I view being the owner of a league to being like the director of a movie. You have people playing parts and you have to be in charge where they are going.
First of all is figuring out how I see a character and how the handler sees them, this is where I really like to have have a talk with the handler and get their view of what the character is like and if I see them that way.
Take Jack '7-10' Hudgins for example. Barry and I came up with the gimmick just out of the blue, I pitched the idea of a bowling gimmick because Barry loves to bowl. We got into the details and '7-10' was born.
Now Barry's Rp's for 7-10 were kind of nutty, and that's the feel I had for the guy, I know Barry was aiming for a little more cynical and jaded, but my take on him was that he's basically a broken street person (Since he can't or won't pay 4.25 for a string) who's now in LVW, fighting the ghost of his double gutterball loss to Walter Ray Williams.
Barry and I had a few more talks about it and we're now pretty much on the same page, which is where you want to be. If I know how to use your character I feel safer in doing stuff with him, I may start just throwing together segments on LVW with people who's gimmicks I feel I know (Olvir, Donovan, Bellmoth, etc.)
I had the sad news that the guy who Rp'ed Rich Andrews was leaving the fed cause he didn't have time to do two leagues, which sucked because his character description for Andrews was so spot on perfect for what LVW is about, a failed E-list celeb wrestling in his high school singlet that he's 40 pounds to heavy for, that's LVW in a nutshell. He did tell me to keep using Andrews, so I'll have to add him to my list of gimmicks.
My vision of LVW is that if it was a real company, it would be about two steps below Ring of Honor, like if you really made it in LVW, you would get to another, somewhat bigger, indy fed, and from there, you might get to ROH and so on. So how I explain Olvir in EPW, well, maybe Dan Ryan and/or Lindsay Troy just decided they really liked the Viking Porn Star and had to have him.
I always want to talk to my handlers and just get info from them and let them know how I see their characters, I've been in so many leagues, almost all of them 'smacktalk' leagues where Rp is judged and you win/lose and I've heard the owner of the fed state that they didn't want people molding their characters to the ideas of the owner 'just to win'...But I mean really, in leagues like that, it's really hard to have much fun if you're constantly losing, and in reality a lot of 'improving' in Roleplaying is trying to find common ground with the person who's judging your Rp. I mean there is universal things like giving more details of your characters backstory, showing how your character reacts in certain situations, etc etc, but if the way you handle your character just doesn't jive with the owner's vision of him, then odds are you're going to lose a match or two because the owner just doesn't 'get' what you're trying to do...
Of course I say this as a guy who rammed a Garbage quoting jerk down the throats of Efedding. So what do I know?
As for booking this week. It's kind of hard when everyone does the same amount of Rp's and I don't have any real storylines to follow, so it was really a week of just trying to figure out what's best to do in each match as best I could.
I did the DQ with 7-10 and Dakota cause I really felt like Hudgins would do that, the character doesn't really get the whole wrestling thing, and I almost feel like he thinks he's being attacked or mugged, and that he'd react by grabbing his bowling ball and going to town on people. I gave Dakota the high number mostly because he did two Rp's and I'd already screwed him out of getting a pinfall victory, so I should make it up to him somehow.
Super Spade Vs J1D was kind of interesting because theyboth did one Rp and they also both had done a storyline Rp before hand, which I love, anytime people just write stuff to introduce/build a character or start an angle with them, that's great with me. In the end I just felt like Super Spade's Rp for the show had a little more weight to it then J1D's...It was close, which is why I did the 15/16 draw after the match, along with the 'controversy' over the pin.
Andrews Vs Olvir was kind of ruined by the fact that the Andrews Rp man told me he was leaving, I tried to tell the story of Andrews just out wrestling Olvir before being overpowered. It would have not been nearly as clean and crushing a result if Andrews had said he was sticking around. I gave him #2 mostly because someone has an angle with #1 and I want to build off that, my big challenge with Olvir was to give him a number that allows me to have some flexibility, since 15-16 will most likely be a J1D/Spade fight with others around, putting him a little away from them gives that storyline of the High Stakes Battle Royal to play out before Olvir comes in like a whirling dervish.
