Hi david,

-----------------

If you are willing to make your side of things open source (or have
some sort of freebie licence) then you might be able to get some
martial artists in other countries involved in some sort of aspect of
it. If it took off you could even go for an international league way
down the line.
------------------

Way down the line, maybe so. Some MA people see where we are going, some don't
of course.

------------------

Sudden death works with any system and would make sence from the
martial arts side of things. However, I have to tell you that most
LARPers prefer to be able to take some amount of damage before being
knocked out, so you'll have to take that into account if you try to
develop a LARP version.

-------------------

It might be better for me to develop Gun Sau just as a martial game and let LARP
people handle the adaptations. I've only played one LARP game and it was quite
fun but it's not really my scene at least at the moment.

-------------------

The thing to realise about LARP is that
people will pay for a game that runs anywhere from 3 hours
(Labyrinthe fantasy LARP in Chislehurst does short games like this)
to an entire weekend (we do weekend games). If your character dies in
a LARP game, then the player either looses the rest of the game that
they paid for (as happend at Labyrinthe last time I went) has to join
the monster team (both Labyrinthe and VE have done this), or create
another character (VE does this if possible as we prefer players to
not monster). (You could still keep sudden death for the original
version.)


--------------------------

Yeah, Gun Sau matches usually last a couple of minutes, tops, and that's if
you're playing points. Maybe for a sci-fi game you could pretend that you get
stunned for a period of time and then come back into the game (?)

---------------------

1) Most of the guns are no longer made. If you buy into a hard to get
system, you could have a lot of trouble replacing broken equipment.
You might need to think about buying more stuff than you need.
---------------------

That would be further down the track as well, right now it's just my family here
and a few other guys spread around the world. Gun Sau is really new, we've only
been doing it for a couple of weeks.

---------------------
2) If you are trying to appeal to existing taggers (which you
probably are not) then they will probably want to bring their own
guns. This means that you would be advised to use whatever gun is
considered to be the standard by NZ taggers. However, as you seem to
be appealing to martial artists, you would probably be lending them
guns and can use whatever system works best.
----------------------

I'm not sure that there is any organised tagging here apart from leagues run by
a couple of commercial LaserTag places. In fact I'm not even sure if they are
still operating, i'll check it out. What I mean is that I haven't found anyone
here who is doing the LARP, do-it-yourself type of game with taggers.

----------------------
3) Some tagging systems are adversely affected by sunlight or
florescent lighting, so you should ask in tagging boards to see what
people think of particular systems. Also some sensors only take hits
from limited areas. If you don't have sensors on your back, you can
only get shot face on.
-----------------------

Only face-on would kind of work for Gun Sau at least in that it is inspired by
one fight scene in Equilibrium. If you study the fight choreography you can see
that it would only really work if the characters were only "allowed" to shoot
for the face, so we have been playing headshots only.

-----------------------
4) Some guns are badly put together and either break very easily,
have bits that drop off or are very difficult to service or repair.
While I wouldn't advise you doing a destruct test, you could ask
experienced taggers for tips.
-----------------------

One guy on the Gun Sau forum runs a big outdoor LazerTag operation in the US and
he is talking about producing some taggers that are custom designed for Gun Sau.
They would be reinforced and/or even padded to cope with impact because the guns
do collide a lot when you are sparring.

-----------------------
5) Tagging systems also break down at very close range. If you think
of the beam from the gun as a cone coming out of the emmiter (an IR
LED) the closer you get to the gun the smaller the circle that
projects onto your body. We actually abandon the Lazer Tag system at
what we call point blank range and use an in house rule that allows
people to declare a hit even if the sensor doesn't register a hit.
Obviously you won't want to do that but I suggest you try out some
shots from different ranges to get an idea of what spred you are
getting.

If you stick three sensors on the floor (or on the heads of three
volunteers) and shoot only at the middle one you can see how close
people can get before they take hits as well.
-------------------

We have done that sort of experiment and found that we have to cover 95% of
either the sensor or the emitter to get the kind of sharpshooter accuracy we
need at close range. That even works with the LTTO system although it's a bit
like buying a Rolls Royce and then painting over all the windows.

