Ideas

I started LRPing on the edge of a massive group of incredibly talented people. As a result I have always had access to interesting insightful games and I have learnt from people who try to do the ridiculous. We create games that we think are interesting and possibly pushing boundaries.

I’m currently tempted to take some people on holiday with me so they can run an event at my destination. I’d also like to run an event were people pull a t-shirt out of a box and it has their character card on the front - that’s what they play.

Tell me your stupid ideas. Tell me the things you want to see and do at events. What ridiculous system do you want to play?

Moving

I've moved the blog. For the past few weeks old entries have been appearing every Monday at Larp.Guide.
From now on new entries will also be appearing there. 
There's a new entry there today. 

Roleplay - If you don't like it LRP probably isn't for you.

Everyone has role play traits that annoy them. For me, it's people saying huzzah and using archaic terms. It jars and feels unnatural. Its not what I'm there for. There's been a post on Reddit suggesting that there are no good games that combine combat and roleplaying well. It's referring to American games, and my initial reaction was that this is something we have achieved. Here in the UK I'm aware of games that do have a good balance of fighting that you can get caught up and a decent world to play those characters in. However, I'm also aware that people would be able to pick holes in the way we fight (I've heard both that we're not violent enough, and that we're too violent. Recent discussions about headshots showed how divided people are about these things). 

Crewing and Monstering

In my experience the vast majority of LRP game worlds are populated by the player characters and by NPCs (None Player Characters). The second group are played by some form of crew. At some games players are encouraged (or required) to take time out from playing in order to fill this crew role. Other players do the same for them. Sometimes crew are dedicated, and NPCs can appear briefly, or be regular recurring characters who are there as often as players are.

Talking about LRP

The best exchange of LRP ideas happens face to face. For me this normally ends up meaning in the workshop. Good conversations happen in places like pubs, at events people are monstering, and anytime you put a group of LRPers in the same place and they’re not actually LRPing.

This is a massive benefit of the LARP awareness party. It gives us a chance to talk about what we’re doing, and to look at the different opinions that are out there. Talks run throughout the weekend, from a wide variety of people running different systems and sites. A whole host of traders are present talking about kit options and exchanging ideas, and a large number of systems advertise there. It gives you a chance to talk to the people running events that you might like to play or crew.

Player Types

Every player is different. They like different things, they’re at the event for different reasons and you have to cater for all of them.

The first thing you can do to make your event easier is pitch it accurately. The players that will enjoy a physically tough action game may in part be the same players that want to sit around and politic for three days, but some of them won’t be, and even those that are will feel cheated by having prepared for one game and getting another, and while it is possible to run an event that offers an engaging experience for both groups, it would probably require a large and equally varied crew, and it would take a lot of experience to work out the compromises involved. I tend to leave that to fest events where they have the people and background to run that level of stuff and focus at being the best at whatever we’re running this week.

Guided Do

This post leads on from my earlier posts covering Tell, Show and Do encounters.
I spent a few days last week discussing scenario design for eLearning, and the Tell, Show and Do encounters were discussed there as well. They also had a Guide category.

Each encounter can be put into a category. A plot is made up of a number of encounters. The lowest value are Tell encounters - which is someone turning up and telling you something, or receiving a letter (or putting a document in a pack). Show encounters are where the players are shown something but can't actually do anything. Something happens to them. Do encounters involve the players (predictably) doing something.

Coherency - part 3

The things that happen in the world you create have to make sense. Maybe not to the players, but you have to understand why things happen and what the likely repercussions of your players actions are.

 You can change things after the time as long as you’re careful. I generally work to the following rules in most cases:

• Death should be final - even if you made a mistake. Once players are dead they are dead. Unless you had a built in mechanism that all players knew about it’s not worth the damage that undoing death will do. If necessary, admit you made a mistake, but apologise and move on.
• Acknowledge your players actions. There should be results for their actions. They don’t have to be the results that they wanted, but acknowledge their effort.
• It’s your game. Decide what’s important to you, lay it out clearly and stick to it. Accommodate players ideas, but within your structure. It helps you to stay keen, and it helps the game to have an identity. It’s fine to say no to people.  

