kingandy | Battlehwak / h11od

Ill-considered, meandering, conversational-style reviews ahoy!

Battlehwak was not nearly as bad as I expected. Admittedly, as seen in

samharber's review, this may be coloured through the use of alcohol, but really, it was quite entertaining. I think the main thing we learned was that if you stick twenty LRPers in a field they will happily roleplay. There's probably an equation for it, and comparisons should be made with the mechanics of momentum (or impulse) - the more players there are, the longer it will happily turn over under its own weight; witness Omega, which needed the odd poke from NPCs, and the much larger Maelstrom, which has happily rolled on for three events with little to no non-player intervention whatsoever. (Some people are saying it will need a bit of momentum added soon, as a closed system tends towards equilibrium which doesn't make for a very entertaining story, but that's a discussion for another time.) The main problem with Battlehwak, then, was that Ash wanted to take Omega sensibilities and apply them to a much smaller playerbase, which quite simply doesn't work. If the rest of the crew hadn't sat down and plotted out some more developments, things would have ground to a halt some time Saturday afternoon, even taking the player-player chat into account. Momentum will only carry you so far, after all.

Throughout the event Ash displayed an ability to remain cheerfully optimistic in the face of mind-bendingly poor organisation. (This may be sign of a psychotic selective perception disorder, or something, or just blind faith.) Half the crew (monsters and refs) didn't get anything resembling a brief until they arrived on site, when - best case - they got a quick verbal sketch hastily grabbed while Ash was on his way to somewhere else. He really needs to be made aware that while, yes, in this case it was possible to just smile and nod and hope everything works out, this only worked because he had a phenomenally competent staff and monster crew. It may not work next time.

I'm actually warming to the rule system rather. Certain elements that make little sense at first begin to fit when you consider that Ash was going for a high-fantasy, heroic epic kind of game. A basic character has one global hit (this can be bought up with your 20 starting character points on a one-for-one basis). When you reach 0 hit points you are incapacitated, capable only of screaming and crawling slowly; below 0 you are unconscious; at -10 you are dead. At first glance this seems an excessively far-negative number, but upon playing it becomes apparent that it was done so as to render the "Dec" (10 hit) damage call [i]scary but nonfatal[/i]. Anyone can kill anyone given enough time and a sharp stick, but with the -10 death number you can have monsters wandering around being almost guaranteed to take people down without necessarily taking them out. Which makes sense. Sort of. Below 0 hit points you heal at a rate of 1 per minute, which means nobody's going to be lying in the ditch for more than 10 minutes, and after than you heal at 1 per hour. Again, all very heroic and epic, making it possible to heal through bedrest while keeping the system's few healers very much in demand.

So at its core, the rule system is valid for the genre. It's only when you start adding the races that things become silly.

I've mentioned the Junlanders previously; they get absorptive rather than ablative armour (but only leather so it can never be too hard), and move onto zombie-style locational hits at 0 instead of falling unconscious. Which makes sense IC (they are sponsored by what is basically a life god), but doesn't seem to come with any sort of equivalent slap. In practice the only blatant Junlander was cut down within half an hour of arriving on site, because apparently they are slavers and this is naturally unconscionable (I don't know, I wasn't involved in that). So maybe that's the slap - NPCs who hunt you down for existing. And quite right too.

Conversely, I thought it was a bit of a shame that the Boarderers (sic) didn't get anything in exchange for coating self with slap and prosthetics. For a 36hr time-in event, voluntarily wearing wings or horns is a fair sacrifice. Given the small size of the event it would even seem practical to give individual Boarderers tailor-made rewards according to the severity of their self-abuse. But then, playing a Borderer myself, perhaps I'm not the most independent judge.

Several of the races/cultures were grossly underrepresented; we only saw one tree-person all weekend, and that was a monster (which was surprising since they're invisible and invulnerable as long as they're hugging a tree - I kid ye not. And I know, we could hardly expect to have seen them if they're invisible. Smart arse) and I don't think there were any from the Eagle Wastes. Most common were the Marakeshi (raghead arabs) and Brotherhood of whatever (boring humans), as far as I could tell.

Things have been said about the shitty players. This was not the entire playerbase, but a number of people failed to grasp the concept of "perpetual time-in" and not only sat around their camp fire shouting "OC, OC" but later complained about their tents being broken into. These miscreants persisted in using OC terms IC and cared nothing for keeping knowledge of previous characters distinct from their current one. One of them can be given the benefit of the doubt as it was apparently his first event, but allegely most of the others are regulars at what is now Forever's Density. I have nothing to base this on but rumour and hearsay; Barry Mann (a known regular) was actually quite decent at being an apparent bimbling mage who at one point managed to shout/stare down an entire camp (mostly, I suspect, through the element of surprise at his sudden rage-filled hoarse tirade).

Anyway. Those that were shit, were shit, and everybody knew they were shit. Those that were good were excellent. Including my good self of course; I was marvellous. As a nearly-useless character backed into a corner I managed to kill two demons myself, and spur somebody else into killing a third in order to rescue my prone form, when everybody else was milling around in a big circle moaning that they couldn't see the nasty invisible demons. Pussies.

I am considering attending a follow-up event, if such arises; if one looks at this event as the playtest, it wasn't at all bad.

So after Battlehwak, me and

batelf went to see Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow (which really should have an exclamation mark somewhere in the title). OMG so cool. It was all like NEAAAWWW and GIANT ROBOTS and omg RAY GUN k'powk'pow SUBMERSIBLE SO COOL BUBBLE HELMETS WOW wtf rocketship robots! It is a fantastic adventure in the truest sense of the word.

Sky Captain and Dex are so a couple.

That's all from me; work tomorrow. Night.