Reducing Holds on the Field

evi1r0n

evi1r0n

Exemplar
Let me paint a picture for you. You are running up a hill towards a powerful enemy who is engaged with 5 combatants. All 5 combatants unload on the enemy. "HOLD!" You stop running up the hill and take a knee. The who threw what and who defended against what happens. "LAY ON!" You continue running up the hill as the group in front of you reaches the fight and unloads. "HOLD!" Discussion on effects happens. "LAY ON!" You finally reach the fight but another volley of effects occurs just as you are about to make your first attack. "HOLD". Rinse and repeat...

This situation occurs a lot and from what I have gathered from visiting players it isn't just a local problem. The hold rule is called the most important rule in the game because I feel the intent was for it to be a safety device not the immersion crushing, fight breaking, annoyance beast it's become. I play a lot of games in the NW. Alliance is the only game in the area with what I affectionately call, "The Hold Monster".

The only time the "HOLD" equivalent is used in other games is when someone is hurt or in immediate danger. Some games I have never heard a hold called and these games do have heavy combat situations.

What causes Alliance to have so many holds? I know in my area we have a reputation of being the "soft" LARP that is too concerned with safety. I have had holds called for me that never needed to happen, although this could be NW specific.

How do we kill the Hold monster? I know there are people really turned off by our game because of the level of holds that get called. Heck, I don't even like them and I am a big proponent of safety (my company insures 3 LARPs in the area so I am sensitive to the topic).

Ideas:
1. Only call holds when someone is obviously hurt, like really hurt and can't talk. Otherwise allow adults to decide for themselves when they need a break in the action. Or when someone is immediate danger of serious bodily harm.

2. Respect miniholds where the folks involved figure it out quickly. Allow them to resolve the holds, then attack. I have seen it too many times where people are trying to resolve effects and someone jumps in because a "real hold wasn't called".

3. Saved this one for last since it would be the most difficult to pull off: Simplify the system so we don't get the "what did you hit me with" holds in big boss fights.
 
I was actually thinking about this over the last few events in the NW. And from my point of view there are 2 major reasons for chain holds.

The first is what I like to call Raid Mobs. Monsters with 100s of body and tons of resists/cloaks/dodges etc. That tend to end up with 5+ players dropping bombs into them. It becomes almost impossible for the person playing the npc to keep track of all the incoming hits. There is not an easy answer for this one, imo. Having a 2nd OOG npc to track spells/defenses seems to help. Outside of that I almost think if you can't keep up with incoming calls perhaps you should just be considered down. Or maybe not have monsters of this magnitude but spread the power out to 4 npcs that stick together to make a hard fight but not a 5+ on 1 fight that it comes to a lot.

Then 2nd time I see this is Massive battles that are the town vs monster camp. I love these fights but they get loud when you have 70+ people calling damage/spells/etc. And you get one person that does not notice a spell that hit them. Or has to ask a rules question and it turns into a game wide hold. Again not a really easy answer to this one.
 
I have a couple of suggestions.

1) Culture shift from BBGs to BBS (Big Bad Squads). Ditching a group of one BBG and ten minions for maybe two minions and 8 Elites mean that you'll need less layered defenses to be tracked by one guy, and less likely to call holds. A BBG is generally just worn down to death, and that won't be any different with a well played BBS.

2) More double-hooking- Use this to augment your NPC pools, and be willing to give some more advanced PCs something that isn't a 10/2 skeleton. Sure, some PCs won't want to NPC, and some cards you don't want PC players to see, so be discretionary.

3) I can't stress this enough, but move away from climactic battles that occur at night, or at least in poorly lot areas. Virtually every fight I see that has a ridiculous amount of holds occur at night, and for a reason.

I think PC NPC ratios and vision problems lead to the most hold issues, and these suggestions deal with both. Both are, ultimately, resolved by how Plot works with it.
 
One thing that would be very simple and (I think) dramatically reduce holds is no longer allowing the return or a returned skill.

