About the super popular MMORPG
Final Fantasy 14 has a new version
And we play running groups in this game
this matter
in FF14
You can’t even play FF14 (not)
Glimpse
Tanatosha: You betrayed the Holy See! Bring back my mother’s weapon!
? ? ? : This is not the place you should enter, I will send you away now…
Laurence: I just want to ask you one question for my teacher – why is Rose here? !
– “Blood Night”, Scene 3
Mercenary Commander Ciel: Why don’t you tell Fenrir?
Cindy: …hold on, they seem to be saying something important.
——The first scene of “Fairytale Ball”
Princess Meng Qi: I sincerely thank you, Your Highness, for your care and love over the years… I hope you will remember that I was your fiancee in the future.
Prince Chen Ze: What do you mean?
– “Singularity Banquet” Scene 2
Vanessa Van Helsing: Welcome to my lab, is it convenient for me to get a blood test?
——Reproduction group of “The Mandala House”
The above are just some of the fragments of the game venue that we built in the game “Final Fantasy 14” and operated our own game characters to play the LARP game. In FF14, you can not only farm monsters and fight dungeons, but even in addition to playing cards, fishing and racing birds, you can also run groups in an immersive way!
the whole story
I’ve always wanted to talk about our troops running the LARP group in the online game FF14, but I always felt that there were too many threads and I didn’t know where to start. In the end, I had to bite the bullet and write, hoping to make it clear what was interesting.
At the beginning of the story, it originated from a group of runners who owned the largest army room in the Shadu residential area of FF14, but they have not been renovated…
(The picture is our army room)
FF14, which is
Final Fantasy XIV
. Presumably many people have heard of this game even if they have never played it. It is an MMORPG game that is highly discussed now. Our game troop was gradually formed by a group of runners. The troop leader is a rich man in the game, and the troop has the largest house in the Uldaha residential area. As for the captain, he has been working in a RP shop (role-playing shop, which can be understood as a maid coffee shop and the like). The shop often changes the decoration according to the theme of the event, so he often tells us about the interesting aspects of house decoration in FF14. place. However, after a group of runners chatted and chatted, the final topic became, “We might as well start a new group if we have that skill?”
So, our troop room has been empty, nothing.
What about these guys in our army, in addition to traditional TRPG, they also like to play LARP.
Briefly introduce the LARP group, which is actually the predecessor of “Script Killing”. LARP is the abbreviation of Live Action Role Playing (reality role-playing game). Usually the number of participants in a game is 6-10. Players get their own character cards before the game starts, communicate with other players through role-playing in the game, explore suspicious places in the scene to find clues, and finally achieve their game goals. The game process is very similar to the ordinary running group, except that “real interaction” is added to it. LARP groups are more like a game category than a specific game rule.
I don’t know if it’s explained clearly, in short, the LARP troupe is probably “a game where a group of people in strange costumes improvise in a set scene.”
The way that LARP group fans in the army gather together has always been that the players in the group make an appointment to rent a residential house. But this is obviously limited by physical distance, basically only players in the same city can play together. The entire army has people from all over the world, and everyone has always wanted to run the LARP regiment together.
The turning point of the story is the sudden arrival of the new crown epidemic at the end of 2019! Because of the need to cooperate with epidemic prevention, everyone is self-isolating at home, and it is impossible for many people to gather…
I don’t remember who originally suggested it, but someone suggested: “If you can’t meet offline, why not try to run a LARP group online? Wasn’t our army room always empty in FF14?”
At first, most people thought it was not feasible. After all, many live-action interactions were too difficult to implement on the Internet – such as “finding items”, “restricting access to rooms”, “eavesdropping” and so on.
But in the situation where the epidemic kept repeating, everyone finally decided to try it first.
This experiment allowed us to discover a new continent!
first test
The first LARP tour we tried was the script I created – “Blood Night”.
This script was inspired by the game “Curse of Blood”. In addition to the “church” scene, the venue also needed a three-dimensional forest maze for players to chase and confront. Like “Script Killing”, LARP’s script is one-off, and the information must be kept secret from the player before the game starts. Therefore, the burden of decoration is on me alone, and no one else can help.
