The $300,000 Fight-A-Thon! [Round Two: Toyetic!]
08-12-2012, 04:57 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-20-2013, 12:28 AM by Elpie.)
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Deep in the farthest reaches of the multiverse—or the greater multiverse metropolitan area, though it may in fact be a different zip code from the multiverse per se—there lies a suburb. The charm of the neighborhood lies in the fact that it very evidently used to be very nice, and now has fallen into sufficient disrepair that the property value has hit a reasonable nadir. The windows are broken but not boarded, the dogs are stray but not rabid, the people are old but not dead.
Within this suburb there is a duplex. Its address is [a number inconceivable through mortal mathematics]. The resident of [a number inconceivable through mortal mathematics]-A is not pertinent to this story. The resident of [a number inconceivable through mortal mathematics]-B is a being of unimaginable power known only as the Coach.
[[So, this is a Grand Battle, a writing-focused roleplay for eight people (plus me, I guess) where anyone can enter any type of character (except a Hussnasty or anything else based on a licensed property). Long story short, you make a character profile using the sheet provided below, and if I like it, I’ll have the Coach (who is my character, sort of) drop your character into a battle to the death, and then you write for them. Easy as that.]]
The Coach—you can see him now, walking out to his mailbox in a bathrobe—doesn’t look like much. He’s balding, middle-aged, a tad overweight, and keeps looking around like he thinks everyone else in the neighborhood somehow knows that he plans on starting drinking at eleven A.M. this morning. You can’t blame the Coach. His physical manifestation to mortal eyes is a product of his emotional state, and he’s been going through some rough times (haven’t we all?)
The coach discovers with mixed feelings that he has received no mail this morning. He picks up the local newspaper and scans it over as he waddles back to the door. The news is nothing that the Coach, both cynical and prescient, doesn’t know already. Obituaries. Crime. Social and moral deterioration. Climate change at the multiversal level. The word jumble for today reads YENPORT, YEVPORT, and RISPADE. “Rich Richer, Poor Poorer.” He takes it all in at a glance, then flips to the job listings.
MODELS NEEDED: We need women ages 18-29 to pretend to be very excited about laundry detergent. Openness to tasteful nudes a must. $500 cash.
The Council Of First Contact Ambassadors wants YOU! to participate in a high-risk joint business venture on the sunny isle of New Frontier! In the interest of fairness, we regret that we will not be accepting applications from omnipotent immortals.
THE REALTOR is looking for skilled interns to help convert a former orphanage/schoolhouse into a luxury condiminium! We are authorized to offer college credit and living wages only. Exposure to lead paint a possibility.
“Nothing,” grumbles the Coach out loud, using his complete and total mastery over spacetime to banish the newspaper into the void. In truth, he is already resigned to his fate. Even if there had been something, there was no way it would be enough to give him the three hundred thousand dollars he needs!
[[The focus of a Grand Battle is writing and collaboration. “Writing” means you won’t be operating under any specific set of rules other than what the story demands. Whenever you think it’s your turn to write, you can make a post ranging anywhere from, say, thirty-two to nine thousand words (probably somewhere logarithmically in the middle there) that tells the next part of the story.
“Collaboration” means that, while you’re ultimately responsible for your own character, you’ll be writing for everyone else’s character, too. Even though this is nominally a competition, your success is largely measured by your ability to cooperate
When I feel like the story’s heading towards some sort of climax, I’ll privately take opinions on whose writing has been the worst or has improved the least or who’s contributed the least to the story. That writer then has to write one final “deathpost” killing off their character and wrapping up the story for that round, and then I’ll shuffle off the characters to a different setting and the new round will begin. The battle ends when one character remains.]]
The Coach reenters his duplex and, engrossed in his thoughts, nearly sits on the orphan child who has taken a seat in his armchair. “Hey, watch it!” complains the child, scrappily.
The Coach gives something between a shriek of alarm and an exasperated moan and considers this new arrival, at the same time surreptitiously teleporting the various open liquor containers strewn about his living room into the recycling bin. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says finally. The Coach avoids eye contact. He doesn’t want to face this boy, this orphan child who had once depended on him, a living testament to his failure. Instead he finds himself examining the kid’s tattered rags, the three-day buildup of dirt on his face, the hungry look in his ribs. “How’d you get in here?” he demands when the child makes no response to his earlier declaration.
