Avalon Stuff

[inner_salvation]

I thought I would never get a Facebook, but I did, and now I never post stuff here.  I think it is customary to bitch about stuff that happens on FB on LJ.

So, I friended a bunch of people that I don't really talk to on a regular basis on FB: old classmates, former thespians, family members, family friends, and a shit-ton of Avalonians.

I got a

Comments

no seriously, this is a fucking novel.

[thevanisher]

Anyway, I’d say overall that discomfort/wariness aside, I was treated pretty well on a personal level-sure, Jesse Wells was really weird and rude to me, but otherwise, I didn’t really feel disrespected, certainly not anything matching the level that you experienced. They seriously docked a lot of my powers and they didn’t give me any kind of stat help the way I thought they might-but they let me keep inate cauterizes after I asked nicely and explained how important they were to my playing of the character. I think what made the whole thing suck so hard was just the level of hypocrisy that I experienced. I remember when I first came to Avalon, my character had amnesia, and Tim laughed and told me, as kindly as he could, that amnesia was a really wack plot idea-and then he suggested/gifted to me a much cooler plot. For the entire weekend in 2007, I had…drumroll…amnesia. This was mostly just laziness-a lot of plot had been retroactively changed since my time as a player and they didn’t want me to spill the wrong info, at least, that’s my guess. But that sucked for me, and really took the fun out of a long-time homecoming. Still, there was a little bit of personal plot for me on Saturday, which seemed more than anyone else got. In fact, most of the weekend, we fought a few squishies in the daytime, but almost nothing happened otherwise. When there was a moment or two of privacy, I sometimes had short out of game conversations with friends to catch up, and it was like there was this subversive element, people who remembered how things were when Mikey was running plot, and they would show me hoarded plot items and props from mikey’s time that they had gone way out of their way to keep “safe” from what was, essentially, simple-minded ret-conning of Mikey’s influence on the storyline. I can understand after a falling out like that, rewriting some of what Mikey did-but a lot of the storyline had changed in ways that made basically no sense, and that sucked for me, and I’m sure it sucked even more for players who had continued to play for the entire span of the game.
I remember this conversation I had with Jeremy in like, 1999 or 2000, right before he got the boot. It was the event when my first character (hah, remember Arsen?) permed within 2 minutes of gameplay (as far as I know, I still hold the record, thankyouverymuch), and I was really touched even then by how kind Jeremy was to me. We talked about why he and Tim had started Avalon, after playing Nero together. He listed various really wrong things that Nero did to their players--boring, plotless combat, routine squishies, unkillable plot villains, ridiculous powergaming structures and abilities, and most notably, cash-for-exp programs that favored players who were rich ooc. When I went back to visit it was clear that Tim had adopted changes to Avalon that included all of the above. Especially the latter, jesus. Basically everyone involved with the merchants’ guild were on this system where they paid a flat rate and got experience for every event that occurred in the area whether or not they attended. They were so shameless about it, too-like they didn’t see how this system really dicked over the old model of PC player. It was clear to me that these PCs wielded a lot of power and influence in and out of game-they were a big cash flow, and had to be appeased, often at the expense of younger players who despite having played Avalon for many more years than the merchants, were simply were too poor to put forward that kind of money out of game. Incidentally, there is no doubt in my mind, the reason why you were given such a hassle when you came to Avalon is because you came to kick out Aramis, because he and at least 4 of his friends were all part of the pay-for-xp system. I heard that about a year or two ago, Aramis led some kind of "player walk-out." I don't know the terms, but it sounded like a pretty straightforward backstab to me, especially when I remember how much ground was given to him in exchange for a couple hundred bucks a month.

aaaand now I can go back to the stuff I was actually supposed to do this afternoon. Christ.

[thevanisher]

Avalon and my memories of it inspire such a deep-seated sadness for me. There will always be genuinely good people there who I will remember as having always been very kind to me-Chad, for example, and certainly Dawn, too. I may not have met my wife there, but I met three out of 7 of my romantic partners there, 2 of whom were really significant to my becoming who I am today. The very few times I’ve “caught up” with Avalon players since my days of gameplay, we talk like veterans. The war stories come out, and all the old memories, the amazingly vivid characters, the amazingly real place we created together, as a group-it just comes flooding back to me and I can’t handle it. It really is too awful that it’s all gone now, and that what has taken its place is this sort of depressive cash-cow, with an out of game community that has a sort of twisted cult-y feel. I mean, have you seen the videos for bloodmooncult? Teenage Avalon players making out in a mosh pit, pretending to worship Tim and Kristy…I mean, you know that I’m no prude, but that shit made me intensely uncomfortable.
I think you're right about the business, but at the same time I think they totally could have run Avalon as a business without it being ruined. If Mikey hadn't been so deadset against the idea, he could have run a LARP that way really easily (i mean, as easily as running any other business, i.e. not easily at all, whatever). We had a model drawn up in 2004 that would have allowed for events to be inexpensive for the players and allowed some NPCs to come for free and others to even get paid, and it still would have allowed for a considerable profit. Maybe not enough to support the kind of lifestyle that Tim and Kristy are accustomed to now, but certainly something. I think the real problem isn’t in the running of the LARP for a profit-I don’t think avalon’s weekend rates are unreasonable by any means-it’s more that Tim wanted to run everything himself, wanted total control, and then didn’t have the kind of energy to maintain that control and also oversee the kind of output that would be necessary for a 5-chapter organization. (They have FIVE chapters! Can you imagine!?). Also, budgetary transparency is essential for any organization, and I think that such transparency would be pretty embarrassing at this point-what I saw at Murshank in 07 was a very, VERY cheaply run game (the notable exception to that being costume pieces for a very small group of NPCs who were clearly a tightly knit clique--I imagine you can guess who that included). In the end, very little effort was put into the roleplaying by the staff ( I had the same experience with the sort of lifeless, half-hearted rping), and very little effort put into what SHOULD have been the whole point-making the players happy.

At the end of the weekend, as a kind of a weird kick-to-the-stomach, Tim and me and a bunch of people were sitting around post-event shooting the shit, the way we all USED to do--I had stayed around and put in some extra effort for cleanup because of my fucking up the payment and them showing me good faith, also because I wasn't really ready to leave...anyway. Tim said he remembered very clearly the day I showed up for the first time, all those years ago, and how I had a list of magical items from D&D that I wanted to bring into game with me, and how funny that I showed up so green, etc. etc. I didn't remember it that way, and I told Tim so, but I didnt push it because he was being nice, overall, and I didn't think it was that big a deal. Come to find out later, he was telling me the story of Mikey's first event. So that was sort of mud in my eyes. Like, what, all gays look alike to him? Even though Mikey slept in his bed and worked closely with him for years, he couldn't remember the first day he met him? It was just a little extra salt on that wound, you know?

Anyway, I don't think Tim and Kristy are bad people at all. I just think they gave in to a lot of pressure and a lot of temptation and forgot what Avalon was really about, all those years ago. That's my 1,000,000 cents.