Misused (new crowner 12/2/13): Necessary Drawback

I'd also say that a Mighty Glacier is not a Glass Cannon. The former may not have as great of a defence as a Stone Wall, but they don't have low defence.

Updated OP.

The archetype of high speed, low attack would be using the Scratch Damage and Death of a Thousand Cuts tropes.

I think it's best that those archetypes are best left under Necessary Drawback as they are now. Only games (video or otherwise) make use of the statistics everyone speaks of, but all the archetypes (with Jack of All Stats being the exception) being applicable to stuff beyond games. That's the whole reason they were moved off Competitive Balance in the first place.

I wonder if it might not be worth renaming Stone Wall in such a way as not to imply slow speed. It's only going to keep causing confusion if it keeps that name but is more tightly defined as +DEF / -STR.

Not sure what a better name would be. Stone Weakling? Damage Sponge? The latter currently redirects to Damage-Sponge Boss but there's no reason that it couldn't be reappropriated as a supertrope to DSB that includes player characters.

edited 16th Aug '13 8:18:17 AM by hbi2k

Noticed that Paper Ram has been cut, so that's one less thing to worry about.

At the very least, Stone Wall needs a description rewrite so that it becomes obvious that it covers everything that Titanium Peashooter does. As I've been saying, currently it covers folks who can tank hits, but if it also covers folks who draw fire and evade, or can do both, it needs to actually say that.

Doing a rename for Stone Wall seems a very good idea.

Damage-Sponge Boss has high damage, but we might be able to get away with it as a subttrope.... I'm not sure about that. Health/Damage Asymmetry is a better fit.

Can we try to just rewrite the definition and leave it that way while we work on some of the other troubles? Such as +Def and -Spd?

• Changed my mind. I'm okay with knocking out a consensus-based definition for Stone Wall first.

edited 16th Aug '13 4:06:44 PM by crazysamaritan

I just took a look at the history of Stone Wall. The description was changed in may from

Distinguished from the Mighty Glacier in that the Stone Wall is even tougher to hurt. The Mighty Glacier is much more balanced in his offense and defense. The Stone Wall is much stronger on defense than on offense, and in extreme cases, may only deal Scratch Damage.

to

Distinguished from the Mighty Glacier and Titanium Peashooter in that the Stone Wall is even tougher to hurt. The Mighty Glacier is much more balanced in his offense and defense. The Titanium Peashooter is more balanced in his defense and speed. The Stone Wall is much stronger on defense than on offense and speed, and in extreme cases, may only deal Scratch Damage.

and it seems that it has been rewritten multiple times. Here is the best version I could find.

Distinguished from the Mighty Glacier in that the Stone Wall is even tougher to hurt, and not necessarily slow, clumsy, lacking in range, or whatever. The Mighty Glacier is much more balanced in his offense and defense. The Stone Wall is much stronger on defense than on offense, and in extreme cases, may only deal Scratch Damage.

If the Stone Wall's defense is evasion-based as opposed to toughness-based, the line between this archetype and a defensively played Fragile Speedster blurs, if it even exists. But toughness is the norm.

Ijust create a TRS for this here.

Let's focus back on JOAS now that there's that new thread.

The whole point of this thread was to deal with the entire trope family, since things have been done individually in the past, multiple times, and the results have not been good. I'm not even sure why a separate thread was made for Stone Wall.

Agreed. The last thing we need is people coming to different conclusions in different threads and working at cross-purposes with one another.

Can the Stone Wall thread be closed and the discussion redirected back here?

I closed the discussion about Stone Wall. Let's please keep these discussions corralled here...free range stat tropes are a nightmare to clean up after.

edited 16th Aug '13 2:16:34 PM by Willbyr

The Tank - is this trope, from RP Gs, already present on the wiki?

Not under that name... I'm referring to the trope of a character that has extremely high defensive capabilities, whose duty in a team-based game is to provide the Glass Cannon and Fragile Speedster with some protection. Stone Wall mentions it as a teamwork strategy, but a party of just Tanks is also something that can be played, in either of the other two methods suggested on the trope page.

Edit-2: found it!

• Meat Shield is a disambiguation page, and the actual definition is on An Adventurer Is You, which has Mighty Glacier instead of Stone Wall, which is misuse.

An Adventurer Is You will be affected by our redefinitions, so I will make a note of that on the Original Post.

edited 16th Aug '13 4:31:33 PM by crazysamaritan

Should we change the tag to "Main.Necessary Drawback" or "Stat Tropes" just to signify the switch in discussion?