But since we are planning to start a group, no matter how difficult it is!
In the week after that, I suddenly learned a lot of FF14 house decoration skills. Although the residential system sounds like a bonus function, there are actually many doorways in FF14 – “furniture suspension”, “imitation window adsorption”, “item sinking” and so on! Even now, I’m not very familiar with many techniques. In addition to decoration skills, the upper limit of furniture space also made me in a hurry when I tried it for the first time.
After tossing around for a whole week, I actually managed to tidy up the venue! It’s just that there are some corners and corners of the venue that are a bit ugly. When the group started, I brushed the dim sum eyes and adjusted the lights in the venue to the darkest… (The screenshots of the opening paragraph should also show that the venue of “Blood Night” is very dark, cough.)
(The church in the original “Blood Night” venue just barely looks like a church)
Click here
You can view the redecoration video of the later re-engraving of “Blood Night”. The church inside is very different from the previous one!
What we didn’t expect was that although there were some small flaws in this test, everyone’s experience was very good! And because there are the first batch of players who have played the script, more people help discuss how to improve the game experience. During the discussion, everyone shared with me that many game features that I didn’t know before can be used in the game! FF14 is a game that always surprises people!
After solving the problems of “how to place clues”, “locking the door and knocking on the door in the game”, the second game of “Blood Night” group players’ game feeling has been greatly improved! By the third “Blood Night” group, we are already fully familiar with how to organize a LARP in FF14! Even a little thought was used to make the game process feel a little scary!
The unanimous praise after the player’s experience has given us a lot of confidence!
Activity
After going through several games, we have figured out the experience of engaging in LARP groups in FF14.
As an experience sharing, let me talk about the whole process of holding the “Fairy Tale Ball” LARP group in FF14~!
The script of the LARP group “Fairytale Ball” comes from “Sleeping Coffin”, an old GM with LARP experience (she is a super cute Lara Phil in FF14!). This script has already opened several live groups before the group started in FF14, but due to physical distance, many Internet friends have not played it. “Fairy Tale Ball” has many on-site evidence searches, and even body searches. I always thought that it might not be suitable for starting a group online. But this time, because a few friends ran through the group, we got together to brainstorm. With the wisdom of the masses, we used the “signature” feature on the items produced by the craftsman profession in FF14, so that players can open the character panel to observe the character equipment and find equipment items with “special signature” – so as to achieve “special signature” body search” effect.
The “Fairy Tale Ball” group requires a dance hall, a king’s room with a secret room and a garden, etc. These scenes can only be described by the GM and imagined by the players. We have used FF14’s house decoration to restore them! (Unfortunately, we didn’t record the decoration at that time, which is a pity)
(Banquet hall with stage)
(There is even a palace garden with a waterfall in the corner)
(Secret room hidden in the ceiling mezzanine in the corner of the king’s room)
After finishing the scene, we discussed with the script writer “Sleeping Coffin” and made simple modifications to the inconvenient content in the online game. After that, through our game group, the background story of the game and optional characters are announced to players.
The core event of the “Fairy Tale Ball” group is that the Ice King held a grand ball in order to find a “man of destiny” for his prince who could unravel his curse. The fairy tale characters, for various reasons, decide to participate in the dance to achieve their goals. There are 10 roles that players can choose: Ice King (male/female optional); Cursed Prince (male); Minister of Ice and Snow (male/female optional); Little Red Riding Hood (male/female optional); Deputy Head of Little Red Riding Hood (male/female optional); Flower Princess (female); Swan Prince/Princess (male/female optional); civilian youth/girl (male/female optional); puppet artist (male/female optional) optional); Fairy Mage (Male/Female optional).
In the original script, the genders of the characters were basically specified. However, when LARP is held in FF14, it often happens that there are too many male or female players signing up for the same game. After communicating with the writer of the script, we all felt that the great love of human beings should not be limited by gender! Isn’t it the love Shura field? Marriage in FF14 does not restrict race and gender, why should we stick to it? Therefore, except for the two characters whose gender will affect the basic logic of the story, there is no restriction, and other characters have unlocked the gender restriction, which is gratifying!
