[b]Premise:[/b]

This isn't like your average competitive battle arena where you try to desperately claw your way to victory. Instead, this will be about battles where you can calmly discuss with your opponent how the fight would (or should for the sake of story or epic-ness) proceed, and then type it out in the IC in greater thought and detail than you could if you were coming up with the battle more on the fly with "if/then" statements that takes some of the immersion out of the conflict. Here you have a clear, singular goal that you are both working towards, so should end up with a better read and no hurt feelings involved on either side. Plus you can work on your parts while waiting on your partner, so it shouldn't take that much longer even if it's more detailed.

Balancing here is far less of an issue as well. For example, there could be fights against a clearly superior big bad; a plucky moister farmer up against a seasoned veteran of evil and must use a bunch of tricks with the terrain to win, for example. Basically, stories that you can now get away with without your opponent yelling at you for god modding, unfair use of terrain, using too much luck, etc. This arena is not only good for those fun situations, but also if they are a close call and you want to think about which character would win in a given matchup. The focus turns to the characters themselves, not how well the player can play as them strategically, and make the battle result more definitive and objective, even if the battle could go either way in certain circumstances. A win percentage could be posted to say what you guys decided each one's odds actually were, as well as other detailed info about advantages and disadvantages each one possesses on the other.

[b]Rules and Suggestions:[/b]

1. Players in the match must agree on what will transpire. Outside of this there are no major rules unless you break standard forum rules or turn this into a roleplay not related to battle.

2. You don't have to have 100% of it planned out, but you certainly could. If nothing of significance is planned, however, that defeats the purpose of being here.

3. Battles should take place in the standard format of each player taking turns writing from their character's perspective as the battle proceeds. However, the players can write with each other's characters at times should they both desire this, such as to make a post more fluid if a series of back and forth blows is written by one person. Also, it can be more impersonal views of the battlefield being posted as well, which could be handy for large scale conflicts.

4. The battles here don't have to take place within the same canon. People can decide to have individual stories be canon with each other or not. If nothing is stated, assume that the battle takes place in it's own separate canon.

5. Anyone can use this thread to set up one of these planned matches. If you do create a battle from this premise, you should type [planned] in the title of the thread that the fight will actually take place in. 

6. The IC tab of this thread isn't really important right now unless you guys have ideas for it.

7. The Characters Tab can be used to post characters you'd like to try out for this. If you see a character you wish to fight, contact them in the OOC here or PM.

8. Battles must [b]not[/b] be ranked, meaning you wont get points kept track in the forum's statistics. If you don't know anything about ranked matches, that's fine. Just make sure you put the battle into the non-ranked category when creating the thread.

9. Have fun!