[OOC] Arena Chat Thread

[Absolis]

@Doc Doctor@Ri Rin

I do somewhat. But yeah, that sound fun! If that's the case, I'll have a hand to hand fighter posted in a tiny bit

[ImportantNobody]

New main character for Gaia; Freelia! I just wanted an excuse to nickname someone "Free" because it sounds like a good name for a main hero. I am ImportantSomebody there because my name was taken. I posted in the interest check for the roleplay part of the forum with the title, "let's fight each other". Be there or be square!

Freelia is my avatar. She's probably also known as random girl because she randomly stumbles upon combat where she's needed thanks to some curse. I was debating on calling her Frillia, which is more feminine. Maybe she has a twin.

P.S. I'll probably be mistaken for a girl more than ever because of Freelia.

[ImportantNobody]

I'm stealing my Freelia idea and giving it to my main male character, who I know enough about now to begin his sheet. He's an ex-prince who's cursed from birth to be constantly assaulted by chaos thanks to someone despising the royal family line. His family disowned him to distance themselves from him. However, thanks to all of the "random encounters", as video game terms would put it, he's gained massive level ups from a young age so he'd be like a level 100 by his upper teen years. The curse has made him super competent and able to detect and put an end to dangerous situations, always showing up exactly where he's needed. The person who cast the curse will either realize their epic fail and try to make amends or not, but either way this prince guy will still forgive him. He won't be an edgelord saying, "oh noes! Everyone is too afraid to hang out with me!" He's still optimistic and outgoing. Plus he'll make friends who can handle the constant chaos with him.

[Alphakoka]

Is it exactly showing up where needed when the problem is coming to him?

[ImportantNobody]

Is it exactly showing up where needed when the problem is coming to him?

@Alphakoka

Depends on point of view

[Darth]

That gaia tournament seems difficult in a bad way. You get a super bad penalty for killing your opponent, so this limits most characters you could do and most actions, as you'd need to constantly worry about killing your opponent so would always pull punches when the possibility of killing them comes up. Opening to the neck and you have a sword? Too bad, can't take it, etc. Someone like a brawler with their bare hands would be so much better in that ruleset as they would be easier to respond without lethal force. Not to mention the character tier limiting a lot of other characters. I'm fine with their rules but not as a main place to go for combat. Perhaps a different, less restrictive combat thread could be made in gaia. There appear to be enough people around that some could show interest in it even if already in the tournament.

Anyways, my character for our battle here would also be a student, as I would look silly having them a master and make mistakes in their form.

@ImportantNobody

I've discussed it before -- at length -- but the bottom line is that deathmatches trend towards being efficient at killing, which leads to a narrowing of viable character archetypes, both in power and in equipment. Nonlethal matches are the most viable means of ensuring that, for example, a fist-fighter can square off against a swordsman. The swordsman can still hamstring his foe or even jam his sword into his belly because the wound won't be IMMINENTLY fatal (a rewording I'll need to make and clarify). It's meant to keep people from "going for the throat", which is the narrowing trend that deathmatches promote. Having done plenty of deathmatches in the past, I've always found them to be both boring and an endless source of arguments whenever I've been made to judge them.

We also use a fairly specific scope of power because a) that's the major trend in our community's events and b) it's the easiest form of powered combat to balance because profile grading and adjustment is a thing in many of Gaia's tournaments. Mild powers has, more or less, been the calling card for Gaia's tournaments ever since about 2007/2008 onward. That being said, I personally promote any kind of event, provided it's run well by someone who doesn't have their head up their ass. People complain about no killing? Make your own event. Don't like mild powers? Make your own event. Want to do tag-team tournaments? Make it happen. The biggest issue in the quasi-fractured community on Gaia is that we lack in leadership. Lots of Indians, few chiefs, and a lot of people who just want to piss and moan about the color of the feathers on the headdress without putting it on.