Players who sign up to join the group must first choose the role they intend to play. After the character is selected, the GM will issue the character card to the corresponding player. After that, players need to dress up their characters according to the character card and submit a “fixed makeup photo”. During live LARP group games, players will identify characters by the name tags worn by others, but in FF14 it is unrealistic to require players to change their character IDs every game. Therefore, we use the methods of “hiding character ID” and “publishing makeup photos before the game” to allow players to identify characters by their appearance.
The following is the corresponding map of the characters of our 3 “Fairy Tale Balls” group, the key is to be able to see the face and clothes——
(The person who designs the character map is only at the primary level, please forgive me!)
When all the preparations are in place, the main event begins! At the appointed time, the GM and the players will open FF14 and the voice software and gather at the venue! Then, the game begins!
The duration of a LARP mission is about 3 to 6 hours, so we usually make appointments on weekend afternoons. Some of our players who actively participate in the group are jet-lag parties abroad, and they need to get up in the early morning to match the domestic time every time! Really hard work!
After the game starts, it is the busiest. Players should concentrate on playing roles while exploring the venue, while GMs move guerrillas, help open and close doors, and provide information to players who find clues. One of the interesting points of this “Fairy Ball” is that the puppet artist will perform a “puppet show” on the stage of the ball hall at the beginning of the game. The puppet masters of the 3 games have carefully prepared their fairy tale puppet shows. Among them, the puppet masters of the 2 groups just chose the story of the ice king because of the play they performed, and they were named and targeted by the king at the beginning! (How miserable!)
Compared with the “script kill”, the LARP group will have more complicated game goals, not only to find the murderer and restore the truth of the incident. The characters in the LARP group have more goals and more choices. For example, the goal of the ice king in the game is to find a cure for his son’s disease, and some characters in the game hold the key to it. Whether the king can achieve his goal will depend on his investigation and performance.
The final story endings of these 3 games are different. The players of the 1st group got a slightly regrettable but perfect ending under the full communication and investigation; In the end, the kind princess chose death, but the wicked returned with the fruits of victory; the players of the 3 regiment originally solved the complex emotional entanglement between the characters, but made the wrong choice before the end, and finally in the huge Sacrifice ushered in the end of the story. The poignant ending of the 3 regiments made the emotional players very uncomfortable, and the aftertaste of the game lasted for many days and could not be dissipated.
Although it’s just a game, the immersive scenes, the delicate makeup of the characters, and the emotional performance of the players make this a real dream.
(A group photo of players and GMs after the game is over)
The “Fairy Tale Ball” LARP group ended successfully after holding it for 3 times!
Epilogue
So far, we have held a total of 5 LARP groups with different scripts, namely “Blood Night”, “Fairy Tale Ball”, “Hana Banquet”, “Mandala Manor” and “Singularity Banquet”. This year, we also have plans to open at least 2 new scripts and some re-enactments of scripts.
By holding LARP activities in FF14, we are also fortunate to meet more friends who run together! In this process, we can get more affirmation from people, which makes us very happy.
However, this journey has not been all happy. For example, we haven’t found a particularly suitable voice software so far, and we are very distressed – we are looking forward to a stable line, a room divider can be established at will, a voice software that can record the whole process and is friendly to jet lag players… It’s because we asked too much. much?
In the past, when we ran the live group LARP, there were always small partners who sighed – “I wish I could be a multi-millionaire, so I don’t have to worry about finding a venue for the running group, alas!”
When we moved to FF14, we suddenly discovered – “We seem to be really multi-millionaires in the game, and it’s great to be able to restore the venue according to the script!”
Because the LARP regiment was held in FF14, the originally empty army room has now undergone many large-scale renovations, which can be said to be quite extravagant!
Although our running team is growing, no one has the idea of holding an event in public. Mainly because we don’t want to spoil the joy of private gatherings between friends, and the core staff are basically social animals, and they are really busy and have no time to manage this helpless reality.
However, if you are also a runner who is playing FF14, maybe one day a friend will suddenly ask you – “Are you interested in running a LARP group in FF14?”
Author: Yi Ran
Typesetting: Dabai
This article is reproduced from: https://www.yystv.cn/p/9898
This site is for inclusion only, and the copyright belongs to the original author.