Trust

We trust our players. We trust them not to take the piss, not to be dicks. We trust them not to book when they're not going to enjoy our game. We trust them not to make the game miserable for other players, and to help build and support the game environment. 

We also trust them to break the rules. To do what's best for the game even if it's not what we've said they should do. 

Any rule should be there to make the game better. To enable players to do something they could not otherwise do. Doing away with rules about death and dying doesn't stop death happening. If it did I would expect Alone games to have had a lot more survivors even if they were still stuck on alien strewn moons. Instead it makes death occur as and when the players decide. 

LRP is odd in that it's often without long term injury (ic). It takes a certain type of person to pretend to have a debilitating injury and enjoy it. It's unfair to hoist that on someone who isn't willing. If you give people the chance to be miserable they often will. Different groups of players enjoy role playing the effects of injury for different amounts of time. With ours, they've signed up for an action game, so I suspect they're not that likely to expect us to subject them to spending 40-50 minutes injured. 

We've used games to represent the medic skill. Computer games where doctors had to balance how much of various drugs they were giving a patient in order to keep them alive. It was possible for the patient to die, but the patient had by this point decided they were seriously wounded, and it did lead to nice levels of panic. 

Trust is good. Systems that allow players to decide what's happening encourage mature roleplaying and makes it more about the game and less about 'winning'. LRP is collaborative. We're all working together to create a game. When you pay us for a ticket you're not paying for entry into a competition, you're paying for your share of the costs of running that game. It's the same as paying for your round at the pub. 

Winning is about the stories. My winning is hearing people tell other people about games I've been involved in. I love knowing that things that I've made happen, plot that I've written or discussions about rules that I've had have given people stories that they're telling to their friends years after they happened, or even that people are passing on as something they've heard about. We aim to do things that are considered beyond normal. LRP is good, but it can be better. I love the traditional games, but I want to run something different. I want to see if we can improve things.

I need to convince Matt P to let me rig his new site with gimbals. So I'm going to finish this here. I've got events for the next three weekends (Gunfest, Red Letter day and the lions banquet) and then I'll be working on Jurassic LRP over Christmas, so get building your dinosaurs. I expect you all to be there.