Cyclops versus Wolverine
Back in college, I played a lot of tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire: The Masquerade, and Heroes Unlimited. The club I was part of started up a convention called Arcon during my last year of college. I created several games to run during the 3-day convention, but only one really stuck around after. Working with my roommate and another friend, I created ‘The Mutant Wrestling Federation’. Obviously, we were into pro-wrestling, mutants, and role-playing games.
We started simple with basic characters to do an elimination tournament. During the test of the game, we ran into several problems. One was that the fights took too long. Those not fighting got bored. The bigger problem was that people did whatever they wanted with the characters and ignored the small paragraph of background information. Enemies were best friends because the players were best friends. One guy kept putting on a referee shirt and rambled about wrestling Hitler, which are things we actually kept because they were hilarious. We quit the test when it became a chair-hurling melee.
How did we fix this? Here is where my insanity came in. I took a full weekend to make three page character sheets with allies, enemies, history, personality, fighting styles, and descriptions. I ended up creating a 50 year history of a sport federation that doesn’t exist and added characters that would appear over the years whenever I tried to do something with this. The tournament didn’t happen, so it became a group of 3 players acting out as a new wrestling faction. They loved the addition of theme music for each character and the comedy of my roommate’s depressive, indestructible referee that could get knocked out with a stiff breeze. Best line out of him:
“My wife left me and that bitch took the dog. Let’s get this over with so I can go back to crying.”
It was a fun project and I’ve lost close contact with my friends on this. I have all the papers somewhere and the sheets typed up on my computer. The big think is that I have no idea what to do with it. I had some lengthy plotlines, but writing a series where it takes place in a wrestling federation is rather boring. Even for me writing it. This is the same problem that I’m having with Ninja Never Wins. Both series deal primarily with fighting scenes and that can get boring. With NNW, I might be able to do it by following one fighter instead of all of them. Maybe even try my hand at first person perspective and keep it a novella or series of short stories. I’d go with John Chandler the guy put in jail by his wife’s assassin family and now he needs the money to de-brainwash her. I’m switching series here. Sorry.
I’m left with some hope for the MWF since one character rose up to snag an actual book series idea from my head. Maybe I’ll have all of them enter that series as allies and enemies. I have a lot and some already made the jump like Plague, Nemesis, Carbomb, and Princess. Time will tell I guess.
