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Challenges and Normal Fights
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The default way to a fight is via a challenge. The RolePlays should offer
more than enough opportunities for challenges. Once both participants have
agreed that they will fight, the GM schedules the fight and excecutes the
ARENA program, publishing its output.
You don't have any influence in the fight itself. It is fully computer-
generated, but it DOES take into account every attribute of your Gladiator.
There are, however, a few options. More precisely, there are three different
types of fights.
Normal is what the fight is when nothing else is agreed upon. It
will come to an end once one Gladiator surrenders, is knocked
out or worse.
FirstBlood For the chickens, or for settling a matter formally, kinda
like a duell. Fight will be over once the first Wound has
been caused. Still this CAN hurt a lot if your enemy wields
a Battle Axe and you don't happen to have a good armour.
FirstBlood fights are rewarded with less experience points
as the risk is not as high as in a normal fight. Expect to
receive around 25% less.
I should add, that the fans usually don't like FirstBlood
that much, it's just not the real thing.
Blood A normal fight with a little twist to it: As long as there
is not much blood on the floor, surrender is not allowed.
Once a couple of (a total of five) wounds are caused,
surrender is again available to both opponents, no matter
who wounded whom.
NoSurrender For the real grudges. NoSurrender simply means what it says:
Surrender is not an option. Fight till you drop. Hope that it
is because of K.O. - and btw: There will be no "simulated"
K.O.s - this is a mean game.
As the risk is considerably higher, NoSurrender fights will
earn you between 10% and 20% more XPs than normal fights.
They also tend to have the crowd get excited more easily.
Timed This fight has a set time limit, mostly somewhere between two
and four minutes, but it can be anything. If one of the two
fighters can score a regular victory in this time, he is the
winner as if it were a normal fight.
If the time runs out, however, a jury will rate both fighters
performance and the one with the higher score wins.
Team Fights
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Although One-on-One fights will (and should) form the main part of any good
league, there exists the opportunity for team fights. All of these always have
four instead of the usual two Gladiators fighting it out. Currently, there are
only two different types of these fights:
Tag-Team Every team gets assigned one "corner" (actually, most of the
stadions are round in shape, but it's still called that way).
In that corner, a touch-sensitive pole is errected. If at any
time during the fight not at least one person touches the
pole, you have lost. Hasn't happened in the last years, it's
just a good measure against cheating.
What that means is, that there will always be exactly one
Gladiator from each team actually fighting, but you have the
opportunity to switch with your partner if you get exhausted.
That is - if you get the opportunity in the middle of some
heated fight...
Xtreme-Tag Basically the Tag-Team equivalent to NoSurrender. Not only
will there be no surrendering in this kind of fight, it's
also not over once you finished off one of the opposing team,
because you have to make them BOTH going down to win. This
means that once one Gladiator is K.O.ed or killed, the other
one can leave the pole and charge on in, and if he can pull
off the trick and beat both enemies, his team has won. The
other two guys will, off course, still have to tag etc, so
it is not two guys slashing away at one, the lone one only
has the disadvantage of not being able to tag anymore ('cause
there's no one left to tag with).
Wounds and Healing
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Shortly after each fight, both Gladiators will regain 10 Fatigue and one
Wound due to first aid.
Other than that, you will have to wait to heal. The ARENA program should be
run once per day in maintenance mode by your GameMaster and will heal 15
Fatigue and one or two Wounds for every Gladiator. As long as you are really
wounded, you will heal two Wounds. Once you are very close to your maximum
Wounds (so close that you'd be fit the next day), you will heal only one for
the last two days.
Yes that does mean that if you just went to the brink of death with loosing
16 of your 18 wounds (or something like that), you'll be out for a week or
more. Which is still only thanks to modern (or near-future) medicine. In a
mediaval setting, the GM should only run maintenance every 2 days or even
less often.
One more thing about nasty Wounds that you should know: Criticals. These are
very serious injuries that you may take. A Critical not only takes a long time
to heal (it will still be there for a few days after all your normal Wounds
have healed), it will also reduce a random attribute of your character by
one point! (2 if the dice comes up with Fatigue)
As you may have guessed, as you cannot avoid criticals in the long run, there
is a time where a Gladiator has to retire. This is a wanted process, and you
shouldn't be worried about it, if you are a bit careful, it should take
several months before you take criticals faster than you can raise your
attributes with experience - and after that time you're probably looking for
a new challenge anyways.
Fighting Beasts
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This is a new addition since ARENA version 2. If you can't seem to find your-
self an enemy or you just want to earn yourself some experience, you can go
and fight Beasts. Beasts are easy to defeat, so don't expect to earn much
fans with these kinds of fights. You will, however, earn some Experience and
very easy, too.
If you are interested, look into the BEASTS.DOC for full details.
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