What is this?
This will be a look back on the above LARP. We will look back at the game from both a story and financial standpoint, go over the feedback form and then maybe look to the future a little. Please note that in the text TGP refers to the 2022 LARP “The Goodman Protocol” and TDO refers to the recently run “The Drake Objective”.
Background
When I originally started writing the game that would become “The Goodman Protocol” back in October 2018, it was initially designed as a stand-alone game. Realistically, I didn’t want to write another series of games that might never finish after the way Season 2 of Goldrush (LARP in the Firefly universe) had ended back in 2016. I’d wanted, for a while, to write a game in the High Frontier universe that would be about more than the eponymous xenomorphs. I’d been interested in the Lore design of the “Engineers” featured in Prometheus for a while. It was that film and a throwaway line in the 1998 film Sphere are what helped form and shape the initial foundation of the game (that and an episode of “Star Cops” would also contribute certain plot points).
Despite all the issues in the runup, during and after The Goodman Protocol, it seems many players really connected with what happened and were keen to see where the story went next (people seem surprised when I say that I have no good memories of that LARP). Writing for what would become TDO really started around July 2023 after it was agreed that the game would run in the already booked July slot the following year. Some of you may remember that the game was in jeopardy for a few weeks during September/October last year and my only comment on that is “where there’s hobbies, there’s politics” but ’m happy that a compromise was reached which meant that the game could run.
I’d always known TDO would end with the cliffhanger: “Mr Weyland wants to meet you” but how to get there took rather longer. The idea of another first contact team came about relatively early on, and it seemed to make sense in the greater telling of the story. Another source of inspiration was the Star Trek Voyager two-parter, “Equinox”. This is where they find another Federation Starship crew doing some very questionable un-Federation like things. This was the starting point from which sprung the Monchino, its mission and ultimately where it went wrong for them and how they ended up where they did. An early idea was that the player team would find the Monchino crew having their own encounter with an Engineer but this didn’t really work from various points and was soon rewritten.
We had two main concerns going into the game, Friday Night and Saturday morning
That first concern boiled down to the fact I (and the other GMs) had all been at games that started incredibly late on Friday night due to people arriving late because of Friday night traffic, being unable to get away from work and so on. Also, even though we didn’t have any structured feedback for TGP some of the informal feedback we did get was that key parts of the plot hadn’t filtered through to everybody. So, this was a chance to have a relatively stress-free IC event that could introduce incoming characters as well as remind everyone what came before.
The second concern was that we were doing a bait-and-switch on the Saturday morning, the mission you were briefed for on the Friday night wasn’t going to be the mission you were ultimately going on (although remember the name KOI-2626 though, it might come up in the future). Nobody likes being misled, the payoff must be worth it.
A physical appearance from the “Engineer” was never really on the cards in TDO once we’d decided the Monchino crew had killed ‘theirs’. We only have the one costume and that was needed as a corpse, but we wanted their presence to be ‘felt’ and that was done via the communication system that we introduced during the Dropzone game “Extraction”. This was there to continue the ‘conversation’ with them and also to give the characters another method to seek help after planetfall. There are some rules we’ve laid down for the Engineers’ capabilities as we are conscious of the fact that we are approaching Clarke’s Third Law in some ways with what they can do.
Fun fact: The Extraction game at Dropzone was to have been the Friday night part of TDO as originally written but we felt we needed a ‘mid-quel’ part to the game to serve as a bridge between TGP and then TDO. Otherwise, we were concerned that there would have been too long a gap between parts.
The “Working Joes” went through several iterations as my original plan had been to use blank face masks over a balaclava of some kind but apparently it would be f***ing July! We found the masks on AliExpress and they fulfilled my requirement of not being able to see the eyes of the person wearing it. I did have a vague worry that they looked too much like the humanoid robots from the Disney film, “The Black Hole”, but based on feedback received immediately after the game they were effective in their portrayal. In fact, it would be those masks is what would lead me to drop in a couple of Easter Eggs related to that film.
Financials
As I’ve said elsewhere, the second document you create after writing your LARP is the budget spreadsheet! The player cost for TDO was £80, this was £10 increase on the cost for The Goodman Protocol back in 2020. Somewhat controversially (certainly in other LARP circles) we also charge crew a nominal fee as well, this was £10 (the same as back in 2020). So, the balance sheet looks something like this: -
Income:
Players x 17 £1360
Crew x 13 £130
Total £1490
Expenditure:
Site £1100
Props & Sundries £341.81
Total £1441.81
Balance: £48.19
The highest expenditure was the site cost which it is for practically every LARP. This would consume a shade under 75% of the total income of the game. The LARP was initially budgeted for 18-20 players which would have given us between £1440 to £1600 (there is a general rule where you try and keep 10% of the overall budget for contingencies). As you can also see we were only one player booking away from making a loss that the GMs would have to bear and that booking came only in the last few weeks before the LARP.
The next highest cost was £80 for the new Costaguanero patches and nametapes we needed for those players coming into the game but weren’t on TGP. These were a late purchase as we didn’t really have the budget for them (and were scrambling around to see how many of the old ones we had) until we got a couple of late player bookings in the month before. In an ideal world I’d have liked to have got some Monchino patches professionally made as well and if we’d had one more player booking, we probably could have but it was not to be. In the end our NPC crew stepped up and DIYed some great looking patches.
For a long time, we were in negative numbers finance wise. Player bookings, after an initial surge on the announcement, then only trickled in over the next few months. This would eventually plateau out until a push was made after Dropzone 2024. We had one early player dropout from the game which we could easily work around then sadly a last-minute illness that nothing could be done about.
Booking Fees will be higher next time as the site hire will has already increased for 2025. One comment I will make is that if people out there want games like this to happen then the earlier you can support them makes more chances of them continuing.
Feedback
We conducted a relatively comprehensive feedback campaign for both players and crew trying to get some more feedback on where things went wrong or didn’t work as well as we hoped and what the overall feeling was towards the game. We certainly tried some new things with TDO and there had been some apprehension going into the game about them. Below we will summarise some of the points made between both groups.
We had responses from 9 players from a potential 17 and 6 crew from a potential 13 which is a nice solid rough 50% of attendees. So, we consider the answers to be representative of overall sentiment.
All responses were anonymous and any quoted comments are a direct copy from what was submitted in the form, nothing has been changed.
Player Feedback
The Practical Information document was something I think we improved on over the one for The Goodman Protocol. This will be the template for any such documents going forward and I would hope for similar documentation from other games. We did get one comment on the practical (and realistically it applies to the final as well): -
- A wee bit more on the location and where we were meant to go on arrival and after arriving. I kind of got to the car park and didn’t know what was next. And more guidance on camping - like could i bring a caravan.
Cost is something we will be touching on later, but the majority thought it was about right.