[OOC] Arena Chat Thread

[Darth]

This is the part where I ramble like a doddering old man about how we used to walk 20 miles in the snow to attend our 32-person mild powers tournament and we were happy to suffer a little bit of frostbite for it.

I want to tap into that level of play again, but running a tournament well takes a lot of people. I'm trying to retool the idea for something a little easier to work with. When I get it finished, I'll probably pop up a link here for people to take a look at.

[Divinity]

Ooh boy, dont make me get nostalgic about the Eden days! Such fun, fair tournaments, minus a hickup or two. Since the last tourney was a bust, sign me up should you follow through with your idea.

[Fallenreaper]

This is the part where I ramble like a doddering old man about how we used to walk 20 miles in the snow to attend our 32-person mild powers tournament and we were happy to suffer a little bit of frostbite for it.

I want to tap into that level of play again, but running a tournament well takes a lot of people. I'm trying to retool the idea for something a little easier to work with. When I get it finished, I'll probably pop up a link here for people to take a look at.

@Darth

Honestly, it sounds like it needs a lot of organization, definition, and monitoring through out the event from what I've seen and heard. Rather than when players require a judge calling as the competitive nature of some individuals can get out of hand because not everyone can handle defeat well and if you have newbies, mainly those who know very little about the system or have less experience, they tend to feel forced to trust the judgement of their opponents. And some times, that's not a very good thing because some people toss fairness out the window in favor of winning at all costs. *shudders*

[Maquina]

Tournaments have a number of baked-in issues it takes a great deal of effort and no small amount of luck to avoid.

One thing I've tried myself in the past, and seen done (very) occasionally elsewhere, is less a "let's you and him fight" conventional tournament and more of an exhibition game (NOT THAT KIND OF EXHIBITION DX). Set a challenge, everyone gets one post to put forth their best effort at meeting the challenge, the judges grade the results, move on to the next challenge in the event. Whoever gets the best overall grading by the end of the event wins. The competition isn't quite so direct so players tend to be less assholish towards their opponents/fellow competitors, it plays much nicer with higher-powered characters, and you can do some fun stuff with the challenges, stretch playin' muscles most straight punch-ups don't really touch on. That and since it's a one-post-per-entrant dealie, it goes wildly off-schedule much less often.

I like those a lot, though they're in the definite minority compared to typical punch-ups. 'Course, recent experience shows that the punch-ups really are way too prone to issues to be reliable. Urgh.

[Darth]

@Fallenreaper Absolutely. If you have a clear vision of what you want to do, and you can express as accurately as possible what it is you expect from people, then it makes running the event a whole lot easier. You want to try and articulate all of your rules and leave as little to interpretation as possible. If you want to run "mild powers" you need to define that, and you need to, say, list everything that you consider explicitly against the definition, or that you think would contribute to poor fights. You want to outline the submission/joining process, how you're going to grade profiles and judge fights, how judge adjudication is handled, etc.

For instance, with my scoring rubric, Sportsmanship is a category. Everyone should get a 0 in it because it's context sensitive: you only see a score in Sportsmanship when you played like an asshole, and the score will always be negative. Someone who makes a repeated habit of getting flagged for shitty sportsmanship in my event will likely find themselves unable to compete the next time it's run (I'm aiming for it to be bi-annual or seasonal, more or less). They get a "season" of play where they don't get to compete so they can take some time to realize that acting like a ponce over playing pretend on the internet is really dumb.

@DLL In order to have a well-run tournament, you really have to know a rules lawyer sort of guy. The guy who knows D&D inside and out and can make ridiculously gimped/specialist characters, or reads all the errata for a war-game. The guy who developed the "tournament rulebook" that everyone copies in my old community is a rules lawyer, and that's why his approach worked for the better part of a decade; he knew what he was doing and he knew what he wanted to accomplish.

And now he's an actual lawyer. So, you know. Learning to make and break rules is in his blood.

