Viewpoint What makes a good Battle Academy.

[Malphaestus]

I am not known for my ventures, or any involvement whatsoever, into the proposed genre of battle academies, nor do I have much involvement in any battle-driven stories throughout my tenure as a writer. But much alike any roleplayer, or at least the largest majority of us, I was fostered though them. When I began, they were everywhere, and even in recent years they were a common setting. Though I seldom see them in as large a prevalence as I used to, their place morphed into superheroes, whose position then usurped theirs on the popularity ladder. But that being said, I find them fascinating, in the distance.

I have repeatedly returned to the idea of a Battle Academy, and what their potential could be, and have always failed to appreciate them for what they are. But, even so, I return to the topic every now and then, and internally muse; allowing me to ask myself, what makes a good Battle Academy. Their livelihoods seem destined fleeting, bound to end as quickly as they began, and this has remained true for any such setting I have been able to observe by my own eye. There may be those who began ages past, and continue to this day, but their existence certainly lie beyond my viewing, and therefore I muse. It is, by this point, a habit of mine.

I have my ideas, but as a person who has not partaken in them for many, many years now, I do not believe I am an authority to speak on this. And therefore I am here, to hear from others what they think a good Battle Academy make, if for no others reason than to satisfy my own curiosity. If that can be done.

What, then, defines a Battle Academy in this context. It is not a difficult definition, perhaps even broader than it should be, but a Battle Academy is any academy setting which involves some degree of combat, whether system-defined, or freeform; a story which takes place within the confines of academia, except academia is somehow martial, and defined by power and subsequent authority thereof derived. Whether magic, martial arts, super powers, or giant robots being the basis through which this power is displayed does not necessarily matter, unless perhaps it does. The kind of systems which would invite competition from participants and perhaps inevitably force it down the spirals of negativity so many roleplays fall prey before.

Is it possible to make a good Battle Academy: is it possible to make a good participant-involved story where the academe of the academy-setting are relevant, whilst littering it's downtime with rigorous battle-scenes and nonsensical villains who believe, for some reason, attacking a school would serve their political manifesto. I believe that it is possible, but I do not know how, yet, and will continue to think about it regardless. But it would not be negative should there be others who think about it in tandem.

Should there be, I have now made this space so that we may convene and discourse about it.

 

[Grey]

I think it's entirely possible to make a decent battle-academy. I think a good battle-academy RP doesn't rely on that element; it has to be a mélange of elements unless you're doing some kind of meta-commentary.
The question I think matters most is why are you using a battle-academy? If the framework supports an interesting story it has the opportunity to be good.
I need to rewrite some of this post because I make blunders in some entries about which I have since learned better, but my thoughts on this topic are covered pretty fully here.

 

[Damafaud]

Few thoughts:

1. The group size. As always, it's easier to run a smaller group than a larger one. Limit the players to a number you are comfortable with and stick with it.
2. The scope. There are many roles in Battle Academy. There are Teachers and School Staffs, and then sometimes the students can be divided into the likes of First Year and Second Year, maybe even a Third Year. The more diversified the roles a player can take, the more complicated it is to manage. Put a limit to the character pool. Maybe all second years and you can make a teacher for a second character if approved.
3. Starting Point. Too many Battle Academy starts by meandering around "getting to know your dorm mates" and "arrival at academy" which just drags the pace to a halt. Start in the middle of a class, a practice excursion, or something as interesting. Put everyone's character in an involved scene that gets everyone excited.
4. Timeskip. The posts petering out? Interactions are getting scarce and the scene is wrapping up? Don't wait around and have everyone slowly write their characters walking down the hallway to the next class. Use your Godly power to move everyone to the next interesting scene! If that next interesting scene is 'monsters attacking at midnight', tucks the characters into bed and send the face eating monster right through their bedroom window.

This is really more general than just for Battle Academy, but I think they as important in an academic setting ^^

 

[Malphaestus]

I will return with a more productive comment in later hours, but I must foremost state that Damafaud 's "tips" are most useful for the common GM who perhaps felt the urge to peruse this thread. Naturally, myself, am quite aware of them, but I will be taking point 3, specifically, as a part of my larger reply later this day.

 

[Idea]

Is it possible? 100% Is it easy? Not in the slightest.

I will first discuss some issues with the battle side, then the school side. Either way, I'm just sharing the thoughts I have on the topic, as there didn't seem to be anything concrete to answer, beyond, well, what I did above.


