[Ashenlock]

Originally Posted by Fat Poppycock

a perfect battle is where you evaluate each option carefully and decide how it will impact your battle in the turns to come. a good warstory is where two players of excellent calibre face off with neither a complete team advantage or an extreme amount of hax, although if you completely outplay a not horrible opponent that is decent to watch too.

losing a pokemon is perfectly acceptable if it was justified and not to 'woops, misplay'.

suspense for me isn't like oh, speed tie, speed tie!! nor is it, will he survive this to kill him???? it's more like can he break this well constructed stall team that seems to be predicting his every move? can he survive the onslaught of a +3/3 kingdra with some excellent play??? that kind of thing.

a misplay in my definition is a play that is completely unjustified and had insufficient reasoning behind it, therefore it should have no place in a good warstory unless the rest of it is so good that the misplay does not matter on the whole. a player coming back to win a match despite making a misplay makes a shit warstory because it means that the opponent was not good enough to take advantage of it, or perhaps the misplay didn't have much of an effect.

What he is saying here is important. I think anyone writing a warstory could benefit from reading this, especially when deciding whether or not to use a particular battle as the subject of one.

OP, you have potential as a writer. Try making a story out of a battle you've given more thought into, without giving it a theme, and I think you'll find that it comes more naturally and "feels right."