I originally had an idea for guns vs. melee practice where we do a bunch of short battles to try different strategies out for different scenarios and see if melee can ever win and what works the best, but this idea can work for other stuff as well. Basically, it will be to practice realism without needing to waste time with unnecessary fluff such as story and character motivations. It's just good old fashioned fights, starting off with the action. The focus of these battles is on how quickly they can go in real life and people might very well get killed in the first attack if they make a mistake, even getting snipe'd in the back of the head. Being treated like NPCs, the player can counterattack the opponent in a realistic manner in their own post. If someone says they will attempt to run past a machinegun nest and dive into the lake, if the machinegunner knows they can't pull that off then the person trying to make a break for it will be shot down right then and there in the machinegunner's post. That's a learning experience for the person who got shot who would otherwise have tried to get by with it through sheer luck and dubious dodging skills.
However, just because you can kill people in your post doesn't mean you can do it if it doesn't make sense. If they come at you from behind with a knife while you have your back turned, focused on something else and reloading, you can't have your character react inhumanly fast and manage to pull off a spin kick that knocks them out while they're bringing the knife down. We are going mostly on the honor system and logic that people are trying for realism, taking the blow or dealing it out based on what would logically happen. If you feel you got the short end of the stick, this should also be a great learning experience as people can debate the reasons why, and if we manage a good debate and find stuff out on here then this experience can carry on to our other battles. Plus, if the battle didn't end to your liking it's no harm done due to how quick these battles are.
Most of the battles will not have superpowers because they are harder to say what would realistically happen (in general), but that's not to say that such battles will be forbidden in this format, and they could be fun to do later on once the basics are done. Battles can be done between multiple people or just 1 on 1s. An interesting battle I have in mind is how well a group of melee users could do against a single gun user, so seeing this played out in a bunch of tests would be very interesting. Different people can be the gun user every time if multiple people want to try it out.
I'm thinking there will be a swift time limit in place to keep these battles going at a good pace, and if they don't post in time then the next post will handle the situation in a realistic manner. Also, you can allow other people to jump into your character if desired to keep things going if you are planning on not posting for a bit. Characters can be the generic John Doe type or a fully realized character, just not having that explored during the battle.
Does this idea appeal to anything?
LeeRoy