What do you like most about a DBZ RPG?

[King B]

I think I voted for 1, but really I can see myself agreeing to any of the above choices.

For me personally, the series was something that made me start and the mythology helped me zero in on a background to develop my character where I could fully focus on developing my character instead of having to think about everything else around it.

However, I don't see myself finding it hard to adapt to any other framework as long as I'm familiar with it. I mean, even when I was canon, I developed a completely different character from what was originally in the series solely working off of the DBZ framework.

I would also be for a more realistic setting for an RPG. Something perhaps along the lines of DC/Marvel comics where we are allowed to have crazy abilities, but it still works around a "realistic" world. Or perhaps something "Matrix-y."

[Shun]

I'm familiar with DBZ. It's background, mythology and world have just become something that I enjoyed being surrounded in and/or being a part of. I didn't need to look at a map or read a description a thousand times just to get an idea of where my character would be standing. I didn't need to google images to understand the types or terrain there were.

That doesn't necessarily make it good anymore though. New is always scary but its just as exciting if it's well constructed. After reading these replies I find myself agreeing with some of them. The idea of everybody being a fighter IS silly. A new element might just be what is needed to inspire innovation and creativity.

Personally I like the idea of something designed similar to the comic books. That would allow the same diversity we've always hoped for with multi-genre sites or the hubb attempt while maintaining a certain level of continuity and reasonable restriction throughout the site as a whole as opposed to in sections.

[Jonathan Meer]

For my part, I've come to hate writing fights. Unfortunately, fighting is the sole focus of Chubbs' mechanics. The entirety of my character's value in the world is based on his/her's fighting prowess.

It's just dumb. It's two-dimensional, adolescent, and ultimately leads to repetitive drudgery.

[Sigfried Hunin]

What do you propose as another method of character improvement?

[Jonathan Meer]

By improvement, do you mean stat-based progression?

[Kaden]

I ran into the same thing as Meer. Fights get boring. I've written more fight scenes than anyone ever needs to write in their life and it just gets so old. I very quickly tried to create scenarios in which character development is happening and it just so happens that there is fighting going on.

Really, though, some of the RPs I'll remember most have nothing to do with fighting at all.

[Alexander Trafford]

If you're talking stat progression, then our current system rewards things other than fighting and fighting equally. Kaden could literally have his 9000 Combat Ability without ever writing a fight, if he chose to do so (that'd be weird, a right? a guy who's never fought having a COMBAT ability of 9000). The problem is that it's incredibly hard to write extensively about things that aren't related to conflict. Obviously you need some conflict in a storyline, and it's difficult to think of anything worth writing that doesn't culminate in combat as conflict. Especially considering that the success of this site is tied to group storylines. How hard would it be to get ten or fifteen people together to write stories that completely exclude fighting? I mean, our most popular sagas over the last ten years have been versions of Dante's Abyss - a storyline where you literally do nothing except fight.

I agree though, fighting can get boring if you don't combine it with other things. For instance, the main reason that I wrote as well as I did in DA09 was that every fight was fused with this emotional and spiritual struggle that my character was going through, and that was more compelling than the mechanical, physical movements.

I guess I wouldn't say that fighting is the sole focus of Chubbs anymore. I think that most of us want something more gratifying and compelling than entire posts that consist of nothing more than fight-writing, and by that i mean repeatedly writing solely about physical movements and conflict. You can see this in practically every post that you read now-a-days. The fight scenes incorporate more dialogue, more relationship intrigue, more emotional struggle, etc.

This is becoming a rambling mess, so I'll conclude in saying that, yes, writing strict fight scenes is immensely boring, but we all have the ability to combine that with other story elements, emotions, relationships, and various types of drama in the course of a story arc to make everything more interesting. I guess the problem is building those relationships and emotional struggles that make storylines really worthwhile is difficult and requires a lot of collaboration.

[Jonathan Meer]

It's difficult to think of anything to do except fight because the set of actions available to our characters in this game are all combat-based. The Abilities, the Techniques, the Custom Moves, each of the Stats: all of these things describe the way our characters participate in the world, and it's alllllllll fighting.

The fundamental structure of Chubbs is competitive. That kicked total ass, and I loved that for years. But now, I really couldn't be less interested. I want a non-competitive roleplay--one where I'm not writing for quantifiable rewards, or to improve the superiority of my character over other characters.

Which is not to say a world without conflict. Give us conflict. But the game mechanics should not bake it in as _the_ mechanism by which characters interact.

It's one of the main reasons I'm annoyed with Far Cry 3: it's a world that promises something more than strict violence, but as it turns out, the only mechanism by which I can interact with the world (shooting guns, skinning animals) is violence, and so my character is violent.

[Sigfried Hunin]

Ok, I can agree with you very strongly on that point. Characters should be rewarded on things other than direct competition and have something that makes them special other than violence. On the rails 100% with you there.

