Monthly Archives: June 2017

LARP Playtest Successful

A couple of days ago I ran the initial playtest for Blackened Hearts, the parlour-style LARP scenario I’ve been working on. While there were a few hiccups here and there, overall the night was a pretty definitive success. The players all enjoyed themselves and I got a lot of positive responses (it feels good when people like/enjoy a thing you did!). As the GM and writer, I noted several things throughout the night that I wanted to add or fix in a revised version, and I got some valuable notes on individual characters by distributing a short feedback survey after the game.

A fair few characters need very little work except for polishing. The ones that had the most potential issues flagged in the feedback survey were ones I already had my eye on in my pre-playtest notes, so it was nice to have some of my own suspicions confirmed. There are one or two things that I’m not sure a single playtest can adequately inform — one character is a cursed spirit possessing a member of the crew and their player said they found it almost too easy to create havoc and spread their curse without any suspicion falling on them, but that might have just been a lucky break for them with other players just not picking up on hints or sharing information. I’m probably going to leave that plot completely as-is for now and see how follow-up playtests go to see if its an actual recurring issue or a one-time thing.

A big thing that I’m still not fully decided on is a replacement for the REFRESH mechanic. One thing that sort of bugged me in Sunset Claws and its sequel was the way the single-use powers are hoarded until later in the game — barely anyone will use a power in the first hour because what if you need it later? My solution in the first draft of Blackened Hearts was to mark most “single-use” powers with REFRESH. When you use a power card, you fold it in half and crease it to show it had been used. If it was marked with REFRESH, for 15 minutes after the GM calls the half-way point you can turn it in to the GM to get a new one. This encourages players to use these powers during the first half of the game, without them missing out on having them in the second half.

There’s an obvious problem with this re: GM access, but in actual play it wasn’t as difficult to manage as I’d worried. The biggest issue is a queue forming as people line up to get their cards switched — even though when I made the half-way announcement I asked that people not queue up, a couple of people still did. I had a discussion after the game with a few of the players who pointed out the issues with it, and I tend to agree. It only took a minute or two to sort everyone out, but it was an undesirable interruption in the action.

Then again, the only alternative that I can see actually working properly during play is to have time-specific power cards — i.e. have duplicate power cards that specifically can only be used in the first or second half of the game. However, the problem I see with this is (combined with the pretty consistent feedback that most characters need an extra power card) … I’m worried that each player having four or five power cards instead of two or three will be a bit of a card overload, and there is a potential issues around mixing up which card you can currently use.

At this stage, I really want to go to Steve D, who wrote the mechanics that I based mine on, and see what his opinion on the whole thing is. I’m just not quite sure what to do at this stage, but I don’t want to abandon it entirely as I think pacing the use of powers throughout the LARP is a desirable outcome.

I’ve still got a long way to go on it, but my road map going forward looks like:

  • finish making a full list of all of the changes and additions I want to make;
  • write a proper introduction, a guide to pre-game preparation, and GM notes on how to run the game;
  • construct an actual vaguely professional-looking draft document to import the original stuff into;
  • work on actually revising and adding to the bits I’ve already written;
  • do a quick once-over to make sure I haven’t missed anything and to catch any minor errors; and
  • submit it through to my editor for a proper review, then make any changes based on his feedback.

Once all that is done, I’d like to run a second and third playtest — we had an almost full group for the initial playtest (14 players), so I’d like to stress-test it with the minimum (8) to make sure its still fun with fewer people. Then I’d want to do a final playtest, again with as many roles filled as practical. I’d want few (if any) of the original playtesters in these subsequent tests, so maybe if an upcoming convention coincides for when I want to run it that would be a good option. Otherwise, I’ll have to do some networking and see who I can find who’s interested. Ideally, I’d like to be able to hand off the draft revised version to another GM and get feedback on my GM sections from someone running it, but I don’t know if that’ll be able to happen… maybe I can ask around on RPGnet.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with Blackened Hearts so far and I think it’s already comparable in quality to the scenarios that inspired it. I really want to take it that extra step forward and make it into something I can really be proud of.

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Filed under Roleplaying, Writing Progress