DieCon 7 Recap

The lovely Signgirl and her son D joined me for the first night of DieCon this past weekend. Jon Bancroft's daughter took us through a game of KinderBunnies. During the game Jon dropped off a coupon which Signgirl used to buy some games for D.

I wrote and helped run the Spycraft LARP for Atomic Squash. In all we had about 22 players and wrote 35 characters. Sorry Jirel, but the Cynthia Pride character was cut due to lack of players. Thanks again for writing up the information on the collectible card game.

Our biggest asset for LARP development was the wiki. I believe the ability to work online and see the edit history and recent changes made us more productive. It took some time to become adjusted to the wiki-style formatting. But everyone who used it seem to pick it up fairly quickly.

We published a guest list, a list of characters, on the Atomic Squash forums before the game. The feedback to the list helped us gauge player interest. We were better able to select which characters to put in the optional column in case not enough players showed up.

For a three to five hour game I feel that a 300-400 word character description worked well. It gives the player a good feel for the character and improves their game. For example I gave the Doctor Lo character a family. It was not important to the immediate events of the game, but helped define the character.

There were not big stories that encompassed a large number of characters. This allowed us to safely cut characters and augment the game by playing the museum curator and auctioneer as non-player characters (NPCs). Most players had at a couple goals that encouraged interaction with other players. Making Otto's disappearance a mystery discouraged players from sticking to their small circles and encouraged them to circulate among the other players.

A couple players told me how much they enjoyed their characters. Seeing them enjoy the game made all of the hard work worth it.

I was thrilled to see Signgirl laughing and enjoying the LARP. Big points for you, sweetie! Now I'll have to draft you to help me write a new Kobolds LARP.

Posted at 3:43 PM