Saving the world on a Sunday afternoon
Written by Judith O. with help from Doug M-S, Dominic D., Warren J. and others.
So, you’ve made it to being an Experienced GM, and feel you’re ready to run your first residential event (a 24/36hr). The good news is that a lot of the skills you’ve already learnt from GMing a normal game still apply; the bad news is that there’s a new bunch of skills to learn on top of that. What follows is not a set of rules – it’s a set of guidelines and things to think about that will hopefully make running your residential a lot less hassle. While the focus of this piece is on running residential events, a fair bit of it can also be applied to normal Sunday games.
As with becoming an Experienced GM, it is highly recommended to help out with a residential before having a go at running one yourself. It’s also recommended to read How to Survive a Residential LARP and have a refresher of The Newbie GM’s Guide to Running a LARP as grounding points – the former will keep you alive and healthy, the latter will remind you of tactics for reducing game stress.
Unless you ask the Committee to help out, you will be responsible for all organising OOC site-based logistics once the site has been booked; if you want to help book the site as well, that’s up to you. The only site-based logistics you are not obliged to help with are getting people to and from site and paying for site, however you will need to pass on announcements about the latter.
A sensible rule of thumb appears to be that you should aim for 1 GM per 10 people on a game with a linear element. This means that for a big residential you probably want 3-4 dedicated GMs – although their individual level of involvement can be anything from helping write the game to just following the plot doc on the day. While you can just pick on experienced monsters to take the plot doc and run, you’re better off asking them to co-GM and going over the plot with them in advance so they know what they’re letting themselves in for – that way, everyone knows roughly what they’re doing and where they need to be.
Every site has its own quirks that you will need to find out about in advance:
You will also want to bring binbags, soap, an emergency pack of toilet roll and everything for doing washing up – in general brushes and brooms for clear-down are available, but all other supplies may be wanted.
If it’s a site the club has used before, there may be maps and photos of the site that you can use to plan encounters; if not, you may want to arrange a pre-game site walk.
As GM, you are responsible for deciding if there is going to be group catering and if so finding someone to do it. Ideally they should be on the monster crew as cooking takes time even with the best will in the world and if you want minimal game disruption you need mealtimes to run smoothly and swiftly – which means doing most of the work while the players are still out in the field. You will also need to take clean-up time and manpower into account. You will also need to give people time in advance to sign up for food and for whoever’s catering to decide the specifics – it can’t be a last-minute thing.
If you don’t organise group catering, be aware that having 40 people providing their own food is a lot more chaotic and time-consuming than having one person feed 40 people.
There is also a club drinks bag available covering tea, coffee, squash etc – the committee member responsible for it needs at least a week’s notice to restock the perishables.
Your briefs are your way of getting all of the OOC logistics sorted with your players and monsters in good time. Getting an IC brief up early enough to give people a chance to decide if they want to play or monster is only polite; getting an OOC brief up and keeping it updated with necessary OOC organisation is essential.
Things people will want to know on the OOC brief:
As the number of people involved increases, so does the amount of time required to do anything. Plan for this, assume the worst, and work on having filler encounters to add in rather than main encounters to cut.
In addition, people get slower as they get tired and power runs down or if it gets dark or wet or hot. On 24/36hrs this goes double as people will get more tired as the weekend goes on and as each day progresses. It’s not a bad idea to split a 36hr into a Friday game (plan encounters to fill around 3-4 hours and have filler if needed), three Saturday games (morning, afternoon and night) and a shortish (2-3 hours plus filler) Sunday, and work out pacing from that – but it will depend heavily on your plot. 24hrs are more variable and depend on your ratio of Tournament to Plot. You will also need to factor in Sleep and Food times.
The suggested guidelines for a 24hr are as follows:
The suggested guidelines for a 36hr are as follows:
However, these times are fairly flexible so long as there is a minimum of 8 hours time-out for sleeping, especially on the last night to give drivers the best chance of getting enough sleep to drive home safely. If you are going to run with a significantly different pattern – or a 24hr time-in – you need to include this in your game application and make sure that everyone is aware of it from the OOC brief.
The corollary is that if players and monsters do not get ready in time for your time-ins, you are well within your right to dock base points or assign negatives as appropriate. As a general tip, if you can keep your meal-times at least Time-ish, this will help people gear up for getting back into Time-in on time.
