Experience is gained through setting and meeting goals. You
must speak with the storyteller, setting a goal to be met, and turn in one or
more Willpower. The storyteller will determine the difficulty of the goal as
Easy (able to be accomplished within a night), Medium (able to be accomplished
within a month or so), or Hard (more than a couple moths of play, if at all
possible). These difficulties are worth 3, 7, or 12 experience, respectively, multiplied by the amount of Willpower spent. If you wish, you can instead agree
on an appropriate reward when setting the goal rather than simply getting free
experience. Rewards may have a base value of 5, 10, or 15 experience. The
Storyteller will note the appropriate information and give you an item card
with a reference for the goal. When a player turns in that item card with and
can demonstrate that the goal has been met their character gets the experience
or reward associated with the goal.
There's a type of player in LARP who show up for months, if not years, never doing anything. Then, suddenly, these wallflowers turn out to have elder-style character sheets from the accumulated time during which they added nothing to the game. While I'm a fan of subtle play, I'm also a fan of players helping to drive storylines, because that's what absolutely makes a LARP. These types of players also have a tendency, when they do act, not to have suddenly developed their own initiative, but to have become the weapon of stronger players. This is, also, not innately a bad thing. The problem is that it makes these "weapons" undeservedly powerful. By creating a direct, mechanical reason for interaction this rule makes an effort to get the wallflowers off the wall and into a position where they help drive stories outside the storyteller's direct force, because that's the point at which LARPs truly come to life.
The next thing that this house rule was designed to do is provide a clear A to B causal connection between activities taken in the game and benefits reaped. If I can show up to X games and simply purchase my next dot of resources, why am I worried about taking in-game actions related to that? The goal here is for players to look for things that don't necessarily have mechanics tied to them normally and give them a benefit that will clearly drive them.
Third, under this system elders have a clear line to use junior characters. As an elder player small experience awards are trivial and will take forever to collect enough to move anything I care about on a character sheet. If, instead, I can gin up some low-value goals that will serve to move a higher-value goal of my own, then as an elder I become far more mechanically interested, and thus useful, in driving my own sub-plots.
Finally, all of this wraps up to serve as a sort of enforced role-play award. I've covered the clearest angles; a character/player that is establishing and pursuing their goals is engaged in play, acting towards their desired outcomes, and incentivized to engage others. It also creates an opportunity for players to reward one another. Either in situations where they have conflicting goals and the "better" player wins out, mechanically awarding them almost exactly the way a tabletop storyteller might for overcoming a challenge, but also because players who value role play can create easy goals that they can give to outstanding players as a reward for excellent scenes.
The next thing that this house rule was designed to do is provide a clear A to B causal connection between activities taken in the game and benefits reaped. If I can show up to X games and simply purchase my next dot of resources, why am I worried about taking in-game actions related to that? The goal here is for players to look for things that don't necessarily have mechanics tied to them normally and give them a benefit that will clearly drive them.
Third, under this system elders have a clear line to use junior characters. As an elder player small experience awards are trivial and will take forever to collect enough to move anything I care about on a character sheet. If, instead, I can gin up some low-value goals that will serve to move a higher-value goal of my own, then as an elder I become far more mechanically interested, and thus useful, in driving my own sub-plots.
Finally, all of this wraps up to serve as a sort of enforced role-play award. I've covered the clearest angles; a character/player that is establishing and pursuing their goals is engaged in play, acting towards their desired outcomes, and incentivized to engage others. It also creates an opportunity for players to reward one another. Either in situations where they have conflicting goals and the "better" player wins out, mechanically awarding them almost exactly the way a tabletop storyteller might for overcoming a challenge, but also because players who value role play can create easy goals that they can give to outstanding players as a reward for excellent scenes.
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