I feel terrible asking out of towners, who are already paying massive transport costs, for extra money. I’ve considered charging Aucklanders $10 to stay on site, but then I’m likely to be hitting the poor students.
(I basically hate charging people money)
Maybe a tiered system where by default you pay for bunk space but students, out-of-towners, and community services card holders get it discounted/free?
Staying on site is great and it is a little sad not everyone can stay. I’d pay for the privalege to stay.
Looking at my costs, its $50 for the full event, $25 for food, approximately $50-60 worth of fuel, I’m lucky enough to have found all my costume for nought (since I have gear in my garage) and then misc. costs of say $20. Not to mention sometimes carting Hamiltonians there and back home with me, for which I expect a donation but often get nothing. (Cost at ~$150)
Coming to any Auckland weekend event is of similar cost, which typically include accomodation as a standard feature ($75-85 is what I expect to pay for the game alone) so even with an additional $10 its not higher than my standard game budget.
Those further afield than me face even greater costs.
And for students, finding similar cash must be quite an ask. I can tell you the cost alone already scares people off.
End points:
If camping or communal arrangements were available however, I would expect their cost to be lower. Offer a lower cost option rather than making staying more expensive. And sadly, camping in August would be effing terrible. We would also need full time security for this kind of arrangement.
Have you thought about doing fundraising to keep the costs to attendees down? Supermarkets and the like are generally willing to let non-profits have sausage sizzles on-site on weekends, and they’re pretty good moneymakers.
It would be good if we could afford to hire Mowgli without charging people more.
In the worst case if the con size in 2011 is around 95 people, that might mean sucking it up and tightening the budget somewhat for that year. But I doubt it will send us into the red.
If we get more like 120 people in 2012, having hired Mowgli probably won’t affect how we budget.
I think we’re almost certain to 120 people by 2012, so it’s only one year of slight budget risk, a risk that can be mitigated by keeping belt-tightening as an option (e.g. no big hay-like decorating expense allowed).
95 would require us to have 100% retention of everyone that turned up this year, plus find another 25 people on top of that. If we manage, we’ll be in the black. If we don’t see quite as much growth and only get to, say, 85, then we are about $350 in the red.
An unpleasant problem: cater for expected demand, and face the risk of a big loss if it does not eventuate. Don’t cater for it, and face the risk of unhappy people or lower first-round attendance. Either way, not good.
Add a Paypal donation button to the diatribe site? I’m willing to help fund the event, beyond my own attendance and airplane costs. Not sure how much I could contribute; probably not the whole amount by myself, but I’d much sooner help pay the balance than see people miss out on Chimera.
Or (and here’s a thought) they could just run some theatreforms as fundraisers, and charge an extra $5 as a way of pre-covering any shortfall. And if it doesn’t eventuate, then NZLARPS will have that money available to spend on props etc for the benefit of the community.
I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. We can call them Chimera warm ups! 
We’ve had requests for a Spy Hard rerun, I’d like a Camelot rerun (please Ryan please! I’ll do all the logistics!), and Blair was talking about a TJS rerun. Oh, and A Dead Man’s Chest might draw some folk in the summer when it may not hail.
I’d love to play Spy Hard and TJS. And do I recall hearing murmurings of re-running the KapCon LARP from last year too?
[quote=“Anna K”]I feel terrible asking out of towners, who are already paying massive transport costs, for extra money. I’ve considered charging Aucklanders $10 to stay on site, but then I’m likely to be hitting the poor students.
(I basically hate charging people money)[/quote]Y’know, it’s already a pretty good deal for a weekend out of town. You know well in advance when it’s going to be, so can book cheap flights, the admission fee is less than the cost of a concert ticket, the catering costs are insanely cheap, and you can travel with other people and share taxi costs. I seriously don’t think a token bunk charge is going to affect the out-of-town people’s decision to come or not come. I figure it’s worth thinking about, anyway.
Hey, could a moderator maybe split out the discussion of stuff for Next Year from the stuff about This Year?
Done
Yeah, I really enjoyed “Renunion” and was thinking of running it indoors sometime in the pre-Chimera winter months of next year.