A-Rod Vs Donovan was kind of a Godbook, as the point of the A-Rod character is he's amazingly talentled but he blows it come crunch time, and thusly his ill-fated moonsault leading to defeat, Miller had already been told about my idea for A-Rod and The Captain as reguards to the High Stakes Battle Royal, so I hope there won't be any problems with the booking of the match, and again, I had to space out Donovan and Olvir, who are my two big stars at the moment.
Of course I'm going into the High Stakes Battle Royal with an open mind and if somebody comes out of left field with a angry Chicago Cubs fan who can't believe the White Sox have gotten a title and a President ahead of them, and is gonna crush LVW for the glory of the North Siders, and it just knocks my socks off (Sox?) then he'll be rocking the deep red strap with the spinner on it at the end of the night, but I have to have a plan for what I can expect for the show.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
LVW booking and effort
As I cross my fingers and hope that either Johnny Doll or one of the 'maybes' I've gotten on the hook for LVW signs up so I can get the next card posted. I wanted to talk about my mindset for booking when it comes to LVW.
I want to book things such that the payoff is at the next 'big show', LVW isn't likely to ever go to PPV, but it will book a slightly bigger building for it's monthly big events. It's there that I want the big time events going down.
Is this to say I'm changing the LVW Title every big show? Of course not, and will I move the belt during the small shows? Yeah, I will do that now and then.
But the basic idea is the old school WWE plan of 'what do we want to do at Mania and booking backwards to get to that moment." only we're not looking quite that far ahead...But I wouldn't have a problem if somebody came to me with a really long term angle that I thought could be pulled off...
What I'm looking for is something that lets me write a bunch of segments over the course of a series of shows, giving me content I know is leading somewhere.
And just Rp...Rp'ing is good...:)
I want to book things such that the payoff is at the next 'big show', LVW isn't likely to ever go to PPV, but it will book a slightly bigger building for it's monthly big events. It's there that I want the big time events going down.
Is this to say I'm changing the LVW Title every big show? Of course not, and will I move the belt during the small shows? Yeah, I will do that now and then.
But the basic idea is the old school WWE plan of 'what do we want to do at Mania and booking backwards to get to that moment." only we're not looking quite that far ahead...But I wouldn't have a problem if somebody came to me with a really long term angle that I thought could be pulled off...
What I'm looking for is something that lets me write a bunch of segments over the course of a series of shows, giving me content I know is leading somewhere.
And just Rp...Rp'ing is good...:)
Monday, March 9, 2009
Writing Stevens/First
I've gotten some praise for the Stevens/First match, so I figured I'd just explain exactly how I tried to write the match and what kind of ideas I had.
Going into the match I really wanted Stevens to dominate the early going, no matter what booking I got from Brunk, (Well unless he said "First squashes Stevens like a bug, put yourself over huge, if you don't, you're out of the fed.") because First is supposed to not be at the level of Stevens. So the early going had to be Stevens just controlling things.
After the first missed X-Factor I wanted Stevens to go to plan B, which was to ground The First and start wearing out the smaller man, rest holds are boring as hell to watch, but you can bang them out in a couple lines and get to the next event, so it's generally not that bad to write about.
Then I had Stevens hit a series of moves to get some two counts, show that First isn't going to just die off, build a little bit of anger for Stevens that this thing isn't ending so quickly. Then we hit the turning point where The First gets control and he starts getting near falls. Now I'd have done this again no matter what the booking of the match was. (Except again if Brunk had told me "Stevens crushes First")
Now the thing that kind of blew my mind was that Brunk really wanted to get First over as a legit threat to Stevens, where as my booking was that of a pretty much scumbag cheat stealing the belt. Having not Rp'ed a strong character since Carlos Canyeta back in the days before gunpowder was discovered, this is a new idea to me. Bloodhunt was a cheat, Doc's the biggest cheat alive, the Forsaken have been pretty heelish, so like, Brunk's view of where the match would go and mine were different by a good margin. I was gunning for First to win the title, Brunk was looking to give First credibility.
