labcats | Intercon K Larp Preparation Notes (Reply)

So, it is T-10 days until Team Straightjackets Optional heads to Intercon K, and T-12 days until our game, Ghost Fu, runs again.

And we have revised the game, sent out costuming hints, character sheets, and blue sheets, printed everything out, and stuffed the envelopes. We have two copies of a GM manual. Oh, sure, there are fiddly things to do, and we may tweak minor details right up until the last minute, but basically, we are ready to run this.

We usually are not at this point until a week later. But, 60% of Team Straightjackets is going off to Dreamation, so we needed to be done by, oh, now. And we are. And it feels so good.

Things we have learned:

THE GOOD

Dedicating a three day weekend to larp prep a week before the last weekend really rocks. We should try it more often.

A lot of fiddly tasks that don't really need to be done, like organizing the material so that we can find things more easily, or re-writing the program that generates the cards so that it will be easier to cut them, really are worth it.

Factoring in a half hour for clean up time, so that one starts winding down a half hour before nominal stop time for the night is a very good thing to do. Get all the garbage tossed, all the materials you're working on out of trip range and drip range, somewhere easy to find and organized to pick up with minimum of fuss the next day. If the game is de facto boxed, put it in a box. Literally, put it in a box, or in boxes, if need be.

If you factor in that half hour, pushing just a little bit to finish organizing the GM Manuals will work. It's also a good idea because it means that all of the loose paper has been put away where it belongs.

THE EXPERIMENTAL

Unless you pay for a rush job, a copy shop will not prioritize your job, so don't send it to one if you cannot fill up the time in between with other useful tasks. Also, watch your timing. If we'd made Staples on Saturday night, there would have been no hold up. Having missed it Saturday night, we couldn't leave copying overnight there, and we couldn't buy cover stock to copy at our place. What we should have done was copy the non-cardstock things at our place, or at least the character sheets, gotten the cover stock the next day, and maybe given Staples the Blue Sheets to print.

Staples is not primarily a copy shop. There were some sloppy errors, like printing only one copy of a couple of files that needed multiples, and reversing direction on double sided copying so that some sheets had the same orientation on both sides and some did not. Also, there was some confusion about whether Staples was to cut up the cards on the cardstock -- we hadn't intended this to be the case, and that was cleared up, but it was nice to know that Staples can do that, for an extra charge, which might well be worth it. Well, in theory, Staples can. In practice, one of the staff was very apologetic, but could not figure out how to cut the cards without chopping off words. I don't understand what the issue was, as our Designated Cutter had no problem doing this with the paper cutter we had to hand. The staff was universally friendly and tried to be accommodating, but this seems to have been a more complicated job than is usually done.

I would consider using a copy shop next time, perhaps a Kinkos, to see if that works better. Note that the primary reason we used Staples was that the toner for our main printer cost enough that, when we crunched the numbers to see which option was cheaper, it was about the same.

And, I've a couple of observations on casting questionnaires, but am not sure how cool it is to discuss these without checking with players, although they are fairly broad observations.