July Update - Strain Variants, Books, and Schedule

Welcome to the July update, which only came out during July because the month was kind enough to have 31 days.

I guess the first thing to give in the transparency blog is how stupid-busy things have been on our side of the game running and development desk. We’ve been finalizing getting a book ready for release, working on writing a second, organizing our staff, running an ARG, and doing a lot of miscellaneous work like web design and graphics over the past month.

The other part of it is that Catie and I have very engaging jobs that sometimes require a massive volume of our attention. Catie got a promotion and a step over into a new company running massive corporate and wedding events, overseeing a full team, and organizing the needs of a growing venue. I’m still working in my VP of marketing and fractional marketing officer position, and a few of my bigger clients are in very busy parts of their seasons and need more direct interaction with me than normal.

The other part is that with as much work as we’ve been doing on game related things and away from game, we want to take our free time to do things together or take care of mundane life things (improving house, days out with family, etc.).

So, there is the first part of the transparency side of things.

The second half is going to be about book releases and Strain variants.

So, if you have been reading our social media posts, in our Discord, attending the national discord event, or attended any of the live meetings we’ve done on the Most Improbable Discord, chances are good you already have seen and heard about our CT Strain variants. They are TTRPG and LARP variants of current Strains where the Strain Traits and some of the roleplay of the Strain are slightly different from the universal Strains. They are designed to be unique mutations based on the screwed-up microcosm of The Wailing Shores. With that, we have had some questions that I want to answer in quick bullet point format.

·         Are these Strains only for DR CT or are they for the entire game?

o   They are only for DR CT. We went through the effort to make something unique to our play space for our players. Sometimes we get contracted to write stuff for the entire network to use, but in this instance, nobody contracted us for this. We paid for the creation of this book out of pocket, did a lot of the labor ourselves, and invested literal hundreds of hours to make something unique for our game.

·         Does that mean that all games can make unique Strain variants?

o   Only if they do it the right way. It requires publishing a book that has all of the details game runners and players will need to use these variants in both the TTRPG and LARP universe. To do this you need to create -new content- to DR Larp National who gets first review on it. After that it gets reviewed by the IP holders and then Onyx Path is given the option to review it as well. You will need to make sure that the book hits all the requirements that all the invested parties have for the book to be released, and you will have to do a lot of revisions.

The other thing to know is that making a book to this scale is not cheap, and as a single source, you will probably lose money doing it. Paying for editors, artwork, and more cost us about $1,000 without counting all the labor that we did in house. So, book releases need to be in connection to running an event that generates attendance to make it break even.

·         If I want to play one of these variants, I need to be based out of DR-CT?

o   Short answer is yes. Slightly longer answer is that with the new Advanced Membership rules you can have your character based out of whatever region you would like and gain the benefits of going to any virtual or personal game as if it were your home game.

·         What does “new content” mean exactly?

o   You can’t write content for someone else’s creation. So, if you are a game runner and are following the rules, you should have a play-space that is unique to your game and is not running on the cannon locations. So as an example (and I use this example because of its proximity to where I live and nothing else), you can have your game in “Old York” or “The Mass”, but you can’t control or change the canon characters, groups, or locations from the published materials.  These characters are someone else’s creative property, were written by someone else, and the owner of the IP has the ability to write or release content for those areas as they see fit.  

·         Can my game hire you guys to write a book for our game space where we give you input and ideas we want to see?

o   Yes, but understand that we would have to charge for our time. While it may not be a lot compared to what is going on, since we personally would not be running an event to earn back the time and money going into production of a book, we would have to charge.

Star blog number 8675309. Transparency Blog

It’s been a bit since our last transparency post, but it’s also been a bit since we did any meetings of note in public. With months before our game goes open for sale, we have been primarily working on the organization back end, continued development of our The Wailing Shores book, and doing the planning for our combo CT- TX double header event.

We did end up popping in to the DR National discord opening-de-grande and did a talk on what our book release plans were and how development was going.

For those of you that attend our Most Improbable chats, its not much of a surprise. We’ve finished the layout for our The Wailing Shores book and intend on giving early access to it to anyone that buys a ticket and at least 1 additional XP for the DR CT event. This will give people early access to the book before the game so that they have more of an understanding of the territory, the unique flavors of Strains in the area, as well as some of the threats.

What was a new-er announcement was that the book releases going forward are also going to contain optional LARP mechanics. As an example, in the TTRPG each of the Strains has a mechanical condition that they have to abide by. This sort of translates over to the “Traits” that each Strain has that is primarily a roleplaying guide. Our book will provide optional roleplay Traits that can be taken for characters with those Strains that are based out of DR CT.

In addition, we announced that Catie and I were going to keep writing and publishing books, all with additional source materials and TTRPG and LARP mechanics. The book that will have the most in the way of “direct XP purchase mechanics” instead of items that are primarily roleplay variants, will be the Murder Inc book that we plan on releasing in 2023.

