Working With Your School

Each school has a political climate that the game must adapt to. At some schools, students have been arrested for carrying around Nerf Gun. (Pro-tip: You do not want that to happen).

Your job is to protect your players. That means doing the dirty work of getting HvZ established.

How important is this first step?

"HvZ never took place, as campus security turned around and told us we hadn't given them enough notice for the event." - Daniel Dean of Reading University in Berkshire, England

Your first step should be to meet with your Dean of Students (or someone similar) and tell them that you're planning on starting a game. They will help you sort things out with campus security, and give you cover if anything goes wrong.

Negociating With Your Administration

Your job in this meeting is not to ask permission to play HvZ, but to tell the administation that you will be playing.

Go into meetings telling admins what you are going to be doing - but don't act like you are making demands.

"Don't ask for permission but do accept responsibility for anything that comes up. Taking responsibility before anything goes wrong is going to make you look good. Cover all your bases right off the bat. Give a copy of your rules to security. Let administrators feel like they are in the driver's seat." - Steven Boddorff, Union College Mod

Tell your administration that you are going to hold this event but listen to their concerns and make concessions to them so that everyone is happy.

Compromise with the administration when possible, and take advantage of their resources:

"At Goucher, our administration requires that we notify the entire campus about the game so nobody freaks out. This is really a blessing in disguise because we see it as an opportunity for free advertising. We got the administration to send a campus-wide e-mail explaining the game and linking everyone to our registration page." - Goucher mod Max Temkin

Take responsibility. Tell them that you will accept any complaints and take the flack.

"We have an e-mail account where we handle any complaints about the game. The administration loves this because they don't have to hear peoples' complaints, and we love it because we handle those issues internally, protecting our players in the process." - Goucher mod Max Temkin

Your school may have a Nerf gun ban. You can challenge this ban, although that may take a lot of time and energy. It might be easier to play your first game with socks, and fight for Nerf guns once HvZ is more established.

NOTE: At the end of this guide, we have a great section on challenging your administration.

Modify the Rules

This is arguably the most important decision you will have to make with your moderators. How do you need to modify the rules to fit your school?

Does your school have special buildings that require specific rules?

Will your school have a very large or very small game?

Will your school allow you to use Nerf guns or refer to "kills" in the rules?

Before you begin to plan out your game, you have to pick the exact rules that your school will use.

Start with the Goucher-Style rules and change where you need to. You can see how other people have customized and presented their rules here. If you want help modifying the rules, you can get some advice on the forums. Let us know when you modify the rules, and we will post your unique rule-set for other people to see.

Becoming A Club

Some mods have had sucess becoming an official HvZ club. This gives them access to school funding, and the advertising resources of student government.

We generally reccommend opting out of student govenment - you want a few people as possible to have the opportunity to mess with (or shut down) your game.

Safety Contracts

People are fucking dumb, and will hurt themselves. We suggest having your players sign our safety contract [.doc] and generic liability waiver [.doc].

This is a great concession to "give away" to your administration. It's something you were probobly going to to anyway... why not let them "make" you do it so that they feel like they have some control?

Step Two: Meet With Administrators

Your most important job is to protect your players. Give your school advance notice of the game. Offer to make selected buildings "safe zones." Allow students to make other events "safe zones" to keep the game from interfering at the school.

Understand the political climate at your school, and don't organize a game unless you know you can protect your players.

Next: Setting Up Your Game