#budget garb

WHAT IS THE CHALLENGE?

The $20 Garb Challenge is a costuming contest that I’ve run for the Dagorhir community for the past five years. The idea is to make the best possible garb outfit you can, using only $20 of materials and in only 30 days. It’s organized by a host/administrator, scored by a panel of three judges on three categories, and the winners get faaaabulous prizes. Entrants have to acquire all materials within those thirty days (they can’t draw on your existing stash of materials), and a third of their score comes from how well they explain their process.

I (Ilsa of Drentha!) started the challenge because I was tired of hearing “good garb is too expensive!” I also wanted to see more garb tutorials that would help new players. The Challenge is meant to prove that you CAN make a fantastic Dagorhir/LARP/foam-fighting costume on a budget. You really don’t have to be rich to play these games!

If you want to run your own version of the Challenge for your local group, here’s how to do it! You can change any element of the contest to suit your needs, but these tactics have served us well for the past few years. :) So!

1. Decide where you’ll host it.

The Challenge is an online contest. I've run this on a group forum before, but I've since found that Facebook is a great platform for it, instead. Each entrant submits an album of photos to the group’s albums, so the judges and observers can find all the entries in the same place.

HERE is our group from 2017. Click around a bit, and you’ll see the entries in the albums, the FAQ and rules in the “files” section, and posts with questions and remarks from participants. These are easiest viewed on desktop Facebook-- mobile FB makes it hard to find some of these elements!

2. Decide WHEN you’ll run it.

The Challenge is a month long. That’s because your contestants need time to put together their entries. I run ours in May. This is nice because it’s right before Ragnarok, Dagorhir’s huge June event. This gives everyone an incentive to join the contest— you always needs extra garb for Rag!— and takes advantage of pre-event excitement. If you have a local event that people are already preparing for, I highly suggest running the Challenge before it!

Alternatively, if you have a slack time of year, like winter, you might want to run the Challenge then. This keeps your locals excited and engaged with the game, even when the weather is too nasty to play outside.

2. Figure out your prizes!

The contest is most fun if you can compete for prizes, so you’ll want to offer up goodies for your winners. A month or so before I launch that year's contest, I privately ask in-game merchants that I'm friendly with if they would consider donating a prize. In exchange, we always make sure to link to their shop page when we announce the prizes— it’s good advertising for them! If you’re a small group or just starting out, you might make the prizes yourself, purchase them from merchants, or ask other members of your realm for donations.

We typically aim to offer prizes for the top three contestants, but it’s fun if you can offer more, too. We’ve had merchants put up 4th and 5th place prizes, too!

The best prizes are things that will be useful to anyone who wins it. Items that can be customized for the winner later, store credit to shops, or pieces that can go with any kit always go over well. We've had sponsors contribute foam weapons, costumes, jewelry, pottery, etched glass vessels, tankards, and more!

Since the winning entries are picked by a panel of judges, I like to also offer an extra “people’s choice” award. This award is the crowd favorite, and anyone can win. This is announced on the 1st of June (a day after the end of the contest). The Facebook album that gets the most “likes” before the end of the week gets this prize. (THESE are the rules we use for People’s Choice.) This helps fill time between the contest ending and the judges filling out their scoring sheets. You can also offer a raffle prize— everyone who enters gets a chance to win it, because it’s randomly drawn! This encourages everyone to finish and submit their entries: even if they’re not perfect, they still have a chance to win something nice. :)

If you have an in-person event coming up that your sponsoring merchants are attending, your winners might be able to collect or pick out their prizes in person. If that’s not an option, ask if the merchants will be willing to ship the prizes to the winners. If not, set aside a budget for yourself so you can pay to ship the prizes to your winners.

4. Pick your judges.

Your judges should be respected and mature members of the community. If you’re running your contest for a group that covers a large geographical area (ours involves all of Dagorhir, from Alaska to Maryland!), try to pull your judges from a variety of places, units and backgrounds— not just from your local realm and friends. Merchants (who aren’t already sponsoring), skilled craftspeople, veterans who are heavily involved in improving the community, past winners, and people who help run A&S competitions are all great judges.

You COULD pick winners for the Challenge by popular vote, but I always worry that the winner the winner will always be the vet with the most friends, not necessarily the best entry. If you want to do popular vote, again, consider running that as a separate thing— you could offer an extra prize for “People’s Choice!”