Our goal is to write and release at least one book every year, each from different locations, and running an event based in that area. Because Most Improbable licensed publication rights from the IP management company (and a chunk of sales go to that company for the things we make), we are able to write books and release optional mechanics going forward.

It is important to mention, that Catie and I aren’t doing this as a job or a living. We literally pay more into releasing these books than we will ever make back in the $1 and $2 residuals we make from each book purchase. With that in mind, we are 100% writing the books we want to write because we LIKE doing it and running events to match because we WANT to tell those stories. We aren’t part of National, we don’t get paychecks from this, and this is all about us effectively doing nerd writing and art.

So, that about sums it up. Other than occasionally Catie and Michael do public chats on the Most Improbable discord talking about different game design theories, processes, and aspects of writing and working in the industry.   

Post Transparency Meeting.

Thank you to everyone who attended our public DR CT transparent meeting. Basically, what we are doing as a gaming group is not only providing information to anyone who wants to know about our business operations, but also allowing our players and the general public to join and listen into our business / operations meetings. Using the Discord Stage function, people can listen in and type questions that they would like to ask the operations team.

The key focuses that we had for the meeting summed up were:

1.       Why we are doing this, and who we are doing it for.

2.       The one-year agreement.

3.       Our current financial status and our investments.

4.       Plans for the next event.

Summary of these points.

1.       We are doing this for a few different reasons. The first is that we just want to do cool things with people and do cool creative events. We all agreed that we would not make this a monthly deal, and that our focus on event and community management would follow the general guideline of “The Bar”. Basically, we are going to make a very cool place that you go to a few times a year, but when you are not at the bar, you actively -aren’t at the bar-. We aren’t going to build a local community that people use as a surrogate for living out in the real world, and we aren’t going to hesitate about asking people not to attend any more if they are problematic. This includes not just the broken stairs, but also super negative or abusive acting people. General idea is “If I was at a local townies bar, would I get tossed out for acting this way? If so, don’t do it here.” The second main reason for us doing this is because there are a lot of people who want to play but due to health or location restrictions they just can’t play anymore.

2.       The one-year agreement is this: no matter how well or how bad we do, we run this for one year. At the end of the one year in December we have a meeting where we decide if we want to do it for another year. The fact is there are many people who stick in with running events even when they are burnt out due to a sense of responsibility. It is a requirement for us to opt back in at the end of the year instead of assumed ongoing involvement.

3.       We went through all of the expenses, the percent income taken by license and national network, the volume of pay and costs for our staff as well as the material and shipping costs for the crystals. We outlined how much we pay in taxes and processing fees line by line and in the end have roughly $5,000 that we are rolling forward into funding for the next event (and business expenses).

4.       We are going to be doing our next online event in May, and the goal is to create a full splat-book for the area that will be made available for TTRPG and LARP source. This will include definition of our play space (new area, not something already existing in core lore), introduction of our financial groups, tying in what criminal organizations are in the area, providing sample cultures from the different regions, and providing our theme and history content.

Questions asked:

1.       What are you looking for in writers? People who want to write and run for 2-day events with a focus on virtual TTRPG skills instead of assuming larp runners. Virtual space has unique nuances and we think it would be good to start reaching out to people we think can be new additions to the narrative instead of just farming existing people. We also want first time runners, people with a passion for narrative but haven’t been trained, additional casted characters, as well as people who are directors for other branches who want to either network together or learn how we operate while assisting (and getting paid for) working an event.

Can characters be based out of DR-CT? Yes. We are effectively another DR branch, but we have special licenses to do the weird shit because the people who created the original books for DR are the people overseeing this branch. This way we can do the experimental and artsy and different formats of play while still staying within the structure of the intellectual property and being woven into the ongoing LARP network narrative.

Murder Inc event done, looking back at some of the hurdles

This is being written before our Sunday public meeting, but it’s probably good to put some details regarding the hurdles for the event that we had. This is intended to be a transparency from before the event up to the event itself, not counting the actual operation of the event and the feedback that came from it. So, everything at this point and going forward will be the hurdles coming into the event. This way people have a better understanding of the process of running something like this, can learn from our experiences, and have a better scope of what what an event like this requires.

The first and in my opinion the largest hurdle we had going into the event was how burned out so many of the existing DR event runners were coming into the event. Prior to the event we opened communication with the Directors of the branches across the network seeing if we could help weave their local stories into our event, see if there were team members (or them) we could hire to be a part of the event and run portions, and to start the communication. We also reached out to, and hired on, staff and Directors from a few branches.

After two months of reaching out, connecting, and working with other branches we had multiple paid Directors back out because they needed to focus on their branch. There were a few writers who couldn’t invest the time because personal items came up (sickness, moving, and other items that happen). We also had several branches that responded they were interested but couldn’t make the time to have a quick meeting or to be actively involved. Can’t lie, was surprised how many branches just “wing it” or have a meeting right before game.

Overall, our plan was to have 3-4 branches very actively involved in the production of the event. While we got close to that in the literally two weeks before the event, we were fighting uphill. People were mentally and emotionally tired because of covid, because they haven’t been able to fully engage with other people, because it takes a lot of work keeping a community together during a crisis, and because many people were tired of being online for discord events.

