Why would you want to run an event?

Players can be a pain. They’re unpredictable, have basic needs that must be met and demand entertainment. They leave mess, and ask questions when you’re trying to focus on more important things like running a game. They’ll cancel, re-book, then ask for extra tickets. They all want to be snipers. Everyone wants to camp in the same glade and none of them are happy with the one you’ve put them in. They expect to sleep. They have dietary and medical needs, they don’t think how you want them to and they all have their own opinions.

Sites are expensive, they’re too hilly, they’re lacking in interesting terrain, and they don’t have enough bunks. Radios don’t work, there’s a footpath across the middle, the scouts keep turning up, and the relationship between the kitchen and the dining room isn’t exactly what you had in mind. There’s never anywhere for the crew to socialise, and the toilets block if more than one is flushed simultaneously. They sites are overused and too well known or miles away and no one wants to travel that far to an event.

Crew are expensive, they have to be fed, need entertaining, and cancel at the last minute because something else has come up. They expect ‘downtime’ and aren’t happy being bodies for eight hours at a stretch. They can’t contort themselves to fit the costume you wish them to wear or they look a little odd in a lycra alien suit. They’re not superhuman and only some of them can read your mind. They all think the thing they do is the most important thing and some of them utterly fail to liaise with people they never knew existed.

Props. There are never enough props that can take a beating, be interacted with in a reliable way and also look good for almost not money. You have to transport them all to site, set them up, and create the thing in your imagination back in the real world. They make you compromise in order to stretch a budget just a bit more, and you often can’t have the thing that you really want. They obey real-world physics and making it seem otherwise involves a carefully controlled situation that you often just don’t have at a LRP event.

You can only spend money once, and some people look at you funny when they realise what you’re doing.

You’ll be the first people on site and the last to leave and you’re the one responsible for ensuring that the fridge is empty, the litter has been cleared and that the site owners will see LRPers as a welcome income source and not a liability.

It will eat your days, your plans and your health and you will realise that you are temporarily utterly committed to something that exists only for a weekend in the heads of a handful of players. And some of them won’t even like it.