same_difference (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
same_difference) wrote2007-04-02 01:20 pm
same_difference) wrote2007-04-02 01:20 pm
Larp and characters
The larp yesterday was good, in hindsight I definitely enjoyed myself. That's always the odd thing about playing Aurinyan, regardless of whether or not he's had a bad day I can never be sure whether I actually enjoyed the game until a while after it. Of course it helped I can ignore puns fairly well, just receiving a mild recognition of the existence of the play on words, but no further mental response than that. You can't filter them out completely, but you can ensure that most of time they generate no reaction at all.
It was good to play Aurinyan again, though I'm still not settled on the best way to play him in terms of using his abilities. With everything he can cast being so un-synergistic with his other castings (and his own skills - cloak meet dexterity), I always find myself just not casting much at all (at least on Aurinyan), because committing to any one spell means committing to not use 2 or 3 others. With the permanent items (Endurance 9, Displaced Image 1) he now has though it seems better to probably cast up armour in combat situations and just accept that there's no great point in using invisibility, or the blur/cloak/obscurement spells. Oddly enough this has inspired me to make an animated icon. I suspect it would be best to score spells in terms of a relative value, and work out which combination is best.
The one thing I am really pleased with from yesterday is that I finally feel like I got the blood lust side of things right. Though that was helped a lot by having opponents Aurinyan can kill. Normally what happens is I stop to try and work out 'Am I hurt?', then 'Am I still standing', then 'Where is my target?'. Sometimes by the time I've worked out the first two the target is already dead, other times there is literally nothing I can do against a target which leads to it just not feeling like I've done it right. Yesterday though was good, I'm happy (though vaguely face-palming) about the fact that Aurinyan didn't put up protection in the last fight to ignore what the little creatures were doing. Mostly I was too busy blood lusting and slaughtering them to find time to cast, and the one pause I did have while trying to relocate![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
drabbit's big bad was spent casting up sun blade for more damage. Still it worked, felt right and some people even said it looked quite good too, so all is well.
It was also interesting to be reminded of Aurinyan's other general personality traits. Aurinyan strikes me as an experienced patrollee, based around an attitude of mistrust and pessimism. As a mage he doesn't expect the party to protect him, because he knows if you rely on them while they may be good even 95% of the time, the 5% of the time they mess up gets you killed. As a caster he knows his survival and effectiveness is directly tied to his available mana, and as experienced patrollee knows that a lot of the non fight situations can often last long enough to make attempting to rest every single time a viable tactic (His bonus mana regeneration upgrading it to awesome). Then there is his general mistrust, he always stays out at around double casting distance from any NPC unless the NPC is definitely healing, and has healed one or two people first, he doesn't accept anything offered for free or for a price, and tries to hide his abilities as much as possible while obtaining information in preparation for the inevitable double cross. So with the game yesterday while most of the party were suffering from their sugar addictions Aurinyan was free to chastise them for their stupidity. In the same way he wasn't the least bit surprised to see the cat make an appearance near the end as a villain, he was the NPC checking out all the party earlier after all.
Ah yes the Cat. That was the one time I (or Aurinyan) really felt like the party was behaving like they had the experience their time on patrol would suggest they should have had. Admittedly the GM's had to fix us killing the source of information. Still from the party point of view it was the right thing to do. A monologing villain regardless of the fact that we've heard it all before many, many times is either a) just gloating, b) lying, or c) stalling for time to get their men positioned/ritual completed. So the best response is always to attack first and attack hard and try and remove them before they're prepared. This is an entirely reasonable tactic because either the villain is hard enough that he'll survive and monologue anyway, or be defeated before he can do anything nasty. Plus you can always speak with dead, and failing that just bumble around killing stuff until you resolve whatever the situation is, which is what about 50% of missions end up being about anyway. It's actually why it's frequently an entirely viable tactic to ignore plot when it feels ignorable, you can tell the missions where listening is important (you have to receive something/find someone), and the missions where it'll just devolve into hitting stuff till it dies. Sure knowing what it is may give an advantage, but 90% of the time it just results in working out the obvious tactics which invariably the big bad is immune to because well they are the obvious tactics.
