BBBQ (The extra B is for BBYOG...)

Well, from 10am 12 midnight ten or so of us intrepid LARP-writers (including tpau, jducoeur, dkapell, and bleemoo) threw together almost a complete game. I've never worked on a Build Your Own Game workshop before, and I was honestly expecting an arduous, messy, fairly slapdash process that would result in something amusing and instructive to have done, but not particularly good as a product. As it turns out, an idea that was initially met with little interest became a point of fascination as a challenge that somehow turned into a cohesive and interesting web of characters and plots with a giant whooshing sound. We sat down, we hammered at it, and when we looked up in was 8 hours later and we had essentially a runnable game on our hands. What's more, I am genuinely happy with the results so far to a degree of satisfaction that I wouldn't have gotten with most of the other ideas we toyed with. Maybe it's the lack of oxygen to my brain, but it seems like a semi-random set of people just got together and produced, dare one think it, actual art this way. We'll see if it still doesn't suck in the morning, I suppose.

(no subject)

Well, the Brandeis BYOG is done. All in all, I had a lot of fun doing it, and I would call it a modest success as a game.

I was not entirely satisfied with how the run itself unfolded for a variety of reasons, but we knew there would be sticky spots and everyone seems to have had a good time playing it.

The game was The Rising Flames, a WWII occult-related period piece. We had nine players for about two hours, so it was a pretty small game especially given the number of GMs. There are a lot of things both obvious and subtle that I view as mistakes in retrospect, but in fact I think they were very instructive mistakes for us to have made. I think that the game could be successfully reworked for future runs and be quite viable, and perhaps a bit larger, but that's not really of central importance to me. I personally learned an enormous amount about LARP writing regarding both process and product, I found the experience exhilarating, and I'm very glad to have produced a finished product out of it. The challenge and pressure are what actually mattered to me, and in the end I am not overly invested in the game ever running again, although I'd be happy if it did.