Robb Graves said:
if you're going to end up splitting the chapters up by what editions they want to use (ultimately because they do or don't like a series of rules), how is that different than wrtiting a new edition of the rules yourself
It handles any legal concerns someone might have over whether or not you're allowed to charge for an event you host that uses a given set of rules.
There are a few legal discussions that can go back and forth on whether or not purchasing a rulebook allows you to use the material therein to host an event which you charge for (for instance, can you purchase a dozen Scrabble sets, then host a tournament using those sets and charge for said tournament?), but my preference would cover that without a bunch of people needing to go through legal battles.
then it basically becomes a series of chapters running thier own games that have nothing to do with each other. not much of an alliance.
That depends on what you are referring to. "Alliance" the ruleset is a different product from "Alliance" the campaign series. The biggest difficulty I think people have is that they can't divorce the two from each other in their minds, and I believe that it hinders both the ruleset and the campaign series.
paythin said:
If a chapters really wants to work with different rules edition they can always start with a viarant campaign
Actually, no, they can't. Originally it was considered that they could with the new contracts going out, then when the winds of change started blowing, and Mike changed the rules and required that 50% or more of the games run had to be "main campaign".
one cannot expect to pull in the same number of people because of the non-transferability running a viarant game.
I suspect that depends on locality. There are larps out here that run independent of any other chapters that have significantly greater attendance than the Alliance chapters in the same region do, so transferability doesn't seem to be the deciding factor in the war for attendance. Similarly, some of those games have far more unbalanced or hole-riddled rulesets, so it would appear that that is not necessarily the deciding factor. When it comes down to it, what gets people to attend is good entertainment, and clearly that has little to nothing to do with the Alliance rulebook.
Speaking for myself, I would follow a good plot team to whatever game they chose to run far faster than I would follow a good set of rules to a bad plot team.