PLAY PHILOSOPHY

Simply put, play to lose is when you as a player create better drama by not trying to win, but instead, by letting your character lose.

We ask our players not to treat the larp as a contest to be won or a game to be maxed out.

Instead, we ask you to play together in a collaborative playstyle, and to create interesting conflicts and personal drama by intentionally letting your character fail. Accidentally post your character's secret conspiracy notes in a group conversation, get drunk and insult someone your character is trying really hard to get in favour of, accidentally make a sound when you're hiding from others, etc.

For iHunt, we are also taking the victim rule into account.

This means that when anything happens to a character, like e.g. getting infected by a monster bite, drinking an unknown (definitely not poison!) concoction, etc., the victim decides on the consequences.

When you are the victim, you decide on the severity of what just happened to your character, and you play out the effects accordingly.

However, there is one exception to that rule at our LARP:

If an organizer in a blackbox scene tells you that something specific happens to your character – even if it's their death – this applies. So be mindful of your preparations before entering a hunt!

The stories we wish to tell are driven by narrative first, by logic second. This order is very important to us as we prefer a story to be beautifully told rather than for it to make 100% sense. That's why we would like our participants to let their in-game decisions be driven by the questions "What creates the most play?" and "What would be more dramatic?" if they are in doubt.

Don't be afraid of overdoing it - experience shows that we more often hold cool ideas back rather than overdoing a scene.

Just go for it and in return, don't judge other people's emotional scenes. We are all here to pretend, no such thing as pretending too much.

We aim to provide you with a basic setting, world, and mood that you can then use to plant your own ideas and stories into if you want to. This means that we won't be releasing a gapless world-building in which the workings and structures of this world are 100% set and explained - we would much rather leave room here and there for you to fill. That means that we expect all participants to accept each other's ideas and conform with a certain amount of "bullshitting" when gaps are being filled. Get used to saying "Yes, and" and weaving your own thoughts into an idea that someone else presents you with during the game.

The stage of this LARP is a shared one and as that needs a certain empathetic recognition of where your own bit of stage ends and that of another begins. We want our players to play each other up, highlight each others' characters' strong suits and thus be able to trust in each other to respect everyone's bit of stage. That way, we can tell the story together, rather than have it be a one-hunter-show.