Article:
Creating a LARP Group: Service Rewards

Creating your own LARP group is a lot of work! Whether you're working with a group of people or if you're doing it on your own, you are going to need help from others. As a hobby, you're going to be hard pressed to pay for that help. However, you can get a lot of mileage out of players, as long as you provide some sort of IG reward for OOG support.

Here are some tricks for implementing a system for service rewards.

Make it Consistant
Nothing will turn people off from helping out more than if they feel their effort is worth less than someone else's effort. When you develop a system for service rewards, the most important thing to do is to put everything in writing. This forces you to use the same system for everybody and makes the system transparent to outside observers.

The added benefit of having a system is that you can delegate the responsibility of service awards to other people without worrying about favoritism.

Make it Worthwhile, but Not Overpowering
Balancing service rewards is a tough thing to do. You want the benefits to be worthwhile, but they should not be required. You don't want a game where doing service work is absolutely required to compete at the highest levels. You want the benefit of service rewards to be renewable, otherwise a player would hit a certain amount of service rewards and then stop contributing to the game. You want to limit how much service rewards can advance a character in the game. It would be unfair to everyone else if a player was running around with twice the abilities, money, and equipment, just because they put a lot of money into your game.

Balancing all these things might seem incredibly difficult, but like most things, once you have a set of goals set up it's a lot easier to meet those goals. Trust me when I say, a well balanced system for service rewards can mean the difference between a successful game and a flop.

Dealing with Cash
So what do you do when someone wants to donate $1000 to your game (other than scream like a girl)? You need to work out the conversion of money to service for the game. As a rule, I would assume about $5 per hour of work. So the guy who donates $1000 to the game will get the same reward as someone who donates 200 hours to the game.