UK LARP Awards

UK LARP Awards.

In recognition of the UK LARP Awards I am spelling LARP incorrectly. This is to enable you to find it when you search for it to nominate your favourite events.

The LARP Awareness Party is happening the same weekend at the same location. It’s worth getting involved. It’s a good weekend and making it better represent UK LRP is good. A wide range of systems promote there and it’s a good chance to talk to other LRPers about what’s going on, buy or order some new kit, listen to the odd talk, and talk to people you normally only see in fields.

Finding Events

The UK has a wide and varied LRP scene. There are a wide range of small games of different styles that happen across the country. Most of them I will never hear of.

The UK LARP Awards run annually (along with the sister event, the UK LRP Awards which runs in the same location at the same time but with more accurate spelling). They’re fun. It’s a chance for a host of LRPers to get together, chat, and heckle each other. They’re also biased towards certain groups of LRPers. They only represent the people that get involved with them. A lot of UK LRPers won’t really have heard of them and it probably won’t occur to them to attend. When you get to small systems, if only 30 play a system and none of those are people involved with the judging at the LRP awards then they will struggle to decide which system wins (especially if they only have a locked Facebook group and no webpage, which is pretty much standard for the very small systems).

R&R characters at fest games

At Mandala events our crew get 4 hours sleep a night and have to hot bunk. We do feed them and keep them hydrated and we ask them to do ridiculous stuff. They come back because they enjoy it, and this is what we expect of our crew at Empire. We want people who are committed to crewing because it’s what they enjoy, not people who see it as a way to pay for a free ticket

These are fairly small events (up to 60 players) and we know we’re at the demanding end of this. We do run through the night. We work shifts. We have people queuing up to crew our events. They enjoy crewing our events and we have a very high quality, independent, reliable crew.

Set Dressing

You can run an event with almost any setting. Your event will be better if you can phys rep the setting in which you are aiming to run your event. I take this seriously. It's something that can really make you up your game.

It applies to everything - to the world, to the rules, to the costumes, and to the technology. In my opinion, if you're having to tell people what they're looking at you're doing it wrong.

We love SciFi events, and we try to do them well. We're pretty good at making the inside of a building look fairly futuristic, but we'll be the first to admit we struggle with dressing the outside of a scout site. We can do pretty cool looking set pieces, but we can't cover all that 'England' with something more blingy. 

The inside looks pretty sci fi

Mechanics

For the events I want to run I would like my players to be able to do things that they can't do in the real world. 

The players are reacting to a story. Even in a heavily Player versus Monster game you're relying on your players to interact and get involved with the world you've given them to make the story. Intense moments can come from putting players under stress and making them have to work to achieve things in difficult situations This tends to be a large part of games we run. Examples include the basics such as trying to rescue an injured comrade while people are trying to shoot you, and clearing a building knowing there's a good chance something bad is hiding in one of the rooms through to trying to replace parts for the power system whilst lying in a tunnel that's barely wider than you are in the dark with only one arm and a glow stick, or balancing meds on a critical patient and fighting to keep them alive. 

Plot and Choice

It's very easy to write a story for an event. It's vastly harder to write plot. It's even less likely to write plot that makes sense after the players get to it, and you'll need to have some mechanics to enable the players to make an utter mess of the plot you've carefully created for them.

At the start of an event the players have a situation. They have a reason to be where they are, and some stuff they know about how they got there. For Dark Hearts the players were Heros who had answered the Empires call and gone to save resources/villagers from an approaching orc force. For Alone often the players were an engineering crew or soldiers who were being sent to a suspect location by some corporation.  For Slender events we're paranormal investigators going to somewhere where paranormal activity has been reported. With a 'Saw' themed event you might wake up in a small room with no idea how you got there and possibly minimal information about who you are.

