Playing the Game of the Arena

The Game of the Arena in Odyssey is the equivalent of great chunks of the downtime system in Maelstrom... It’s the lever that allows players to affect the world on a grand scale. For some players, it’ll be the centre of their event, for others, it’ll be something happening in the periphery, while they get on with their own story. It was a very early fixture in the design process, inspired directly by the original Odyssey game as developed by Neil Hughes and Smitt. and it fitted with what PD wanted in a game to contrast with Maelstrom - "No downtime".

Odyssey was aimed to appeal to LRPers who like fighting as much as those who like politicking. A large amount of the activity for fighters and politicians at Odyssey will hinge on events in the Arena. In character, it’s the final decision-making setting for the politics of the world. Out of character, it provides the structure for PvP play, and a very scalable mechanism for providing meaningful fights. So, the game can do without disruption to the Arena. That’s affected the rules of the game and the setting, but I think it’s worth underscoring in a softer, social contract kind of way. We’d hope that the characters the game ends up with will be fit for genre. Heroes, however flawed. So, I guess our deal is - play a character like that, and you’ll enjoy our game more.

I think lrp fights are more enjoyable when there’s a chance of death, when they’re close, when you’re risking something, and when they mean something. We’re expecting every warleader and every champion to be able to have four arena fights a weekend. Four fights with a meaningful affect on the world. Every warrior who goes down in the arena has a chance of death through a beadpull. Every fight in the arena uses a precious attacking opportunity - a warleader and their warband only gets one a day. And every fight decides something meaningful - who gets the tribute from a specific territory.

We’re not going to absolutely promise they’ll be good fights. We won’t be balancing the sides, or engineering the outcomes, but fights there will be. However, we have tried to increase the chances they’ll be good... Fights starting with balanced sides, and ending in a close-fought victory will gain the winners more renown than a massacre at overwhelming odds, and those who fight few against many will gain renown too. So there’s some gamist reasons for ensuring a close fight, opposing the political imperative to just win, as well as everyone’s desire for a great scrap.

To win without risk is to triumph without glory.

H.

Remember the Arena is a theatre and not all battles are fought with (latex) weapons. Your Orator should rag on your opponents and your fans should roar their support from the sidelines. Renown can be earned by facing great odds - but remember, the role of the Arena at the Annual is to put on a show for the gods. So put on a show - make your battle theatrical, as well as the introduction; be merciful in victory and gracious in defeat.

And don’t underestimate the adrenaline and the rush of big combat. I still remember my first charge on a Gathering battlefield; I think few people forget it. Odyssey is designed so that the Arena combats especially try to recapture that top-of-the-rollercoaster moment when the charge goes in; a simple, low-call system where what you see (or get hit by) is what you get.

Personally, it’s over ten years since I was regularly fighting in LARP battles, and getting on for four since the last time I struck a blow in anger. I don’t imagine I’m alone in that - a lot of Maelstrom players especially might not have seen more than one or two brief fights in their entire LARP careers. I look forward to being mercilessly schooled by younger and fitter fighters - or perhaps, to providing a surprise or two to cocky youngsters who underestimate the fat old blokes...

Ian A

Considerations relating to the warbands actually in the arena aside, another aspect to the arena is it provides a spectacle for those with no immediately pressing matter to attend to. With the best will in the world from the organisers, I think every LARPer amongst us has hit a point at a large scale event where you’ve done everything you wanted to do coming into the game and there’s nothing immediately happening that requires your attention. It’s at this point many resort to the traditional sloping off to the bar, or back to faction for a few beverages. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could guarantee every player that even if they have nothing directly relevant to themselves at all times, there’ll at least be something to gawp at that means a lot to some other people?

Hopefully the arena will evolve into the place to be when lacking inspiration or motivation for anything else. Watching a close run arena fight, seeing who got buffed by a god/quest, watching who else is there and who’s conspiciously absent and so on whilst nuzzling a beverage has got to be more interesting than nuzzling a beverage in the bar alone - right?

