Forum:Survival of the Fittest 2.0

Introduction
''Once upon a time, there was a system. Vast, unknowable, and secure in its own power, the system could and would go to any lengths to make sure it got what it wanted. And what it wanted was to continue doing what it had been made for. And the thing that it had been made for was The Game. ''

''The Game was the core of the system. If the multitude of intelligences that coordinated the system's inner workings were its brain, then The Game was its soul. The Game existed because of the system and the system existed because of The Game. They were one and the same, neither existing without the other.''

''It was a hungry thing, this Game. It required two things in order to sustain itself: viewers and blood. You see, The Game existed to entertain the multitudes, to sate their never-ceasing need for violent distractions. The system catered to the needs of The Game and The Game catered to the needs of the public. The public wanted blood, so The Game needed to give them blood. But the public would not be satisfied by just any blood. The blood they wanted had to be spilled on a battlefield, a battlefield of heart-pounding combat and cold-sweated fear. The battlefield had to be deadly, and the contestants who fought and died upon it even more so. It had to be a veritable altar of death, an environment so hostile that no one could possibly survive within its deadly embrace. And so The Game and the system created this death world, tailoring it to utter perfection. But when it was finished, it still required contestants to populate, fight, and die upon it. And so the system found some.''

''There was a distant galaxy, one populated by dozens of species, each one composed of trillions of beings. And these species delighted upon visiting war and destruction upon each other. It was all they had been doing for as long as any one of them could remember, and each one was very good at it in their own special ways. And each species possessed within itself warriors who surpassed those around them in strength, skill, and cunning. These would be The Game's contestants. These would be the heroes gazed upon by the public.''

''So the system made its selections and gathered them up in the blink of an eye. None of them knew what was happening to them or where they were going, but the system cared very little about what they thought. As it sped its prizes back to the arena that awaited them, the system sent a message to the death world and the public.''

The Game was about to begin.

Survival of the Fittest 2.0
If the introduction or the title of this section didn't clue you in, I'm making this forum post to announce the return of an old HFFW project, Survival of the Fittest. The overlying premise is fairly simple: the collective user body submits any of their fanon characters and the project manager proceeds to write a "season" in episodical chunks in which the contestants are pitted against each other in an open environment. Bullets and blades clash, alliances are formed, allies betray each other, people die, and the last man (or woman) standing survives and wins. It was started some time ago by Justanothergrunt, who successfully managed to organize and write the project's first season. After some time of inactivity, he granted the responsibility of writing the second season to me. I began the season with gusto, and was a good way into it when life intervened, some time past, and I unfortunately lost interest in continuing the project. However, I write this forum post not only to announce the regrettable but necessary cancellation of SOTF Season Two, but to announce SOTF Season Three.

While it may seem cocky to start a new season with only an unfinished one under my belt, but I've put more thought into this season than I did the previous one and have made some changes to the way it will be written and the direction it will go in. Since Justanothergrunt has not been active for some time now, I've taken the liberty of changing some of the rules he put in place for the series. When I was beginning to write Season Two, he told me that I could make whatever changes I felt necessary when writing. Instead, I followed his own tried and true approach, and although this was successful when I was actively writing, I would like to try more approaches to the project. Therefore, I have made a few additions and modifications to SOTF, which I will detail below. Feel free to support/criticize changes in the comments section. I plan on beginning writing the actual season in early June, as soon as my school lets out for summer break, but I'm using the time until then to solidify my overall plans for the season and collect feedback about the changes I'm making.

Main Rules

 * 1) The season will be written for the most part by me. In the past, guest writers have been recruited to write episodes, and while this was an excellent way to include new writing talent and change the pace of the story they also made it somewhat harder for me to organize the characters properly and give the season a coherent overreaching storyline. So while I’ll leave a space open for anyone wishing to guest write an episode, the episodes guest-written will be subject to more guidelines from me.
 * 2) Only canon-friendly characters may be entered. Characters featuring NCF, Godmodding, or any similar tags are not eligible.
 * 3) Guidance and advice ranging from my handling of your personal characters to my handling of the overall story is welcome, but remain within the bounds of the site’s civility rules while doing so.
 * 4) Once episodes are submitted by myself or any guest writers who may volunteer, they will not be edited in any way. This means that if I or a guest writer misrepresent or miswrite your character in some way, don’t expect the offending episode to be revised to suit your needs. On the other hand, your advice and criticism regarding the portrayals of your characters are welcome and if a misrepresentation does occur be sure to tell me how the character is misrepresented so that it does not happen in future episodes.

