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Heroic Knight
 
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| The first thing I would have to say to anyone running an event whether your first or 1000th is that live role players have commitment issues. I thought that my regular players in Heroquest were bad but they appear angelic compared to the people who expressed an interest in Herofest. At one point I had over 150 would be players and 30 staff/monsters/crew. Our final numbers were 81 in total. Nearly 100 cancelations! I am used to a 30% cancelation which is what I still got from people I know. However from the people I dont know who actually said they were coming and asked for a booking form I had over 80% cancelations, almost all of which were in the 10 days preceding the event after we had written the plot, brought tents, arranged our catering and food and spent nearly £8000 on the site. So the lesson to be learnt here is do not consider anyone to be definite until you have their money in full and even then expect some cancelations. To get their money in full make sure you are offering something to make them want to book and pay early. (i think cash reductions works the best) Anyway other than that everything else worked well. It was my first player vs player event, here are some of the things we did and our responses - made players join factions and wear faction colours at all times - this worked excellently although we will allow players on future events play independents if they so choose had a clearly marked non combat and combat area - again worked great and the fear of death factor when entering the combat zone was very high kept the system very simple, 1 hit per location and no armour or magic etc - again the players loved this, whether old hands or brand new to lrp everyone was the same, not 1 instance of people cheating the entire weekend! clean decent toilets showers and washrooms that were lit 24 hours and checked/cleaned 4 times a day - everyone loved these especially the ladies food available 16 hours a day, decent hot and cold food and drinks at reasonable prices, with real crockery and cutlery, plus the availability to sit and eat in a building. - again we had lots of positive response from this off site parking, no cars etc were visible from any of the in character areas - this went down very well and helped keep people in character for most if not the entire event loads more but thats enough for now herofest website http://www.live-roleplaying.co.uk/index.htm photos from the first event http://www.rachelpertphotography.co.uk/section183554_142330.html
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Knight
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Live roleplaying's greatest cheerleader...
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Ah it also sometimes happens that they'll pay and never turn up.
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RL: Mr Sofar
Curved core weaponry and bespoke stuff.
ShelfordFX
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Wag
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Shelford (5/9/2008)
Ah it also sometimes happens that they'll pay and never turn up.
In my experience about 10-15% of players pay and then simply don't turn up. It's always seemed to be pretty constant to me, without regard to size or weather. I suspect you have to be of a reasonable "size" to notice the phenomena but I suspect it affects pretty much every game.
Players saying they will come and then not booking is even more endemic. I suspect there are a number of reasons why that happens, but it's not really the scope of this thread to discuss them. Personally I've never paid the slightest attention to people saying they will come, but a helluva lot of organizers seem to take these indications as meaningful. I guess if you're trying to plan budgets based on numbers then maybe organizers feel they have to. Since the numbers are pretty meaningless (unless someone can calculate a reliable actuality ratio, the ratio of people who will actually turn up compared to those who say they will) then I'd say they're worse than useless.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Champion
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| Personaly i look at, 50% of the people who say will turn up actualy do. and Mandalas best customer is somone who has paid for every event bar alone, and not turned up to any of them, and is still happy. you dotn get better than that
www.mandalastudios.co.uk www.kangena.co.uk RL - Mark (Coventry)
CP - Urtsi (Ael) [Ex Head Weapons Checker/ Ref]
Mandala - Wookie (Ref/ Props)
PD - Wookie (Ref)
GF - Organiser
Dark Secrets - Philip Stanley (Tech Assistant)
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Wag
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NICHOLS_ME (5/9/2008)
Personaly i look at, 50% of the people who say will turn up actualy do
It seems a pretty fair figure, but I think unlike my "no-show" ratio, I think it's much more variable than that. For instance I suspect larger more established events have less of a problem (nobody bothers to tell me if they're coming to the event, they either book or they don't). Smaller events seem more prone to the problem, but maybe 50% is pretty fair. (Having done a quick count, we have 1000 people who have requested mailshots off us but never attended an event, so in that sense we're probably on about 33%).
I think detailed discussion of the issue would be interesting, but it's hardly a herofest issue and I'm too lazy to start my own topic. 
and Mandalas best customer is somone who has paid for every event bar alone, and not turned up to any of them, and is still happy.
you dotn get better than that
Do you not find it faintly dissatisfying? I don't want people's money if they're not coming to my events. If you work hard to create an event then you want people to enjoy it. I take pride in my events, and I want people to enjoy what they've paid for - I noticed Mark promising a refund to anyone who didn't enjoy Herofest before the event and I suspected that half of that was good marketing and half of it was a genuine desire not to have people's money if they really didn't enjoy the event.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Initiate
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What I enjoyed about Herofest and believe it was an excellent inclusion to the fest style event was the mixture of player and story led plot. What I mean by this is that unlike LT you don't have a wave of monsters attacking your camp ever so often and NPC's herding you into doing stuff. You had a choice to engage in the plot and missions however you wished. You could even simply ignore quests if you found them distasteful as we Halbadoians did.
Also unlike Maelstrom you didn't have to create plot, there was always something to do. It was a most excellent blend of story and freedom that I wish the bigger systmes would pick up. Thougth I expect LT never will as it would be far to much work for them.
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Champion
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[b]Matt Pennington ). I think detailed discussion of the issue would be interesting, but it's hardly a herofest issue and I'm too lazy to start my own topic. i started a topic in logistics
www.mandalastudios.co.uk www.kangena.co.uk RL - Mark (Coventry)
CP - Urtsi (Ael) [Ex Head Weapons Checker/ Ref]
Mandala - Wookie (Ref/ Props)
PD - Wookie (Ref)
GF - Organiser
Dark Secrets - Philip Stanley (Tech Assistant)
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