We’re excited to be starting a new recurring series of blog posts about how we’re managing, maintaining and expanding our technology as a LARP. These articles may not appeal to everyone, but we think there’s a lot of valuable knowledge in them for individuals who run their own LARPS, whether they’re independent LARP owners or any of our wonderful Underworld LARP guildmasters.
It can be beneficial to have a way to communicate in-game and out of game information to your players, recruit new players, and potentially allow your players to communicate to one another. The simplest way to achieve this is with something like a Facebook group, but if you want to stand out there are a lot of existing options for offering enhanced versions of this functionality.
These blog posts will focus on our efforts to expand or improve our technology. We’ll do future articles covering different options for technologies, but for today we’ll just be talking in general about this subject, and focusing on one specific issue we’re dealing with at Underworld LARP.
You don’t need to write code
The technological challenges faced by anyone who runs a LARP often don’t relate to needing to build things, they relate to needing to learn about and install things. With the exception of your LARPs specific ruleset, you’re probably not doing anything that is drastically different from any other LARP.
There are companies and websites that offer solutions for forums, chat, websites and everything else under the sun. It’s very possible to up your tech game without finding a developer to build and install things for you. I’ll cover some of those options in a future blog post.
You get better customization with your own server
In simplest terms a server is a computer on the internet, which you can connect to a URL / domain name, in order to install software that enhances your LARP in some way. Some software is installed and configured, some software requires code to be written as well, and some software is custom-built for you.
Underworld LARP has a server and over the years we’ve had a lot of different stuff installed on it. Our main website, forums, wikis, our logistics database and a number of other things. We’re a LARP and, as everyone knows about LARPs in general, we’ve benefited greatly from a bunch of keen and experienced volunteers over the years. Those volunteers have given us a lot of amazing resources and they’ve helped grow the quality of our game.
(Author’s note: the big reason I’m here is because all of the volunteer work I did with our Cape Breton guild, Tempest Grove. I love building things, writing code and volunteerism. I enjoyed the fact that I could practice my skills and learn new things while building content for Tempest Grove. It’s great getting paid in frags so I can enhance my LARP experience. It was totally a win/win for me.)
Simplicity is key
The more software you have the more you need to know and the more you need to do. Software is updated regularly. New team members need to be trained on how to use it. Paid or unpaid, nobody should deal with unnecessarily complex software in order to do their job. Using the software isn’t how they want to help.
This time last year Underworld LARP had a website, a wiki, global forums, guild forums and our logistics database. Everyone needs to be able to log into all of these in order to use their full functionality, which means that everyone needs a different login for every piece of software.
These pieces of software all have a different user interfaces. They can be used differently, even though at their core they’re all about adding and consuming content about our LARP. In recent months it’s become clear that using all of these different pieces of software has made things harder on our team that we would prefer. We’re now working on streamlining things.
Use LARP technology to save time and energy
Our logistics database is faster than using spreadsheets. Our forums are a more efficient way to organize discussions than a Facebook group. Technology helps us deliver a better LARP experience because it makes things easier and faster. But things still aren’t perfect. We need to update and maintain all of these pieces of software and we need to train people.
A while ago we started adding more functionality to our website. We’re moving away from the traditional wiki model of serving content. We’ve added a new Lore section to our website. The people who add lore knowledge to our site will now use the same interface as the people who add blog posts, or our guild masters and their representatives. And this is just the beginning.
More changes are coming
In the coming weeks we’ll be moving the global forums to the website as well. We’ll continue to improve our LARP technology. Installing this forum plugin is something I’d done previously with the Tempest Grove website. Many people already have accounts for this website. They buy items from our online store. This change will mean less accounts for them to manage. We have a forum, it’s just rolled into the website rather than on its own.
Making this change means less work for our volunteers, and less time spent maintaining our software. We’ll save time working on Underworld LARP logistics and systems. We’ll spend more time focusing on things that help our players and community. When we help you start a LARP we want to make sure you have the best chance of success.