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LARP Plot Tips: Keeping Players Busy
As a member of a LARP's plot team, your ultimate goal should always be to run a memorable event. There are many facets that you should consider when trying to make things memorable. Memorable events come in all shapes and sizes, but there is one thing that almost every memorable event I've seen all have in common:
The players were kept busy.
I understand that you spent two weeks designing a module, building props, scaling it well, and thinking out every possible outcome. Maybe you took care to make every detail of that module important and interesting for the players. None of that will matter if the town is waiting three hours with nothing to do for you to set that module up.
I'm not saying you shouldn't write epic modules that take a while to set up. I'm saying that you should always have something planned for the players while they're waiting.
Here are some tricks you can use to keep the players busy.
Random Encounters and Wandering Monsters
The easiest thing to keep players busy is to continue sending monsters into the town to fight. Take about a third of your NPCs, give them 5 or 6 monster cards, treasure, and costumes and let them go and entertain. It's amazing how much better an event is made by sending in monsters on regular intervals.
Interpersonal Puzzles and Games
Sometimes you can't spare the NPCs. Plan in advance for some downtime by giving the PCs some things to do amongst themselves. This could be as simple as organizing a riddle test, scavenger hunt, or game that the PCs can play on their own. This way, players will have something to distract them when you're setting up the major attack on the town or getting everyone suited up in your killer dragon costume.
A note on scavenger hunts: Make the items on the list easily attainable in town. Do not put a bunch of rare things on the list that will require players adventuring on modules to attain. You're much better off having a player grab a certain kind of flower around the camp then adding a rare flower that only exists on the top of a mountain that's covered in monsters.
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Another way to get players talking is to give them lots of information to chew on. This works especially well if you back it up with interesting props. Your plot line could very well be linear, but if the players have a diary to read, captured letters to sift through, or a bag of runes to ponder the meaning and purpose of, they can still spend a lot of downtime talking about the plot line before moving on to the next module.
I'm also a big fan of moral grey areas and multiple NPC factions. What if an artifact or item the PCs need is buried beneath the settlement of some kind of seemingly hostile sentient creatures (Orcs, Mer-people, Barbarians, whatever works for your setting). The PCs could just move in, slaughter the "monsters" and retrieve the item right? Well then some NPC, possibly someone important or respected, doesn't want those particular creatures slaughtered. Maybe the local noble is in peace negotiations with the chief or the local government has established a biological preserve. To make matters more complicated, maybe those "monsters" aren't particularly hostile. Now you've set up a situation in which the PCs have a lot of different angles to consider. Maybe some want to go in and kill everybody anyway, but others want to try bargaining for the item. This can work especially well if you know your PCs and can predict their reactions to certain events.
The only hard part about this is that you've either got to be prepared to think on your feet and adapt your event to the PCs' actions or you have to design multiple fully-prepped modules knowing that only a portion of them will wind up being run. However, with some creative planning you can cut this workload down dramatically. NPCs A and B may have different jobs for the PCs to do, but both of those jobs could be based around one basic mod framework and single set up and location.
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I've always been a proponent of Flair like diaries, maps, and letters, and I always try to leave openings for flexibility when writing my plot. Great tips!