Doctor Roth's Sing-Along Blog

Doctor Roth's Sing-Along Blog, often abbreviated DRSAB, is a planned roleplay in the OAZ, lead by Henry.

Story(Contains heavy spoilers!)
A man claiming to be Chrono Roth has surfaced, reviving the original hero's multimillion dollar company, and the terrorist group Aversion Isthyasti. He has managed to once again dominate the collective global market, and re-establish the company as one of the largest and most powerful umbrella corporations in the world.

The man's true identity remains unknown, but his purpose is apparent. He wastes no time in pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into militant forces, creating an army out of the original Chrono's Mobile Suit designs.

In less than forty-eight hours, a three man team with "Chrono" at its head have completely overwhelmed the Ohana, forcing them into hiding and proving once again that powers and strength can almost always be outmatched with technological prowess and quick thinking.

The Ohana themselves are forced to hold out in the Bird's Nest, the original Chrono's now-abandoned emergency bunker. Sealed below 200 ft below the surface in a 12-ft thick asphalt and steel complex, with little power, a failing generator, no cellphone or radio signals, a weak 2MBPS internet connection, a jury-rigged oxygen pump on its last legs, little air left, little food, little water, a broken computer, and no access to any feasible weapons or ammunition that could put a dent in the Aversion weapons, things are looking dire. The Ohana has little to do other than wait for their inevitable demise.

Given a full twenty-four hours of undisturbed work, Shurajou manages to repair the broken computer. Within it, he finds the specs for the RGZ-95 ReZEL, a mass-production mobile weapon Chrono had designed for Aversion use only weeks before his death. Other than its design, Chrono left no notes on the model. Shurajou is confident that he can build at least four of them with what little they have, but he is worried about just how he's going to power them, not to mention he has nothing to go on except the untested designs of a deadman, so he can't even be sure they will work properly when he does construct them. Despite this, he realises it's their only hope of survival... But building these four machines will take him over six weeks, and they only have enough supplies to last them another two days, even if they were to ration them as strictly as possible... And four ReZELs wouldn't be able to easily house all of them.

The Ohana has a terrible choice to make. Build the machines and pray they don't starve to death before they can escape, or take what they can, and run like bats out of hell, praying the Aversion doesn't catch up to them too quickly?

Gameplay
DRSAB will introduce a variety of new gameplay elements into the OAZ, most noticeably the introduction of true real-time strategy elements. The Roleplay will never have "chapters", or "episodes", and "downtime" will not exist. Instead, the Roleplay is constantly going, even when nobody is online, a. Idea that has never been done in an OAZ Roleplay before. This means that, in essence, the Ohana can be attacked at any time, no matter how inconvenient. This does not mean, however, that the Ohana will ALWAYS be under attack. There will be numerous occasions when the battlefield is quiet, but that quietness could change in a moment's notice.

DRSAB will also feature a rather unique new system for combat, as well. Combat instances are held on an active battleground, split into a variety of different Fields. Fields are always owned by one faction or another, and can be taken by destroying enough of that faction's units. Fields will have a number of different strategic uses; from mineral mines, to mobile weapon factories, to small bazaars, with a variety of other field-types available. Fields which are owned by a faction STAY owned by a faction, long after the battle ends, unless the faction decides to pull out of that field.

Resources will also take on a large amount of value in DRSAB, as well. You will constantly need resources to build your many weapons and machines, and you will always be looking for money to purchase new design specs and to hire workers and mercenaries.

DRSAB is also one of(If not the VERY) first stand-alone main roleplays to use both a card-based stat system and to use mobile suits as the main means of attack.

In addition to all of this, DRSAB also introduces the idea of players actually having to research material for themselves, in the form of Doctor Roth's Sing-Along Blog, The Blog!, a blog by the author of the roleplay(In character as "Chrono"), in which he posts cryptic(And not-so-cryptic) hints about the Aversion Isthyasti's latest plans and plots. This blog is not yet open to the public.

Detective Mode
All players can enter "Detective Mode", a hightened state of awareness which allows them to see several statistics of a Mobile Weapon they focus their attention on. Detective Mode cannot be used while moving or attacking. While piloting a Mobile Weapon, the focus can be extended to three separate Mobile Weapons at once. There are several other uses for Detective Mode, most of which likely have to do with problemsolving, however the author has chosen to withhold these until further notice. He has stated that most of them will simply be revealed when the ability has been gained, however, and that the Ohana will not have to figure them out themselves.

