Today in perverse design incentives: cheap players / low community price points forcing GMs to “monetize the game system” by selling XP:
Ultimately we settled on a system that is Rules Heavy for one reason…money.
With a Rules Light system it is almost impossible to monetize the game in such a way that we could expect a reasonable return on our investment. In our area, Northeastern US, the generally agreed upon price for larping is $45…give or take.
As a game, just starting out, our cost as business owners was greater than $45 a head. We made up the difference by monetizing the Rules System. Offer incentives to those who want to spend the money, that would allow them to get Skills faster. It is a system that a majority of American Style games use. And it makes absolute sense from the business side of things. Of course I’ll let you give me money to put numbers on your card!
Reading this, I’m so glad that we have a larp community which overwhelmingly accepts that games cost what they cost, and don’t force GMs to make such perverse decisions.