We're now less than a week away from deciding on the next Society LARP, so I thought it would be good to do a quick retrospective, and maybe talk about the changes in the latest (and possibly last) version of the wiki.
Mat contacted me way back in July 2017 to talk about working on this project together, and I'm so happy that he did. I still feel that I was incredibly lucky, and that he was exceptionally generous to trust me with co-parenting his baby. What a delightful little scamp they have grown into.
It's been hard work. We've had over forty meetings, two playtests, made countless changes to the wiki, spoken to dozens of you about all things LARP, and, in short, sunk a truly terrifying number of hours into this game. But it hasn't felt like hard work to me, and I find myself in the unusual (if enviable) position of really hoping that I don't have to stop doing it.
But even if we do, I feel like we've created something really excellent together. Moreover, I feel some pride in being able to start a dialogue about what we value in LARP, and where we could do better as a community. Regardless of what happens, I am never going to stop advocating for simplicity in core systems, accessibility, the importance of designing mechanics and setting together, and the triumph of devising win-win solutions for people over total devotion to an abstract system.
Version 2.2 is almost exclusively based on feedback from participants at the second playtest, and is a model for how I'd see us continuing to update the wiki in future. We've managed to further simplify the system by culling a huge number of unique calls, and refining those standard calls that we do have. We've also made tweaks to various classes and abilities where they just didn't work in play.
Oh, and we added some of your lovely faces to the wiki. Because, I remember being a newbie and not having any idea what this LARP thing would even be like, and I think that having pictures of people having fun together goes a long way to bridging that gap. A linear LARP system, even more than other LARPs, is first and foremost dependent on a healthy community, and that is its greatest strength and primary responsibility.
Seb