Next war discussion

[QuirkyTemplate]

so the war is pretty much over, right? Maybe in the future we should set certain time limits on chapters in the war, that way we avoid the 'going out with a wimper' effect that leaving it open like this has.

[LaughingTurtle]

It's all your fault quirk, should have posted more

~waves hands mysterious to distract people from looking at himself~

[Amos]

aw. this is a shame. can we start again? i have many ideas... well okay, three ideas:

• restricting the war to a single city/town, at least for a certain amount of time, in order to create more familiarity and "realsim" within the scenery/atmosphere
• two character maximum per writer, one of whom must somehow die at the end of the chapter (and a replacement created for the next chapter), thus encouraging vitality, suspense (at wondering who will live, and who wont'nt), and a healthy body count
• two teams of writers, each vieing for supremacy over the other, thus enhancing the warlike nature of the war. each team having a base of some sort. possibly one lone ranger/wildcard writer

basically what i think we should go for is more interaction and competitiveness in a smaller environment. i don't see it as being restricting at all. as always the only restriction would be our own creativity limits.

[Malcor Sylverwood]

Ah...the war...

Here's my problem with the war. And I don't mean to demean or belittle anyone's preferred writing style...but if I'm going to be able to get into writing again, it has to be a reasonably serious style. I just can't write in the same breathe as some of the silliness. So, maybe if we start up again, we do two worlds? One free for all, one more serious?

~shrugs~

-Malcor "Warrior" Sylverwood

[Apoc]

~agrees with malc~ I have no disdain for psillyness...but i would refrain from writing aloungside it...humour i feel is great, but psillyness just kills it for me to have any interaction...my thoughts on it have been written before and is till hold to them.

[QuirkyTemplate]

James (amos? psh! edit: but not psh in the bad way .. hey, if you're amos the that's cool too.), I think those are really good suggestions. In addition to that, I think we should do something about the time problems. Namely,

We need a consistent timeline for all characters.
I mean seriously now. I couldn't have been the only one that had difficulties with this. The chaos thing was an attempt to fix it logically, but even then everything still felt disjointed. I think that some kind of chronology should be given, and I think if we do something like 1 week = 1 day in the war, it will not only give everything some kind of consistency, but it will also motivate people to make posts.

Kind of 'forcing' people to post was vetoed last time because it stifles creativity, but I think it does the complete opposite. When you're forced to be creative-on-demand, you can do some pretty cool stuff after awhile. Back when I was in High School, the first people that lured me into this crazy world of writing forced me to write even when I didn't feel 'inspired to' or what have you. It eventually became a kind of second nature to just ... write it. I've lost a lot of that ability since I stopped writing with them, but much of it is still there. I mean, so what if now and again the post is garbage and uninspired, at least you're getting better. And with a site name like enchantedquill, I don't think it's an unfair thing to do.

So my proposed solution is that one real week = one war-world day. A couple obvious problems:
1. Not very realistic timeline for a war (one month is only 4 days ... we'd have to play for ten years to get anything close to a useful timeline)
2. If you have a character that needs to take up a lot of time doing one thing (is training, is injured, is imprisioned), you're pretty much out of luck.

So we'd have to tweak the time
-maybe each real-life month we can have a speed-round week where each real day = war day, or
-each war-week there is a gap for a month of time where we just assume a month of time has passed and continue writing our characters as if this were so, or
-both of the above, where we spend one week writing as normal (week=day), then a speed week(day=day), then a month gap, then back, or
-some other option ... ?


No offense taken malc I didn't mean to write Tak as silly; if you read his character profile he doesn't seem very silly there. However, I suppose I just write that way naturally. I wasn't silly with Isaac, but he was much harder for me to write ... and that possibly showed. But I can write characters that aren't always silly ... or at least only have their moments of sillyness.

[Amos]

agreed quirk, this is a big issue. time was ridiculous in the last war. another option might be to simply be specific about the time our posts occur. allow me to elaborate with the help of these snazzy bullet points:

• make it compulsory to label posts with a specific beginning and end-time, therefore ensuring almost zero confusion about when events occur.
• the intoductory post (to the chapter) would establish the beginning time and date (i.e 1.00PM, Warday the 9th of Warmonth, Year Zero).
• a seperate thread to be created listing the posts in chronological order (beginning post times), so it would be easy to check up on things

the biggest problem would be trying to realistically determine how much time passes in the course of your post. and also it does lack the motivational aspect of the one day=one week system. i don't know if they could work in conjunction... possibly things would get over-complicated... which might be worse than what we had.

that's the only solution i have. i'd be quite happy with mr. quirk's system

James (amos? psh! edit: but not psh in the bad way .. hey, if you're amos then that's cool too.)

