MA campaigns and your experience

[trooper6]

I was in a MA campaign run by whswhs (Fencing), and in an Arena game on rpol. I think the key to making it full of rp goodness...is having players who are interested in lots of rp goodness. If the players are into rp, then there will be RP.

This also is a part of how to make combat exciting for RP types. Combat strategy has to be a part of the characterization.

So for example, I decided my fencer--Overconfident, Self-Esteem Issues hidden by Arrogance--would do lots of Committed Attacks...and would not ever retreat...sideslip? slip? yes. Retreat? Not if he could at all help it. So it became interesting for me to think about my characterization and how that would manifest in combat. So all of the combats became not only about the fight itself, but also about a way of exploring my character's morality, personality, etc.

In the Arena game, which was not at all about RP'ing, I had lots and lots of fun exploring how my character's personality would manifest in the different combats. From warning a foe about a trap to waiting until a foe stood up again before attacking...or whatever.

As a method actor player, I could still find interest in combat after combat by making sure that combat and character are linked.

If I were a butt kicker player, the combat would probably be enough by itself. If I were a Tactician, I think that as long as the combats had interesting tactical challenges (Pits! Traps! etc.) that would help for that.
For the Storyteller, you'll want some sort of overarching narrative (which could be supplied by the players themselves...for example, my Arena fighter had a couple of motivations that could spin into narrative: he wanted to earn enough money to buy his own pirate ship so he could fight the Megalans and free Araterre, and he wanted to represent Araterre well so that he could gain sympathy for his homeland while diminishing people's attitude towards Megalos). If you had some some sort of story-ish hook, or some sort of thing (money) that players could use to craft their own narrative, that would also be fine. I find interesting non-combatant NPCs are helpful here.

MA tournaments may feature combat, but they can still have all the elements that please all of the different types of players that Robin Laws talks about.

I ran a Traveller game that had one adventure that featured an MA tournament. Of course each of the contestants was sponsored by various larger political factions so the tournament was a proxy political war. Enter the PCs. Of course someone wants to hire them fight for Faction A, and it becomes really important that Faction B's fighter not win. During the tournament, the observant PCs learned a lot about galactic politics. But they were also confronted with some mysteries and some moral conundrums (do they cheat?) There was a great moment when they decided to spike the water bottle of the Imperial Naval Contestant with performance enhancing drugs and then calling for a drug test. The contestant tested positive and that was a great blow to the honor of the Imperial Navy and caused a lot of ripples. There was blackmail, fighting, increasing tensions among fans of different factions that threatened to boil over into riots.

Good times! The tournament was all fighting...but the fighting was an ends in and of itself, but also a means to illuminate something about the wider galactic politics, and also about the character of individual combatants, including the PCs.

Interestingly, the Pilot PC got to the Final match of the tournament (mostly through lots of cheating on the part of the other PCs)...and he declared that he would not allow any cheating for the final match (one, the observation had gotten too hot, but also because he wanted to win fair and square and was never comfortable with the cheating). The other players thought he was crazy and there was some great rp around that situation. In the end, he went in without cheating...and lost! But then the more...morally flexible PCs leaked a recording of the sponsor of the winner attempting to bribe the PCs into throwing the fight, thus undermining any political advantage the winner's faction gained by it.

It was really fun...but that was because we had great RPers, designing the combatants fighting style as an extension of character, and having the combatants express larger story.