![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Weekly Update: Team-Building Exercises
Welcome to Arc of Light's weekly update for the week of April 8th, 2015. In this, the first of hopefully many such updates, we're going to be going over a few things including new ways to communicate, creating the characters that are going to be the backbone of our first major arc and the final building blocks, OOCly and ICly, we need to put together before we can hit the starting line and get this thing underway. First off though, we need to establish exactly what this is.
Exactly What This Is:
The weekly update, put simply, is supposed to function for the OOC comm the same way weekly meetings function for the game chat. A way to keep consistent activity and discussion on the OOC comm and to keep everybody apprised of the going-ons in our games, both out in front and behind the scenes. This isn't meant to replace other OOC posts, but more to be a regular post that ensures that even if no other posts are made throughout the week, everybody is still on the same page. The other purpose is so that at our weekly meetings, we have at least a couple things to talk about and something to refer back to during the meeting.
I'm going to strive to do these every week on Wednesday in the late afternoon or early evening. The exact time will probably take a while to get down, but right now I'm going to aim for either 7 or 8 PM ET every Wednesday.
---
The Lines of Communication:
There's one minor and one slightly more tangible change to our lines of communication going into action starting this week. First, the minor one: we've gone through a variety of chat names in the past year-ish (which has been, through nobody's fault but my own, hell on my log keeping, for the record) and for a while, we've sticking with the fairly simple 'fivedeesarpee'. As of this week, we're going to be making one final name change and going with 'arcoflightchat' on a permanent basis. This is mostly just a logic-based change, in its last incarnation, when we didn't really care about a name, the game was called "5D's RP", so, the chat was as well. Now, we're "Arc of Light", so the chat's name matches. It's branding. When we start selling Arc of Light mugs and t-shirts, you'll all thank me.
The second, less minor change is the addition of a Game Plurk. I'll be using this to plurk out important IC posts, OOC posts like weekly updates, memes and whatever other game-related stuff comes up. It's still somewhat under construction, mostly 'cause I can't figure out how to get hyperlinks to show up in the profile. Again, this is a mostly logic based thing. Most of us use Plurk, the tool is there, so why not use it? It's a bit of a redundancy, but I like having a couple redundancies in place.
---
Team Building Exercises:
As we've moved closer to the start of our game and its first major arc, the Cross-America Tournament arc, the tournament has become less of a concept vaguely alluded to in the waning moments of 5D's and evolved into the very tangible foundation for the start of this RP and its story. We have a route, we have a rule summary, we have our antagonists for the arc taking a more solid form every day. There's a couple key parts of the tournament and its structure left to iron out, but the most important thing left to decide is those participating in it.
I spoke about this a bit in this post, which I still encourage all of us to use to continue brainstorming and sharing ideas. As of right now, the only characters confirmed to be participating in the WRGP are Yusei and Jack (team name still undecided). I think it's very important that this arc have a genuine, organic feel to it and that the tournament doesn't feel like an empty wasteland where Yusei and Jack basically travel the entire county knocking down cardboard cut-out NPCs and bowling pin one-shots. To that effect, I'll re-state my goal: 8 teams will be in the finals at the end of this arc and I'd like to have that many teams with real characters, who have been played at least a little throughout the arc up until that point. Do all of these characters and teams have to be played or fleshed out as much as Yusei and Jack? Of course not. Do they all have to stick around once they're eliminated? Of course not. But if we all dig in and put a bit of effort into this, I think it'll make the tournament arc and the finals a much more rewarding experience and knowing us, I think we'll find that at least a couple teams really surprise us in their ability to stick around when the tournament's said and done.
So that's the "what" and the "why", let's move on to the "how". How do we get from one team to 8? There's two ways - building OC teams and adapting canon teams. Before we elaborate, let's establish a couple tenants on what our teams should be like:
• There should be an international feel here. This is a tournament that's attracted duelists from all over the world, not just Japan and America, so let's try and have characters from varied locales. Yusei and Jack already cover the Japanese angle - there can be other duelists from Japan and even Neo Domino as logically, that'd be one of the few places able to afford to send multiple teams, but we don't need a lot more Japanese entrants.
