Some games go for complex character set up, but plays with loose rules. Like NMC. This works for them. But if you are approaching it cold, then the many pages of skills and their descriptions can be daunting.
OWBN is similar. Complex pages of set up, but if you need to do anything, theres heaps of people around who will try to explain things.
I see things like Nibbles and Mayday as entry level games due to the need for no rules, just an imagination.
I had a feeling that the comment about NERO was going to be met with derision
Back on topic? You guys can bash NERO in another thread, I’ll even come join you.
It would enable people who dont know people in larp to rock on up…recruiting people we know is a little easier as they tend to be more open to LARP. But pre-gens would allow people not fimiliar with LARP or people within the community to pop into the frame easily…It may not be even used but just offering the service would cultivate a much more open and inviting enviroment.
GM’s wouldn’t neccaseraly be involved to any great extent either…when one of the Mentor’s submits their character they may submit an additional character that can be for the use of anyone that wants to play but finds the character creation process intimidating. The GM’s can offer to set new players up with these characters and by extension an experianced player that will help them through their first experiance.
Thoughts?
I think it’s a good idea, but one that we should consider more directly when people are actually stumbling on the community regularly without being shown by a friend. It sounds like a potential solution to a problem which we aren’t facing just yet.
Getting back onto topic, we have figured out that one thing we need to work on is presenting our games as more accessible, rather than necessarily making them more simple-- I think that the systems currently in use are pretty much as difficult to get into as anything we’ve ever run and it hasn’t stopped us from bringing in new people before now.
The other thing we need to do is advertise, like, for real. Placing a few copies of Immersion in the Medieval Shop and Costume Magic is a good idea but not enough, as those are somewhat esoteric establishments.
We need to get some cheap posters up around town, in areas frequented by students or pulp culture fans-- I suggest a photo shoot or two to get promo material for each of the major LARP campaigns running at the moment. We need some imagery on the order of the stuff done for the flashy Mordavia rulebooks.
After these posters are made we strategically place them around. Costume Magic has enjoyed our business for some time and was fine with putting Immersion on their desk, so I don’t think it’d be a far cry to put some posters in their entrance. Areas frequented by students are also excellent-- I’ll put up a few in the common room at MAINZ.
Beyond this, I think having promotional material for Stargate, Nightmare Circle, 2014 and Ravenholme spread between Borders, Vagabond, Heroes For Sale, and somewhere like the Aotea Centre or the Civic would be beneficial. (You know those shelves with flyers for what’s on in Auckland?) Borders is the kind of place where H.P. Lovecraft and science fiction fans would see the posters; Vagbond and Heroes for sale get healthy traffic of the kind of people who would also enjoy TNC, but especially Stargate and 2014.
Each of these posters, obviously, would have links to nzLARPS on them, and prominently display links to their own subforum.
I was just putting the idea out there as the cultivation of a friendly inviting enviroment would encourage those that do come to a single game to return to future games. As well as encourage those that may stumble across the community to come rather than skip across to something else, and plus we can then say “You should come to X you wouldn’t even have to create a character”…
It couldn’t hurt to have the system in place for when we have people start to come.
Also, I think we absolutely should get a booth (or some promo material at the very least) at Armageddon this october. A handful of GMs and committee representatives can man the booth, handing out rulebooks and answering questions. Decorate the booth with a combination of photos from games and promotional material.
Adam West is going to be there. There WILL be nerd traffic.
We’ve discussed this before and dismissed it on the grounds that it is too expensive. Perhaps its time we looked into it again, and see if they have anything special for a non-profit organisation promoting New Zealand creativity.
Scotty Marks has been suggesting to me for months that we should send a copy of Immersion to every secondary school in the greater Auckland area, if not the country, with a letter of introduction and an offer of a cheap subscription ($20 for the year or something). Matt Moore was pointing out to me earlier how high schools are amongst the easiest places to recruit larpers. Most of us here were recruited back in our high school days.
Selwyn is a sure bet for this, as it’s turned out many active members of the community.
[size=150]Sales 1.01[/size]
This is the most basic rule of Sales. Unfortunately there seems to be a total lack of comprehension of this on this forum. While the Auckalnd LRP scene offers an excellent selection of high quality boutique games, this is not always what the main stream audience wants. For the fact that NERO is a crap rule system, but there are reasons why it is one of the most successful LRP franchises ever. It is because NERO offers what the public wants. So offer games the public wants and not what the organisers want.