The boy giggles. “Haha! Silly Coach. Walls can’t stop us.”
Seven other orphans appear—some melting through the wall, others crashing through it headfirst, some simply teleporting into being. The Coach’s heart swells with pride and regret. These are—were—among his favorite students. In his hubris, he has taken to thinking of them as the children he could never have.
“What are you kids doing here?” he asks grimly, repairing the wall with a mere thought.
“It’s time for class, Coach!” says one child, a girl no more than five years old.
The Coach shakes his head. “Don’t you kids understand? There is no ‘class’ anymore. Not unless I can somehow get together the three hundred thousand dollars I need to buy the orphanage back from the Realtor!”
[[A couple things to take note of:
The general etiquette in a Grand Battle is to announce your intention to write a post with a post simply saying, “RESERVE,” immediately before you start writing, or maybe slightly after. This prevents everyone from writing over each other. You’re expected to honor other people’s reserves—if a reserve is up for a problematically long time and the writer is showing no signs of progress on the post, talk to me, and I might give you the go-ahead to post.
The IRC channel #grandbattle on irc.esper.net (the same server as #pesterchum or #mspafa or what have you) is usually pretty active and full of nerds who spend all day critiquing profiles or planning out future events in battles. It’s generally the best way to keep in contact with your fellow writers, but private messages on the fora also work.
In my experience with these sorts of things, there are two sorts of rounds that cause problems and slow up the battle. Sometimes you’ll get a round that drags on too long and is punctuated by infrequent posts basically to the effect of “the characters talked about stuff while walking towards a vague destination or just sitting around waiting for something to happen.” Keep in mind that if you write a post that ends with everything exactly the same as it started, you’re not really doing your job as a collaborator, even if you’re writing really well. Even if you’re stuck in a rut where you’re not in a position to write a plot-heavy post, make sure to include some sort of inciting incident at the end—have the characters meet up with someone else, arrive at their destination, pull out a gun and start indiscriminately shooting each other, whatever it takes to give some sort of narrative momentum.
On the other side of the coin, you get posts where everyone has lots of ideas, but the ideas that don’t really connect, and the story becomes too complicated for the writers to wrap up coherently. Sometimes the problem is overambition. You want to let everyone introduce all the concepts they think are best, but about halfway through a round, it’s best to stop introducing new things and start boiling what you have down into one or two central conflicts. You might have to leave a fun idea or two by the wayside, but it’s worth it for a better opportunity to set up for a climax and eventually move on to the next round.]]
”We can’t give up now, Coach!” insists one of the orphans. “We had a great idea for how we can get that money!”
“Now, kids, I appreciate your attitude,” sighs the Coach, “But money doesn’t grow on trees.” To demonstrate, the Coach waves his arm and a tree begins to grow in the middle of his living room. There is clearly no money growing on it, just some apples. He dispels the tree. “And even if it did, you’d need a whole orchard.”
“You are a fool to underestimate us, Coach,” intones an adorable little girl. “You need to see this awesome show first!”
The girl pulls a VHS tape out of the deepest reaches of the abyss. It is labeled “LAST THING STANDING—ROUND ONE.” She ejects a tape labeled “THE BIG GAME” from the Coach’s VCR, puts in LAST THING STANDING and hits play.
The TV blares to life. A garishly-dressed Announcer is addressing the camera. Eight strange beings are visible over his shoulder. ”WELCOME BACK TO LAST THING STANDING! WE’VE JUST TALLIED THE VOTE FOR THE FINAL EIGHT,” the Announcer shouts at the screen.
“It’s easy,” explains an orphan. “All we need is a camera, eight gladiators with unique skills from across the multiverse, and somewhere to put them. This guy threw this together in, like, two weeks and it’s already made, like, eleven billion hundred dollars. I was thinking we could call ours the Three Hundred Thousand Dollar FIGHT-A-THON.”
The Coach sits and stares at the screen. “This might actually work,” he exclaims. “You kids are geniuses!”
“Technically the term is ‘limited omniscience,’” corrects one orphan.
“Alright.” The Coach takes a deep breath. “Alright. We need to work fast. I need each of you kids to go out amongst all of Creation and find one contestant apiece, okay? I’ll work on the set.” The kids oblige, warping and smashing and skateboarding their way out of the duplex the same way they came in.
