[OOC] RPGuild Ranking Headquarters!

[Gun]

Yeah, this is definitely a case of metagaming rather than interrupting, and has a pretty straightforward answer and result whereas interrupts and where they should or shouldn't be is super suggestive. But your sentiment is the same, and I thank you for sharing in my pain xD

Edit: That rhyme at the end? Toootally intentional.
#Bars

[ImportantNobody]

For my example I meant he shoots the bullet at Evvie but she burns him before he can shoot so his bullet never happens. I'd be 100% fine with her incinerating him to death to stop the bullet from being fired if she had the time to do so in between him aiming and pulling the trigger, but I said this would be the questionable reaction time unless it's crystal clear she's far quicker from the sheet. Much easier to accept if he says he charges at her with a sword and says he swings, of course she'll interrupt that attack from occurring and burn him to death if she's inclined to kill him. Of course he could change his plan after my post saying the fire comes in to possibly avoid his doom or maybe even interrupt her fire, but reacting to her mouth opening and stopping her fire before it comes out is a huge stretch.

[LeeRoy]

@Skallagrim A lot of anger towards the game master for creating a system that rewards power over skill.

That was my first steps.

[EmptyArmor]

@Davlamin

Any way you could link a pdf or an image of your pathfinder sheet? It'd be easier to be specific as to how different abilities can be described if we could get an idea of what the crunch looks like.

As far as your sheet goes, it looks pretty well organized. Basically, the DM handbook for your class and any splatbooks you might be using are your best friends; if you can paraphrase some of the ways they describe the martial abilities of a character for your level, or some of what they use to describe your class in general, you'll be golden. The beauty of text based RP is that you have as much freedom to be specific as you want, but as a start, reading up and borrowing the fluff from PF will carry you miles.

As a side note, you may also want to add a section for miscelaneous equipment. Fights can and often are decided by taking advantage of logical consistencies in your posts, and exploiting the inconsistencies in the posts of others. Something that's helped me a lot has been to approach the whole process-- character sheets, intro posts, reactions-- with as much to say about it as possible. Don't be afraid to describe your positioning, intentions, preparations, environment, as much as you can. Others will, and will often surprise their opponents with how much of an advantage can be gained from offhand, seemingly insignificant details. They're kinda like debates; as was stated recently, the first to make a mistake in a text fight loses.

Most importantly, have fun : p

[Doc Doctor]

A problem is what the reasonable limit for a fighter's reaction speed would be. On the subject of boxers, sometimes all it takes is a well thrown punch and they never see if coming. Yet imagine a character like many on this site reaching to draw his weapon in front of a boxer. He'd have little experience in getting punched at every day. It'd be from close range and out of his area of expertise. Logically the boxer could probably cream him in one shot before he gets a blade out.

Yet how many, and be honest now... how many weapon using characters on this forum could avoid that strike? I'd imagine just about every player would say their character would see it coming in time. But if every match could be settled just like that, those unfamiliar with the intricacies of boxing losing out nearly every time under such circumstances, I'd be a regular Chuck Norris.
My main character Gonad is a pugilist of the highest order, but if he won by logical default everytime he got into striking range shit would be boring as hell.

I don't mind a swordsman ducking a left straight that even a trained MMA fighter might not notice. It keeps things interesting. And yes, I know that normally a swordsman would cut an MMA fighter in two. This is just a circumstantial argument about reactions. Sometimes willing suspension of disbelief is what lets us have fun.

[MelonHead]

Well, although most swordsmen would be unfamiliar with a boxing style, they would be plenty used to fighting other people with weapons, which are far more dangerous. They probably wouldn't be alive if they weren't quick enough to step away from an opening strike. Though ducking it may be a little unrealistic, as that's specifically a hand to hand skill.

What's great about your opponent dodging, and this is something most people overlook, is that it can be just as useful to force an opponent to dodge in the way you want then to hit them in the first place. I can think of a fair few fights where forcing a specific dodge from my opponent has earned me a better hit, or even the win.

[Davlamin]

While I don't have a lot of experience in Arena fighting I do write and read often and I have to say, isn't reading all about suspension of disbelief? Most fantasy books are grossly inaccurate when it comes to writing fighting scenes anyways. I find that they take their cues from movies and not directly from the source. Real fighting is never that clean. I was watching a video on knight and how they fought based on manuals that were find (primarily western Europe) and its some brutal stuff, nothing like you see in television.