• Mix of cool, dick and neutral. Any good tournament arc has the old standbys. The cutthroat guys who want to stomp the protags into the dirt with whatever dirty tricks they can manage. The unexpected allies who show up to help, believing that good sportsmanship is every bit as important as victory. The guys who are otherwise good sports but just want to accomplish their own goals and may be allies of necessity one moment and enemies the next. And of course, those who move from one end of the scale to the other as the tournament progresses. We all know the good tropes, so let's make sure we hit a nice range of them.
• Skilled. These are our teams that are going to wind up making the finals, so they have to be, y'know, good. They don't necessarily have to be Jack-and-Yusei-tier though. There's always something compelling about the underdog team who starts off looking like a joke and just manages to sneak their way in as the 8th seed.
• At least one Liberty's Scar team: Liberty's Scar is planning to use the finals of this tournament as a staging ground for their ritual to unleash Scar-Red Nova. So they've quietly inserted a team into the tournament with two of the organization's strongest duelists.
• At least one Project Vanguard team: The US government has good reason to have one of their Vanguard teams enter. Proving that the best duelists in the world are born and raised in America and are a part of the US armed forces would do wonders for both America's latent dueling culture and the approval ratings of Project Vanguard.
Now, keeping those tenets in mind, let's elaborate a bit. Speaking on the former first, building an OC team, we'll take a couple ideas from the brainstorming post to put something together.
Let's take one of Nick's ideas and combine it with one of mine:
-Team in which one guy has bought the services of the other, abuses and belittles them but they have to put up with it due to needing the money so badly. One uses Monarchs while the other uses exclusively Junk cards, with the less powerful (Gardna, Berserker) as the aces, and solely to support the Monarch user.
- Duelists from some really poor part of the country, trying to win the tournament so they can get whatever money they can (selling the Gold Cards, winning the tournament's purse, becoming pros as a result of the tourney, whatever).
The synergy here is obvious, the ideas slide right together like a delicious Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. So let's flesh them out a bit. First off, they need to be international. One of them's gonna be a Monarch user, so let's say these guys are English. Now, let's put together a couple concepts. This is all off the top of my head.
Claude & Roxanne:
Claude is a duelist from London, the site of the United Kingdom's Momentum Reactor. London has been converted to run on Momentum for a while now, so the city is one of the more well-off in the nation and in Europe in general. Claude's family owns a construction company that was responsible for converting much of the city to run on Momentum, so to say he's well-off would be a hilarious understatement. Claude is a duelist by trade and owing to his family's money and connections, he's grown up with the best duelists in the United Kingdom as instructors. Not to mention access to basically whatever card he wants that's less rare than "literally only one in existence." To this effect, Claude is a very good duelist, an up-and-comer in the English circuit. He plans to enter the Cross-America Golden Tag Tournament to cement his place in the echelon of elite duelists, but he also has an ulterior motive. Following the Fortune Cup and Jack Atlas' duels as King before that, he began to covet the dragons used by Yusei Fudo and Jack Atlas, Stardust Dragon and Red Daemons' Dragon. He plans to confront Yusei and Jack in the tournament, force them into a situation where they must ante their dragons and then defeat them, claiming them for himself. He's built an incredibly powerful (and incredibly shiny) Monarch deck for this purpose.
Roxanne is a duelist from Scarborough. Scarborough is a long way from England's only Momentum Reactor, so it isn't nearly as well off as the kingdom's capital. Roxanne commutes via D-Wheel to London every day for work to support herself and her family, where she works for, coincidentally enough, Claude's family's company. The conditions aren't great and she barely gets to go home for anything but sleep, but it's honest work for honest pay, which is more than many in England can claim to have, so she doesn't complain. Roxanne's only indulgence is an appreciation for dueling. She's built a deck with what she can get over the years, buying cards cheaply and secondhand, winning them in bar bets and yeah, maybe picking up a few that she saw get pulled out of a booster pack and then tossed straight into the bin. Fittingly enough, she runs a Junk deck and over the years, she's become pretty good with it. When she heard of the Cross-America Golden Tag Tournament, she briefly dreamed of entering, but knew she could never raise the money to get herself and her D-Wheel to America, muchless pay the entrance fee, an room and board for such a lengthy trip.
