Fight, fight, fight

Nothing spices up a post like a good fight scene. We've all read/written them, and had characters with different fighting styles and strategies. What have been your favorite fights/fighters in RPs? How easy is it for you to write these kind of scenes?

I feel like as far as my writing goes my fight scenes are hit and miss. When they're good they're good but when they're bad, boy do they suck. As far as my own characters go, I really enjoy the fighting styles of Skellen and Alex.

Skellen is much weaker than most of the other characters in One Piece, so he makes up with that by being agile and precise (and poisoning people lol). He fills a really fun niche where he struggles one on one against the "boss" characters in the RP, but mows through groups of underlings.

Alex is similar, but is more about dealing rapid damage than precision. He "blinks" (teleports) around a lot whilst shooting in the direction of his target. He's pretty brutal but he's reckless as well.

I'll get back to you on other characters.

I rather enjoy fight scenes as long as they are played out in a decent enough way. Unfortunately, I've really only had one or two characters that have managed to make it that far in a plot. Many of the characters I design to be fighters never even get a chance on screen due to dying RPs or my badly timed hiatuses. (*Cough* sorry *cough*)

At the moment, one of my most notable characters in terms of fighting was Thayne Clarke from Atlantis Awakening. He was an Erebokinetic, who used dark matter (albeit severely weakened so that he wasn't OP) for weapon generation, tendril creation, and a variety of other abilities. He was more or less skilled in the power, though, it did take several months (Honestly, I don't even remember how long that RP lasted in game time) worth of missions and training.

Though he was skilled in fighting hand-to-hand and with weapons, he excelled primarily as a medium to long distance fighting. He opted to use projectiles to move his opponent to a place where he could easily lock them down with his tendrils. Of course, he had many different abilities under Erebokinesis, but I could always go on forever about that.

Currently, I am using a character known as Mikara in Pikachu's Star Wars RP. Beforehand, I knew quite a bit about Star Wars' forms of lightsaber combat, so hopefully I will be able to write the swordsmanship of the character well enough. It'll definitely be quite interesting to see when we get to that point in the RP.

I don't remember the last time I created a post with some fight scenes, except during Pokemon Odyssey (not the current one though.)

I was playing a Snorlax whose main job was to get in there, get some hits, finish off with some Surf or Earthquake. It was a really fun part although I did not get to enjoy it as much as I wanted since I went on an unannounced hiatus. :(

I wanted to try out my character's fighting style in Tales of Altaria since he was made to be a medic but always wanted to be on the frontlines. That kind of contrasting personality should be a real treat but sadly, Altaria went out of business. bring it back please.

I'm kind of excited to play as Black Gil in As the Dust Settles. I never written a cowardly character before and it's exciting.

I hate fight scenes, oh my god. It's what is holding me up from posting a certain post I need to post to conclude a very important chapter of my RPing life.

I love having character that will fight, but doing the actual fight scenes are a nightmare. I always feel like I'm not describing something accurately enough or in a way that makes sense. When I do fight scenes I want to make sure it's actually physically correct and I've gone through it thoroughly.

To be honest, my sense of timing and flow is a little off. I enjoy a good fight scene, but can never tell if I'm giving too much or too little information, if I'm rushing through the fight ir bogging it down, if my attacks are too weak or too strong...

But that's never stopped me! I've been in dozens of games where I had to fight (even a dedicated combat arena game on another forum) and I treat it like any other post: have fun, tell the story, and try to make something that people enjoy reading.

That's what really matters. Whether it's a big brawler, sneaky archer, flashy mage, or even a coward who cheats and runs a lot, what truly matters is that it's fun for you to write and for others to read.

Godzil said:

what truly matters is that it's fun for you to write and for others to read.

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I second this so much it hurts. Well of course, a good fighting scene is one that is very well-written and who doesn't enjoy writing such?

Fight scenes are always highly entertaining for me. I adore dialogue and quiet moments in the story too but nothing compares to really showing yourself with a good, well choreographed fight scene.

They can be somewhat more difficult then the other variants of writing due to it being even moreso important than usual to convey the exact image you picture in your head... if you're reading a fight scene and a characters movement or action doesn't make sense then it takes you out of the action, breaks reader immersion and makes it so suddenly, nobody wants to read about what's going on because it doesn't make sense anyway.

It's important to do this while at the same time, not rambling on for too long and not making a fight too unrealistic for the setting. A lot of people really dislike fight scenes due to this layer of extra complexity as well as a general distaste for the topic.