The other thing which the game confirmed is it's so very nice that Aurinyan and Linte are totally different as mages. There whole attitude to everything is so totally opposite. Aurinyan is paranoid, mistrustful, totally self preservationistic, really quite nasty and arrogant. Stick him in a RP situation and he'll back to a safe distance watching for casual surrounding manoeuvres and analysing for threats. Stick him in a combat situation and he's always looking for threats to his safety, which enemies look like they'll break and attack the soft centre. Since the last game I played him on with the returning villains larp ran byduke_of_krondor he felt guilty for not helping so now he's looking for opportunities where he can swing the side of a fight by either powering up an ally or blinding a foe. Still as he demonstrated yesterday he'll back out of what looks like a losing proposition every single time. Aurinyan is always looking for opportunities to rest, to recover and gain power, he's after every edge he can get, because that's how he plans to survive and win.
Linte on the other hand is perpetually happy and optimistic, he sees the best in people until proven otherwise. He's out for excitement and fun and that means getting stuck into things, and he'll always try and be friendly to people. Stick him in a RP situation and he'll run up and be bouncy at people, asking questions being interested (until he gets distracted or gets bored with the repetition or slowness of those involved). Stick him in a fight and he's always pressing forward looking for any opportunity where he can get involved and help, and if he can't affect an enemy working out ways to help his fellow patrol members, pointed out threats and manoeuvres of the enemy. Linte can't settle, he's always on the move running backwards and forwards, never thinking to sit down and rest. He works on the principle it'll all work out in the end, and that he's fast enough to get out of trouble if things go wrong. Linte is also in a relationship, something that Aurinyan would never even consider any more. He cares if people are hurt, something Aurinyan rarely does.
Of course Linte doesn't berserk when hurt, and that's one massive difference in and of itself.
It was certainly interesting finally getting to see Linte's reaction to plan stupid, though I must apologise toxanthipe, drabbit and alexrothis for the endless poking. The thing about Linte is that unless I'm actively RPing him in a situation I can't work out was his reaction will be. He defies it. So that coupled with his endless bouncy optimism has made me get to the point where I want to destruction test his personality, see how far it goes before he snaps, or if he really is immune to angst and unwaveringly happy. So after a couple of weeks of knowing about plan stupid, and then about 4-5 days of it actually getting sorted I was utterly curious about what would happen, and what effect it would have. There were a few issues to consider that could affect his response. First there was the possibility of something nasty happening to Kadija, unlikely to be utterly horrible like death because it is downtime and the system isn't set up to really handle entirely down time events. Still there are lots of ways creative GM's could have taken it, and alexrothis and fourmyle are certainly creative GM's. Then there was the whole trust issue with Kadija not telling Linte about it (and at least one very hypocritical conversation on her part when she was first planning it).
Linte though is fundamentally happy so I wasn't sure how he'd react to Kadija returning dead, or vanishing, or something else coming back in her body or similar. Plus in TL death isn't an end so it's hard to see how he'd view it, but I guess it would upset him. Linte trusts Kadija so to find out she's lied to him he might have taken it badly that she couldn't be honest. Plus she didn't ask him to help to protect him so he might have gone into stupid heroics to prove she didn't need to worry. All considered all possible responses Linte was giving back to me with a 'I'm being difficult and not saying' kind of way.
What actually happened Linte's response:
- Kadija went off to touch the stones, I don't trust the stones, but I trust Kadija. She's amazing so of course she would be fine. She's so brave to have tried it.
- She didn't tell me, I wish she would, but she was protecting me. She said she won't not tell again and she seems to trust my ability to look after myself so it's all ok.
- But, why Calum? I mean Calum? He who'd run off and lose to the first goblin to challenge him. Calum?! Just doesn't make sense, surely there are so many better options.
The last one caught me by surprise. Funny as hell though.
Lastly, in this long general larp related froth, I wanted to get some thoughts I had on the 24 hour coming up down and out of my system. Right now the key thing I'm finding is I'm not really look forward to the 24 hour, I'm just not expecting much from it and I'm not a 100% sure why. On the one hand I have every faith thatalmosthonest and roadkillgerbil are capable of doing a good job as GM's, and I'm very grateful for the time and effort that's gone into it. On the other hand my experiences involved missing the first 24 hour which everyone agreed was very good, and making the second where the general consensus was that it wasn't. So it's not a 100% surprising I'm not expecting as much as I did last year.