The weather is a major bugbear for working out plans. Even at the June 36hr you can’t guarantee a warm, dry weekend – or at least, not without it being guaranteed to be a too-hot, dry weekend instead.
Where possible, the club tries to pick sites that feature some indoors or covered space of some form so if Weather happens there is at least space for people to stay out of the wet; if you can plan your game so that in an emergency sections can be run using that old standby of ‘circling around the barn’ then it’s a good back-up plan. Failing that, flexibility in linear time so people have more time to dry out and warm up/cool down is sensible, especially as drying kit out between days is probably going to be nigh impossible for most people.
Residentials have two major problems that need to be taken into account, even more than on normal Sunday games. You’re generally needing to wrangle upwards of thirty people (and in the case of the 24hr often with a monster crew of five at best for the Saturday), and you will probably have to deal with the rank 50+ people. This makes it a lot harder to write a game that everyone will get to enjoy, as there’s inevitably someone who can do what so-and-so can do but better.
Rank brackets
Think very, very hard about your rank bracket, and how strongly you’re going to stick to it when accepting characters. While there’s less difference between a rank 60 and a rank 70 warrior than there is a rank 2 and a rank 10, the relative differences of the classes and stat choices can cause the durability of characters to vary widely – a high-ranking warrior can generally survive a lot more than a high-ranking mage. If you find that most of your party are underrank, you should think about dropping the rank bracket – or making it very clear that they will have a struggle on their hands if they can’t work together and plan intelligently.
Statting around the party
It is generally a good idea to get players to put up their current character stats and special abilities/loot on their Notes section of their character profile as early as possible – this means you know what sort of weirdness they can pull out of their hat (sometimes literally) while working out the stats and plot. It also means that if your game revolves around keeping people trapped in Location N you can work out how to work around existing Plot Item X, and other problems of that nature.
However, try to avoid the trap of “this encounter can only be solved if so-and-so uses foo” – if nothing else, you can’t guarantee that at that point so-and-so will be present and alive, never mind thinking of using foo in the first place.
Low-stat encounters
Not everything in the game has to be based on stats, and this can help to let the lower ranked and squishier characters get a piece of the action. Puzzles, diplomacy, investigation, NPCs that are there primarily to talk and interact with the party – they add flavour as well, and give people with soft skills and OOC skills a chance to step up and join in.
The corollary is that for puzzles it’s worth getting a monster or non-larper who doesn’t know the way you think (so ideally not a partner/relative/bff) to check the puzzle in advance to make sure it’s solvable by someone other than you…
Splitting the party
If you have enough GMs and monsters, splitting a game or part of a game into two (or more) patrols is a way around the Huge Party problem. The easiest way is to have two completely separate games going on in different parts of site, and the players only get to meet up at the end; the hardest is to run as a sandbox game where everyone is scattered everywhere. Once again, the key is communication – for the former, both lots of GMs as a minimum need to know the plan and know when they’re due to meet up again, while for the latter every single monster needs to know the plan and pre-arranged return time and location. Radios or mobile phones are invaluable for this sort of thing.
Remember that while you may be starting with a rank n party, statting around them over a residential isn’t as straightforward as assuming you’re running 5 normal linears. Friday night and Sunday do work as being considered as short but otherwise regular linears, so can even be made a bit harder if you are going to keep them short – Saturday is a bit different.
The main issue with Saturday is power and health management. Normally a character has time to rest and reset between linears; when there are three or four back-to-back, they have to be far more careful about using castings and getting hurt or they won’t make it to the end of the day. How you choose to manage this is up to you – you can drop your monster stats or numbers, you can ‘help’ the party via NPCs and wibble, or you can ignore it and make them work harder (or smarter) – so long as you do take it into account. If you’re planning on having a rank 70 mage in the party with 100 mana left for the final fight on Saturday night because you’d expect to have one at the end of your normal Sunday linear, you can probably go whistle.
The other big thing to remember if you’re going for a high-level game is that you’ll have tanks in 20 armour and 90+ life, second-liners in maybe half that, and casters in maybe 4 armour and 30 life before buffing. There is no easy way to level the playing field; the best you can do is keep the normal damage low and up the power damage to compensate, but even then if you get carried away it’s a death sentence for the squishies. Try to keep your stats as varied as the players, and you’ll probably do okay and if in doubt, drop the ratio of monsters to players a little for an encounter. It’s better to make everyone feel like they can be involved all day, one way or another, than to have two or three ‘stars’ doing everything while everyone else is there to cheer them on.
