Cost of a LARP?

[gschneider]

I am putting together a plan to start my own LARP. It is likely that I will need to get some money from my players to cover costs of location and the like. So I was curious of what the usual "price" for entry to LARP would be?

I am specifically interested in a One-day Theatrical style LARP (no beating each other up), although I am at least curious what people are willing to pay for all sorts of LARPs.

Greg

[Nath]

Most larps tend to run at a loss at first.

Work out your expenses (site hire, props, insurance, food if you are providing it, printing, etc) then try to figure out how many players you can reasonably expect. Do the maths and you should be able to work out your break-even figure.

To be honest, the market here is currently messed up. Because lots of people run good larps not for profit, it's very hard for anyone to compete with a professional larp.

[Peter Svensson]

It depends on the style of LARP. A large scale Action LARP is going to require more money than a large scale Drama LARP, and both are much costlier than a small scale drama LARP.

What is the time period? Can costumes be found in people's closets, will they have to go raid thrift stores to get the proper feel, or will they have to make it? What about props? Generally, modern games are cheaper than fantasy games or games set in a specific time period.

Where are you setting it? Most LARPs I've been involved with have used public parks as their settings, (because they're free usually) but if that's not an option, you'll find to pay for a place to game in. That will probably be your biggest expnse. You can get away with a smaller place in a Drama LARP, but most Action LARPs will require an outdoor venue.

Then comes the boring parts, which is the price for food, for photocopies of important documents (character sheets, in-character newsletters, rules, etc), and those sorts of things. Be prepared. They will add up.

A lot of how much your LARP will cost depends on how immersive you want to be. If you're going to play Dynamic Nobilis, (Like I am later this month...) and are content with writing a sign that says "Flophouse" then you'll need less money than a person running Call of Cthulu in the 1920s who needs to make a proper flophouse to set the scene.

Oh, and always ask your players for help. You'll be surprised how much cool things that people will know how to get for free or cheaply.

EDIT: And look how I missed the point. I've never payed for a LARP ever, so I can't help you there man. How much I'd be willing to pay depends on the frequency of the game, as well as where the location is. $5-15 is about as much as I'd be willing to pay.

[Samhaine]

Around here, the cap for one day games of any type is generally around $15. More than that and the players will become defensive of their cash. If you aren't playing in a dedicated venue away from non-players, expect to go lower (e.g., if you're in a student center with immersion-breaking individuals and furniture around, player wallets may lock up after $5-$10).

Full weekend games depend on how much you pay for the site and how many players you get. In GA, campsites with cabins, beds, and electricity start at about $400 a day for 75 beds. Game prices for these venues currently average at $50; some games come down in price if they can routinely get enough players that they're not afraid of taking a loss on the venue, food sales, and misc costs.

[Wade L]

Around here? Let's see... About half of the on-going LARPs here are free. The one I run has a "recommended donation" of $3 to help us cover costs for photocopying, venues, etc. One or two others have a $2 or $3 charge. The most expensive on-going LARP in the area has a $5 game fee.

One-shots can get away with a bit more. If there is an expensive venue, elaborate props or free food, etc, people will pay up to $10 fairly willingly for a one-shot LARP. SLARPCon - a LARP convention locally with 5 LARPs in non-overlapping timeslots over the weekend - charges $10 for the whole weekend and all but one of those LARPs. One LARP has a seperate $15 fee simply because it is a fully catered event - you pay your extra $15 with the expectation that you will be fed, and fed well. Most one-shot events tend to range from $5-$10, though. After that your player count decreases dramatically.

Now that I think of it, though, a lot of one-shots around here run on the "pass the hat" principle - no entry free, but at game wrap up pass the hat and make nicey-nice. They seem to do alright.

In general, I think it's accepted that if you want to run a LARP - do things on the cheap, and never spend more than you'd be willing to suck up as a loss if your LARP makes $0. Heh...as for "For-Profit" LARPs? I have never known of one in this city, and I doubt anyone would pay for it - the organizers would likely get laughed out of town on the principle that "Hey, does my tabletop GM ask me to do more than bring chips to the game for my weekly D&D game? No...so why should you get any more?"

[Eggwhite]

The Dark Ages: Vampire MET LARP I'm involved in running has an evening game every month, for which we charge £3 a head, which with about 15 consistent players attending and usually 10-15 of our other players turning up, generally gives us £75 - £90 a night. This usually balances out enough to cover our hall expenses and very little else, but if we charge more, we lose players and our overall budget ends up going down rather than up.

So we rely on our players to assist with atmosphere in the venue.

