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Behind the Scenes, Mandala's Minion 0

Teamwork – Building Better Games Together

By Leah @AmabatLeah · On February 22, 2016

It can take a lot of people to run a LRP event. We often end up with a core team of about 10, monster crew of 20-30 and 30-55 players, and we do cap our monster numbers. We’re beginning to look at monster roles that don’t involve people being on site. This would give us more NPCs that interact over the weekend without people necessarily needing to commit to the whole weekend or needing somewhere to sleep. We also have people who feed our players, manage our email, write systems and build props for us, and people who will direct people where to park there car. Who’ll meet them in the pub and give them their OOC briefing. We have carpenters, electricians, electrical engineers, people who do things with computers, network engineers, chefs, costume designers, creature designers, writers and numerous other highly skilled roles, many of whom do things that I could not do without years of studying.

I’ve written before that I don’t think players pay enough to be customers. No one at any of our events gets paid for what they do. It’s something we do because we enjoy writing games and because they’re fun. The people who put the most into the event are the people running it. It will be something they live and breath for a few weeks before an event, and some of the builds we do can be happening for months before that.

This is, I suspect, something something that you are all aware of. If you’re reading this there is a very good chance that you’re involved in LRP and given my normal blog subject matter you’re hopefully at least thinking about running your own event and want it to be amazing (or maybe you just want to see what goes on behind the scenes). We can’t run events without these people. We certainly wouldn’t be able to pull off some of the stuff that we consider makes us one of the best LRP companies in the world if we didn’t have a pool of highly skilled volunteers to draw from each time we run a game.

We expect a lot from our players. We expect them to know what they want from the game, and we also expect them to respect other people’s games. We expect them to treat us with respect and to treat our crew with the same respect. We expect them to put themselves in interesting situations, and to meet us halfway in many, many things. We expect them to know when they’ve had enough and remove themselves from situations they can’t cope with. We expect them not to die in a manner which may be detrimental to the continuation of our hobby and we expect them to read the emails we send them and if they’re thinking “ooh, that doesn’t sound fun” instead of “fuck yeah! this sounds awesome” to send us an email and say “this may not be the game for me (We give both refunds and respect for this. ).

We’re all deciding to create games together. It should be a happy community where everyone does what they can to further other peoples enjoyment. We’re happy with people asking us for help as long as they’re aware that we won’t be able to give them a refund for a last minute cancellation (it’s a small game, we’ve already spent the money) and that at that point we won’t be able to find another players (we haven’t slept for a week so it’s best that you look for someone yourself).

However, we’re not at the point where we tell you exactly what food we’re providing before an event, we let you supplement it yourselves and we never leave you without tea and coffee. (For those who played Alone 3, we kind of expected you to turn the urn on within about 2 hours of arriving. It never occurred to us that you would abandon the building with the caffeine in it for plot reasons.)

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Leah

I spend most of my free time involved in LRP in one way or another. I part own and run Mandala Studios in Coventry and have been running games through them for 5 or 6 years. I also crew Empire LRP. I have catered a variety of events and banquets and the events I run are a mix of genres (SciFi, Fantasy and stupid - next year I'm running a dinosaur event).

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