I think the problem is the format is flawed and I don't just mean the Tournament of Arms idea, but the whole thing. I can see the advantages of having a fixed format that once has been made to work well enough, can be repeated year on year (just updating the plot), but I think it's wasting an opportunity to make something better and more interesting. I haven't got any concrete ideas, this is stuff that's just be churning away on background threads of my mind, but I do have a few key issues:
- 48 points. This is the key really. This is the crutch that the 24 hour has tied itself to that is ultimately holding it back. In a normal larp you have a fixed mission, with quantifiable risks and a reward based on time. With a 36 hour (and note you are on site for longer than 36 hours, but are actively IC and larping for less than 36 hours) is the culmination of a years plot or a big game doing things you can't do on a normal larp. The very nature of a 36 hour is that much more taxing on the PC's and justifies the higher reward than actual game time. An IC meal is just a social gathering of characters because it's fun. No risk, no reward, but bonuses available for good roleplay.
The current 24 hour format is somewhere in the middle, it's part tournament, part IC meal, part linear larp trying to justify giving out a player based of 48 points at the end by forcing enough risk to justify it. The IC meal side of things needs no risk, the point is the fun roleplay that's it. The tournament contest is in direct competition with the larp part of it, both need time, the latter has to have the risk, the former has to justify it's existence in spite of the risk and is only complicated at constrained and limited by the forced risk of the latter.
If you just stop trying to make the 24 hour worth 48 points, then you can have some much more freedom on the whole thing. Have the tournament and the roleplay for the sake of the tournament and the roleplay, and then have a larp day 2 which gets to be set up the day before and can a feel not achievable on either a normal game or the 36 hour. People get bonuses (and they can be relatively generous) for RP for most of a day, for competing in the games, and then get points for going out and engaging in a risky situation.
- 48 points. Yes again, but different reasons. 48 points is too much to hand out at that point in the year, to any of the characters of the year. They key big build up to a 36 hour is the larps directly before and following Easter, following when the 24 hour is held. Any new member, or anyone with an interesting character they want to bring along, automatically disqualifies themselves from the key plot games leading to the 36 hour because they push themselves out of the rank bracket. We should be encouraging everyone to come to both, because they are good and fun and enjoyable. Right now we giving them a choice, play this once a year event (and who wouldn't want to play) or play with the plot for the 36 hour.
- The focus on a contest of arms. You have a contest of physical arms, and a scouting competition, and so have automatically excluded characters from joining in with that side of the 24 hour, that's bad. Trying to run a full tournament, fitting plot in not withstanding takes time. A different setting, could allow for more varied contests, giving more characters chances to join in, exhibition matches rather than full contests. Compare how long a tournament takes to run through versus the time for the Scout contest. More work? Yes absolutely, better more inclusive results I can't say for certain, but it certainly gives more opportunities.
If you change the style, then you reduce the rewards accordingly. No more master work weapons being handed out. On the one hand it's a shame it's a very effective way to give players the hope of obtaining something very special. On the hand you could still make it up for grabs, but by defeating someone significantly more powerful than you in a gladiatorial combat for example.
The thing is the system of gladiatorial combat is unfair, there isn't any attempt to balance out characters of vastly different ranks. In fact I'm not sure it's even possible. In the end there are only ever going to be a few high levels characters appropriate to enter the tournament with a reasonable chance of winning, and assuming they keep turning up (and with the gladiators in the unpowered why not) these items will only ever end up in the same few hands. Yes, the 24 aren't frequent enough to ever likely be an issue, and yes it's good to keep such powerful things away from characters of inappropriate rank. It's just a shame that the whole thing isn't more inclusive.
I think that's it, anything more my brain produces may end up in comments if this sparks a discussion. Or maybe they'll be a future post. Regardless I'm going, and I'm expecting to enjoy myself because I enjoy RPing my characters, and I have no reason to think ill of the GMs capabilities. Yet at the same time all the above has churned through my head, and I think it worth putting out there.
