Maquina

Arena Chat Thread

@Darth
I can see that.

Part of the issue, I imagine, is that writers, which most of us would consider ourselves to be to at least some extent, are going to dislike reducing writing to a series of quantifiable steps and equations, and yet I'd say most of us have been burned at least once by someone who's looking to do just that. Whether it's a natural engineer who craves precision and finds allegory and allusion frustratingly, possibly unfairly vague, or someone who has in turn been burned by someone else who managed to write posts so filled with allegory and allusion that there was no information in them, we've all encountered Equations Guy at least once or twice.

Nobody but another Equations Guy likes fighting Equations Guy. The more violent that dislike, the further towards Satan's-fiery-asshole the player's opinion of numbers veers. I will admit, much of my own opinion on numbers comes from my native high/heavily powered settings, where they really do tend to be almost completely meaningless. Comparing precise figures when the overall scope of two high-powered characters isn't tuned to the same wavelength ends very, very badly. It's why I go with advantage/disadvantage - simpler comparisons like that are more likely to allow the spirit of different characters to shine through and lead to more interesting contests at high power levels than trying to compare hundreds of tons to thousands of tons, or figure out different Mach values, or any of that nonsense. The speed-centric character gets the edge in speed, the strongman gets the edge in strength, the wizard has the edge in ether-blasting, so on and so forth. Give people what they're good at, insist on getting what you're good at, and see how things shake out. Only way I've ever found to make high-powered contests between strangers work out, especially for travelers like me and the rest of the SRI folks

If you intend to take a high-end character to other boards, you can't use fixed numbers - the baselines those numbers are compared to changes from board to board, usually drastically. Some 'high-level' boards see Mach 1 as outright cheating, while others might see Mach 5 as a good starting point for a speed-centric character. Getting one set of fixed, inflexible values to fit all these wildly different standards just doesn't work.

Anyways. Darth, @Melonhead, I didn't intend what I said as any kind of slight against you guys. I just believe that part of being a good player is knowing when personality/style clashes would result in a less-than-ideal experience and being willing to admit to that. I don't do low-end/mild powers fights, where the numbers are useful tools applied to a universal 'human norm' baseline, for shit. For folks who enjoy those, which seems to be the majority of the board, I'm a bad/unpleasant match. Heh, all there is to it, really.

The Robot Uprising?! (Cee Fatalis vs. Virtuoso)

No big rush. Now that I know what's up, will take posts as they come.

Arena Chat Thread

The main issue I've always encountered with numbers is that Numbers People and Descriptions People (a.k.a. lack-of-numbers people) tend to fall into two different mindsets.

Numbers People tend to be rules sticklers, looking for strict math, science, and comparisons between characters - the dreaded "my 1500 newtons tops your 1200 newtons, so you lose" argument. Note that only idiots actually make that argument, but it's sort of endemic to the Numbers Person mindset - they're engineers doing head-math in their fights, looking for precision and quantification. They get incredibly frustrated when nothing but qualitative comparisons are made, because those comparisons don't mean anything to them. Obviously the good math-heads can deal with some vagueness, especially given the million and one variables in any given fight. They tend to be the more competitive/structured guys, because a numbers system lends itself well to organized competition.

Other guys, though? They ain't here for numbers. I'll admit - I am not a numbers guy. I hate assigning stats to my characters, even weird pseudo-IRL stats like deadlift weight, footspeed, maximum-force-exertable, shit like that. To me, doing that sort of thing gets in the way of the Flow of Awesome. I'm not ever going to do ranked fights here because I'm not competing so much as running my own personal anime and substituting other players for episode bosses every now and then. To me, certain things should be obvious - an oni is GOING TO BE stronger than a human. That's a given. I don't need to measure the oni's physical strength and give a concrete statistic delineating the ceiling of the oni's strength to show that if he swings his kanabo and a human guy blocks with his sword, that block is gonna be no bloody good without something else backing it.

If advantage/disadvantage isn't that obvious? Then the circumstances of a particular fight/action should hold sway over and above numbers. If the 1500n and 1200n guys above are locked hand-to-hand in a grapple, but the 1200n guy has better footing and a stronger grip...why should he lose that action just because the other guy has a theoretically higher maximum force limit than he does? The 1200n guy has advantage in that action; the 1500n guy might be able to muscle out of it, but he's still going to come out of the encounter on the bottom end without some clever moves.

Fights are fluid, shifting things, not equations to be solved. If you can tell who has advantage, who is at a disadvantage, and which characters have edges in which areas, that should be sufficient in my view. If it's not sufficient, then you sit down and hammer out what is. If the other guy's a big enough douchehammer that you can't hammer it out, then either you call a judge if one's available...or you just give it up as a bad job and put that guy on your No Punch List.

I've never needed numbers to settle disputes with amicable players. That doesn't mean numbers are bad - it just means that my own personal style of play and history is more conducive to descriptive, qualitative freeform than to quantitative structure. Means I can put Darth and Melon on my No Punch List right off the bat, but they aren't bad guys - just bad fits for my Boss of the Week. They'd get frustrated with me never giving them the hard, empirical data they're looking for, and I'd get frustrated with them not just rolling with it and making judgment calls.