I like to start my events with very little background. I know why I believe I'm there, and I know what I think I'm trying to do, but usually this is the extent of my knowledge (other than how my char fits in with the wider world). We do get players who want more. I can understand that that's their style of play, but given the way we write games and the way I think about the games I'm writing it's hard to work out what extra information our players are after. Briefings are given in game, often by the commanders the players have picked themselves, or packs are handed over at the pub in the hours before time in, and the players are dropped in running.

I tend to find people who run events have patterns they tend to follow regarding pacing. Some of this is dictated by timings they run to, but event those are often chosen and stuck to by organisers. For example, at Mandala 24 hour time in means 24 hour things happening at all hours and if we think too many people are sleeping we'll find ways to wake some of them up. At other games often much less happens from 2-3am until 10am. We benefit from having refs who are early risers and others who sleep late. We have shift systems for monsters to ensure people are awake through the night and time out between midnight and 3 on the sunday morning to give people a chance to sleep.

We also like to time out at a dramatic moment. We will build up to a shuttle launch, or final large battle and rarely play through the effects of it for long. Players can make that bit happen without us.

We've had to ban individual 'thank you' speeches. Too many people were getting missed because having run on almost no sleep for the last few days and built up to running around with flares in the dark to make that ending special for the players is not conducive to remembering who you have to thank. People always get missed and they're inevitably tired enough that it's not as easy to ignore as it should be.

Events normally involve things happening for us. These can be the result of things we do, the result of things the players do or things that are entirely unexpected and no one ever works out quite how they happened. Usually there are things that players can't stop. Some of these are things that've happened before the players got there. We like to give players choices and have things that happen as a result of the choices the players make. If the players feel they were responsible for the choice they're more likely to feel personal responsibility for the effects of that choice.

We aim to give the appearance of choice. We cannot guarantee what the players will do, and we aim to have options for as many of their actions as we can predict. You can often give the illusion that the players actions are having an effect whereas both of the two most likely choices had the same outcome. We will ignore entire sections of game if the players don't take the hook even if it means they don't get to see a lovingly prepared set piece. The set piece doesn't add value if it's forced in to a plot where it doesn't belong. There have to be coherent reasons for each happening even if the players can't work out what they are. 

We have people who spend most of their time at our events writing and rewriting plot to respond to the players actions. Finding out what the players are planning and working out how we respond to things are major uses of our resources. We've had one game where the plot was being rewritten constantly and had five major rewrites with new endings and new story lines over the course of the weekend. They did end up with an ending very similar to the one we'd originally written, but that was by no means a sure thing and they took an entirely different route than planned to get there. For that event we had a few people comment to us that the plot had seemed a bit linear.

2014

In 2013 I failed to play Empire (bought a ticket, had a character and accidentally crewed) and realised I hadn't played a LRP game for about three years. 
In 2014 I played all four Curious Pastimes games, three SlenderLARP (LRP) games, Red Letter Day, Gunfest, and went to Phoenix LRP, as well as crewing Empire.

It's been a really good year (from a LRP point of view, I'm aware the year isn't yet over but I'm not attending games for the next few days so it'll be next year before anything amazingly LRP based happens again). 

Curious Pastimes:

Curious Pastimes is the first large system I was part of. From 2003 until 2009 I went to most of their main events and several faction and winter events (Including ones run by Mandala). I stopped enjoying it and stopped attending. I only went to renewal in 2011 and left that feeling a bit meh. 

This year there was a chance to be part of a 'monster' faction for new players and those who'd been out of the game for a while. I figured I'd try it. It was really good. They've ironed out a lot of the reasons it wasn't working for me, and it's now a really nice system with a lot of atmosphere and strong national identities for the players. I played one event with the Tuareg and then moved back to the Lions who've been amazing. They're welcoming, inclusive and lovely people. It's been really great to see so many people I know and the CP style of game really suits me. 


SlenderLRP:

I seem to have turned into something of a SlenderLRP fan girl (even if they do insist on putting the 'A' in LRP). I've been to three of their events this year. They're always felt utterly disconcerting in the best possible way and each one is better than the last. I love what these people do. These events have also made me think about the way that we run events and are one of the reasons I started the blog. There's normally utter terror at some point mixed in with a huge amount of clue solving and piles of information, paperwork, real world references, visits to other locations and a good deal of paranoia relating to other players. 
The attention to detail is amazing. 

