Moonlit Sonata

Fate/Empty Providence

People should post if they have any intention of their characters not getting lasered.

Let's say that 24 hours remain.

Fate/Empty Providence

My core argument is that you are choosing to interpret a Phantasmal Beasts turning slower than Servants, as meaning that this Phantasmal beast could not be fast enough to turn to evade a projectile in this circumstance, which does not have to be the case.

As an aside, one of the archers that was covering me was player by you? Was their a specific reason why the Matou Archer did not fire?

@Beloss

The reasons the Matou Archer has for acting have not been explicitly stated, for a few reasons. It is possible to form some educated guesses by looking at his matrix. I most heavily recommend looking at his Skills.

Either way, from where I'm standing, I don't eee sufficient reason to overturn my verdict, so it stands.

Fate/Empty Providence

This is true, I withdraw my argument from this angle. Now that some of these characters are posting however, one just a few minuets ago, and that they opened fire as expected, I would like to submit that this was a simple case of dropping the ball twice, rather than malicious intent to leave Rostam unsupported. I can talk to these other players if you want.

@Beloss

Whether there was the intent to post or not is irrelevant. The rules state that if you don't post in a timely manner, events will progress without you, and I provided ample warning that this would happen in this specific circumstance. If you believed that Rostam would not move forwards without supporting fire, you should have spoken up asking people OOC if they were posting.

At this point, it's after the fact.

Does prana bursting give you some kind of armor or something? I thought it was just to increase your physical attributes. If I had known that I would have done it.

Prana Burst is what allows the Phantasm Races to, at least in strength, overpower Servants. An all-out attack of a Phantasmal Beast, while weaker than the Jewel Sword's light, would at least have been comparable enough to offset it such that it could have been survived.

I appreciate your commitment to cannon, but plenty of RP's say that and have subtly difrent interpretations of cannon, especially since it changes and expands over time, especially recently with these new grand order games, which I have not played.

That's all well and good for those RPs. I operate off of canon mechanics. If something is ambiguous in canon and I'm forced to assume a specific interp that may differ from others, then I will either disclose it or try to keep it distances from character death decisions. When new mechanics are introduced, they are incorporated. However, it has been a constant since around 2004 that Phantasmal Beasts don't break the sound barrier.

The effect Grand Order has on canon is widely overstated and perpetuated by people who haven't read it. Very few things in canon are ever changed, and what people perceive as retcons are almost always just introduction of new ideas.

Either way, this point is moot, since it's not as if it has applicability to this specific situation in any regard.

Right, but the oncoming prana blast is moving at a speed which is fast enough to threaten him. Regardless of how fast he can move, performing those extra actions slows him down enough to matter in relation to anything that's fast enough to hit him in the first place. Dismounting is not commonly regarded as a free action, something I feel is pretty universally recognised. This is one of a mounted mans great weaknesses actually, commonly used by more agile footmen to kill them, and if I had used similar logic to dodge something like an oncoming sword thrust or arrow, there would be justifiable outrage.

But given that, at its best, Rakhsh is moving at 1/8th of the burst speed that Rostam can reach, the fraction of a fraction of a second spent dismounting doesn't amount to much.

Besides that, if anything all you're really arguing here is why one of your ways out would have killed you. Even if I were to say you were right here, that doesn't give me a reason to change what's happened. If there was no viable way for you to survive the light, which there certainly was, that still would be my ruling since this is the decision you made, to charge headlong at an enemy who had proved himself able to deal with Servants and who was channeling an absurd quantity of prana.

I was aware of this rule before posting. Just because a phantasmal beast is slower at does not mean that Rakhsh is required to be to slow to pull off the desired objective in this case. Especially when I accounted for that in having him sprain his leg from turning faster than a Phantasmal Horse normally would.

It is plausible in cannon that it could have been done. I would like to renew my request that Rostam is not ruled dead at this awkward early stage in the game, where it would not result in any breaking of cannon rules, where it would make for extreamly bad storytelling, and where it would sink a huge amount of my personal time investment into your excellent RP.