A lot of people also decide to run events without realizing how much work it takes. If you can't take time out of your day to grade at least one fight a day, or to communicate with your participants, then you're gonna have a bad time. A super, super bad time. And so will they.

[Dazsos]

Wooo, tier systems! I also made my own combat tier system for my old forum... which only had 4 different areas. Then I had to memorize Rilla's which had way more. Now I can only remember mine, I'd offer it to the public because it's super easy to work with... but in the end it's just easier to give reference to your favourite TV show.

"He's about as strong as Goku" - "Oh, well fuck, so he's a freaking god?!"

I missed all the current tournaments, so I'm down to scout out and join a new one. Though I'm a touch picky with who I allow to judge me, I need to be able to read past fights of theirs, or they need to fight me and prove their wisdom.

[Divinity]

B-but I like punch 'em ups :/

[ImportantNobody]

Speaking of giant enemy crabs, how about we do a boss fight where I control a giant enemy crab and any number of low powered characters can team up to fight him? It will be more story related as the giant enemy crab (GEC) forces invade the multiverse and this one is the vanguard. He will lose but do tons of damage to you guys in the process and he's 10 times smaller than the king crab despite standing 15 feet tall. This concept will take minimal effort so won't interfere with my other battles tha may start.

Anyone interested? It will be a slightly more silly tone than usual, but also capable of serious moments like One Punch Man or Gintama.

[Enki]

I'll work on my new guy tomorrow night and then I'll throw it up here to see if anyone wants to test against it.

[Divinity]

On the note of characters and challenges, I am open for any and all! Ranked or off the books.

[Dazsos]

@Divinity

I'd normally limit myself to about 3 fights at once... Meaning I have 1 spot open to have at you.

Interested in a ranked bout? Any tier that doesn't include guns and future tech.

[Divinity]

@Dazsos
Sure. I can scale across the board with Corban, so mid-tier sounds reasonable. However, it would probably help if we decided exactly what tier we will fight in, and what that entails. For instance, do you just not like guns, or anything that can achieve bullet speed? Magitech can surely involve futuristic aspects, but would that be included to you?

[Dazsos]

@Divinity
Modern guns I don't like, just because I don't see fights being fun with them. Logically gunfights shouldn't last as long as they do in TV shows or any RP battle. It's a who-ever shoots first should win type of gig.

Magitech is fine, usually it has more requirements and whatnot, and usually takes more mind to work. The effects are more fantastic.

Guns are easy and cheap.

[Maquina]

@Divinity
Modern guns I don't like, just because I don't see fights being fun with them. Logically gunfights shouldn't last as long as they do in TV shows or any RP battle. It's a who-ever shoots first should win type of gig.

Magitech is fine, usually it has more requirements and whatnot, and usually takes more mind to work. The effects are more fantastic.

Guns are easy and cheap.

@Dazsos

As a pretty dedicated gunslinger for the majority of my time in the game, I feel I should point out that everything can be 'easy and cheap', and conversely there are ways to make anything awesome and fun to work with. Guns are only as 'easy and cheap' as a given player lets them be.

[Divinity]

@DazsosI have to agree with D. Especially in the confines of a contest involving metahuman powers, guns lose their edge. Unless it's point blank, I'd generally argue bullets can be dodged. If not, then surely blocked. As for the magitech, it isn't intrinsically any more creatively attuned than a gunslinger with interesting guns. I think it comes down to your flavor, and your palette just excludes Smith & Wesson. Which is fine, of course. Corban is more of a sword guy, anyway.

That said, when will we begin trying to stab each other?

[ImportantNobody]

My new main character will be versatile with lots of room for improvement. Now that I think about it she's sort of like Archer from the Fate series. She can summon sparkly, glowing energy stuff like daggers and swords, or even armor and shields, into the air around her. The weapons can be fired off or track her movements like bending from The Last Airbender, only with pointy objects rater than elements. I'm thinking she could have the energy explode into energy attacks rater than remain only solid. It will take a second or two to spawn weapons so she can't just make a dagger unavoidably appear facing your heart as you charge in. Well, in later tiers her attacks would appear unavoidable to lesser folks.

