Graduation Requirements

[The Masked Orange]

I know a lot of people miss the old feature of dojos which made them more likely to produce certain types of wrestlers. This is kind of a spin on that which should also add a little bit of risk/reward to the system. Basically, a graduation requirement would be a skill (or set of skills) that a graduate would have to have in order to graduate from a dojo.

 

For example, say you're fed up of producing wrestlers that don't have the stamina for your work-rate product. You could put a 'requirement' on your dojo that graduates pass a fitness test. The positive is that graduates are more likely to have higher starting stats (not potential) in this area to reflect the emphasis of the dojo and the training to 'pass' that part of the course. The negative is that workers that would have come through your dojo that 'fail' simply don't graduate to the game world any more. Your graduating class of 6 might become a graduating class of 4. That may not be an issue if you're a promotion with little room for developing those who aren't naturally gifted, but if you're a promotion that cares more about brute-forcing prospects through with good fortune in star quality and/or charisma rolls, maybe being picky just made you send into the ether that 90 star quality prospect that gets blown up a bit easily at 19, but that would have developed decent stamina over the first phase of their career.

 

I like this more than a return to the old system just because it gives you a little more control of your dojo, which has become increasingly important, while adding a real strategic element with a real downside to trying to impart that control. For a promotion with a dev territory having some rough graduates is no big deal as you're likely sending them to that territory anyway, but for a company (say CZCW) with no dev territory and not the biggest roster in the world, but with a great dojo and probably a few too many graduates coming through anyway, it allows you to better bridge the gap in homegrown quality.

 

In my head this takes the form of a check list for each relevant category (Striking, Technical, Aerial, Fundamental, Physical, On-Camera (mic/acting)), with the ability to turn on as many as you like. Do you want only graduates that are all-round prospects from the go? If you're that picky, you may not get any able to graduate! I think this would all have to scale with the quality of the facilities. So a local-level dojo might only need for you to have a 30 average in your fundamental skills whereas a national-level dojo might need you to have, say, 55.

 

I know some people also miss being able to specify wanting 'big workers' and things like that. Maybe that could operate on a similar system called 'Recruitment Focus', where you specialise in that type of worker but it reduces the size of your graduating class. A dojo looking for athletes with good fundamentals is going to have more graduates than a dojo that is looking for athletes with good fundamentals that are at least 6' 5''. I like the idea of a recruitment focus as well because it allows you to potentially add a few different recruitment styles (say, converting athletes from other sports, recruiting from the entertainment industry, national tryouts...) but my favourite idea is that it allows you to play with the upkeep cost of the dojo. The more you specialise the recruitment focus, the less people you get paying fees to train, and so the more expensive your dojo is to maintain. Again, I think a nice way to have a real gameplay impact from a dojo interaction. AI dojos would have the impediment as well, so if a retiring wrestler founds a dojo and has their heart set on producing a certain type of wrestler, they would produce less graduates than if that same wrestler had taken on all comers.

 

The potential to have dojos with wildly different recruitment focuses also takes us into the forbidden realm of companies having multiple training facilities, say a general entry dojo and a special program for recruiting ex-athletes, but perhaps that pandora's box is for another time...

 

Anyway, sorry for the long one. Been going deep with a CWW save recently and am starting to really rely on the generated graduates from the UK scene so I've been thinking about the worker generation system a bit.