Most importantly, make sure that you have stats (even if it’s just an outline) for everything you have planned, and have printed off enough copies of all stats for the weekend! You should ideally have one copy per GM plus at least one spare in case Weather happens or copies get lost – the chance of being able to print off more copies on site is minimal.
One of the good sides to running a residential is that while there are usually the same prop capacity issues as on a regular linear a savvy GM can fit in big set pieces by either making them weather-resistant and setting them up in advance when the whole site is booked to us or by circling the linear past the monster room to swap props over or set things up for the short term. You also have night-time sections, so make use of lighting effects that wouldn’t work normally – and if you can find a way to work in sound effects (a set of speakers hidden in the player room for example) then go for it.
The club has a selection of basic props (tabards, masks and the like) that you can borrow by emailing the committee and requesting them in advance. There is generally also a props budget for good, reusable props – find out what it is and what’s acceptable, then go nuts (bearing in mind that someone will have to store it in the long run).
Whatever you decide to bring, make a list of everything you want to use (including numbers of tabards etc), check it off as you pack – then take it with you to site for checking things back in on clear-down. Include on your plot-doc a note of what props go with what encounters/monsters.
Wibbly effects outside of the normal rules can be fun to play with and guarantee a novel situation for the party to deal with. However, you should aim to write down exactly what happens for all wibbly effects before you start if you can, then make sure you have the piece of paper with you when it comes to time to explain them. If possible, explain before the game starts; if not, make sure you explain en masse to the players at the earliest opportunity (battleboard, deliberate Time Out etc.). This goes double if it’s a ranged rather than touch effect.
If you have multiple GMs, make sure everyone knows exactly what the effect does, and has a copy of the written version – otherwise you’ll end up with the party thinking half a dozen different things, and it will all get horribly messy.
Where possible, get to site as early as you are allowed, or delegate someone responsible to do it for you. This will give you time to scope out the site, work out where camping and encounters and IC spaces are going, and more importantly give you lots of time to set up your monster room so you can find things later.
You will always have people who arrive late; if you’re lucky, they will let you know in advance, or at least as soon as they know. Don’t panic, just have a reason for them to show up late IC – even to the point of working them in Saturday/Sunday morning.
If you can, delegate a monster to guide people to the camping area and show them where things are on site so you don’t have to do it, and tell them to swap out as and when they get bored.
Do not forget to eat. If you’re really lucky, someone will be doing a chip run and will be willing to get you something – bring change. If someone’s doing a supermarket run, give them a list with anything you’ve forgotten to bring – bring change.
Don’t forget to assign a player and monster first-aider – if numbers warrant, or if you expect a lot of splitting up, assign two on each side, and if possible have a small first aid kit kept by one of the players.
While a reminder of safe fighting – especially night-time fighting – isn’t obligatory, remember that you will probably have people who haven’t larped in a long time showing up. A quick reminder before first Time-in won’t hurt.
For 24/36hrs, everything you’ve learnt about communication goes triple, as in addition to normal in-game things you will need to make sure people are aware of:
If word needs to go around the entire larp – or through all players – about something, call a Time-out or wait for a battleboard and explain it en masse, it will save a lot of hassle in the long run. Where possible, use the start of the day or end of mealtimes for big announcements – and don’t forget to remind people of morning time-in time after evening time-out.
If you think that you’re going to miss people for OOC messages, notices on the kitchen, monster room and toilet doors will generally catch stragglers.
As the rank bracket and number of wibbly effects increase, the number of people on a battleboard should decrease. At high ranks (50+) 3 – 4 people per battleboard is not a bad idea and will keep the game moving along – likewise, making sure that the ‘difficult’ (i.e. high damage taking and multiple power using) people are split across boards. Pair off battleboarders to keep track of each other, and try to have no more than 6 people on a battleboard at most.
If a particular battleboarder is struggling on the Friday night of a 36hr, find out why and if necessary move the problem player to a different battleboard or swap out the battleboarder. Judging this for a 24hr is harder, but generally less of a problem.
Whatever plans you had made for the weather, even if you made them on the Friday, will probably need to be tweaked as you go. Don’t panic, just talk to the players and monsters and find out what they are willing to endure.
