Event Review - As Luck Would Have It (February 2019 Tavern Night)

[Yuwain]

Sorry for the lateness of this one; I thought I'd missed my chance until I was told to just go off and post the review anyway.

So I came into this event as a completely new character. Literally never LARPed before the moment things started. It was definitely an experience, though I'd hesitate to call it a good one. It's been a while so my memory may be a bit fuzzy, but I'll try and get everything I remember out there because I've heard so many amazing stories from so many people and I'd love to be a part of them.

Pros:

• Everyone was very kind. If I didn't know something, someone was always willing to help.
  
• The excitement level was simply infectious! It was great seeing people so clearly enjoying themselves.
  
• Stuff was always happening, so it all felt pretty organic for the most part.
  
• The inside/outside stuff was cool. It wouldn't have even crossed my mind to do that with a literal outside 10 feet away, but it worked.
  
• The plot seemed neat!
  

Cons:

• Stuff was always happening. As far as I remember the game started with someone yelling at the top of their lungs and it feels like it didn't really mellow out from there. This made it very confusing and difficult to follow anything. I understand it's hard with 50ish people in a room, but I feel like even when important stuff was going on, I just couldn't hear it a lot of the time.
  
• As a level 1 PC with zero useful skills, the plot was a bit impossible to take part in. I know someone died and there was poison going around. I couldn't tell if anything was spooky to drink and a crowd of people started immediately being incredibly useful to this dead person. I felt like if I went to do something, I'd just be getting in the way of people who could actually do something.
  
• There was apparently a lowbie mod that happened at some point. I had absolutely zero idea it had happened (and based on some polling after the fact, I'm not nearly the only one) until I heard someone mention they got rats (?). Felt pretty bad learning I missed out on basically the only thing I could reasonably do.
  
• The combat scenarios seemed fun to take part in, but 1) as soon as they started, a swarm of people went running and it seemed like I'd just be kind of in the way again; 2) after one of them started, I watched someone come limping inside talking about murder ducks and I definitely wanted nothing to do with something that's apparently destroying people who were probably  multiple times stronger than me; 3) player combat was fun to watch, but really solidified the fact that I wanted nothing to do with it. Hearing someone go "BLAHBLAH 50!" or throwing a barrage of hits and numbers and watching someone drop kind of just made me go "oh I have... 4? Yeah let's literally never". Pairing this all with the fact that I didn't know I could die however many times I wanted and I just sat in a corner and occasionally talked to people when they weren't off doing something cool and relevant.
  

All in all, I'm a bit bummed that this was the event that I wasted my free entry, infinite deaths, and floating armor on. So much was going on, little was explained, and everything seemed to be well beyond my abilities (though I'm told that they weren't). It was rather overwhelming and kind of put me off the idea of going to another game until a few people in the discord encouraged me to give it another try.