Battle Roleplays

One of the biggest issues with battle-centric roleplays is a dichotomy created by having competition at the core. If being good at fighting, something competitive, is put at the center of how a character can shine, then the assumption naturally follows that a better fighter will get more of a spotlight, more plot relevance, and that generally the character's competence is in their ability to fight. At the same time, people naturally have a bias when it comes to judging fairness, they are more likely to judge whatever they or those they favor to be doing things fairly, while those whom they are competing with to have some unfair advantage (and not that I am not saying they automatically assume competitors to have an unfair advantage, just that they are prone to see one or to think it is greater rather than lesser). When you put these together is an environment where you will easily feel threatened by others having any kind of, say, powerful ability, and in turn feel that might make your character, your work, or even you obsolete. Furthermore, coetris paribus a person prefers winning over loosing, and thus even people not normally prone to entering a pissing contest may escalate things in an effort to keep up with those who are trying to exploit things to be at the top and/or those who do get into pissing context as far as power level / character competence is concerned. Making balanced, interesting things is thus pitted against your perceived ability to participate, but this in turn can harm the desire to participate because of the self-selection bias that pushes out more creative and rules-abiding yet less effective in competition character designs and writing approaches.

Another concern is something that happens more in tournament-style combat: Characters having to just sit around while other characters are doing the fighting. In other words, in certain scenes the vast majority of characters may have nothing to do except talk to each other. As I will address later this is something that from my experience roleplayers in general struggle with a lot, scenes were really not a lot is happening and there isn't a clear direction on what one could be doing, especially in longer post formats like the one I tend to prefer. Tournament style or really situation which leads to characters being out of the main action of the scene and being for some reason constrained from moving on to something else can really easily bore players or make them struggle with posts, thus reducing how much they post, and that can kill the enthusiasm for a roleplay.

Lastly there is the matter of thinking of battles in excessively cinematic terms. If I described you exactly a battle from a movie you didn't know, even if that fight was really epic in said movie there is a good chance it really wouldn't live up to the hype, if not be outright boring. In writing you lack visuals, music, and both cinematography and choreography are dependent on your ability to describe them and more relevantly the reader's ability to imagine them (more relevantly because the movie will also be dependent on the ability of the makers to portray it on-screen, so there is something of a parallel to the writer's description, but once the product is made there is no need for the reader to also be imaginative and familiar with the terms of the description as there is in writing). This isn't to say that any fight in written form will be boring of course, but making those fights interesting is a lot more dependent on an interesting interplay of the characters, on having strong motivations in the fight, on having build-up or how you set up the fight, etc.... Because unlike other mediums you can't rely on spectacle.



School Roleplays

Almost opposite to a combat roleplay's problems, often school roleplay have the issue that the topic in the name does not take enough focus naturally. Of course, there are many reasons why school roleplays (and stories really) are popular, among them being a few that specifically pertain to the fact they are set in a school (for instance familiarity), however what do you actually do in a school? Well, you make friends, gather in groups, learn stuff... but you could just as much do that outside of any kind of school environment, in fact you could it in just about any kind of setting. Then you study, you take tests, sit in classrooms listening to lectures... That's more school-centric, but it's not exactly the picture of "fun" is it?

Then there is all the coordination problems of schedules and such, and there's the slow progress of real learning and the difficulty of creating some way to make learning and studying meaningfully - especially in an environment where many players simply do no exhibit the baseline goodwill of having their characters be at the learning level of a student, rather than coming pre-packaged with all the combat techniques or information they might need, unless the character is specifically designed to be especially incompetent in those areas. In one way, characters do kind of reflect real students though: They tend to not care about anything in the school except what pertains to their grades and even then it's not necessarily consistent.

The problem seems clear then: School roleplays have a categorical attraction but not a content-based one, or in other words people may join a school roleplay because it is a school roleplay without having an attraction to any of the things that make it a school roleplay, much in a similar way to how some people will join any roleplay of a specific fandom and never bother to pay attention to the details.

How then, could one possibly make a school roleplay interesting? Well, the way it is done in media with schools: The focus is rarely on the schooling element itself but rather in character dynamics, using the school as a stage. Sure you might get glimpses of classes and the characters might be in uniforms, but in the end of the day it's often activities outside the school, or club-focused, or only pertaining to certain school events or which could just as easily happen in those early morning/late afternoon classrooms as they could in any other setting. While I'm speaking of conventions of course, I do think these are a big influence on the kind of experience people expect going into a school roleplay. It follows that the same thing that makes or breaks those elements - in their drama, comedy, slice of life comfiness, or whatever else- the character, is regarded with utmost priority.