I'm really looking forward to their next event, just a bit worried it might be at the point I'm intending to be in another country, so hopefully they'll release the date soon... 


Workshop:

This blog isn't really about the workshop. Hence I normally don't really talk about what I'm doing there. However, it seems appropriate for this entry. We make weapons, armour, costume, jewellery, leather work as well as the masks and prosthetics we started with. Mandala has a wide range of people working there, and it's developed nicely over the last year. We're going to be trading at the LRP Awareness Party in Leicester in February (and some of our stock will be at 'What's Your Game' with Whiterose Apparel.) Our new armour range will be unveiled at these events. I'm really looking forward to that. 

We've got a laser cutter. This expands the range of things we can make in house nicely. There should be more photos appearing on the Mandala Facebook Page to show some of the things we've been working on. 

Red Letter Day:

This was a brilliant event. I've posted a review of this only recently so won't go into too much detail. It's run by a very good time and builds on many of the elements I enjoy most about SlenderLRP. I'm really looking forward to their next game, which Dave has assured me they are writing as I type :-p. 

I also played a Gunfest event. I'll probably just leave it at Gunfest - Fuck yeah.

Empire:

Empire is not the event I want to play. I do really enjoy crewing it. I seem to be tending towards smaller games when I am playing and, with the exception of CP, I'm tending towards modern day events. 

Phoenix LRP

This was delightfully old school. A group of us went for an afternoons adventuring and it was great. We will be returning. 

2015

I intend to continue in the same vein as I have been. I'm looking for more of the present day stuff and would like to run a horror event or two. We've got a site booked for Jurassic LRP in September. The list of things I want to do is far longer than I can possibly accommodate in the time I have available. I suspect that's true for most LRPers. If there's anything you'd particularly recommend let me know.

Feedback

Good feedback is really hard to come by. Typically if you run an event you'll get too see the comments and photos of some of the players afterwards. If there was a real issue they'll drop you an email or chat to you one facebook. If you're planning on running more events in the future you should probably talk to them and find out what they actually thought. There is a version of the form we send out here.  Editable version is here

Once we're home from an event we send out forms asking for feedback to all participants (players and crew). We ask them to rate a range of elements from the event, from the NPCs to the site and catering. We also ask them to provide an overall rating of the event. We use an adjusted version of the overall rating to give us a 'score' for the event. We've been doing this with every event since Mandala were running winter events in the CP system, and the score means we have one figure that we can compare for each event we run. This is nice for us, but overall not a particularly significant figure. 

The real value for us is being able to review some of the planning decisions we made and the effect they had on the players. One of the big things with the Alone series was food. We really value ic style food.  Unfortunately our players would like food that is actually edible (so picky). Reaching a balance between space food and edible food that actually keeps them happy took most of the Alone series. By Alone 4 we were telling them exactly what they were getting, letting them bring their own additions if it was appropriate, and making them carry supplies of bottles water with them. We got much improved ratings for the catering. People were happy because they'd prepared for self heating meals. A few people would have preferred hot cooked food, but that wasn't appropriate for the event that we chose to run. 

We've discovered that the people who love your game the most are often the most critical. If they're spending a lot of time telling us about things they would change it's often been because they loved most of the rest of it, and these differences are the things that would take it to perfect. We analyse events we play at. Partially it's an interesting exercise in why certain decisions have been made, and things that were really jarring for me. It's also about looking at our own events and learning how we can change them and what we'd run differently. 

With some of our SciFi games we don't really see the players from timein to timeout. All their communication is through AIs and it means it's very easy to miss things if we've not been told their happening. The feedback can fill in some of the gaps by prompting people to tell us what was amazing and what didn't quite work for them.

