Owner/Handler relations and booking

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.