5. Set up your group.

You’ll set up a Facebook group for your contest. You’ll want to set up the group at least two weeks in advance of the start of the contest, so you can advertise it, get people to join, and build excitement.

For the first week or so, you might want to keep moderator approval turned on for posts to the group— it lets you answer questions before the post goes live to the group, so you can catch issues and weigh in on them before everyone else weighs in.

Use the “pinned post” option to tack important announcements to the top of the page.

You’ll upload a couple documents to the “files” section. These are your vital documents, like “How to Enter + Judging,” and Rules/FAQ. (See links for our current versions of each.) You might also include a list of the prizes you’re offering here, but I think it’s more fun to announce these over the course of a week or two, to keep people excited about the contest.

If your group gets big, you might consider adding another moderator to help you keep track of the posts. This should be someone, ideally, who isn’t a judge or a sponsor— just another respected, responsible member of the community who can help herd the cats and answer questions.

6. Spread the word!

Share your Challenge group with other areas of your community! If you have a website, group forum, or social media page for your game, be sure to post about the Challenge there. Tell your new players in person, and encourage your friends to spread the word. The more, the merrier!

7. Run the contest!

The contest runs for 30 days, and the contestants can upload their entry album as soon as they’re ready. These 30 days are a great time to share resources, tutorials, hype your prizes, encourage your entrants, and build community. Your contestants will probably have a fun time talking about their successes, the materials they’ve found, and the plans they’ve made. Give them a chance to do just that by prompting them with discussion questions!

Don’t be surprised if you get lots of people who join the group just to observe— lots of people are interested in budget garb, even if they don’t have the time to join the Challenge! Be sure to remind everyone that the Challenge is also a resource for new players, and encourage them to share it with their friends and local players.

8. Judge the entries...

Towards the end of the month, remind your contestants when entries will close. We use “midnight on May 31st, wherever you are,” so no one has to worry about time zones. As soon as the contest is officially closed to new entries, your judges will start recording their scores.

Your judges will be scoring each entry on three categories— creativity, use of budget, and write-up. Each subcategory is worth 10 points from each judge, so you’ll be awarding each entry out of 30 points. Since there are three judges, a perfect score would be 90 total points.

Judging usually takes at least a week, because your judges are probably very, very busy people!

It’s up to you whether you want to share everyone’s final scores or just announce the top winners. These days, we announce the top five winners and privately send everyone else their scores. They then have the option to share these, or not, with the group.

9. ...by using the spreadsheet...

The spreadsheet is HERE. Please copy the spreadsheet to make a master sheet for your contest. (Go to File --> Make a Copy.)

The scoring sheet has four sheets that your judges will use— one for scoring each subcategory, and one master sheet for you to enter any comments you have. You can toggle between these in the sheet at the bottom left. The comments aren’t necessary, but entrants really appreciate them. Try to keep them positive!

Your judges each have a color-coded column on each sub-sheet that highlights where you’ll be putting your scores. Judge #1 is always green, Judge #2 is always mauve, and Judge #3 is always yellow. If the column is white, it’s either something that will calculate automatically or be filled out by the non-judge admin/host.

The “ranking” column in “Total scores (updates automatically) and comments” is the most important one, and it should update automatically. It will show you which entrant has the top score, and if there are any ties. “1” means they’re in first place, etc.

If anything looks broken, it might just be that the sheet wants values it hasn’t been given yet. Certain things will update automatically as you enter your scores. Remember that it ain’t over until it’s over— if just one judge, say, has entered their scores, someone might look like they’re winning, but that might change before the scoring is over!

Each entrant’s name should be updated by the admin/host to link to the Facebook album of their entry in the Facebook group. This makes it easier for the judges to figure out who they’re scoring at any given moment.

Alternatively, you might want to give each judge a copy of their own sheet, so they can't be influenced by seeing the scores of other judges. We may try this, next year, so there's no peer pressure to reach a consensus. :)

10. ...and this bare-bones scoring rubric.

Each judge scores each entry out of ten points in three categories: Creativity, Use of Budget, and Write-Up. There are three judges who can each award a maximum of thirty points. Their scores are added together, so the highest possible score for any entry is 90 points. Each judge will score slightly differently (in fact, we try to pick judges who have different backgrounds and tastes!), so I created this rubric, based on other A&S contests, to help them in their judging. Note that this rubric mentions Dagorhir a lot-- if you’re running the Challenge for a different community, edit that out!

