The Labor Wars, accomplished

At long last, The Labor Wars has come into being as a game. The journey from Nat asking me in Chad’s kitchen if I wanted to help write a game has culminated in a satisfactory run this past weekend.

Overall, I feel the game went well. Players enjoyed it on the whole, and the concepts we put into place worked fairly well. If there was a major issue, it was that conflict was dealt with too easily. We wanted a major source of it to be with people with different interests, alliances, and prejudices wrangling over a limited pool of economic resources/. I believe we established proof of concept by the fact that the mechanic for determining the workings of it was very functional, but we are going to have to make some adjustments to the amount of accessible resources. It was too easy for everyone to secure exactly what they wanted, without having to fight for it with other factions or make compromises in order to gain anything. Also, I was surprised at how much players were willing to work together to come up with arrangements that were agreeable to everyone. I walked around muttering, “Fuckin’ Brandeisians,” given our circle’s tendency toward such kind and gentle play style, but then I noticed there wasn’t any actual Brandeisian in the game! Still, they were mostly part of the extended Brandeis larp circle, and they very much had that kind of larp culture. Indeed, zrealm* coined the term “to Brandeis” a game, meaning to neutralize all the conflict through a tendency to compromise and work together.

We compensated for the lower than expected amount of conflict by throwing lots of events in the world that the players could affect and be affected by. I was actually extremely proud of our GM team for handling this; we came up with a lot of really good material, totally on the fly, that not only amped up the in-game struggle, it gelled with the direction that the players were taking the story, AND it felt like there was a living complete outside world that was active and reactive, and not just a series of crises that the GMs were throwing to trip up the players. They actually really surprised us with the direction they took things, necessitating us to make up so much on the fly, but we rolled with it and generated a series of events that remained true to the spirit while still meeting the players halfway.

We’ll need to make some edits, that’s for sure. Resources definitely need to be scarer. Anything to ramp up the conflict. One character may need to be completely overhauled. But we wrote a brand-new weekend long game, one of the first in this area in ten years, and it didn’t run half badly. I’m incredibly grateful to Nat, Susan, and Vito for inviting me to be part of this really cool project that they came up with.

We’ll have to get it in shape for a second run!