That's okay, though. That's what LeeRoy's for, after all. 'Least until Cee's done twisting Virtuoso into a pretty golden bow to stick on top of the Venture.

The Robot Uprising?! (Cee Fatalis vs. Virtuoso)

@LeeRoy A'ight, IC is up. Any technique/weapon/whatsit marked with a '*' is given a brief(ish) OOC description in the hiders at the bottom of the post. Hard to fit all of that information properly into a readable IC storytelling flow (though I do try), and I just kinda refuse to build a twenty-page library of junk ahead of time when any such document would be obsolete three fights later. Hopefully this is a workable compromise? Lemme know if I missed anything.

The Robot Uprising?! (Cee Fatalis vs. Virtuoso)

Yeeeuuup – Juniortron was definitely counting on raw physical hardening to tough out attacks. Her first Pompeii bolt impacted on the mechanoid’s chest, somehow diffused across the surface plating and causing some superficial exterior damage. The second shot missed as Juniortron’s evasion-in-progress completed, sailing off past his flank as he raised his left arm to return fire.

There was no gun to be seen, but it wasn’t really much of a logical stretch to anticipate that a robot arm raised imperiously in the direction of a distant foe was going to spit some sort of distance attack at that foe. That assumption turned out to be accurate enough to be getting on, and allowed Cee to…continue doing mostly what she’d been planning on. Autochthon’s Bastion*, on her right arm, was already in pretty much exactly the spot it needed to be in order to intercept the incoming shots. Cee shifted the position of the shield slightly, angling it relative to Juniortron’s Pointin’ Fingers such that whatever hit her would deflect off to the side rather than hit straight-on.

When the shots came, they arrived in the form of some sort of hard-light shots traveling at a considerable fraction of lightspeed, crossing the distance between shooter and target effectively instantly. Not really fun, but while the shots had enormous velocity they didn’t carry much at all in the way of mass. Certainly enough to cause rather nasty damage if they hit an unprepared target, and enough for Cee to feel the impacts against her shield, but not nearly so much force as she would’ve expected from Juniortron. Not enough to threaten the Bastion’s integrity or throw off her game, anyways. Not yet, at least.

Still channeling energy steadily to her Lament, Cee continued her backwards dash, turning it into a lazily circular aerial strafe away from Juniortron and moving to her left, clockwise relative to Juniortron. She was aiming to keep a good five hundred meters or so between her and the mechanoid if she could, though she wasn’t going to sweat the exact number. Either way, she wanted more information on this threat before committing to more powerful strikes, which left a few different ways of going about the contest. What to do, what to do…

…sacrificial lamb. That sounded about right.

As Cee circled, she summoned up a Sword Sister* next to her, armed with a classic sword-and-board combination. A phantasmal echo of Cee’s own Bastion occupied the Sister’s right arm, while a ‘forged Hyperion-DM 033XA* longsword was gripped in her left. Sisters weren’t the brightest bulbs on the tree, reliant as they were on secondary processing nodes within Cee’s own combat systems, and they were neither as powerful nor as durable as the original…but they were generally powerful and durable enough.

Suspended from her own Halo, the Sword Sister reversed Cee’s course, charging towards Juniortron on a tight, corkscrew spiral pattern, altering the speed and exact course of the spiral randomly to try and avoid precise counterfire from the mechanoid. Her own ‘forged Bastion was up in front of her, protecting her from incidental fire, as she accelerated as rapidly as she could towards the doing of her job. Closing with Juniortron in a bare few seconds at most, the Sword Sister’s corkscrew path had her coming up at the robot-man’s front face from an upward angle, her longsword flicking out in a sharp backhand stroke aimed to bite into the outside of Juniortron’s left knee. Unopposed, the strike had a damn good shot of harvesting the limb altogether – dependent on Juniortron’s construction, of course – and even if it didn’t, most people felt significantly less adventurous after taking a longsword to the knee.

Cee herself continued her circular cruise around the battlefield, her Bastion held ready to intercept more fire as it came, and contributed to the Sister’s strike with a third Pompeii* shot, timed to coincide as precisely as possible with the projected impact of the Sword Sister’s kneecapping stroke. This Pompeii shot was targeted squarely at the mechanoid’s weakened chestplate, coming in from the killbot’s right side and seeking to take advantage of the (hopefully) compromised armoring there and/or force the thing to defend itself. Ideally it’d be too bamboozled by the simultaneous strikes to defend properly against either…but Cee damn well knew better than that.

Now to see how Robo-Goldie responded to her play, and just how much free time he was going to give her to build up her Lament. The answer was already “more than Juniortron was going to like”, and every moment she got where she didn’t need to redirect power elsewhere, the answer swung closer to “more than Juniortron could survive.”

