Right-Step Alternate Universe

Premise

All characters have been moved one class to the right - Scout becomes a Soldier, Soldier becomes a Pyro, etc. until Spy loops back around to being a Scout. Events such as WAR! apply to classes rather than characters. It is assumed that classes were not altered by mistake, but rather, things changed that caused each character to be suited somehow to their given class. As such, there are a few changes to the background of the story:

• RS!Scout stayed behind to bring up RS!Soldier. He wasn't particularly good at it, but he was at least Physically Present.
• Pyros and Demos share visual quirks called Demoland. RS!Pyro doesn't actually percieve fire in an exaggerated manner, but rather thinks of the colours are more significant than they really are. RS!Demo, on the other hand, sees everything through a visor and likes to make little edits to things for aesthetic's sake, sometimes taking cues from the words of those around him.
• RS!Heavy doesn't come from a line of Highlands Demolitions Men but rather a line of Highlands Weaponsmiths.
• RS!Sniper never got to steal any skeletons on account of never going to medical school. He is, however, wanted for murder (well. Assassination, really) and theft of a motor vehicle (and birds!)

I'm sure there are other such occurrences, but pulling them directly off the top of my head is kind of hard.

Apart from these sorts of alterations, the premise of this is pretty much the same as in the video game. A bunch of men of questionable character are tasked with fighting an unending war over gravel.

Worldbuilding

In the writing I have done, I treat one team as in canon and apply the right-step to another. I'm not sure this is exactly a codified feature of the idea, though, so much as that's the most interesting way to write it. TF2's team boundaries are confusing at best and vague to the point of barely existing at worst, and in the context of the sort of semi-practical ideas this AU tends to produce I'm not too bothered about ironing out said blurriness.

Initially, the idea was to uniformly shuffle each character along in class, but as they were quite literally designed to Be their class names they do tend to retain certain traits across class lines. Pyro and Medic being Pyro and Medic even when they're RS!Demo and RS!Sniper are some obvious ones, but it really applies to all of them. So as I developed the ideas, I let the shuffle change from a clean movement to more of a smudge. It's resulted in a lot of varied damage types, but I hardly think that's a bad thing. It does blur the roles a little in some cases, though. RS!Demo's wealth of auxiliary fire damage comes to mind.

On Weapons

Character pages have weapons and their stats listed. I have no idea how to balance weapons, and sometimes outright do not want to, so they might not be the best weapons out there. The general idea is more important than the details, I figure.

Practically speaking I'm not even sure all of these would work in Source. Which is funny, because some of the other ones are explicitly based around working with Source jank.

Art