EDIT: Having spoken toalmosthonest I am now firmly looking forward to the 24 hour, and also have understanding. I still think the discussion is worth having and we should look at trying something else next year, at the very least to give roadkillgerbil a break. Edit End
The other thing is I'm not sure who to bring to the 24 hour any more. Cumberland is definitely out as a freedom priest he has absolutely no interesting in a test of combat run by a might priest, he's had quite enough of that sort of combat from his own experiences to enjoy watching it. Lucien is tempting, but to be honest I'd have to borrow chain mail to cover all my locations and I'm not sure I can be bothered with the weight of armour, especially as the costume is the armour, and I couldn't really relax as him and remove it. So that leaves my mages Aurinyan and Linte. As mages they aren't going to be able to get involved with the combat contest side of things, the rules have mostly guaranteed that, though Linte could take part in the scout competition. Aurinyan had planned to go to sell power ups to because to be honest it was the only time the charity has earned any income, and with that gone, he'd probably spend most of his time bitching and insulting the tournament and how it has gone down hill this year. He's fun to roleplay, and while he could go in an effort to network, he wouldn't have a great time (Though he'd be amused if something came up to ruin the tournament, and he'd be pleased to see certain people get beaten up). Linte on the other hand would enjoy himself regardless, get to meet a whole load of new characters and it would be interesting to see how many characters and playersxanthipe and I could break with the IC cuteness. Aurinyan would like the points, he needs them, random item creation skills buying for the sake of the charity/golems has left him behind where he needs to be power wise. Linte would almost certainly mean monstering on the Sunday, at the very least because while I need points for him I don't want to push him out of the rank brackets for the following shire games as 48 would be too many.
So who should I bring?
It was good to play Aurinyan again, though I'm still not settled on the best way to play him in terms of using his abilities. With everything he can cast being so un-synergistic with his other castings (and his own skills - cloak meet dexterity), I always find myself just not casting much at all (at least on Aurinyan), because committing to any one spell means committing to not use 2 or 3 others. With the permanent items (Endurance 9, Displaced Image 1) he now has though it seems better to probably cast up armour in combat situations and just accept that there's no great point in using invisibility, or the blur/cloak/obscurement spells. Oddly enough this has inspired me to make an animated icon. I suspect it would be best to score spells in terms of a relative value, and work out which combination is best.
The one thing I am really pleased with from yesterday is that I finally feel like I got the blood lust side of things right. Though that was helped a lot by having opponents Aurinyan can kill. Normally what happens is I stop to try and work out 'Am I hurt?', then 'Am I still standing', then 'Where is my target?'. Sometimes by the time I've worked out the first two the target is already dead, other times there is literally nothing I can do against a target which leads to it just not feeling like I've done it right. Yesterday though was good, I'm happy (though vaguely face-palming) about the fact that Aurinyan didn't put up protection in the last fight to ignore what the little creatures were doing. Mostly I was too busy blood lusting and slaughtering them to find time to cast, and the one pause I did have while trying to relocate
drabbit's big bad was spent casting up sun blade for more damage. Still it worked, felt right and some people even said it looked quite good too, so all is well.It was also interesting to be reminded of Aurinyan's other general personality traits. Aurinyan strikes me as an experienced patrollee, based around an attitude of mistrust and pessimism. As a mage he doesn't expect the party to protect him, because he knows if you rely on them while they may be good even 95% of the time, the 5% of the time they mess up gets you killed. As a caster he knows his survival and effectiveness is directly tied to his available mana, and as experienced patrollee knows that a lot of the non fight situations can often last long enough to make attempting to rest every single time a viable tactic (His bonus mana regeneration upgrading it to awesome). Then there is his general mistrust, he always stays out at around double casting distance from any NPC unless the NPC is definitely healing, and has healed one or two people first, he doesn't accept anything offered for free or for a price, and tries to hide his abilities as much as possible while obtaining information in preparation for the inevitable double cross. So with the game yesterday while most of the party were suffering from their sugar addictions Aurinyan was free to chastise them for their stupidity. In the same way he wasn't the least bit surprised to see the cat make an appearance near the end as a villain, he was the NPC checking out all the party earlier after all.