Claude, who was easily sponsored by his own family, needed a partner. Somebody who could keep up with him and wouldn't weigh him down. So he held a little tournament of his own in London, with entrance to the tournament on his family's dime as the prize. His plan was simple, get the most skilled duelist in London as his partner, load their deck up with some of his rare cards, then go to America from there. Plenty of his similarly well-off friends entered the tournament, but it was none of them that won. Instead, it was a girl who worked for his family's company. She used a deck of beaten up secondhand common cards to defeat all of his rich friends and a few other legitimately highly skilled duelists from the English circuit to earn the right to be Claude's partner. For contractual reasons, Claude was forced to accept the results and take the girl, Roxanne, as his partner. But he hasn't exactly treated her like an equal since she's won - he's abusive and belittling to Roxanne over her deck, her financial situation, just about everything under the sun he can use for ammunition, he fires at her as often as he can. This doesn't change on the dueling field - Roxanne's normally combo-heavy Junk deck has basically been reduced to a factory to spit out tribute fodder for Claude's Monarch monsters. Monarch support isn't kind to Extra Deck summons, so even though she has a couple of Synchro monsters, they almost never see any play. Still, she puts up with all of it, because she knows how much she needs the money from entering the tournament. The Gold Cards, the tournament prize, the potential to become a pro duelist, quit her job and move her family to London is enough to make her put up with near anything.
And there you have it, a foundation for a team concept, a bit of backstory, a couple decks and you have two characters with plenty of room to grow and surprise you throughout this arc. That's just an example - if you're interested in it, if you wanna tweak it, if you wanna use it as a base for you own concept, speak up! And if you have more ideas that you can put into the brainstorming post, do that. I wouldn't mind putting together more basic concepts like this to help people build their characters.
So that's how you build an OC team. Now let's talk about adapting a canon team. This is quite simple - you take characters from somewhere else in the Yu-Gi-Oh! series and adapt them to be ready for competition in the Cross-America Tag Tournament. Or, if they're from part 1 of 5D's, no need for adaptation, just play 'em! For this, though we're gonna use an example that would require some adaptation.
Sherry Leblanc:
Sherry Leblanc is a duelist from France. The heir to the Leblanc family, Sherry lived a happy life with her parents as a young girl until one night, her parents were mysteriously murdered, orphaning her and forcing her to go on the run with her family's guard and now, her only caretaker, Mizoguchi. As she grew, Sherry became skilled in taking care of and fighting for herself so she could learn who killed her parents and why. Through her search, she's learned of the organization "Yliaster". With this knowledge, she's set her sights on the Cross-America Golden Tag Tournament. Believing Yliaster, an organization with influence all over the world, to have some degree of influence in the US government and Industrial Illusions, she plans to win the tournament to get closer to Yliaster and, hopefully, to the truth of her parents' demise.
The nice thing about characters from the WRGP and Fortune Cup is that in most cases, you really wouldn't have to do much to adapt them to fit this. Sherry's backstory right there is essentially unchanged from canon, making adapting and playing her an easy task and this would similarly apply to a lot of characters across both parts of 5D's. Whether you're adapting a canon character or building your own, be sure to discuss anything that you need help tweaking or ironing out with the group. We're all here to help each other.
---
That's Profiling, Man!:
As of right now, we have quite a few unfinished profiles up on the wiki. I myself have a couple that need to be done for the upcoming plot - in addition to creating characters to fill out the cast of the tournament, in the coming couple of weeks, let's focus on getting profiles for the characters we know we're going to be playing in the first arc done. It's our rule that as long as you have at least one accepted profile, there's more leniency on getting future profiles done while you try out characters, get a feel for them, etc. But for characters you know you intend to play a lot, let's get them done sooner rather than later. I'll reply to this post with my own character profile to do list. Do the same if you feel so inclined.
---
Character Calling: Time to Eat Some Crow:
Character Calling is something I'm gonna do every so often that's basically a character ad. If there's a canon character I think the story would be better off for having, if there's a concept for an OC I have that I can't play myself but is still character or story-relevant enough to be worth putting out there, I'll put it up here. If you're interested in playing that character, talk to me and hopefully we can figure something out. Similarly, if you know someone not necessarily in our game who might be interested, feel free to show them or get them in touch with me. Don't ever feel obligated to pick up a character I bring up in this section. I don't want people playing the characters I bring up here out of obligation, I want you guys to save your energy to play the stuff you want to play. If something I list here happens to fall under that umbrella, let's talk.
