Paintball

[Roughneck]

I play paintball a lot, though I avoid the official tournaments. So, I'm wondering if anyone else here plays paintball a lot, and if they do, if they have any special games and stories.

For example,

Zombie paintball:

One team will be survivors, the other will be zombies. The majority (and I mean almost everyone) of the players are zombies because they don't have weapons and instead have to use their facemasks to touch an area of the survivor player's body to score a hit or kill. Only headshots can kill the zombies (unless they just get shot-up with an obscene amount of paintballs in one round). If a survivor has been hit by a zombie without being killed, they have a limited amount of time to help any remaining survivors and to survive themselves until that time runs out. Sometimes, I'll just call the game off after I've been hit (after I make it to relative safety, that is) to roleplay me just offing myself to save myself the trouble. However, if I'm teamed up with more survivors, I'll usually stick around to help them out until I get close to my time limit, in which I'll call myself off to roleplay me offing myself or one of the other survivors doing it for me. However, a kill against a survivor can also be scored by facemask contact made by a zombie player for an extended amount of time or multiple zombie players making facemask contact. There are also critical-hits if we have a lot of players. A critical-hit is a hit scored on a vital body-part, such as the neck, head, torso, arms, or legs. If a critical-hit is scored ont he neck or head, the survivor is rendered incapacitated, and thus, dead. Some zombie players will actually roleplay the devouring of the incapacitated players for fun. A critical-hit scored on the arms or legs renders the survivor crippled on that particular limb. So if a zombie player 'bites' a chunk out of the survivor's leg, he or she has to limp for the rest of the round. The number of hits to score a kill changes from game to game and depends on the amount of players we have.

Usually, the best strategy zombie players have is grouping together and swarming the survivor players. When they swarm, it gets hard to resist and free yourself from the clutches of the zombies. This part usually gets pretty violent, in a sense, because of all the close-contact being made, but we're responsible and smart enough to not let it get out of hand. We also have a rule not allowing the shooting of anyone if they're closer than approximately two meters from the barrel of the paintball gun, but sometimes that gets stretched to one meter or even less. However, sometimes those sneaky zombies will catch survivors off-guard and score a hit or critical-hit. It gets chaotic, believe me.

If the game is large enough to support at least two survivor players, when one survivor is killed by a zombie, he or she respawns as a zombie player. Sometimes players will roleplay when they're zombies if they've been critically hit in a body-part as to cripple that body part. So sometimes, out of fun, some players will crawl or limp, or just move really goofy-like. It's great fun in large groups.

We usually play by 28 Days/Weeks Later rules in that zombies (which by 28 Days/Weeks Later are more like vampires) can run (because sometimes the survivor players will just keep their distance, making the game dragged out since walking zombies can't run), only we use traditional rules when it comes to actually killing a zombie. The zombie team has a respawn but it's usually limited. In small groups, however, it's infinite respawn, to compensate for lack of large zombie groups, so the survivors have to survive until the game gets called off. Running out of paintballs is no excuse to quit the round, either. In that case, we use wiffel-ball bats as a stand-in for various blunt objects, since real blunt objects can cause serious harm, but if you run out of paintballs, it's usually just a game of outrunning and survival then. Two strikes to the head and the zombie is dead. When this happens, survivors can still call the game off if a hit has been scored against them, but they have to come up with an alternate method of suicide, such as hanging or jumping from a really high platform, and those methods aren't always available, but sometimes the players come up with cunning ways.

Since survivors can't respawn, they usually tire out fast, especially if we have many players since the zombies can take a break during their respawn to catch their breath. So it gets really interesting and forces the survivor players to strategise more.

Zombie players are not allowed to talk to eachother, but they can shout/scream to warn other zombie players of any survivor activity they spot. In large groups, the zombie players are encouraged to split into seperate groups and some wander off on their own.

The game starts with the survivors picking a spot to set up and barricading that spot if possible. We have a great many areas to choose where we want to play in, so new games never get boring. After either the survivors are ready or the time-limit runs out, the zombie players enter in their preset locations. They wander about until they find the survivors, and then it's a fight for the survivor's life from there on.

We've had single rounds last up to five hours and spread across three kilometers. It's great excercise, if nothing else.

In large groups, it's really fun and a single round can last for hours, since the game isn't over until it either gets called off, the survivors die, or the spawn limit for the zombies is reached. I can't wait for my friends to come back for their summer break so we can play Zombies again. We usually play paintball twice to three times a month, and we try to play Zombies at least once a month sometimes less since it's a really specific type of game that requires a lot of planning and effort, but the unique fun of it is worth it all.

So, anyone have any special game-types? How about any good paintball stories. I've got some good stories about a few games, including some rather interesting variants of Zombies, but I'll save them for another post- this one is long enough.

[Mademoiselle]

I'm too old for this !