The fact is that the gap in speed is too significant to ignore, when one is considering that Rostam was charging at NAGATO at this time, and that Rakhsh's speed is far inferior to Rostam's, let alone NAGATO's. The fact that you had Rakhsh sprain his leg doesn't mean anything, because he simply cannot move quickly enough to get out of the way of the attack.

In sum, here are your remaining points.

-The supporting fire of Archers was not taken into account. This falls simply because, regardless of whether there was intent to post or not, the players of those Archers made no effort to inform me that they planned on posting despite receiving a warning that the roleplay was moving forwards.
-Canon is ever-shifting. While canon might be expanding, the core mechanics have not changed in the past two decades. Moreover, the important point here, namely the speed of Phantasmal Beasts, has not been changed and can be viewed front and center on the profiles of the first two Riders we'd ever seen in canon, Medusa and Iskander. This is not an obscure nor ambiguous piece of canon knowledge, and reading the profiles of at least one of those Riders would have been assumed to have happened, especially if someone is apping a similar mount.
-Dismounting time would make that approach to dodging infeasible. See above. Moreover, even if this is the case, that's no reason to reverse the death decision, that simply means the odds were more stacked against you do to your decision.
-Rakhsh should be able to dodge. You've given no justification for this, only saying things like you took into account it would be difficult with the leg-spraining angle. That does nothing for the fact that Rakhsh is not fast enough to dodge.

In the end, you're not giving me any true reason why I should reverse the decision. You're appealing to things which aren't relevant to the situation at hand. I understand your annoyance, and make no mistake that if you want to, the application of a new Servant is certainly possible, but I haven't been given an actual argument for why, in the logic of the IC and given the posts we had available to us, Rostam should be alive.

Fate/Empty Providence

@Beloss
You're of course welcome to contest rulings or offer your own argument. With that said, I will be blunt in saying that the odds of a ruling being changed after the fact, while nonzero, are low. As such, when you've said your piece, I ask that you don't harp on about this to a heavy degree.

Now then.

Shouldn't you have waited for the other characters to have posted before issuing your response? Rostam was being supported by 3 Archers during his charge, all of whom are going to get shots off before his Charge is complete. The idea of advancing under ranged support is that the target has to fend off ranged attacks while the melee unit approaches, hence protecting him from being singled out. Maybe all three archers do decide to betray him and not shoot, but we really don't know that yet. You broke posting order to launch a killing blow, while ignoring everything everyone else might be doing in the remaining time.

While I have been lenient on this front, the fact remains that:

There is a 24 hour period you must try to reply to a post within. I will be lenient with this, but if you're in a fight, someone swung a sword at you, and you didn't post within 24 hours of that sword swing, then there's a good chance that your character will stop having a head. The same applies if you're talking to a character; if it's been 24 hours since your last post without a reply, you're free to walk away. Of course, if you have real life troubles or will have difficulty meeting that threshold, let me know so I can grant leeway.

I waited for three days and eight hours after a post before posting with NAGATO's attack. I was not told that anybody had real life issues or received any request for an extension. I was not told by any player that they had plans on posting something relevant to the fight. If I had, then I would have waited, but after having waited over triple the length that I had said to, there was no reason to continue delaying.

Most damning of all, though, is that I explicitly gave a full day's warning that the fight was about to move forwards.

If anyone was going to offer support to Rostam, they should have spoken up during those three days, or especially during that last one day time frame.

On speed related matters, I'm not thinking in terms of breaking or not breaking the sound barrier or anything like that, nor did I think I was expected to. Most, in fact, all Role Plays I have been a part of don't do this, simply because of how complicated it makes everything, especially with humans running around at 10 and 20 miles per hours at the same time.

If you are going to apply these standards, you should have told me first, and assigned an exact speed for Rostam and his Mount during the character creation.

The points you make about Servants being able to turn faster than their mounts can is moot since I assumed that either way it would be fast enough. I even factored this rule in by having Rakhsh take a sprain from turning faster than horse's are meant to on this occasion.

