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I was organizing my gaming stuff today. So far I have written three games: one Spycraft LARP and two Kobolds Ate My Baby LARPs. At Archon this year we discussed what the next Spycraft game will involve. I am going to join Jason and Ron, a talented writer who writes for the SLUGS Vampire LARP, in putting together a game set in the late 70s, arguably the golden age of spy movies. This gives us a lot of material from which to draw.

As I thought about what the next game might be like. I wondered if I would be onboard to write a third, a fourth or more. I recalled the conversation I had with David Collins at GenCon. He has written dozens of LARPs using his Courting Murder rules system. He told me that he usually writes five or six games in a setting before he moves on to another one. This made me realize that perhaps there is such a thing as a creative limit. This may explain why some of our favorite shows jump the shark in dramatic fashion. I loved the X-Files but, friends, the latter seasons were never as great as those that preceded them. I want to believe that I can realize this in my work before it happens.

Every game I write I like to challenge myself to introduce conflict in new and fresh ways. The conflict can take many forms: character vs character, character vs environment and even character vs herself. For "The Black Tie Affair" we used a dysfunctional family. All of the family members were at odds. The father was missing and probably dead. The mother put out a hit on her son. The son was a dope fiend with no love for his mother. For "Kobolds on a Plane" the clan leader was dead and two different Kobolds wanted to claim his spot. In "Tabriz School of Magick" there were two houses with many rivalries between them. Of course, sometimes the players take the conflicts and turn them on their ear. The player who played the mother in "The Black Tie Affair" decided to cancel the hit and reconcile with her son. I'm okay with that. After all the game is for the players and we should never make them a slave to the story.