I'd like to do it differently, and I think if I were to run longer, one off games I'd probably be able to charge a larger amount. I don't even mean proportionally larger - at the moment we charge £3 for a 4 hour game, and I reckon I could charge £10 for an 8 hour game without anyone balking at it... with 20 people that'd give me £200 quid, enough to hire our usual hall for the best part of the day with a bit left over (I think). If I had 30 people then I'd have another £100 left over for a props and venue dressing budget... Especially if I got them to pay in advance!

[invisible_al]

Depends on your costs (site, props, costume, transport for crew, printing), how long it's running for and if you're providing food or accomodation.

When I was a student and the uni provided the venue for free they charged £1-2 a session, with a monthly game this paid for running costs (lots of print-outs and photocopying) plus some extra costume every once in a while.

I think our monthly one day linear game charged £3-4, plus what is cost to get to the site as it was out from the city.

For a weekend game on a campsite with 30-100 players (bearing in mind that exclusive campsite hire can cost up to £1000) I've paid anything from £30 to £60 depending on the quality of the game.

You can usually get away with charging a bit more once you've proven to people that you can give them a good game and they know what the money is used for and £5-£15 for an day of LRP would seem reasonable to me. Always aim to make a profit, as that way when your costs escalate (and they will) you won't end up making a loss. And if you do somehow make a profit you've got money to build your next game with.

[Merten]

I think the usual range for roughly one day/weekend game around here is 10 - 20 €. Games reaching the upper limit of range or bypassing it are expected to have a very good location for playing, decent to very good food (though limited by the setting) - generally the physical/material preparations for the game should be good. A good number of players would probably pay more as the standards go up; 20 € gets you two movie tickets and a good game beats that as choice of entertaiment.

As for doing a budget, most of the items that come into mind have been listed, but I'd suggest putting some kind of emergency reserve to it; games always go over the budget, period. If you have allocated some cash for emergency spending, they just go over it a bit less.

[Requiem_17_23]

In the UK, £30 to £60 gets you a weekend's play, though if you want to monster rather than play you tend to get in free or very cheap. (This is a good way of getting people to play monster roles if you're short of them and can use as many as you get...)

My uni society charges £2 a week, but we get rooms cheap from the university and one of the players does our kit at cost.

Personally I'd pay £10 for a day's LARP; much above that and I'd start seeing it as a luxury I could do without.

[Iskander]

Pfew, I'm amazed at these low prices. How do the organisations cope?

We charge our players € 95 euro (+/- 60 pax) and the npc's €50 (+/- 35 - 45 pax). Students get a reduction of €10.
What they get is a full weekend starting friday evening till sunday afternoon. Lodging off course is in-game but can be a castle or some sort of camp site (always with buildings and bedding, showers, the works), according to the running scenario. Cost for such campsites can run from €800 to €1900.
Plus we provide very good food. Something warm friday evening, breakfast saturday and sunday, and warm food for saturday noon and evening and sunday afternoon (when the game is finished).

Off course we make profit, which we use to make our own monsters and props and to buy clothing and weaponry for our npc's, to pay for a stocking area and transport.

At the summerfest Avatar, I play for €60 for a weekend, and thats simply camping in a tent. We have to provide our own food and drinks (or we can buy on site).

I'm no longer a student and I don't mind these prices for a whole weekend of great fun.

[Samhaine]

At the summerfest Avatar
How often do your games run?

Around here, there's usually a lot of games going on of various popularity, such that some people very easily larp two weekends a month. Charging much more than $50 for the weekend would reach the point that people can't justify spending that much each month, where they could save if larps occured more infrequently.

Food is also generally extra. Some games provide a "feast" on Saturday at some point, but you generally pay $5 extra for it. Beyond that, the kitchen is essentially a seperate financial entity; for our games, we've even considered getting someone else to run the kitchen and charge whatever he or she wants just so we don't have to add food costs to our calculations.

[David Artman]

As it is obvious how to summ expenses and divide by number of participants, I'll just chime in with a data point.

In North Carolina:
One session a month from Friday night to Sunday afternoon (about 40 straight hours): $25 - $40
Feasts: $5
Other foods: $2 - $3
Group sizes: 60 - 200 players

[Merten]

Pfew, I'm amazed at these low prices. How do the organisations cope?

We don't have organisations; games are usually arranged by individuals who get together to make a LARP. The good side of one-shots is that you just have to come up with the single-game costs covered (the downside is, of course, that you usually start from a scratch).

Also, most of the games are set on semi-modern settings, which both gives a lot more options for venues and makes them cheaper - and the whole game is easier & cheaper to prop both for the organisers and players.

[Iskander]

How often do your games run?

Around here, there's usually a lot of games going on of various popularity, such that some people very easily larp two weekends a month.

