Gadgetory

- love you hi - yeah one afternoon in late spring I traveled to a Girl Scout camp in rural New Jersey to see the Apocalypse coming from an office in Manhattan the 200 acres of field and forest I felt like I had stepped into some empty dream world but what I was about to get into was more like Mad Max this is dystopia rising a live-action role-playing game set generations after a disaster that wiped out civilization as we know it so you're the verge ma'am are not sure if you want to play out here oh no I'm totally playing play do you have anything else to wear I mean I have another t-shirt and another pair of jeans okay we can put something together with a lot of help from veteran players I made up a fighter whose race sorry strain had been horribly disfigured by radiation I was covered in hideous boozing open sores and gigantic body armor it's probably the closest I'll ever get to being able to scare someone in a dark alley I might have looked tough but I still had no idea a sight when you're doing combat mm-hmm I'm going to show you what a strike feels like first and I'm gonna catch you by surprise when I do it so that you don't tense up you don't freak out and you don't think all right that is as hard as it's ever going to hit and then when you strike we do what's called a three-strike flurry system which means you can only hit someone three times before you have to pause for something okay this is a prevent someone from just yeah wiggling their blade and doing silly shit so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to try and hit you mmm and I want you to block the first strike and then strike back at me as it turns out fighting and dystopia rising is sort of like fencing while doing math in your head you hit someone with a stick you yell a stat you get hit you calculate how much more damage you can take I would do plenty of fighting but it's a small part of the overall experience you spend a lot of time trading making friends or just listening to someone play acoustic Daft Punk covers at a bar it feels like 24/7 Improv Theater sometimes the role-playing was fantastic but other times it was absolutely terrifying my character was supposed to be tough but because I really had no idea what I was doing she ended up as a socially awkward Wallflower I kept feeling like I had to break out of character to think about what she should be doing and I kept wondering was i holding up my end of a conversation should I be more creative was I being too forward it was like a cotillion at the end of the world then I died we're going to be leading a lovely raid on that horrid into town there is going to be another player waiting for us we're going to hook her and we're going to kill her right so let's go right perfectly before it happened my character was supposed to be running on a broken leg coincidentally I'd twisted my ankle that morning and decided to walk it off it was an incredibly stupid idea but it was also the thing that would bring us together when she limped I was limping when she got knocked down by a giant zombie I couldn't stand back up for something that made us both yearn for death it was great welcome can you speak yes do you want to live yes I want to live remember always that you are one of deaths chosen I'm done with you so yeah take a minute if anyone but you'll be in character once you come out of here sort salt can someone down there pick up the weapons from the floor and bring them back up Thanks when I came back I learned someone had looted my weapons and armor and I was genuinely afraid I built a character who could barely do anything but fight and now she was basically useless that was strangely the moment something seemed to click my character had gone crazy from dying and I was in pain everything I did somehow seemed natural for both of us we studied a religion that worships TV signals join the gang and finally got back on our feet oh oh yeah I got I mean hurt bit earlier yeah that's the part um it was like the stupidest greater injury ever I fell into you know they ran into my leg oh yeah well kind of funny but it was very realistic I still never quite figured out what I wanted to be LARPing can be about leaving yourself behind and some of the people I met before the game seemed totally different during it sometimes it seemed like I was just amplifying a few things about myself sometimes the best thing is sometimes the worst and adding swords then again the swords were fantastic and I'm pretty sure the more I had known about the world before going in the better prepared I would have felt to create something new but I'm probably overthinking it most people I met were there for one reason to have some fun at the end of the world you