You're in the middle of a LARP. You're firmly entrenched in your headspace. Everyone else is firmly entrenched in theirs. You're remembering your accent, cursing only in terms found in common use before 1953, and dutifully ignoring the sounds of traffic from outside your grounded submarine. And then suddenly, just when the exchange with your commanding officer gets the most heated... Everything Grinds To a Stop.

What happened? Mechanics. The part of the game that inevitably reminds us that we are playing a game. It doesn't matter how cleverly they're designed, or how seamlessly they blend with the genre or milieu. The basic fact is that if you're using a mechanic, you're dragging at least a little bit of everybody concerned back to the Real World, which is where we're all trying to get away from, at least for the afternoon.

So why use them? Why not just Roleplay Everything The Way God Intended? Because that would be dumb. No, wait - this is an article, not an opinion piece. Say, instead, that there are a couple of good reasons why mechanics could enter the picture:

• Because doing the real thing is impractical. Unless George Lucas is your GM, you can Zeus yourself up all you want, but you ain't going to be throwing around any thunderbolts. And even if you could, think of the site insurance. Also, running actual people through with actual swords tends to cut down on the whole 'attract new people to LARP' vibe. Depending on what sort of people you're trying to attract, I guess.
• Because doing the real thing is difficult, at least for some players. If I'm cast as Gary Kasparov, then unless it's a really weird game I had better be able to open up a can of Chess® brand Whoop-Ass on any other players present, unless somebody else got cast as Deep Blue. Put me in there without some kind of a mechanical crutch for chess-playing and you're going to have a much less accurate portrayal, and I'm going to have a bad time.
• Because doing the real thing is less fun. Suppose that I'm an accountant. Suppose that, miraculously, I get cast as Brian Bean, Super-Accountant to the Stars. Suppose that to figure out who murdered the unfortunate victim, somebody has to pore over ten years of old tax returns and cross reference them to twelve shoeboxes full of banking receipts. Maybe somebody would enjoy doing that, but I'm guessing that if I'm accounting for five days a week, I just might want to take a pass on doing it all day Saturday - even if I (the player) am capable of doing the deed. Having a mechanic that makes everybody gasp in awe at Brian Bean's def accounting skillz without my having to spend three hours adding figures just might make the game more fun for me.
• Because it's hard to be fair. It's no big deal to tell if the basketball went in the hoop or not. But a lot of actions in games, and in real life, are a lot less black and white. How do you know if you wrote a really good annual report? Who's to judge? Did you do a good job convincing the gym coach that you've got a stomachache on dodgeball day? In a lot of cases like these the results are in the hands of other characters, whether PCs or NPCs. And no matter how good a player or gamemaster is, decisions like these are difficult, and somewhat arbitrary. A mechanic can ease things up a bit, providing a neutral force to help make some of the shady calls.

So mechanics are to some degree necessary, at least in the vast majority of games that I've heard about. But having a mechanic isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. Just for the sake of organization, let's break down the possible mechanics like this:

• No Mechanic. Do what your character's doing, and succeed or fail on your own merits. Wanna climb a tree? Make toast? Convince the peasants to take a pass on their annual revolt? Go for it, and if you succeed then so does your character. This is a perfectly sound way to handle a lot of actions. But it can run into trouble of all four sorts listed above. It's probably pretty safe to have the characters making toast, but if they're supposed to be world-class sous chefs, you don't want to hang them out to dry just because their players all mix up tablespoons and teaspoons.
• All Mechanic. This way has bad connotations, images of players rolling dice, adding up modifiers, and confidently announcing that they have won the love of the crowd with their great speech. But before throwing out the concept entirely, realize that there are an awful lot of games out there that have no roleplaying involved at all, yet somehow turn out to be fun. Taking a time out in the middle of a roleplaying session to essentially play a hand of poker or a round of craps isn't in and of itself a bad thing, particularly if the situation demands a mechanic of some sort. Sometimes it's better to go all the way and have a quick and fun mechanical resolution than to draw out the process by splicing in roleplaying elements.
• Real Action Analog. Maybe you can't really stab those new players through the gut with a couple of inches of sharp steel - but you can pretend to. In cases where doing The Real Thing isn't a good idea, sometimes you can do The Almost Real Thing. Boffer weapons, for example. You can still get some of the thrill of performing the action, and there's little break in the flow of things, but usually nobody dies if you do it right. Some deal. Similarly, you could have players who are defusing a bomb play an ultra-tense version of Operation (the Milton Bradley Game of Crazy Surgery). Sometimes the hardest part of going this route is, much like the No Mechanic route, factoring in character skill. For the Operation Bomb mechanic, less capable characters might be forced to drink vast quantities of caffeine before attempt the defusing. Just a thought.
• Mechanical Resolution with Real World Adjustments. In this case the primary resolution method is still mechanical - it's going to come down to a die roll, adding in your Waffle-Making skill and subtracting three because the Evil Pancaker put salt in your strawberry syrup. But there's a GM around to hand out bonuses and penalties depending on how much real world effort you (the player) are putting into it. So if you go to the effort of playing up the cooking process, The Gods hand down a +2 for you to go smite your foe with. If your explanation of why you were caught behind enemy lines consists of "I use my Fool skill to... um... fool them", then expect the -3 of editorial disappointment to poison your SaveMyButt roll. The upside of this is that it encourages people to get into the spirit of things, hiding the mechanic as much as possible. The downside is that it requires an impartial somebody to be around to vent their (dis)approval, and it's possible to get into a mode where the players are just pandering to the GMs, who are supposed to be all invisible and everything. Plus, we don't know anybody who needs this kind of carrot and stick approach to goad them into hamming things up, do we?
• Mechanical Resolution, Act Out Outcome. A common criticism of using mechanics can be paraphrased as: 'If you're going to do that, why bother to play? Roll some dice, see who wins, and go home.' Not entirely true. In virtually every play I've ever seen performed the outcome was pretty well known to the actors before they started. But it was still fun to watch, and, from what I've seen, fun to perform. In this type of mechanic, a mechanical means is used to determine the outcome of an event, but the outcome doesn't actually occur until it's been roleplayed out. What this means is that your player knows at the start of the 'save the child's life' scene that they're going to be unsuccessful, but they still have to play through the angst of having the kid kick it on the emergency room table. If you've having a fencing duel, take a couple of seconds to go roll dice, compare stats, or what have you. Then, when you both know who wins, grab the spotlight and skewer away. This won't work for all situations, or all groups, but with a little cooperation between players it can be a reasonable option. And you don't need a GM around, for the most part.