For unrestricted combat, we have Kharessos, which will be revamped shortly whenever I find someone capable of running a separate thread solely for arena combat. I, unfortunately, haven't the time to do so while also running/revamping the seasons and pursuing my own personal projects and hobbies (cooking 3,500+ calories of fruit, veggies, eggs, and chicken takes a lot of work, as does touching base with agents and editors). I realized that too late after making Kharessos, so Kharessos will be filtered down to "seasonal story shit" and another thread will be made solely for fights, where players are only limited by what they mutually agree to.

[Absolis]

Busy balancing out a character. I have quite a few, but they are quite powerful

[Doc Doctor]

Here's my character list, as small as it is. Just a reminder that I'm up for a match anytime, with any of my characters!

http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/87852-docs-gnarly-characters/ooc#post-3105991

[ImportantNobody]

Here's my character list, as small as it is. Just a reminder that I'm up for a match anytime, with any of my characters!

http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/87852-docs-gnarly-characters/ooc#post-3105991

@Doc Doctor

Maybe I should fight Kentucky Tomb with my universal butt monkey character, a magical girl who has outgrown that stage.

[Divinity]

Magical girl you say? Show me this character!

[Divinity]

@AbsolisHey there! You may recall me from the MAW rp. Id take on one of your more powered characters. Corban is considered one of the heavier hitters of this arena.

[Absolis]

@Doc Doctor

Alright, I'll remember that, but for now...

(i'll also be borrowing from your character sheet to format mine)

@Divinity

I do indeed remember you. And, I have a character all picked out and ready. An alternate version though, to keep you on your toes

Also, this character can probably be used for both the three way mentioned, and a battle against Corban. I would just have to have her lose the weapon, and she already doesn't use her other abilities all that much, so her not using them would be easilt explainable

Cyano Conablum

Name: Cyano Conablum
Gender: Female
Age:33
Height: 6'1
Weight: Why would you ask this...(150 Lbs)
Boxing reach: 79.6 inches
Race: Human
Class: Mageknight? Magerogue?
Allignment: Chaotic Neutral

Weapons and Equipment:

The Cleaver: Cyano only has one main weapon, a sword known as The Cleaver. Weighing roughly 200 pounds, it is incredibly sharp, but heavy and slow to swing. On top of it's immense power, it also slightly enhances the wielders endurance and magical ability. Though, only to a small extent.

Swiftness Pendent: A pendent Cyano wears, that enhances her speed. The change is noticeable enough.

Illusion ring: Enhances and empowers her illusion magic by a great deal, making her illusions more potent and damaging

Abilities:

The real meat of Alternate Cyano's power, besides her physical prowess, is her abilities

Illusion Magic: Cyano's most powerful magic, enhanced by her ring. With Illusion magic, Cyano has the ability to steal ones sight for a short time, throw their sense of direction into the wind, causing them to stumble around wildly, summon an illusion clone to help her fight, take the form of someone else, make it seem as if she has disappeared into the background, and, her most powerful ability...

Cyano forces the target into a stat of immobility, and buffets them with illusions of immense pain. At the cost of also requiring her to be immobile, and an immensely long cooldown before she can use it again.

Lightning Magic/hellstorm magic: Cyano is capable of mixing darkness and lightning magic, to create a certain magic called hellstorm. Hellstorm magic is red, and arcing. As befitting a magic derived from lightning. Overall, there is nothing too special about it. Summoning lightning, striking an opponent with it, etc, etc, except for one very important thing. With hellstorm, she has three powerful spells. One, shoots lightning out in four directions. Stunning anyone close by, and arcing between targets. The second, is an ability to teleport with a short cooldown. It has a slightly limited range, but within that range she could be anywhere. The final one, is an aura. She surrounds herself in the red lightning, enhancing her physical strength and magical prowess. The aura also adds a secodary shocking attack to her melee attacks, and will cause small shocks to anyone that physically touches her.

Darkness magic: Cyano's darkness magic is rarely used, and for good reason. In comparison to her other magics, it is her weakest. The only spell of note being corruption. Which coats the ground in dark magic, and causes damage to anyone who steps in it, excepting the user.