Take Bruce Lee for example, anyone that thinks he actually fought like he does in his movies knows nothing.

I don't remember where I was going with this except that I agree with Doc Doctor when it comes to suspension of disbelief.

@EmptyArmor I will try and copy my character sheet over. Most of the stuff I think would be fairly easy. I'm just unsure how to work magic. I've looked at character sheets and it doesn't look like anyone really uses that style of magic.

[Vordak]

While I don't have a lot of experience in Arena fighting I do write and read often and I have to say, isn't reading all about suspension of disbelief? Most fantasy books are grossly inaccurate when it comes to writing fighting scenes anyways. I find that they take their cues from movies and not directly from the source. Real fighting is never that clean. I was watching a video on knight and how they fought based on manuals that were find (primarily western Europe) and its some brutal stuff, nothing like you see in television.

Take Bruce Lee for example, anyone that thinks he actually fought like he does in his movies knows nothing.

@Davlamin

Well, we, arena folk, still do like ourselves a modicum of realism, so most of us do adhere to actual real-life fighting styles, with a bit of our own imagination mixed in.

Also, i still remember fighting as Ido and actually comparing the time it would take for my projectiles to travel to the average human reaction speed of 100-150 milliseconds. XD

[Davlamin]

I have only been here a couple of days and have spent a lot of time reading the different fights new and old. I have been taking notes and as someone new to this I have noticed a trend in fights and fighters across the board, which I think stems from the arenas main strength and weakness. It tries to please everyone.

What I have noticed is that:

A) The mixture of modern day and typical fantasy characters generally does not work.

-- I think this is because those writing with modern and advanced technology rely much more heavily on statistics while those that focus on a fantasy element do not.

-- Loose terminology in character sheets. Part of my issue in creating my character is that I want to be exact and specific as possible, which is not easy to do. Again, it is easier to put out the specifics for a gun than it is for magic.

Magic, by nature is inherently vague, and it has to remain that way or else it is not magic. I believe it was Clarke that stated “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

B) Most of us are not experts in close quarters combat and/or military tactics. Yet, our characters often are.

-- While reading many fights I often notice that many (if not most) turn into an OOC debate because person A and B are not on the same page. A simple switching of words, when you meant left but said right can mean all the difference in the world.

This is all the rambling of someone that has no arena combat experience. So take it with a grain of salt and know that this is only what I have observed from reading.

I do believe that complaining about something without offering ideas on how to better it is a waste of everyone’s time, so my suggestions are thus.

1. Come up with rules governing character creation and segregate characters based on technology level as well as power. It could be as simple as medieval , modern and sci-fi and then list examples of what’s possible at each tier such as Base-Human, Meta-Human, Super-Human, God.

--A Meta-Human in the medieval setting might be someone with access to self-enhancing spells and minor magics.
--A Meta-Human at modern level would be someone at Captain Americas level.
--And a Meta-Human at the Sci-Fi level could very well be something like a Marine in Star-Craft.

Sorry for the rant and ignore if I am off the mark. I am just really excited to be here and want to do my part to contribute and make the forum better. Please do not rip my head off. Please?

[MelonHead]

@Davlamin Hey, these are all truisms of Arena but you're right in pointing them out. Just a quick summary of what issues still exist and some of the ways they've been dealt with.

1. This is a personal gripe of mine, luckily the issue only becomes apparent in tournament play, otherwise it is up to the disclosure of the combatants if they agree to combat with an incompatible character. So far the work arounds tend to involve a middle ground being found, which revolves around the balancing elements of T1 Eden era and some practical reductions of firearms and other long range high capcity weaponry.

This issue very much still exists, but its mitigated somewhat by these factors. Segregation based on tech level would only really be useful as a stipulation for tournaments, which is also up to the tournament host.

2. This is common, ultimately though it does not matter, you're in control of your characters actions, so all that a mastery of a skill entails is the ability by which your character carries out the action you intend, and the range of actions you can have your character make. If you yourself have made a clear error, overextending or fucking up spacing or some other common mistake, you've just made your supposed masterful character look bad, and will be punished. It's worth learning about close quarters combat or at least doing some online research before slapping that description onto a character.

There will always be issues in regards to the subjectivity of language, though a decent mitigating factor is a judge ruling or communicating with your opponent throughout the fight to ensure you're both imagining the scene properly. A recent example of this was LeeRoy and me fighting in our Heavy Hitters battle, where it descended into a slightly messy grapple, we ensured that both of us knew what was going on and cut off the potential for misunderstandings. It's not the only way to deal with this issue, but it helps.

