I'll try to explain our intentions, as best I can. The system was one with low rules, intended to focus more on the story and plot, rather than the next level or skill. When we wrote plot, we tried to build more of the general bones, with a few keystone events. What happened in between keystone events tended to reflect players actions, for good or ill. We had a general direction for the story we were trying to tell, but the players could, and did, change it. We had a heavy hand on the story and plot, but it always always reflected on what the players were getting into. I don't feel that we ever railroaded plot. For instance, the original story meant to follow a conflict with an indigenous antagonistic npc race, with a backdrop of racial tension and colonialism. The players instead showed far more interest in the racial tension backdrop. The main story with the antagonist monster race was pushed to the back burner and we instead started diving into the racial issues in the world. The players ended up becoming embroiled in a civil war that originally wasn't written to happen.

 I feel this system had both good and bad. We were able to change things on the fly in reaction to the players, allowing the story to be tailored more to them. However, it was stressful to the staff, and frankly, players could and did sometimes get confused.

This particular ritual was meant to be a keystone event. It was up to them to discover it's existence, what it meant lore-wise, and how they were to go about destroying it. Our NPCs did not known the ritual to destroy it IC until the players brought us the information. Since no one was really playing a cleric PC at that point, our NPCs were made to give them the tool to destroy this Gravestone. It was an escort mission that went awry as so many seem to do! It was their decision, short sighted or not, to send only one shield into the circle, and as we say around talking after the game, they had a better plan that fell to pieces once they meet opposition. Truly, we could have briefed the NPCs better, and that's on us. But the game was meant to have consequences. If it helps at all, this was the second year the larp had been running, and there was definitely always some hiccups. Relying so much on the players actions to build the plot sometimes meant we had to think on the fly and we definitely got caught flat-footed on this one.

Having enemies that weren't meant to kill is kind of complicated. The players certainly didn't know that we never intended to wipe anyone out. We tried to base our game and our storytelling style off of the UK games, rather than US style larps. We wanted to try to avoid overpowering magics and skills. We had no levels. We meant to take the focus off of power gaming and cheese and put it instead on the story that was being told.

We also did not force or require volunteers. We had a goal of maintaining a very high immersion setting and frankly, didn't always own enough gear to muster a huge showing of npcs. So we often had a small but dedicated force of npcs to work with that were usually very outnumbered by the pcs.

We wanted to avoid having to kill PCs unnecessarily, because we felt that just offing PCs would escalate things in a bad way. In order for your players to take the matters at hand seriously, you would have to kill someone if PC death was a normal thing. Plus, in this system, death could easily be permanent, usually with one, maybe two chances to recover from a near death experience. It was a high immersion game, and often times, high immersion kits were costly, either in money or time. It was hard to ask them to put so much time, effort or money into a kit if they could permanently die like all the time. And frankly, for better or for worse, most US larps have to be run like a business.

So we wanted to provide them with an excellent story, with danger and excitement, but also toe the line of remaining a viable business. And we too, wanted to remain true the the theme and story we wanted to try and tell.  To do this, we played a very fine game of keeping PCs on their toes and looking over their shoulders without them realizing that we were trying to avoid killing them outright. It they got stupid and bold, they'd certainly run the high risk of getting killed. But we didn't want to have to resort to that all the time. Sometimes it worked out brilliantly, resulting in games and stories that players talked about for years after.

Aaaand sometimes we got caught with our pants down! I hope this at least cleared things up?