------------------

Most groups that use Lazer Tag (and when I say Lazer Tag I
specifically mean the game actually called Lazer Tag from Worlds of
Wonder) use the six hits built into the sensor as their combat rules.
Most of them don't bother with location hits, but a few do. Some
groups say that each hit does some sort of damage and the last knocks
you out or kills you.

At VE, we say that the sensor actually exists in our games and it
represents a forcefield that defelcts the first five bullets. We are
one of the groups that do and we hand out 'casualty cards' that
contain a random amount of damage to a random part of the body. This
can be overruled by an opponant as they can delberately shoot a
particular location if they are at close range. If you think it might
be worth looking at, you can see a more detailed description of our
combat system on our main website:

http://virtualeclipse.aboho.com/roleplay/larp/index.htm
------------------

I had a look, it does look good and i like the forcefield idea. Because we have
not really been role-playing so far we just treat hits as points.

------------------

If you have the first hit (after armour is delt with) disabling a
location, then you could allow a player of your game to continue
fighting with one hand or hoping on one leg if they really want to
(this is how they do it at many fantasy LARP games - we make people
limp and ban them from running or carrying heavy items). You will
have to think about the safety aspect of this as hopping might not be
safe with martial arts.
-----------------------

I have to say that although i don't mind role-playing I would feel a bit
self-conscious hopping around pretending that my leg was shot or whatever. No
problem if people wanted to adapt the basic Gun Sau rules to do that, although
the style and the techniques are really based on the headshots only idea. If you
watch the last Equilibrium fight carefully you can see that if they had been
"allowed" to shoot any target they would probably have killed each other 11
times. the gun sau rules we have been working on so far include handicaps that
really force you to stick to that target area, which affects the techniques and
the general fighting style.

----------------------

At the end of the day money will have to be involved somewhere,
because you are going to have to pay to hire venues and provide
certain things. (We hire scout camps, woods and other locations and
provide catering for our events and *we* have to charge, although we
charge the minimum amount as we are a non profit organisation. Don't
forget to work out the money at some point or you will get into
trouble and have to stop playing.) You might even need to have
insurance. Even if you don't insure the players agianst accidents you
might need to insure your group against damaging property or anyone
watching. (This might be a requirement from people that rent venues
to you as it is here.)
---------------------

That would be off in the future, I'm only 17 and I don't quite think I'm
qualified to be organising big events, etc. I'd be happy to be an advisor on Gun
Sau for an existing game though, or on an Equilibrium-themed LARP (but I bet
everyone would want to play a Cleric!)
---------------------

If you were going to do sword disarms then you would probably have to
do rules similar to gun disarms. My personal feeling is that if
someone grabs the blade of a LARP sword they cut off their fingers!
--------------------

Fair enough although lots of historical European martial arts disarms did
involve grabbing the blade, usually with a strong leather or chainmail gauntlet.
Anyway the problem is not so muc h what the sword is made of as the fact that if
we included disarms and people weren't really up to speed on the techniques you
would end up with wrestling contests that would be out of character and
basically pretty dangerous. People would trip over and fall on top of each
other, or into furniture, etc.
-----------------------
By the way, if you did get involved in a LARP version of your game,
people would things to do in between combats and that might require
some non combat rules. You could, for example, have your players be a
Special Forces team that needs to invade a building and rescue one or
more hostages from a group of kidnappers.

----------------------

It's a good idea - let me know if anyone over there wants to set up an
Equilibrium LARP and I will be very happy to bounce some ideas around!
-----------------------------
It sounds fun, but I don't think that you will be having very long
games as people will be tired if they have very long combats. Maybe
LARP is too much faf for a short intese fight.
-----------------------------

Not sure what faf means (?) Anyway yeah, I reckon the time thing is part of the
difference between doing it as a sport and playing it as a game. The long range
style with the flips, etc. would probably only appeal to young athletes anyway.

----------------------------

Right, mind you someone could block a blow with a gun in their hand
and give the gun a bit of a bash.
---------------------------

That's why we're padding/reinforcing the guns. we also use padded gloves.

--------------------------

I didn't know that Europe had any martial arts. I thought we imported
them all.
-------------------------

Are you kidding!? Check out http://www.thehaca.com/HEMA.htm ,
http://www.newyorkcarver.com/martialarts.htm , http://www.hemac.org/ , etc.,
etc. There are hundreds of gorups, conferences, forums, etc.

Thanks,

Mike


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