All larps have some kind of rule set – even the deliberate absence of rules is itself a creative choice.

In the early days of larp rule sets were extremely complex – combats had to stop to ‘battle board;’ to track hit points. These days the fashion seems to be leaning towards relatively much simpler systems.

One important design consideration is how do ‘soft skills’ (character skills) if you use them interface with ‘hard skills?’ (player skills). For example, suppose juggling was important in your larp. Options include:

• Pure soft skill; a player with the character skill merely declares they are juggling (the theatre-style approach) and other people react accordingly
• Pure hard skill; ‘if you can, then you can’ as the Danes put it. This is the approach taken by some major European larps such as System Denmarc.
• Some combination of soft & hard skills; for example, fighting with boffer swords is a hard skill, but allow soft skills to influence amounts of damage issued or taken. An important consideration is communicating this to players, and deciding what to do if they don’t act as you expect. For example, I once saw a larp player take out a set of lockpicks and pick a padlock on a chest for real. If you were an organiser and had intended that to require a soft skill to open, how would you react?

When designing or selecting a ruleset, there are few things I suggest considering:

• What are you trying to achieve? (in GNS terms, what is your creative agenda?) Many larps include verbose combat rules, which suggest the need to support fair competitive combat. Some larps include a detailed system for crafting and the different properties and value of items, to support trading / stealing play. Do you need to engage in world modelling to support Simulationist play, or is that level of consistency not important to you?
• Do your rules replace action you want to include? For example, Mind’s Eye Theatre includes a game mechanic for social interaction – actually using this as written may remove the sort of drama you were aiming to achieve. On the other hand, you may want to replace certain types of action on the grounds of safety (such as combat rules).
• What actions do you want soft skills to cover, if any? What are your reasons for this?
• If you give people weapons, they are more likely to use them. If you write in rules for something (e.g. combat, romance), that is not a neutral action and shapes player behaviour. If you include detailed blacksmithing rules, more players are likely to want to play blacksmiths.
• Uptime and downtime rules. If you are organising a campaign larp, you also need to consider rules for downtime. That might be simply free text submission and organiser fiat, or it might be a detailed world modelling system.
• A complex distinction exists between off-game rules and in-game (meta)physical laws. Suppose you have magical setting, but magic that brings back the dead is impossible (as in Ars Magica). Clearly then you should not have a rule in the rulebook for a spell that breaks this limit. However the difference is the metaphysical laws can be discovered, debated and discussed by the characters; off-game rules should not. However in some cases two may mirror each other exactly.
• Who needs to learn what rules? For example, in some older fantasy rule sets, all players needed to learn a huge list of spell effects in order to react correctly. One modern solution (used in the UK) has been a system with a small number of standardised effect calls (as used in Maelstrom). Another solution (used in Sweden) has been to have the magic user responsible for describing the effect.

One way to design a rule set is to start from the most basic, and build up. Consider for example:

‘If you can, then you can. If someone acts like they are doing something to you, react as if they are.’

What else do you need? That depends on what you want to achieve. It might also depend on your setting – if you want to run a superhero larp you may feel you need rules to define the character’s special powers.

Here is another example, taken from larp Serpent of Ash (available on the game bank):

‘Essentially, pain hurts and death kills. If you need to share off-game information, do it with statements that start with the word “Meta”. (For example: “Meta: I hit you”, after which the punch is performed through acting)’

The larp is mostly a discourse-based (or ‘emotion-orientated’ as I prefer to call it; through some characters have died in some runs of Serpent of Ash) so it does not need a detailed combat system. It has no defined way to resolve a ‘contest’ the way MET does; however given the nature of play this doesn’t normally pose a problem.

There is a drawback to these extremely minimalist rule sets, in that they can impose limits on what can be done. For example, health & safety limits become ‘hard limits’ since players have no way for the characters to do certain things without the players also doing them (e.g. jumping through a window). The ‘meta’ in Serpent of Ash clearly doesn’t offer a way to handle a massed gun battle.

My advice then when selects rules for your larp is:

Start with the most minimalist rule set
• Decide what you need a system for, and include it
• Look back and what you have put together is consistent, and the payoff justifies the extra complexity

There two last points to consider:

• For some players, high rules complexity may actually be seen as a good thing since they enjoy manipulating the complexity.
• Conventions rather than rules. For example, having a ‘not here’ hand gesture or the convention that a shoulder massage represents in-character intimacy. Decide what conventions you want to use, and bear in mind that some may creep across from other larps even if you don’t decide to use them.