This even goes into the other major issue, the one shared by those tournaments from earlier: A lot of downtime moments. After all "a break" is really just a period with nothing to do. The period between events is a huge killer of roleplays because momentum and hype grind to a halt. Many roleplayers are not good at dealing with moments like that, and at the core of that is often character. If you ask, players who are not posting and don't give you a "actually I'm busy" will usually say something along the lines of "My character wouldn't really talk to people" or "I don't think my character would approach yours" or "I don't know what my character would do". Another group will eventually stop this and ram through a bowl full of metagaming that breaks character (if there is discernable character to begin with, but that's another topic), just basically making their character psychic and guessing stuff about other characters with hunches out of desperation for some reason to make their characters interested, or with explicit contradictions like "they didn't care but they went there anyway because reasons they wanted to see what was going on". Not everyone is like this obviously, but I am talking about issues specifically.

Lastly, it might be worth pointing out that school settings are quite prone to being attractive to a larger ratio of newer players, for whatever reason it might be. Naturally this means quality of the writing in general has a drop, and those players are less likely to have the experience to know how to handle certain issues, or things to avoid etc... This of course is no fault of the players or GM, just a natural consequence of the composition of players the genre seems to attract.


The Key Factor to Putting Them Together (in my opinion)

Bringing the school and combat genres together can make use of them to complement each other, making up for some of their issues. School provides context and direction to the combat, combat can fill the gaps lessening the downtime or provide an alternative form of classes that can be roleplayed through while being more entertaining. However, many of the other issues remain, and I believe the key things that are needed to make a combat school roleplay work are three:

1. Player Cooperation - I think a cooperative mindset is one of the main things needed for a successful RP of this kind in particular, though it is something I think is important in general too. The reason why it is so important here, however, is that player's that prioritize thinking about how they can do things together with others, how they can contribute to the RP, and who actively try to play into rather than simply respond to the narrative created by the GM (and other players), can get out of the common pitfalls of both school and battle roleplays that I've been mentioning: The need to be competitive is alleviated, a cooperative mindset can view themselves as useful by contributing even without standing out from the crowd. Low-activity moments are greatly helped if you have players / characters who can actively pull on others, or even if players just craft characters more prone to contributing in low activity times even if this contribution isn't necessarily interactive. Cooperative players will be more mindful of RP expectations, so to take an example from before they might make a student who is actually designed to have things they need to learn. Furthermore, even if we ignore how it can fix the issues brought before, cooperation can help coordinate more interesting fights (and perhaps even fight results, depending on how much one values not knowing the results a priori versus creating particular consequences from the results of the fight), it could help set up particular events, arcs and the like in the school side of things (as often school drama media will involve tangled webs of events and character issues that come together), and so on....

2. Characters Designed With Awareness (of the Long-Term) - This kind of falls into point 1, due to the fact that I characterized cooperative players as mindful, however it's big enough of a point I think it deserves to be mentioned separately. At the source of many issues is that characters are designed with only thought of how they will be in the short-term, if any of the context is being thought about at all (in this later category being included those who have long-term ideas entirely detached from any thought of how one might progress towards them or the impact the things to build them may have until that point). In the long term you will have to have low-activity moments, you will want character arcs, you want your character to be striving something either tangible or at least which impacts them in a tangible way. You want a character with room to grow, and a character that others have fun with and are interested in, as opposed to one that might be the best but doesn't give the others room to have their spotlight, or perhaps might be really badass but is unpleasant for even other players to deal with. I could go on, but I think the point is made. Player cooperation is having the right people, and the method to come up with the right execution - then mindful character design is creating tools that won't break down midway through that execution. Good combat is very reliant on restraint and good school roleplays are reliant on character exploration and growth. Both of these benefit massively from long-term thinking in character design.

3.GM: Providing the stage or Guiding the Scene - While the other two aspects pertained to what players can do for this roleplay, this third aspect is for GMs: Should a GM focus more on just providing the context and letting players have as much freedom as possible? Or should they actively create several options for players to choose which ones to engage with, but always giving them something the GM made as opposed to expecting them to craft or search themselves? Obviously this will depend on the group of players you have, but I honestly don't know what I would think of the general case either. In the past I've tried the later method, and later I've come to try the former, and both had issues. The balance between them is thus one thing that I've yet to properly grasp myself, however, I do believe it is crucial on this kind of RP, as the events of school RPs and battle RPs tend to be more isolated, or episodic, than in many other kinds of RPs, which makes it much harder for a player to just pinpoint a goal and have their character continually pursue it if the GM isn't actively focused on crafting the next events or at least the context around it.



Well, that's enough ramble from me. For what it's worth, I hope you at least enjoyed the read I apologize if anything sounds a bit disjointed I wrote this over the course of several days with a lot interruptions due to being busy...