Hider

-Autochthon’s Bastion: a targe-style shield forged for Cee by On High Industries, a literally divine weapons and equipment manufacturer staffed by gods of the forge, war, and other militant/productive spheres. The shield had no offensive capabilities beyond being a solid disc of metal one can slap with, but is nigh impervious to harm and possessed of divine glyphs etched into it that grant it two special functions: the ability to drastically amplify the defensive properties of Cee’s Ether Field, or the ability to extend its nigh-impervious frontal defense in a circular shield-wall roughly as wide as Cee is tall. Only one such function can be active at a time, not both.

-Sisters: Cee can create semi-autonomous lower-functioning copies of herself, generally referred to as Sisters, with the help of her Godforge. Sisters are impossible to mistake for Cee-actual for anyone with any kind of sensory ability – no clone-hiding or clone-dodging – and are used strictly as force multipliers. Sisters piggyback off Cee’s own processing ability and have little real intelligence of their own, and generally are able to exert only half at best of her physical capabilities. Sisters come in a number of informal varieties based on their equipped items – sword-armed Sisters are ‘Sword Sisters’, firearm-equipped Sisters are ‘Bullet Sisters’, Sisters with defensive gear are ‘Shield Sisters’ and so forth.

-Hyperion-DM 033XA: A weapon originally recovered by the Yggdrasil Crew’s Captain, Crim El Furaga, from the headquarters of Tenba, Inc. during the Machine Wars incident. The (original) blade is forged of exotic type-T Armageddium, a material which exhibits nearly-ideal properties of weight, strength, and incredible toughness. The Hyperion is a light, flawlessly balanced blade orders of magnitude more durable than ordinary steel swords, but does not possess any of the technological sub-weapons or dire enchantments of more showy, overtly powerful Doomswords. The Hyperion is just a really damn good longsword.

-Pompeii: A micronuclear graser round, typically fired from Gunsmoke. The Pompeii utilizes a micronuke spark to power – very briefly – an equally compact magnetic lensing circuit that forcibly focuses the micronuke blast into a linear bolt of coherent gamma radiation – a gamma laser, or ‘graser’, in Cee terminology. As the explosive force of the micronuke blast is not entirely absorbed/suppressed by the magnetic lensing, there is a minimum safe distance at which Pompeii shots can be fired – typically given as ten feet/three meters.

The Robot Uprising?! (Cee Fatalis vs. Virtuoso)

Hm.

Cee has a gargantuan library of spells, weapons, techniques, and other stuff she can call up mostly on a whim. I tried to convey that in the sheet, but if I were to try and create a comprehensive itemized list of everything she has, it'd probably run another twenty pages and still not really be comprehensive. Is that going to be an issue?

EDIT:: Gonna try something new in the IC, once I get it written up. Hopefully will alleviate the issue in the future.

The Robot Uprising?! (Cee Fatalis vs. Virtuoso)

@LeeRoy As a note for the future: both the earlier Krakatoa and these Pompeii shots were intended as piercing beams, not explosive bursts. I apologize for not making that clear enough, but yeah - the Krakatoa is a one-shot monster-killing radiation sword, and the Pompeii are gamma lasers ('graser', in DLL shorthand). No need for adjustments at this stage, I'll roll with it, but if the weapons come up again, they're penetrating bolts and not blasts.

Heh, trust me - you'll know if Cee starts blasting.

Anyways. Will get to the IC reply as soon as I can manage. Shouldn't be more than a day or two at most, I hope.

Divinity Vs Dazsos!

...I know it's not my fight and I'm a useless fuckwit noob who needs to shut up and GTFO and all, and I'll be getting right on that in a second...

But nobody finds it at all suspicious that Divinity is trying to get permission from the thread judge to summarize his opponent's actions, as well as his own, in a rather heatedly contested exchange?

Arena Chat Thread

Obsidian Prophecies operated by the same general rule - battles ended with knockouts, not fatalities. Whether or not one wants to inject a bit more pizzazz into the setting, fatalities just don't really belong in a Pokemon battle.

And yeah - anything capable of listening to, comprehending, and acting on abstract instructions from human beings would be sapient. On top of the proof of a large number of Pokemon throughout the series (shut up. You all watched it fifteen friggin' years ago too) which are actively able to communicate with people in spoken word. 'Sides - it's more fun to write when the li'l beasties can think on their own.

Arena Chat Thread

Been a long dang time since I’ve run a Pokemon battle. Heh…used to have a little site for it, ran several with some buddies. Had team formats and moveset rules and everything, alongside a mad overpowered Gardevoir who was basically a Trainer in her own right by the time that team was done. Go go sapient Psychic-types.

People are always surprised at how vicious even semi-realistic Pokemon battles can get. I’m always like…”dudes. These are beings who can manipulate the primordial elements, batter enemies with raw telekinetic force, or which come with armor and weapons actually built into their bodies. The Pokedex entries for the games specifically mention Pokemon who eat, or burn, souls, go on city-destroying rampages, live for a thousand years, generate BLACK FRIGGIN’ HOLES, and dozens of other ridiculous things. The only reason whatsoever that Pokemon battles aren’t Dragon Ball-level throwdowns is because Nintendo is allergic to maturity.”