[Mr. Game & Watch]

Hey all,

So, this time around it is nothing major, though the staff and I have sparked a couple threads worth of discussions involving minor tweaks around the board and we felt it necessary to inform everyone on what are the outcomes of our little chats. Some of you may already be aware of some of these changes, but probably not all, so make sure to take out your cards and see if can get a Bingo.

1)

Apr 7, 2011 19:12:06 GMT -8 WolfEx said:

7. Retain Immersion. Minor 4th Wall Breaking on occasion can be in a character's comedic arsenal but don't over do it.

We have decided that fourth wall breaking can be problematic, though that does not mean we are completely abolishing fourth wall jokes. It is against the rules to abuse the fourth wall to allow characters to access Out of Character information that they couldn’t possibly know otherwise. For example, you looking up a Boss’s weaknesses on Wikipedia does not mean that your character will also suddenly know them, especially if it is a Boss that they have canonically never seen or heard of before.

In addition to that, please refrain from having characters talk about metagame battle mechanics. Having a character be like “Oh no, I got burned even though it was a 5% chance!” might be charming or cute once or twice, but don’t push it.

2)

Jun 30, 2016 6:19:58 GMT -8 Cielmira said:

In addition to that, a character coming from a game series in which the lore and atmosphere does not attempt to distance itself from the Real World will not be considered for the sake of keeping our Nintendo-centric tone intact. That means that while games such as COD, GTA, Battlefield, etc meet above criteria, they are not franchises that members can draw characters from.

Kind of self-explanatory and really shouldn’t change much considering that this hasn’t been a problem just yet, but we always need to be cautious. Fear no more, generic COD soldier will not be joining the fray anytime soon.

3)Item Index

Wait there’s more! Our updates are not all just about new restrictions! After a grueling couple of days, the Pokemon section has been fully revamped. Almost every Pokemon has been completely redone, some now having more flavour text, others given some slight tweaks, and a good majority has been fully reworked to give them a new lease on life. Go ahead, give’em a try!

4)The Claims List

Last but not least, we now have the Claims List, where your characters can become an active part of the Life Sphere’s society. Previously, who runs what has been sort of a mystery and usually the answer to that has been some NPC that no one really gets to interact with save for a brief moment during a mission. Now, your character can become that NPC! Do you think that your character has what it takes to run the Police HQ? How about the Lightweather Hospital? Well, see if you can snag that slot in order to make the Life Sphere a living breathing city.

That’s all for now.

[Mari]

Adding on to what Mr. Game and Watch listed above, I took the liberty of suggesting some changes to a few mechanics and rules. For the most part, the general theme of these changes are to remove the potential for effective immobilization, which drew threads to screeching halt in practice and therefore probably wasn't a whole lot of fun for anyone.

1) The Hungry Cookpot
This item has received an overall nerf. No longer will eaten enemies be incapable of fighting back, allowing battles to continue and enabling those with poor strength stats to better defend themselves compared to the old version. However, this item has received a damage buff and some healing potential to help offset this nerf, as well as a secondary function that allows it to be used to protect an ally as opposed to defeating enemies--assuming you can get them to cooperate with such an idea. Overall this item is much less obnoxiously oppressive, but is immensely more versatile. I expect it to be much funner to play around and with in practice because of this. Read up on its new mechanics here! ssblifeitself.proboards.com/post/41734/thread

2) The Infatuation Status
This status has been completely redone to avoid shutting down the victim almost completely. It is now a very powerful damage debuff instead that encourages the victim to attack other characters, while also buffing persuasion attempts against the target.

The target is burdened by love for 3-8 turns based on an INT roll. To end the status prematurely, they must roll INT against a value equal to 12+(The Charisma Mod of the person they're infatuated to. While infatuated the victim suffers a -3 penalty to rolls against persuasion attempts by the character that afflicted the status. Additionally, they deal 10% less to the character in question and 5% less damage to other characters. This is explained as the character being hesitant to go all out against the target or somewhat distracted respectively.

3) The Disabled Status
Likewise, this status has been completely redone to avoid shutting down characters that only have one attacking stat. It now only gives a damage and accuracy debuff, strongly encouraging characters to use other stats if they can but not completely preventing them from continuing if they can't.

The target is crippled, preventing them from making the most of their abilities. A single stat is 'disabled' by this status. The target will suffer both a -7% damage penalty an -3 roll penalty when making attacks with that stat.

4) The Ranking System
Some of the rewards were deemed to be broken to the point that you either couldn't really take advantage of them or they posed a massive balancing problem that wasn't originally intended. If you are of the Commanding Brother (12 missions) rank or higher, go HERE and read up on your new rewards. Note: None of the changes involved the stat gains, so you don't need to worry about that. The following ranks were changed: Commanding Brother, God Amongst Brethren, Chosen One

5) Character Accuracy Policy
In the past, we've had a couple of issues where characters were given stats that were inconsistent with how they are portrayed in their own games. This is due to the fact that there simply wasn't a policy enforcing character accuracy at all. If we saw something that looked wrong, we couldn't really say much about it. We're officially adopting a lite character accuracy policy, though. Rest assured that the overwhelming majority of characters shouldn't be affected by this. However, in the future, if it comes to the staff's attention that a character's stats, not including stat upgrades, are egregiously unrepresentative of the character's canon portrayal, we may stop and ask for a rebalance to correct this. Understanding will, of course, be given for characters wherein it is difficult to represent their abilities given the system's limitations and we will be willing to hear out a player's reasoning for why they chose the stats they did to rule out the potential for mistakes on our end.