I apologize, but this was also dealt with in the rules.

Keep in mind that we're following canon rules and mechanics here, first and foremost.

I've already explained why, under canon logic, it is reasonable to know that Rakhsh would be inferior to Rostam in burst movement speed. Moreover, as was stated above, the onus is on you if you are unaware of the nature of what you are applying. If you are not clear on the abilities of your character, then it is important that you ask this in advance; if you do not, I will assume you have done the reading and are aware of what having a Phantasmal Beast mount means.

For trying to tank out the attack, you just finished shooting Rostam with an arrow, and telling me I was foolish to try and tank it. Noble Phantasms use difrent standards of power to ordinary attacks, and there is no case I can think of of a Servant surviving a direct hit from an A rank one, except for Hercules.
Besides, if Rostam can tank this attack, then shouldn't he still be alive anyway? Trying to dodge it doesn't lower his passive defenses, and since it's a wide range blast, holding his mace out or something isn't going to do anything.

You're misunderstanding. I'm not saying Rostam should have tried to tank it with his body, I'm saying that a viable method would have been using Rakhsh's Prana Burst to clash against the attack. If Rostam just sat there and tanked it, he would have died as well.

You are in possession of a B+ Noble Phantasm, and the light was equivalent to an A rank, after all. While mystery and power don't scale 1:1, the fact that 80 is greater than 50 should have been something of an indication.

Dismounting from the horse and then jumping away would have taken longer in this case, since it takes a moment to free yourself of the saddle and then change directon. I knight cant just spring out of the saddle whenever he wants.
When Alexander escapes Excalibur, he is jumping from a moving platform which he is already standing upright on.

This applies to conventional humans. Servants are freaks who can accelerate to mach 4 in a fraction of a second.

Not attacking at all I guess is an option, but I already exercised that option when I had him take his Master away to safety first.
When Rostam charged he was not charging head on, was ready to prepare evasive maneuvers, and he was being supported by 3 archer Servants, who you didn't let post. This hardly counts as reckless, in fact, I cant honestly think of any better opportunity for a mounted melee character to try an come to grips with a ranged one.

I really don't see any circumstance which Rostam could have survived this, aside from not attacking at all, which I had already done. Continuing to delay longer would have been bad characterization, as well as being tactically bad.

I will be blunt: You had Rostam charge directly at an enemy who had just entered a more combat-capable form at the same time that he was channeling enough prana to fill the Eastern Field in one of his hands. If you sincerely believed that you should have had this supporting fire, then you should have brought it up before my previous two posts, but as already stated, I myself had no reason to believe such fire was coming in a reasonable time.

The presence of evasive maneuvers given the circumstances is relatively meaningless given what has already been said about Rakhsh's speed. This is doubly the case given that it has been displayed in previous events such as the kidnapping of Stirner Cartisius that NAGATO's physical parameters are well above those of a standard Servant, as it should be for something capable of matching the "nuke" of a Servant with sheer power.

As an aside, I'm not really sure why you are viewing NAGATO as a ranged combatant, considering that IC he committed zero ranged actions before the release of the Jewel Sword, and OOC his matrix calls him a "ridiculous close-ranged combatant".

I'm sorry you're unhappy about this. To be quite frank, I didn't expect Rostam to die in this situation, but nonetheless, that is what has happened here. The Archers' support is vacuous, given the rules and especially given the warning post I provided. The defensibility of Rostam's own actions is moot given the prior knowledge about the enemy and the knowledge about Rakhsh that was presumed on account of being very prevalent in character materials.

If you have further objections, you are free to voice them, but I'll be clear in saying that while I can understand your annoyance, I genuinely don't think you have a leg to stand on from the perspective of the logic of the IC.

Beyond the Gate at World's End

Diane Edelweiss

Group 4
Location: Outside Rowen's Compartment || Action: Riddle Me This || Mood: "Heh, You Flipped My Switch..."

Interacting with Rowan @Kore and Wakana @Tenma Tendo

Diane skidded to a halt after coming outside a compartment that voices seemed to be emanating from. No doubt, one of those inside that compartment was the screaming prospective sidekick in peril. There was no need to fear, though, for she was-

And the door was closed.