Ah yes the Cat. That was the one time I (or Aurinyan) really felt like the party was behaving like they had the experience their time on patrol would suggest they should have had. Admittedly the GM's had to fix us killing the source of information. Still from the party point of view it was the right thing to do. A monologing villain regardless of the fact that we've heard it all before many, many times is either a) just gloating, b) lying, or c) stalling for time to get their men positioned/ritual completed. So the best response is always to attack first and attack hard and try and remove them before they're prepared. This is an entirely reasonable tactic because either the villain is hard enough that he'll survive and monologue anyway, or be defeated before he can do anything nasty. Plus you can always speak with dead, and failing that just bumble around killing stuff until you resolve whatever the situation is, which is what about 50% of missions end up being about anyway. It's actually why it's frequently an entirely viable tactic to ignore plot when it feels ignorable, you can tell the missions where listening is important (you have to receive something/find someone), and the missions where it'll just devolve into hitting stuff till it dies. Sure knowing what it is may give an advantage, but 90% of the time it just results in working out the obvious tactics which invariably the big bad is immune to because well they are the obvious tactics.
The other thing which the game confirmed is it's so very nice that Aurinyan and Linte are totally different as mages. There whole attitude to everything is so totally opposite. Aurinyan is paranoid, mistrustful, totally self preservationistic, really quite nasty and arrogant. Stick him in a RP situation and he'll back to a safe distance watching for casual surrounding manoeuvres and analysing for threats. Stick him in a combat situation and he's always looking for threats to his safety, which enemies look like they'll break and attack the soft centre. Since the last game I played him on with the returning villains larp ran by
duke_of_krondor he felt guilty for not helping so now he's looking for opportunities where he can swing the side of a fight by either powering up an ally or blinding a foe. Still as he demonstrated yesterday he'll back out of what looks like a losing proposition every single time. Aurinyan is always looking for opportunities to rest, to recover and gain power, he's after every edge he can get, because that's how he plans to survive and win.Linte on the other hand is perpetually happy and optimistic, he sees the best in people until proven otherwise. He's out for excitement and fun and that means getting stuck into things, and he'll always try and be friendly to people. Stick him in a RP situation and he'll run up and be bouncy at people, asking questions being interested (until he gets distracted or gets bored with the repetition or slowness of those involved). Stick him in a fight and he's always pressing forward looking for any opportunity where he can get involved and help, and if he can't affect an enemy working out ways to help his fellow patrol members, pointed out threats and manoeuvres of the enemy. Linte can't settle, he's always on the move running backwards and forwards, never thinking to sit down and rest. He works on the principle it'll all work out in the end, and that he's fast enough to get out of trouble if things go wrong. Linte is also in a relationship, something that Aurinyan would never even consider any more. He cares if people are hurt, something Aurinyan rarely does.
Of course Linte doesn't berserk when hurt, and that's one massive difference in and of itself.
It was certainly interesting finally getting to see Linte's reaction to plan stupid, though I must apologise to
xanthipe, drabbit and alexrothis for the endless poking. The thing about Linte is that unless I'm actively RPing him in a situation I can't work out was his reaction will be. He defies it. So that coupled with his endless bouncy optimism has made me get to the point where I want to destruction test his personality, see how far it goes before he snaps, or if he really is immune to angst and unwaveringly happy. So after a couple of weeks of knowing about plan stupid, and then about 4-5 days of it actually getting sorted I was utterly curious about what would happen, and what effect it would have. There were a few issues to consider that could affect his response. First there was the possibility of something nasty happening to Kadija, unlikely to be utterly horrible like death because it is downtime and the system isn't set up to really handle entirely down time events. Still there are lots of ways creative GM's could have taken it, and alexrothis and fourmyle are certainly creative GM's. Then there was the whole trust issue with Kadija not telling Linte about it (and at least one very hypocritical conversation on her part when she was first planning it).Linte though is fundamentally happy so I wasn't sure how he'd react to Kadija returning dead, or vanishing, or something else coming back in her body or similar. Plus in TL death isn't an end so it's hard to see how he'd view it, but I guess it would upset him. Linte trusts Kadija so to find out she's lied to him he might have taken it badly that she couldn't be honest. Plus she didn't ask him to help to protect him so he might have gone into stupid heroics to prove she didn't need to worry. All considered all possible responses Linte was giving back to me with a 'I'm being difficult and not saying' kind of way.
