Rezzes
GMs who design games that maintain direct competition between groups within a layer of epic level have some standard approaches for quantifying and comparing the relative strengths of groups that may have very different traits. To understand how this plays out in the design of a game, let us examine some properties that often define the variations of groups in SIK games that tend to operate on a single layer of competition: combat.
The MIT Assassins’ Guild hosts a weekly game known as “Patrol,� which is a sort of dart-gun tag game with teams. The rules are simple: use the dart gun to shoot anybody who is not in your team. If you are shot, however, the game does not quite end for you. You go to the nearest stairwell, walk up a flight or two, and you are now back in the game. This process of returning back into the game is known as “rezzing,� an abbreviation of “resurrecting.�
Many Guild games do not include rezzing because of the thorny issue of player knowledge versus character knowledge. When a character dies at the hands of an opponent, the player is usually aware of who was responsible for the character’s death. However, if the player is allowed to return to the game as the same character, is it fair for the player to bring the knowledge of the killer into the game? If he or she returns as a different character, can the player be trusted not to relate information that the new character should not know? For many GMs, the answer to these questions is simply “no.�
However, in SIK games and some high-combat games, players need relatively little information about other characters to engage in their basic objectives, which usually boil down to attacking anyone who is not on your team. Rezzing thus becomes a feasible method of mimicking the existence of vast numbers of characters without needing many players. In one of the most memorable high-combat games of Guild history, Antartica (1994) by Mark Rousculp, Derek Hererra and Michael Moore, many of the characters were conventional in the sense that they would die and leave the game after taking enough damage. When confronted by players who could return to the game by simply running a couple of yards away, the game quickly turned from “kill the aliens� to “stay alive.� The GMs have described Antartica as “an experiment in fear� and many who have played in the game readily confirm the validity of that claim. The success of Antartica has been influential on the development of SIK games and on Guild vocabulary. Antartica described character types with near-infinite resurrections (“rezzes�) as “vespid,� a term now common in Guild parlance that alludes to the wasp-like creatures in James Cameron’s 1986 film "Aliens".
