like Party dynamics: I made a story where four people are all running around trying to fight bad guys as they leap out of the shadows. So it was like "k in this panel we see warrior, then in this one Valkyrie..." but there was no organic sense of a group or relationship between them. Sure I had an idea of how Warrior and Valkyrie acted together, but the other two were a blank. Now I feel like I'm going to give them all loyalties to the group, as an entity in itself. That should be fun.

One of my favorite party dynamics is FFXI. Yes its a pain in the ass to be forced to party but because of that we the players have a sense of value to the party and care more that it lasts longer, that we find a replacement if we have to leave, and are more considerate even though we've just partied with 5 complete strangers who may or may not speak English at all. Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria does a cute singleplayer version of this by sticking your 4 PCs shoulder to shoulder and moving them as one, unless you split the groups to flank or something.

Making my four characters not as four people with interpersonal relationships but four people with a relationship as a group will allow me to actually let them interact more, i think maybe because the awkwardness is gone. Also I'm still toying with the idea of jumping around in continuity so I can skip the whole "meeting, proving" stages.

Also, if tactically they move as a group, no longer do I have to worry about giving them opponent's to fight. If I fracture them into single units, where and how and who will they fight so that each character is involved in the brawl? They'd have to fight at least 4 enemies at a time, most likely more to keep it dynamic so that Warrior can face 4 baddies at a time and Wizard can nuke whole groups to keep them from getting bored. Which would be fun, I guess, but then as a group I can make distinct enemies for them to fight. Enemies that I can follow and learn and make it not necessarily a 1-on-1 contest all the time. Such as a 6 person FFXI party fighting a single Land Crab.

Guild Wars and Star Wars: Battlefront I think shaped a great deal of my perception of class-based group tactics. Its actually scary how much in common they have tactically, when one is an RPG and the other is a squad-based shooter. Except Guild Wars' pve is more like the aforementioned "8 people fight whoever the fuck they want" as opposed to moving like a coordinated group and in Battlefront coordinating AI is nothing like coordinating humans (who may not listen, who may listen but not understand, whose minds are so focused they block outside noise, who can be clouded by adrenaline, who can attack differently and brilliantly, etc etc)

I apologize for this journal entry for having little meaning to anyone but myself. Of course all my journal entries are like this in some way, but this one is a little more dense than the others.

The last note I want to make is on that note of decompression I might have talked about earlier. Going from the 'videogame' approach to something more resembling a story. I had thought that "everyone has already seen everything i'm about to draw, so i'll skip the boring stuff and get to the stuff I want to draw. My shameful artistic skills will thank me." Well as you've seen from the Wizard origin, that SUCKS. And Valkyrie was going to be just like it. Well I'm changing it now, and will probably give Valkyrie a full-on training scene like in Mulan. Yeah, I can hear your groans already. But I want to develop her as a person and why not do it in an enclosed, "safe" environment before she meets the other heroes? Don't worry, I'll skip the boring "training" montages.

I'd like to give Warrior the same treatment, but I'm not so sure how he's supposed to grow. The idea for the character came from Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Mists of Avalon", where I loved the character of the Lady of the Lake (the first one) because she was so shockingly new. But she also wasn't. She was a powerful woman in a matriarchal society, and had taken for granted her rights to be obeyed, her control over other people, and the subjugation of men in her society. I felt bad for the Merlin of Britain (the first one), because as a man in growing up in this society he was completely devoted to her, but without even a hint of love. Anyway, you know powerful men who grew up in a patriarchal society. You see them all the time. And we call them jerks and assholes but they control the money and the power and it makes us really mad when they become our bosses. There were many great male characters in Mists of Avalon; Lancelot who rejected the spiritual and matriarchal control of his mother and believed in only what he could see, Arthur a weak-willed slave to the matriarchs and patriarchs around him, Mordred who used this society for his own means. I want to take them and blend them into my Warrior. He would be called by the Priestess of Avalon during the Beltane feasts and the ritual of the Great Marriage, and she would tell him that he too, must kill a stag. But his target will not be a forest animal but a previous King Stag who turned dark and started destroying society and civilisation. So, ritually dressed up and tattooed, they turn Warrior to go seek his villain in the wild and untamed Earth.

The bad guy's name is Death=Adder, btw. Taken from the final boss of Golden Axe, a 2D beat 'em up from the Sega Genesis. As far as I understand it, the reason he has an '=' sign in his name is because that's how the Japanese separate first and last names that aren't kanji.