Perverse design incentives

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.

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Agreed!

Well we sort of do. Our monthly games are run really cheap, but we tend to compromise on venue rather than system - using cheap, readily available options rather than others which might be more aesthetically or functionally suited to larp. We run what he describes as boutique larps by default - higher cost, fewer events. I suspect if we were running monthly weekend games at a higher budget, we would encounter similar problems, though pay-to-win certainly seems a rather unfortunate design choice.

In our big campaigns, you could argue that we underprice weekend games (relative to their cost to run) and overprice the day games (again compared to their running cost). Because the day games are run in free public venues, they are cheap to run, and are often used as fundraisers to help make the ticket price of weekend games (which are already very high for some people) lower.

Attending day games usually allows you to advance your character faster.

So… we monetise the game types, instead of the rules.

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