Vince

I’ve been IC on three or four large battles on the August Bank Holiday and I’ve always been on the losing side - I consider it a kind of lucky streak. What has always amused me is that those players who weren’t as happy as me to be on the losing side tended to have one of two complaints - the first that the organizers ruined the battle by OOC interfering to dictate the sides in an attempt to get an even battle - and the second that the organizers ruined the battle by not doing enough to balance the sides. I’d usually encounter both complaints in roughly equal numbers for the same battle - LRPers are not easy to please.

While my personal preference would always favour minimal interference, I’ve pondered on this paradox for years - how to hold an IC battle between PCs where both sides bring their own forces to the fight and both sides have a reasonable chance to win. The logical IC approach in a PvP game is to avoid any battle unless you have overwhelming odds in your favour. That’s not a set-up that tends to produce high adrenalin battles, rather it leads to short and murderous fights as characters avoid attacking enemies that stand any credible chance of fighting back.

Finding an answer to this riddle was always going to be incredibly important to Odyssey. The clear risk is that you end up in a situation where one side is the largest and ends up wiping the field of their enemies by weight of numbers. That’s not very enjoyable for the losers and appears to me to be even more dull for the winners. Fantasy literature is not replete with stories in which an overwhelming force of heroes rapidly crush a much smaller band of antagonists. Victory in the arena should come from skill, courage, wits and daring - that’s a story you’ll want to tell for years.

But if the organizers are not going to interfere to balance the sides of each fight, how can you ensure that all the fights are equal? The simply answer is you can’t ensure it, but the IC rules of the Great Game give us an opportunity to engineer it, by creating a social set-up that will actively encourage players to engage in equal fights.

Like any PvP mechanism it’s relatively subtle. Each Nation will be looking to win. But each Nation must divide up it’s forces to attack and defend. The easiest way to ensure victory is to refuse to split your forces at all and for every warleader to combine their warbands in one great attack. But doing that gives up any possibility of winning more than one territory. And critically those warleaders must now find a way to divide up the winnings. Larger warbands will expect a larger share of the spoils, but the easiest way to get a better cut is to attack by yourself or with the help of much smaller warbands. In other words the Great Game will actively reward those warleaders who have the guts to attack with the smallest force they need to win - because the less allies they call on, the less people they’ll need to share the tribute with.

What about in defense? The number of times a warleader can defend a territory is limited, the same way attacks are limited. This means that if the warbands in a Nation attempt to cooperate then they will need to divide their fighting strength between every territory they must defend. The consequence of limited numbers is that each Nation would ideally like to spread their defence in response to the weight of individual attacks. Sending in 50 Champions to defend a territory is a waste of precious resources that will be needed elsewhere if you estimate that 40 Champions will be enough to carry the day. Just enough to win is the perfect number of Champions to defend a territory, since that leaves the most Champions available to defend other territories later.

However, while "just enough to win" is the ideal number for good game in a single fight, it can less than ideal for good game in a series of fights. So we have a tension there.

Say one side has 15 champions and one side has 12. Given an even spread of warriors, the side with 15 champions will probably win each fight. Not a great war. If, however, the side with 12 is split into 3 bands of 4, and the side with 15 split, say, into 2 bands of 3, 4, 8 - then that’s one even fight, and one fight each that probably go the way of the bigger band. Makes a much better war.

Now, that implies the perfect number for a warband is 1, because that gives you the greatest flexibility. True, but: we’ve made warleaders weaker in statistics so you also want to maximise the number of champions in your band. All things being equal, a band with champions will probably defeat an evenly sized force of warleaders. Of course, in exchange for this weakness, warleaders do get given all the tribute for all the territories held by their band, and it’s them the Gods recognise as leaders with all that entails, so it’s not all bad. And history and myth have enough examples of the leader of a warband not being the strongest, or the best warrior for us not to worry about it too much.

The overall effect should encourage warbands to seek narrow victories over similar sized opponents, both in attack and defense. It won’t be a perfect solution, some battles will still be very uneven, but add in the effects of renown and the response of the crowd and the set-up should make for some pretty epic battles.

Matt Pennington