[b]NZLARPs Committee Meeting 14-05-2014
Present: Patrick Cummunskey, Hannah Jackson, Prema Cottingham, Dave Luxton, James Cooper, Clare Stones, Porl Bowdler, Nikki Brown, Reuben Strom, Muppet Brown
Note: These minutes are a record of the discussions and decisions that took place at the meeting. Discussions are not word for word.
Meeting Start:[/b]
Motion to accept minutes from last meeting: 3 ayes, 2 abstentions
Online discussions over the last month:
- Crucible budget email sent to committee to review.
- Hamilton has started up as a NZLARPs region.
Action points from last meeting:
- Crucible budget email sent to committee.
- Affiliation agreement with America – Clare hasn’t rechecked the secretary box but did a really thorough check of it last time. She is confident that the original affiliation agreement with the AMERICA club is not in there.
- Action Point: James to contact America about signing a formal affiliation agreement. He can download a copy of affiliation agreement from the NZLARPs website to use as a basis for this.
- James expecting to get info from Jon Ball soon, expecting that they won’t have changed much from the interim actuals.
Patrick not aware of anything outstanding – to the best of his knowledge all the catering receipts from Colin and David have been sent through. Receipts from Anna and Mike also received. - Prema provided James with receipt for staplegun today. Purchased for Crucible set dressing, will be used in multiple games.
- Dave has sent feedback to Crucible GMs regarding the catering for last game.
- Gear – Nikki has contacted Jordan but no reply yet. Has gone over to see the seeker gear at Patrick’s place, thinks it is safer there for now.
- James has received a Laundromat receipt for Crucible, so we can assume the gear has been cleaned.
- Prema’s run of the Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow game – went well, only one person did not show up. Now have an archery target that NZLARPs can use for other games if wanted, it does belong to Prema and Walter though.
-> Prema will talk to Vanya to see if he wants to use it for Crucible.
Crucible:
- James needs receipts in order to reimburse costs, Patrick says he should have access to them via Crucible financials folder online.
- Crucible budget for next game – budgeted on the expectation of 125 players, 75 crew. The props and materials part of the budget is smaller than for the last game.
- Day games not included in budget; any profit from day games will go towards props.
- Colin will be expanding catering menu next time around, but availability restricted next game. This means he needs someone else to do prep work during leadup, including shopping and preparing some food during the weekend.
- Food is budgeted at $17 per head.
- Nikki – suggests asking Robbo if he is willing to chef/lead the kitchen for next game.
- Late withdrawal fee included to prevent drop-outs close to game.
- Accomodation – has a base requirement of paying for 180 people, if we have more than this will not be charged extra for cost.
- Last time, the store hall wasn’t used due to wet weather, as was firewood. -> Venue charged us a reduced cost.
Next game, they do plan to use this hall for plot and to reduce night noise. - Last game, there were some late drop-outs due to weather. There were also some people who had to be chased up a lot to see if they were coming. About 40 or 50 NPCs did not show, due to the cyclone. One person was unable to attend, but transferred their payment to someone else.
- So far 70 players have signed up for the next weekend game, as have 10 crew.
- The game does not conflict with university exams. It’s scheduled for about a month before study leave.
- Props and materials budget is for Seeker gear (both specific and generic costume), additional weapons, set dressing. The GMs are trying to keep unreusable, specific things to a minimum. Patrick is saving a lot doing laser cutting through the University, for example for reagent tokens. There is potential for doing set dressing on this as well.
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Catering:
Prema - Would players get a discount if their diet is not being catered for? For example, vegan, gluten free, allergies.
Nikki – People with allergies not being able to eat some of the food is a big issue for those people. Also, the camp location is far away from places that sell food supplies. - Patrick – Can provide a discount; however, if people are completely self-catering, they must be self catering.
- Budgets for previous games:
Nikki and Muppet – have the Teonn budgets, happy to email them to Patrick. Nikki did some massive analysis of the actuals for last few years as part of gear research, so we do have access to material going back to Wolfgangs and Ravenholm. - Budget for this game:
- Patrick happy to make budget changes closer to time if needed, for example removing school hall cost again and reducing prop reimbursement. Good relationship with the hall.
- James suggested staggering the budget, so that prop and material costs are contingent on the number of people that have paid, and so the money available increases with the number of people paid up.
We have decided against this – Teonn didn’t have to work within a staggered budget, and also people often pay quite close to the game. This would mean these funds would only become available for prop building close to the game, which is clearly impractical. - The current GM team is comprised of Mark, Linda, Vanya, Dave, Claire (quartermaster) and Patrick. Gene, Porl – additional storytelling team. Beth and Jackie – Logistics/communications, Jordan – Gear. Jon – treasurer.
- The quartermaster will be closer to the crew room, and some GMs will be based in the crew room for the next game.
- The team is looking at running some crew only events, to train the crew up on rules and create new gear. We have a lot of cosplayers coming through who have fantastic costume ideas and are very keen on sewing days/gear making days.
- Reuben wants the Armageddon advertising to be targeted towards Crucible, but wants there to be a system in place to take care of new players. Patrick – this needs to be driven by senior crew. Porl – the crew divided into small teams last Crucible game.
- Prema – a buddy system could be implemented, this worked well for the crew at Teonn.
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Reporting:
Hannah – How often do the GM team expect to report back to the committee during the leadup to the game?
Patrick – haven’t thought about this too much, only if there is a list of things to bring forward.
Nikki – no other game has had to do this.