Weaknesses:

While Cyano's magic may seem powerful, it was built on practicality, rather then combat prowess. On top of that, her natural affinity towards magic is weak, thus the potential damage for many of her spells are low. Indeed, the only one to truly watch out for is her illusion magic.

On top of that, her mana reserves are low. Her illusion magic and hellstorm teleport do not put too much of a strain on her mana, everything else does.

Background:

Cyano is very much shaped by her experiences. Starting with nothing, Cyano could have been called a common thug, up until the day she was captured and enslaved by a particular cult, starting her on her path. That event led to her setting up her group, the Illusionaries, started her on the path towards Darkness magic and hellstorm, and led to her being one of the major players, even if not many people knew it.

-Theme music

[ImportantNobody]

Magical girl you say? Show me this character!

@Divinity

More like magical young woman now. XD

The sheet isn't typed up yet. Maybe in a couple of days to a week. I still need to come up with my characters for the other fights.

[Enki]

I was starting to try to get into the thing on gaia, but I quickly realized it was missing the fun element. I could have easily tweaked my profile for it to work with just a few more minor changes but it hit me... I'd just be doing it because I was bored and instead of doing un-fun things to fill my boredom I could just play a few games or so and wait till more fun things pick back up.

[LeeRoy]

You ever notice how we all congregate to the chat thread, talk a lot, even pitch fights. But when push comes to shove, we're not that active of a board?

I mean it's weird, Skallagrim starts a thread and everyone flocks to it like flies to shit.
Rilla starts a thread and boom we're crawling on it like maggots on meat.

But anyone else? Death sentence from day one.

WHy is that?

[MelonHead]

You ever notice how we all congregate to the chat thread, talk a lot, even pitch fights. But when push comes to shove, we're not that active of a board?

I mean it's weird, Skallagrim starts a thread and everyone flocks to it like flies to shit.
Rilla starts a thread and boom we're crawling on it like maggots on meat.

But anyone else? Death sentence from day one.

WHy is that?

@LeeRoy

They made the Arena what it is on RPG, basically built it up from the ground-up. Most if not all of the people who've been here for over a year have participated in things run by one of those two before, some only started Arena combat because of them.

Point being, they've earned their reputation, vulgar analogies aside, and most people respect them for it.

Let's face it, there aren't that many of us congregating in this chat thread anymore, there's maybe, three regulars still around, that's it. At its peak this chat had maybe ten to fifteen people in it regularly. Sometimes losing the Old Guard is beneficial, but evidently that wasn't the case in this community.

I suppose there might have been other reasons, but it seems like the drop-off of player-base directly correlated with Skallagrim and Rilla's absence, perhaps alongside the inevitable decline after the sharp peak brought about by the new ranking system. Though I suppose you'd have to ask those people personally why they're not interested any more to know for sure.

[Darth]

The biggest problems are a) a lack of traffic and b) a lack of organization. There's the ranking system, sure, but there's nothing really promoting fighting. New faces come in once in a blue moon, but there's no structure to keep them around or to "remind" them to check in. You can "just" have a lot of fights if you have a good population and can steadily bring people in (even if they pop in and out) but if you don't, you need to have some kind of a lure. Just having a handful of people who sometimes, sort of, maybe fight isn't enough. It can be frustrating because it's kind of the work/experience or chicken/egg thing. You have to work to get experience, but you have to have experience to get a job. You have to have a population to have fights, but you have to have fights to have a population.

Gaia has a similar problem in maintaining a PERSISTENT community, but we also have the advantage of a lot of cross communication across several dozen individuals. Someone can clap their hands and shout "FIGHTING EVENT AHOY!" and people will crawl out of the woodworks. People message each other over Skype or Discord, or even text each other whenever it happens.

Skalla and Rilla get a lot of immediate attention when they try to host something for a few reasons. A) They've been around a while, and havce run things in the past with varying degrees of success and B) like Melon said, they basically worked to build the Arena subforum from the ground up.