This one is harder. Probably the biggest negative influence in Live Role Play are power players. From our experience we have noted that one power player will drive away between 20 to 50 players, many of whom would be much better players than the power player if given a chance to develop. This figure of 20 to 50 players per power player assumes that you have strict controls on the power player. In the Auckland LRP scene there appears to be no controls over the power players and in fact they are actively encouraged. I would suggest that you will lose a lot more than 50 people per power player.
No problems here that I can see.
You have to let people know that you are there. This is especially true in the case of a downturn in business. When in trouble, advertise more. There have been several markets identified in this thread that should be targeted. Unfortunately there is a certain group trying actively to discourage this advertising on the grounds that it will bring in unsuitable players, i.e. the general public. LuRPers start off as general public. For every twenty of the genral you see you might keep one. But you still have to talk to those twenty!!!
I know all the above is incredibly basic, but this thread seems to be ignoring the basics. Good luck on your recruiting, we are going to have to go hard down here.
I find two problems with this. I believe that NERO is exactly counter-productive to what we want to achieve - we’re already getting complaints for being to complex up here, and we balk at the NERO system. I think the NERO system is very much a product for the American (country, not RPG club) audience, and it’s been previously discussed that their larp value system differs significantly from ours.
I strongly believe Alista’s point of the importance of running a fantasy game. I just don’t believe NERO is it. For more discussion on NERO, please see the seperate thread.
My other point is a much more minor one, but I have to point out that every single one of us here is in this hobby for love, not money. We do it because we love it, not because we want to make a profit. Therefore, it’ll be hard to convince organisers to run games they’re entirely uninterested - after all, what’s the benefit for them? (Benefit in this context can refer the enjoyment derived from running something you love) I think the trick is to find an organiser who wants to the the big fantasy game, rather than conscript someone who has no interest into it.
If you’re referring to my comment about bringing in people who aren’t gamers, I never said we should not allow these people to play. I said that I was not going to waste effort trying to convert people who aren’t interested in geeky pasttimes to start off with-- i.e. Rugby players, middle-aged accountants, etc.
My stance on “unsuitable players” boils down to that I would rather put up a poster in Vagabond than in Supre. Fair enough?
[quote=“FauxCyclops”]
If you’re referring to my comment about bringing in people who aren’t gamers, I never said we should not allow these people to play. [/quote]
Not what I referring to, different issue altogether.
In terms of the market, I think there’s an interesting crossover between Brian’s comments about geeks and Alista’s comments about giving people what they want. I’m not a fan of identifying people as geeks (the whole celebrating geekdom meme makes me quesy) but to be approximate I’d say that Alista’s ideal of a NERO-like fantasy larp will attract what Brian’s idea of geekier people is: people who are already into roleplaying, enjoy more complex rules, want elves-and-dwarves-and-orcs fantasy and are more typically male (tabletop roleplaying is skewed heavily towards men, same with online roleplay I think).
But there is another market for larp, which I’d call something like “arty” people, again being horribly stereotypical. People more into the drama and arts aspects of larp. Less interested in rules. Less obsessed with generic fantasy. More gender-balanced. A generic fantasy campaign is not necessarily the best way to attract these arty people.
In practice, everyone in the world has a bit of geek in them and a bit of artiness, to the extent that the words have meaning at all. A lot of people who lean in the arty direction do tabletop roleplaying too, typically with more of an emphasis on characterisation and storytelling. But I don’t think recruiting purely from tabletop roleplayers is a great idea.
A lot of people who’d be interested in larp don’t already roleplay because most encounters with roleplay are D&D, and a moderately complex generic fantasy larp would be equally offputting. Creating the latter type of larp might attract a lot people if you do it well, but it would be a self-fulfilling prophesy in terms of the type of people it would attract.
For the record, I think St Wolfgang’s looks like an excellent middle ground and a prime game for recruitment. It has the medieval and vampire aspects which will attract conventional roleplaying types, but it’s not the stereotypical roleplay setting, the rules are fairly easy to learn, and I imagine the dramatic emphasis will be fairly high. It should also be pretty interesting to the historical interests crowd and some advertising there is probably warrented.
Don’t confuse “geek” with “tabletop roleplayer”, while tabletop is a large part of what can sometimes define a person as a geek, alot of my friends idendify as part of the geek subculture and either don’t do any tabletop/computer games, or have only a minimal interest in them.
