WOW….just WOW….
After reading this thread I realize how much I have missed during my absence here.
Lots of good points brought up by SS(formerly Selene), Wy, Gaiden, Rep and Gale.
I have only two notes that pertain to almost everyone here.
1. You guys are all just too afraid to admit defeat!!
My first point is something that has been a problem in the Gunjin since many of the vets left oh so long ago. Many of you here have a tendency to continue a fight way past its prime, which in the end degrades the quality of the overall battle (I think I saw Wyborn bring this up a while ago as well). It’s like a great movie that comes out only to be hammered to hell by its unworthy sequels. The only difference is that the sequels come in the form of useless posts that usually entail some high end semantics like planet tossing. At some point in the fight you have to go back to page 1 (assuming it goes beyond page 1) and read the entire thing altogether. Many of us only look to the post that we are writing a response for, not taking into consideration the whole of the battle. In my earlier battles (the ones I had time to finish) I always did this to ensure that the battle was still entertaining and made some kind of logical sense. To that end, I found that many of my opponents had crafted wonderfully executed attacks that would have been cheap of me to come back and write off with some type of clever escape.
In those instances, after reading the entire battle I would judge the amount of free time I had left, how may other battles I had going on and whether or not I though this battle had reached a good point for it to end regardless if I was the victor or not. Many of the times I was able to recognize when one of my opponent had made a checkmate. It takes a certain level of skill for this to happen with out making it seem as if your character is not needlessly dying. In fact many of my defeats at the hands of people like Wyborn, LTS, SML, Iron Warrior, Zora, Gaiden, and Volvagia did well to enrich my status on the battlefield.
What ever respect and popularity I have in this forum isn’t because I won or I was the best writer, it was because when people read the fights I was in they were some what entertained. My opponents and I were never writing some drawn out soap opera between two immortals that were too stupid to realize neither of them could die. And that’s what a great deal of battles have become. One long Iliad of two immortals fighting endlessly into oblivion (some have even battled into oblivion then back into existence than back into oblivion again).
The only clear conclusion to the fight happens when one of the two writers can no longer think of any reasonable come back and simply ceases to post in the topic. They choose to let the topic die rather than admit defeat. This, above all else needs to change if we are to have fights that actually come to a conclusion instead of being left to rot on the pages of the Gunjin.
I’m not saying for everyone to run around and just give up three posts into a fight. Instead I want you guys to go back into some of the fights you thought you were doing pretty good in and read the whole damn thing. Try to find at which point (if any) the fight could have stopped and still have been a success. I’m sure some of you will find where one of your battles peaked and should have ended but didn’t and slowly degraded into ridiculousness being out done by ridiculousness.
Unless a battle is set in such a tone as where “silly” is the acceptable form of combat, you shouldn’t try and come up with far fetched ways of carrying your character through one more post in the hopes that your enemy will give up.
2. SHOW RESPECT FOR YOUR OPPONENTS DAMAGE !
I know some of us get hit with buildings, megaton explosions, comets, mountains, sex toys, but for the love of god people show you acknowledge it !!
And if you’re a good enough writer and you have the balls for it, show that it actually hurts you. Try and envision how cheap it would look if you got up every Saturday morning and watched your favorite cartoon super hero go through every episode where his attacks were completely useless against his enemies.
For those of you who do acknowledge damage but don’t respect the severity of what is dealt to you. I’m not letting you go thinking that just mentioning it is enough. Depending on what kind of damage is done, you have to show that it has a continued affect on your character some way. The more you get used to having your character act hurt the easier it will be to feel when the fight should be coming to a reasonable end. Now granted if your opponent is not doing this and is just going about posting uber mega doo doo posts, then screw the whole damage thing and F*** them up !!
But if you are fighting against an experienced writer who has talent and skill, show that you can work around what ever restraints they place on you (with in reason of course). Tax your ability to the limits….if they rip off your am…then find a way to battle with one arm while showing that not having the other arm is some kind of inconvenience. It sucks when you take an appendage from some one only to have them say some thing like “ AH– HA ! I didn’t need that arm anyways pppffftt”
Many of today’s writers deserve a little more respect for their attacks than is being given to them. I see so many awesome attacks that go unacknowledged by opponents because they fail to even act as if they are hurt. Or if they are hurt they are only wounded for the first three paragraphs or less, and by the end of the post have gone back to being A-OKAY.
The other points that SS made in this topic are being well handled by the rest of you. I just wanted to say a few things about those two areas that bug me to this day.