The First Aiders are your best asset at this point as they will be on hand to tell people to rehydrate/get more layers/take layers off and so on – let them know if you really need them to take a more active role in this.
Make sure your props stay organised in your monster room, and make sure that you can easily find and grab them when you want them – you don’t want to make people have to wait around while you search for them. Where possible, split them up and bag them ready to move first thing or during breaks, or get a monster to do it for you. If you’re using make-up, use the breaks to get rid of dead wipes and clean sponges.
Just like on a normal game, make your monsters put things away properly after encounters – otherwise kit gets lost or destroyed.
Unless you desperately have to leave to catch a train (and it’s not brilliant organisation if that’s the case) your first priority on Time-out is the monster room. Grab a couple of people, get all the borrowed kit bagged up and returned to its owners, and make sure you’ve got all of the club kit. Until you’ve done this, the monster room cannot be cleaned up, and you’re delaying everybody else. If you really have to leave, ask a responsible person or committee member to do the job for you – this is another reason for having the kit list with you, as then they know what to look for – and make sure they know you appreciate them for doing it.
If it is practical, it is your responsibility as GM to make sure all club kit is cleaned, mended if you can and returned to the club within a reasonable timespan – ideally no more than a week, but at least within a fortnight. Otherwise, make sure that you are suitably appreciative of whichever poor person gets the job because it’s a pain to do. When you do hand over the kit, you need to report any losses and damage to the Committee (ideally the Treasurer).
It’s not obligatory to be the last person off site, but it’s generally considered polite to wait for at least people who have been helping with site-wide cleaning and tidying if you can. Do not forget lunch though!
For a residential event, you have three weeks to get the debrief done (subject to emergencies, discussions with Character Refs etc). If you can’t get it done properly for whatever reason, get a skeleton debrief showing just the base points up as soon as you can so that people can use them. To help make the job easier, do a post-event general thank you on the boards and ask for recommendations at the same time. Mission reports will also give you ideas for what to give to people on an IC basis, especially if the game didn’t go to plan and the players failed to win completely or if someone was being a twit IC.
Make sure that you thank all monsters and players who have gone above and beyond on the OOC side – ‘taxis’, people who have organised food (including mass chip runs) and clean-up, people who have lent out props and kit etc. as this encourages them to keep doing it in future. You can do this as a general thank-you in the OOC debrief if there’s a lot of them, or you can do it as individual comments as you see fit.
Base changes, bonuses and negatives
While not obligatory, bonus/negative points given out at residential events tend to be correspondingly larger due to the greater time and numbers of people involved. It’s not unusual to see +6 if someone has had a spectacular weekend, but rare to see more than -3 given for poor behaviour. It is, within reason, up to you to decide on the scale.
The simple rule is – if you’re not sure if you’re allowed to drop the base or assign a bonus or negative for something, check with the Committee, and if it’s an unusual negative you should get the player/monster involved as well. Normal reasons for negatives are things like failing to have the right ears/make-up and not asking to borrow the club supply, unsafe fighting, arguing with the GM during time-in – check the code of conduct for the ‘full’ list of standards. However, the one persistently safe reason is lateness – if the person lets you know that they’re going to be late or can’t play on for safety reasons, drop the base to correspond to how much time they played for if you feel it is merited. If they’re persistently just being late to time-in without warning or good reason then assign negatives for poor behaviour.
Danger pay, loot, hero abilities and IC Consequences
In general, danger pay should be worked out based on how many hours of actual danger were involved, whether it was a mission that would logically earn danger pay, and the success of the mission. If the players have ended up on an unexpected wibbly-wobbly ‘mission’, consider giving them loot or a hero ability instead if appropriate, otherwise 3 – 5g is normal for a 36hr. Generally danger pay is only earnt for the Sunday of a 24hr if at all, but this depends on how you’ve structured your weekend.
The epicness of loot and hero abilities can be proportional to the risk level of the weekend. As always, check with the Character Refs before getting carried away.
As always, IC actions should lead to IC Consequences, be they good or bad. The primary mechanisms for this are reports, deities and NPCs. Deities should only really get a say if a character’s actions apply directly to their Path/Temple restriction, or if someone has roleplayed being a follower of a particular deity spectacularly well over the weekend, and NPCs should only get a say if the monster sends in a report to a relevant Guild NPC. Again, Consequences should scale with the risk level and success of the weekend – check with the Character Refs if you need guidance.