Tools, Not Rules

If you play Monstrosity, you’ll hear the words “tools, not rules” again and again as we prepare for the larp. While our risk management system has many parts, “tools, not rules” is one of the most important for you, the participant, to remember. The bottom line: we give you tools to prevent harm, not rules to punish you if you do… and there’s no one right way to prevent harm.

The Difference Between a Rule and a Tool

Both tools and rules have the same intention: to prevent harm. We don’t want you being touched in an unwanted manner or having emotional trauma or cutting yourself on broken glass… all of these are examples of harm. You’re probably familiar with larps that have rules: they tell you “don’t do this,” with the assumption that if you follow the rule, no harm will come to you. We have some problems with using rules, however:

• Rules can only avoid harm, not actively prevent it. Using a tool, however, proactively mitigates risk.

• Rules don’t always work, because people make mistakes or choose not to follow them. Tools, however, are just the human element of a larger system of mitigation.

• If we have a rule, we have to have a consequence if you break it. We’re not your parents, so we give you tools to play with instead of rules to follow.

We know that people make mistakes or forget things. We also know there are malicious actors in the world who will subvert rules to their own ends. So instead, we try to give you specific tools that promote a style of play and help you actively prevent harm. We’ve playtested them, and we know they help… but you don’t have to use our tools, because the point is preventing harm, not you doing as we say.

No Harm? No Problem! You're an Adult

You might decide you don’t like our tools, or that you have a tool you love using that we don’t introduce in Monstrosity. That is 100% okay by us. If you decide to do something to mitigate risk, and it works, we’re happy. You’re an adult, you made a decision, and it worked.

But that’s the key: you’re an adult and we trust you. We also have a lot of other parts of our risk management system to back you up in case you make a decision and it doesn’t work. But it also means you have a lot of responsibility, not just to us or your fellow players, but to yourself to make good decisions. We promise you: our tools are playtested for this specific larp and this specific system. If you decide not to use them, please put some thought into it. 

And remember: you can do everything right, and use our tools as intended, and someone might still get hurt. What happens then?

Focus On the Individual

When someone gets harmed (and it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when), we focus on the individual harmed. This is the single most important thing to remember about “tools, not rules” - if something bad happens, we provide care and fix it if we can… we don’t punish. If someone breaks a rule, they’re a rule-breaker, and we’d need to do something about it, or the rule is meaningless. But if a tool doesn’t work, we can focus on the individual effects.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences for people who cause harm. The biggest consequence is that sometimes you do something, someone gets harmed, and they can’t be around you. For example, if you touch someone inappropriately, even by accident, your presence might be harmful to them. If that’s the case, we might remove you from play, not because you’re a bad person, but because that’s what the individual harmed needs to return to play. However, this is less likely to happen than just additional training: if something goes wrong and we can prevent it from happening again by talking with you, we’re going to talk with you in order to prevent it. 

And remember: you’re still an individual yourself, and you might be hurt too. After we provide care to the people who were harmed, we’re going to check on you, to see what you need. After all, you probably didn’t come to this larp to hurt anyone, and probably feel bad about it. 

There’s only one exception to any of this: we have one rule at Monstrosity, and it’s very specific.

Our One Rule

We have a specific rule we want you to remember, that we’ll present in the workshop. This rule is a restriction on violence to the throat, face or head, specifically choking, slapping or hair-pulling. Before you do any violence to anyone’s throat, face or head, you need to follow specific out-of-role protocol; if you don’t follow the protocol, you’re not allowed to do any such violence.

We have this rule because choking, slapping and hair-pulling are the three biggest hazards we identified through playtesting, and it’s not uncommon for one of these to trigger emotional trauma very quickly. If someone comes up to us and says you did one of these things without following the protocol, we’re going to take you out-of-role, confirm that it happened, and provide additional training. If it happens again, we’ll remove you from play for breaking the rule twice. 

This is the last advantage of “tools, not rules” - if we generally don’t use rules, you can tell that the one exception is extremely important. When you arrive at the larp, we’ll go over the one rule until everyone understands it… and then you only have one thing you have to remember. Everything else is just another tool to put in your toolbox to keep you and the other participants from harm.