Previous LARP Retrospectives

I’ve written several posts focusing on my international LARP adventures, but these were not my first writings on LARP. On my recent games where I’ve been either a GM or lead GM I’ve started writing after game thoughts and look backs. I started writing these things as either a cathartic release or maybe I was trying to say goodbye to a project I would have spent a long time on. These 3 documents were originally published on the UKLTA Laser-Tag LARP pages on Facebook. The first two were after the two Goldrush LARP Campaigns (based on Firefly) and the third is after my most recent weekend event that I was GM on, “The Goodman Protocol”. Witness the highs, the lows and the snatching of defeat from what seemed like a victory. All articles are as they were originally presented and have only been corrected for spelling mistakes I’d missed the first time round.

This first article is from July 2015 and I remember that I was on a bit of a high. I’d finished what I had set out to do and it seemed to have gone quite well…

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A Retrospective of Five Years

The purpose of this article is to go into some of the background of the recently concluded Goldrush campaign. This article will go into plot points, the rules system, and some general observations. It will also try and clarify why certain decisions were taken the way they were.

What was the actual Rubicon Conspiracy?

These games are set around 6 months after the events of the movie Serenity, the fallout from the evidence that was broadwaved is still being felt and the government is only just clinging on to power. Three high-ranking government officials hatch a plan to keep the government in power by both planting fake evidence and perpetrating an alleged terrorist attack. Once discovered, the public would be outraged and then the government would have to crack down with the intention of whipping the public into frenzy, which would then have the hopeful side effect of returning the incumbent president back to power.

Was this always the plan?

Not really, the original outline for Goldrush was as a single weekend event that roughly followed the events of the Dropzone one-day event (albeit in a expanded form with materiel that had to be cut out from the one day event that would ultimately make it back into the campaign proper). The Goldrush name came from the fact that people would be prospecting, trying to make their fortune whilst other stuff happened around them. I have to credit (or blame) Andy Flood for starting the ball running that would lead us to run that first game at Dropzone, as it was a conversation in the aftermath of Dropzone 2009’s The Last Great Adventure discussing what game universes could utilise some of the great costume we had seen that weekend, Firefly was mentioned and one thing led to another.

Why the name Rubicon?

When writing the overall campaign arcs and backstory I would be lying if various TV series or films didn’t inspire me. A big influence on this campaign was the TV series Rubicon which looks at the lives of intelligence analysts whilst at the same time a bunch of government types and industrialists plot a supposed terrorist attack to line their own pockets. It only had a limited run but is definitely worth your valuable time. The term Rubicon is used in the series to describe crossing a point of no return and allegedly dates back to Roman times when Julius Caesar led his armies across the Rubicon on the road to Rome with the intention of overthrowing the current government.

What’s in the Silver Case?

Initially this was a homage to the film Ronin, in that film you never find out what is in the case and I initially intended to do the same but a creative decision taken relatively early on that was that this case had been such a focal point for some people, particularly in that first game (at Dropzone 2010) that it would ultimately need resolving and that’s how we then decided to bring it back into the main plot.  It would have a valuable relic of Earth-that-was as well as a military decoding device that would be needed.  I seem to recall choosing the flag as the relic happened quite quickly on, as it just seemed to fit thematically.

Character Advancement Vs. Player Advancement

Another question that was asked in the early days was about Character Experience Points or XP, would they be any awarded at the end of a game.  This is something that never really featured in the initial design process when we were putting the players handbook together.  There’s been some debate on the relative merits of awarding XP on some of the Facebook LRP pages, with a lot of polarisation on various points.  If I’m honest I’ve never been motivated in point scoring like this usually entails, I’ve always been more motivated by a characters story.  Skills are merely the tools players have to pick in order to give their characters abilities they wouldn’t normally have.   

Thinking on I wouldn’t be averse to including some kind of skill advancement but I would need convincing that there is a desire for this from the player base and that it wouldn’t get in the way of the story as ultimately it is the story that drives me forward.