I do believe that there are a lot of ways we can take that, however. What other mechanisms would you like to see in a game that allows your character to interact? Social "skills"? Having special abilities that allow them to make certain kinds of interactions that other characters cannot? Perhaps access to areas, vehicles or some other privilege?

One of my millions of game projects (and one of the few I've actually completed) is a play-by-post system so I'd be very interested in seeing what kinds of interactions you and others would like to see having a "game" element added to.

[Jonathan Meer]

I'm not really interested in a game anymore. I just want to write with people sometimes. We can just start with that.

If we want to start adding game mechanics to flavor things up, I'm totes down for that, but it should always be in service of the story. That is, game mechanics as a means for enforcing rules about how the world works. But that shit's gotta be _light_. I don't have the energy or interest for something as involved as the Chubbs system.

[Sophia]

Since we're sharing, I can appreciate the overall sentiment of the past few posts.

However, having been forum hopping for the nearly two years that I've been away from the site, I can say definitively that I miss exactly what the past few people have grown tired of. xD Which is unfortunate. The character building aspect that Chubbs provided was an interesting motivation to keep posting. I like the non-competitive side of RP, and I'm still doing it, but I came back to investigate any possibility of salvaging what I found so enjoyable here. I wasn't heavily involved in anything before the turnover, but I really liked the period of time between the last FoF saga and...well, I guess I flamed out a little bit after the aforementioned Invasion saga.

I don't necessarily care about the fighting aspect, but the competitive side pushed me to get better. I absolutely contribute whatever talent I have to this site. Trading short posts with someone else on a traditional non-competitive roleplay site, while enjoyable, gets old after a while, especially if I get the feeling that nobody reads it. However, I feel like if we took away the "game" aspect, we'd lose...something. I can't really explain what I think would be lost, exactly, but that's my gut feeling.

Having said all of that, I wouldn't fight most of the broad ideas being thrown around if that's the overall sentiment. If there are multiple hubs born out of these discussions, then I'll toss in my support as much as I can. The purpose of this post was mostly to state my preference.

[Sigfried Hunin]

I'm not really interested in a game anymore. I just want to write with people sometimes. We can just start with that.

If we want to start adding game mechanics to flavor things up, I'm totes down for that, but it should always be in service of the story. That is, game mechanics as a means for enforcing rules about how the world works. But that shit's gotta be _light_. I don't have the energy or interest for something as involved as the Chubbs system.

Yeah, I dunno if any of you ever got a chance to review the system I had, but basically it was just a cycle of people writing together cooperatively, writing together competitively and then giving writing feedback. Participating in each of those actions would give you some sort of benefit (ie money, experience to buy techniques and competitive scores, or whatever other values you wanted to reward you felt like dolling out as an incentive to do each of those aspects).

I basically tried to highlight the aspects of cooperation that would help us learn how to write better, so there doesn't HAVE to be anything super rules heavy, it just gives people the option of involving themselves in the community more and therefore being rewarded for future interactions with that community.

I can post it again if anyone wants it.

[Celena]

I value 1, 3 and 6 in the same esteem. For me they all linked together when I first joined Chubbs. Voted number one though for the sake of picking.

I will admit that, despite everything, the mechanics of an RPG are far more important to me than the setting.

That's always been my opinion.

[Victoria]

I agree with most of what Sophia said.

I also have been forum hopping, or rather, I began to help run and maintain a forum where all you did was write with people. You built characters, interacted, there was some fighting, but it was really about the story...and then I got bored.

You can only do the same thing for so long before you need something else.

I wrote Victoria's story from the ground up, bare bones. I enjoyed the custom aspect. Honestly, if we went canon, I'd do it again only the character would be a well-known anime icon rather than someone I named personally. That was the thing...for a lot of people, the characters were just a name and face, we made them our own. It was cool.

I like DBZ writing for the story, the world, the basis for a grand idea. Victoria's story would never have come to light if not for this world that I put her in. All I have to do is change a few names and her story is really, for the most part, unique, but based off of such a cool thing.

Chubbs gave us a structure to build around. Stats were there for OOC means, but in character, I could use them to push and pull my character. I lost interest in the fighting. Yes, there were fights, but it was about the conflict and resolution rather than the competition for me.

Over the years I've found myself gravitating toward character development and social development than the game itself. As some of the people I've written with will have noticed (Kaden, Sophia, Sig) I gravitate toward the drama of a story and the situations more-so than combat and stats. Having combat ability was just a cool number for me to aim toward, I wanted to be at the top, so I wrote as much as I could to get there. It didn't mean I wanted to fight, or do anything like that, it meant that my character was then officially a badass IC.

I miss writing with great writers who want to craft a story. I miss building something with someone else. You can write with 50 semi-literate writers for a time, but they will never compare to the amount of talent that this site has generated. It's just a shame that we're all so tired. At least, that was my excuse.