The Coach holds back a tear. “I’m so proud of you kids,” he sniffs.
Signup Sheet:
Username: Literally your username. I know, it’s right there to the left, but having it repeated on the profile is useful for administrative purposes or tradition or something.
Name: Your character’s name.
Species: Or “Race,” if your character is biologically compatible with what we would consider a human but still distinct enough that you need another term for it.
Gender: Not “Sex,” so if your character doesn’t have all the girl parts but you’re still going to be referring to her as “her” in your posts, you can just say “female.”
Color: The idea is that every character has a unique text color so as to highlight the parts of various posts that pertain to various characters. Plus, it’s pretty. The Coach’s is Darkblue, so don’t take anything too close to that.
Description: One of the meatier sections. This is mostly a physical description, but it also helps to write a bit on your character’s personality and motives—enough to serve as a reference to other writers who plan on using your character.
Equipment/Abilities: Don’t worry too much about being over- or under-powered. If you have to jump through narrative hoops to provide a challenge for your character, that’s a problem. If you have to jump through narrative hoops for your character to do anything useful, that’s a problem. But in the middle there, there’s a lot of wiggle room.
Backstory: A lot of people try to use this section as a sort of “writing sample” and write out this whole extended biography to try and impress the host. I’d rather you didn’t. Just give any information the other writers will need to know in order to write your character.
Signups will close on midnight EST on the night of Friday, August 24th. If you've never been in a Grand Battle before, you're basically guaranteed to get in, so don't be shy. The battle proper will begin shortly thereafter.
The Line-Up:
Eberron—Ironjaw—#P1914? Profile
Flummox— Felus—#7676C8—Profile
~ATH—Warden of the Sixth Ring—#100020—Profile
Hobbesy—Dr. Franz von Schuster—#6D1C05—Profile
Linkzeldi—Thize—#FF33FF—Profile DEAD
Pharmacy—Guillemet—#02FFFF on #004080—Profile
SeventeenthSquid—Eriz Col-Myel—#566799—Profile
Thunderjolt—Axys—#336600—Profile COLLATERAL
SRA--Cockfighter Brawlmite--#800080--Profile
Deep in the farthest reaches of the multiverse—or the greater multiverse metropolitan area, though it may in fact be a different zip code from the multiverse per se—there lies a suburb. The charm of the neighborhood lies in the fact that it very evidently used to be very nice, and now has fallen into sufficient disrepair that the property value has hit a reasonable nadir. The windows are broken but not boarded, the dogs are stray but not rabid, the people are old but not dead.
Within this suburb there is a duplex. Its address is [a number inconceivable through mortal mathematics]. The resident of [a number inconceivable through mortal mathematics]-A is not pertinent to this story. The resident of [a number inconceivable through mortal mathematics]-B is a being of unimaginable power known only as the Coach.
[[So, this is a Grand Battle, a writing-focused roleplay for eight people (plus me, I guess) where anyone can enter any type of character (except a Hussnasty or anything else based on a licensed property). Long story short, you make a character profile using the sheet provided below, and if I like it, I’ll have the Coach (who is my character, sort of) drop your character into a battle to the death, and then you write for them. Easy as that.]]
The Coach—you can see him now, walking out to his mailbox in a bathrobe—doesn’t look like much. He’s balding, middle-aged, a tad overweight, and keeps looking around like he thinks everyone else in the neighborhood somehow knows that he plans on starting drinking at eleven A.M. this morning. You can’t blame the Coach. His physical manifestation to mortal eyes is a product of his emotional state, and he’s been going through some rough times (haven’t we all?)
The coach discovers with mixed feelings that he has received no mail this morning. He picks up the local newspaper and scans it over as he waddles back to the door. The news is nothing that the Coach, both cynical and prescient, doesn’t know already. Obituaries. Crime. Social and moral deterioration. Climate change at the multiversal level. The word jumble for today reads YENPORT, YEVPORT, and RISPADE. “Rich Richer, Poor Poorer.” He takes it all in at a glance, then flips to the job listings.
MODELS NEEDED: We need women ages 18-29 to pretend to be very excited about laundry detergent. Openness to tasteful nudes a must. $500 cash.
