We've heard a lot of questions about what players should expect for combat at Attaway!
Combat at Attaway will be less frequent and much faster than combat found at many other boffer or sport LARPs. We wanted to give players the ability to control how deadly they make their violent interactions, and also create consequences for choosing to employ more deadly forms of violence.
The most combat opportunities will be available to fistfighters. (We'll even have a Wharf District boxing ring active, for rumblers who want to earn a few IMPs on the side.) In our playtests, evenly matched fistfights ranged from 5 to 10 minutes, and the stakes of fistfights are relatively low. No one will get knocked to "Bleeding and Crying" or worse unless someone escalates the encounter by introducing weapons (or deadly fistfighter skills). Playing a fistfighter is definitely the best option for players who want to get into frequent scraps.
Fights with Brutal implements (any melee weapon that isn't a fist) are often quite short. Fights with Lethal implements (nerf guns!) are even shorter.
And remember! If you shoot another human character and they're reduced to Mortal Jeopardy (the usual result of being shot in-game), you are also dropped to Bleeding and Crying, unless you posses a skill or item that lets your character mitigate the emotional trauma. By setting up the rules this way, we wanted to provide an answer to the perennial question, "Well, why don't we just kill them?" and make a very serious choice a deliberate one.
We don't want to prevent players from solving problems with brute force, but we do want to make fights just one option out of an array of tools that are available to characters as they make their way through the world of Attaway.