So when I'm like "Flame Terminate" and bad guy says "Riposte" he doesn't have to wait to see if I say "Bane," for example.

It almost always gets messy when I feel we're essentially playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, best two out of three.

It would also make it so Riposte is no longer the one skill that spends most of its time negating itself. How many times do we usually see "(SKILL)," Riposte!" Riposte" (punctuation may vary)?

At this rate of exchange, we're better off just getting rid of Riposte all together.

Even better, if we REALLY want to reduce holds, get rid of all return effects. No more Banes, Reflects or Ripostes. Man, that would make things run so much smoother. And would we really lose anything substantial from the game? I doubt it. I recall playing when Reflects were rare, Banes were super rare, and Ripostes didn't exist yet. And you know what? We had fewer holds. A lot fewer.

I also agree with the don't call a hold for someone who took a tumble. Let them call it if they need it.

Also, we need to stop calling holds when another player is doing something we don't like, but isn't against the rules, like laying valid hits on the soon to be hold caller too much. This seems like a relatively new thing, and I hope we can squash it fast, but I'm seeing a sharp rise on grossly invalid hold calls.
 
We tried a thing in NH that worked AMAZINGLY WELL, when people remembered to do it. I have no idea who thought of it first or where they got the idea from, so forgive me if this is broken record syndrome at work.

What we tried doing was, instead of screaming a hold that caused the entire battle to grind to a halt, was this: everyone currently engaged in a scrum that required sorting of defensives and calls would simply hold both of their hands up and point with their index fingers or weapons at the person they were engaged with, until all clarifications were made. This counted people who were currently roguing on someone within the scrum, as well as people who were roguing on the people roguing, etc etc etc.

What this accomplished was a means to continue the battle at large without calling a halt. It gave a clear visual signal to other players that an OOG call was being made, and that they shouldn't rush up and start laying prisons into whoever was at the center of the scrum. It ensured that anyone trying to be tactical or sneaky was able to maintain their position without complications. Best of all, it allowed the players making clarifications to remain more or less in character, without the full-stop end of paragraph effect of a hold being called.

I'm hoping we can make a return to that system and really stress it over clarification holds in the coming season, because holy hell was it elegant.
 
1. Having slid, tumbled and fallen more times than I care to count, I'm okay with holds called for "obviously hurt" as long as the player culture also understands that a tumble or the like is the equivalent of a mini-hold... which ties into 2.

2. For mini-holds if there were a hand signal for "working things out" that isn't hands-on-head, that could make it pretty easy.

3. Raid Mobs definitely have their place, and I've seen more Big Bad Squads lately out of the Seattle Chapter. From what I've seen they're somewhat more hard to scale appropriately, but that's still very doable.

4. Town vs Monster Camp. This is a pet peeve of mine actually, and what I'd personally like to do to help avoid it is that when NPC ratios allow, to have mulitple things going on in multiple locations and sometimes PCs will actually have to go FIND where the bad guys are doing bad things. If it's not necessarily going to be held in a close location, PCs have to split up or risk the bad thing happening and suffering the consequences.

5. I know I'm in the minority, but I'm okay with a climactic battle on Sunday morning... but resource management is a thing. Saturday night fights are a big thing because PCs have all their toys to use. If I were an evil villain, I'd harry PCs from 7pm to 3pm the next day, then roll in with the main force...

6. I'm all for the no returning a return.
 
stonegolem said:
We tried a thing in NH that worked AMAZINGLY WELL, when people remembered to do it. I have no idea who thought of it first or where they got the idea from, so forgive me if this is broken record syndrome at work.

What we tried doing was, instead of screaming a hold that caused the entire battle to grind to a halt, was this: everyone currently engaged in a scrum that required sorting of defensives and calls would simply hold both of their hands up and point with their index fingers or weapons at the person they were engaged with, until all clarifications were made. This counted people who were currently roguing on someone within the scrum, as well as people who were roguing on the people roguing, etc etc etc.