The Council Of First Contact Ambassadors wants YOU! to participate in a high-risk joint business venture on the sunny isle of New Frontier! In the interest of fairness, we regret that we will not be accepting applications from omnipotent immortals.
THE REALTOR is looking for skilled interns to help convert a former orphanage/schoolhouse into a luxury condiminium! We are authorized to offer college credit and living wages only. Exposure to lead paint a possibility.
“Nothing,” grumbles the Coach out loud, using his complete and total mastery over spacetime to banish the newspaper into the void. In truth, he is already resigned to his fate. Even if there had been something, there was no way it would be enough to give him the three hundred thousand dollars he needs!
[[The focus of a Grand Battle is writing and collaboration. “Writing” means you won’t be operating under any specific set of rules other than what the story demands. Whenever you think it’s your turn to write, you can make a post ranging anywhere from, say, thirty-two to nine thousand words (probably somewhere logarithmically in the middle there) that tells the next part of the story.
“Collaboration” means that, while you’re ultimately responsible for your own character, you’ll be writing for everyone else’s character, too. Even though this is nominally a competition, your success is largely measured by your ability to cooperate
When I feel like the story’s heading towards some sort of climax, I’ll privately take opinions on whose writing has been the worst or has improved the least or who’s contributed the least to the story. That writer then has to write one final “deathpost” killing off their character and wrapping up the story for that round, and then I’ll shuffle off the characters to a different setting and the new round will begin. The battle ends when one character remains.]]
The Coach reenters his duplex and, engrossed in his thoughts, nearly sits on the orphan child who has taken a seat in his armchair. “Hey, watch it!” complains the child, scrappily.
The Coach gives something between a shriek of alarm and an exasperated moan and considers this new arrival, at the same time surreptitiously teleporting the various open liquor containers strewn about his living room into the recycling bin. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says finally. The Coach avoids eye contact. He doesn’t want to face this boy, this orphan child who had once depended on him, a living testament to his failure. Instead he finds himself examining the kid’s tattered rags, the three-day buildup of dirt on his face, the hungry look in his ribs. “How’d you get in here?” he demands when the child makes no response to his earlier declaration.
The boy giggles. “Haha! Silly Coach. Walls can’t stop us.”
Seven other orphans appear—some melting through the wall, others crashing through it headfirst, some simply teleporting into being. The Coach’s heart swells with pride and regret. These are—were—among his favorite students. In his hubris, he has taken to thinking of them as the children he could never have.
“What are you kids doing here?” he asks grimly, repairing the wall with a mere thought.
“It’s time for class, Coach!” says one child, a girl no more than five years old.
The Coach shakes his head. “Don’t you kids understand? There is no ‘class’ anymore. Not unless I can somehow get together the three hundred thousand dollars I need to buy the orphanage back from the Realtor!”
[[A couple things to take note of:
The general etiquette in a Grand Battle is to announce your intention to write a post with a post simply saying, “RESERVE,” immediately before you start writing, or maybe slightly after. This prevents everyone from writing over each other. You’re expected to honor other people’s reserves—if a reserve is up for a problematically long time and the writer is showing no signs of progress on the post, talk to me, and I might give you the go-ahead to post.
The IRC channel #grandbattle on irc.esper.net (the same server as #pesterchum or #mspafa or what have you) is usually pretty active and full of nerds who spend all day critiquing profiles or planning out future events in battles. It’s generally the best way to keep in contact with your fellow writers, but private messages on the fora also work.
In my experience with these sorts of things, there are two sorts of rounds that cause problems and slow up the battle. Sometimes you’ll get a round that drags on too long and is punctuated by infrequent posts basically to the effect of “the characters talked about stuff while walking towards a vague destination or just sitting around waiting for something to happen.” Keep in mind that if you write a post that ends with everything exactly the same as it started, you’re not really doing your job as a collaborator, even if you’re writing really well. Even if you’re stuck in a rut where you’re not in a position to write a plot-heavy post, make sure to include some sort of inciting incident at the end—have the characters meet up with someone else, arrive at their destination, pull out a gun and start indiscriminately shooting each other, whatever it takes to give some sort of narrative momentum.