Cause I never would have had First hit his finisher on Stevens and get a pin that wasn't counted by the ref, never would have crossed my mind to even think to do that. As a matter of fact my angle for the match was "If First wins the title, I want Stevens to kick out of the Cut The Thread." I was booking for a Doc-ian screwjob, Brunk was trying to get himself a contender.
Now The First (I keep switching between "First" and "The First" that's always gonna be something in my head, maybe Stevens is right and I should just call him Brian) hitting his finisher on Stevens and covering without a ref there. I felt this was out of character for The First, who views wrestling matches as a black/white 'win/lose' ideal. I was watching ECW's One Night Stand from 2006 and when RVD frog splashed Cena, he didn't cover him, he raced over to Nick Patrick to wake him up to count the fall, and I feel like First would have done the same thing, so I had to work out why he'd go for a cover, and my answer to that was to have the ref in a state of limbo, slumped against the ropes. First has to cover cause Pat Jones *could* be awake enough to count the pin. I justify First's counting of the fall himself after Jones crashed to the mat as the actions of a young gothtard who's throwing a pity party for himself after getting screwed out of the title.
Now with Brunk's booking I would have finished the match with First trying to wake up the ref and getting X-Factor'ed into a pin, because at that point we'd basically done everything that the match was designed to do, get The First over as a guy who can beat Stevens, and now Stevens retains, but Brunk put in my own angle so I run with it.
For the storyline of the match I wouldn't have used the mist/ultra-cheating cradle, but it fits First completely, cause he's totally amoral about actions in the ring, cause all that matters is winning. He doesn't plan to screwjob anyone or anything, but he just lives by the mindset that 'it's only cheating if you get caught'
When I got the match, the card was late enough already so I wasn't going to try to pick apart details of the match and try to get revisions and rewrites, cause that would have been pretty absurd, double so because I was thrilled with the booking, cause having a strong in-ring character is something I've seldom had, now I just have to resist ruining his cred with my own paranoid angles.
One final note is that Sean Stevens' T-Shirt he wore on his way to the ring was most likely the toughest thing to write in the whole match, I have become Jamarian (JN not JS) detail freak in my intros and I really hate, hate, HATE it when I write up like a paragraph or two about my own guy and then I check the profile for the opponent and it doesn't have much or anything about what kind of outfit they wear to the ring, cause I feel like such a dirtbag writing out First's facepaint/Wrist tape/hair color/whatever the hell it is, and then I write something to the effect of "MUSIC UP: "Opponent's theme" Joe Blow wearing black trunks shambles to the ring to a loud chorus of boos." I just want to write like an OORP note under their intro saying "Please forgive me, I really don't know your entrance, I'm so sorry."
Thankfully Lindsay came up with an idea for the T-Shirt and I added a little extra to it and I was able to move on. Rest assured I wouldn't have written another line of the match until I had defeated that T-Shirt, I am deeply ill.
Going into the match I really wanted Stevens to dominate the early going, no matter what booking I got from Brunk, (Well unless he said "First squashes Stevens like a bug, put yourself over huge, if you don't, you're out of the fed.") because First is supposed to not be at the level of Stevens. So the early going had to be Stevens just controlling things.
After the first missed X-Factor I wanted Stevens to go to plan B, which was to ground The First and start wearing out the smaller man, rest holds are boring as hell to watch, but you can bang them out in a couple lines and get to the next event, so it's generally not that bad to write about.