Patrick – Negative feedback from the community has meant that some of the GMs have questioned why they are running the game.
Prema – Would like to be kept informed of the number of sign ups and number of people paid. Updating via Diatribe is fine.
Prema – Motion to accept the Crucible budget. Seconded by Nikki. 5 ayes, one abstention.
- Porl – Crucible GM team was considering pulling out of NZLARPs and running as a standalone game because of criticisms from committee and from a few members of the community.
Finance report:
- James – ANZ has got back to us with details of what they offer in terms of bank accounts. While the details generally sound good, they charge a fee per transaction.
Marketing report:
Armageddon:
- Reuben has got all the marketing gear off Vanya. Has sent some of this down to Wellington for their Armageddon stand – small photo board plus photo albums. These can be posted back up to Auckland if necessary.
- Thinks we will get a lot more out of the Armageddon stand if we have strong advertising for current games.
- Thinking of better ways to run the stand, to make it more interactive and more fun.
-> Recruiters for each NPC legion, who can bicker with each other.
-> Market through Cosplay groups (Muppet)
-> Frontier guys – Super keen to set up right next to us and sell costumes.
-> Would be awesome to have Paddywhack on the other side as well; however, the cost of stalls is expensive, especially for merchants.
-> Porl – set things up so people can actually have battles.
Hannah – Risk of people running off with things or using weapons inappropriately.
Prema – Make it so each larper has a weapon or two, and they are responsible for that weapon. - Nikki – do we have a stall organized already?
- Muppet – Cosplayers had costume talks at Armageddon, about other things they can use costumes for. -> Muppet to forward email to Reuben about this.
- Muppet – suggests a Best of Chimera day, where we rerun games after Armageddon.
- Reuben – would like to have a Crucible day game shortly after. Would also like some theatreform games for shortly after.
- Prema – happy to run Robin Hood again.
Website: - Muppet – Who owns “What is Larp” website? -> Nikki – think it is Craig Nelsien, as he also owns the Diatribe website.
- Prema –NZLARPs needs to be updated.
- Muppet – suggestion that the Crucible site could be a branch of the NZLARPs site – this means that the website funding for Crucible can be spent on hosting the whole site.
- Muppet and Reuben happy to write a proposal for making the website easier to edit, and put it on the committee forum.
- Hannah – timeframe – by Chimera, for national committee to make a decision on proposal.
- We want it to be user friendly, and not built up right from the ground.
- Action Point – Reuben and Muppet to create a proposal for how to improve the NZLARPs website.
Gear report:
- Nikki – with Anna Klein’s help, analyzed all the actuals for the last 6 years, to determine how the figures would turn out if crew were to bear 25% of extra costs and players were to bear 75%.
- It turned out that there is no significant difference between gear fees charged under a percentage system or a flat fee system, for most game sizes. The difference per head is only a couple of dollars. The differences are larger for smaller games.
-> Conclusion – percentage system gives slightly higher fees for big games. Flat fee is capped so it does not. Percentage system gives slightly smaller fees for small games.
A Flat fee would bring in more income, in years with bigger games. - Nikki recommends applying a flat fee for gear, staggered at different game sizes, as it makes it easier for writing budgets. Also yields slightly higher gear fees.
- Chimera is a big outlier, but Anna is going to send a suggested fee structure to Nikki. Basically it was a dollar per person per individual game they attend.
- Monthly campaigns that use gear would have to be charged in a similar way. However, if the game does not use gear, then there would be no gear charge.
- Prema – is it still necessary to charge for gear, given that we don’t have to pay for gear storage anymore?
- Nikki – thinks this is still required – there are still gear maintenance costs, and costs for building shelves.
- If the profit the society earns in a year is too high, minus costs/depreciation, then we have to pay tax.
- -> Action Point: James to follow up yearly profit/loss to see how we are placed for this year. Do this by next meeting.
- Nikki – recommends we vote for a position on day games/weekend games, and other game types can be on a case-by-case basis.
- If day games are using a free venue but are using gear, then they will still need to submit a budget.
- Reuben – not convinced that charging an overheads fee (which goes mostly to gear) is of benefit to the community, for games that do not actually use gear.
Should projects be charged if they do not see a tangible benefit? - Porl – The fee could persuade games to run outside of NZLARPs instead.
- Nikki – Think we did decide to make it opt-in for games not using gear.
- Hannah – we don’t need to accumulate money to cover large overheads anymore, given that we don’t have $4000 to raise per year for gear any more.
- Muppet – We could start the fees at a lower level – eg. halve the amounts – as an intro system.
- Prema – This could become a problem with new games, they may consider running outside NZLARPs instead of paying fee.
-> Action Point: Nikki to run some lower overhead fee estimates through her models. - We will delay voting till the next meeting.
- Nikki - What would be a reasonable total overhead to aim for each year?
- Reuben – What are the overheads per year currently?
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Would be good to have all the costs – eg. koha, trailer rego and insurance and wof – documented out, so we know exactly what the costs are.
This is important for transparency, so we don’t charge a faceless tax.
This would provide us with a resource to share with new GMs, so they know what profits are spent on. - Mike, Nikki and Phillip are going over to Brad’s garage tomorrow night to measure it out.
- What about games running in Wellington? Maybe if an Auckland game runs in Wellington, give the overhead fee to Wellington in good faith?
- Nikki – Carnival Costumes on North Shore is wanting to affiliate with NZLARPs.
Upcoming games:
- Skirmish coming up this weekend.
- Chimera coming up at end of August.
Meeting Close: 10:02pm.