[Tatum]

Hmm, I'd be up for another round in the wars...even with all this new fandangled fancy stuff you guys are coming up with. Just point me in the right direction and tell me to post by Tuesday and I'll follow like a good little sheep. As for the sillyness, I'm not going to pretend you weren't referring to some of my posts. I'm like Quirk, I can go either way (haha, so many connotations there but I shall not digress). I think the way anybody writes is a matter of opinion and style, so to exclude one or the other (sillyness vs. seriousness) is just unfair and a bit ellitist. Don't misread me, I did not call ANYBODY here ellitist...I just think that there is room enough in these stories for both. In the wars on .org we had huge storylines going ranging from deeply dark to ridiculously hilarious. I mean for goodness sake, we had Scooby Doo make a suprise visit during the Plague! If you don't want to write silly, then don't, if you don't want to write serious, then don't. Thats the great thing about creativity, you can just about adapt to anything. I personally like to switch back and forth. Sometimes Moni was reciting lines from Titanic, sometimes she was trying to slice Dorian into little tiny pieces. Being free to write how I wanted was part of what made it so fun. My suggestion is to have each person post how they want their character to be interacted with. Like if we were starting this today, I would know that if my character were to interact with Malcor or Apoc's characters, they would prefer that I did it on a more serious level. Whereas with Quirk, we'll I'd just depants his character and run away.

I'd also like to make the suggestion that we limit the posts to a certain size. The wars I've been in before moved VERY fast and that was because the posts were kept smaller. This allowed more characters to interact and it forced the writers to be more creative because things did not always go the way that they wanted. I think the previous wars got a bit lengthy. We all posted almost complete short stories as our posts and that made it too hard to interact.

Just my two cents.

Umm...can I have that 2 cents back when you are done with it? I could sure use some MnM's.

[Apoc]

hmmm, I suppose the time being totally skrewed up was my bad...but it was only my attempt to keep the story moving aloung instead of being grounded...its obviously gonna get skrewed when someone attempts to move the story aloung and attempt a faster pace then nearly everyone else revert back to their incomplete storylines after months have passed and the one whose attempted to keep it going has moved on somewhat and is either left with having to wait months for others to carch up or just continue in the future of everyone elses stories ~shrugs~

my suggestion for a new war would be to have characters created by members into specific roles of importance-king, queen, knight, general, warrior, assassin, mage, tavern owner, librarian etc etc or something rather where a character is very much the writers person ie: could be a drunk, a whore, a washed up hero, a farmboy...but has a purpose you know in the overall picture...

and i really like the idea of group writing....my other suggestion would be to have two cities, i'm thinking the likes of Athens and Sparta and the Pelopanesian Wars kinda deal...two groups of writers, two cities...a war brewing...but i guess thats just me heh ~shrugs and walks away~

[Darth Everhate]

How do I get involved in this little shin-dig??

[Tatum]

You send me $99.95 and the deed to your first home and I'll send you a starter kit!

OR...you could just stay tuned to this area of the board and when a new war starts, jump right in.

Though to be perfectly honest, you should go with option number one. I need some new clothes...er....I mean...the starter kit is a HUGE help.

[Darth Everhate]

You send me $99.95 and the deed to your first home and I'll send you a starter kit!
OR...you could just stay tuned to this area of the board and when a new war starts, jump right in.
Though to be perfectly honest, you should go with option number one. I need some new clothes...er....I mean...the starter kit is a HUGE help.

I'm kinda short on cash (which is y I won't be at quillfest)
How 'bout pictures of Chrono in compromising positions!

[Tatum]

Wait, Chrono in compromising positions IS the starter kit. How did you get a hold of it? Damn it!! There goes my pyramid scheme.

P.S. I'm missing Quillfest to for the same reason. And I'm one of the ORIGINAL members!! *sobs*

[LaughingTurtle]

• make it compulsory to label posts with a specific beginning and end-time, therefore ensuring almost zero confusion about when events occur.
• the intoductory post (to the chapter) would establish the beginning time and date (i.e 1.00PM, Warday the 9th of Warmonth, Year Zero).
• a seperate thread to be created listing the posts in chronological order (beginning post times), so it would be easy to check up on things

Heh reminds me of the show 24...

"The following takes place between 4:00 AM and 5:00AM"

I do like the idea of narrowing the focus of the war, as in a single or two cities at the most. Bloomingdale was a quasi hub for the last war but it didn't work out as well considering there was so much more to the "world" and people did try to spread things out a bit. Hopefully there would be more opportunities for character interaction in such a small arena. Though I'm not too hot for forcing characters into specific roles, sorry apoc heh . I'd much rather let people grow into whatever roles they wanted and it would avoid conflicts of say three people wanting to be king or whatever. (not that we couldn't do it, just variety is the spice of life...)

Additionally, I would be in favor of the idea of having two separate wars if it would mean more people would write. While I do enjoy silliness, there has to be moderation or it does somewhat disrupt the flow of some serious storylines. Both can be based in the same world, though parallel dimensions or whatever. One can have the strict timeline thus forcing people to keep to a writing scheduling and being tailored to more hardcore writers and the other can be a looser, with posters specifying the times when events occur for their character with more zaniness allowed.

I dunno…

[Tatum]

The problem I see with making two different storylines (one for silly and one for serious) is that we would be spreading ourselves too thin and frankly, we would be dividing ourselves into two groups...which would completely defeat the purpose of writing together. DOWN WITH SEGREGATION I SAY! Okay seriously, I hate the idea of separating the two. If I have to choose one or the other in order to participate then its not worth it to me. Writing with other people means that you have to accept what they bring to the table. If you want to write with your own rules and limits, then write by yourself. This has always been my opinion on this matter. Serafella tried to do something like this years ago. Anyone remember that?