Then I had Stevens hit a series of moves to get some two counts, show that First isn't going to just die off, build a little bit of anger for Stevens that this thing isn't ending so quickly. Then we hit the turning point where The First gets control and he starts getting near falls. Now I'd have done this again no matter what the booking of the match was. (Except again if Brunk had told me "Stevens crushes First")
Now the thing that kind of blew my mind was that Brunk really wanted to get First over as a legit threat to Stevens, where as my booking was that of a pretty much scumbag cheat stealing the belt. Having not Rp'ed a strong character since Carlos Canyeta back in the days before gunpowder was discovered, this is a new idea to me. Bloodhunt was a cheat, Doc's the biggest cheat alive, the Forsaken have been pretty heelish, so like, Brunk's view of where the match would go and mine were different by a good margin. I was gunning for First to win the title, Brunk was looking to give First credibility.
Cause I never would have had First hit his finisher on Stevens and get a pin that wasn't counted by the ref, never would have crossed my mind to even think to do that. As a matter of fact my angle for the match was "If First wins the title, I want Stevens to kick out of the Cut The Thread." I was booking for a Doc-ian screwjob, Brunk was trying to get himself a contender.
Now The First (I keep switching between "First" and "The First" that's always gonna be something in my head, maybe Stevens is right and I should just call him Brian) hitting his finisher on Stevens and covering without a ref there. I felt this was out of character for The First, who views wrestling matches as a black/white 'win/lose' ideal. I was watching ECW's One Night Stand from 2006 and when RVD frog splashed Cena, he didn't cover him, he raced over to Nick Patrick to wake him up to count the fall, and I feel like First would have done the same thing, so I had to work out why he'd go for a cover, and my answer to that was to have the ref in a state of limbo, slumped against the ropes. First has to cover cause Pat Jones *could* be awake enough to count the pin. I justify First's counting of the fall himself after Jones crashed to the mat as the actions of a young gothtard who's throwing a pity party for himself after getting screwed out of the title.
Now with Brunk's booking I would have finished the match with First trying to wake up the ref and getting X-Factor'ed into a pin, because at that point we'd basically done everything that the match was designed to do, get The First over as a guy who can beat Stevens, and now Stevens retains, but Brunk put in my own angle so I run with it.
For the storyline of the match I wouldn't have used the mist/ultra-cheating cradle, but it fits First completely, cause he's totally amoral about actions in the ring, cause all that matters is winning. He doesn't plan to screwjob anyone or anything, but he just lives by the mindset that 'it's only cheating if you get caught'
When I got the match, the card was late enough already so I wasn't going to try to pick apart details of the match and try to get revisions and rewrites, cause that would have been pretty absurd, double so because I was thrilled with the booking, cause having a strong in-ring character is something I've seldom had, now I just have to resist ruining his cred with my own paranoid angles.
One final note is that Sean Stevens' T-Shirt he wore on his way to the ring was most likely the toughest thing to write in the whole match, I have become Jamarian (JN not JS) detail freak in my intros and I really hate, hate, HATE it when I write up like a paragraph or two about my own guy and then I check the profile for the opponent and it doesn't have much or anything about what kind of outfit they wear to the ring, cause I feel like such a dirtbag writing out First's facepaint/Wrist tape/hair color/whatever the hell it is, and then I write something to the effect of "MUSIC UP: "Opponent's theme" Joe Blow wearing black trunks shambles to the ring to a loud chorus of boos." I just want to write like an OORP note under their intro saying "Please forgive me, I really don't know your entrance, I'm so sorry."
Thankfully Lindsay came up with an idea for the T-Shirt and I added a little extra to it and I was able to move on. Rest assured I wouldn't have written another line of the match until I had defeated that T-Shirt, I am deeply ill.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Aggresson 42, LVW, Olde Tymie Fun
I thought the Shawn Hart thing at the top of the show was cool, anything to get one's self some heat is always fun, I just hope that Hart is able to work forward with this for an angle or storyline that will get him some flow in the league.
Read the Omega/Tact match and was really confused because when I'd looked at the Rp thread I could have sworn that Omega had just buried Tact in Rp's, then I checked it again and saw one of them is named Starstruck and the other Starbreaker, and thusly my simple mind was overwhelmed. A good win for Anthology.
