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Wag
 
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| I had a conversation at Foreign Fields with the F&H rep about this very issue... I know Birmingham Uni treasure trap basically died because of apathy. There were no students left willing to take over the running of the club, there were less and less members every year anyway and those that tended to join didn't hang around. I personally consider at least one reason for this to have been the lack of social activities outside LRP - parties, club nights etc - which I think served to keep people interested. As mentioned, the reliance on the old staples of fantasy may be partly to blame. LRP and indeed fantasy fiction has moved on from there. A single club cannot hope to fulfill all requirements in its own homegrown system. One solution to this may be to set up clubs which don't tie themselves to a single system. Rather than setting up their own systems they should maybe look at facilitating their members attending other systems. By this I mean setting up groups to attend the big three and arranging minibuses to get to them as well as providing info and contacts about other events going on and maybe transport to them as well. I wouldn't say that Riftworld and Waypoint are really in competition, mind... we tend to share player bases a lot and arrange things so that we never clash so it is hardly a competition. 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Whispering God is your friend... trust the Whispering God... Ruins of Empire 1st - 3rd Feb, 2008, Gladstone scout centre, Chester
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Champion
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| Yeah, Dark Light branched out by offering more games, so we now have Vampire, Brighton Below and the occassional Dark Times. Once I've got more time then I'll get back working on the High Fantasy system. We get players coming to Brighton Below who woulnd't normally try anything like that cos they know our Vamp game We're really keen on keeping the OOC aspects of the game going as well. We try to have regular pubmeets so that people get to know each other as well as their characters. We also allow our players to borrow kit from the club if they're going off doing stuff. Think we've survived with probably only 15 or so regular Vamp players (as thats our only very regualr game) mostly because its free (ish). You pay for a years membership to the club at £30 and that gives you all your Vamp games for free, and discounts on the others. Certainly with things like Brighton Below though, we have to be really careful when we pick dates. Especially in the summer months, I think every weekend has either LT, CP or Maelstrom. Think theres one weekend in there thats not, so thats the day that every other system will go for I don't think that theres an easy answer. You just have to provide as many options to keep as many players happy as possible. Some people wont do weekend events, so have day events that they can attend, but then do a weekend every 4 months or so for the people who like weekend events (Spearhead do this). Think it comes down to find something that really appeals. Brighton Below gets interest because its (AFAIK) the only Neverwhere LRP running at the moment. Its the Unique Selling Point adn appeals to the people who like Neverwhere. Again we have the issues of what sort of game should it be. Some people want combat, some want politics, some want to dress up and swap stuff, so we have to be as many things to as many people as we can
Dark Light LRP
www.darklightlrp.com
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Prodigal
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| I think there are two big questions here. The first one is: has club larp in general become unsustainable? The second one is: is there currently any market for NEW larp clubs (or are the existing clubs filling most of the available niches)? The first post seems to be asking the second question, but many of the replies seem to be answering the first one. I can't really answer either question, since the only larp club I've had personal experience of is Durham University Treasure Trap. Afaik, our internal membership is growing at the moment. Trez (3/25/2007)
I think though that is that the bar is being raised, and people are beginning to expect a certain standard of kit / set dressing / gadgets at their events. To some degree this relies on players and to some degree its expected that the organisers will arrange these things too. [...] I think that LRPers are no longer satisfied with "curtain cloaks" and gaffa armour, or photocopied A4 rulebooks. Theres an expectation now that LRP is slick and professional and well organised, and unfortunately for the most part, small clubs cannot manage this partially because of numbers and partially because of budget. I think this logic only applies if you assume you're recruiting mostly people who are already larpers. This isn't the case with DUTT- the vast majority of new members have never larped before, or even heard of larp. Most are students who get pulled in either through our recruiting campaign in freshers' week or by being friends with someone who's already a member. They have relatively low expectations of kit standards. They've never heard of Maelstrom, and when we do show them the shiny rulebook our explanation is not "look at how their set dressing is much better than ours is", it's "this is the kind of impressive stuff you can achieve if you get into larp- if you become a DUTT member then you can learn the ropes here and then come to Maelstrom with us next spring." Then once they've tried Maelstrom (or LT- I don't think DUTT has any CP players), they tend to stick around because they've made friends, and because however good Maelstrom is, it's not running weekly on their doorstep. The main way we lose members is through people moving hundreds of miles away once they finish their degrees. There are possibly other people who lose interest because they prefer the style of larger events (although I can't think of any specific cases where I know that's true), but since we're built to expect a high level of turnover, I don't think this causes too many problems. So, I can't speak about whether competition is a big problem for club larp in general- all I know is, it doesn't seem to be a problem in our particular case.