Avatar is only once a year, but it is an event of about 1200 - 1400 people, mostly from Belgium, but a lot of visitors of other European countries.

Eternica, the event we organise is, only two times a year. It takes us a lot of time to write the scenario, make the props, organize all the practical stuff from hiring the domain to transport, food and drinks. The weekend itself is very intensive for us (we organise with about 8 people). We start on thursday with a lot of preparations and loading of the stock. In the evening we are at the location and we organise our headquarters.
In the morning we start with the site itself. Depending on the scenario we have to build or dress up a lot of locations (last time: a library with 200 books, a laboratory, a special red room, rooms for the professors, two bars and an orck tent camp. ). That takes us almost the whole day. In the evening we start the game. We brief the npc's, give them their weaponry and costumes, referee the fights and anser any questions from our players.
Sunday late afternoon we start breaking up, and we arive home again late night.

More than two times a year would simply be to much. ;)

[Samhaine]

More than two times a year would simply be to much. ;)
Well there's your answer :) . If we had only a few larps a year, they could easily cost similar prices to yours. Competition and simple lack of enough funds to go around have driven down the prices, however.

Although, we do have big gaming conventions where certain attendees come just to play the larps. An $80 convention badge, $100+ a night hotel rooms, plus $20-$40 to play the larp makes our numbers much more similar to yours.

[Hysteria]

Many of others responses have detailed some of the cost categories from a run-time perspective. First some background. I ran SIL-West's http://www.silwest.com finances for 4 years. Sadly the GMs moved out of area and the 3-day weekend LARP no longer happens. We did not run a game under the aegis of a convention. Oh, sure back in the day, it was run that way. The only production costs were for printing character sheets, bluesheet, item cards, rules, and the character binders to put it all in. There was also webhosting costs,
game creation costs, but the development was done for love, not profit. Most people WAG the cost, divide by number of players & charge only enough to recoupe costs. At local cons (Silicon Valley CA) there is no additional charge for games run at those cons. AFAIK, the GMs & writers eat the production costs.

SIL-West runs games that start Friday with 6p or 8p game-on. Game ends 3p on Sunday with the GMs taking time-outs for 1 hr meal breaks. The game is always on. It's very intense and most of our players stayed in the hotel even tho some could have commuted less that 20 mins. It was a very dedicated bunch of players, GMs and an amazing support staff. Why pay $40 to an SF or game con, if all you're doing is the 3-day LARP? We also thought we could do it cheaper & without the risk of being jerked around by the hosting convention.

Once we made the decision to go independant, we had to buy function space, GM meeting space, sleeping space from a hotel, park, community org or such. The issues of feeding players also comes in to consideration in planning long games. Conside whether you will issue comp tix for your support staff, food tsar, character packet stuffers, etc. Will GMs get their rooms for free? Consider insurance, support
staff, access to food & caffiene, etc. Here's a trivial example: at a game or SF con, the hotel is providing water tables to the con already. If you run your LARP in the woods at the state park, you need support staff to deal with same.

We chose a hotel for all of our 3-day games. Here's some pricing categories:
Daily Rate/ guest room
Daily Rate/ guest room single or double occup
Daily Rate/ guest room, quad occup
Price single GM suite, 2 beds
Function Space, options, pricing and availability (I price by the sq foot)

Here's some basic people counting things you'll need:
Basic Nosecounting
Minimum players 60
Breakeven players 65
Max players 75
Game masters, game goddesses, game mommies & food tzar (include in food budget) 9
Comp tix - Assume you distribute comp tix per game. 5

This section considers the addition fee required to bring in catered food. Careful, some hotels will get tweeked about this.

"SIL catered Food for all players, estimated
Figures are included in SIL G&A fees listed above."
"Sandwich Bar at lunch
Saturday (sample)" $6.00
"Burrito Bar at lunch
Sunday (sample)" $7.00
Total possible food to include in production $13.00


Let me council you also to eval your costs from a player perspective.
Here's some quick ways to think about
Rollup of Player's Costs
Basic calulations:
Calc'd game fee (costs DIV breakeven # of players)
single occup+ tax/nite
quad occup hotel+tax/nite
All food not catered by SIL (estimate)

Total costs/player:
Stay at Home Case - (the bargain!)
Slum case prediction - (hotel 2 nites, 4 to a room)
Worst case predictions (hotel 2 nites, single occup, )

I have an Excel spreadsheet automating these calculations. For the usual 3-day SIL-west game,at a local business class hotel, GM rooms & function space paid for by players, 2 meals included (sandwich bar & a burrito bar) costs were estimated US$67-71 in 2004.

That's way more than you wanted to know.
--cin