 There are a lot of things that people don't like about our games that we wouldn't change. We set out to run games were things happen around the clock, and where sleep is a privilege. We time out in the early hours of the Sunday which gives drivers a chance to sleep before driving home. We've had people say that they couldn't play our events again because they don't get to sleep over Saturday night. We don't want to stop the action or even give people a safe area to sleep in. It's not part of the game we want to run. We appreciate the feedback and that that's been said, but we'll normally let that person know that we won't be changing that element of the game. 

With ZapFest we had several people feedback issues that we hadn't even been aware of on site. Knowing about it means we've got a chance to spot the same things if they happen at future events. We review feedback in a fair amount of detail, and discuss whether it's something we want to act on or whether there's a reason we've done things the way we have. It also gives our player base a chance to tell us what they want to see us do. Given we're currently playing with a series of more experimental games this is quite important to us. 

Most event teams ask for feedback in one form or another. For us, the Google Forms work. They give people a way to tell us if they're not happy, which gives us a fighting chance to resolve the problems with future games (people choose whether to leave their name or not) - or to make it clearer that this is what we intended with future advertising.  


 

Death

Death in LRP divides people. I’m a proponent of doing what feels right, and think that giving people control over when they die allows for greater glory and making things feel right. Trusting players is important. LRP is collaborative. We’re working together to make the game.

I like low rules systems. There are places this doesn’t work. For example - you need an agreement about how firearms are going to work, and you may need some agreement about certain skills in order that players can use them.

There are a few main things you need to consider when running an event that relate to character death:

• Do players get a new character if they die?
• Does that change depending on when they die?
• Is the new character disadvantaged at all
• How are you feeding new characters in? We used to have two slots we could use to feed people into Alone games. People would have to wait for those.
• Do you need to outline a way to handle death ic? With most of our games it gets briefly roleplayed over and then ignored.
• Do you have kit to send players back in with?

Death of a character is a big thing. Sometimes it’s the end of the game for someone, and at other times it’s a change in direction. Other characters will quickly move on from it. It’s the nature of LRP. Dead friends are people you talk about around the campfire with a drink a few times a year. They’re a reason to keep fighting, part of the story and some background atmosphere. For a lot of systems there are a significant number of dead characters and the majority of them won’t be individually significant in the game anymore.

For me the best deaths are those with meaning. To die gloriously holding the enemy back while your friends escape or complete setup or to die because someone has put a lot of thought into killing both feel good. That characters death had relevance. It always feels a bit rubbish to lose a character to a random skirmish, because you fell into a shadow or similar. it’s a sudden and abrupt ending that doesn’t really feel like you had any choice in it. Which is realistic, but not glorious. These deaths are also important. I can see their value, but I don’t really like them. They discourage effort spent on making kit that can’t be reused, and for me they make me move on when I may not have got bored of playing something. I don’t like going back to the same thing twice in a row. It devalues death to play the same character twice.

I don’t see LRP as a competitive thing and so I believe people can be trusted to decide when they die. It can still come as a shock. That realisation that someone has put thought and effort into killing you can be a bit of a surprise. For me, this normally happens once the character is dead. Letting you make that choice also allows you to choose to roleplay your injuries appropriately. It makes for far more immersive situations.

With any character death, it’s no longer about you. You’re not the one who gets to decide what is remembered about a character or how people react. In long term campaigns there are often lists of the dead, ways of remembering who has gone before. They add a sense of continuity and ritual to a situation that often has more death than would be fun in the real world.

In most cases it’s important that death is acknowledged. There could be groups that refuse to discuss death or to participate in any form of memorial or funeral rite. That should really be a significant thing about that group though. For the most part how a society deals with its dead is a significant part of making it feel real, especially in a violent situation.

I like death. It’s a nice underlining of the end of a life. It gives solid stops and leaves no ‘after’ for someone to worry about. As someone who runs games it makes it a lot easier to track survivors. If only 6 characters are still alive and I know where they are then I know there’s very little chance of someone showing up with knowledge I don’t expect them to have at future games.

Winter Events

In the UK there is a LRP season. This is at least partially because in winter it's a bit too cold to camp. When I started LRPing it pretty much ran from April/May to September. This year it doesn't seem to exist. 

