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Initiate
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For my sins, I've been elected to run my uni's LARP next year. My experience is less than a year of LARP, but a fair amount of medieval reenactment and tabletop RPGs. I've still got a few months before I need to get people down by the lakeside in their cloaks and all, but I'm feeling really uncertain about what I can do. I'm working within a lot of limits laid down by tradition and investment in years past (no, we don't care that the weapons look improbable and you can't stab, no we don't care that studded leather makes no sense even as a concept, yes we demand a high fantasy linear) which is getting frustrating to try to think of ways to improve.
My budget is far from huge, of course, and whenever I try to think of plot, my SATT experience kicks in a breaking way- what're you going to do for that half-submerged ancient temple? You've got woods, paths and... more woods and paths! I'd also like to perhaps run one-off, non-fantasy (maybe even dramatically less combat orientated) LARPs, but I'm really dubious about whether I'd be able to muster any interest, especially given how few people have costume for the long established fantasy LARP- expecting them to get something together for a one off seems a little too much.
Despite this whining, I really enjoyed the LARP I took part in this year, but planning it for next year, especially in terms of improving it, is seeming a little daunting. Although if I can at least keep things organised it'll be something of an improvement. I'm basically just asking for tips on how to keep a small LARP alive and kicking, interesting without needing huge investment. There was a page on Cthulhu Live running that was fairly helpful, in terms of suggesting focus on plot needed for length of play. Just wondering what tips people might have.
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Wag
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When you say go down by the lake...is this Nottingham Uni?
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RL: Mr Sofar
Curved core weaponry and bespoke stuff.
ShelfordFX
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Heroic Knight
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| I think that lot of this depends on your player base. If they all like high fantasy then thats a good starting point. The next thing I would urge you consider is the type of game you want to run. From my experience University LRPs tend to be EITHER social/political or linear/combat. Both are good for different reasons. From your first post I'm inclined you'll be going down the linear route. Next thing is the frequency of games and will there be a dreaded "downtime"? Downtime is a double edged sword. It can be a nightmare to run for players and can eat up your entire existence but if done right it will really enhance the time between games and keep players eager. If you are running regular, linear games then you will need to think what kind of system to use and whether you are going to allow for character progression or not. For linear games I find that game to game plot is far more important than an overall plot arc/story line. The focus IMHO is to keep the players constantly occupied whether it be with puzzles, roleplay or combat. Don't give them enough time for their adrenaline to run out....keep them going no matter what. Think about how common death is going to be. If death is common ensure you congratulate players for dying. "Hey man that final stand was awesome" can go along way and really get buy in from your players. On the general costume and kit front. If people don't have much of it or can't afford it then see if you can pick up some bits and pieces for cheap and get people together to make some stuff. If you need to "imagine" a sunken ancient city rather than build one...then do that. There is nothing wrong with giving players descriptive narratives about what monsters/locations look like as you go along if you can't afford to kit it out. Although, whatever you do, if you've found excellent real life caves to play in don't tell the players they're in a forest (sorry...laby joke there). Hope that helps, Matt
If I wanted to listen to an arsehole, I'd fart!
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Wag
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Things you might want to do:
* Get a team together of people you feel comfortable organising events/linears with
* Sit down and decide what sort of thing you will enjoy running
* Find out what sort of thing people want to attend (judicious mixture of what people _say_ they want to attend and what they actually _did_ attend and enjoy the previous year)
* Find a reasonable compromise between the two, get your team to go over it and write it down and don't deviate from that (except where you explicitly run something totally distinct)
* Consistency helps (unless you're specifically running a sequence of unconnected one-offs)
* Presumably people have buggered off home - it helps if you can get the society to give you a clear mandate on what they want you to do/not do
* I guess you want to sit down and figure out what the biggest threat to you what you want to achieve is - I get the impression that, for most uni societies, it'll be running out of people/low attendance, for one reason or another
- If that is the case, then you'll want to focus on increasing attendance (try to get a couple of different things going off and then support the ones which people actually attend)
- Focusing on turn out has the advantage that, once you've got a decent number of people turning up regularly, you can delegate authority to actually run stuff to the more enthusiastic among the people who've turned up
- Try to team up with any other potentially interested societies (run joint events where each society has a chance to gain extra members from the other)
- Push really, really hard on the Fresher's Fair (and make sure you have plans in place to keep anyone you do persuade to attend your first couple of events - deputise enough people you trust not to put people off to go forth and befriend the new people)
Marios
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Initiate
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Shelford (7/4/2008)
When you say go down by the lake...is this Nottingham Uni?
Indeed. Does there LARP have some reputation then?
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Wag
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Oh just that I used to work on the campus and stuff. Just rang a bell.
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Curved core weaponry and bespoke stuff.
ShelfordFX
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Wag
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GenericUnique (7/4/2008)
You've got woods, paths and... more woods and paths!
Some people don't even have convenient access to that! I would suggest starting simple and building up (woods and paths physrep nothing so well as ... woods and paths). Granted, you've got to your refs/event runners happy but generally they get their payoff from being in charge - try to focus on what the players/crew are likely to want. If you think they'll want to hear the ref describe the submerged temple, do that - if you think they'd rather beat up some orcs who have been caught trying to sneak something through the woods, do that.
Be clear about what you're offering OOC. Whatever you do, everyone will have specific contradictory preferences, but at least if you say "We're going to attempt to achieve _this sort of thing_" you can (i) find out that nobody wants that before the day comes and no one turns up and (ii) everyone is clear on what is a bug in implementation and what is a feature of the intended plan.
Have plans to run ambitious things, but don't run them first and moot them about to see what the level of interest is like first.
GenericUnique (7/4/2008)
Despite this whining, I really enjoyed the LARP I took part in this year, but planning it for next year, especially in terms of improving it, is seeming a little daunting. Although if I can at least keep things organised it'll be something of an improvement. I'm basically just asking for tips on how to keep a small LARP alive and kicking, interesting without needing huge investment.
Organise and advertise. Have a forum and a mailing list, knock up a list of potential slots for linears and poke people to sign up to run stuff in slots/make requests for stuff to be run in slots.
Make sure you're clear about what you're responsible for and don't sign on to do something you can't consistently keep up with for most of the year (i.e. give other people clear roles - make it one person's job to organise all 'social' events and then back-up whatever they go with).
Keeping a small larp alive seems to be largely about getting people in (push hard for recruiting and don't ever stop) and making sure that there's regular stuff for them to do (could be one larp event per month, but with barbecues/weapon's practices/games evenings on the weekends in between). Ideally, you also create institutions/roles which reproduce of their own accord (the social secretary has to find some candidates for doing it next year, ideally persuading them to help a bit this year ...).
Marios
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Apprentice
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Something I would say from experience is don't let standard of kit hold you back. A bit of imaginiation and a well thought-out and exciting plot, and it won't matter so much how good the kit-standard is. You can do scene setting between encounters with verbal discriptions, and use clever mechanics to get a feel for stuff.
Student larp that I've played has often had no costume requirement at all - people have played in dark jeans and t-shirts. This breaks immersion if what you're playing is a high-phys-rep high immersion game, but in my experience, in the right context, you can still get extremely high-intensity RP out of people, in both a social and a linear setting. If you make a base expectuation that people have a high level of 'filtering out' OC stuff, you can concentrate on creating high-impact plot high-emotional plot without a huge outlay.
In my experience, this will work best if the system, setting and plots are creative, rather than 'find the plot-token, defeat the bad guy', and if people are prepared for high levels of interpersonal rp.
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 Posted Friday, July 04, 2008 4:35 PM |
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