You get out, what you put in

Some people turn up to LRP events expecting to be entertained and often go home not having had a good time because the plot didn’t revolve around them. Actually there’s two points I’m going to make here: –

• A character background plays a much more important role in a game like this as the Ref team can then write you into the story and make you part of it. This isn’t really possible if you write two lines or say something like “They have a dark history” or “my parents were killed by outlaws, I hunted them down and killed them in revenge”. These really are examples of what not to do at least not without talking to the Ref Team as well. The design team can write stuff for characters if necessary but I’ve always found it’s so much more fulfilling for both parties when working with great source material. Goldrush has given us both extremes when it comes to backgrounds, some were incredibly detailed and a joy to read and others less so but always we worked with what we had trying to give players the best time possible. A more detailed background lets us tie characters together and gives a springboard to role-play when Time In is eventually called.

• A Role Playing Game, whether live action or table top requires interaction with other characters, if you just sit on the side and don’t get involved, again you are not going to get the best out of the game. If you want to stay dark and mysterious at the back of the room, then there’s also a very good chance no one is going to interact with you. A LRP game is not an exercise in point scoring or achievement grabbing like a video game, it’s an interactive experience, and the key word is interactive.

“This isn’t Lost!”

This is a statement I made a couple of times and by that I meant I was never not going to give you the answers to the campaign. I’ve been on some LRP campaign’s that delight in getting you to ask questions and never give you answers; this was not going to be like that. The rough plan was always something along the following lines: –

• Game #1 & #2: Give the Players questions to ask
• Game #3: Give them the answers
• Game #4 & #5: What do they do with those answers?

The original plot for each game was roughly laid out as follows: –

• Game #1: Jacobs
• Game #2: Clinic
• Game #3: Wedding
• Game #4: Trial
• Game #5: ???

The actual sequence of games changed in that the trial of Joshua Morgustein and the Wedding were originally the other way around to how they were produced but we felt that the playing of the audio file (which was always going to be game #3 regardless of plot) would play better against the setting of a trial in a courthouse and also I felt the Morgustein plot needed resolving sooner than it was going to be as it was still in the mind of the players that had been on that first game. Looking back I think I would actually have had the Trial game as Game #2 and move the clinic to Game #3 as I think that would have flowed better but hindsight and all that. Looking back, I think playing the audio could have worked equally well in either game (Trial or Clinic).

Staying on games for a moment, there was a rough plan mapped out for each one right at the beginning, initially only a few bullet points for each event but that would help form the roadmap for the campaign. The only game that was a big unknown was the last one, there was a couple of rough ideas but these really didn’t take any shape until after Game #4 had happened and we had a firmer idea of what the players were intending to do. As an example, the players could have made a deal with the Alliance back on Game #4, it was probably unlikely but it could have happened and I had considered what might then happen to the events of Game #5, as they would have been adapted around that outcome.

From an early point I wanted the ending of the game to fall to the players, I wanted it to be their choice and whilst the ending ultimately might not have been the one I would have liked, I’m incredibly happy that it is the one the players chose and I know how much that decision was debated and agonised over in the time before it actually happened.

Smash it, Twist it, Pull it

I’m a fan of players actually having to do something in order to use their character skill, it’s not always achievable but I’m always on the lookout for a new methodology, this is how the Bop-It’s came to be used. I’m relatively happy at the way the skill system has evolved over the course of the games. Probably the skill that changed the most is Code Breaking, changing from the original method to the one we have now and then adding an additional option with an optional app for smartphones (third party I hasten to add). With a skill it’s often a case of treading the line between playability and realism; it’s all well and good having a great fiz-rep (Physical Representation) but if the player can’t actually do the thing then it becomes a source of frustration.

There are some tweaks coming for Season 2 but the source ideas of the system will be staying roughly the same. A decision taken at the beginning was that there would be no Tabletop system for piloting. To give people some background; in the Star Wars games I’ve been involved in, the various pilots would resolve their battles in a table top game but the universe of Firefly doesn’t really cater for that kind of intense spaceship combat.

Similarly I’m not a fan of pointless skills, or skills you can take that there is no point in taking as there is no opportunity to use them on game. I was and still am very keen that there being an opportunity to use all and every skill that your character has taken.

The Wayward Endeavour

This was always meant as a launching point for characters in that to provide a central hub that would make tying backgrounds together slightly easier for us as refs. There was never a plan to run one of the games on there even though it was considered at several points. Similarly for the named NPC’s, Carter Jacobs had been part of the overall campaign in the back of my mind since the first event at Dropzone and he was always going to be the focus of Game #1 mainly to start sowing the first seeds of the conspiracy plotline. Had the character not been as well received as he was then I did have a couple of backup ideas, one of which was using John Herod (Ellis Billington’s number two on the Endeavour) but that was never needed and his story may now go in a very different direction after the events of Game #5.