Seconded!
Also the “Chimera warm-ups” (or sneak previews/teasers?) sound brilliant. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to participate in them myself but I think it would be really helpful for people to get more used to playing and/or running them. Sort of trial runs with less pressure than “OMG CHIMERA!” and maybe that would end up meaning it’s easier for Anna to find people willing to run slots when the time comes.
Seconded!
[/quote]
Thirded!
Even if I don’t have time to re-run Camelot before Chimera 2011, it’s all written up with instructions for running it. Anyone is welcome to run it.
[quote=“JanetLin”]
Also the “Chimera warm-ups” (or sneak previews/teasers?) sound brilliant. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to participate in them myself but I think it would be really helpful for people to get more used to playing and/or running them. Sort of trial runs with less pressure than “OMG CHIMERA!” and maybe that would end up meaning it’s easier for Anna to find people willing to run slots when the time comes.[/quote]
You know if it was a scifi-ish larp we could set you up on a laptop on Skype and you could totally be an ‘interactive’ computer / AI type deal, an extra GM, computer that actually answers your questions 
[quote=“Ryan Paddy”]Con size (average non-Flagship round attendance) has done this:
2008: 37
2009: 48 (130% annual growth)
2010: 74 (154% annual growth)
Next year we might expect a con size of anything between about 95 and 120, depending on whether annual growth peaks or continues to trend exponentially. If 2/3 of those players want accomodation, then between about 63 and 80 will want to stay.
If my upper prediction is correct, there will be 26 people without bunks. Some overflow next year could be handled by sleeping some folks on mattresses in the small dining hall, or camping.
By the same sort of logic, the flagship might expect about 110 to 120 players next year, assuming we had 95 this year.[/quote]
I don’t know how this impacts your maths, Ryan, but I did some playing with the registration spreadsheets this evening and here are some more numbers for you. Over 3 years, we have had 133 different individuals attend Chimera. That means our pool of attendees is actually much larger than the number of people we have at any one time.
35 people have attended all three Chimeras
32 have attended two out of the three (15 have attended the last two consecutive years, 6 have attended first and third, and 11 attended the first two years but not this one)
66 people have attended only one Chimera (12 of those attended 2008, 15 of those attended 2009, 39 of those attended 2010)
Type of Attendance
2008: 54% of people stayed for the full weekend, 24% came for partial weekend, and 22% for just the flagship
2009: 70% of people stayed for the full weekend, 8% came for partial weekend, and 22% for just the flagship
2010: 76.5% of people stayed for the full weekend, 9% came for partial weekend, and 13.5% for just the flagship
It sounds like people are becoming more likely to play the whole weekend. Because there’s such high consistency of quality games across the con, presumably, and maybe because people who like “big” games can increasingly find one in any round. However, the growth in full-con attendance is decelerating (54% / 70% / 76.5%).
Reading into your “unique individual” stats, I gather this was the number of unique individuals each year:
2008: 35 + 6 + 11 + 12 = 64
2009: 35 + 15 + 11 + 15 = 76 (19% year-on-year growth, 72% of all previous attendees re-attended)
2010: 35 + 15 + 6 + 39 = 95 (25% year-on-year growth, 71% of all previous attendees re-attended)
So,the proportion of those who attended in previous years who return hasn’t changed.
The growth in the “con size” statistic I used doesn’t just represent new people, it also represents attendees playing more rounds. That trend must tail off, so it won’t be responsible for continued “con size” growth. However, it appears that despite the growth in full-attendence having already started to decelerate this year, the con size growth still accelerated because of the 39 first-time attendees. I’m predicting we’ll continue to see a growth in first-time attendees, as word of the quality of the con spreads.
The only question is around your bubble of WW larpers that came to Chimera for the first time this year. Did they create a one-off surge in con size? I doubt it. Even if there aren’t other groups of potential players out there (and I suspect there are), I still predict the WW players will help create an expanding word-of-mouth effect by telling new people about Chimera. So yeah, I still predict we’ll see Chimera with a con size of 95 to 120 next year, with about 110 to 130 unique attendees, and about 110 to 120 in the flagship.