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All the planning in the world isn't the same as actually writing
Last week and this have been mainly focused on frantic preparation for A Respectful Calm, my game for Intercon this year. I had thought I was in good shape: the game has been largely *designed* for months, with lots of archetypes and characters and plots and stuff outlined in Querki. And I kept coming up with Querki enhancements to make it easier to manage the game, which kept taking the place of actually writing.
Yeah, I'm out of practice. I had forgotten quite how long it takes to write 26 good character sheets; hence, all the frantic prep, which has mostly been writing. I'm a faster writer than most, but *man* I've had to crank out a lot. (Kudos to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laurion for taking on some of the characters, which has kept my back from being totally to the wall.)
It's mostly done now, but this morning I found myself with three characters left, and all of them shared one thing in common: they were all too weak. That hadn't been obvious from the plot web, but when I thought through what their character sheets would look like, they just didn't have enough meat.
At which point, I pulled out one of my favorite tricks: I asked what these three characters might have in common. And the answer that came to me is a thing of beauty. It's a pain in the ass, actually: a new plot that requires changes to several other characters to fit it in, but it is lovely and evil and fun, makes all three of those characters *much* more interesting, and should give a bunch of people more to do. I have a lot more writing to do in the next two days, but I finally feel like the end result should hum properly, and none of the characters look boring.
The moral of the story? LARP writing is a lot like coding, and I need to work on being more agile. Design is good, but only gets you so far: until you actually write the "code" and see how it works, there are going to be bugs in your design that you don't even realize are there...
Yeah, I'm out of practice. I had forgotten quite how long it takes to write 26 good character sheets; hence, all the frantic prep, which has mostly been writing. I'm a faster writer than most, but *man* I've had to crank out a lot. (Kudos to
laurion for taking on some of the characters, which has kept my back from being totally to the wall.)It's mostly done now, but this morning I found myself with three characters left, and all of them shared one thing in common: they were all too weak. That hadn't been obvious from the plot web, but when I thought through what their character sheets would look like, they just didn't have enough meat.
At which point, I pulled out one of my favorite tricks: I asked what these three characters might have in common. And the answer that came to me is a thing of beauty. It's a pain in the ass, actually: a new plot that requires changes to several other characters to fit it in, but it is lovely and evil and fun, makes all three of those characters *much* more interesting, and should give a bunch of people more to do. I have a lot more writing to do in the next two days, but I finally feel like the end result should hum properly, and none of the characters look boring.
The moral of the story? LARP writing is a lot like coding, and I need to work on being more agile. Design is good, but only gets you so far: until you actually write the "code" and see how it works, there are going to be bugs in your design that you don't even realize are there...