Wot no Reavers?

Of all the plot points that got debated during the writing sessions, this is probably the most debated. Reavers are a part of the Firefly universe that we hinted at back in Game #2 where the players got to a planet just after an attack. Whether or not to have them actually appear in the game was something we toyed and debated for Games #3, #4 and #5. Ultimately they didn’t appear because we couldn’t reason a way to do them justice, because they are such an overwhelming force. We were concerned that if deployed we would be looking at a TPK (Total Party Kill), having been on enough Aliens based games, I’ve seen first hand what monsters like that can do. That’s not to say I’m ruling them out of an appearance at a later date though.

Favourite Moments

I will take away a lot of moments from these games but a few do stand out: –

• From the first game when the cryo pod opened and Alex Gage jumping back in surprise and then the look on his face when he sees what’s inside.
• The look on people’s faces when they hear the Stockburn audio file for the first time and they begin to understand what has been going on.
• Emmaline slapping Smudger, I only saw it out of the corner of my eye but it’s that kind if instinctive roleplay I love to see.
• The first IC meal, I wish I could take credit for it but it’s kudos to the players for making this happen.

The Future

I had never planned to carry the campaign on past the fifth game or even from that first Goldrush that I had initially mapped out before Pete and Rob came on board. As I mentioned during the debrief, I’ve been on several campaigns that never really ended and just stopped leaving unanswered questions in their wake. I was determined not to do that so this campaign with these characters so it was always going to end with the fifth game. The idea for a second campaign occurred somewhere between Games #3 and #4. Once again, I have taken a film as inspiration and I have started to map out plot points in a basic sense. Of course a second campaign was only going to happen if there was a demand for it, and apparently there is.

Season 2 will be set in the same universe and the same timeline as Season 1 so events that have happened will be part of that universe and will be referenced as such. Similarly events of Season 1 will now form part of the history of the universe and as such will be included in the next version of the Players Guide as back-story. In terms of bringing characters back, I might ask to bring one or two back as scripted NPC’s but for the most part, however hard it is (and I can sympathise having been there) it is time to say goodbye to these characters.

Conclusion

I think I achieved virtually everything I wanted to with this first season of Goldrush (it still feels weird writing ‘first season’) and I’ve stated several times (in case you missed it) that I’ve been completely overwhelmed by the response and I hope that Season 2 (when it happens) can live up to what has gone before.

James Bloodworth
July 2015

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So, on the whole, quite positive I think. I have a lot of good memories from those games. It wasn’t perfect of course, what LARP is? I do remember riding quite the positive wave after that last game at Fort Widley in June 2015 (the image from the top of the page was a presentation made to me at the end of that last event). When I wrote that retrospection I already had some ideas of what shape I wanted the second campaign to be. Little did I know quite how badly and indeed prematurely, this one would end. This below article was first released in November 2017, from a previous high to something of a real low.

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A Retrospective of Two out of Three Games

If you are reading this then I’m guessing you potentially read my last retrospective on the previous campaign The Rubicon Conspiracy. I wasn’t going to write another after the premature end of the most recent one but maybe I’m trying to find some catharsis. What this document is going to try to do is explore the background of the second Goldrush campaign, try and identify issues and work out where it ultimately went wrong. I’m not trying to project blame onto anyone (with the exception of probably myself but more of that later) but if you feel I am blaming for anything you then it’s not intentional. I’ve always said in games there has to be someone who says either “Yes that’s great” or “No that’s rubbish” and for Goldrush that would be me. As I’m sure Pete and Rob would tell you we had some spirited discussions in the past concerning plot points, prop design and any other element you would care to mention but ultimately, I would call it, as Head Ref, that is my responsibility.

What was the background to the game?