Straw with the usual excellent write up of Wells/Olvir, which again puts Anthology in the win coluimn and maybe gives them something to do with Olivr/Crimson Calling. How that all shakes out will be interesting.
Stalker now demands to not win the TV off Fusenhoff, which confuses me, cause I figured he was going over in this match due to the storyline, and why not take the TV title with it? Why have a third singles title if people are actively avoiding winning it? Then again I'm a belt whore, so what do I know...
The JA/Fuse storyline could be very interesting, a way back into the storylines for JA after his recent struggles.
I wrote up the Forsaken having to defend the tag belts next week, and the angle to get rid of evil cheaters from evil cheating in the World Title Match...
I also wrote the 3 way dance. I'd guess Anarky's just got himself stuck in the Westscott/Miles ordeal.
Cruise wins the IC Title in a big event for Anthology, I understand that the gimmick they are running has no set leader in Anthology, but I have a hard time wrapping my feeble brain around that concept. In a stable 4 deep or more, you kind of have to have somebody who's the de facto ruler of the roost, and to me right now that's Cruise, cause he's won the IC Title. I'm glad the Hart Omni-Title angle went off at the top of the show or else the angle might have stolen some of the heat off Cammy's big win and that would be lame having stablemates fighting each other for heat.
The main event ended up being sent to me and so all I can say about it was the booking make First look way stronger then I could have hoped for, so thanks management, and I hope my matches were good reads.
I'm trying to get LVW re-opened on FW.com. I sent a message to the Godfather about it, hopefully the tab comes up sometimes shortly. I'm unemployed, and my WoW guild leaves me weeping so I got nothing better to do then to start up the land of a thousand gimmicks again. I have ideas for a bunch of characters, so if anyone's interested about LVW, IM me at War on Eurasia on AIM or Stantonmjs on Yahoo.
Lastly a thread on the FW.com first quarter has been brutally threadjacked into a discussion of olde tymie FW. One thing that's come up is the "Mike Sparks Incident"...Where "X-Man" Michael Sparks shockingly won the UWA Random Rumble and inspired a great deal of QQ'ing (WoW term)
I think the real problem with the Sparks win wasn't so much that he won, but that the card was posted bit by bit, and that Jamar didn't post the Canyeta/Sparks main event. At the time, the Michael Manson's and Ares' of the world were legit main event contenders and all around bad-asses, they could have challenged for the UWA World Title and it would have been fine, now Michael Sparks? No way he's getting a title shot, he wasn't big time.
What Jamar was doing with the Rumble booking was establishing a new star in Sparks, but at the same time, keeping the belt on Canyeta (Who was my main event guy in UWA) , I think a lot of people would have been a lot more cool with the whole situation had the Canyeta/Sparks match been posted with the Rumble, it would have basically told the Main Eventers at the time "Look, I put this new guy over, I'm establishing him as a player, but I wasn't jobbing the champ, Canyeta was leaving the Rumble with the belt."
I mean, I can't really imagine anyone being upset about the fact that they lost the right to eat a Canyeta Cutter and finish the night with Canyeta holding the belt while they slinked back to the the locker room defeated. The thing was, by not posting it all at once, it led to a bunch of "Mike Sparks won?! ZOMG!!!!" and angry screaming and yelling, hooting and hollering, a lot of people at the time were messaging me telling that they would have been pissed if Canyeta jobbed to Sparks/Were pissed BECAUSE they wre convinced Canyeta was going to job to Sparks, etc etc.
I really feel that posting the Rumble and leaving the league in a state of abeyance over what was going to happen in the title match led to most of the butthurt and anger in the situation, cause winning the Rumble was only step 1...Step 2 was still a pretty big step...I can understand Jamar's reaction to the outrage and it sucks being a fed head to deal with drama, but I think a lot of it would have been muted if the main event had gone up with the Rumble.
Read the Omega/Tact match and was really confused because when I'd looked at the Rp thread I could have sworn that Omega had just buried Tact in Rp's, then I checked it again and saw one of them is named Starstruck and the other Starbreaker, and thusly my simple mind was overwhelmed. A good win for Anthology.
