PROCESS HACK: Seven Tips for Starting Your Own Game
So, I have a lot of asks sitting in my inbox about how to start / run / write a LARP game. I’m going to give it my best shot, but I’m equally aware that there are many wiser than me out there who likely have their own opinions, and I look forward to learning and reblogging from people who want to add to or disagree with anything I’ve said here. The post is a bit of a monster, so buckle in!
1. DECLARE YOUR INTENT
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Your policies on diversity & inclusion / equality and accessibility should be the first thing you think about and the first thing you publish when you start making material public, not an afterthought.
Photo from the first event of Pioneers, by @tomgarnett
Now Read On....
It isn’t good enough to write some airy-fairy “~~everyone is welcome at our LARP~~ ^_^” rubbish either. You’ve got to get real with this stuff. This is a statement of principles that your entire game needs to live up to. You have to start considering now:
What the practical limitations facing you are, and
What sort of game you want to run vs. what sort of game you can run.
Is your intent to run a game where everyone has equal access to all IC spaces? Then you can’t put any of those IC spaces in areas only accessible by stairs. Is your intent to run a game where people of all genders feel welcome and included? Then you’d better be prepared to back it up in your setting material by including specific representation of multiple genders in different roles, otherwise your intention means squat. Is your intent to run a game where everyone can participate in combat? Then you need to have a serious chat with yourself about hard vs soft skills.
The statement of principles that you start with will influence every aspect of your game, from setting, to system, to what sites you can and can’t use. It isn’t set in stone - there’s nothing wrong with coming back and revising it later, adding elements you’ve forgotten or clarifying how it relates to your game; indeed I heartily encourage it! But you need to understand now what sort of game you intend to run, and for what sort of people.
Unpopular opinion time: It is not inherently evil to run a game which is not equally accessible to all possible players. LARP is a physical hobby, some variants more than others - it is not wrong to run a game where it’s easier to play a fighter if you have 20/20 vision and the use of both legs; it is not wrong to run a game where it’s easier to play a mage if you are highly numerate and can speak fluently in public. It’s not even wrong to run a game at a site that’s impossible to access by wheelchair, especially if that’s the only site available to you.
What is wrong is not clearly signposting those restrictions up front in your publicly accessible game material, and making whatever reasonable adjustments you can to compensate. It is worse to be welcoming and “talk the talk” in your advertising material, then fail to follow through on the field, than to state simply and clearly what access restrictions your game comes with - your players need as much information as possible to decide for themselves whether the game is right for them.
If you want some examples of what an “OC policies” or E&D / accessibility statement might look like, try these:
Death unto Darkness OOC policies
Profound Decisions Accessibility Policy
Profound Decisions Equality & Diversity Policy
Tales out of Anchor Event Rules
Photo from the first event of Falling Down, by @tomgarnett
2. WRITE FOR THE SITE
Now that you understand what inclusion and accessibility requirements you need to meet, you can pick a site!
If you’re a university or small-town LARP, this decision may be from a very small pool indeed; you may even find after looking at your options that you need to go back to your accessibility statement and revise it or manage expectations. That’s fine - you can only work with the resources you have; just make sure that you’re doing site recce & viewings with accessibility in mind.
If you are mobility impaired or have a friend who is, they may be willing to help you out by conducting an accessibility survey of your potential site. Don’t assume they’re obligated to help you, but there’s nothing wrong with asking politely.
It is important that you match the game to the site, not the other way around. My LARP career is littered with examples of start-up games which had a fantastic concept of the world they wanted to run in, and which implemented shockingly badly in play because the site they eventually found didn’t match up with their requirements.
What do you have? A lot of single-use mixed-terrain woodland? Then small-party linear adventures can be an excellent feature of your game! A big open empty field with nothing in it? Have some linefights, or a big friendly diplomacy-heavy IC camp! An abandoned glue factory but no outdoor terrain? Claustrophobic space-prison survival horror it is!
At all costs, avoid marrying yourself to any particular gameplay style or type before you know what site you’re working with.
Photo from the first event of Regenesis, by @tomgarnett
3. GAMEPLAY BEFORE NUMBERS
Start thinking about designing the mechanics and working parts of your game the same way the military plans operations: Begin with the effect you want to achieve on the players and then think about the tools you can use to get there, not the other way around. A lot of people who write and run LARP games are mathematically clever and get excited about creating intricate, clever systems like D&D; that’s fine, if that’s the sort of game you want to run, but you need to be focused on what the players get out of it and how it works in play as the first priority, not as an interesting side effect.
Your “system” - the crunchy numbers bit, the magic, the calls, the death counts, the bean bags, the Nerf guns, whatever it is - is a mechanism to create the kind of gameplay you want, not an end in itself.
Once more: System is a mechanism to create the kind of gameplay you want, not an end in itself.
Photo from the first event of Slayers LRP, by @tomgarnett
4. PLAYTEST THOROUGHLY
Take every possible opportunity to playtest. Give your mechanics, your setting, your character creation and your fight system to fellow LARPers. Give them to LARPers whose opinions you disagree with, who like a different type of game to you, who you argue with on the internet. Give them to friends and family. Give them to total newbies and ask them how accessible they are. Ask them to murder your darlings. Swallow your pride and take all feedback with equanimity - use it to hone and refine your game. Don’t feel the need to change everything someone objects to, but understand where the objection comes from and how you would meet it from a paying customer.
