[Sarai and Samiel]

Originally Posted by Wyborn

5. Writing is not as important in battles as it is in RP topics. I'm going to repeat this again later, but I thought I should state it here: you don't have to write a freaking novel every time you post in a battle, and no one is going to make you feel like less of a battler if you don't use a lot of description. Hell, you can use script format if you want to. In RP topics writing is slightly more important, but if you don't feel like making huge posts when you want to kick the crap out of the other guy, then don't.

This one gives me chronic problems. I would really, REALLY like to say that I am completely not a writing snob and will happily engage in cooperative writing and/or a fight regardless of your skill with words. Unfortunately, this is simply not true. I have to admit to suffering a certain amount of psychological pain from the more poorly-written stuff, and it’s not really just a matter of grammar and spelling- if that were the case, I wouldn’t be able to deal with Repster at all, who has capitalization errors coming out his ears and frequently misspells any word not in extremely common use. No, my real problem is with people who cannot manage to adequately describe what is happening. Part of this, I think, is that I really get ticked when I feel like I’m being made to think for my opponent, a problem I had with X-3 a ways back and which he hasn’t completely solved, but has been making progress on, no longer simply saying ‘he was bleeding’. Part of this is that it’s really, really, really, really, really ****ing impossible to figure out how your character would respond to seeing something happen that you can’t figure out what the hell it was that happened. Too often I see ‘attacks him with his spear’. Well, how? Stab? Slash? Clonk them with the butt end? Please, please, PLEASE, we need to put in at least some sort of guideline that says that you have to describe what’s going on reasonably well enough for someone to respond to it. I hate to have to pick on the newbies for this, but it’s a chronic problem with new writers, and being nice and ignoring it only encourages it to stick around. Criticism of failings in your writing will only do you good, as with the criticism I once received for my blatant overuse of commas among other things.

This also brings up another important point. Writing exists to be read. There, I said it, and I know it’s blasphemous to say in this era when writing mostly exists for the sole purpose of either expressing yourself regardless of whether or not anyone can make heads or tails of it, or in order to be ignored because who wants to read anything anyways?

The fact of the matter is, the original purpose of writing is to communicate a concept. You have to approach writing from the perspective of trying to impart an idea or a piece of information to someone else in a clear manner or else all you’re really doing is eating time for nothing, and if I’m going to spend time for no material result that helps anyone else or failing that helps just myself, I’m going to (in the spirit of remaining candid, I will say it) spend it masturbating.

Just to hit the dead horse one last time with the baseball bat, I urge people to improve their writing not because I hate bad writing (and I’m saying this most especially to you, Inferno) but because I want people to be able to actually achieve what they want to with their writing in terms of communication, be it telling a story or informing someone of news or anything else.

We need to have standards of effort into writing if not results of said writing because otherwise we start degenerating the language to the point where what word we use doesn’t even matter anymore and every sentence will look like the next one: fish clat wobbeconehead beedleNorf maltescha the umber twalp lol

Yeah, I’m exaggerating, but hey, it’s to get a laugh out in the middle of this, bear with me.

Originally Posted by Wyborn

Let's move on to those, anyway...

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Battle-Specific Rules

Or, as I like to say, the crux.

Originally Posted by Wyborn

1. Only you can say when you lose. The same goes for your opponent: he can't say when you die or get knockd unconscious, and you can't say when he does. Try to be fair and go down when it's realistic.

This is easy to do as along as you are reasonable, though some people seem to be trying very hard to ignore that you don’t get to declare when your opponent gets knocked out or killed.

Incidentally, this rule is rather a direct contradiction to our standard way of fighting around here, because we usually show the results of an attack in the same post of the attack, which basically forces people to only get knocked out or killed *ON THEIR TURN*. Which is, quite simply, bull****, and needs to be changed. This is one of the things that enhances the current state of interminable fights and unpleasant dissolutions- because it’s also standard that in your own posts, you don’t get hit, or if you do, not much and it usually isn’t significant.