As the Rubicon Conspiracy was coming to its climax, I seem to recall I’d made it pretty clear to the players attending that last game at Fort Widley that this would be the last time they would play their characters. This made a lot of sense to me as I’ve done numerous LARP campaigns that promised a lot but, for various reasons, were never completed or left characters hanging in situations never to be resolved and I was quite determined that Goldrush would not end like that. The first ideas for a second series of games started percolating somewhere between running Games 4 and 5. Once again I had taken inspiration from a recently watched film (and guilty pleasure), in this case The First Great Train Robbery, the idea of a heist of some kind seemed to make a lot of sense and fit a lot of the criteria I was already conceptually drawing up. Perhaps even more so when you consider so many of the original episodes revolve around a robbery of some kind (“The Train Job”, “Ariel” and “Trash”). Looking back, it strikes me now that if Rubicon was our “Serenity”, then Winter Queen would be our regular episode of “Firefly”, I wonder now if that was one of the underlying problems?

Ultimately wherever the story would take us for the second season, early on I was quite keen on it not being quite as epic as the galactic conspiracies that were such key points of the first campaign. The end of the last game seemed to finish on such a high I found myself caught up in its wake and duly announced that “Goldrush will return” in classic end-of-James-Bond-film-style. That was in June 2015, the inability to book a suitable site on a suitable date for 2016 meant that any return would be delayed (of course my being in hospital in March 2016 and three months off work took its toll as well). I do seem to recall that when we were able to secure two dates in 2017 it was too tempting to resist, I can still remember when the countdown app on my phone said there were 500 days left until the first game.

What was the plan?

As before I had planned the Winter Queen campaign as three acts, the set-up, the chase, the pay-off or as I would call them, the funeral, the robbery, the getaway. WQ1 went pretty much as planned and I would say I was relatively happy with the execution. WQ2 was obviously going to be the robbery, I hadn’t written anything specific for the players to do as such, I’d left various potential plot points dangling as potential ways in as I wanted that part to be player led and would be something I would react to.

I’ll probably talk about this more later but when it became apparent that WQ3 would not happen due to the low numbers on WQ2 the majority of the plotlines then got dumped (ironically if you read my previous retrospective) a full on Reaver attack, I had finally decided that the time was right and had started looking into potential makeup and costumes for them. As it was the majority of the second game happened quite organically and I was relatively happy with the way it panned out, we were able to give some characters the closure they had been seeking if it wasn’t particularly well (from my perspective) executed. The third game would have been the getaway, a double cross and then Reavers, I would have brought back characters from WQ1 to try and bookend the campaign of games.

Was there anything planned post Winter Queen?

Bizarrely there was, but not a campaign but rather a series of short one-shot games set in the same universe tentatively called Goldrush Stories, I hadn’t got much further than that (not even talking to Pete and Rob) apart from a couple of ideas in note form on my iPad which will probably now not happen.

Thicker than Water?

One problem with the Rubicon story (from my perspective anyway) was that the player group had no common background and were thrown together by circumstance. Whilst there is nothing wrong with this approach (and how realistically most player groups in a lot of other LARP’s come together) I was keen to try something different. The idea of a family unit was a relatively early component of the overall game design and lead naturally to the idea of producing the family tree, so everyone would see their place and how they were related to each other (I didn’t realise how much of a pain it would be to put together and if I ever do another one I’ve learned some interesting lessons in terms of design).

Having every character being related to each other could (at least I thought it would) open up another avenue of creating tension among the player group. The idea of everyone coming together for a funeral as well was a very early design component (I’ve often found it hard to resist a classic cliché). I still stand by the decision as I think it helped generate some of the best roleplay I’ve seen for a while, even more so on the second (and would turn out to be last) game.

Hard vs Soft: The Skills Question

Similarly, with the hacking skill, we went from having nothing to using Pocket GameBoy’s running Tetris to the web based system we had one the last couple of games. I haven’t even mentioned the (infamous?) Bop-It’s.

One thing I’ve always been quite keen on with my games is that for skills the players have to actually “do something” whenever possible in order to enact the skill. If you think about it, Combat using Laser-Tag is totally a hard skill system, you have to be able to aim and utilise your chosen weapon (in some ways then I guess NERF isn’t too different and we won’t talk about the complications that arise from using a vocal system). The first thing we introduced was the Morton Bullet Box (or MBB) as we were looking to move away from SAMS as our primary medical system. In the very early design stages of the game as a whole (before even Dropzone 2010) we were looking at various “Operation” style games but nothing we found off the shelf really fitted with what we wanted to achieve, they were either too simple, too complex or too bulky. We talked about creating custom versions with multiple options before we settled on the single Bullet Box that we ended up with.

