Deranged: Wide Long Con

Deranged is a historical, musical drama about the boundaries between genius and madness. The frame is the aging, deranged Robert Schumann who on his deathbed, ill with Syphilis and Mercury poisoning, revisits the memories of the people that had an important impact on his life.

I’ve played this game. Once. It left me breathless, wanting more, and not knowing how to get it. I am not alone.

To solve that best of all problems, I want to do some design to turn it into a “long wide con” version; at least 20 people, a weekend, running through the game over and over again. Switching facilitator, players, etc.

For those who have done long cons or wide cons before: What work needs to be done to make a game work as a long con? As a wide con?

If this is a single day, what do the difficulties look like? If it is more, how much harder is it to provide basic food and lodging for multiple days over “just” an 18-hour larp?

For now, I’m thinking through the logistics as the Forum isn’t setup to recruit players. Once that’s more or less figured out, figuring out who and doing like recruitment will happen somewhere else.

So: How do you modify a game to be a wide con? How do you modify it to be a long con? If you’ve played Deranged, what perspective do you have on it?

I don’t think wide/long con formats really apply here - you are talking about playing the same game in rep, with each participant shuffling through various roles. For that I think you just need to have a firm player commitment and then program it on a schedule. The things I’d be concerned about:

  1. Getting very solid player commitments in numbers appropriate for the game (multiples of five, basically, which is super awkward).
  2. Pacing the event to address the intense commitment and cumulative bleed over repeated instances of play.

It’s a weird idea! I am deeply skeptical it can be made to work!

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Deranged is one of my all-time favorite games of any kind, and I share @Jmstar’s concern about commitment and bleed. I played Robert Schumann in Deranged at Dreamation 2018, it was an AMAZING experience, but I was so physically and emotionally exhausted afterward that I had to withdraw from the evening game I’d signed up for and instead take a 3-hour nap.

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