I think the overall market for larpers can be described as “people with an innate interest in becoming part of another world” because no matter how you slice it, ‘arty’ or ‘geek’, the main drawing factor of larp is its appeal something inside that makes you want to be part of creating and telling a story. I can’t describe this very well. What I’m saying is that there has to be a tendency to lend oneself wholeheartedly into a media experience that is common in larpers, that I think is also very predominant in the geek culture.
Just look at the way geeks (which I never use a derogatory term, by the way, it’s what I call myself) go all out for favourite movies and TV shows. They’re the ones that mob premieres in costume, the ones that send millions of letters of complaints when a TV show is cancelled, they’re the ones that write fanfiction…they’re the ones that want to be involved with their media.
This is true, but we could use the fantasy campain to recruit the geekier people and create a different advertising campaign to target the arty types. We have a large selection of larps available at the moment, not just fantasy. I believe our large selection of larps currently is the problem.
Consider also the argument that fantasy is a gateway larp. I started with fantasy because it was safe, familiar ground and after about a year of that, when I felt comfortable with the whole larp malarky, I ran off to try a whole bunch of slightly more esoteric larps.
This is true, I played DnD half heartedly for a while because I wanted the fantasy adventure but it was so slow and we were always rifling through books to look up rules. When Matt handed me the Mordavia rulebook and I read the first page, my instant reaction was “This is what I’ve been looking for!”
For the record, I wouldn’t touch NERO with a ten foot larp-safe pole.
We’ll do our darndest. So help us God. 
[quote=“Anna K”]
How can we get new players?
I believe we need to chase up the lapsed larpers. The ones that attended Mordavia but have not heard of the new scene we have going on. If we could gather their details and send them a friendly email/prospectus showing them what’s new, we may get a few of them back
Invest in promotional materials. Big glossy photos to show people how incredibly awesome we look, and that they too can come play with us. [/quote]
How many times have I suggeseted we do this now?
From another thread back in March:
http://www.diatribe.co.nz/viewtopic.php?t=1262&start=0
Time and again I’ve suggested the email list and that we need to do a better job of keeping our NZLARPs members and following up on those memberships that have lapsed.
Again - Has this been done yet? If not why not?
Should the memberships portfolio have its own officer rather than be held by the Secretary?
What do I have to do to get the committee moving on this?
[quote]
I don’t think so. Larping is a just a way to kill a few hours. It doesn’t have a duty attached.[/quote]
I think I have found the problem. What is your solution ?
I really don’t think that running something other than a mainstream fantasy game is just stroking one’s ego. The community should be and generally is diverse enough in its tastes to handle a draught of games where you slay orcs and play elves, and the campaigns running are labors of love and creative inspiration which their organizers have chosen to share with the community. It comes with the same ego boost as does seeing anything you have created come to fruition and bring people enjoyment.
By this rationale of “please the community, not the organizers”, you are suggesting that David Gemmell writing Wolf In Shadow was an excercise in pure wankery, and he should have stuck to the Rigante or Druss the Legend titles purely because his fans don’t want to read about anything else.
nzLARPS is not a business venture, it’s a creative one. We want to express new and original ideas and I personally want to play in imaginative, original games. I have seen that I am not the only person who feels this way. If we did nothing but slay orcs I would get really fucking bored with slaying orcs, as I’m sure many would.
We are currently waiting for No Man’s Land to go up. The last Mordavia weekend event was in December of last year-- even if it was still running, we’d only have had one Mordavia weekend event since then, and maybe two day games, tops.
The fact of the matter is many newer games have popped up since then, more than have ever been crammed into such a comparatively small space of time, and we are feeling the numbers that were lost when the big campaign finally ended. I don’t believe for half a second that it’s impossible to bring in new people when there isn’t a big swords-and-sorcery game running, nor do I think it’s a matter of masturbating one’s own ego to run something that ISN’T a swords-and-sorcery game.
If the answer to the problem is “run a fantasy game because people want to play a fantasy game, anything else is just an ego trip”, I’m sorely disappointed in my fellow gamers.
[quote]
If the answer to the problem is “run a fantasy game because people want to play a fantasy game, anything else is just an ego trip”, I’m sorely disappointed in my fellow gamers.[/quote]
I am suggesting that such a game can be run as well as other games, rather than having just the the existing games.
I think this clearly demonstrates what I am talking about.