About HFS
About the High Fantasy Society
This is a listing of quotes form players of HFS and Amtgard in their own words.
Gabriel P. Morley
I completely agree that it was one of the bigger strengths, back in the early days of the game. These days, there is a faction of people in HFS that sees that it still is a major strength. However, most of those are groups or individuals that came from Amtgard - jaded - and or just enjoy having the total freedom to play the game how they want to play it.
I also share the opinion after believing in that autonomy for so long and watching HFS fall apart over the past 10 years, that it is also probably its biggest weakness (other than population as a whole).
The problem isn't necessarily the Autonomy, it is the people that abuse it. 9 years ago, the autonomy didn't hurt much, because most changes to the rules came from interaction with either Barad Duin or simple clarifications. Knighthood was pretty standard, being replicated in fashion from watching our parent kingdom. Over the years, the older people left, tradition that was unwritten and not passed down was lost. These days the autonomy has become so apparent, that the rulebooks are not even similar in many cases.
We had one kingdom crop up recently, obviously an ex-amt group, who took the 7.0 rules, added in some HFS stuff, and added in a bunch of park level house rules, and called it a new HFS kingdom. When I approached them about it, many groups in HFS told me that I was wrong to ask them to start with learning HFS before going off on their own tangent.
It is hard enough to change geographical locations that bring on individual interpretations of rules, much less entire different rulebooks. In my opinion this is a mistake.
The point is, things have become so fragmented, no 2 parks play the same game. No 2 parks even have anything close to a similar knighting standard or award system. This leaves most of them feeling superior to the other parks, and not respecting the awards or knighthoods from the other parks, as it is not of the same superior standard.
As much as I hate people telling me what I can or can not do, as much as I hate stifling of younger players creative freedom to create new classes or rules, I would trade it gladly if the different parks could unite and come together with a set of standards.
We have tried committees and such, all have been utter failures, because the newer players and the crossover players see the unique parks as a strength.
These days we may have strong individual parks, but the events end up being 2 friendly kingdoms populations and the rest of HFS stays home, around 60 player events if we are lucky.
It is sad. I am not attributing it all to the autonomy, there are many other factors involved, however I believe the Autonomy in large part led to the current state of HFS.
There is nothing uniting us together as players anymore other than a name and a desire on differing levels to hit each other with a padded stick.
Live and learn I guess.
Gabriel P. Morley
Well since those days, the Autonomy has run wild, and each group has changed and modified it to its own vision to the point that there are not even similarities between the BD corpora and the others. My group is really guilty of the corpora changes in a lot of groups. We changed ours pretty drastically about 6 years ago to try to address trends we were seeing in our own park.
However, having a large internet presence back then also gave rise to our corpora that was *in beta* being used by new parks, at least 3 of them, that sprung up, and were using the corpora before we even knew they existed. When we realized some of the ideas, while great on paper, weren't so good in practice at a small park though they worked fine in a well managed large park, we decided to tell the other chapters about it, but nothing changed - they kept going in their own direction.
Yes I was talking about a committee that oversees nothing but the management of at least a "base version" of the rulebook and corpora. Every time it is proposed, people start screaming tyranny and communism.
I gave up 2 years ago, the last time I brought it up.
Again now theirs are only minute reflections of ours, and they don't know the history behind it nor care. For instance, we renamed our service award to Wolf (though we still call it the Rose for standard HFS events) to signify service to our kingdom since our heraldic symbol is a wolf. Many new kingdoms are using the wolf now as their symbol for service, but many of their other corpora have been changed from ours, ours was a complete rewrite taking little to nothing from BD.
It all has a snowball effect and gets worse as time goes on. There is no joint committee to oversee the global rules set, and so each park strays further and further away. Not that some of the changes made are not good or valid, but as a whole it hurts the game a lot.
