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.