First up, some guy with stupid orange hair: Crow Hogan. Those of you who know me well, may recall me using certain words to describe this character - "travesty", "obnoxious", "douchebag", "overpowered", "literally the Titanic of card games". But right now I'm actually gonna advocate for him a little bit - in his time in part 1 of 5D's, he's a pretty decent character with a good character arc that ends in a pretty satisfying way, obnoxious clown duels notwithstanding. Most of the problems with Crow start manifesting in part 2, when they start taking away other characters' screentime for him and using him to advertise mediocre Blackwing cards. Neither of these are something that'd be a big problem in our story, given that we're not a TV show and don't have to worry about advertising a multi-billion dollar card franchise.
What I mean to impart from all of this is that removed of the weird production decisions of 5D's, Crow is a decent character with a cool deck that is, after everything, a Signer, so it would make sense for him to be a part of the story. If you were to have any interest in giving him a shot, I have a couple ideas for how he could fit into the Cross-America Golden Tag Team arc. Gimme a buzz.
---
Wave the Checkered Flag:
Let's talk about starting, as in, when we're gonna officially get this story underway. Right now, I think the to-do list is still a little lengthy to kick things off, but we're very close nonetheless. A little more character and plot building and we'll be just about there, I think. So I'd like to start thinking about setting a start date. Right now, I dunno how realistic a goal this is, but I'm going to set it anyway: if we've not already started by then, I'd like to have a starting date set by the time of our next weekly meeting on Wednesday, April 15th. I'd rather take too long to start than find out we did it too soon, so I don't mind if we take things slowly, as long as it's towards a better experience for all of us, overall. But if we can have a solid idea of what we're doing by next week, I think that'll be good.
And that's all for this week! How'd you like the inaugural weekly update? Hopefully in the future they'll go up earlier than this. If you have any comments or questions, leave them below or bring them up in chat. If all goes well, next week, it'll go earlier and we'll be able to discuss things like plot summaries for the Cross-America and the Spirit World arcs and the subject of events that took place in the six month timeskip between the end of 5D's Part 1 and the start of our story and what of those events, if any, we'd like to play out.
Exactly What This Is:
The weekly update, put simply, is supposed to function for the OOC comm the same way weekly meetings function for the game chat. A way to keep consistent activity and discussion on the OOC comm and to keep everybody apprised of the going-ons in our games, both out in front and behind the scenes. This isn't meant to replace other OOC posts, but more to be a regular post that ensures that even if no other posts are made throughout the week, everybody is still on the same page. The other purpose is so that at our weekly meetings, we have at least a couple things to talk about and something to refer back to during the meeting.
I'm going to strive to do these every week on Wednesday in the late afternoon or early evening. The exact time will probably take a while to get down, but right now I'm going to aim for either 7 or 8 PM ET every Wednesday.
---
The Lines of Communication:
There's one minor and one slightly more tangible change to our lines of communication going into action starting this week. First, the minor one: we've gone through a variety of chat names in the past year-ish (which has been, through nobody's fault but my own, hell on my log keeping, for the record) and for a while, we've sticking with the fairly simple 'fivedeesarpee'. As of this week, we're going to be making one final name change and going with 'arcoflightchat' on a permanent basis. This is mostly just a logic-based change, in its last incarnation, when we didn't really care about a name, the game was called "5D's RP", so, the chat was as well. Now, we're "Arc of Light", so the chat's name matches. It's branding. When we start selling Arc of Light mugs and t-shirts, you'll all thank me.
The second, less minor change is the addition of a Game Plurk. I'll be using this to plurk out important IC posts, OOC posts like weekly updates, memes and whatever other game-related stuff comes up. It's still somewhat under construction, mostly 'cause I can't figure out how to get hyperlinks to show up in the profile. Again, this is a mostly logic based thing. Most of us use Plurk, the tool is there, so why not use it? It's a bit of a redundancy, but I like having a couple redundancies in place.
---
Team Building Exercises:
As we've moved closer to the start of our game and its first major arc, the Cross-America Tournament arc, the tournament has become less of a concept vaguely alluded to in the waning moments of 5D's and evolved into the very tangible foundation for the start of this RP and its story. We have a route, we have a rule summary, we have our antagonists for the arc taking a more solid form every day. There's a couple key parts of the tournament and its structure left to iron out, but the most important thing left to decide is those participating in it.