Don’t try to please everyone “just enough” (unless you are trying to run a national, professional-level game you intend to make a lot of money from, or a local system in a town that has no other LARPs and which you want to have a wide appeal to local nerds); please your target audience as much as you can, and make it very clear who that audience is and what sort of game you are running. Hard work during the playtest will help you articulate these things, and clearly signpost who this game is designed for - and who it’s not designed for.
One useful project management system that my friends Crazy Donkey LARP use when receiving feedback about games is the Stop, Start, Continue heuristic. They ask their audience segment to tell them about things they didn’t enjoy (that they should Stop doing in their games), things they felt were lacking that they should Start doing, and things which worked well which they should Continue doing.
Photo from the first event of Split Worlds, by @tomgarnett
5. THINK ABOUT THE BUY-IN
What is the minimum amount someone needs to know to functionally play this game, and how long will it take them to absorb that information?
If you really care about your game setting, you’ll be overflowing with cool tidbits of history and costume advice and setting material. That is great - and all to the good for stoking the fires of keen from already keen players! But a huge volume of game material (such as, much as I love it, the Empire wiki) can be really offputting for a new player. It’s in your interests to boil down “the basics” as far as possible, and present them in a clear, obvious one-pager which allows a new player to quickly and easily absorb them. This also helps accessibility for people who have issues reading, or absorbing, a large volume of text at once.
The “At-a-Glance” pages for the six Cultures of Odyssey LARP (now, tragically, ended) are a really good example of how the game writers used a single format to boil down a high volume of culture-specific setting material into a series of representative fragments that gave a new player all the information they need to quickly play a character from that IC culture. Here and here are examples.
In system terms, this is a pretty successful attempt to collate several pages of Odyssey rules into as-basic-as-possible summaries for the reader in a hurry.
The Empire Game Overview is another good page, and the Combat Rules page for Empire is an example of the “Bullet Point / Expand” format that can make it easier for some people to absorb complex rules and system information.
Photo from the first event of Tales Out Of Anchor, by @tomgarnett
6. KIT & COSTUMING
When contemplating what costume looks like for your setting, you should be thinking on two levels: Firstly, what makes the characters look cool and iconic (and, assuming your setting has different classes, nations, professions or cultures which are distinguished by kit, what is obviously different about each one); but secondly and more importantly, what do your players have access to?
Once again here, understanding your target audience is key. For a small, local weekly game that runs for a few hours on a Saturday and targets university students, your costume briefs need to be realistically achievable by people with a low budget and time constraints. For a £250 three-dayer in a castle, you can probably assume your target audience has a bit more spare cash to splash out on frock coats or chainmail or EL wire. If your target audience already has a certain type of kit in abundance - Medieval armour, or Roller Derby kneepads, or leather jackets - build that into your briefs.
Do your best to provide photographic examples of costumes in advance so that players can see what sort of “look” they strive for. When writing costume briefs, pick one or two clear, simple, iconic and easy elements for each brief - like “wide sash around the waist” or “brightly coloured headgear” - and try not to crowd the brief with too many elaborate suggestions for the perfect look. Your players will pleasantly surprise you.
Be aware of body shape and size accessibility when writing your costume briefs. “Empire line” or “broad shoulders” or “ethereal, floaty, elfin clothing” may all sound iconic and straightforward to you, but they are all examples of clothing which disproportionately favours particular body shapes; steer away.
Think about where your monster/crew kit comes from; do you expect crew to self-costume or will you be buying kit for them? What does a properly stocked crew kit room look like? How does that affect your budget?
Photo from Hades, by Oliver Facey
7. SEPARATION OF POWERS
When you’re putting your game team together, clearly define what each role means - who’s responsible for what - and write down those responsibilities somewhere everyone on the team can see them. An amorphous blob of “the refs” which slowly evolves into proper working practices is unlikely to be as efficient as starting out with a head of site & logistics, a head of setting coherency, etc.
You can always change and modify these terms of reference as you go on, but setting them out clearly at the start will cut out an awful lot of drama later down the line.
Try to avoid having any individual make big important setting, system or plot decisions on their own; everyone, no matter how authoritative, should have their work checked by at least one other person who has the power to veto or bring their material to discussion.
If you can, appoint a “conscience” early in the game design process. That person’s job is to stand behind you every time you’re about to make an important decision or rules call, or finalise a plot, or do something you think is really cool, and ask “What about player agency?” and “But how do the players interact with this?” and “What effect does this have on the players?”
Photo from Gruntz, by Oliver Facey
8. CREW
Where is your crew from? How do you keep crew coming back for more? How many crew do you need to run a successful game?
If you’re starting up a local small linear style system, inculcating an early culture of “crew one / play one” is a good way to keep a regular stream of crew available for more. For medium systems, you might implement a “crew lottery” where people who crewed the last game get favourable placement for tickets for the next event, or discounts on future tickets. You should also do your best to include crew incentives - you’d be surprised how little “bennies” like hats or t-shirts help cement a sense of group identity and belonging among your crew cohort.
Out of the number of crew you need to run your ideal event, 2/3rds will book, and half of that number will actually show up. Be prepared and write your encounter based on low crew numbers as a contingency.
All photos from this set are from the first games of new systems, or one-off games.
