Drac/FullContact

At Warwick, a few of us practiced full contact LARP. We enjoyed this, and I was wondering if any of the cambridges were interested.

The "rules" of full contact worked like this.

1. You are a big boy/girl, take responsibility. You are doing this against the explicit safety rules of the society. If you injure yourself, the society will laugh at you. The society will not be liable for your injuries or for injuries that you cause others.

2. Full Contact is by consensual, explicit opt in, in advance, only. You must be extra safe and gentle with everyone else. Failure to respect this makes you dangerous to other members of the society and you will suffer the consequences of it. The other people who are partaking in full contact must feel safe enough that you are sensible enough to not injure them, or cause injury to other members of the society.

2.1 Non full contacters, see the reverse to this rule to this at the bottom.

2.5 It is usually best not to engage in full contact in any melee where you are fighting full contact people and non, save it for when its just full contact people and you don't have to worry about collateral damage. For the purposes of cutt, this really means linears only, as the bar is too crowded.

3. It is worth refreshing the opt in before a linear, particularly for rule 4.

4. Be careful what weapons you take, some lend themselves to full contact, some do not and are outright dangerous. Soft padded things are excellent examples of the former, my gresatsword is an excellent example of the latter.

Reverse to Rule 2 for people who do not want to engage in full contact: This is not an invitation for you to hit someone who practices full contact as hard as possible. They are respecting your desire not to do it, so you should respect them enough to continue to pull blows against them. Failing to pull blows can be considered an implicit "I want to join" with added "I have been very rude by not taking to you about this beforehand and am thus a dick" and will either result in acrimony, or being deliberately hit back at hard as possible.

Full contact combat as we practiced at warwick, this varied of course depending on what the individuals were comfortable with:

• Generally you don't pull blows. This is where the "trusting you to be sensible" bit comes in, we trust each other to use common sense with this, the goal is after all, not to cause serious injury to your friends.
• Shield barging / smashing
• Body checking
• Tackling / grappling (though this one was good to double-check with everyone beforehand)
• As a rule we don't aim for head in full contact, as we always saw that as an easy way to cause injury due to eyes, mouths, fragile bone structures in the form of noses and jaws, concussion etc... Similarly with other weak parts of the body - knee, wrist, hands. See the part about not wanting to OC injure your mates.

If interested, talk to Drac.