But what do you do if a person really can’t do the skill? If they can’t play Tetris, or connect to a WiFi network or play Operation? I had one player who wanted to play a doctor but just didn’t have the dexterity needed to use the MBB, similarly I had new players who needed more time getting to learn how the combat system worked and, personally, I don’t think I served any of them very well. I’m not sure what I could do different apart from laying out in the design document exactly how the skills system works more than I already had. Arguably this is one the areas where SAMS scores very highly against what we had in that anyone can do it (I’ve talked about my issues with SAMS at various points and I’ve had lengthy discussion with Tim A as well). This is something I’ve been wrestling with over the course of both games and since and is certainly one of the factors that has led me to my decision to withdraw from writing/running games at this stage.

If I was doing all of this again I’m genuinely not sure what design choices I would pick. One of my key LARP design criteria (maybe even my primary) has always been about balancing the line between Realism and Playability, we had a more realistic system but did we sacrifice too much in the playability stakes? The point of the game (at least one of them) is to give players the fantasy of doing things they wouldn’t ordinarily be able to do and maybe in my drive for more realism, I dropped the playability ball. If, and it’s a massive if at this stage, I was to run another game then I would look at the skill system with a lot more detail, I probably need to play some other systems and see how things are resolved elsewhere. Ultimately this was my failing as I was the one who kept pushing in this realm.

Was it something I said?

Dates for the 2017 games were first announced in February 2016, booking for the new campaign opened back on October 7th (much later than planned due to my aforementioned hospital stay) and all 18 places for the first game were gone within a week with a significant number also paying for the second game in September and also deposits for the proposed 3rd game.

A week, all booked, job done.

Or so I thought.

The first warning signs started in late November with the first two dropouts happening relatively close to each other. Now this isn’t unusual by any stretch, I’ve always said that reality takes precedence over our fantasy lives and people committing and then being unable to follow through for whatever reasons is part of that. What I wasn’t prepared for were the numbers that would drop out over the course of the next couple of months, of the original 18 who booked in that first week only 11 would go on to play that first game. I realise 7 people may not sound like much but when you are balancing the budget around 18 and you lose nearly 40% it’s a bit of a hit. If it hadn’t been for some active recruitment on the part of a couple of players we would been in serious trouble. Ultimately April’s game ran with 15 players, 3 less than target, the September game ran with just 9, It was only because of some careful book-keeping on Pete’s side that we able to mount the games at all but there was no margin for anything and we paid for some things out of our own pockets. With so few bookings for game 2 we knew in the run up that it was going to be the final one.

You try not to take it personally, but when people tell you the dates don’t work for them when you had published them so far in advance and they obviously worked when they first booked…

That’s my rant over, but this would lead to period of deep personal frustration on my part that would, unfortunately, permeate into the campaign and my social interaction as a whole and is something I still carry to a degree.

So where do you think it went wrong?

In the cold light of day, I think I’ve identified a few reasons: –

• Existing Characters: As previously mentioned WQ would involve all brand-new characters and none from the previous Rubicon campaign. Looking back this undoubtedly cost me some players, I remember someone had a go at me about not understanding how attached players get to their characters, I remember I replied I did and that was why I was giving them closure. In the Laser-Tag LARP hobby we tend to play a lot of one-shot disposable games with disposable characters, recurring characters are rare but not completely unheard of. Probably the longest character I’ve ever had was my Wizard on a set of 15 Arthurian based games in the noughties, I was one of only two players who had played every single game and the ending to that was hard but appropriate. I still stand by the decision to have all new characters on WQ even though, as stated above, it lost me players.

