Re: Greetings
Alright. Here's my assessment of "Chapter 00: Sandbox"
It played similar to the Cell games in DBZ. You had 1 on 1 fights in an arena with everyone else standing by and watching. The only thing making that different from any other DBZ fight, of course, is the fact there was an arena. But a key element that happened here that makes me happy is no meta-gaming. The whole thing went along fine, if a bit extended. But the extension was because of a number of factors that I believe should never be dropped from RP, but one factor I might consider dropping:
1) I've formed a good habbit of not dragging OOC into IC. This includes OOC feelings about a scenario or OOC knowledge that my character doesn't know IC. SO... When Raichel tried to shoot Blake with some energy, she not only found out that he wasn't as immune to damage as she thought, but she couldn't kill Blake by blowing his head off. However, she was afraid of using lightning on him because she figured she could actually kill him and she came too close. So this made Raichel hesitant to "finish the job" (especially since as her charsheet shows, she prefers sticking with Martial Arts when she can).
2) Darkthorne wound up looking for a seat, sure, but didn't conveniently sit with one of the people he met at the gateway. This was partly due to the fact everyone decided to find seats rather than socialize, lest they miss the show (and oocly, to get things moving). However, the main reason Darkthorne wrote his char out of the chapter was he made Blake for Raichel. Which was a fight that took forever. So this was kinda something that just happened, but can be avoided in the future.
3) In a realization of how my "royal" alts would react to this scenario, I wound up having Rai, Alexis AND Timothius all show up. :\ It was a natural order of things. But wound up with a mountain of poses and as Darkthorne pointed out, they were people his char couldn't exactly interact with. That said, I'd like to once again throw the offer out there for any of my players to grab a royal alt. I don't mind controlling all the royalty of the universe, save 2, but it would be more fun for those scenarios if we had other players playing royal types. It's a different kind of fun, sure, but still...
4) I tried to make more things happen during the fight, but I should have realized it was, in fact, just an arena fight.
All that said, we need to take a break from the arena. So I'm starting a new chapter. Arena fights will be open at the fire kingdom for future fights, but it will be treated as a separate RP for purposes of moving the plot along. Now to type an opening scene... *goes to type up the new chapter*