Actions Between Games: Getting the Most out of IBGAs

In Alliance LARP Denver we try to do as much as we can at the game itself, but we also try to create the illusion of a living world that exists for more than the time between games. People go home to their houses, estates, and in some cases featherbeds and the world ticks on in the meantime.

To help give the impression of your character living in an actual world that exists more than for the event, we have a concept of an In-Between Game Action or IBGA. Other chapters may refer to these as “Plot Submissions,” which we tend to avoid simply due to history of the terms from previous LARPs.

This document is an attempt to break down the IBGA to help players, from the standpoint of Plot, in getting the most out of the experience.

Basics of the IBGA

We would love for people to have the opportunity to do a lot of things during their downtime, but unfortunately our resources are incredibly limited to be able to both handle all of the various IBGAs as well as prep for the next event. As a result the IBGA form — which is released for each event — is highly structured.

First, we need to know who you are traveling with. Everyone who is on a particular IBGA should submit separately just so that there’s no last minute confusion with who is doing what, but we still need to know who is in your party.

The second thing we need to know is what major action you will be performing. This is a single major action that you can accomplish in the time allotted (keeping in mind travel times, assume about 20 miles a day unless you have a horse or some other means of alternate transportation). Good examples are research in a particular library or just traveling home to sleep in your feather bed. We limit IBGAs to a single major action due to resource constraints.

The third thing we need is how you intend to do the major action. Are you intending to travel to Solace and attempt to pay for access to the Valacious Proudmore School of Alchemical Studies? How much (we will collect this when you check in at Logistics)? Are you going to attempt to do it through sheer force of personality? How will you go about convincing people? Also in here is how you intend to get to wherever it is you are going. This is going to be somewhat optional if your intention is to travel to Solace (which is right next door to New Acarthia), it is a lot less optional if your intention is to travel to Garthok (which could easily take 14 days or more to reach, let alone get back from if you don’t have an alternative means of transportation).

The final thing we need to know are any minor actions. These are things that can be accomplished en route and are more for your benefit to add flavor to your major action than anything. For example, if you are traveling to a library to Rivervale to do some research (your major action) and you make sure that any travelers you happen to meet along way know about the upcoming tournament, that’s a minor action. Going out of your way to tell people about that tournament (e.g., systematically going door to door, loitering on the roads with fliers, etc) would make it a major action.

One major addition to this is the matter of letters, which are covered under their own heading later in the document.

“Postcard Out, Postcard Back”

The basic principle of the IBGA is that it is a “postcard out and a postcard back.” This means that you shouldn’t expect a great deal of involved dialogue around an IBGA: you send us one thing, we send you one thing, and that’s the IBGA.

We’ll occasionally have short exchanges to clarify what you do in certain events, but as a general rule you should expect that your response to a particular IBGA is the end of it and should write your IBGAs accordingly.

The fields in the form are length-limited to emphasize this, in part because while many players are great at writing, reading 40 5-page IBGAs from players is too much for the Plot team to both manage and simultaneously keep up with their day jobs.

In-Game vs. Between Games

If something can be accomplished in-game we strongly prefer that it is accomplished IG. We are predominantly a live action roleplaying game, and so if what you are going to do will involve anything that you can do live at the event, it is best to do it there.

This means that if your character wants to talk to the gnolls, you can research the best ways to get in touch with them in the IBGA. Research is a great activity between games, because we can’t physrep entire libraries IG very effectively.

If your research leads to find that they like raw meat and therefore you want to attach a letter to a piece of steak and tie it to a tree and walk away, that’s also a reasonable in-between game action. Whether something replies or even takes the letter you won’t find out about until later, but there’s not a high probability of you getting eaten alive just by tying a steak to a letter and leaving it outdoors.

On the other hand, if you want to strap a bunch of raw meat to yourself and go jogging in the Howling Woods… that’s something to do In-Game at the event and to notify Plot about before you start your jog so that we know where to put the dire wolves.

Continuing, Discovering, or Exploring— Not Solving

What the above boils down to is that IBGAs are a great way to continue a plotline, to discover new plotlines, or to explore the world, yourself, or the relationship between the two. They aren’t a great way to solve or to close out a plotline that is already in progress.

This means that if you expect to finish something between events that was started at an event, you are probably going to be disappointed by the response. If you write instead to investigate to find a next step or to improve your understanding of something, the response is more likely to be useful.

What You Can Control

If you’ve ever been engaged in a forum-based RPG or a Play-by-email RPG you are probably used to having a great deal of “plot control” over your character and the world. Basically you write both what you do as well as some of what you find, trying to keep it congruent with what you know about the world but otherwise having broad freedom.

In our game the Plot team controls the world itself and basically everything that isn’t what your/other characters are specifically doing. You get to write some of the world in your character history, but that is still approved by the Plot team and otherwise the world is under control of Plot.

This means that while you can tell us what you are doing, the IBGA doesn’t let you tell us what happens. You can tell us what part of the world you are going to and what you are going to attempt to do, but what is happening in that part of the world (even if it pertains to your backstory) is entirely in the hands of plot.

There are a couple of reasons for this, but a big part of it is that the Plot team has designs going on in a variety of places around the world, not all of which are obvious. If you are trying to flesh out the world or have your character respond to events you are triggering, you are taking the role of Plot and it could very easily (and accidentally) step on a set of designs held by a member of Plot.