I am not one of those people and I love making characters who can fight, as The Last Sentinel said however... it's hard to actually get to the fight scenes these days.

Though he didn't get hours of screen time, I really enjoyed writing the combat posts for Renegade in Titans. His speedy and precise fighting style was fun to write and I enjoyed thinking of interesting ways for him to bring down tougher, superpowered opponents with his comparably limited powers.

I like writing fights as characters that either aren't my own specifically or are NPCs. There's just somethign about giving a chance to someone who might otherwise be a pushover if anyone else wrote them... or making someone big and powerful appear to be a pushover when confronted with your own character's power.... I also really like writing darker fight scenes such as the fight between kel and his first outlaw who's name I forgot. I played the outlaw and it was pretty fun, and then also most any post with Verelys in it is fun to write. The posts with the titans would have been more fun, but i got lazy and made them more about just figuring out how to scale the things rather than how to actual take them out.

Fight scenes are really easy for me to write. But Idk if I'm actually good at them. I tend to either get too caught up in the minor details of describing the scene or I just get bored of it all and try to rush through it.

Fight scenes are pretty damn fun to write. I don't usually write them, because I tend to focus more on character and plot development, so I tend to try to make them as grand as possible when I do. I'm hoping my Dust character will drag me into more fights, since he goes out of his way to look for them, and the majority of my previous character have gone out of their way to avoid confrontation(For their own reasons).

Retro Bug said:

I hate fight scenes, oh my god. It's what is holding me up from posting a certain post I need to post to conclude a very important chapter of my RPing life.

I love having character that will fight, but doing the actual fight scenes are a nightmare. I always feel like I'm not describing something accurately enough or in a way that makes sense. When I do fight scenes I want to make sure it's actually physically correct and I've gone through it thoroughly.

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I feel this on so many levels. I prefer being smart and talking my way out of problems. But if I do have to fight, I make it long and beautiful. Because battle is like a dance, and our swords are the dancers or however that quote goes. Swords being relative, i guess it could work for Pokemon, or just about anything...

Actually... I doubt I've actually written a proper fighting scene here that wasn't pokémon :V I do so many pokémon RPs, or perhaps I just don't usually battle when I make other kinds of characters. I think maybe a character I controlled in the old Checkmate did some fighting minions?

Pokémon battles are bae though. You can be so creative with the moves and use setting and strategy in the weirdest ways. I love doing strange things and spicing up things to show the world that RPing pokémon battles is 1000 times greater than just pressing buttons on a handheld console (;

I've found that I love fight scenes when writing. It is one of the few areas where everything comes naturally to me and it can be very hard for me to end the fight. This is especially true of Pokemon battles. I tend to model my fighting after the anime, leaving it to be far more dynamic and unpredictable and this shows in my writing. Half the time I don't even know what is going to happen as I improvise as I go. An example of how I lose myself in writing these scenes would be some recent posts in Redux as it took me three fairly long posts to get through a single gym battle. That was some of my favorite writing and I can't wait for the next gym battle now!

I really enjoy reading well written/though out fight scenes, however I myself am terrible at writing them so I don't really enjoy creating them myself ;_;

I dislike fight scenes and find them to be boring. Whether it's written or not. But at least if it's in a movie or a video game, it's visual and it makes sense to watch. Sometimes, the flashiness can give me some adrenaline there. Fighting is such a visceral thing, and I feel that written media is honestly an inappropriate format for action-heavy stories. In roleplays, it becomes even worse and more confusing with the involvement of more people. In almost every roleplay fight scene, I've found that at least 40% of the people posting confuse some of the details, accidentally godmod, or just plain misread things and make mistakes not in continuity with what happened before. It's just a clusterfuck.

And honestly, I'm not even really all that good at it. I know my strengths. My strengths lie in describing a character's feelings and thoughts, not in describing their actions. I can barely even imagine a lot of the fight scenes that are happening due to this... inability I have in my brain to imagine things visually. Really, I think they should be short, quick, and to the point. That's what I try to do. I try to make it as clear for others as possible, not get caught up in unnecessary words or descriptions, and give other people something easy to do to interact with me.

My favorite fight scene is one I did several years ago with only one other person. We described our actions succinctly, in about three sentences or less, and the whole thing went pretty smoothly. Because it wasn't just about the fighting, it was about the characters as well. My character had betrayed hers, and it was a very intense moment for the both of them as they spat venom at each other.