Why was the door closed?

Why was there someone behind the door putting on an audibly strained voice?

Why was she being asked to answer a riddle?

"A riddle, hm~?"

...The past has been viewed. The history has been retained. The foundation has been forged.

"You underestimate me, not-sidekick. A riddle is what the dragon and the sphinx pose of the man. A riddle is the evaluation of an eyeless god, and yet you, a mere not-sidekick, dare to place yourself upon that pedestal?"

Devise a system. I have to devise a system.

Like an army of insects, again and again.

A system.

In the span of an "instant", something changed. The world in Diane's purview seemed to shudder, space distorting for the briefest moment as something sleeping within it was roused to life.

"...laughable. It's simply laughable. Ah, how does it go? The name is unfamiliar, the feelings are unfamiliar, but the words, the words can still be felt. Like looking through a pane of misted glass, like a song without a melody, like a declaration for the end of an era."

Make the usage from mental circuit possible.

Divide.

Expand.

-And square that expansion.

"Right, that's it. Answer your riddle? Idiocy, utter idiocy. I don't care what sort of not-sidekick you are. Don't get in my way. That goal I'm stepping towards is already in sight, and that's why- I will break through this trifling storm of yours, sneering at it to declare that I've already reached that goal!

"Watch, for this is the first step of ending a voyage!"

Space bent.

Light pierced the dark. A lance stabbed upwards from the Kingdom Below, the light pervaded this space of tranquil knowledge. The darkness was burned away, twisted and perverted by the all-consuming light. A cataclysm that lasted for an instant from the outside and an eternity from the inside.

A being beyond description let out a laugh that sealed the very heavens. Head bending backwards in an angle that was obtuse but behaves as though it was acute, she roared for the end of innocence.

Her hand reached forwards, sundering space and light as it cut towards its goal...!

"...mmf."

-And tugged at the door weakly.

It looked like she couldn't just brute force the locked door open.

Damn these girlish arms.

Fate/Empty Providence

Isn't expecting someone to know that the burst movement speed of a Servant outranks the speed of a Phantasmal beast a bit extreme though? It seems like a minute detail, especially when there's no real way to have known the speed with which NAGATO's attack came out. I'm not trying to be argumentative or anything, it just didn't seem obvious to me that the action taken to avoid the attack wasn't a viable way of dodging it.

@DrowsyPangolin

Hmmmm... after reading both posts again, I do kinda agree it was an obscure fact (granted, I don't know every little fact about Type Moon, so I'm in no position to question its authenticity). It's doubly weird because it is implied that the only way for Rostam to have dodged the attack would've been to jump off his steed, which is something a proud Rider would almost never do.

@Kost Alter

It's not that minute. I won't expect someone to be able to quote the scene from Zero where this is most explicitly addressed by memory, but the first two Riders that we ever saw, one of whom has a Phantasmal Beast and the other having Divine Beasts, both have it on their stat sheets that their mounts don't even come close to breaking the sound barrier. If someone's apping a Phantasmal Beast mount, I'd hope they'd familiarize themselves with what they're capable of, and looking at the sheets of similar Servants is something of a given with regards to that. And if someone has something on their sheet that they aren't fully aware of the capabilities of, I'd hope they ask me in advance of what sort of thing their character is capable of.

There were several ways Rostam could have come out of this alive, a couple of which were addressed in the post (abandoning Rakhsh or simply using the fact that an A rank Noble Phantasm equivalent could be endured if Rakhsh fought against it) and a couple more which will be brought up in All About Grail. In the end, though, the method he selected, in line with the mechanics of the setting, meant that he perished. I agree that as a matter of narrative this death was abrupt and was honestly something I was not expecting to occur, but nonetheless, as the GM I will be carrying out that kind of judgment.

