Larp design / Spacerpunk Larp

[devp]

So you my know I've been working on many iterations of a spacerpunk rpg for some time. So it goes.

The latest permutation is: running a Larp edition for friends of mine at a yearly house party they've thrown. I'm excited by seeing my vision portrayed by lots of people.

But, note that the expected structure of larps - in this circle at least - is where the GMs/authors are putting on a bit of a show. 20 or more
Characters, writing bios for each, inventing signature minigame, establishing interlocking plots while allowing for player freedom, dealing with the unexpected, and inevitable printing lots of pages of items/cards/player sheets.

And I got most of it done in a rush (with the help of some coauthors) so I'm worried about severe unfun plot holes being revealed.

I had plans of somehow using game design skills to reduce prep, but - damn I have written so much in a while and this is still such intense prep.

[devp]

Some other friends have commented that the amount of prep and design and time required is escalating out of hand. (I'll note that you may have heard of the Dance & the Dawn Larp kickstarter; that came out of this group of friends.) Retroactively, I wish I pushed harder into the low author-prep design space.

But some of these are design constraints. If you want >10 people, and I'd you can't guarantee that they'll read all the prep before game time, and given normal adult limits, and to make the investment pay off, you want to design something that gives each player multiple goals and suits different preferences. (ex: puzzles vs anti puzzles, random immersive chatter vs directed plot, etc.)

I wanted to get my thoughts down before stuff gets underway tomorrow - I shall report back afterwards, too.

The Larp design does have some indie/narr tabletop bits that surprised my coauthors. We'll see how well that works out in practice!