There are no doubt a thousand other mechanic styles that could be dealt with just as cursorily, but it's probably about time to get on to the important stuff. It's time to get to the sex. You can't title an article "The Mechanics of Seduction" and then just leave people hanging, after all.

The act of seduction is a long-standing part of many fictional genres, and it's likely that in many LARP settings it would be reasonable for something along those lines to occur. It's hard to imagine a spy thriller game, for instance, which doesn't have it crop up from time to time. Seduction in this case is also being used as a stand-in for a number of personality-involving acts, such as Intimidation, Flattery, Fast Talk, and others.

Seduction can be impractical. Mainly because everybody involved knows, at least on some level, that this is a game. Also, carrying through to the point where Bond wakes up, takes the microfilm and leaves is going to involve at least some camera-dissolving in all but the most liberal LARPing groups.

Seduction can be difficult, at least for some players. Not everybody can be as good with a rapier as Zorro. Similarly, not everybody can be as good with... um... well, point made. Unless you want to limit casting Cyrano de Bergerac to only those players in your group who are universally found supernaturally charming to everyone else in the group, some kind of mechanic is probably a Good Thing.

Seduction can be less fun. Ok, it's not a universally applicable example.

With seduction, it's hard to be fair. Here's the gist of the thing. If character A is trying to seduce a piece of information out of character B, the success or failure of the thing is entirely in player B's hands. Nobody likes to give up control, not to mention microfilm. If player A has to roleplay well enough to overcome both character B's natural objections as well as player B's meta-objections, well, that's a tough row to hoe. And this isn't saying anything about how 'good a roleplayer' either A or B is; it's just human nature.

So what's the solution? There isn't just one. But looking at our list of mechanic types we can propose a couple of alternatives that might work with some groups.

• No Mechanic. Certainly doable, but watch out for the roadblocks mentioned above. If not careful, unhappy players may result.
• All Mechanic. Probably best for groups or games that don't want to deal with the details. I've got a Seduce score, you've got a NotBeSeduced score, maybe a couple of modifiers because I'm a Lizardman and you're a Bugwoman. Roll some dice and badda-bing, I get the Staff of King Swampee.
• Mechanical Resolution with Real World Adjustments. In this case I get to make my plea, extolling the beauty of your antennae and the charming way you liquify your food before slurping it up. A handy local GM gets to listen to all of it and hand me the big -4 before I roll, because Bugpeople as a rule are very sensitive about the noises they make eating. If it works for your group of players, the Seducee could be the one to assign the modifier, but the final say is still made by the dice, or whatever.
• Real Action Analog. I'm kind of drawing a blank here. If anybody's got one, let me know.
• Mechanical Resolution, Act Out Outcome. Mostly the same as the above, but the Bugwoman and I work out before hand whether the attempt is going to succeed or fail. This could be based on a die roll or some other mechanic, or in fact could just be mutual decision based on what would make a good story. Maybe I get off on playing a character who constantly gets turned down by women of different species. It could happen. In any case, once the resolution is made the two players can go ahead and act through the scene. Lizardman can drop appropriately insulting remarks, if it turns out that the attempt is going to fail. Bugwoman can find Lizardman's toothy lisp and long pauses to think of a word that rhymes with "thorax" as a charmingly refreshing break from the silver-tongued Butterflymen she's used to dealing with. Whatever.

It's been said before, but it bears repeating. No one solution is correct for all games, or all gamers. If you're a GM, the correct thing when choosing any sort of mechanic is to take into account the kind of game you want to run and the sensibilities of the players involved. After all, the real goal is to Maximize Fun, and Minimize Stress.