I spoke about this a bit in this post, which I still encourage all of us to use to continue brainstorming and sharing ideas. As of right now, the only characters confirmed to be participating in the WRGP are Yusei and Jack (team name still undecided). I think it's very important that this arc have a genuine, organic feel to it and that the tournament doesn't feel like an empty wasteland where Yusei and Jack basically travel the entire county knocking down cardboard cut-out NPCs and bowling pin one-shots. To that effect, I'll re-state my goal: 8 teams will be in the finals at the end of this arc and I'd like to have that many teams with real characters, who have been played at least a little throughout the arc up until that point. Do all of these characters and teams have to be played or fleshed out as much as Yusei and Jack? Of course not. Do they all have to stick around once they're eliminated? Of course not. But if we all dig in and put a bit of effort into this, I think it'll make the tournament arc and the finals a much more rewarding experience and knowing us, I think we'll find that at least a couple teams really surprise us in their ability to stick around when the tournament's said and done.
So that's the "what" and the "why", let's move on to the "how". How do we get from one team to 8? There's two ways - building OC teams and adapting canon teams. Before we elaborate, let's establish a couple tenants on what our teams should be like:
• There should be an international feel here. This is a tournament that's attracted duelists from all over the world, not just Japan and America, so let's try and have characters from varied locales. Yusei and Jack already cover the Japanese angle - there can be other duelists from Japan and even Neo Domino as logically, that'd be one of the few places able to afford to send multiple teams, but we don't need a lot more Japanese entrants.
• Mix of cool, dick and neutral. Any good tournament arc has the old standbys. The cutthroat guys who want to stomp the protags into the dirt with whatever dirty tricks they can manage. The unexpected allies who show up to help, believing that good sportsmanship is every bit as important as victory. The guys who are otherwise good sports but just want to accomplish their own goals and may be allies of necessity one moment and enemies the next. And of course, those who move from one end of the scale to the other as the tournament progresses. We all know the good tropes, so let's make sure we hit a nice range of them.
• Skilled. These are our teams that are going to wind up making the finals, so they have to be, y'know, good. They don't necessarily have to be Jack-and-Yusei-tier though. There's always something compelling about the underdog team who starts off looking like a joke and just manages to sneak their way in as the 8th seed.
• At least one Liberty's Scar team: Liberty's Scar is planning to use the finals of this tournament as a staging ground for their ritual to unleash Scar-Red Nova. So they've quietly inserted a team into the tournament with two of the organization's strongest duelists.
• At least one Project Vanguard team: The US government has good reason to have one of their Vanguard teams enter. Proving that the best duelists in the world are born and raised in America and are a part of the US armed forces would do wonders for both America's latent dueling culture and the approval ratings of Project Vanguard.
Now, keeping those tenets in mind, let's elaborate a bit. Speaking on the former first, building an OC team, we'll take a couple ideas from the brainstorming post to put something together.
Let's take one of Nick's ideas and combine it with one of mine:
-Team in which one guy has bought the services of the other, abuses and belittles them but they have to put up with it due to needing the money so badly. One uses Monarchs while the other uses exclusively Junk cards, with the less powerful (Gardna, Berserker) as the aces, and solely to support the Monarch user.
- Duelists from some really poor part of the country, trying to win the tournament so they can get whatever money they can (selling the Gold Cards, winning the tournament's purse, becoming pros as a result of the tourney, whatever).
The synergy here is obvious, the ideas slide right together like a delicious Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. So let's flesh them out a bit. First off, they need to be international. One of them's gonna be a Monarch user, so let's say these guys are English. Now, let's put together a couple concepts. This is all off the top of my head.
Claude & Roxanne:
Claude is a duelist from London, the site of the United Kingdom's Momentum Reactor. London has been converted to run on Momentum for a while now, so the city is one of the more well-off in the nation and in Europe in general. Claude's family owns a construction company that was responsible for converting much of the city to run on Momentum, so to say he's well-off would be a hilarious understatement. Claude is a duelist by trade and owing to his family's money and connections, he's grown up with the best duelists in the United Kingdom as instructors. Not to mention access to basically whatever card he wants that's less rare than "literally only one in existence." To this effect, Claude is a very good duelist, an up-and-comer in the English circuit. He plans to enter the Cross-America Golden Tag Tournament to cement his place in the echelon of elite duelists, but he also has an ulterior motive. Following the Fortune Cup and Jack Atlas' duels as King before that, he began to covet the dragons used by Yusei Fudo and Jack Atlas, Stardust Dragon and Red Daemons' Dragon. He plans to confront Yusei and Jack in the tournament, force them into a situation where they must ante their dragons and then defeat them, claiming them for himself. He's built an incredibly powerful (and incredibly shiny) Monarch deck for this purpose.
