a-cake to represent sexual contact, which is an example of one hard skill be using to represent another.

-         Well digging.  I heard about a LARP where some player characters tried to dig a well and the hard skills players decided to try to do this for real.  They got into a mess because none of them actual knew how to dig a well for real.  This example points out one of the problems of an excessive hard skill approach: it restricts the range of characters someone can play.  Of course no LARP actually has ‘well digging’ as a defined soft skill.  However some LARPs have very broad soft skills. A character with ‘ranger skills’ could probably claim they knew how to perform them, for example.  How narrow or broad skills are is something to consider carefully when designing your system.

Different LARP traditions have taken different approaches.  In the Nordic countries, almost everything is a hard skill (ex. if you want to be a blacksmith, you actually have to know the basics of blacksmithing). This works because LARPs over there are about playing normal characters, not one with exceptional skills or supernatural powers.  Some players like the idea of training themselves to learn useful in game skills. Other LARPers object to such because they think that is going too far or don’t have the time or interest.

In the UK most LARPs have combat-related soft skills and soft skills for things perceived to be ‘useful’ that affect game balance.  Skills without perceived use are often left as hard skills.  A few have argued the reverse would be better to make players act out those things that are the focus on the game.

In the US, soft skills are more main-stream.  This often leads to very large rulebooks but does allow more ‘heroic’ styles of game with larger than life characters. NERO’s^® slogan ‘be all you can’t be’ sums this approach up.

If you ever design (or review) a LARP system, how it has addressed the question of hard and soft skills is something to consider carefully, and inform the players of, so they can act appropriately.  To sum up, here are some points you should bear in mind:

-         Is your system for mostly soft skills (like White Wolf’s MET system) or hard skills?  Do you need soft skills at all?

-         Should your soft skills cover the actions the game is about, or actions that occur in the background? What about skills that are only used in downtime?

-         Are your soft skills broad enough? Do they overlap (which may not be a bad thing)

-         If a player actually just starts doing things for real (picking locks, breaking codes) because they can really do them, how will you react as game organizer?

The next article in this series will look at another common element of many LARPs – combat, armour and injury mechanics, and the possible different approaches.