Dystopian/cyberpunk fight night…but with beasts/robots

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Welcome to Isol!
The city that never sleeps and doesn't let anyone sleep for that matter.
Where you must either fight, flee or fuck.

The year is 3067. To put it simply, the world has gone completely ape shit. Former New York City has now turned into a dystopian wasteland, where technology has peaked. Sex is better and humans have turned into literal monsters. Not that they weren't before, but y'know. The underground fighting rings have changed. They are now dominated by monsters that are controlled with the human mind through many years of developed technology.The monsters, or so-called Beasties, are real life, real flesh, real blood.

Real pain.

Having a beast isn't for everyone, and only few can handle the life of a Pilot. Some end up as betters, sponsors, developers, or simple medics for a team. It's not all fight, it's also a lot of play.

Pilots are unusually heavily modified; they deter from using modifications for a more desirable appearance. Instead, they mod themselves internally.

The beastie fights are a 1v1. Each pilot has a port with anything their heart desires, including the connector, that merges Pilot and beast. Think Avatar, the tall blue guys, but more technical, and way more thought out. The beasts themselves are genetically modified, with what you ask? Now that's a secret behind every team. They consist of a healthy amount of flesh, blood, and machinery. Any further questions? No? Good.

Beasties are not the only thing that adorns Isol. The grimy streets are littered with prostitution, alcohol, drugs, and anything you desire. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, the only reliability is yourself.

Where do you stand?

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Hi! You can call me Ori. I'm a 25 yo woman who has been roleplaying for a hot minute now. I'm extremely new to this site, so bear with me please. What you just read above is the setting of this RP. So what I have in mind is heavily inspired by Sonnie's Edge from Love death + robots. I love a good dystopian/futuristic/cyberpunk setting. I originally thought I'd make it a 1x1 but honestly, a group might be more fun and interesting! I'm thinking around 6 people? If more are interested we could bump it to 10. If you have any ideas to thicken the plot I'm totally willing to hear it. Just message me and we can talk. This is PvP in certain scenes, if there's a fight and so on between beasties. Please respect the fight if nothing else is planned!
note;you don't need to have a beastie, there's a lot of elements to this.

I'm not asking for much, just a few notes.

Don't god-mode. You are not indestructible.

Do not intend to kill if it's not consensual. If you plan to kill off your beastie and is successful, then there's no coming back, unless you have a really good reason or plot for it and it has been mentioned to me.

18+ please!

Readable writing, don't be lazy or illiterate. It is you, not u. I don't mind if you make a few grammatical errors, English is not my first language and I am bound to make mistakes too.

Face claims! I tend to use artbreeder.com, and I'm not a fan of anime face claims. If you usually use anime FC please send me a message of what you intend to use for your character.

In terms of roles, I'm giving it a lot of leash, no pun intended, for you to be whoever you want or whatever. Basically anything between prostitutes to Pilots (Solely playing a beast would become too minor of a role. If you want to be a pilot then beast follows and you'll RP that if in a fight. I've had plenty of time to think while the site has been down, and maybe we could organically work towards Beasts being able to think for themselves, but that wont be anytime soon!) So basically anything is up for grabs. This is not purely the fights, but everything that goes on around the city. I highly encourage sex, relations and fluff. A little atleast.

What a team usually consists of besides the pilot(which totally can be NPC's); Sponsor(piggy bank), Modder(Techy nerd basically), Gene specialist (Fancy medic).

As someone mentioned to me, to make it ''fair'' I will limit the beasts a little. There will be a weight class, just so we dont end up in a lion VS elephant situation. That would be unfair. SO! Food for thought;

3-5 meters tall (Muricans, google it)
3-4 Gene pools (Basically genes from 3 to 4 different animals, insects whatever. This is not fantasy, so shit like unicorns, dragons and all that is a no-go. Although that would be rad)
It does not HAVE to be animalistic, if you have a banger idea for a giant robot, then thats cool, it still is ''built'' around an animal, so in this case it could be like a bear, gorilla and more human animals that are bulky and can stand on their back legs. Besides this, release your imagination.


Considering not all of us will be pilots, I will be directing some random fights with no specific pilots, just whatever I come up with, or if anyone else has a cool little idea for a NPC fight, then all is good. Or my pilot VS random shit I come up with. I encourage you to do the same obviously, unless we agree to fighting and everyones okay with it.


Anyhow, as I mentioned, I'm new to this site so please bear with me. I've read rules and so on but if there's anything I should definitely know about this site, don't be afraid to let me know.

I will create an OOC and Character sheet thread if people are interested.
 
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Cool, so I had another question from the day before the forum went down, which was what happens to the beasts when they're not being piloted? Are they just unconscious, or do they operate according to a base personality of their own? I'm thinking that in order to maintain their muscle they need regular exercise and a controlled diet, just like managing a race horse, or for that matter a boxer, and the pilot can't always be around to take care of basic functions. I get the impression the beasts are managed kind of like race cars, with a pit crew and everything, but maintenance of machines is very different from maintenance of muscle.

On the gene pools, I would add a note that mythical beasts are very often a composite of different animals, so it should still be possible to create something like a dragon by combining various dinosaurs (a dragon at its base, just like a chimera, is a combination of our three ancestral predators: lions/tigers, eagles, and snakes). Or a unicorn by combining a horse and some sea creatures.

