Welcome to the GCA, or Guild of Combat Analysts for those of you who haven't heard of us before. This is a special weekly project dedicated to analyzing fights, unpacking their inner workings and presenting them to you in a consumable format. Our goal is to disseminate what makes a good fight and share it with the world so everyone can benefit from the beginners to the legends. You never know just what you're going to find when you start studying some of these brawls.

In each analysis we are going to be looking for four main categories of my personal rubric. None of these categories are going to be used as a means of grading the fighters only for better organizing my thoughts and compartmentalizing the information more efficiently. The categories are Clarity, Creativity, Style and Compatibility, which will be presented to the audience to show different aspects to the fight besides what's just going on. If all I did was recap what the fight was about, this would be ridiculously short and not very useful for those seeking improvement.

Another important idea behind the creation of this little one man show is that I will be as objective as humanly possible when presenting my analysis. This isn't some veiled attempt to troll or make fun of people just for some laughs. What I am hoping to accomplish is a fun, interactive means of connecting with the role players who frequent this board and provide a means for beginners to understand the fundamentals of text based combat. Trust me when I say I never want to try and discourage someone from wanting to try out text based combat by further adding to the toxicity attached to the reputation of this place.

Don't worry though because its not going to be just about analyzing fight threads and giving out tips and tricks. I plan on getting really personal with the members of this community and picking their brains on how they operate when it comes to combat. Every week I will pick a new person to bug about doing an interview with until I find someone willing to listen. Then I'll come up with some personalized questions to figure out their role play fighting history, who had taught them the craft and other bits of trivia. Once that's done I'll post it in a separate thread so as not to keep the thread I'll be doing for the weekly combat analysis cluttered. Sometimes I may just switch things up and do an interview with a person's character and see how they like to prepare for a match or how successful they've been in previous matches since their creation.

Seems like a lot for one guy, right? Well that's why I hope to mitigate that through keeping things simple and only focusing on one or two threads a week and giving you folks a well detailed analysis for one or both threads instead of spreading myself thin on multiple threads. If a thread I've chosen happens to conclude before I post up my analysis, then I'll give my full thoughts on the match including maybe a playful little IC scene of my courageous and expendable reporting crew as they get in on the action and get the facts about what's going on in the field of battle.

One extra little thing about the interviews is that if I have chosen you for an interview and you use that as a chance to try and troll or flame other members of the community then I'm not going to post up that interview. Leeway can be given for the IC interviews dependent on the personality of your character, but when I am interviewing you the role player, I won't hesitate to scrap an interview just to find someone who won't use my project as their platform to trash talk. We're all here to have fun and play pretend on the internet, there's no reason to be a jerk about it.

The first posting will be up by Friday of January 19th so look around the Arena board for my very first interview and analysis.

Well I would like to think that was a pretty successful run for the GCA. People seem to like my analysis and have even offered me a few tips on how to make it better through Discord. I truly appreciate having such a warm welcome for my group on this forum and I hope to make you all proud through my further work. Its my hope that for every analysis I put out, more people can come to have a more in depth understanding of how combat writing works.

As always my next analysis will be out on the twenty-sixth, a Friday so everyone can find some time to enjoy it. There are a lot of great fights out there that I want to cover, but in the interest of keeping my sanity I will only choose one. If there is anything I’ve learned from my role playing career its how learning your limit on how much work you can handle. If I was just a single guy without much responsibility I would be pumping out reviews like they were hot cakes. Of course though I do have responsibilities at home, which is why I will simply be doing one analysis this week and one interview.

Now I know some may be wondering why I haven't talked much about trying to analyze my own work. Yes I have plenty of fights going on in the arena, but I have what I feel is a good enough excuse as to why I don't do that. Mainly its because I know that my own work is hard enough just to come up with, I don't think I could handle picking out all the errors I have going on in my own work without losing my mind. Besides, this project is for the people on the forum, to see how they do things and to celebrate their victories and try to understand their failures. Maybe as I go along I’ll be able to look at my own work objectively and be able to disseminate it without coming off as either too harsh or not harsh enough.

So as the other two tournaments gear up for their beginning I thought I would take a blast into the past and look at a match that had just recently concluded. From the whispers I’ve been able to catch on Discord the ending towards this battle had to be decided via judge ruling, so I am curious to see how I can look at this match and see where my work can line up with said judges. Of course I am by no means saying I could do their job better, being a judge for a tournament is a bit of a hellish exercise in self restraint and patience. All I wanna do is try to analyze this thread and see what we can glean from the different writer's who participated in the fight. Get ready for an exciting read because I think this is gonna be a great ride for everyone.