No Running by the Pool

 

Yesterday I finished the last assignment for my summer class and announced the theatre season that I've spent the last four months working on, so I've decided that this weekend I'm taking a goddamn vacation and getting some me time. I got up at 9 AM to throw a new recipe in the slow cooker, and while I was hanging around between steps of cooking I decided to read another RPG for review, and I'd made a promise that my next post would be about Prawn, a LARP set in a fishtank and played in a pool. So this morning I made my way through the forty-odd page PDF for this system.

What a weird fucking game. 

Okay, I should add some context: I have zero experience with LARPs (never read or played one), so a lot of my comments and things I find surprising in here are probably just part of the genre in general. LARP fans, don't @ me, I'm sure you guys have lots of fun.

The premise is basically this: the player characters are various (edible) aquatic creatures living in the fish-tank at a seafood restaurant, with the tank being represented in the LARP by an actual swimming pool. The rules do state you can play Prawn on land, but I think the idea of doing so is one of the saddest things I've ever heard, so I'm going to politely ask that you don't. The game seems to be built for around 16 players (that's the number of pregenerated characters provided in the book, each of whom has a role in one of several plot-lines), plus a group of three or four people to play NPCs, plus three different game masters-- excuse me, Tank Masters: one to run things in the pool, one to run things with the NPCs, and one to facilitate communication between the other two. 

Off the bat, I have a minor gripe: not only does this game require a lot of people to play, but a non-negligible fraction of those people don't actually get to play. I've GMed RPGs, I get the appeal of that part, so I'm mostly referring to the poor bastards that get to play one NPC for thirty seconds every half-hour. And with the exception of one NPC player who is established as a plant among the players (more on that later) you don't even get to hang out in the pool! 

The game also calls for a bunch of props (fake food to represent Hit Points, a treasure chest at the bottom of the pool, shit like that) but the only one I really want to touch on is The Hands: a pair of hands attached to seven-foot poles (the book also clarifies that if you can't be bothered to make fake hands you can just use the seven-foot poles unadorned). These are used for parts of the game where NPCs are pulling fish out of the pool to be cooked and eaten, which introduces a cool little element of gameplay to those parts (you're only caught if the pole touches you, and the NPCs can't get in the pool, so you can try to evade the Hands). NPCs also come to the poolside at times for non-Hand reasons, mostly to distribute food to the fish (a phase where rubber hamburgers and what-all are cast into the pool and each player has to grab as much as they can) but the book makes clear that you should bring out The Hands even when it's feeding time and bring out the food even when it's time for somebody to get grabbed so that the players never know if they should be approaching or avoiding the poolside. I actually think that's a cool little bit of design: it's a good way to prevent metagaming and keeps people paying attention. 

A session of Prawn consists of our aquatic heroes swimming around the tank, pursuing their different plot lines, as the NPCs perform events at pre-determined times in the game. The fish can do combat with each other using a weirdly complex system that requires both players to hold out a number of fingers (which can't be more than their current hit point total) and calculate the damage (either zero, one, or two damage) to the defender based on the difference between the numbers they held up. Listen, I don't play LARPs, and I understand that you can't really bring a handful of D6s into the pool with you, but come on, nobody's going to remember the damage progression table when they're in the middle of their climactic battle with Sammy the Clam or whatever.

After the rules and the summary of NPCs, the rest of the book (as in, the back 75% or so) is devoted to character creation and pregenerated characters. I will say, I appreciate that this game allows you to create your own characters, which you'd think would be a given but isn't (looking at you, Lego Ninjago TTRPG). The characters get to pick from a list of different features and powers from their characters. The book calls these "Fish Schticks," which I enjoy immensely. Listen, I may be a cynical cow, but I'm not made of stone.

The pregenerated characters are... fine. They've got their schticks, they've got their backstories, it's fine. Each one is involved in one of several plotlines, most of which are boring, but I would like to touch on the fact that one of them is about two rival gangs called the Sharks and the Jets who are going to have a rumble, and also one of the Sharks is in love with one of the Jets. Just in case we were at risk of missing this subtle homage, the author dubs this storyline "West Tank Story." The only other interesting thing in the character section is poor Mr. Pinchly, the above-mentioned NPC plant among the players. Mr. Pinchly is here only to, and I do quote, "show the futility of life in The Tank" by getting grabbed out of the tank and devoured by restaurant patrons as part of a pre-scripted event. The player representing Mr. Pinchly is encouraged to "make lots of friends" in their short time on this earth and "cause pathos when [they] die," which I think is legitimately hilarious in a game of make-believe played in a swimming pool.

Honestly, that's about all there is in this book. There's a lot of the goofy, unprofessional writing that you'd expect in a low-rent game like this; one of my favorite parts is when the book tells you that, while you can make your own characters, you should not play as any copyrighted fish lest Disney's lawyers crash your pool LARP and sue you. The author also goes out of his way to caution you against running by the pool, which is just solid advice that I feel like you don't see in enough RPGs. 

Would I play Prawn? No.

Would I listen to somebody else tell me about their Prawn session? Probably, and not just to make fun of them for being a nerd who knows upwards of twenty other nerds: I'm curious of this game is actually fun. It's not well-written, but it is competent, and I bet there's an audience out there for something this gleefully dumb. Say what you will about Prawn, but it's incredibly earnest in a way that only a Pool LARP can be.