I’ve been wrestling with a touch writers block just recently in terms of my next couple of LRP events. It doesn’t matter the subject matter but there’s been a couple of plot points that I’ve been trying to rationalise with myself as I know my players would pick up on it. It took a couple of weeks but it was taking a walk one lunchtime that a solution then presented itself. So two weeks writing misery (misery is probably the wrong word in this context) for a moment of revelation. This then got me thinking about why I do this in the first place, why do I (and so many others) run these games?
Is it for the money and the fame?
Then I got to thinking that LRP events can be a real pain to run.
- You have to recruit players
- Produce pre-game material for players who may not even book
- Find, book and pay a deposit for a LRP friendly site for you to run your game on
- Badger players who have said they are coming to pay for their place
- Badger players even more to send in character information
- Write character briefs
- Recruit NPC’s / Crew
- Write plot for the game
And at the end of all that,
- Run the damn game (because by the time the start, it is a “damn game”)
I’m sure everyone who has run their own LRP event all have their own thoughts and ideas as to why they would put themselves through it. It can be hours of misery punctuated by moments of joy as you players faces start to put pieces of the plot together and rationalise what is going on. Whether you are running a 3 hour linear, a fest with a thousand people or something even more complex.
As for me, ultimately I’d like to think (perhaps slightly egotistically) that at heart I’m a storyteller and LRP is my methodology for telling my stories.
Critical Path 