Roxanne is a duelist from Scarborough. Scarborough is a long way from England's only Momentum Reactor, so it isn't nearly as well off as the kingdom's capital. Roxanne commutes via D-Wheel to London every day for work to support herself and her family, where she works for, coincidentally enough, Claude's family's company. The conditions aren't great and she barely gets to go home for anything but sleep, but it's honest work for honest pay, which is more than many in England can claim to have, so she doesn't complain. Roxanne's only indulgence is an appreciation for dueling. She's built a deck with what she can get over the years, buying cards cheaply and secondhand, winning them in bar bets and yeah, maybe picking up a few that she saw get pulled out of a booster pack and then tossed straight into the bin. Fittingly enough, she runs a Junk deck and over the years, she's become pretty good with it. When she heard of the Cross-America Golden Tag Tournament, she briefly dreamed of entering, but knew she could never raise the money to get herself and her D-Wheel to America, muchless pay the entrance fee, an room and board for such a lengthy trip.
Claude, who was easily sponsored by his own family, needed a partner. Somebody who could keep up with him and wouldn't weigh him down. So he held a little tournament of his own in London, with entrance to the tournament on his family's dime as the prize. His plan was simple, get the most skilled duelist in London as his partner, load their deck up with some of his rare cards, then go to America from there. Plenty of his similarly well-off friends entered the tournament, but it was none of them that won. Instead, it was a girl who worked for his family's company. She used a deck of beaten up secondhand common cards to defeat all of his rich friends and a few other legitimately highly skilled duelists from the English circuit to earn the right to be Claude's partner. For contractual reasons, Claude was forced to accept the results and take the girl, Roxanne, as his partner. But he hasn't exactly treated her like an equal since she's won - he's abusive and belittling to Roxanne over her deck, her financial situation, just about everything under the sun he can use for ammunition, he fires at her as often as he can. This doesn't change on the dueling field - Roxanne's normally combo-heavy Junk deck has basically been reduced to a factory to spit out tribute fodder for Claude's Monarch monsters. Monarch support isn't kind to Extra Deck summons, so even though she has a couple of Synchro monsters, they almost never see any play. Still, she puts up with all of it, because she knows how much she needs the money from entering the tournament. The Gold Cards, the tournament prize, the potential to become a pro duelist, quit her job and move her family to London is enough to make her put up with near anything.
And there you have it, a foundation for a team concept, a bit of backstory, a couple decks and you have two characters with plenty of room to grow and surprise you throughout this arc. That's just an example - if you're interested in it, if you wanna tweak it, if you wanna use it as a base for you own concept, speak up! And if you have more ideas that you can put into the brainstorming post, do that. I wouldn't mind putting together more basic concepts like this to help people build their characters.
So that's how you build an OC team. Now let's talk about adapting a canon team. This is quite simple - you take characters from somewhere else in the Yu-Gi-Oh! series and adapt them to be ready for competition in the Cross-America Tag Tournament. Or, if they're from part 1 of 5D's, no need for adaptation, just play 'em! For this, though we're gonna use an example that would require some adaptation.
Sherry Leblanc:
Sherry Leblanc is a duelist from France. The heir to the Leblanc family, Sherry lived a happy life with her parents as a young girl until one night, her parents were mysteriously murdered, orphaning her and forcing her to go on the run with her family's guard and now, her only caretaker, Mizoguchi. As she grew, Sherry became skilled in taking care of and fighting for herself so she could learn who killed her parents and why. Through her search, she's learned of the organization "Yliaster". With this knowledge, she's set her sights on the Cross-America Golden Tag Tournament. Believing Yliaster, an organization with influence all over the world, to have some degree of influence in the US government and Industrial Illusions, she plans to win the tournament to get closer to Yliaster and, hopefully, to the truth of her parents' demise.