What this accomplished was a means to continue the battle at large without calling a halt. It gave a clear visual signal to other players that an OOG call was being made, and that they shouldn't rush up and start laying prisons into whoever was at the center of the scrum. It ensured that anyone trying to be tactical or sneaky was able to maintain their position without complications. Best of all, it allowed the players making clarifications to remain more or less in character, without the full-stop end of paragraph effect of a hold being called.

I'm hoping we can make a return to that system and really stress it over clarification holds in the coming season, because holy hell was it elegant.
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That came from SF. Another local LARP, Realms of Conflict, has always had that system in place, and it's made the amount of holds we have out here much smaller and keeps the flow of fights much smoother. When playing in other chapters, it's more jarring than it used to be to have hold after hold after hold called, because the double-point (arms should be "stacked" parallel to each other and perpendicular to the ground) is distinctive, easy to work around if you're not part of it, and lets things be more quickly resolved. Holds get called for safety reasons or large-scale effects that everyone needs to know, and that's maybe one or two in a huge full-town fight.

It's a system I'd love to see more widely adopted.
 
I would also be heavily in favor of making a new notation under the Good Sportsman rule that heavily encouraged a maximum engagement number. Nothing causes more holds than the BBG Pillow Party, because there is simply no way to play the game at the speed it is played with 6 people all dumping effects onto one person. This is said with a certain level of bias on my part, mostly because I'm tired of just getting frustrated and falling down when playing some Scary Monster because I don't want to call another hold to say "Yes, I got that" or Resisty Resist Dodge.
 
deadlandsrules said:
I would also be heavily in favor of making a new notation under the Good Sportsman rule that heavily encouraged a maximum engagement number. Nothing causes more holds than the BBG Pillow Party, because there is simply no way to play the game at the speed it is played with 6 people all dumping effects onto one person. This is said with a certain level of bias on my part, mostly because I'm tired of just getting frustrated and falling down when playing some Scary Monster because I don't want to call another hold to say "Yes, I got that" or Resisty Resist Dodge.
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+1. I'm in complete agreement.

For me, this is where all of my non-plot holds come from. The pillow party starts and the buffering holds follow shortly after.
 
I like it. I mean, realistically, a single BBG can only swing at so many people at once. I like the idea of letting X people deal with it.

I assume backpackers wouldn't count as engaging the enemy, though, as long as they aren't throwing offensively.
 
I agree, I think this would go a long way to making battle more Dynamic and challenging as well. While it's true that an artificial max engagement number can seem a little unrealistic, I think that if it's handled as organically as possible, especially in large battles it could be really effective. My only concern would be how to balance it so everyone who is interested in boss fights gets an opportunity at some point to try taking on a boss. Not necessarily the same boss, but if the same, say three, warriors are always fighting the boss it could reduce peoples fun. Of course that's more a matter good sportsmanship than a rules issue.
 
There is a different LARP that has a system where unless your target acknowledges the hit/spell/effect with RP the ability is not used up AND it is assumed that the target did not take the effect. No holds are needed and no discussion.

This not only de incentivizes mobbing a boss, it also makes knowing when your spells hit easier and encourages RP.

Please do NOT respond back that players will use this to their advantage- because saying that something is not a good idea because players will NOT be good sports is not a valid reason to not do something. Also do not say that monsters will then be too powerful- they would of course need to be redesigned for this change.

Thoughts?
 
RuneBrighteyes said:
There is a different LARP that has a system where unless your target acknowledges the hit/spell/effect with RP the ability is not used up AND it is assumed that the target did not take the effect. No holds are needed and no discussion.
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This would be great. Rather then have to shout at someone about what you hit them with in the mass melee or call a hold to make sure people take every little thing, combat just keeps going and the person that used the 9th/slay/etc does not feel cheat out of an ability. It also discourages the swarm from just zerging on one NPC. I would really like to see this idea in action.
 
It would actually make it pointless to mob an NPC, because they're probably incapable of acknowledging hits from more than 2-3 people (so long as one of those is a caster or archer, if it's two people just laying pipe on the NPC, I'd say 1-2 tops).

