The prospects for my two-part LARP idea are looking promising; I have received some enthusiastic reactions from potential players and also an offer from someone to act as co-storyteller. For now, I will keep the volunteer's name a secret... but I'm quite excited about the game and how it may work.
At the same time, I want to do more pen 'n' paper role-playing in 2015. I've mentioned before that I miss tabletop games, especially running one of my own. The biggest hurdle seems to be people's availability. My friends have such busy lives at the moment that signing up to a campaign of tabletop games is just too heavy a commitment, especially when any campaign that I come up with would be competing for a regular time slot with all the other ideas for campaigns, LARPs and regular social engagements that my friends have.
However, Dom's one-shot Cthulhu game has given me an idea. He ran a single scenario three times for different groups, and he was able to do this because he had a large base of interested players, but each with limited availability. Dom explained that he usually runs Call of Cthulhu as a campaign, but with players unable to commit to a regular campaign, he developed a one-shot adventure that lasted for about eight hours, and played with three groups of five.
We have a large pool of players in the local area, but all with a lot of commitments. I don't propose to have a single scenario that I run multiple times, but I have a game - Leverage, which I deeply want to run - that is designed for episodic play. Each game is supposed to be a stand-alone job lasting for a few hours of play.
What if I also have a pool of players, and each one has a character. When I come up with a game, it is designed to stand alone, for any five of the players in that pool depending on their availability. I can then design other one-shot games that are all part of the same campaign, but completely different groups of players could come together on each occasion to tackle the scenario.
This allows the game to cater for players' availability. Some overlap could exist between the different player groups, because some players would be more available for games than others. In concept, that would be fine, and could even create some continuity between episodes, even though no player would be required to attend every installment or even more than one installment. Another advantage of this approach is that I would not have to run the same game twice.
I think I should refer to this idea as the "Suikoden" model of forming a player base for a pen 'n' paper game. It reminds me of the Suikoden computer RPGs; the player in those games takes the role of an army's leader, and his castle can have over one hundred named characters in it. However, for the "adventuring-party" sections of the game, the player travels around with a party of up to six of those characters. What Suikoden provides is the ability to swap out members of the party and field a team that could be different every time.
This could easily gel with the concept of an episodic game about neo-pulp outlaw heroes. Imagine a network of numerous vigilantees, including thieves, masterminds, con artists, hackers and fighters, and - every so often - a call for help goes out, and a short-term Crew is assembled to deal with the problem from the available members of the network. I think that the Suikoden model may be the best option that I have for running some tabletop role-playing in 2015 that fits into other people's social calendars, and also lets me role-play with a greater variety of people.
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