On the other side of the coin, you get posts where everyone has lots of ideas, but the ideas that don’t really connect, and the story becomes too complicated for the writers to wrap up coherently. Sometimes the problem is overambition. You want to let everyone introduce all the concepts they think are best, but about halfway through a round, it’s best to stop introducing new things and start boiling what you have down into one or two central conflicts. You might have to leave a fun idea or two by the wayside, but it’s worth it for a better opportunity to set up for a climax and eventually move on to the next round.]]
”We can’t give up now, Coach!” insists one of the orphans. “We had a great idea for how we can get that money!”
“Now, kids, I appreciate your attitude,” sighs the Coach, “But money doesn’t grow on trees.” To demonstrate, the Coach waves his arm and a tree begins to grow in the middle of his living room. There is clearly no money growing on it, just some apples. He dispels the tree. “And even if it did, you’d need a whole orchard.”
“You are a fool to underestimate us, Coach,” intones an adorable little girl. “You need to see this awesome show first!”
The girl pulls a VHS tape out of the deepest reaches of the abyss. It is labeled “LAST THING STANDING—ROUND ONE.” She ejects a tape labeled “THE BIG GAME” from the Coach’s VCR, puts in LAST THING STANDING and hits play.
The TV blares to life. A garishly-dressed Announcer is addressing the camera. Eight strange beings are visible over his shoulder. ”WELCOME BACK TO LAST THING STANDING! WE’VE JUST TALLIED THE VOTE FOR THE FINAL EIGHT,” the Announcer shouts at the screen.
“It’s easy,” explains an orphan. “All we need is a camera, eight gladiators with unique skills from across the multiverse, and somewhere to put them. This guy threw this together in, like, two weeks and it’s already made, like, eleven billion hundred dollars. I was thinking we could call ours the Three Hundred Thousand Dollar FIGHT-A-THON.”
The Coach sits and stares at the screen. “This might actually work,” he exclaims. “You kids are geniuses!”
“Technically the term is ‘limited omniscience,’” corrects one orphan.
“Alright.” The Coach takes a deep breath. “Alright. We need to work fast. I need each of you kids to go out amongst all of Creation and find one contestant apiece, okay? I’ll work on the set.” The kids oblige, warping and smashing and skateboarding their way out of the duplex the same way they came in.
The Coach holds back a tear. “I’m so proud of you kids,” he sniffs.
Signup Sheet:
Username: Literally your username. I know, it’s right there to the left, but having it repeated on the profile is useful for administrative purposes or tradition or something.
Name: Your character’s name.
Species: Or “Race,” if your character is biologically compatible with what we would consider a human but still distinct enough that you need another term for it.
Gender: Not “Sex,” so if your character doesn’t have all the girl parts but you’re still going to be referring to her as “her” in your posts, you can just say “female.”
Color: The idea is that every character has a unique text color so as to highlight the parts of various posts that pertain to various characters. Plus, it’s pretty. The Coach’s is Darkblue, so don’t take anything too close to that.
Description: One of the meatier sections. This is mostly a physical description, but it also helps to write a bit on your character’s personality and motives—enough to serve as a reference to other writers who plan on using your character.
Equipment/Abilities: Don’t worry too much about being over- or under-powered. If you have to jump through narrative hoops to provide a challenge for your character, that’s a problem. If you have to jump through narrative hoops for your character to do anything useful, that’s a problem. But in the middle there, there’s a lot of wiggle room.
Backstory: A lot of people try to use this section as a sort of “writing sample” and write out this whole extended biography to try and impress the host. I’d rather you didn’t. Just give any information the other writers will need to know in order to write your character.
Signups will close on midnight EST on the night of Friday, August 24th. If you've never been in a Grand Battle before, you're basically guaranteed to get in, so don't be shy. The battle proper will begin shortly thereafter.
The Line-Up:
Eberron—Ironjaw—#P1914? Profile
Flummox— Felus—#7676C8—Profile
~ATH—Warden of the Sixth Ring—#100020—Profile
Hobbesy—Dr. Franz von Schuster—#6D1C05—Profile
Linkzeldi—Thize—#FF33FF—Profile DEAD
Pharmacy—Guillemet—#02FFFF on #004080—Profile
SeventeenthSquid—Eriz Col-Myel—#566799—Profile
Thunderjolt—Axys—#336600—Profile COLLATERAL
SRA--Cockfighter Brawlmite--#800080--Profile