baudot

My old friend Jon asked me to join him at a LARP to be one of his minions. (LARP: Live Action Roleplaying game. Like Dungeons and Dragons, except the players actually dress up in costume and walk around in character. It's about the dorkiest thing you can do with a handful of dice and 40 people of limited social cognizance.) I agreed. This ate my weekend. It also illustrated the principle of power, the one that goes: "Half the people in the world are dumber than average."

We - a party of four - arrived in costume. This consisted of masqes and our quick impression of venetian carnival attire gone goth, eyeshadow and grey lipstick. In character, our crew represented those remnants of the Medici family who had found various forms of undeath, and we did quite the job of looking the part, by which I mean "damn creepy."

By the end of the session, we'd seized more power than any other group and were set up to grab more when the game restarts next season.

Here's the twisted thing: The way the game works, each person plays a character, and one character can be vastly more or less powerful than another. It's not remotely balanced. You start off entirely wimpy and grow stronger over time. All of our characters save one were brand new, and thus, wimpy as could be. There were half a dozen individual players who could have rubbed out our entire group without breaking a sweat. Instead, we ended up with one of them in our debt, and another begging boons from us. By the end of the game, we had seized more goals than anyone else with the weakest group of characters.

How? Unity, politeness, and gnosis.

It was fun being evil for a weekend.