Refusal of Service Policy

The crew of Monstrosity can refuse service to you at any time for any reason. This means we can ask you to leave the larp before, during or even after the event. This might be for a limited duration (for example, we ask you to leave the play area for the rest of the night) or for the remainder of the event. If we ask you to leave for the remainder of the event, you can expect a full refund if you comply with our request. If you refuse to leave, we’ll have to stop the event or otherwise prevent anyone from playing with you; if this happens, we will not issue a refund. Realize that we do not make this decision lightly, and so if we inform you of it, we’ve already made up our minds.

There are two primary situations that might lead to a refusal of service. 

The first is if you’ve done something to another person, such that the person cannot be in the same larp as you, we’re likely to issue a refusal of service. This isn’t because you’re a bad person and we’re not trying to punish you. This is because your presence now represents a hazard to the other person that would prevent them from participating. This is a value judgement on the part of the crew, and usually happens after someone informs us of abuse or harassment.

The second is if a member of the crew determines your behavior is an unacceptable risk to anyone in the larp, particularly themselves. Every member of the crew is trained and trusted to issue a refusal of service, for a simple reason: as we are paying them to be there, we have a higher responsibility to their welfare. While this situation is extremely rare, if a facilitator decides to refuse service to you, we’re going to back up their decision. Facilitators have many more tools available to them to manage participants, and we do not expect this to happen, but we want you to be aware of this possibility.

Time permitting, we will investigate both prior to issuing a refusal of service, and we will always conduct an investigation afterwards. This investigation is focused on root cause analysis, where we look at the cause of the situation, and risk management, where we focus on prevention. We may issue a temporary refusal of service in high-risk situations while we investigate; if we do this, you can expect us to give you a time when we’ll get back to you, and possibly a get-well plan to return you to play. We’ll also attempt to be as discreet as possible; while we can’t guarantee anonymity, we will try to protect your identity as much as possible through this process.

There’s one exception to all of this: in 2022 at a different larp, someone called the police on us due to a misunderstanding with the venue. While the misunderstanding was easily resolved, if you are the cause for armed and uniformed officers showing up at the larp, you can expect that we’re going to kick you out forever.