Creativity:

1 point: No thought put into choice of materials and design-- very basic default garb put together in a standard way, ie, a two-seam tunic with scrub pants, or made of the first things grabbed at the thrift store. Also includes garb that fails by the Manual of Arms for obtrusive modern components, illegal colors, etc.

3 points: Passes by the MoA, but is boring and made in standard ways. Brief thought went into the design process, but it produced generic garb-- ie, you used your personal colors but produced a “generiViking” kit.

5 points: Concept OR use of materials are original, but not both. Wouldn’t give it a second look on the field, either for good or bad reasons. Decent “background Dagorhir character” garb. Standard garb made with standard materials. 

7 points: A new spin on construction and concept. Delved deeper than the standard resources. May have set an interesting personal challenge (garbing multiple people, a whole week of garb, etc) or tried to tackle a kit not normally seen in Dagorhir.

10 points: Wildly original in both concept and use of materials. Is aesthetically impressive. Something we haven’t seen in Dagorhir before. 

Use of Budget:

1 point: Materials wasted, went far over budget, OR entrant did something that feels cheap and unfair to other contestants-- shopping from their pre-established materials stash; large gifts of materials from friends, etc.

3 points: Materials wasted, paid too much for materials. Slightly over budget or had $10 or more left over.

5 points: Entrant paid standard prices for standard materials. Anyone could get these materials on any day of the week. Had $5 or more left over. 

7 points: Some cunning put into acquiring materials, but methods were standard (ie, JoAnn’s coupons, waiting for sales, etc). Very little left over. 

10 points: Entrant got an objectively impressive amount of material out of their $20. May have gone to new lengths to stretch their resources (making components from scratch, dumpster-diving, extensive thrifting, repurposing, upcycling, etc). Patience and cunning were used in putting together this kit. Used every bit of their money.

Write-Up:

1 point: Write-up is incoherent or nonexistent. 

3 points: Write-up doesn’t credit resources used or describe the creation process. A new craftsperson following this would be utterly lost.

5 points: Write-up mostly links to tutorials written by other people. Explains design process or construction, but not both. A new craftsman following this would struggle to replicate your results.

7 points: A solid walk-through, well documented (ie, lots of process pictures). A new craftsman could get through it. May explain processes already extensively documented elsewhere in the garb-o-sphere (ie, describes how to sew a basic seam), but explains them well. 

10 points: Write-up provides extensive documentation of design process, construction methods, and resources used. A high-quality tutorial with original content that doesn’t already exist on the internet. A new craftsman could follow this with no confusion and use the skills learned to make different things later.

11. Announce your winners!

People will REALLY want to know in advance WHEN you’ll announce your winners, so be sure you let them know when they can expect to see the prizes go up!  The host will announce the winners on the FB page and get them in touch with the merchants who are sponsoring prizes. I like to start with fourth place (or whatever the last place I have prizes for is) and work up to announcing first. It’s fun if you can get winners’ certificates made for your winners! This also helps the sponsoring merchants know who the winners are: the winner just displays their certificate when they go to the merchant to pick up their prize.

Be sure to thank your entrants, judges, and sponsors! This is a TON of work for everyone involved, but it’s huge fun and it’s great for the community.

12. Wrap things up.

You’ll wrap up the contest by announcing the winners, putting the winners in touch with the sponsoring merchants so they can arrange to receive their prizes, and thanking everyone for their participation. It can be fun to start a discussion about what everyone liked best this year, and what they want to do differently next time. Encourage your participants to keep it positive— even if they didn’t win, they made a great outfit for the cost of a large pizza, and that’s always a plus!

If you have an in-person event coming up, encourage your participants to meet, enter any Arts and Sciences contests that are running at that event, and thank the judges and sponsoring merchants in person. It’s also a nice touch for the host to personally thank the judges— they volunteer a lot of their time, and without them, the Challenge would be impossible!

13. Tell me how it went! :D

I’m always curious to see peoples’ entries close-up, so if you’ve entered the Dagorhir $20 Garb Challenge, you’re always welcome to come by to Drentha camp and say hi! If you’ve run your own version of the contest, please let me know— this is a cause I really believe in, so I really want to hear how it went, wherever you run it!

Inspiration: Calabrian Man – On a Budget

It can be difficult when starting to LARP to find good kit for a reasonable price. I know that pain when I started and wanted to make sure I had enough clean shirts for a four day weekend event – it simply wasn’t happening if I bought from traders because it would have been ridiculously expensive. However if you have some time to dedicate to making costume then there’s every chance you could end…