Things I'd change in the January LARP the second time around

This post is partly more deconstruction, and partly for the benefit of anytone following this Blog who ever is interested in running the game for their own friends.


1: Not give the robbers rope. They tied up several hostages quickly, which reduced what those players could do. While it may be realistic, none of the variousbank robbery movies or TV shows I've watched involved tying up the hostages. Probably for the same reasons: so that the hero of the show/movie can move around and manipulate things rather than be tied up and helpless.

2: Change Thursday's background, so that he/she wants evidence of the embezzling plot. Thursday would in this case want to get out, alive if possible, and clear his name of the embezzling charges. Of course, this raises again the question I had for a long time: how would Thursday plan to get out alive and free? Well, maybe Thursday's priorities have gotten all screwed up, and he's willing to be arrested for robbing a bank if proven innocent of embezzling from the same bank. Or maybe he has some other plan, though I couldn't think of a good one. (That's why Thursday didn't care about surviving: so I didn't have to come up with an escape plan.)

3: Possibly change it so the manager is not the person embezzling. The manager had enough to do just being the manager, therefore the ones the robbers talked to. The manager might suspect his other employee of something, even, which could move that plot other ways.

Maybe some other things, like: give a hostage or bank employee a weapon. This was planned for the undercover cop, but she didn't get played. Should have given the gun then to the ex-con. We did give the duffel full of cash (written to go to the convenience store worker) to the off-duty cop, which worked really well. It gave the PCs something to fight for and sneak bits of cash away. (The cop had collected a bunch of money at his son's Bar Mitzvah, apparently, and was at the bank to deposit it all.)



But I should get to writing for February. So far it looks like a smaller crowd than January, but these things have a tendency to look deserted until two days before the LARP. Then at the last minute they double in attendance and I have to write extra characters. Two of whom never get played. We'll see how that cycle continues, though it's been the pattern every previous LARP I've ran.

Things I learned from the January

* Giving someone a lethal weapon and a revenge goal that doesn't include their character living means the LARP will be very short.

* Playing a hostage is not as much fun as playing a dynamic character.

* The plot was too focused on one primary group of PCs: the Kirkwood / Thursday pairing. They tied in to way too much of the game. Other characters were more on the periphery. Future games need to be more balanced out: if one character's info sheet is two pages long and another's is half a page, there needs to be some balancing going on. Maybe the game would have worked better if the embezzler weren't the bank manager? If the revenge were for something else? If the teller and her ex-con ex-husband really were robbing the place too?


All these points seem obvious in hindsight, but it's hard to keep this stuff in mind when writing scenarios. Maybe future months can benefit from earlier mistakes. Especially if I formalize them some.


In other news, the February LARP will be a comedic superhero game, like unto The Tick or The Mystery Men. The other strong contender for February (a science fiction mystery) will be moved to march or beyond.