Hope these prevailing issues don't put you off Arena fighting, there's still a lot of fun to be had in combat.

[Rilla]

Well, although most swordsmen would be unfamiliar with a boxing style, they would be plenty used to fighting other people with weapons, which are far more dangerous. They probably wouldn't be alive if they weren't quick enough to step away from an opening strike. Though ducking it may be a little unrealistic, as that's specifically a hand to hand skill.

What's great about your opponent dodging, and this is something most people overlook, is that it can be just as useful to force an opponent to dodge in the way you want then to hit them in the first place. I can think of a fair few fights where forcing a specific dodge from my opponent has earned me a better hit, or even the win.

@MelonHead

That actually came up in Naruto, when Guy said he could tell what the 100th move in a fight would be. It was less predicting and more him using his considerable skill to force an opponent to move in certain ways to ensure the outcome.

[Skallagrim]

Close quarter combat is extremely entertaining when done right. However the only static rule in arena is compromise. No two character are equal, you work to get them as close as possible.

[Davlamin]

Thanks for the responses! Quick question.

What is T1 Eden Era?

[yoshua171]

This whole conversation is like two icebergs having an argument.

Both of them are drifting apart, but neither of them would budge if force was applied to them.

@LeeRoy

*Has been reading this whole time* Is there an argument, LeeRoy? This really seems like just a discussion to understand the two systems and what the failings of the interrupt system are. Rather than a debate to decide which is superior or which is flawed.

@Gun

Relevant Rant

Funny how I know exactly what you mean about "retroactive interrupts," now. I had to deal with the difficulty of reaction speed quite a bit in my fight against Khan's unreasonably fast (in processing power, reaction, and physical movement) character, Khazna. The character also possesses a sword which allows him to do the following:

Cut the space-time threads that cause a magical attack to occur meaning that no matter how far into the spell someone is the entire effect ceases to exist. Meaning that the spell is essentially never cast with few exceptions.

Granted, my own character, Raelis, was quite fast and had sufficiently advanced perceptual abilities and processing power that the field was evened a little.

Still that entire fight was just a clusterfuck of interrupts wherein I kept cutting off Khan's posts part way through (because she kept trying to carry out over 2 actions in each post and despite them being high speed, my character had the perceptual abilities to notice so he could react). It was pretty absurd really.

Mostly because of the fact that his character "predicted," my actions multiple times while also using those space-time blades, which were absurdly OP.

So yeah, I feel your pain...intimately. Imagine your fireball/vacuum nullification situation, except you have prepped it for several turns meaning it shouldn't be easily stopped, and then because of their space-time blade they stop the spell from ever having occurred "just because."

Frustrating. I also lost that fight only because we ran out of time and Khan couldn't reply to my last post (we had a deadline), which was more or less impossible to deal with. Mind you it took me the whole fight to set that maneuver up, so it wasn't cheap. It was also notable that Khan's character was the one who caused the maneuver in a sense. :P

Ah yes, subconscious metagaming. Tis annoying, but oh well we're all human so we must put up with it ^^;

[Rilla]

To be fair, from my understandings, preps don't really determine how easy or not they are to stop, but how much power is behind them. You can prep one hundred turns, if I can logically stop it... fuckdatshitson #nitpicky xD

[Rilla]

Thanks for the responses! Quick question.

What is T1 Eden Era?

@Davlamin

Basically a set of rules.

Click the T1 link in Skallagrim's siggy for a read.

[Rilla]

Close quarter combat is extremely entertaining when done right. However the only static rule in arena is compromise. No two character are equal, you work to get them as close as possible.

@Skallagrim

Right up until it becomes a e-peen contest about who can dodge the most close quarters attacks.

[yoshua171]

To be fair, from my understandings, preps don't really determine how easy or not they are to stop, but how much power is behind them. You can prep one hundred turns, if I can logically stop it... fuckdatshitson #nitpicky xD

@Rilla

In the case of Khazna's swords, each prep used for a magical attack constitutes how many times "threads" he has to cut to nullify that magical attack/defense/maneuver.

Sooooo

[Rilla]

His swords were basically bull anyway. Skally accepted them for his own reasoning, so I respect that. I wouldn't have. But in general, that's how it should have been anyway, I imagine he probably tried to work around that. xD

[yoshua171]

Agreed on that account.