Straw with the usual excellent write up of Wells/Olvir, which again puts Anthology in the win coluimn and maybe gives them something to do with Olivr/Crimson Calling. How that all shakes out will be interesting.
Stalker now demands to not win the TV off Fusenhoff, which confuses me, cause I figured he was going over in this match due to the storyline, and why not take the TV title with it? Why have a third singles title if people are actively avoiding winning it? Then again I'm a belt whore, so what do I know...
The JA/Fuse storyline could be very interesting, a way back into the storylines for JA after his recent struggles.
I wrote up the Forsaken having to defend the tag belts next week, and the angle to get rid of evil cheaters from evil cheating in the World Title Match...
I also wrote the 3 way dance. I'd guess Anarky's just got himself stuck in the Westscott/Miles ordeal.
Cruise wins the IC Title in a big event for Anthology, I understand that the gimmick they are running has no set leader in Anthology, but I have a hard time wrapping my feeble brain around that concept. In a stable 4 deep or more, you kind of have to have somebody who's the de facto ruler of the roost, and to me right now that's Cruise, cause he's won the IC Title. I'm glad the Hart Omni-Title angle went off at the top of the show or else the angle might have stolen some of the heat off Cammy's big win and that would be lame having stablemates fighting each other for heat.
The main event ended up being sent to me and so all I can say about it was the booking make First look way stronger then I could have hoped for, so thanks management, and I hope my matches were good reads.
I'm trying to get LVW re-opened on FW.com. I sent a message to the Godfather about it, hopefully the tab comes up sometimes shortly. I'm unemployed, and my WoW guild leaves me weeping so I got nothing better to do then to start up the land of a thousand gimmicks again. I have ideas for a bunch of characters, so if anyone's interested about LVW, IM me at War on Eurasia on AIM or Stantonmjs on Yahoo.
Lastly a thread on the FW.com first quarter has been brutally threadjacked into a discussion of olde tymie FW. One thing that's come up is the "Mike Sparks Incident"...Where "X-Man" Michael Sparks shockingly won the UWA Random Rumble and inspired a great deal of QQ'ing (WoW term)
I think the real problem with the Sparks win wasn't so much that he won, but that the card was posted bit by bit, and that Jamar didn't post the Canyeta/Sparks main event. At the time, the Michael Manson's and Ares' of the world were legit main event contenders and all around bad-asses, they could have challenged for the UWA World Title and it would have been fine, now Michael Sparks? No way he's getting a title shot, he wasn't big time.
What Jamar was doing with the Rumble booking was establishing a new star in Sparks, but at the same time, keeping the belt on Canyeta (Who was my main event guy in UWA) , I think a lot of people would have been a lot more cool with the whole situation had the Canyeta/Sparks match been posted with the Rumble, it would have basically told the Main Eventers at the time "Look, I put this new guy over, I'm establishing him as a player, but I wasn't jobbing the champ, Canyeta was leaving the Rumble with the belt."
I mean, I can't really imagine anyone being upset about the fact that they lost the right to eat a Canyeta Cutter and finish the night with Canyeta holding the belt while they slinked back to the the locker room defeated. The thing was, by not posting it all at once, it led to a bunch of "Mike Sparks won?! ZOMG!!!!" and angry screaming and yelling, hooting and hollering, a lot of people at the time were messaging me telling that they would have been pissed if Canyeta jobbed to Sparks/Were pissed BECAUSE they wre convinced Canyeta was going to job to Sparks, etc etc.
I really feel that posting the Rumble and leaving the league in a state of abeyance over what was going to happen in the title match led to most of the butthurt and anger in the situation, cause winning the Rumble was only step 1...Step 2 was still a pretty big step...I can understand Jamar's reaction to the outrage and it sucks being a fed head to deal with drama, but I think a lot of it would have been muted if the main event had gone up with the Rumble.
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