• Game Design: A good friend and someone who’s opinion I value turned to me after WQ1 and told me that it would have been a great game, 15 years ago. When I asked what he meant he thought it was the right game for the wrong audience. Looking back retrospectively I think he was onto something, I still think a heist game was the right move but I would have changed the backstory for all concerned to be more conducive to what was going on. I think people were expecting more family stress and I didn’t deliver it, the family element was not the primary drive of the plotline.
• Game Structure: The majority of the games I’ve run are what I would call “Long Linear”, that is there is always a path in the background that the players should follow. This differs from what I call a “Short Linear” in that you move from encounter to encounter to encounter, from A -> B -> C -> D -> E, in true old school style. If you look back the Rubicon games then they were mostly standalone but always came back to the overall arc plotline, so each game led to another but the path within that game was relatively self-determined by the players reacting to whatever situation we laid on for them. Looking back, it feels like WQ was one game in three parts and that’s great if the players are up for that. It also has to be said that a Linear structure like that is relatively old fashioned, a lot of games seem to have adopted what I tentatively call “Linear Group”, in this groups of characters gather in one central IC location, figure out what are going to do to further their own plotlines, tell the GM’s their intentions who then try and organise a “short linear” or something similar so they can accomplish their goals. I’m not saying there is anything bad with this approach but it’s nothing I’ve got a huge amount of experience with so typically with WQ I went with what I knew best and had seemingly worked before. I ended up with one game in three parts when I should have been aiming for was three games with an overall plotline spanning the games.

In conclusion

In the Garden of the Winter Queen was ultimately a failed experiment that didn’t engage people in the same way that The Rubicon Conspiracy did. There are multiple small reasons why as opposed to one big reason but as I stated right at the beginning, as head GM this was my call and my responsibility. I do and will regret some of the choices I made but as someone once said, “Regret is part of being alive, but keep it a small part”, I will try and live up to those words.

James Bloodworth
November 2017

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So not great then, even now it irks to a degree as no-one wants to run a game that seemingly few people want to play. Looking back, I did feel a combination of sadness and bitterness towards the collapse of that campaign. As lead GM, I have to take the blame as ultimately these were the decisions I (and the other GMs) took. I still stand by the basis of the game, but maybe I did have the wrong audience at the time. Not everyone treats LARP the same as everybody else, that’s a lesson a friend of mine has just learned the hard way recently.

I wouldn’t run another game for some time, initially I was probably sulking to a degree after this but there was a little thing called Covid that you may have heard of. I have mulled trying to run the “Stories” games that I alluded to earlier but I think that idea is dead, it’s been too long and (like with the terrible Babylon5 LARP I went to) maybe some old wounds shouldn’t be reopened. So my next game was on more familiar ground, returning the Alien/Aliens/Predator inspired “High Frontier” universe, but this would not be without it’s pre-game controversies, prop & NPC problems and probably my worst Friday start to a LARP. Ever. This article was first published in May 2022.

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The Goodman Protocol

What started as a gathering of thoughts on a family cruise in November 2018 finally culminated in a LARP at the end of March 2022. Of course this had been delayed by two years by the you-know-what, indeed it had been an early casualty as it should have run the first weekend of the first lockdown. Ultimately this was a game steeped both in Laser-Tag tradition whilst trying new things in terms of both technology and story expectation. If you’ve read my previous two retrospectives on the Goldrush games (both are still in the FB files section) then you will know what to expect from this document. This will be my thoughts on the recently run LARP in conception, execution and aftermath

Story Origins

There’s a dialog exchange in the 1998 film Sphere that relates to a fictional document that details how first contact with a ULF (Unknown Life Form) could go. We never get to see the document (The “Goodman Protocol” is named after the character that wrote it) but I thought that was a fascinating idea as to what such a document could look like. This was the first germs of what would become the basis for the game. The goal in the early days was two-fold, run a High Frontier game that didn’t feature the eponymous Xenomorphs (apologies if you were expecting them) and feature (hopefully) a peaceful first contact with the race of beings known as ‘Engineers’. I know both Prometheus and Covenant have their issues, but I thought some elements were fascinating and deserved more exploration (it’s only a shame Ridley Scott doesn’t seem to agree and seems more interested in the AI of David).

The genesis of this would be the discovery of an alien tablet in the likeness of something that could have been found prior to the events of Prometheus. For this part of the plot, I went back to a 1987 episode of the vastly underrated BBC TV series, Star Cops, for inspiration. The episode deals with events when a discovery is made on Mars that seems to indicate intelligent life was there first. But its all part of an elaborate hoax as this one turned out to be, the tablet was genuine, but it did not originate on the planet the game is set on. These two central events would intertwine to give us the overall plot of the Goodman Protocol and was the basis for the LARP.

“Two Tribes go to war..”

