Larp Conference - Theory, Discussion and E-Books

Looks interesting. I love some of the ideas. That said, what on earth is ‘stuffing a game’ all about? It’s not a term I’ve encountered…

Prepping your game materials, traditionally by stuffing them into envelopes.

This has never been a complicated thing for any game I’ve played in, and I struggle to see how you could fill an hour and a quarter talking about it.

It also seems like the discussion there may also be wandering towards putting together all the materials for others to run your game, but I’m not sure.

Nope. It really is just getting it into envelopes.

fairescape.wordpress.com/2014/07 … -stuffing/
fairescape.files.wordpress.com/ … alarp.pptx

From the context, I get the sense that their games are much bigger. 3GMs to stuff a 4-hour game? What the hell are they all doing?

For an 60-80 person game? Yeah, you could put a lot of person hours into that. Putting in a lot of handouts and ability cards can really add up for a large game.

When I was preparing to run “The Final Voyage of the Mary Celeste” for Hydra, it took me about four or five hours to stuff envelopes for it. It’s a 19 character game. It was monstrously complex

I agree, for a big game. But the average game size in the Intercon community (which is where this came from) is about 20, with some going as high as 40 or 50. Though there are specific formats such as weekend-length games or the MIT games wit their grand-strat style influence systems and envelope-driven “shadowruns” which you’d obvious expect to require a lot more effort.

I found Flight of the Hindenburg really taxing to stuff the first time we ran it in Auckland for Chimera 2008.

It’s not just character sheets but name tags, ability cards and item cards. Then there’s paper set dressing props too. Printing it all and getting it into envelopes even for 40 characters can be very time-consuming.

Do we know what the suggestions in the talk were?

[quote=“Ryan Paddy”]I found Flight of the Hindenburg really taxing to stuff the first time we ran it in Auckland for Chimera 2008.

It’s not just character sheets but name tags, ability cards and item cards. Then there’s paper set dressing props too. Printing it all and getting it into envelopes even for 40 characters can be very time-consuming.[/quote]

Its certainly fiddly, but it still only took me an evening.

See the links upthread. The most important one: check your printer collation settings. Which matters if you’re printing big multipage documents for each character, but not so much if you’re restricting yourself to a page of character and a page of rules/background.

In the comments, Fair Escape talks of getting 10 or even 14-page character sheets for some (4-hour) games. I’m quite boggled by that.

Intercon O Precon events. Again there’s a heavy focus on the practicalities - set dressing, props, game design, systems. But there’s also some theory stuff. The one I’m really looking forward to reading afterwards is “Writers are total cocks” (because I’m sure we are, just as GMs are bastards, players are scum, and Nordic larp is toss).

There’s some fascinating stuff there:
[ul]
[li] Turning a Work of Fiction Into a LARP[/li]
[li] All LARP is Local: Running Games Outside Your Home Group[/li]
[li] “Family Tree” History of US Larp (they’re going to try and build one)[/li]
[li] Using Querki for LARP Creation and Management [/li]
[li] Intellectual Property Issues in Game Design[/li]
[li] How to do a Small Weekend Games Writing Workshop (the secret of BYOG and Peaky)[/li]
[li] Building a Strong and Welcoming LARP Community[/li][/ul]

The “Stuffing” talk is now up here:

larpoutofcharacter.wordpress.co … /stuffing/

NEIL - the people who do NELCO and Intercon - are seekign submissions for Game Wrap, their first annual books:

gamewrap.interactiveliterature.org/submissions/

Abstracts are due by July 1. The list of potential topics is quite wide:

Pointer to Diatribe thread about international participation in NELCO:

They’d like to experiment with videoed talks. Anyone interested?

This year’s NELCO lineup:

docs.google.com/document/d/141- … 3qNOA/edit

Looks a bit thinner than last year. Of greatest interest (to me): “Creating Plots that Players Want to Talk About”, “Let’s Run a Big Showcase LARP” (NEIL wants to do something like Monitor Celestra!) and “How to Found and Run a College-based LARP Community”.

I am very interested in that last one; will it be available in it’s entirety anywhere?

They should eventually show up at Larp Out Of Character: larpoutofcharacter.wordpress.com/

I expect their talk will be US-centric (because its unashamedly advice for people at US universities), and focused mainly on theatre-style (because NELCO and that’s what college larp groups do in the US), but some of it should be applicable here.

My advice is largely stuff you’re doing anyway: set up a Facebook group or mailing list so people can find you and talk about larp; organise expeditionary forces to visit major events; run lots of events to provide them with an outlet. The successful US college larp groups run their own cons as well - SLAW, Bubble and Festival; these tend to be free or nominal cost because university groups get cheap venues. To that you could also add a writer’s weekend as a way of producing games / training writers.

The big problem with university groups is churn: people graduate and leave and take their institutional knowledge of how to do it with them. So you need to consciously pass on institutional knowledge and organisation, rather than just rely on community osmosis.

There are current plans to tape the presentation, and if it does get recorded, it will probably end up on LARP OOC and/or the NEIL website. I’m pretty sure there will also be slides to go with it, which will probably end up online much faster.

The talk certainly will be US-university-centric and theater-focused; that’s pretty much the background of the presenter. I would be very curious to hear international thoughts on it, such as in what ways do universities in different countries differ, and how would that affect the way they build LARP communities?

While this presentation is theater-focused, NELCO is making an effort this year to include more live-combat-centric stuff. We tried to include at least one topic in every time slot that would interest live-combat LARPers. The LARP Forums have thus far been mostly populated by live combat LARPers, and I think it’s likely to have a significant effect on attendance.

Out of curiosity, what about the “Creating Plots that Players want to Talk About” discussion interests you? Are there particular questions or sub-topics you hope it addresses? It strikes me as a very broad topic, so I’m not sure what to expect from it.

Mostly terms, exam periods and degree length (=churn time). But in the UK, “university larp club” apparently means boffer, which would be a different set of problems.

(And yeah, presenters should totally present what they know)

Largely general interest; I’m always interested in seeing how other people do it.

I’m going to mention those elements (terms, exam periods, and degree length) to him, see if he has any thoughts on how those interact with the LARP community. I’m sure this differs from country to country, but what are the term, exam period and degree lengths in a typical New Zealand community? I also wonder if how far people travel for university/how far they move once they graduate is a factor – I remember learning that Australians, for example, are far more likely to attend local universities and live at home while they do, while Americans more commonly attend distant universities and live in dorms.

It’d affect things like when you run and don’t run, and, as mentioned, churn length and institutional memory. Loss of institutional knowledge is a significant problem in NZ university gaming clubs.

(The NZ academic year is in two trimesters, March - June and July - November, with a one month exam period / break at the end of each and a 2-week break in the middle. Stuff organised by/for students tends to happen in the breaks, for obvious reasons. We also have a 3-year degree length rather than 4, which means faster churn).

Residency would be a huge factor; if everyone goes home for the summer, you get no larp then. In NZ, that varies a lot by university, but when people study elsewhere they tend to flat with other students rather than live in dorms anyway. When they graduate they often drift north to Auckland or Wellington, or go overseas.