Mobile Weapons(MWs)
Combat in DRSAB is primarily fought in gigantic hulking vehicles called Mobile Weapons. These have appeared multiple times in the OAZ, but all have featured a perfect gysoscopic cockpit, holographic monitors, and a Zero Motion Control System, meaning that the pilot needed to simply stand in a large black "Control Helm", and the Mobile Weapon would mimic his every move. In DRSAB, these systems exist, but they are as expensive as they are hard to build, taking a master mechanic to even attempt to recreate any of them, and a millionare to boot.

The Mobile Weapons in DRSAB are much more mundane in nature, featuring contemporary one-man cockpits with traditional suit-lock technology, comparable to the cockpits featured in Mobile Suit Gundam 00.

The weapons themselves are as varied as in the Gundam franchise itself. There are hundreds, possibly even thousands, of designs available for unlock in DRSAB, and in addition, most designs have several levels and variations, making them upgradable, to a point.

Mobile Suit Limitations
While they are indeed powerful weapons, Mobile Suits and the like are not as totally hulking and unstoppable as they have previously been represented. Now, a Mobile Suit has a set limit on its energy levels, the damage it can take, the damage it can put out, and the maneuvers and weapons available to it. These are represented on the Mobile Weapon's Statistical Calculated Account Readout Display, or Stat Card. These tend to change when upgraded, in both positive and negative ways.

In addition to this, the now-obsolete cockpits that the Ohana are forced to use are very old, and require an extreme amount of upper-body strength to effectively pilot. They are also far more complicated than any of the other designs that the Ohana has encountered before, meaning that it also requires an extreme amount of intelligence and memorization skills to effectively pilot, as well.

And as another fault, the severely outdated Mobile Suit OS "Porthole Vista" requires that the pilot be programmed directly into the software; from their genetic code to their brainwave patterns, all biometric data is entered into the computer ahead of time, and even then the pilot has to sit in the mobile suit and hand-calibrate the controls to their specifications afterwards, and there's a triad of required diagnostics checks that must be carried out after the entire process is over with. This means that the entire system is very hard to set up, and creating new mobile suits takes days of work. In addition, they are also almost non-transferable when they have been properly synced to a specific pilot, and the unsyncing process can take weeks, and sometimes even months. The OS is also known to stutter and even shutdown entirely, if too many systems are installed and/or active at once, and because the OS is constantly accumulating miscellaneous data, frequent "data dumps" are required, which involves dumping large portions of the internal memory to at least ease the performance drop caused by the data collection.

Despite the best efforts of renowned Mobile Weapon expert Chrono Roth; "Porthole Vista is just too damned complicated! It's un-optimizable. There's just too many problems with it, that if I even tried to take them all away, all that I'd be left with is a primitive tic-tac-toe program! I KNEW I should've just gone to CackleFruit..."

Inspiration
DRSAB draws inspiration from, obviously, Gundam, more than any other source. It borrows several gameplay elements from other games, such as Starcraft and Dynasty Warriors 3: Gundam, and it borrows its card-based stat system from DnD. The story attempted to draw as little from other works as possible, save for the name and the actual blogs themselves.

Trivia

 * DRSAB is one of the only roleplays to put so much heavy emphasis on unorthodox fighting methods.
 * Despite the fact that almost all mobile suits in the OAZ universe are technically "Gundam" units, the acronym does not exist in any way, shape, or form within the canon, and has never even been mentioned.
 * Chrono once used the original protagonist Gundams from 00 as partners!
 * The OAZ universe uses a few of the same acronyms from the Gundam universe, but applies them to new subjects or terms; such as the "ZERO" system. This can occasionally make it harder to follow, and is often the result of poor research on the author's part.
 * The author has gone into great detail with just how the suits were created, who they were created by, and how they work.... Most of the time.
 * The author actually has a key for what every individual button and lever does inside the cockpit; but has gone on record by saying that he is "Not sadistic enough to make the Ohana memorize button combinations that even [he] couldn't memorize."
 * DRSAB is not the first roleplay to utilize a form of "Detective Mode" in the OAZ, but it is the second.
 * This is one of the most ambitious, complex, and extensive roleplays to date, in terms of gameplay gimmicks!