WARNING: the information above may have been subjected to dangerously high levels of ignorance.
OOC (and on Pagga): Carrie
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Squire
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| From my perspective on running the lrp insurance over the last 3 years, numbers have stayed roughly constant on overall club take-up. With about 5-10 clubs stopping and the same number again taking off. I don't though see many of the uni clubs so wouldn't presume to answer that area. Having run a club, every other weekend for over 10 years, there does come when you just run out of most things on a personal level - time, fresh ideas, enthusiasm etc. It's hard work at times. We never ran out of players though and did attend large events together as a large group or smaller groups. One thing I would say from running the club is that those people who stuck with me for most of those years, are now personal friends and I don't regret one minute of it. Clubs though traditionally are run and frequented by the younger lrp'ers from what I've seen now, as us old 'uns don't have the time due to real life getting in the way. So maybe their are lots more out there setting-up that we don't know about?
www.thefallenlrp.com - lrp www.iipr.co.uk - real life (I also organise lrp insurance).
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Wag
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Well, we started up last year, although in a way we're not really a new club. We draw from the same pool of players as Aberddu, and avoid competing by only running once a month.
For us here in Aber it seems that it really comes down to having a group of charismatic players show up from whatever source (usually University intakes). That tends to reinvigorate things as they inspire other players and bring in their own social circles to the game. Then slowly the ego problem sets in, they fossilize into cliques and petty power struggles, and a new group of charismatic players turns up and eclipses them.
My own "generation" were one such group about 9 years ago, and we were lucky enough to have another one about 3-4 years ago. While a group of charismatic players are in the ascendant, we get lots of people at Fresher's Fairs (because charismatic people can look cool and interesting on the stall in costume, as opposed to sad and ridiculous) and lots of people's friends joining in. While they're in the descendant, we get (comparatively) few recruits and people leaving the game due to the petty power struggles as well as the usual losses to people moving or "growing up" (for which I usually read "getting a girlfriend or circle of friends who think LRP is stupid, and not having the strength of character to hold your own").
PD - Brother Farael of the Ordo Dictum Dominus
EOS - Lord Nasir Suran
6P - System creator (now retired), Andrei Treune of Clan Suner
RL - Will Robinson
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Wag
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Egonaught (3/25/2007)
Certainly I've thought for a while that the big three are just killing off everything else, particularly with the way they've become more competitive with weekenders.
The relationship between the "big three" and other LRP systems is something I worry about constantly. Do Maelstrom events damage the hobby by drawing players away from small local games to the detriment and eventual collapse of those games? I don't know, it's very difficult to tell, but it's easy to find a lot of anecdotal evidence for it. I used to be very actively involved in organising small local games, I gave it up to get involved in running bigger, occasional national events.
Nesciomancer's anecdote about using Maelstrom literature to entice players in is fantastically heartening, I'd love to think the mutual benefits were all that positive, but it seems unlikely. It genuinely hadn't occurred to me that local clubs might use our literature in that way. I'm very keen on supporting LRP generally in any way that we can so possibly we can look to produce resources that are more generally useful in this respect. Not quite sure how at the moment, but it's one to think about. It's difficult to swallow the cost of producing glossy colour things that don't have our branding all over them, but it might be doable. We're also working on producing some net resources that will be useful to everyone in the hobby I hope. We need to do more, but time is a limited commodity as ever.
I would definitely agree that Warcrack is a big challenge at the moment. I've been saying this for a while now and all the warcrack addicts who still LRP say "no, no, no, I could give it up anytime, I'd never miss an event for Warcrack. Unless there was a raid on". Of course the players I know who have given up LRP for warcrack don't say anything at all on the subject. Warcrack should be a great source of new blood for LRP, it's make-believe for the masses, but at the moment I fear the traffic is all one way. If we can whether the storm then we might be able to turn that tide.
