Burt’s Martial Arts Tournament
You might be wondering what the upcoming Burt’s Martial Arts Tournament is… well today you find out!
We’ve had a system sitting around in the code in a partial state of completion for a few years now, that was never released for various reasons. We thought it might be fun to dust it off for the celebration games as a sort of preview, and to also see what people think about it for a potential full release in the future.
So for the next few days, I’ve turned on the Brawling system! Everybody has access to it at Transcendent rank.
What is Brawling?
Brawling is a tactical fighting minigame that’s all about reading your opponent and timing your moves perfectly. Think of it as a high-stakes game of rock-paper-scissors meets a fighting game – every attack can be countered, every defense can be baited out, and the key to victory is making your opponent guess wrong.
It’s a little complex to explain, so you’ll have to play with it a bit to understand how it works. But here’s some quick notes:
– Use BRAWL CHALLENGE to challenge other players.
– Visit Burt’s Brawling Hall at v83633 to challenge the brawler NPCs there to a match. Make sure to specify a difficulty: BRAWL CHALLENGE EASY
– Brawls take place in instanced arenas with Vigour (health) and Fatigue (stamina). The numbers for these are deliberately obscured.
– Attacks have a telegraph window (think like a channeled) attack – most telegraphs are 3 seconds with lariat and throw being the exceptions.
– Defences need to be done in the last second of an attack. So if Keroc attacks me with an uppercut, his telegraph is 3 seconds long. I’ll want to enter my defence command in the 2-3 second period.
– You can cancel your attack mid-telegraph to start a different one (feinting!).
– This creates a sort of mind-game where your opponent has to determine if you’re going to commit to the current telegraphed attack, or start another attack. If they choose to use their defend on the first attack’s window, they’ll be off balance for too long to defend against the next attack.
– Your stats don’t matter for this – everybody is on equal footing!
– You don’t lose (or gain) experience, lose your defences, or anything like that for losing.
You’ll want to read through all the files in AB BRAWLING and either learn with another player, or head over to Burt’s Brawling Hall and challenge some NPC’s on easy difficulty. I do recommend getting some practice in against another player before the tournament, because fighting against a human is a completely different experience to the NPCs.
As for Burt’s Martial Arts Tournament, it will be a double elimination bracket of 1v1 bouts, so even if you lose once, you’ll have a chance to fight your way back through the loser’s bracket!
And for a final note: We strongly encourage everyone to embrace playing the system manually without the aid of triggers. In my opinion, automating it would suck the joy out of it!
Penned by my hand on Kinsday, the 4th of Lleian, in the year 14 AC.