The second big hurdle we needed to address was that we wanted to tell a story for a section of the game that was either underserved, used in strange (not always genre) ways, or just had no documentation for what had been done. So, in addition to writing the overall event we needed to create a documentation kit for our staff to be able to work from so that they had a common return point for the narratives they were writing. Story arcs, themes, focuses, and design documents had to be cranked out at a -at least- 80% completion so that they were functional to work from.

This was a lot of labor and more hands-on work by the same people who should have been more focused on organization and project managing the event. While still doable, and we did a really great job with it, there was a lot of extra up-front deadline priority work that needed to be done. We needed to set the foundation and materials that the event would be based on, make it into transparent but non-spoiler content for the public as well. Most of this needed to be done before we could launch the webpage. Add in having to finalize the test revisions for the Most Improbable larpletop system, and you have almost two books of writing.

In the top three of hurdles, the last one was a very complex item and is still in review post event. Dystopia Rising has been around for well over a decade now. With that, we have multiple generations of players who have very different expectations and desires from a gaming experience. Combine the generational difference with local community culture and local game preferences, the gap becomes much wider. We knew going into the event that we were going to ionize the people who attended into either LOVED or HATED categories. What was worse is going into the event we *knew* that whichever direction we leaned towards was going to have the non-served respond with negativity and accusations of “doing it wrong”.

The duration of the event, the duration of modules, the volume of modules, and the system to be used all had to be very carefully decided on. We thought for a very long time and had several meetings internal and external about this issue.

In the end we had to just say “FUCK IT” and we decided to run the event for the kind of story we wanted to run for the kind of player that we wanted to tell a story for. We provided webpage transparency about it not being crafting or gear focused, we provided transparency that it would be an event of many shorter modules (which people predictably either LOVED or HATED), and we put all the details up on the page for people to have. We also did a few public event Q&A’s on our discord and opened the boards for support prior to the event.

Not to go into the during and post event too much, but we were dead on when it came to our predictions about who and what focus player would love our event, and which would hate it. In my mundane job I create marketing and business plans based on demographic and psychographic projects, and in this instance, it hit with a 95% accuracy (which is gold for most companies).

Last hurdle to go into today was startup cost and projected expenses. Originally, we had designed this event to be a Premier event instead of a National event. When running a Premier event, you pay the same percent of income to the national network as you do for running a normal game. When you are running a National event, the national network takes a larger percentage of income in exchange for being able to support the game with higher XP sales and larger resource access. While the additional XP sales helped us pay for the event and forward income for the next one, it didn’t really provide us much with additional resource access (spoiler, when there is a national event, often Most Improbable is the people who assist with that resource development for national kits). So, we were able to get an adjustment on the percent paid, but at the same time, we needed to project our bookkeeping/income/costs to pay for a large percent to processing fees and national. While it ended up (mostly) working out in the end, it was a hurdle to get over.

Next update will be next week after we have had our transparency and planning meeting. If any of this interested you, you want to hear the casual conversation regarding feedback and future events, or if you have questions please join us and tune in this Sunday on our discord.

Why this page is here.

Welcome.
Lets get to the brass tacks of it.

We’ve run a lot of events over a long period of time.

Not as a company, but as the people who own this company. Michael started running larp events in 1995 and worked with multiple networks, created multiple IPs, and founded an events company a publication company and a gaming network. Catie has run hundreds of live events, has written for Eschaton Media, Onyx Path, and many other gaming publications. Between the two of us we have thousands of events in multiple countries in multiple formats. If you are interested in some of the other projects, check out the main Most Improbable page.

Despite our history of involvement, both of us have full time jobs and careers that take care of our personal finances. These full time careers can consume large portions of our time, but financially put us in a place where we can afford to gamble on hosting creative events.

So, because we need to express what level of involvement we are going to have and communicate clearly, we decided that we are going to run our events with a very high level of transparency. This includes inviting people to attend our planning sessions to listen in and write feedback / ask questions. This includes making the finances visible so that people understand what it takes to run this sort of event. This also includes putting our notes and discussion from event feedback available to the public.

Now while our goal is offering a wide swath of transparency, in the hopes of being more transparent and create good communication, we are also not going to put these posts and updates as the highest priority. Don’t expect real time feeds and up to the second updates. If our mundane jobs need our attention, or really, if we don’t have the spoons to do it on a certain day we aren’t going to.

Also to be clear with transparency, please don’t mistake transparency and open communication with shared ownership and decision making power. Transparency ensures we are accountable for the people we are making cool things for, but at the end of the day, as a company and as individual owners we are the only ones left holding the bag if something goes wrong and personal income needs to be invested. So decisions need to be made while listening to others, but by the people who are fronting the money and liability for the events.

So, over the coming weeks and months expect more of these of varied degrees of content and different focuses. If you would like a more active awareness of what and how we are doing things then please join us on our Discord for our regularly scheduled event manager meetings.