I’ve been thinking recently about modeling Iron Man matches in WWW. It’s certainly something that could be done purely through narrative (falls are booked throughout the match, but mechanically it builds normally and closes on an ordinary finishing move), like the International Incident Beta suggests doing with 2-out-of-3 falls matches, but I’d like to see just a bit more structure than that.
The idea I think appeals to me most is that you could do a countdown timer like the core book recommends for the King of the Hill match, and then coordinate the booking of each fall with the timer… Wrestler X is booked to score a fall when the timer’s at 4, Y is booked to score one at 2, X is booked to eke out a win as time expires at 0, something like that. Nothing else about the match needs to be anything but standard; the coordination with the timer just emphasizes the time component of the match.
The “Indy Match” rules in II would also work as an option for Iron Man matches, pretty much just as written. Wrestle as normal up to the first fall, then the player whose wrestler lost that fall has a chance to Interrupt to say that there’s time left on the clock and the match keeps going. That would leave the exact pacing of the match up to the players’ discretion, not Creative’s.
I’m slightly tempted to try to work some kind of stamina element into the Iron Man match, possibly making botches more likely toward the end of the allotted time period, but I think that’d be excessively crunchy, and not really true to the handful of Iron Man matches I’ve seen (which don’t seem to be booked unless the wrestlers involved have good enough cardio to go the distance).
I would be remiss not to mention that there were a few more ideas for the Iron Man stipulation (linking the scoring of falls to Momentum or to the basic Wrestling move) recommended on this community back in September, which aren’t particularly to my tastes but could certainly serve.
What are your thoughts?
(Apologies if I shouldn’t have used the ‘Backstage Workshop’ tag for this.)
Oh, I like the idea of that. I’d forgotten to take into account the difficulty of keeping an audience invested in an Iron Man match all the way to the end, but that’s definitely an issue.