I. Explanation and Introduction

What this is about

This text is a "how to" guide for writing theatre-style live roleplaying events. If you aren’t sure if you run that kind of live roleplaying event, you may want to read ahead anyway. "Theatre style" is a seldom used "meta term" which embraces most live roleplaying that doesn’t focus primarily on combat with padded weapons. And even if your events do focus on combat with padded weapons, you may find some useful tips here – many facts about facilities, food, and decision making are the same for all types of live roleplay.

There is a default assumption at some points in this guide that we are dealing primarily with overnight events. The fact is most theatre-style events aren’t overnight – most run for 4-6 hours, and many occur at venues where the event producers aren’t responsible for anything except delivering and running the event.

But full length standalone events are the most complex live roleplaying events. One could consider them the "Mount Everest" of the genre. And because they are the most complicated, we’ll focus on them. If the event you end up running has a simpler structure, you’ll find that all the basic rules still apply.

Introduction

Since 1986, I have been producing various types of Theatre-Style Live Roleplaying games. In late 1998, I began to realize that an awful lot of local GMs starting their own writing projects were asking me for advice or suggestions. I also became painfully aware that what I could tell them over a two hour dinner was not going to be of much help to them. There was no "secret" to running games that people enjoyed, and any attempt to condense one resulted in a set of platitudes that were transparent to the rawest of writers.

I also became aware of a big discrepancy in Theatre Style production. Experienced Theatre Style GMs – writers with several successful events under their belts – would make the same critical mistakes in runtime again and again. Mistakes I could see my way around.

Rather than pat myself on the back for being a smart guy, I decided to try to figure out why. Most of these people were as bright as I was, and some were smarter and more talented. I looked at the producers who weren’t making mistakes, and I found a common denominator.

Experience.

By 1996, I had spent over 800 hours actually on the floor running Theatre Style games. While that’s just a couple of years of work in the Live Combat world, it is almost unheard of in Theatre Style gaming. The reason is simple – writing and pre-production consume a very large amount of time in comparison to actual runtime in Theatre Style games.

Thus the problem. When it came to actually running games, nobody was an expert, but I was at least a journeyman. Talented and experienced people who were excellent writers were consistently botching elements of production and floor work, because they didn’t have adequate experience. Because the only way to get experience was to spend months writing a game, and you could spend enough time writing to be an expert before you had spent your first hundred hours actually running events.

That’s the focus of this how to work. Most work in the past has focused on "how to write, how to create plots, etc." The fact is, you probably have at least a fair idea of that, or you wouldn’t be reading this. What you want to know are all the other things – the things that you don’t want to learn the hard way in the last two weeks of production, or as you try to spin control your event onsite.

Copyright 1998 , Gordon Olmstead-Dean.  You may reprint or cite, providing the source is attributed.
Some of this material has appeared previously in identical or substantially similar form in the LARPA Periodical
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