I'm not sure cost is really an issue. LRP is more expensive than it was, but many LRPers have more money than they did. I do think, without trying to be patronising, that some small clubs/games are too haphazard about organising and promoting their game. I often get a strong sense that if you run a good game and 50 people go you can just run another game and the same 50 people will go again. It doesn't work like that, there are no captive audiences anymore... We have to fight for every player we get at our event, if you think it's easy for the "big three" then I will tell you that it sure isn't easy for us. We send literature to every player who hasn't booked for every event every time. We mailshot 2500 players a year. If we don't our numbers go down, it's that simple. So we fight and we fight hard to keep existing players and get new players in.
I don't want to tell other event organisers how to run their games, but sometimes I do put my head in my hands and weep when I see another "email shot" or "new game advertised on rule7" or "website coming soon" etc. Without trying to take the piss, you have to raise your game above that now. It doesn't have to be full colour prints on glossy paper with wemic porn on p37 (although don't kid yourself that that doesn't help), but it does need to be well presented. At the very least produce a .pdf of your rules, better yet print it out and give it to the players. If you produce a flyer, it has to look good (Nyctophobia's flyers are fantastic, others... not so good). It's no good telling players you are running an event, you have to advertise, you have to promote, you have to enthuse players about your event. Too many organisers think that sticking a post on rule7 saying your game is on, will cut it. It won't.
As I said at the start, I'm very worried about the relationship between the "big three" and the smaller systems. Partly because this is my hobby too, and sometimes I like to play. And I want to have somewhere I can go to play. But mostly because Maelstrom is my job and it's supposed to pay my mortgage. Look at Necsciomancer's post again, it's pretty clear that their recruiting strategy is just as good for Maelstrom as it is for DUTT. Where will the "big three" be when all the local clubs and societies and small events are gone? Fucked is where we'll be...
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Wag
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Matt Pennington (3/27/2007)
Do Maelstrom events damage the hobby by drawing players away from small local games to the detriment and eventual collapse of those games?
Depends whether they are regular (weekly/bi-weekly/monthly) and local or irregular and not so local. I don't see Maelstrom ever competing with a regular, small, local, cheap game - it can't provide any of those things. I can imagine Maelstrom competing with irregular, medium-size and expensive games - but I don't know of many of those and I don't think that's what we're talking about.
Matt Pennington (3/27/2007)
Nesciomancer's anecdote about using Maelstrom literature to entice players in is fantastically heartening, I'd love to think the mutual benefits were all that positive, but it seems unlikely.
I don't know about non-university clubs, but I don't think Maelstrom is ever likely to draw university-larpers away from their university larp-club (unless it's absolutely terrible, expensive and very, very irregular). From my limited experience, for university-larp, Maelstrom is just a useful vehicle to parasitise. The worst that can happen is that you don't make anything of the opportunity. If anything, attending Maelstrom as university-based group is just another way to advertise your existence (people join the IC group, then find out about your OOC uni larp) and it gives another reason for people to keep in touch/visit when they've moved away.
Marios
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Wag
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| Marios you say you can’t see Maelstrom ever competing with a regular, small, local, cheap game. I agree to a certain extent. There are certainly players that enjoy a quick hack around in the local woods and a pint afterwards and don’t have the cash or inclination to fork out for decent kit, tent, booze, food and event ticket. However, Maelstrom has hit the small clubs to some extent. Some players I have known that once attended a certain sci-fi monthly game stopped taking the trouble to attend because they were getting their ‘LRP hit’ from attending Maelstrom. It wasn’t a case of money, it’s just that Maelstrom suddenly just filled that gap, the need for some decent LRP and social needs. Fo them it is far easier to attend a few Maelstrom events a year and pay the cash, instead of writing plot/ monstering/ reffing etc for a small LRP outfit. To hold fire on the doom and gloom I have encountered roleplayers at Maelstrom who only attend Maelstrom and are now considering getting an extra fix o | | | |