The only thing I wonder is if it will increase the need for marshals on specific monsters, and how that will impact chapters with smaller rosters of people willing or able to take that on.
 
phedre said:
It would actually make it pointless to mob an NPC, because they're probably incapable of acknowledging hits from more than 2-3 people (so long as one of those is a caster or archer, if it's two people just laying pipe on the NPC, I'd say 1-2 tops).

The only thing I wonder is if it will increase the need for marshals on specific monsters, and how that will impact chapters with smaller rosters of people willing or able to take that on.
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I think I am not understanding why it would require more marshals for certain monsters. Is this to make sure that the monsters are taking hits/effects?
 
RuneBrighteyes said:
phedre said:
It would actually make it pointless to mob an NPC, because they're probably incapable of acknowledging hits from more than 2-3 people (so long as one of those is a caster or archer, if it's two people just laying pipe on the NPC, I'd say 1-2 tops).

The only thing I wonder is if it will increase the need for marshals on specific monsters, and how that will impact chapters with smaller rosters of people willing or able to take that on.
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I think I am not understanding why it would require more marshals for certain monsters. Is this to make sure that the monsters are taking hits/effects?
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More likely to ensure the monster isn't taking hits from "illegal combatants," I assume.

Big combat has always been something like a sport, only makes sense that we'd eventually have referees.
 
RuneBrighteyes said:
I think I am not understanding why it would require more marshals for certain monsters. Is this to make sure that the monsters are taking hits/effects?
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As an example, Seattle has used a monster costume in which the person repping the creature simply can't hear or identify all of the packets and weapon blows striking it, so a separate marshal was responsible for counting body, making defensive calls, etc. They also had a dragon where the head and claws were manned by NPCs, but the torso was repped by a barn, and so another marshal tracked body totals. Oregon has also used a dracolich puppet that was crewed by six NPCs - each segment reported in when they received a certain amount of damage, and the central segment was responsible for tallying the overall amount of damage.

It's not a common, every-encounter kind of thing, but for Big Battles®, it's not exactly rare.
 
RuneBrighteyes said:
There is a different LARP that has a system where unless your target acknowledges the hit/spell/effect with RP the ability is not used up AND it is assumed that the target did not take the effect. No holds are needed and no discussion.

This not only de incentivizes mobbing a boss, it also makes knowing when your spells hit easier and encourages RP.

Please do NOT respond back that players will use this to their advantage- because saying that something is not a good idea because players will NOT be good sports is not a valid reason to not do something. Also do not say that monsters will then be too powerful- they would of course need to be redesigned for this change.

Thoughts?
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I second, or third, or what ever were upto on this, I think this would be a great way to handle both reducing boss mobbing and also reduce holds, I would love to see this written officially into the rules.
 
I disagree that the suggestion "de incentivizes mobbing a boss". On the contrary, it further provides further incentive - if the boss has to respond to nine different things before he can mount a counterattack, then mobbing becomes substantially more useful, not less.

It's not about players being or not being good sports, it's about what is reasonable to expect as a result. If plot has done their job right, the characters will be emotionally invested in taking down the Big Bad®, and that includes taking advantage of the fact that Captain McEvilPants™ is too busy flinching and wincing to hit back. It's not substantially different from feinting. "Oh, I thought he was going to hit my ankle, so I was blocking there, but then he took advantage of my reaction and hit my shoulder" isn't particularly distinct from "While he was wincing from my Slay, I jumped in and tagged him with two Stun Limbs and a Terminate.".

(What's proper roleplay for being unaffected?)
 
I think it's substantially different from feinting. Overwhelming an NPC with effects from eight people they must verbalize the defenses for in an attempt to make it impossible to make attacks they must verbalize is basically metagaming and using the rules of the game to your advantage. I'd also call it poor sportsmanship. The NPC's are there to have fun too, and beating them with the rules of the game is does not really foster a feeling of fair play.
 
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