The nice thing about characters from the WRGP and Fortune Cup is that in most cases, you really wouldn't have to do much to adapt them to fit this. Sherry's backstory right there is essentially unchanged from canon, making adapting and playing her an easy task and this would similarly apply to a lot of characters across both parts of 5D's. Whether you're adapting a canon character or building your own, be sure to discuss anything that you need help tweaking or ironing out with the group. We're all here to help each other.
---
That's Profiling, Man!:
As of right now, we have quite a few unfinished profiles up on the wiki. I myself have a couple that need to be done for the upcoming plot - in addition to creating characters to fill out the cast of the tournament, in the coming couple of weeks, let's focus on getting profiles for the characters we know we're going to be playing in the first arc done. It's our rule that as long as you have at least one accepted profile, there's more leniency on getting future profiles done while you try out characters, get a feel for them, etc. But for characters you know you intend to play a lot, let's get them done sooner rather than later. I'll reply to this post with my own character profile to do list. Do the same if you feel so inclined.
---
Character Calling: Time to Eat Some Crow:
Character Calling is something I'm gonna do every so often that's basically a character ad. If there's a canon character I think the story would be better off for having, if there's a concept for an OC I have that I can't play myself but is still character or story-relevant enough to be worth putting out there, I'll put it up here. If you're interested in playing that character, talk to me and hopefully we can figure something out. Similarly, if you know someone not necessarily in our game who might be interested, feel free to show them or get them in touch with me. Don't ever feel obligated to pick up a character I bring up in this section. I don't want people playing the characters I bring up here out of obligation, I want you guys to save your energy to play the stuff you want to play. If something I list here happens to fall under that umbrella, let's talk.
First up, some guy with stupid orange hair: Crow Hogan. Those of you who know me well, may recall me using certain words to describe this character - "travesty", "obnoxious", "douchebag", "overpowered", "literally the Titanic of card games". But right now I'm actually gonna advocate for him a little bit - in his time in part 1 of 5D's, he's a pretty decent character with a good character arc that ends in a pretty satisfying way, obnoxious clown duels notwithstanding. Most of the problems with Crow start manifesting in part 2, when they start taking away other characters' screentime for him and using him to advertise mediocre Blackwing cards. Neither of these are something that'd be a big problem in our story, given that we're not a TV show and don't have to worry about advertising a multi-billion dollar card franchise.
What I mean to impart from all of this is that removed of the weird production decisions of 5D's, Crow is a decent character with a cool deck that is, after everything, a Signer, so it would make sense for him to be a part of the story. If you were to have any interest in giving him a shot, I have a couple ideas for how he could fit into the Cross-America Golden Tag Team arc. Gimme a buzz.
---
Wave the Checkered Flag:
Let's talk about starting, as in, when we're gonna officially get this story underway. Right now, I think the to-do list is still a little lengthy to kick things off, but we're very close nonetheless. A little more character and plot building and we'll be just about there, I think. So I'd like to start thinking about setting a start date. Right now, I dunno how realistic a goal this is, but I'm going to set it anyway: if we've not already started by then, I'd like to have a starting date set by the time of our next weekly meeting on Wednesday, April 15th. I'd rather take too long to start than find out we did it too soon, so I don't mind if we take things slowly, as long as it's towards a better experience for all of us, overall. But if we can have a solid idea of what we're doing by next week, I think that'll be good.
And that's all for this week! How'd you like the inaugural weekly update? Hopefully in the future they'll go up earlier than this. If you have any comments or questions, leave them below or bring them up in chat. If all goes well, next week, it'll go earlier and we'll be able to discuss things like plot summaries for the Cross-America and the Spirit World arcs and the subject of events that took place in the six month timeskip between the end of 5D's Part 1 and the start of our story and what of those events, if any, we'd like to play out.
no subject
•Yusei: I'm still using a wiki link as a placeholder for his history section. Gotta finish his history section and finish that post-haste.
•Rua: Profile in progress, all the big sections still need to be done.
•Amelia: Whole profile needs to be done.
no subject
Finished profiles: Aki, Kyoko.
Needs profile: Ushio.
Needs profile, icons, hell, a PB for that matter: Kouen.
Been thinking about that last one for some time. Can't settle on anything. Suggestions more than welcome. Needs to have red hair and be a scowly dude. Current best bet is Han Shinwoo from Noblesse.