Anyone think they'd like to fight her? I was thinking her introduction should be an important battle of some sort.

[Dazsos]

@DLL@Divinity
I said no guns because I'm not bringing a gun to the fight. Guns are definitely on the high end of the easy spectrum for 'low tier'... it takes virtually no energy to pull a trigger, and the result is extremely lethal. But this is an issue of personal preference, nothing I'm shoving down your throats. I live in a modern era that I'm trying to escape, gunslinging fights are just so fast paced, I'd rather play a video game for that thrill.

Then there's the issue with logic. Sure bullets can be dodged, but we forget just how fast a character actually needs to be to dodge a bullet, and at that speed alone, then we're getting in to a tier where it doesn't matter what you argue... everything is cheap and easy, everyone is OP. Not many of my mid-tier characters can run at 1,500mph, which isn't even as fast as most bullets travel. The fastest human alive runs at what... 25mph? Dodging bullets isn't logical, we just want it to be so we can enjoy our gun battles.

[Dazsos]

@Divinity
Uhhh, I sorta' digressed there. Guns just annoy me, and I really don't know why... I actually have a pirate character who uses them! But he's annoying and I like to kill him off in all of my D&D sessions.

Back to the topic! Yeah I'm available for a sword fight, let me look over Corban's profile to find a suitable candidate for him. Then when I have my own profile ready, I'll show you and see if you're fine with the balance.

[Darth]

Guns are definitely an issue for a lot of characters in the mild powers tier (re: using the definition I posted previously, for specific reference purposes). However, it depends on where in the tier the character is, too. A character at the upper end of the tier can probably deal with them. Once you hit sort of that point where a character can conceivably cross over from one tier to the next, guns become very much standard "tools of the trade" in that they're useful, but not game-changing. At that point, they're no longer much of an issue at all.

My main character is definitively "mild powers." He's square in the middle of the tier. He has ablative armor designed to withstand gun-shots and slashing attacks, but someone with a .357 Saturday Night Special will end the fight post-haste if they put six in his chest if for no other reason than that they've done so much deep tissue trauma to him that he's going to be hard-pressed to keep fighting. That's assuming his armor holds up after the first two or three shots - if not, he's very likely dead If the opponent is, say, 30 feet away, well -- there's not much hucking or jiving he can do to get out of the way. In the words of the helicopter machine gunner from Full Metal Jacket, you just don't lead 'em as much.

On the other hand, my Shadowrun character can eat a faceful of birdshot and not give a shit. He's at the upper end of the mild powers spectrum or the bottom of the next one depending on how you choose to classify him. He's basically a punch wizard with enormous amounts of damage soak. To him, a gun is a potential danger, but it's something he can fight against. Someone with armor piercing shells could do some damage to him, but something like a .22 is going to bounce off of his skin because he's a (literal) troll.

A lot of characters at mild powers, barring specific power sets or gear, aren't equipped to deal with the speed, range, or potential tissue damage of a gun-shot. You can circumvent a lot of the issues that come with modern firearms by utilizing magitech or future-tech weapons that are specifically designed for that purpose. I've seen a lot of people play "gun-mages" who do exactly that.

[Divinity]

Then it becomes an argument of semantics. Logically, nothing we do in mid-tier is possible or even coherent most of the time, even when pseudoscience is thrown into the mix for the validity of something. A lot of the things we do are done for reasons that ultimately amount to 'cuz that's just how it is.' Things that have just become acceptable in combat communities, like bullet dodging and spell-weaving.

Moving on! Am I posting first or would you like the honors?

Edit: Just caught up and saw your message. Disregard the previous question! My sheet will be sent shortly. Just a disclaimer-at base, Corban rests probably somewhere between slap dab middle and middle-high.