Any background plot is just an excuse and "flavor" for the battle taking place

Players are static, and plots are brought to them externally by organizers

Players are being led linearly through the encounters

Players are static, and several of them are being pulled through linear encounters

Players drive the story in a self-motivated way - they chose that faction, role-play and mindset

Players are given hints and elements by organizers which they play out to drive the story forward together

Players are given a relationship web to other characters that drives the plot forward

Players are told to do something at a certain time (at some trigger point)

Competition for the limited number of resources

All of these (and more) can be used to build larps - either by themselves, or in combination with other plot structures. If you've been following your local scene for a while, you'll probably notice trends - moving from one of these structures ("how things used to be done") to another ("what players want now").





Same thing about rule systems. They change over time, varying in complexity and design. In some places, you'll have fantasy rules spanning over 200 pages - in others, they will be covered by a single acronym - DKWDDK (Du Kannst Was Du Darstellen Kannst - a German acronym for "You can what you can show", a mechanic-less playstyle focused on providing a good show for others and quite popular in Germany and elsewhere). The larp scenes will also have "how things used to be done" and "what players want now" variants of that.





But these are all trends - in which, for the mainstream larp population, the past is viewed in a negative light, and the current trend as a positive. If there's a local larp scene that you're aware of while creating a new larp, you basically have three choices:





So yeah, you can do it - run or start a larp.

As one follows any larp community for a longer amount of time, they will certainly notice some trends appearing. Like in any other hobby, people in larp communities tend to do stuff a certain way. So if you're starting a new larp in an area where there are already several established larps, you basically have two choices: to go with the trends or to go against them.These trends can be many things. Perhaps it's the themes of the larps covered, perhaps it's the structure used, perhaps it's how plot is written, and perhaps it's what is expected in larps in general.There are a lot of larps out there in the world, and many of them are vastly different from one another. Even if you wanted to limit it down narrowly to the most popular genre - fantasy larps featuring live combat with foam swords - you would be surprised by how much variety is out there. Where do players begin? What are the plots about? How is the plot delivered to players? Just a few of the examples of this that I've personally seen are: