[OOC] Dragonball: Final Hours

[Thess]

@BCTheEntityI apologize, I did get a bit standoffish. It is slow, we had a whole lot more show interest that never joined and we have not had a fast rate of posting. Still, I promise you this is not a game I will just let die off. I love the concept and devoted 60+ hours to the OOC information alone. But I have since become a lot busier. I will get a post up hopefully tonight but tomorrow night at the latest. It may be slow going for a while but for the moment I am okay with that. I am in contact with Uffizi and Bartok, we will not let the game just die off.

[BCTheEntity]

@Thess Alright, then. I'm not necessarily too worried about Bartok, who posted recently, but Uffizi has had more than three weeks to get his character sheet finalised. I'm just concerned that he might not show up, but if you say you've been in contact with him and you know for a fact that he's still interested in this, then I suppose he'll be there eventually.

[Terminal]

I am here. I simply cannot proceed any further until other events happen. I cannot drive the plot by myself. I have a few things planned, but they cannot happen in a vacuum. Other stuff needs to happen. Preferably stuff posted by other people.

I would love to post some more. If other people post, I will.

[BCTheEntity]

@Terminal Yeaaah... it's honestly kind of a similar situation with me. Like, there's Azamat, Piccolo, and maybe some NPCs for my characters (well, mostly Expial, since Luceptor's in his room) to interact with... and then nobody. Which could be solved if you had Charis turn up at the tournament too with a significant degree of power... I'm not sure why you're against that, but it's an idea.

[Terminal]

@Terminal Yeaaah... it's honestly kind of a similar situation with me. Like, there's Azamat, Piccolo, and maybe some NPCs for my characters (well, mostly Expial, since Luceptor's in his room) to interact with... and then nobody. Which could be solved if you had Charis turn up at the tournament too with a significant degree of power... I'm not sure why you're against that, but it's an idea.

@BCTheEntity

Mainly because she does not currently have a significant degree of power, and even with the suggested doubling of power she wouldn't hit that benchmark anyway.

Here are my plans for her at the moment though, in case anybody thinks something can be worked out.

-Charis has access to a training ground akin to the Room of Spirit and Time and the Gravity Chamber (this particular training ground is hardly unique and not particularly hard to locate, but until stated otherwise she is likely the only one using it), which will allow her to progressively train to become much, much stronger at a faster rate than normal training routines elsewhere would permit. But that sort of thing still takes time. Her power level isn't going to abruptly shoot up from 1,000 20,000 from in a few days.

And here's a snippet from a PM I had with Thess.

I was going to write Charis as having extreme anti-Saiyan sentiments, and holding immense disdain for transformation states - especially Super Saiyan, Arcosian, and Capsule-Derived States. . .[snip]

She's very big on skill and technique versus raw power, see, which was why I planned on pitting her as an antagonist tooled for a protagonist party I initially assumed would be a mix of Saiyans, Humans, Namekians, and Androids - and perhaps Majin as well, on the higher end of scale.

Cue everybody making Arcosians and Makaioshins.

As she gains more power she will gain increasingly sophisticated ki techniques that emphasize form over force - which is already something her current build is aimed at. As for boosting her up to two-four thousand, at best that would only really put her in the same ballpark as the Namekian character - making her 'third weakest.'

Terminal

So yeah. The current plan is to have her eventually start confronting people while weaker than them, yet somehow still able to hold her own and even win. But that can't realistically happen anytime soon, since the vast majority of characters present currently are, literally, an entire order of magnitude stronger than her.

[BCTheEntity]

@Terminal I mean... why not just set her pre-game power level to a more equivalent level to the other characters? Keeping in mind that the characters we're playing as are nominally extraordinary examples of their respective species, save characters who are notably weaker than their racial norm such as the Arcosian twins, I don't think it'd be too horrendous to play as a human with a power level rivalling the relatively high-level fighters we've seen so far; hell, maybe that's why she's been vanishing so frequently, if she's been out training for extended periods of time in a place where time is sped up relative to the outside world. There are obviously limits to what's reasonable, but I don't think starting her off with a power level of, say, fifteen thousand is too unreasonable, again given that she's an exceptional example of how powerful human beings can feasibly get; I think that's about the level Halvtand planned to put his character at, anyway, and at that point, Expial is actually the weakest PC in the game outside of Thess' base form.

[Terminal]

@Terminal I mean... why not just set her pre-game power level to a more equivalent level to the other characters? Keeping in mind that the characters we're playing as are nominally extraordinary examples of their respective species, save characters who are notably weaker than their racial norm such as the Arcosian twins, I don't think it'd be too horrendous to play as a human with a power level rivalling the relatively high-level fighters we've seen so far; hell, maybe that's why she's been vanishing so frequently, if she's been out training for extended periods of time in a place where time is sped up relative to the outside world. There are obviously limits to what's reasonable, but I don't think starting her off with a power level of, say, fifteen thousand is too unreasonable, again given that she's an exceptional example of how powerful human beings can feasibly get; I think that's about the level Halvtand planned to put his character at, anyway, and at that point, Expial is actually the weakest PC in the game outside of Thess' base form.

@BCTheEntity

They would still be stronger than @Halvtand's Harkon and unnamed android, actually.

And no, time isn't sped up relative to the outside world. It's just a training ground that enables enhanced training - it does not have the same properties as the Room of Spirit and Time or of the Gravity Chamber (I was just listing those as examples to help illustrate that it was an unusual training ground). She has been/will have to train at a normal relative rate.

As for the prospect of simply handwaving Charis up to fifteen thousand, I'm not necessarily against it, but that wouldn't be particularly fair to the other characters who are stuck in the same pit she is. The original implied intent of the thread was for a group of individuals, starting at a power level of around 1,000, working their way up while also getting pulled in to a plot involving the war between Earth and Arcosia, and eventually joining the tournament after a fair number of prior struggles - with Arcosian and Makaioshin templates provided for one or two poster-run antagonists on top of whatever @Thess originally had planned.

Harkon, our unnamed anroid, Expial, and Charis all occupy that approximate, original intended range. But they are the minority. If we were acting on the premise that they would have to grind their way up to the tournament-level while also participating in other plotlines, then that might work. But as it turns out, the tournament is almost ready to start and the preliminary 'arc' will deal mostly with intrigue and people getting into unofficial fights beforehand. If that's how we're playing it, then those four weaker characters simply cannot realistically participate in the tournament, full stop. They are consigned to a separate realm of activity unless they want to be reduced to smears on the wall.

I could boost Charis so that she could crash the tournament, but that would be leaving the other three characters behind in an already sparse character landscape. Doing so makes no sense unless you plan to boost all of them.

[BCTheEntity]

@Terminal Yeaaah, about that... I kind of did boost Expial up to 12000. I think I might have forgotten to mention it, but yeah, I did that. And when I said "I think that's about the level Halvtand planned to put his character at, anyway," I meant that he was, so far as I'm aware, planning to boost Harkon's power up to 15000 too, in light of my rant about how much of a boost fusion actually gives. So, if you want Charis to be at that sort of level, then there's your reasoning for it. I'll admit that I did forget about the unnamed android; however, assuming every other character is boosted in that manner, that still technically leaves Expial as second-weakest, most likely with a somewhat lesser ability to advance than said android due to how its power upgrading works. But, uh, yeah, that's basically what I have to say on the topic.

[Halvtand]

1. I officially apologize to anyone that has been held back by my lack of activity, and specifically to GM Thess, as well as BCTheEntity and Terminal. I'm sorry, I should've contacted someone and I didn't. My fault.

2. Harkon has been updated, there's only a short bit added to his background with training and the L3 technique 2healing" has been moved to a mystic arts-hider.

3. As soon as I've hit the post-button I'll start reading the IC to get up to speed.

4. When I'm done reading I will write the entry post for Harkon and the unnamed Android. Hopefully, by the time anyone sees this I have already started writing.

What happened is that I'm studying to become a teacher, and as such I have to write a series of essays to prove to my colleagues that I understand academic lingo and am able to reproduce the same. However, the time set for writing these essays is extremely short, and finding scholarly sources to support my theses... Let's just say that it takes time. Time I didn't have, a fact that I discovered a few hours after posting my last comment in this thread. Since then I've pretty much only gone to lectures, studied and slept, somewhere I got fed, not sure how. Anywho. I have all my sources and quotes sorted, and a writing schedule in place. A few hours free time every other day should let me keep up with this game from now on. I hope you can understand. I don't want to quit this game.

[BCTheEntity]

@Halvtand Well that makes sense. Glad to see you haven't abandoned us entirely, but just make sure you don't screw up your IRL scheduling either; as Thess implied earlier, IRL requirements take precedence over the internet.

EDIT: You know what I just realised? There's only three PCs participating in the Galactic Tournament proper as of this post; one of them is the GM's character, and the other two are my own. There's time for more PCs to actually enter before it starts, of course, but that's a surprisingly low number of people whose active purpose is getting involved in the tournament itself. I wonder if making a third character might not be pushing my influence a bit too much...

[Halvtand]

Paging @Halvtand. After reading the description for your Android, I realize you probably had your own ideas for introducing them - but if you are currently lacking/would like to explore alternate avenues, I left an opening for their introduction in my post as one of the Androids tasked with exploring the Estate. Being a creation of the old Regime of the RR army, either Royal Robotics or the Royal Army might be using that particular task in order to evaluate how trustworthy/effective they are.

But if that's not what you had in mind, it's not problem. I can proceed regardless. I just thought I would make the offer so long as I was using androids at all in the first place.

@Terminal

Thanks for the offer, I probably would've gone for it if I didn't get another idea from reading your post.
I'd like to run an idea by you.
We'll set up an encounter, your guy has a couple of droids of the same model as my guys, I guess someone else found a warehouse or something, doesn't matter. They're doing the sweep when my character shows up and basically takes over the role of master, thus removing all those droids from your command. My character then wants to leave with the droids and live happily ever after and... Yeah, what do you think?

[Terminal]

I don't have a guy.

I also don't have a guy with a couple of androids.

I also don't have anybody who knows or cares about the warehouse.

The Royal Army inquisitor and his APCs outside of the Guiomar Estate are basically NPCs. If you want them or people like them to appear at the warehouse, you do not need me to set that up.

[Terminal]

@Halvtand Well that makes sense. Glad to see you haven't abandoned us entirely, but just make sure you don't screw up your IRL scheduling either; as Thess implied earlier, IRL requirements take precedence over the internet.

EDIT: You know what I just realised? There's only three PCs participating in the Galactic Tournament proper as of this post; one of them is the GM's character, and the other two are my own. There's time for more PCs to actually enter before it starts, of course, but that's a surprisingly low number of people whose active purpose is getting involved in the tournament itself. I wonder if making a third character might not be pushing my influence a bit too much...

@BCTheEntity

Four, actually.

The problem is that so far, THREE of those are fighting on the Arcosian side. So we have one Super-Saiyan brat fighting three different Imperial champions. That's less of a Tournament and more of a gauntlet.

[BCTheEntity]

@Terminal ...you're completely wrong, as far as I'm aware. We have one Legendary Super Saiyan teenager (with a max power level of about 24000, no less, albeit for only a short period at a time) who's explicitly allied with Earth; we have a Majin with no particular affiliation, who's not going to win the tournament anyway even if every participant other than the PCs are weaker than him, since his base PL is at any given moment at least a third lower than Thess' base; and we have one demon god with about twice the base power level of the next-strongest confirmed PC in the tournament, the capacity to readily become even stronger than that with a short amount of mystic training to relearn the Boost ability, and the highest PL out of every character thus far, whose plans go as far as "make everybody into liars" with no specific targets. To the best of my knowledge, NONE of the Arcosian characters are currently directly participating in the Galactic Tournament itself; Lord Shiver presumably considers himself above something of that sort and has been confirmed to be pre-occupied with his own plans, whilst Glacial and Glacier are also seemingly unconcerned with the tournament, being that their bios show them as only really desiring the capacity to best their father and show him who's the one bringing shame upon their family, and there are no specific allies of the Arcosians in the tournament as PCs. In conclusion, there's three PCs in the tournament as of this moment, and none of them are actively fighting on behalf of the Arcosians.

[Terminal]

There are four PCs in the tournament. That is all.

That said, even if it's just unaffiliated parties, we could probably stand more than just four contestants.

[BCTheEntity]

@Terminal ...I'm going to double-check every single character bio, to make sure that I'm not abruptly going crazy. I'm also going to count "PCs not presently enroled or explicitly on their way to enrol" as "not part of the tournament yet".

Calculations

You've explicitly stated several times that Charis isn't going to be in the tournament. This, despite several suggestions about how you could involve her through PL boosting. Unless your opinion on that has changed since then, I'm going to assume she's not in the tourney.

Tiamat hasn't even been created yet, beyond the basic skeleton of what she is, so unless you have plans to introduce her as a contestant halfway through the tournament arc, it's safe to presume she's also not in the tournament.

Thess is explicitly on his way to enrol/be enroled in the tournament, so that's one PC contestant. He's also explicitly not allied with the Arcosians, which we both agree on.

There is nothing to suggest that Glacial has any plans to enrol in the tournament itself, instead focusing on his desire to challenge his father to combat. Since there is nothing to otherwise suggest he wishes to engage in formal combat within the actual tournament at this stage, I am going to assume he is not going to be involved in the tournament proper.

Azamat is present at the colosseum, but so far hasn't shown any apparent interest in joining the tournament, and is known to have his own plans regardless. Until further notice, I'm again assuming he won't be fighting in the tournament itself.

Luceptor and Expial have both signed up already, so there's three PC contestants. Of them, Luceptor's allegiance is primarily to himself, and secondarily to the Makaioshin as a whole; at this precise moment, he has no particular reason to consider himself an ally of the Arcosians, and therefore isn't. Expial currently has no allegiance to anyone, so he can't be counted as an Arcosian ally either.

Lord Shiver's personality and biography haven't been filled in yet, so there's not much about him that can reasonably be assumed beyond "he's the Blue Clan leader"; however, what is within capacity to assume is that it'd be poor form for the leaders of either side in the truce meetings between Earth and Arcose to actually enter the tournaments themselves, for a variety of reasons. With that in mind, and again given that Shiver presumably has other plans beyond the tournament's bounds, I figure it's safe to assume he won't be entering into the tournament either.

Glacier likely won't be entering the Galactic Tournament for the same reasons as Glacial, being preoccupied with challenging their father to a duel to prove non-shame, and no suggestion of entering the tournament has yet been made in any case.

There is no good reason to assume the Android will possess the capacity to enter the tournament with any expectation of victory in the short time period available to it, even if one assumes that it manages to find out that there's even a tournament going on before then. It's been implied that much of its story arc will take place on Earth regardless, at least early on, but either way, entering the tournament currently seems to be far out of reach for it.

The only wild card I can think of is Harkon, who may be compelled to enter the tournament by the voice in his head that was previously Limac. However, since it has not yet been suggested by @Halvtand that he will enter the tournament at any point, I cannot assume he will do so; thus, I shall assume that he won't for the time being, and even if he does, he certainly isn't affiliated with the Arcosians at this time.

Thus, we have Thess, Luceptor, and Expial who are definitely going to be part of the tournament, with no other characters having any solid suggestion that they will also join the tournament at this stage, and as I've said before, I therefore cannot assume they will join the tournament at all. Saiyan plus Makaioshin plus Majin equals three PCs, none of whom are allied with the Arcosians. I have made certain beyond any reasonable doubt in my mind that this is the case at this moment, given that the uncertain cases mentioned where a currently-unenroled PC might enter the tournament for some reason or another, as well as the situations I listed with your characters, can be accounted for in future listings of who is and is not a part of the tournament; if I have missed something critical that affects these results, then by all means, please do tell me what I've failed to account for.

[Terminal]

Very well, there are three contestants for the tournament currently that you know of.

There are four contestants for the tournament currently that I currently know of. I suspect there's actually five, but we'll have to wait and see on that front.

Part of what I mean should become apparent in my next post. You are correct that I do not plan to have Charis attend the tournament, though thanks to your arguments you have convinced me it might not be unreasonable to boost her up to the tournament level. I might have her present in the tournament arc, behind-the-scenes intrigue and a few 'unofficial' fights, but know that I do not count her amongst those attending the tournament.

[Halvtand]

There is no good reason to assume the Android will possess the capacity to enter the tournament with any expectation of victory in the short time period available to it, even if one assumes that it manages to find out that there's even a tournament going on before then. It's been implied that much of its story arc will take place on Earth regardless, at least early on, but either way, entering the tournament currently seems to be far out of reach for it.

The only wild card I can think of is Harkon, who may be compelled to enter the tournament by the voice in his head that was previously Limac. However, since it has not yet been suggested by Halvtand that he will enter the tournament at any point, I cannot assume he will do so; thus, I shall assume that he won't for the time being, and even if he does, he certainly isn't affiliated with the Arcosians at this time.

@BCTheEntity

I'd say you are entirely correct. The android will travel across earth for the moment, get in small fights with NPCs until it's viable to get a PC-PC encounter. Throwing this character into the tournament would pretty much be like pressing delete. First fight and he's garbage, alone on an alien world literally light years away from spare parts.
Harkon could be pointed toward the tournament either by the voice or by some external means. Example: Harkon still has friends amongst the saiyans of CC from the galactic war, if one or more of them should go to the tournament they might be able to persuade Harkon to accompany them, at least it would take him far away from the "mad scientists" that held him captive. I can work with this in mind if we need more player characters in the tournament.

[Halvtand]

Don't tell me I killed the game with that.

[BCTheEntity]

@Halvtand I'm still waiting for people to turn up at the tournament. Expial needs communication partners; Luceptor has a communication partner who hasn't responded yet.