The discussion hasn't changed. It was always about all of them.

Alight, so it looks like what we actually need to do is:

• Decide what we're doing re: Master of All and Lightning Bruiser. Lumping? Splitting? Redefining one or both somehow?
• Deal with Stone Wall. Currently, it's "high defense, low offense". The name suggests "high defense, low speed". We can either rename it to match the definition or redefine it to match the name.
• Decide what to do about the remaining two archetypes that don't have tropes yet (high speed, low attack and whichever one we decide Stone Wall isn't)

After that it's just an ungodly amount of example sorting and wick cleanup.

We still have a number of things to do with the other generalist tropes, as well as fixing the definitions across the entire wiki.

But for Lightning Bruiser, I had an idea earlier....

• Joke Character / Master of None - character with low stats in everything. (In-Universe mocking to distinguish?)
  • Lethal Joke Character - is awesome because of an ability/technique, independent of their stats.
• Master of All - has the best of everything; stats and abilities.
  • Lightning Bruiser - Would be the best at everything, if not for a weakness. The character may lack a skill or technique that makes a "lower" power creature a better choice.

My reasoning comes mostly from the Pokémon section of LB. Several mons are listed as LB, with caveats of "but the lack of moveset makes them weaker", or "but their vulnerability to Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors makes them useless". I figure it isn't much of a redefinition, more moving off the characters that really are great at everything (the misuse LB has attracted) and leaving it with "great stats-wise; fast, tough, strong, but has a weakness."

I like this. It's already in the description as a "may" ("...the Lightning Bruiser may have weaknesses beyond strength, speed, and toughness: lack of range, magical capability, or a high resource cost are some of the challenges these characters can face."), so this is a tweak rather than an overhaul, changing that "may" to "must."

But it serves the purpose of further differentiating it from Master of All.

I don't see anything wrong with Lightning Bruiser having an overlap with Master of All.

I don't think there's anything wrong with it per se, but the more we can do to clearly delineate the difference, the less confusion and misuse we'll have to deal with down the road.

Right. Overlap is fine, but they still need distinct definitions. If people think Master of All = Lightning Bruiser, that's an issue.

As-is, we have examples like Chess, where the Queen is listed as a Lightning Bruiser, despite none of the factors being relevant. She fits Master of All, because she can imitate most other pieces.

Getting back to Stone Wall, here's my suggestion for a revamped description:

—-

If the Glass Cannon believes that the best defense is a good offense, the Stone Wall tries for the reverse. His offense is nothing to write home about, if it even technically exists. But he's tough. Really, really tough. And if anything can put him down, odds are he's quick enough on the recovery to get right back up for round two.

As a solo character, the Stone Wall's strategy is often known as turtling, especially in Real-Time Strategy games where he can slowly expand outward until he leaves the enemy without a foot to stand on. As a team player, he acts as a tank or Meat Shield, drawing enemy aggression toward himself while leaving the damage-dealing to others, usually a Glass Cannon and/or Squishy Wizard.

Distinguished from the Mighty Glacier in that the Stone Wall is even tougher to hurt, and not necessarily slow, clumsy, lacking in range, or whatever. The Mighty Glacier is much more balanced in his offense and defense. The Stone Wall is much stronger on defense than on offense, and in extreme cases, may only deal Scratch Damage.

This trope partly takes its name from a real-life example: Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson won the battle of Bull Run due to his strategy to not retreat from his line, no matter how bad things went for him. And for a while things went pretty bad.

A subtrope of Competitive Balance.

—-

I'm still thinking that a name change is in order. Stone Weakling seems like the best we've got right now, but I'm open to hearing other suggestions.

The bolded paragraph will obviously have to change if/when we settle on a redefinition of Mighty Glacier.

Another thought: as of right now, we've tentatively got:

Stone Wall/Weakling: -STR / +DEF Mighty Glacier: -SPD / +STR

The old definition of Mighty Glacier was +STR / +DEF / -SPD, and that's such a common archetype that I think we want to retain a well-defined place for it in the hierarchy. It seems, then, that we need a +DEF / -SPD trope to round things that. Call it, I dunno, Invincible Immobile for now.

If we've got: Stone Wall/Weakling: -STR / +DEF Mighty Glacier: -SPD / +STR Invincible Immobile: -SPD / +DEF

Then the common archetype of the slow guy who's both offensively and defensively strong is defined as the overlap between Mighty Glacier and Invincible Immobile.

Thoughts?

edited 21st Aug '13 8:57:11 AM by hbi2k

Way the hell better than what we've got now.