Gladiator Clan

[Hauwke]

I assume its pretty terrible to watch. Much fun to play though.

[Refugee]

Re:  Bloodball

1.  I like it best when we're allowed to have sparring weapons so that it is possible to disarm the ball carrier and also so you can somewhat defend against that brutal bludgeoning ball.
2.  Staff/nobles are still tweaking the rules I guess.  Last game there was a lot of confusion but it was on purpose I think!  There were inequities built in, attached to luck.  Every game there's different rules though.
3.  What if each team wore the cloaks, say one in green and the other blue, whatever.  Would it be better than masks for the spectators?  Still wouldn't help with knowing who has the ball. 
4.  Maybe you put your hood down when you have the ball?  I bet people would forget, because there is a lot going on.  Crowd could yell about it though.
5.  I think renaming the rooms in the arena is a great idea.
6.  The double echo, with 4-6 people moving around separate from each other, how can that be fixed?  I doubt it can easily.  Sure would be nice.

Re: OP -
People talk a lot on the GDB about wanting gladiators but it's been tried many times.  People don't sign up in the numbers you'd think they would by what you read.  Lavinia was the most successful, and if it's to be pursued I think something developing her ideas would be a good way to proceed.  But she still had trouble getting people to show up after the novelty wore off.  Houses start telling their hunters/fighters they can't participate because really, what's in it for them?  We're missing something still.  But I feel like we might be on the right track.

[Seeker]

Every gladiator event should have an award paid out to each of the winning participants and/or their handlers.  Pouch of coins. If they are a slave participant, the owner gets the purse.  If they are currently a House employee, the House gets a taste.  Half?  Quarter?  One part in eight?  Depends on how good your bargaining position is.  Losers (and/or their handlers) should get some ridiculously small fraction of the winners' take. 

An individual Noble who privately sponsors particular gladiators can earn income from their victories.  That might encourage some of the less horrifically affluent of the Nobility to keep a profitable stable of gladiators.  It is considered a bit petty to privately sponsor gladiators instead of giving all the glory (and profit) to your House, but hard choices must be made to fund the schemes.

Generally commoners cannot sponsor gladiators unless they are running a Templarate-licensed, approved gladiator stable. There might be a few small gladiator companies, buying slaves and hiring trainers, but it is a hard career.  It should work like the MMH procedure if a player wanted to give it a go.  Expect the Templarate to crush any stable which does anything that is worrisome, suspicious or annoying or who doesn't lose a match when and how the Great Lady Templar insists.

This source of award revenue from winning Gladiator events should come from the virtual world into the playerbase.  It should be possible to adjust it to be a hard struggle for a new PC to get by as a nobody gladiator, but not too much worse than dung scrapping.  It should eventually provide a better-than-a-peon living in the mid-range and to allow for the possibility of comfortable living at very rare highest end.   

It is in the interest of great Houses to regularly have their gladiators kick-serious butt and earn them bragging rights about the city.   The Powers that Be want people to be excited by gladiator and blood sports in the Arena.  They want to keep the unwashed rabble suitably pacified and entertained.

To run this, staff would have to set some guidelines to PCs who they want to be able to initiate and pay out for these common events and to make the funds easily tracked and available.

Or... you know... I could just app a Borsail bad-ass bastard or a sleazy, aspiring gladiator stable mistress myself.

[IntuitiveApathy]

Fantastic post, Seeker.

I'd love to see infrastructure put in to facilitate an ongoing gladiator culture.  As it stands, the gladiator culture in-game has always been more of an undercurrent gameplay-wise (the somewhat more frequent bloodball events are starting to change this), but IC'ly, I've always had the impression it was more prominent in the everyday life of a citizen in a city-state.  I assume that the games are a large part of entertaining and distracting the masses from their dirty, hard, desperate lives under the burning sun as they were IRL, and would love to see everyday gameplay line up with that.  As has been pointed out, things have been tried before to get a constant thing going, but without proper incentive, regular PC's are hesitant to risk their lives in the Arena.  With proper incentive, that could change.  As an alternative, a separate gladiator clan which allows players secondary gladiator characters, whether as one-offs or otherwise, would help solve that problem either as it's own independent solution, or as mechanism to enhance what the regular PC's have going.

As Seeker pointed out, it could open a new aspect of play and conflict for the entire playerbase.  If you've never watched the show =Spartacus: Blood and Sand, aside from the 300-type sensationalism, I think it's a decent depiction of Arena life in general.  There's a lot going on behind the scenes of every Arena spectacle.  From the gladiator stables, how they work as a business: recruiting, training, slavery and competition with other stables; to the politics that surround them: stable owners jostling for political clout and politicians dictating schemes for their own glory; and all the betrayal, murder and corruption that results from all of this.

Gladiator culture really just screams Zalanthas from the Arena sands, and I'd love to see it more at the forefront.

[bardlyone]

Guys, quick question about the masks. Should we just lose them entirely? Or would adding a really clear and unique keyword as the first word in the short description work?

ie A yellow insectile half mask
A red, long-tongued, beast-faced half-mask

I like the idea put forward about using the templar robe code.

ie: the tall, muscular d00d in a black, twisted hawk mask or something? Then you get masks but can also follow who you're cheering on.

[BadSkeelz]

That isn't how the templar-robe code works, unfortunately. The templar-robe code swaps out the last word of the sdesc for "templar" (hence 'the man with no nose' becoming 'the man with no templar').

[bardlyone]

As the particular robes are implemented yes. Is that the limitation of how the script can be used? Probably not. Given the way that you become 'a <size> figure in <item>' when you have on a mask/cloak with the hood up. I'm imagining something that is a cross of the two '(sdesc) in <item>'.

[John]

Currently the Templar robe code replaces 1 word with 1 word. Ideally it should have minimal effort to replace 1 word with multiple words. E.g. the short hairy man becomes the short hairy insect-masked gladiator .

[bardlyone]

That'd be simpler, and would still work. I was imagining a version of it where you might still be able to wear the mask without man/woman at the end, or be able to see if it's a dwarf vs a man/woman, but honestly either would be an improvement on the current. I like the concept of the masks, it's the effect of making it impossible to see who is who that sucks for me as an onlooker. As someone else put it, like watching a unit of kuraci duncloaks with hoods up taking on gith. Impossible to follow.