The text battle community is stronger together than it is divided. We know this. The difficulty is that there’s always been a divide between our text battlers and topical heads.
The idea of a format where both sets of guys can take part isn’t particularly new; we’ve had Swag And Flow battles which was almost a hybrid format falling somewhere between the two. We had the Lyric Olympics battle format where it’s champ could dictate which format was used. It was cool, if a little flawed, as the champion could then simply play to their strong suit each week.
I hope to try and remedy that with this idea of the “Wheel of Misfortune”.
This is a league intended for both text battlers, and topical heads, to sign-up and take part. Each battle there will be a randomiser used to effectively “spin the wheel” on your individual battles, and that will be what decides whether your match-up will be a text battle or topical that week. Neither participant will know until threads go up. It will mean you have an even 50/50 chance each week of the battle being to your strong suit.
Now, to help even the playing field somewhat, I intend for the line limits to stay strictly between 10-16 lines min/max. This will mean it’s not all that dissimilar a format to the one current text battle leagues follow. It’s relatively easily to accommodate the text battlers, and the shorter verses will hopefully help maintain their interest (No one wants to read through 96 lines per battle, sorry topical guys).
My initial thoughts early on are that the topic choices should be more fun also - less reliant on the long storytelling format currently used, and more just fun in general - something that throws the storytellers for a loop and gets them out of this depressive, dark, doom and gloom with a murderous twist at the end type of writing. Lol. When it’s wrote down like that, you can start to see why it wouldn’t interest everyone.
Let’s try something more like “ Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or a horse sized duck?”. I think bringing in that more light hearted entertainment element could also convince more battlers to actively participate, as they don’t have to necessarily write a “story”. It doesn’t have to be long winded, it’s a short verse format. Quick, easy, and familiar to all involved. The topic is what it is and left open-ended as to doing what you want with it. The topical heads are challenged to write something outside of their comfort zone, the verses are shorter so will take up less of their time writing, there’s a complete shift away from the darker topics that have become the norm and everyone gets a chance at a decent record as they’re playing to their strong suit 50% of the time. The two worlds meet on the most even footing yet.
The wheel of misfortune decides everyones fate.
Dare to take a spin?