Entering Characters
In the previous incarnation of SOTF, users simply submitted the names of their characters with links to the articles. This time around there's a little more to it than that. In order to give players a little more control over how their character is armed and how they will behave on the battlefield of SOTF, a more detailed entry form will be used, as detailed below:
 * Name: The character's name, linked to their article.
 * Weapons and equipment used: This is pretty self-explanatory, but I feel that some clarification is needed here. Just give a short list of the weapons and equipment that you want your character to start the battle with. This list should be confined to any weapons, armor, and gadgets the character will have when his/her boots hit the ground. Don't include vehicles in this list (more on that later); at the beginning of the season, everyone will be infantry, at least for a while. The criteria for weapons/armor/gadgets is simple: you can use any canon equipment (i.e. it appears in the Halo video games or books), any weapons of your own creation, or any weapons listed on the character's page as being used by him/her.
 * Summary: Just to clarify, this is not a description or history of the character in question. Their article is for that, and I assure you that I will read every single entry thoroughly before beginning to write. This section is for you to describe any particular character traits you want the contestant to show through his/her actions in the field. How will he/she react to being forced into such a hostile environment? Is there any person or persons he/she hates or will be motivated to kill? Will he/she be more focused on survival or on killing his/her fellow combatants? Is he/she trustworthy? You can answer all of these questions and more through this section, so make it as long or short as you want.

While the first section is obviously mandatory, the second two are not. These are for you to have more control over how the characters you enter are portrayed, and you can choose whether or not you want to fill them out. I will be looking at each article as well, so I'll use what's there for inspiration should you choose not to fill out the Weapons/Equipment or Summary sections.

It must be noted that the weapons and equipment you select for your characters will not affect how well the character in question fares during the season. The selections are to help me have an easier time imagining each character and to allow you more of an opportunity to determine how your character will fight during the season. So just because a character has a rocket launcher does not mean that they’ll do better than a character with a pistol; this is determined by the articles themselves.

Supply Drops
These are the closest you can come to directly influencing the course of events in the season. Once per character per season you may have a single item “dropped” to aid said character in his endeavors to survive and kill his/her fellow contestants. These can take the form of vehicles, weapons, equipment, or any other useful item you can think of. Rather than listing everything that can or cannot be used, I’ll just say this: when you submit an item and specify which character it’s for, I’ll take a look at it and incorporate it into the next episode that character appears in. Just about every item submitted will be approved and incorporated, but I reserve the right to reject supply drop submissions for reason which I will explain under the submission.

If you don’t feel like using these, don’t worry. It’s not required that you use them. However, they may end up serving more of a purpose than just giving characters more toys to kill people with, so just bear that in mind.

Criteria for Writing
I’ll start this section by saying that under no circumstances will I even begin episode one without first reading each and every submitted character’s article in its entirety. The entire point of this project is to encourage the creation of good articles on the site, so disregarding any of the characters submitted to SOTF.

That being said, the success or failure of your characters will be determined for the most part by the quality of their articles. Characters with two sentence-long articles will be little more than fodder to be killed off during the first few episodes, while characters with creative premises, substantive articles, or plain old good writing will have a much greater chance of seeing the season through to its bloody climax.

Unfortunately I am a human being and am subject to the personal flaws and biases that plague us all. There’s no real method of judging just how superior each character is from another, and that means that at times my own opinions will determine how things go. This isn’t a computer program built for fairness, this is a project written by an individual using characters submitted to his violent whims by their owners. So try not to cry foul every time an engagement between characters does not go the way you think it should... unless it’s obvious that I’m being extremely biased towards certain characters. In that case feel free to ostracize, lynch, hang, crucify, or draw and quarter me however you see fit.

As a final note in this regard, it is important to remember that this project is not founded upon realism. So yes, you’ll see Spartans torn apart in situations where their armor should have held, or see unjammable weapons jam, or see HCW-era tech trump tech built decades after it. It’s a contest featuring fan fiction characters from a video game series killing each other. Just go with it.

Comments
So there you have it. Feel free to use this section to give critiques or opinions about the changes I've made. Remember that the season is still in its planning phase, so things can be changed depending on what people tell me about this. In the meantime, I'm opening a new Season Three section on the SOTF main page where people can sign their characters up.