Planning when to run an event is a bit of nightmare. You want a weekend that's likely to be warm and dry enough that you don't have to run everything in buildings (as long as you've got a site with buildings) and you don't want to clash with anything else. 


Finding sites is a nightmare. We usually want something that's less than £1200, has a kitchen and enough shelter for the people we have attending as well as somewhere to put the crew and is in the midlands. It loses points for every minute further from Coventry we have to drive. If we're running with 50 players we're hoping for 60-70 bunks. 

The site we have booked for our next event has no bunks. People can sleep in tents. However, the event is in September so this should be reasonable.

There are several large fest systems in the UK running with up to 4 events over summer. Off the top of my head I can think of Fools and Heroes, Lorien Trust, Curious Pastimes, Profound Decisions have both Empire and Odyssey and the Vale fitting events into the summer months. Unless we really knew our audience we wouldn't want to clash with these or run the weekend before or after. Dark Hearts, which we ran in November 2013, was based on the Empire system. We were aiming to draw players from there. 

When considering what the event clashes with, in addition to considering where your players come from, you also need to consider where your crew come from. We have some crew who're utterly insane, and will follow a brief through the night, returning every few hours to let their wrangler know they're alive and to eat/drink something. We try to ensure they're available for the dates we want to run our events on (especially with Alone events).

Having established when we can run an event we begin the thoroughly miserable business of contacting scout sites, LRP sites, and Youth Hostels collecting prices and dates and locations, while trawling the internet for something a bit special. Drakelow tunnels is one fine that was outstanding for us. SlenderLRP and Red LRP seem to do this considerably better than us. They have found several really interesting locations and they use them brilliantly. They invest a huge amount of work in setting their event in the location of the site and making it utterly relevant. I really rate them for it. 

We typically have an idea what we're after. There's a particular type of location we've been after for years and we may have found it. If we have, we should have a really nice Sci Fi event lined up for next year. :)
 Typically we have to compromise massively somewhere. There are sites we contact event though we know they only have three LRP slots a year and we haven't a hope of getting them as they're booked up by a 40k club as soon as they become available. I'd also love to run something on Bardsey Island, but we've yet to find a whole team that are keen enough to make that work (Any volunteers?). It does seem to suit 1930s Cthulhu style LRP and that's not actually something on our list to run. Also it doesn't have electricity and everything has to be ferried out by boat so we'll be limited in what we can take for set dressing and effects kit. 

The last three weekends I've been at events. I played two brilliant events and catered the CP Lions faction banquet. This last one was at the Court Hill Centre, which has amazing views. The main hall has wooden beams and was amazingly decorated by the Lions (although it was a little dark, the servers kept tripping over shields people had left in the tiny gaps between the tables). We had between 50 and 60 attending and fed them 12 courses over 4-5 hours. They did some of the washing up. Everyone seemed content.

I've previously really enjoyed catering banquets. I really enjoyed the weekend and seeing people, but apparently we've got too good at catering and it's too organised and no longer appeals to my sense of chaos.
I'm really glad we had bunks for this one. I'd been sleeping outside only a fortnight before and it was snowing at a couple of points over the weekend. 

Still, this year the season has finished. It's probably about time. I need to make some new kit before next years season starts on the 24th January... What happened to time for projects?


 
 

Resonance 2

I like LRPing in a group. If you have a group of people you can agree a common look. This helps with establishing an identity. You don’t need a personal identity if people can work out your place from the kit you’re wearing.

You can use it to add resonance. When we played tree worshipping cultists we all wore generic kit underneath and hoods and robes over the top. The look hinted slightly at a religious order which was mirrored by the way we spoke about our selves. The bulking up and furs often worn by beastkinmakes the people wearing it more likely to lounge around on a hot day, and also improves their ability to both hide and loom, which are important ways of separating your behaviour from that of other people.

In the star wars films they used very different clothing styles for the imperials and the rebels. If they are wearing black and have a mandarin collar then they are imperial. The clothes were very fitted, military and ordered. The rebels tended to have layers, v necks and clothing that was loose but belted. We used the same styles through Alone (although this rarely came up). It does mean that if you use those styles anywhere then people will see them in the same way.