Ever since Dropzone 1992, a lot of Laser-tag based games have adopted a two-team structure that roughly equates to a Roleplay Team and a Combat Team. Typically, this translates into a military and a scientific team or (Skyhook and Backstop if you were at Dropzone 1992). This structure has served the laser-tag hobby well in the past as it’s the first clear indicator to prospective players what they are letting themselves in for when they sign up.

I’ve become less of a fan over the years, but it can work in the framework of certain genre game universes, where it didn’t really work was for the Goldrush games that were set in the Firefly universe. Ultimately, I feel we are pigeon holing players, and whilst some probably prefer that to a degree it’s not something I really want to do again. It’s certainly something I would look to move away from if I could if I were to write another Laser-Tag LARP.

LARP in a post Covid world

As originally planned the LARP was planned to run over the weekend of 21/22 March 2020. The first news of what would become Covid-19 came right at the end of 2019. We would then watch its progression across the world over the next three months. For me, I think it was the film of the overflowing hospitals in Italy that convinced me we had to postpone. We held a quickly arranged GM meeting on Friday 13^th(?) over Google hangouts (who had heard of Zoom at this stage?) and we (all the GMs) had already come to the same conclusion, the LARP would have to be postponed. I posted this straight away on both crew and player pages and nearly every response was supportive.

Nearly.

We did get some feedback where people thought we had cancelled too early, and we had been wrong to.

Should we have run? Ultimately, we couldn’t have as the game site suspended all operations on what would have been the Friday the LARP should have started and the following Monday we went into the first lockdown. We got an apology later from those people who thought we had been wrong; we had indeed called it correctly although it didn’t necessarily feel like it at the time.

Fast forward 12 months and the site is open again and viable dates in the autumn start to become available. We did secure one, but it was decided among the GM team to offer it to the UKLTA and the wider hobby in the absence of any other event that year, this was accepted, and an event was subsequently run in September 2021. In the run up to the March 2022 dates I was keen that this LARP should have a Covid policy and that we would communicate it in good time ahead of the game. It seemed that some LARPs were happy to treat Covid as the elephant in the room and pretend it wasn’t there, but I was not going to do that. What the actual specifics were going to be did involve a lot of debate amongst the GM team, easily the most debated non plot related item. Eventually it was decided that we would ask for everyone to take an LFT and not to come to the event in the case it was positive. We felt this was both the simplest and safest solution. This was duly communicated on January 23^rd.

The government Coronavirus restrictions expired on March 25 (right before the LARP was due to happen). We did get some queries if our policy would change considering this to which we replied to it would not. Us asking for you to take an LFT was never a legal issue but (and this me talking now) a moral one.

In the event, I believe no-one tested positive and out of the many LARPs that happened that weekend (I think the count was around 9 plus WereWar in Poland) we did not suffer a Covid outbreak (unlike at least 4 that did). If I was running a game again this year (don’t worry, I’m not) then I would have the same policy. I know LFT tests are no longer free, but I feel people should build the cost into their overall LARP budget and people should be testing for, at minimum, the rest of 2022.

“Oooh.  Guns, guns, guns..”

Combat has been a key element of Laser-Tag LARP since the beginning, indeed it was the combat element that first attracted people to pick up all those sets languishing in bargain bins up and down the country 30 years ago. Tuning the combat side of almost any LARP is a task all GMs must decide on. Typically, this will be partially dictated by the kind of scenario they want to run. Couple that with what weapons are being allowed (such as variable damage) and what kind of medical system (are you using SAMS, SIABs, etc.). it can be a fine line between an enjoyable and frenetic skirmish and what begins to feel like a turgid slog. Some games you just get shot down, get healed, get up, get shot down, get healed, get up, get shot down, etc. That’s no fun for anyone so balancing NPC forces can be difficult. This game was always mean’t as more of a roleplay-based game but with still a heavy combat element and, looking back, I think we lowballed the combat. There’s often a debate on the crew radio channel about “do we send in one more wave” and the GM then needs to weigh that versus what state the players are in. We could (and should have realistically) sent in more opposition than we did and I’m sorry for that.