What actually happened Linte's response:
- Kadija went off to touch the stones, I don't trust the stones, but I trust Kadija. She's amazing so of course she would be fine. She's so brave to have tried it.
- She didn't tell me, I wish she would, but she was protecting me. She said she won't not tell again and she seems to trust my ability to look after myself so it's all ok.
- But, why Calum? I mean Calum? He who'd run off and lose to the first goblin to challenge him. Calum?! Just doesn't make sense, surely there are so many better options.
The last one caught me by surprise. Funny as hell though.
Lastly, in this long general larp related froth, I wanted to get some thoughts I had on the 24 hour coming up down and out of my system. Right now the key thing I'm finding is I'm not really look forward to the 24 hour, I'm just not expecting much from it and I'm not a 100% sure why. On the one hand I have every faith that
almosthonest and roadkillgerbil are capable of doing a good job as GM's, and I'm very grateful for the time and effort that's gone into it. On the other hand my experiences involved missing the first 24 hour which everyone agreed was very good, and making the second where the general consensus was that it wasn't. So it's not a 100% surprising I'm not expecting as much as I did last year.I think the problem is the format is flawed and I don't just mean the Tournament of Arms idea, but the whole thing. I can see the advantages of having a fixed format that once has been made to work well enough, can be repeated year on year (just updating the plot), but I think it's wasting an opportunity to make something better and more interesting. I haven't got any concrete ideas, this is stuff that's just be churning away on background threads of my mind, but I do have a few key issues:
- 48 points. This is the key really. This is the crutch that the 24 hour has tied itself to that is ultimately holding it back. In a normal larp you have a fixed mission, with quantifiable risks and a reward based on time. With a 36 hour (and note you are on site for longer than 36 hours, but are actively IC and larping for less than 36 hours) is the culmination of a years plot or a big game doing things you can't do on a normal larp. The very nature of a 36 hour is that much more taxing on the PC's and justifies the higher reward than actual game time. An IC meal is just a social gathering of characters because it's fun. No risk, no reward, but bonuses available for good roleplay.
The current 24 hour format is somewhere in the middle, it's part tournament, part IC meal, part linear larp trying to justify giving out a player based of 48 points at the end by forcing enough risk to justify it. The IC meal side of things needs no risk, the point is the fun roleplay that's it. The tournament contest is in direct competition with the larp part of it, both need time, the latter has to have the risk, the former has to justify it's existence in spite of the risk and is only complicated at constrained and limited by the forced risk of the latter.
If you just stop trying to make the 24 hour worth 48 points, then you can have some much more freedom on the whole thing. Have the tournament and the roleplay for the sake of the tournament and the roleplay, and then have a larp day 2 which gets to be set up the day before and can a feel not achievable on either a normal game or the 36 hour. People get bonuses (and they can be relatively generous) for RP for most of a day, for competing in the games, and then get points for going out and engaging in a risky situation.
- 48 points. Yes again, but different reasons. 48 points is too much to hand out at that point in the year, to any of the characters of the year. They key big build up to a 36 hour is the larps directly before and following Easter, following when the 24 hour is held. Any new member, or anyone with an interesting character they want to bring along, automatically disqualifies themselves from the key plot games leading to the 36 hour because they push themselves out of the rank bracket. We should be encouraging everyone to come to both, because they are good and fun and enjoyable. Right now we giving them a choice, play this once a year event (and who wouldn't want to play) or play with the plot for the 36 hour.
- The focus on a contest of arms. You have a contest of physical arms, and a scouting competition, and so have automatically excluded characters from joining in with that side of the 24 hour, that's bad. Trying to run a full tournament, fitting plot in not withstanding takes time. A different setting, could allow for more varied contests, giving more characters chances to join in, exhibition matches rather than full contests. Compare how long a tournament takes to run through versus the time for the Scout contest. More work? Yes absolutely, better more inclusive results I can't say for certain, but it certainly gives more opportunities.
If you change the style, then you reduce the rewards accordingly. No more master work weapons being handed out. On the one hand it's a shame it's a very effective way to give players the hope of obtaining something very special. On the hand you could still make it up for grabs, but by defeating someone significantly more powerful than you in a gladiatorial combat for example.
