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Development Diary #3: LRP Financing – Part One (Scoping a LRP)

Good evening all,

As I write this Development Diary, I am currently on a train back from London frantically typing away and creating additional touches for our website in between swigs of bottled water and intermittent wi-fi signals. I am looking forward to sharing what we have created with you all for the first time in greater detail and I hope you will be as excited for the future of Equinox as we are.

By the time you read this our website will have opened and bookings underway. Now, I don’t know any process in the life of a LRP event that is more nerve-wracking than ticket opening – for organisers and attendees alike. For organisers, ticket opening will often dictate the financial viability of running the event or, in the case of a festival-sized LRP, bring about additional logistical challenges such as space or the ability to meet player expectations. For attendees, particularly at smaller LRPs such as ours, the chance of getting a ticket can be anxiety inducing, frustrating or both.

In fact, it is probably the element of our game to date for which we have received the most questions and the most feedback. Unfortunately, however this is a huge topic, certainly one which goes beyond the scope of just one Development Diary. So, this week, as part of our on-going desire to be transparent about how we are running our event, there will be two Development Diaries. The first of these will touch upon our process for scoping the financial position of a LRP while the second will be setting out our reasoning behind our ticketing system.

An Uncomfortable Truth of Running LRP Events

It is an uncomfortable reality that most LRPs in the United Kingdom operate as businesses. Tickets are sold for an amount and in return the organiser provides a service or product to those in attendance. There are a lot of arguments around what that service looks like and the scope of an organiser’s obligations, but the reality is that most events that the community are familiar with, regardless of size or LRP style, cannot operate without asking for some form of money from those who wish to attend.

It’s a huge topic, one which I know is contentious and concerns issues not wholly restricted to LRP. There is a bigger discussion around this and this post is almost certainly not the right place for that.

What I will be clear about however is that we are a business. The Equinox Institute is run by Reality Checkpoint Limited, a registered UK business (company no: 16046025) and we therefore provide a service to those who purchase a ticket to attend our events. As part of that, we look to set out clearly what our attendees can expect to receive in return for the money they entrust to us as event organisers.

Before we can even considering taking that money however, we need to consider what service it is that we want to offer and price for that accordingly. This Development Diary will look at how we go about doing this.

Minimum Viable Service

When we consider the service we are looking to provide we consider this against the game requirements we set ourselves. We go and find sites that fulfil that purpose and consider how much additional expenditure we need to account for (for example props, insurance, additional crew costs such as food or travel expenditure). This allows us to determine the budget necessary for us to achieve minimum viable service.

What do we mean by minimum viable service? For us, it means the least number of features that we need to implement to achieve our objectives for the event that we want to run. In short its the least amount of money which we need in order to run the event.

Once this is determined, we add an additional amount to act as a contingency fund should the event fail to sell enough tickets or should we need to make additional expenditure beyond the amount originally budgeted. Any contingency fund that remains at the end of the event, rolls over to any future events the Game Team may choose to run and, because we are a UK business, this is treated as profit and subject to corporation tax.

As part of our on-going goals with respect to transparency, please find our minimum viable service budget contained within our spreadsheet below:

https://docs.google.com/…/1lbnssEHXU0gNfauajvNL…/edit…

You may note two things from reviewing the spreadsheet.

The first is that we have no costs for insurance. We are luckily covered in respect of this event by the support and assistance of Unfinished Tome LARP – a group of LARP organisers to whom we have offered support in the past and vice versa. Speaking personally, I am incredibly grateful for their offer of support that allows us to make some small savings that can hopefully improve everyone’s overall enjoyment of the event.

Secondly you will see that none of the Game Team are receiving an income from this event. Like the majority of LRP event organisers, we cannot run our system without the assistance of volunteers who give up their time (and sometimes their money) to make the event a reality.

Speaking personally for a moment but – I would like to change that. I want to see people remunerated for giving up their time and money for others. We have so many incredibly talented people in our community and I want them to be paid for their skills where they share them with us and others. As the Director of Reality Checkpoint LRP, I may not be able to offer a lot (certainly not a salary) but I hope something is better than nothing.

What next?

From there we consider our approach with respect to ticketing. That in and of itself is another long topic for discussion – and one which I will be sharing with you tomorrow!

If you’re interested in this topic and want to read a little further there are a number of interesting articles online. Scott Walker at LARP.Guide wrote an article nearly a decade ago discussing expensive LRPs in the context of the UK LRP scene and it is an eye opening read as to not only the challenges LRP organisers face in pricing their events but also how much inflation and other factors have increased the overall cost of events since 2015. You can find a copy of this below:

https://larp.guide/2015/08/that-event-is-too-expensive/

I hope you’ve found this very dry topic insightful into some of the thoughts and processes that goes into the creation of our events. Hopefully we will see you tomorrow for the second part of our series where we explain our pricing structure and some of our goals around the LRP system we want to grow alongside you all.

Many thanks and stay [REDACTED]

Chris Lamb
On behalf of The Equinox Institute Team