Ambiguous Plot

One of the key plot points was the ultimate translation of the tablet and we decided quite early on that once it had all been translated then it would be open to player interpretation what to do with the information. Below is the table listing out each potential translation a tablet piece could give. I’ve written elsewhere how the translation worked from a prop point of view: –

The tablet could have been translated in any order (you had to scan each piece at least once to be able to accurately translate the whole thing) and the message became clearer the more you used the translation prop. How players worked out what and how to send the message (and ultimately triggered the Engineer encounter) was left open. Our first thought was “Using the light of the sun” might get them to use a laser of some kind. There was some debate about how clear it was about what to send but this seemed to be solved very quickly (this was the value of pi). Ambiguous plot lines can be dangerous in LARP as no matter how you game out potential plot lines ahead of the LARP, you can never quite predict what players will think of or how the plot will eventually play out. Looking back, I wonder what we would have done if no transmission had been sent, we would still have had the Engineer encounter (the whole game was effectively written around it).

Non-Resolved Plot

In every LARP there are plot lines that may not get resolved or not resolved to a satisfactory conclusion. It’s always difficult to try and second guess what players may or may not do. Obviously, the main plot was focused on the tablet and then contacting the Engineer. The murder plot was mean’t to be important in the first half of the LARP and then less so but, as ever, some players took this one and ran with it and would have liked to have seen Eddie Howard get his just desserts, even if a Federal Marshall or Star Cop turned up to arrest him. There was a law enforcement character included in an early version of the plot, but they were quickly discarded as we wanted the players to be doing the investigating. We could have injected a law enforcement character, but it wouldn’t have worked if we obeyed the law of the game universe in terms of how long it might take them to get there, but we could potentially had fudged it somehow, maybe. The point I’m trying to make is that its hard to predict which plot lines will fly and which will get left by the wayside as the LARP progresses. We thought Eddie would get locked up somewhere and that would be that whilst Engineers, mercenaries and ultimately Con-Am would keep players’ minds occupied.

Play to Lift

If you were at the TagCon 2020 then you might have seen the presentation on the Odysseus LARP that me and Nick Reynolds had attended in 2019. One of the things that impressed me during that game was the “play to lift” concept. The idea being that (as a player) you work to ensure that every other player has the best time where possible and if everyone does this then it works for everyone. I had hoped to bring this concept to this game but (for various reasons) it was missed from my initial safety briefing on the Friday night (in case you never realised it, an awful lot went wrong both on the day and in the run up to the LARP). If I had mentioned, it would it have made a difference to other players? Well, that’s hindsight in a nutshell and I really don’t know. I do know that next time I will listen to my instincts which is one area where I failed this time round, but I would only find out about this once the LARP was over.

Summing up

It felt like this LARP might never run at one stage or would be delayed again until later in 2022 or maybe not even until 2023 (as some LARP’s have recently advertised). We had player dropouts in the final months but, unlike Goldrush, we were mostly able to fill them. Then in the days before we had key NPCs drop out, props went missing or refused to work and we had to retool a key element of the game during the game. I’ve often alluded to running a LARP is like keeping plates spinning on sticks, but this time I think we were doing that whilst walking a tightrope over lava and, probably inevitably, some plates did not survive. I’d like to think the LARP was mostly successful, nearly all of the feedback we’ve had has been positive with only criticism at mostly minor structural issues around gameplay, but I’ve always been my own worst critic. Every LARP is a learning curve to one degree or another, I will think on what I’ve learned from this one.

So, thanks for reading, if indeed you still are.

James Bloodworth
May 2022

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So, there you have it. A potted history of some of my LARP experience. Definitely some incredible highs and some depressing lows, but isn’t that any hobby? Looking back, I do regret some of the design choices I made, certainly on the second Goldrush I probably made the wrong decisions but, for the right reasons. There is also the possibility I’m just not very good at writing LARPs. That is one thought I’ve had over the past few years as I’ve tried to branch out into different systems and events just to see other interpretations of LARP. Perhaps I should just stick to the mechanics? On the whole I’m not sure but I am currently writing a sequel to the “Goodman Protocol” as well writing a Star Wars LARP campaign as writing/designing is still something I enjoy. I’m rambling now and if you’ve gotten this far then I’ve probably bored you enough.

In closing then, I’ve often described myself as my own worst critic, but at the same time I’d also like to think I can find the best in things as well, even my most negative LARP experiences usually have an element I can appreciate and like.

So, thanks for reading, if indeed you still are.