I like things to have a coherent look. Anything that looks good does, and things with a coherent look invariably look better. One poly cotton tabard invariable looks quite cheap - a group of them in the same colours look like something meaningful. 

For fantasy LRP I would expect anyone who has been to a couple of events to have IC trousers (appropriately coloured, not jeans or combats) and an ic top (not a t-shirt or something with a modern cut). I have advantage that I generally know what look I am going for and have both money and time to make the items I am after. I’m also of the opinion that in the same way that you couldn’t play cricket without the appropriate gear (the less gear you have the less like cricket it is and if you take this too far we end up arguing about whether throwing a turnip at a spade is cricket), you can’t LRP without the appropriate costume.

LRP is a luxury hobby. You can get appropriate kit for most things for less than the cost of one event.

Most people apply resonance automatically. If they’re playing the groups religious leader then their costume will be taken from their view of what a religious leader will look like. There are numerous interpretations of the phrase ‘Space Cowboys’ but if you use it currently most people will start to look to firefly for inspiration and you’ll get themes that come from there.

If you have an established world you’ll probably want players to be able to identify things from within that world. For example, if you have a particular military unit then you may want players to be able to identify that people are from that particular military unit. Military uniforms create a military look and badges, insignia and hats can be used to tie a group of soldiers into something the players recognise. We’re often tempted to create a set of police-ish uniforms, a set of paramedic gear and similar. We already have a decent set of military gear. A lot of people have a set of military gear, as it’s cheap and easy to buy. A lot of modern or post apocalyptic games are flooded with it when there’s a lot of alternatives that could be used.

We also consider whether it’s a one off event or a series of events. One offs require players to buy in very quickly. They only have 30-40 hours of game time and spending a lot of that working out the setting can really limit things. If it’s a series of events then you have more time to play with and can spend more time establishing something as a setting. You need to work out how much your players will happily read and at what point you’re being so constraining that you’re not leaving them room to make the world their own.

Finally, on another topic, we’re planning on running Jurassic LRP on 25th-27th September 2015.

The facebook group is here. Let us know if it’s something you’re interested in. More details after Christmas.

Make them pay

With small events typically no one is making a profit. If you’re lucky you’ll come close to breaking even.

We have a few rules that make this work for us.

• No one has a place without having paid a deposit.
• Once the deposit has been paid payments must be made each month to keep the place, and the full cost should be paid at least a month before the event.
• No refunds (we use discretion on this, but we typically can’t refund and don’t have time to resell tickets if there’s less than a month before the event)
• Typically half the number of people that say they will definitely show up will. Some of those will crew. If there are 80 people on your facebook group saying they will definitely be there then your player/crew/ref base is probably about 40. Usually a lot of them have said they’ll crew and you’ll find you’ve got a player base of about 17. If it’s only 17 before you’ve announced dates and prices then you may find you struggle.
• Get dates and prices out early. Setting people expectations enables them to confirm they can make your event.

Because we typically run events for our friends these can seem harsh, but it’s utterly worth it. Having to hassle our friends for money is no fun, and having rules in place from the start makes it easier. It also means you know what you’re doing and how much you’re spending and that you have the money in your hand at a point when you can actually spend it (before the event) and it can go to making the event better. 

The 50% rule is really important. It actually applies after you’ve told people the date and price.

Zapfest caught us out because it was closer to 30% actually booked, but because we had the figures we could make decisions based on the actual costs of running the event and knew what we were committing to.

There are a lot of people who have access to kit that can be used for running events. We will sometimes lend kit to people (and also rent out some monsters) and we have catering equipment. Some of the larger event organisers have kit that they can lend to groups running smaller events. We teamed up with Rockets and Rayguns to rebuild our drop pod so that it could be used for both their game and ours. If there is something aspirational you want it’s worth talking to other people who run games to see if it can be shared between groups. 

Link to previous post on Money
An example of our finance spreadsheet