So for example, if you go home and try to market cures for various ailments (as part of your Craftsman skill) and that includes helping people with their personal problems, absolutely include that in your actions, but don’t tell us that you do help someone with their personal problems, since that’s taking control of part of the world outside of yourself.

Another example: You are going to travel to Norwist and visit an estate there. You have looked at the map and determined you can make it there and back before the next event. Tell us that, but don’t tell us that you were “received with open arms” or that you traveled there “in response to a letter” since those touch on areas of the world that aren’t you and therefore are under the control of a member of Plot.

Letters

One major exception to the “postcard rule” and to the IBGA form is the matter of letters. You can send a reasonable number of letters to whoever you want so long as you know a name and an approximate location. These always go to the plot email address. Simply sending it to “Mrs. Firstname… if that was actually her name… somewhere in the Kingdom of Acarthia” is going to get a “Return to Sender” response.

The catch is that letters do take time to travel and, unlike email, people do not obsessively check their letters every 15 minutes and responses on real paper can take time to write out. If you really need a specific response to your letter then make that your major action to ensure that we set aside time to specifically answer. You can also take your chances and see what happens (we very frequently have time for a few short letters and in other cases a letter may be received and read but a response will be handled in-game or in some future event).

This means, however, that as a Baron you are perfectly free to send a letter to each of your estates to let them know what is happening, you just might not get an individual response to each one.

The Process Plot Side

Once the IBGAs have been submitted they go into a Google Spreadsheet which has, in addition to the publicly visible fields, columns for:

• If a response has been delivered yet, who delivered that response, and when was it delivered to the player(s).
• Which plot member(s) is (are) on point to deliver a response.
• Any additional notes.

This makes sure that we don’t have things fall through the cracks. Simply emailing things to plot makes it harder to keep track of all of the IBGAs and increases the likelihood that your IBGA will be lost.

At the plot meeting before the event we assign any IBGAs that have not already been assigned out, this way we make sure that every IBGA has a name associated with it. You’ll hear us refer to these in conversations as each individual’s “queue.”

Deadlines and Response Schedule

The deadlines for IBGAs vary slightly per event and will be noted after each event on the forums as well as on our Google calendar. As a general rule, exempting the last game/first game of the season, the deadline for IBGAs to be submitted will be the earlier of two weeks after the event or two weeks before the next event.

Responses to IBGAs will usually be handled sometime between the close of the IBGAs and a few days before the next event. Staff members need a break too!

Letters get handled in their own timeline, depending on availability and when they are received. You can send letters after the IBGA deadline, but the closer to the event they are sent the less likely it is that they will be read by the intended party — let alone acted upon — before the event.

Good IBGA Activities

This is a non-exclusive list of some good examples of IBGA activities:

• Travel to other parts of the Kingdom (to visit friends, explore the world, or for other purposes).
• Research.
• Looking for information by asking “around town.”
• Writing letters.
• Working out other documents (e.g., organizational charters).
• Getting a short dialogue with someone, especially someone who is otherwise hard to reach (e.g., they live in a different estate, bear in mind that you probably want to let them know you are coming before you show up on their doorstep).
• Practicing a skill that you learned at the previous event.

Basically: things that help flesh out the world that are either very difficult to do at the event or that practically are not accomplishable at an event given the constraints on the game.

What To Expect Back

In most scenarios you will get something back, but that something is going to be a “postcard” worth of material and it may not be what you were originally looking for. It might be a clipping from a book around the material you were researching, a description of the sorts of people you meet on your journey, or a description of events that are more notable for what is missing than for what is present.

In most cases you won’t solve the next step of your journey for a particular plotline, but you might get some information or setup that will make it easier when the events actually happen in-game in the future. Perhaps you’ll also get some rumors from the road, depending on where you are going and what you are doing.

In some cases you won’t get as much back. These generally fall into four categories:

1. Your response will be handled at the next event, in which case we will make a good faith effort to put something in related to your IBGA. Be aware, however, that if you go look for Foobar Bazsson and they show up in the next game and you don’t choose to talk with them, you may have to repeat the dance in the future to get what you are after.
2. Plot is overwhelmed, so your response is abbreviated from what you were looking for. In these cases we apologize: sometimes things happen that mean that we can’t engage with every IBGA as much as we would like. In these cases your IBGA is still not wasted since if you further it IG or BG at a later point those actions may come back to help you, but it does mean in the moment your answer isn’t all either of us could have hoped for.
3. You were looking at something where relatively little was happening. For example, if you want to go to Solace and stand guard they might be happy to let you, but it is unlikely that Solace is going to be a hotbed of activity and so your IBGA response will likely reflect this. Your actions might be noted and add up to something later, but at the moment they aren’t going to generate much of a response.
4. You were looking somewhere where nothing happening is itself significant. A variation of the previous one: You sent a letter to Bob the Blacksmith and you did not receive a response. This isn’t because Plot didn’t have time to respond but rather because Plot had already established that Bob the Blacksmith was killed by the Dreaded League of Dread Knights™ and is currently wandering the countryside as a ghoul (craving flesh, subcategory: yours) and thus unable to receive your letter.

Conclusion

Hopefully this guide is useful for letting you know what the Plot team looks for in IBGAs! Let us know any feedback that you might have that will help us improve the experience and make the world more believable.