Hi Mike,

<snip>

> -------------------
>
> 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 (?)

Unlike book based RPGs most LARPs are organised either by small
companies or clubs. Every LARP is organised a different way and has
its rules. I've even seen websites from a few LARPs that say that
other types of LARPs are not "proper" role playing.

However, I think that is a bit of a snobbish attitude. At the end of
the day all LARPs are about pretending to be someone you are not
(role playing) and acting out what your charcter does (live action).
If people want to role play something with no fighting that is still
LARP and if people want to have 99 percent fighting and one percent
in-character briefing that is still LARP as well.

At the end of the day, the people running a LARP get to decide what
rules go into it. The rules might be stacked to favor latex swords,
IR guns, unarmed combat, spells or special abilities. I don't think
there is any system around that favors all of these things as
everybody has to fiddle with the rules to keep the game running at a
pace that the players are happy with.

There is no reason why you couldn't cut down the role playing to a
minimum if you wanted to do a LARP.

If *you* feel that pretending to be injured while role playing
doesn't feel right then find a way to keep players in the game with
sudden death rules. (Maybe the players team have an infinate supply
of clones or something - maybe people get kept out of the game for 5
minutes if they get "killed" during a fight.) Whatever you think fits
in with the style of the films you are copying will probably be ok.

> 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.

If there are only a few of you then you can probably afford to switch
guns if you find that the first ones do not work for you, but if you
build up to about 30 players it will start to get more and more
expensive to change your mind. You can also face the problem where
extra people want to come along but you can't get spare guns for them.

That wouldn't matter too much if you did short combats between two
people, but if everyone was potentially fighting at the same time
they would need a gun each (or two guns each).

> ---------------------
> 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.

The commercial places are not very good at bringing people into the
hobby as a whole because they want to hang onto their players. They
also tend to target children more than adults. You probably don't
want to have children playing as there can be insurance problems with
under 16s.

I would think that there would be Lazer Tagging groups of some kind
(maybe not LARPers) in NZ. Have you checked out the Lazer Tag groups
in our links pages?

Don't forget that not all Lazer Taging groups use the system for
LARP. Some groups just use it for IR paintballing games. Those sort
of people might be more attracted to your games if they have done
some martial arts.

> 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.

Sounds like you will be going down the customised gun route. I
suggest you learn a bit about putting circuts into guns as you will
almost certainly need to tinker with guns if you play long term. If a
microswitch connected to the trigger of a gun gives out it would be
good to be able to repair it without posting it off to the guy in the
USA.

We have people that adapt toy guns and design guns from scratch and
different people that put circuits together to go inside them. It
seems like people are often better at one skill than the other.

<snip>

> ...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.

The main reason to bring in the forcefield idea was to explain, why
people wore flashing hats and why they could be shot six times.

We found that it was easier to build the VE combat system around the
Lazer Tag system rather than try to fit a six hit flashing hat into a
simulation of real combat.

I would suggest using gun rules that fit in with the martial arts as
well as whatever tagging system you decide to go with. If you do go
with homebuilt stuff you will probably also find that you can have
the chips programmed to follow whatever sort of rules you use. I know
of people that make magazines with 99 shots and that sort of thing.
Maybe you could put a fixed number of bullets into your guns and
control the fire rate.

> 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.

If you don't like it, then don't do it. It is your game. I'm just
chucking ideas at you. You will be mainly doing this with martial
artists as LARPers or Taggers would probably not be skilled enough.
If the martial artists think that LARP feels a bit corny then they
won't want to do it and you would be better off sticking to the pure
combat.

However, if you cut down the amount of role playing until it feels
right to you then perhaps they *will* like it.

At a bare (and this is really bare) minimum you could:

* Get people to come up with a game name for their fighter and

* Dress up the arena or the players in some way, so that it reminds
people of the films.

You could even publish some sort of league table with peoples
character names and scores.

> At the end of the day money will have to be involved somewhere...
<snip>
> ---------------------
>
> 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!)

It probably would be a long way off, but just be careful to watch how
much of your personal money you sink into this. You need to look
after kit to try to minimise breakages and try to recycle things if
you can. Have a look around the internet for websites telling you how
to make props if you decide you want to use props.

> ---------------------
>
> 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.

Having said that, we don't use rubber swords at VE so it doesn't
matter if people do allow sword disarms.

>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.
> -----------------------

Over here if people did LARP sword disarms, the person they disarmed
would be complaining about their sword getting bent!

:-)

> 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!

Thanks for the offer. I don't think that anyone in our group would
want to base a game on a film with martial arts in it as we have
specifically banned *most* hand to hand combat from our game.

Our universe is mostly based on space films and is not influenced
much by martial arts films. (We have seven power blocs fighting to
control the inhabited worlds.)

If someone else was running an Equilibrium game, some of our players
might want to come along, but I can't see our people organising an
entire new background to fit in with that style of play. We have
enough things in our own universe that need additional stuff added.

If you are interested our sci fi background has its own section on
our main website:

http://virtualeclipse.aboho.com/scifi/index.htm

> -----------------------------
> 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.

Sorry "faf" means fuss. What I mean't was that spending two months
creating a LARP system, if your game lasts five minutes might not be
worth doing.

> 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.

I stand corrected. I assumed that you were talking of japanese
*style* martial arts similar to kung fu. If you mean all sorts of
close up fighting then I assume that all countries have their own
versions (assuming their culture has not been wiped out).