Originally Posted by Wyborn

2. Show damage like it's dealt to you. If you get hit in the face with a hammer, don't just shrug it off. Likewise, if your leg is broken, don't start running around as if nothing's happen. Your leg is broken. Either fix it or limp or run with a lot of pain or something. Just don't ignore it when damage is done.

I could not possibly count the number of times this rule gets bent. It’s been bent so far it’s tied in knots, which is the only thing keeping it from being completely broken apart. With the current thinking that you should keep fighting as long as you have time to (I’m looking at you, NLBFT. **** staying up until time is called, protracting things like that is *not good writing* and it’s *not good fighting*.), people ignore or work around damage so much it’s just stupid. I do it too, and I’d like to not, only then I might get called a bad writer for letting a fight end or not giving as good as I just got if not better than. **** one-upmanship again. With a bat wrapped in barbed wire.

Originally Posted by Wyborn

3. Don't do something that would completely obliterate your enemy in one post. This is kind of hard to define - you can do pretty much anything you want to your enemy, but don't just freaking nuke them or something. Likewise, don't severe their heads, or slit their throats, or do something that there is no way possible they could survive in a thousand years. Try to control yourself. Believe me, you can still be brutal without being cheap.

You had me until the last sentence there. That last sentence, however, has not been taken to heart much around here. There is way too much of a culture of beating on the opponent with positively no regard for anything other than the need to hit them harder and worse than they just hit you. We need to change this, to make that last bit of this rule much more important, or else we’re going to continue having the problems that we have now.

Originally Posted by Wyborn

4. This is going to sound weird, but Assume that you and your enemy are more or less even. He can be infinitely stronger than you, or you can be a lot faster than him, or whatever...but overall they should be an even match for each other, even if it's not in similar areas. For example, a character from Dragonball Z would be on equal footing with a character from Harry Potter. It's weird, but it's how we keep things fair.

This.

This.

This right here little gem of I’m not sure what to call it is responsible for more problems than I can count. Why is that? Well, first off, there’s the whole culture of one-upmanship that has grown around here. This rule combines with that in one of two ways. Either:

a) You fail to one-up your opponent. The fight ends there, because let’s be honest, he just handed you your head, your ass, and all of your teeth individually shrinkwrapped and labeled for sale. This happens enough, people will learn to stop fighting via constant one-upmanship, and we can keep this rule... for the time being. Then we start realizing that having all fighters even is the reason fights take so ****ing long and never get finished, and we drop it. Because honestly, while this rule is a nice *idea*, it just doesn’t work. You can write about your character being more skilled but not more fast, or more powerful but not better-planning, but with the authorial competitiveness that should be in place here and is (see the rule that states that the goal in a fight is to WIN first, which is only sensible, and have fun along the way second) and the penchant for one-upmanship basically saying that nobody gets finally beaten by anything- because who wants to lose, really? Not even me, and I often don’t care about winning in and of itself- where was I? Ah, yes. With the authorial competetiveness and the penchant for one-upmanship, no character really *has* effective upper limits. So the one-upmanship war basically reinforces this rule, really- they’re all equal, because they’re all infiinitely powerful. And you can’t get bigger than infinite.

OR

b) You have what we do today, where nobody really quite seems willing to admit how brokenly powerful they’re making their characters except for the newbies, who quickly get trained out of doing that by all the people dropping gorram stars on their heads. And all the while we’re claiming it’s not really about winning or losing the fight. Yuh-huh. Sure. And I’m the bastard love-child of the tooth fairy and the alligator responsible for elephants having long noses.

WE NEED TO GET RID OF THIS RULE.

Because of this rule, our fights don’t end. This rule is the ultimate justification for ‘I’m not dead yet!’ and ‘I got better.’ This rule makes it impossible to be competetive here without an infinitely powerful character, and with infinitely powerful characters, it’s not competition anymore, because we all tie in the stupid pissing contests.