The thing is the system of gladiatorial combat is unfair, there isn't any attempt to balance out characters of vastly different ranks. In fact I'm not sure it's even possible. In the end there are only ever going to be a few high levels characters appropriate to enter the tournament with a reasonable chance of winning, and assuming they keep turning up (and with the gladiators in the unpowered why not) these items will only ever end up in the same few hands. Yes, the 24 aren't frequent enough to ever likely be an issue, and yes it's good to keep such powerful things away from characters of inappropriate rank. It's just a shame that the whole thing isn't more inclusive.
I think that's it, anything more my brain produces may end up in comments if this sparks a discussion. Or maybe they'll be a future post. Regardless I'm going, and I'm expecting to enjoy myself because I enjoy RPing my characters, and I have no reason to think ill of the GMs capabilities. Yet at the same time all the above has churned through my head, and I think it worth putting out there.
EDIT: Having spoken to
almosthonest I am now firmly looking forward to the 24 hour, and also have understanding. I still think the discussion is worth having and we should look at trying something else next year, at the very least to give roadkillgerbil a break. Edit EndThe other thing is I'm not sure who to bring to the 24 hour any more. Cumberland is definitely out as a freedom priest he has absolutely no interesting in a test of combat run by a might priest, he's had quite enough of that sort of combat from his own experiences to enjoy watching it. Lucien is tempting, but to be honest I'd have to borrow chain mail to cover all my locations and I'm not sure I can be bothered with the weight of armour, especially as the costume is the armour, and I couldn't really relax as him and remove it. So that leaves my mages Aurinyan and Linte. As mages they aren't going to be able to get involved with the combat contest side of things, the rules have mostly guaranteed that, though Linte could take part in the scout competition. Aurinyan had planned to go to sell power ups to because to be honest it was the only time the charity has earned any income, and with that gone, he'd probably spend most of his time bitching and insulting the tournament and how it has gone down hill this year. He's fun to roleplay, and while he could go in an effort to network, he wouldn't have a great time (Though he'd be amused if something came up to ruin the tournament, and he'd be pleased to see certain people get beaten up). Linte on the other hand would enjoy himself regardless, get to meet a whole load of new characters and it would be interesting to see how many characters and players
xanthipe and I could break with the IC cuteness. Aurinyan would like the points, he needs them, random item creation skills buying for the sake of the charity/golems has left him behind where he needs to be power wise. Linte would almost certainly mean monstering on the Sunday, at the very least because while I need points for him I don't want to push him out of the rank brackets for the following shire games as 48 would be too many.So who should I bring?
no subject
The first is Tempest somehow managing to fall towards the bottom in the rank bracket wrt shire - I had been worried she would overshoot the rank bracket; that now looks unlikely. At the worst, I'll end up monstering one, maybe two games while others catch up.
For a second, the realisation of exactly how much work I've got to do after Easter has set in, and thus has made me realise that I might very well be missing more than the odd one larp, and so Tempest overshooting just a little bit might be a good thing, because otherwise she really is going to be at the bottom of the rank bracket for the 36 hour. Because, y'know, it's not like she doesn't fall over enough already.
Thus it's come down to that I need Prospera to be around the scouting competition and for a little while after that. Other than that, I'll bring Tempest; I figure I'll be able to think up excuses for one or the other to duck out as needed (I have to get back in time to patrol/I need to catch the messenger at the inn).
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Not sure when would be best to play both. I'd have to be Aurinyan at right timeto get involved with plot, and Linte for a large part of the rest to make it worth doing.
24
you'd have to organise it with one overall GM who is OOC all the time, and then individual 'Games' GMs who are OOC for their game, and an IC 'Game sponsor' who is the IC point of contact.
That way you get to run a smooth and efficient event.
But if it is truly going to be just a contest of arms with a scouting competition tacked on the side, then its a waste of time for spellcasters, freedom priests etc.
Re: 24
I do wonder how you guarantee a good number of monsters, it would require a good mix of clever planning and a willingness from people to monster for a bit. Then again given the nature of our club that's not much to ask.
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All the requests and suggestions made by people were passed on, and I'm sure they still are being, to the official address. If it doesn't work, I will apologise, but I'm willing to bet there will be something for everyone.
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Hopefully it'll all work out perfectly, if it doesn't and even if it does there's no harm in considering options.
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