The Winds of Change
Becca Noe
Hello, oh best of players,
It's with no small amount of regret that I have to step down as a GM for our larp. There's a lot of personal business on my plate right now, and I know it has affected the energy and creativity that I can direct for our game. I will still be NPCing for our brave GMs and helping to streamline large scenes, but I will no longer being in charge of letters, bluebooking, or directing the plot for game. I'll still be seeing you guys for game, but no more GM hat for me.
That said, I also am scheduled to work on our game day this month, and so will be showing up around 6pm to begin NPCing.
Thanks,
Becca
Tish Carter
Okay, we need to seriously sit down and look at our situation honestly, team.
There are two writing GMs and three running GMs; one of which has situations arise from work and health to where we cannot always have him on hand. We need to very seriously consider that we may have a game wherein we only have two GMs available and if we can handle that situation. I'd like to gung-ho say that we can but I'm shaken. I tried to write a game that we could take care of with a small staff and I'd be lying if I said I didn't expect Becca to step down, but, I didn't have time to prepare for it either. We have a multi-person tournament that would simply and completely be unfair for the PCs of the game if we didn't go through it from start to finish and we have a great deal of players which aren't playing children (more my fault than anything I know) that should not have to sit and do nothing while that's happening. Further, in this instance, we have a LOT of NPCs which need to be bracketed and actually run fully through the tournament for it to be fair.
We have the temple plot, the Hirahara plot, the oni plot, the library plot, the bandit plot and probably other things which need to be resolved. Finally, we have far too many players that don't have enough to do for my tastes. We have combat characters who have barely seen combat, a court which is crippled because we need more interaction to make it feel real, and magistrates who don't have enough of an overarching scheme to feel support.
I need to come up with a time wherein we can all meet and re-write this game so we can run it with what we have so we know we can continue forward and we can continue forward with quality. I won't lie - I feel a bit overwhelmed sometimes with all of the letters to write, the character sheets, the plot, the questions, emails, and being pinged by players all the time. I want to be more involved and more organized; but next semester I'm back to school to get my masters. I don't think things went as well as they could have this opening year. Not by a long shot. I want this game to be the game the players deserve to have and for that, I need to get everything as hammered down and hammered out.
Ideally we need to count players and sit down and literally write out a full and complete storyarc for each of them, not just story bits, using the cues they gave us. Winter Court is a perfect time for personal plots if we can make it there. We also need to stretch back the scope of the camera so the world feels more real and less focused here; as well as give more glory and honor so that players feel as justified as they ought to be. PCs are going to be on average Status 3-6 in the Winter Court game with glories between 4 through 7 and the feel should be that they just jumped into a VERY big pond when they were previously big fish in a small one. It should be awe inspiring and overwhelming and intimidating and exciting all at once.
For this we're going to need dedicated NPCs. And for that we're going to need to recruit so that we GMs have to be as few NPCs as possible - find and ask your friends. We will feed them. People who want to drop their PCs for Winter Court; my suggestion is that we offer them some XP per game for playing an NPC which they can spend once Winter Court is over (Ambitious as I'm still at the point of HOPING we can continue with our small staff) on their original PC. We're also going to need two dedicated meeting times a month to talk about game and two days for each GM where they can meet with players officially to talk about things, handle rolls, etc. We should also make a " What we expect you to do " with downtime chart.
We do have a boon of actually knowing who our PCs are for Winter Court and we can more closely write towards them. Should March and April go well without being overwhelmed and the time-sheet thing work out; we should plan on taking a hiatus in May and literally hammering out the next year of game.
I'd say we should recruit GMs but there's one thing that makes games wonky, it's taking good players out of the game to run. If you know external GMs, we should go for it, but we shouldn't remove players. I dislike the idea of game going back and forth with people GMing and playing, and I would only suggest it if there was a season between (re: Run in Winter, NPC in spring, play again NEXT winter court) but again... that's way beyond our current time frame of understanding.
Hit me back on any of this. There's still time, I think, and the ability to keep this game afloat with just us. It's a great game with great players and I think if we CAN work a bit harder we can make it amazing.
Tish Carter
Scott Pockat
Happens to the best of us!