@Moonlit Sonata Also, in regards to the whole "Once 7 Servants have fallen the War will end" thing that Ruler mentioned a while back, so far the body count is:

Lancer Nimrod (killed by NAGATO)
Berserker Muramasa (killed by Dulle Griet)
Rider Rostam (killed by NAGATO)
Assassin Cao Cao (will be killed soon???)
Rider Hugues (was killed off-screen or something???)

So, does that mean we're already more than halfway there, or do only Servants killed by official Grail War participants (aka not NAGATO) count towards the 7 total?

@Kost Alter

Who knows? The Grail will certainly activate when seven Servants enter it, and any and all Servants are viable to that end.

If those Servants listed are in the Grail, though, is something I can't speak to.

Fate/Empty Providence

@Moonlit Sonata Aaaand does this mean that Lorelei can summon another servant as well? If so, i have an idea (@Kost Alter) of who to summon among the last two remaining servants. Ya know, unless said servant want to choose a different possible master. XD

@Holy Grail

Yes. However, obviously doing so currently is impossible for multiple reasons.

Fate/Empty Providence

So, what are my options from here? I'm confused by this rather abrupt demise. I get that this is supposed to be high stakes, but it's a little pointless to kill off my character on his very first actual combat action isn't it?

@Beloss

After a cooldown period based off of in-RP time passed, you can app a new Servant if you're so inclined.

If a character is in a situation where the natural result is the character dying, then the character will die. I'll only fudge things if I think it patently mean, for instance killing someone in their first post after being summoned. In this case though, there wasn't any fudging; there were ways for Rostam to survive the attack, but they were not taken, so Rostam's death resulted.

This sort of standard will be applied across the board, as well as to NPCs. For instance, if there was a "final boss" who had yet to reach their final form, and a player killed them on day one whether intentionally or not, then I wouldn't fudge things so that they somehow survived for no other reason than because I OOC want them to. Similarly, while I do want the players to win, if they were to wipe against the current boss for instance, I won't fudge things so that they somehow survive, even though them wiping means the roleplay ends and most of the work I put into the setting goes unused.

Fate/Empty Providence

Rider-Class Servant Rostam has died.

The corresponding episode of All About Grail should be up tonight, barring unforeseen circumstances.

Fate/Empty Providence

Demon Castle NAGATO

...futile.

In his haste to trust his steed, Rostam had made a fundamental misstep. This was born from nothing other than the speed of a Phantasmal Beast.

Rostam's steed was fast, that much was obvious. Compared to a mundane horse, there could be no comparison, and in fact in a sustained race against a Servant, it would come out on top against all but a handful of heroes. However, in terms of the burst speed that it could reach, the first Pegasus could merely scrape into the realm of half the speed of sound, and the Divine Beasts who pulled a certain king's chariot were below even that.

In comparison, while a Servant could not maintain such speeds in as reliable a fashion, in terms of "burst" movement speed, one would be hard pressed to find a Servant who could not casually shatter the sound barrier. This was the nature of the difference in speed between a Phantasmal Beast and a Servant; while the former had greater strength and greater sustainability, the latter's burst speed was supreme. And in this case, to avoid that Kaleidoscopic light, what was needed was burst speed.

In other words, had Rostam moved on his own rather than trusting in the speed of his mount, then perhaps he could have slipped away, but...

The light streamed forwards, engulfing the horse who was unable to leap out of its purvey in time, and engulfing the Servant who rode atop it. At this point, there were many additional considerations. Were Rakhsh a steed that granted its owner additional defense like the bridle of a Gorgon, were Rostam's armor something that covered all his body in the same way as a nearby Saber, were his steed to have let loose with the Prana Burst inherent to all Phantasmal Beasts in an attempt to push back against the light, then perhaps it could have been survived. Alas, none of these were to be.

You will slay demons.

You will slay your child.

You will be slain by deceit.

The light tore through Rostam and his steed, and when it cleared, neither was present any longer. Even Battle Continuation could not save a Servant from their body being destroyed.

Having taken the first tribute of the battle, NAGATO looked to the gathered Servants with a somber expression, that multicolored light beginning to condense once again. However...

-This time, it surrounded both hands.