On purely mechanical beasts, one reason why these would be suboptimal and therefore rare could be that the stress upon the legs and joints at large scale makes them vulnerable if there is not some flexible muscle-like tissue involved. This is why there are no giant insects in the world - legs of chitin would simply snap under the creature's weight, if it was the size of a person. So nature evolved tendons, ligaments, and muscle to deal with the square-cube problem (the weight of a creature is proportional to the cube of its size, while its strength is to the square of its size--the cross-sectional area of its muscles--putting a hard upper limit on how big a creature can get... dinosaurs were about the maximum, and you can see how massive their legs had to be... poor T-rex couldn't even afford the weight of its arms). I think this principle was factored into the Metal Gear Solid games when they had those dinosaur-like mechas in number 2 (Sons of Liberty I think was the title?).

Another question I had was about weapons, like guns and lasers. I assume such things would be disallowed? Or would the rule be something like it has to be part of the creature's body, which means a beast with a laser has to eat the energy cost from its own metabolism (meaning it will get tired very quickly) and a beast with embedded guns can't have any more ammunition than fits inside its body (leaving less space for vital organs and other skeletal structures, or else giving it a massive protrusion that can be exploited as a weak point). Sword-like projections of bone or steel might have the same weaknesses as long legs, being that they are easily broken/dislocated at the joints, etc... Perhaps a beast could even have guided missiles embedded inside it, to be launched like spines, but the tradeoff being that each missile is very expensive, so the pilot better have a good sponsor? Plus the damage received by the propellant on launch is not insignificant...
 
Cool, so I had another question from the day before the forum went down, which was what happens to the beasts when they're not being piloted? Are they just unconscious, or do they operate according to a base personality of their own? I'm thinking that in order to maintain their muscle they need regular exercise and a controlled diet, just like managing a race horse, or for that matter a boxer, and the pilot can't always be around to take care of basic functions. I get the impression the beasts are managed kind of like race cars, with a pit crew and everything, but maintenance of machines is very different from maintenance of muscle.

I feel like they need to be cured and maintained in the tanks for now/outside the tanks unconcious obviously. Development could be that they evolve from having to be in the tanks. But for now I'd like to keep them in the tanks. I totally agree, but they are neither 100% muscle or machine. I don't know if you've read or seen any videos of that robot dolphin, that basically looks like a real dolphin, but yeah kind of like that. It could just be a total dream to rp and maybe it's too technical, but yeah.

On the gene pools, I would add a note that mythical beasts are very often a composite of different animals, so it should still be possible to create something like a dragon by combining various dinosaurs (a dragon at its base, just like a chimera, is a combination of our three ancestral predators: lions/tigers, eagles, and snakes). Or a unicorn by combining a horse and some sea creatures.

On purely mechanical beasts, one reason why these would be suboptimal and therefore rare could be that the stress upon the legs and joints at large scale makes them vulnerable if there is not some flexible muscle-like tissue involved. This is why there are no giant insects in the world - legs of chitin would simply snap under the creature's weight, if it was the size of a person. So nature evolved tendons, ligaments, and muscle to deal with the square-cube problem (the weight of a creature is proportional to the cube of its size, while its strength is to the square of its size--the cross-sectional area of its muscles--putting a hard upper limit on how big a creature can get... dinosaurs were about the maximum, and you can see how massive their legs had to be... poor T-rex couldn't even afford the weight of its arms). I think this principle was factored into the Metal Gear Solid games when they had those dinosaur-like mechas in number 2 (Sons of Liberty I think was the title?).

Combining is just fine, my point was that having all the genepools filled by *mystical creatures* such as a dragon, unicorn and a vampire just wouldn't make sense. If you're smart about choosing your genepools then yeah theres no limit basically. I don't remember if you were familiar with Sonnie's edge, but here's the fight and bio-mechs I'm basing it off of.


Another question I had was about weapons, like guns and lasers. I assume such things would be disallowed? Or would the rule be something like it has to be part of the creature's body, which means a beast with a laser has to eat the energy cost from its own metabolism (meaning it will get tired very quickly) and a beast with embedded guns can't have any more ammunition than fits inside its body (leaving less space for vital organs and other skeletal structures, or else giving it a massive protrusion that can be exploited as a weak point). Sword-like projections of bone or steel might have the same weaknesses as long legs, being that they are easily broken/dislocated at the joints, etc... Perhaps a beast could even have guided missiles embedded inside it, to be launched like spines, but the tradeoff being that each missile is very expensive, so the pilot better have a good sponsor? Plus the damage received by the propellant on launch is not insignificant...

Not exactly disallowed but just needs to be discussed.
 
This does look fascinating! I adore concepts like this. Moral ambiguity is my favorite part of fighting stories. Who said the Pokemon wanted to fight eachother for their masters, you know? This entire concept offers so much fascinating lore to explore as well. Societarily speaking, is there a nobility or are people rice due to their own machinations? Are modders and gene specialists hobbiests or is there a level of study involved to be truly good at what they do? Pilots as well, for that matter? And what would these institutions be like? So many questions that could easily be explored in world rather than here, or could be explored here before they are implimented in world. I can tell you spent a lot of time working on this idea and I already adore it.