Stirring Up Trouble - A Beginner’s Guide to Running an Event

Sooner or later, it happens. You’ll be going along, minding your own business, killing orcs, or vampires or what-have-you, when you suddenly find yourself in a horrible, unenviable position. They’ve put you in charge. Maybe you’ve always secretly wanted to be here, maybe you’ve stumbled into it on accident. Two absolute truths you should just accept now so you can move on with your life though:

1. No One who hasn’t done it will appreciate the amount of work you’re about to do.
2. Do a good job, and they’ll talk about this for years.
3. Do a bad job, and they’ll talk about this forever.

 

Sorry, that’s just how this whole “Event Marshal” thing works. Now that you’re calling the shots, you get all the blame and only a modicum of glory. Of course, there is the power, the raw, titillating knowledge that the world rest in the palm of your hand! *insert maniacal laughter here*

But how do you use that power appropriately, as we all know you’re going to. After all, they only allow fine, upstanding and in no way, cruel or sadistic people to control events, right?

Of course.

I’m going to assume that you’re already familiar with the rules and regulations of your own game, otherwise, who in their right mind would allow you to run the thing? What you might need first and foremost is a primer in how the bureaucracy of an event runs. The subtle nuances of a hidden culture inside your subculture.

Yes, Game Officers are a completely different breed of LARPer. They are a sad, tired lot, with the weight of the world, or at least a small portion of it, carried squarely on their shoulders.

And now, you’re one of them, congratulations.

Let’s Start with the Basics

An event can basically be broken down into 5 parts from your perspective:

1. Planning
2. Preparing
3. Execution
4. Abandonment
5. Recovery

Over the next few posts, we’ll go into more detail about each of these phases, but for today, we’ll start with a basic understanding of what each one involves.

Planning

In my experience, this involves sitting round, staring at the ceiling and thinking about how it would be nice if you could convince someone else to do all the work for you. We’ll talk about how to pull off that trick later, though. For now, you’re on your own, and that means you’re going to have to start figuring out exactly what type of event you’re going to run. Is it an adventure? A War? A Feast? Maybe Just a weekend of cleaning up your event site?

Once you have that down, you can start working on the minutia of figuring out what you need to do what you have to do. From there, you enter into phase 2.

Preparing

Preparation is pretty easy. It’s just getting what you need to get to run the event. You can usually double this together with your normal event prep, but you might want to make some calls to solidify NPCs if they’re needed and the like. Not much to say here.

Execution

This phase is the hour or so of registration followed by the first 15-20 minutes of the actual event. The shortest, and most easy part of an event.

Abandonment

About 20 minutes (or less) into an event, all of your players are going to rebel against you’re wonderfully thought out plans and start doing things you would never in a million years expect them to do. This is the Abandonment. It means you have to think quickly, and with some guile to keep things from turning into a Canadian Independent Film.

If you’re lucky, you survive this phase and end up, late at night, sitting around a campfire exchanging war stories with other game officers. These will all start with, “No shit, there I was…”

Recovery

The blissful Monday morning feeling that you have done the impossible, and that you are a god amongst men. This quickly fades with the realization that one of two things has happened:

• A) You’ve done a wonderful job, and thus will be doing it again… soon.
• B) You’ve done a horrible job, and no one will ever let you forget it.

Either way, there are ways to recover, and we’ll talk about those later.

So, now that you have a very basic idea of what goes into running an event, surely you’re going to go out and give your game officers hugs, booze, and chocolate chip cookies, right?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.