I’m tired of pretending I don’t regularly use broken characters (Karna) or make my nonbroken characters broken so I can use them here (Reiko). And I’m tired as I have no idea what but it’s so tired I have no words for it of not being able to bring my less-powerful characters into competition because I’ll get lambasted for not one-upping someone. I’m even tired of all the problems that get caused by the combination of this vague assumption and the talent some people have for figuring out a way out of any potential dilemma if only their character were tweaked just a tiny little bit. We don’t need that temptation.

If we could, and this is just an idea, just a little pipe-dream, because really nobody has to listen to me any more than I do to them, and sometimes I’m much too good for my own good at not listening, but if we could just give general ideas of how powerful a character is (I envision a very vague system. Rankings like ‘Only Human’, ‘Slightly Superhuman’, ‘Mountain-Mover’ and ‘Dear God, What Have You Done To My Solar System’ come to mind.) before a fight, and then- again, dreaming a bit here- stick to the capabilites we’ve already laid out in our heads for them beforehand, which means a limit to one-upmanship and a reduction on the importans of being impressively annihilation-happy, I think we’d see a lot more fights actually getting finished.

This is not to say that this isn’t a problem that has cropped up in other places. I remember losing my first tournament fight to Mr. Chimpo, who was surprised as all hell that Reiko hadn’t beaten him up. She didn’t beat him up because back then I didn’t compromise my character capabilities just to satisfy the local idea of how a fight should go. It’s a gun I should have stuck to- I’d have lost a lot more fights, but I think I’d have been happier and a better example for it. I didn’t make that ‘mistake’ again there, and I have yet to here.

I think I’m gonna pick that gun back up, because some of this **** is just stupid.

Originally Posted by Wyborn

5. Don't worry about dying. In battles, character deaths don't really count. That means that if you make your own char, and he dies in battle, you can still use him in other topics. You don't even have to make up a way for him to come back. That's just how it works. If it looks like you're doing to die, that's cool. Don't worry about it.

See the previous rule, only this one *isn’t* being followed. Mostly because we largely *can’t* because the fights *don’t ****ing end*. I really, really wish this rule mattered more often. But it doesn’t.

Originally Posted by Wyborn

6. Don't worry about how you write in battles. See, told you it would be repeated - like I said before, all levels of description are welcome in battles. If you go up against someone who writes massive, eloquent posts that fill up pages upon pages in Word or something but you prefer to write minimalistic paragraphs that concentrate more on what you do to your enemy, that's fine. Don't worry about it. Just make sure you communicate what you're doing completely, and that other people can read it. Everybody has access to a spellchecker.

Okay, you see the bit at the end there? The thing in bold?

This is not followed enough. Most new people aren’t even *trying* to follow it, and I can *tell*. I shouldn’t even have to mention who they are, so I won’t, in the vain hope that they will *realize* who they are.

If you have the time to write this stuff, and it means anything, anything at all, to you, I see absolutely no reason- NONE AT ALL- why you can’t go to a little bit of effort to make it clearer what the hell it is you’re saying. Punctuation, capitalization, and spelling exist for a reason. That reason is to make writing more clear. Sometimes people abuse it by overusing it, which I am occasionally or less occasionally guilty of in the case of punctuation. But if you can’t take the time to at least try to make your grammar and punctuation comprehensible, you really have no business spending your time writing anyways, you should do something else communal and fun, like beating your friends at Smash Brothers or going skateboarding in groups or something.

Bad enough we write semi-incomprehensibly when we’re just communicating (OMG did u c? is jlo!!!!!!!111!!!1111), but when we’re writing something sincerely for the sake of having it read, even a thing like the fights here, and the writer doesn’t take the time to at least try to make it easy to read, there is something seriously wrong.

I may be totally off-base here, but I’m pretty sure that when this rule say s ‘Don’t worry about how you write in battles.’ it’s talking about style, not effort.