I think the drop-off has a lot to do with the change-over from Old Guild to New Guild. Fighting, overall, has seen a decline since about 2011, which is probably a mixture of people getting older and the changing technology. Back in 2007, not everyone had Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, and a dozen mobile games on their phone. For a big chunk of the 2000s, the whole "forums" thing was a novel concept because most people didn't know about Usenet. You're always going to have roleplaying, but you can't just walk two paces and trip over a brawler anymore. You have to find them and then reel them in and get them involved.

Chat fighting has been dying a slow, ugly death for a decade. Forum RP has more sustainability, but only if people can commit to it.

[ImportantNobody]

@Divinity

More about my magical girl character. I'm torn between two ideas, each with it's own humor to it. The first possibility is that the magical girl mascots, the cute animals who guide magical girls, get sued for child endangerment and are forced to re-recruit past magical girls who are now over 18 years old. The second possibility is that it's only this character getting re-recruited at an older age due to reasons, which is funny in the fish out of water sense, her standing in a line-up towering over the other magical girls and all awkward like she's babysitting. The fish out of water doesn't work as well in the first option if everyone is a fish out of water.

She is a chain smoker, curses, and tries to act cool so is embarrassed about her past cutesy antics, staring in commercials and such that everyone brings up upon hearing her name so she feels she's not taken seriously. And now she has to relive her magical girl days and, by instinct, keeps summoning her original clothing way too small for her, further adding to the problem. She does accept her role eventually but slacks off in the meantime.

I need to make this into a manga...

[Alphakoka]

@ImportantNobody
The second one seems more entertaining.

As for reasons, why not have it that the Dark threat acts mostly like those we got in circulation and the magical girls were contracted specifically to counter that specific threat but sometimes you get the ones who wises up and gone into hiding (with all the power ups from seasonal progress). Then they re-emerge years later and beat back the new magical girls contracted to fight them because they got more power ups and few years of build up compared to the newbies. Finally, the mascots realize that the Dark threat was an old foe so they get into contact with the old magical girl.
:v

As for me not being around here much: Warframe is fun. :v

[ImportantNobody]

@ImportantNobody
The second one seems more entertaining.

As for reasons, why not have it that the Dark threat acts mostly like those we got in circulation and the magical girls were contracted specifically to counter that specific threat but sometimes you get the ones who wises up and gone into hiding (with all the power ups from seasonal progress). Then they re-emerge years later and beat back the new magical girls contracted to fight them because they got more power ups and few years of build up compared to the newbies. Finally, the mascots realize that the Dark threat was an old foe so they get into contact with the old magical girl.
:v

As for me not being around here much: Warframe is fun. :v

@Alphakoka

By "they", do you mean the dark threats got the power ups and went into hiding, because the way it's worded it seems like the past magical girls powered up and went into hiding to beat newbie magical girls later. I'm assuming it goes like, "dark threat grew powerful but so did past magical girls, so the dark threat knew they couldn't beat those magical girls so hide until those magical girls got too old and new girls came in who were ill prepared".

My magical girl was one of the greatest prodigies of her time, so it would make sense why she was one the one to be brought back. Perhaps the other ones can't fulfill their obligation because my girl is the only one who's magical wand survived the years. She didn't want to admit she kept it in her attic so said she destroyed it. Meanwhile, the other magical girl's wands were destroyed or stolen by the forces of evil because they were more prominently placed. It will take a long time to replace theirs so it's up to mine to be the sole one able to respond in time. In later chapters she could reunite with old battle buddies and it could turn more from a comedy to an epic storyline as they get new outfits that actually fit them and look cool.

The "child endangerment" plotline could also be in effect once the dark threat proves that magical girls can be defeated, as in the past magical girls were vastly superior to all monsters so it wasn't considered endangerment until now. Maybe the children could band together and have a moment to shine as they show up in the nick of time to help out at some point. They could be the next generation of magical women in the sequel series and the main girl would then be like a mentor who could treat her duties seriously.

Yeah...I'm seriously planning a web comic for this now. Somehow it's turning out more epic then I imagined her first being as just a cosmic butt monkey.