An Airing of Battleboard Grievances.

[u/CobaltMonkey]

I've got a lot of problems with you people, and now you're going to hear about it. /s
Okay, not really you people specifically. But there are a lot of things we all do at one point or another that are just awful for everyone's enjoyment of our shared hobby.

Let's start with this question: What is the purpose of battleboarding?
The answer is twofold:
1.) Have fun.
2.) Use the board's rules to arrive as close as reasonably possible to a right answer to the question of who would win in a given competition.

What do you not see in there?
"Be right."
You are absolutely not here to personally be right about who is or isn't the victor.
You are here to find what is right, not who. To find the right answer, not simply to be the one who has it.
You are not the appointed champion of a character or franchise. Not even if you were their actual author. But even if you were both of those things, it would still not be your goal to make your characters win. It would be to find out if they could according to our rules.

Your favored character(s) absolutely will lose sometimes. No, this is not a sin. No, the board is not biased against them. No, the rules are not stupid just because you don't like them or can't exploit them to fanwank your character. Either voice your problems with them in the State of the Sub (where you can expect to be rightly shouted down if the latter was your goal), or hit the bricks. If all you do is whine about them, you won't be missed.

Another aspect of this perceived need to be right is choosing to engage with only the highest powered characters you can find. Yes, I'm looking at you, people who won't touch anyone below universal tier.
Let's not get confused here. It's perfectly fine to like and enjoy those characters and the media they are from. Your taste in characters is your own and is entirely above ridicule. You like what you like and there is never anything wrong with that.

However, that doesn't make those characters particularly suitable for enjoyable battleboarding.
If the description of your character or any of their abilities includes any of the following terms, then pretty much no one is going to enjoy engaging with you:
Universal
Multiversal
Omniversal
Conceptual
Abstract
Omnipotent
Omniscient
^{Ki Control/s}

Why? For starters, in choosing these, it looks an awful lot like you're wanting "victory" for as little effort as possible. If this is your goal, you're no better than anyone who tries to NLF Hulk's anger or Batman's prep time. Yes, it's wrong to wank someone up to having no limits, but it's almost as wrong to simply pick characters whose limits are either unknowable or arbitrarily high. You're not looking for debate when you do that, you're looking to "win."

Well, that might not be the case 100% of the time, in fairness. You could genuinely be interested in trying to find a match for a really high powered character. But that's moot since you can't really arrive at a reasonable conclusion because too much of what the characters to whom the above terms apply is vague, undefinable nonsense or a complete mess (see any one of the many omnipotence rants here). It's a "safe" character to back because pretty much nothing can be conclusively proven about it. It will invariably get bogged down into a mess of "does my abstract defense beat your ontological weapon" or something. Nobody can know that sort of thing, not the least reason for which is that such terms were never meant to be applied in a battleboard setting and authors that threw them around to sound cool were never concerned with it anyway (barring Suggs, of course). In short, for everyone around you it's a violation of answer 1 up there, Have fun.

I could go on, but it's actually kind of late. I'm sure I'll have more opportunity to vent/be crucified in the comments in the morning. See you then. I'll even bring the nails. I'm just helpful like that.

[u/CoolandAverageGuy]

I feel like there's two types of battleboarders: people that want to read highly detailed and interesting fights and people that want to find out who the most powerful entity in all of fiction is. The latter is why the Suggsverse novels exist and why their are so many cosmic entity characters that are known more of their appearances in battleboarding then in their original canon stories.

[u/LostDelver → u/CoolandAverageGuy]

That and japanese light novel level of conceptual powers insanity is fun for some people. I like my lolis who can squash multiverses like ants.

[u/CoolandAverageGuy → u/LostDelver]

Yeah, learning about comically overpowered characters that i would have never heard about otherwise has been really fun for me.

[u/[deleted] → u/LostDelver]

Real talk, I feel that light novels and visual novels of the action/fantasy persuasion need to be that level of absurd to be able to stand out. Especially if it's an isekai.

[u/Trim345 → u/CoolandAverageGuy]

I think there's a third category of "people who like thinking about what would happen in weird situations." Those are the ones that are more under the "Challenge" subheading in WhoWouldWin. I'm thinking of prompts like "Can Konosuba characters board an airplane?", "Would Kratos or Uncle Iroh be more effective when switching places?", or "Thanos vs. Darkseid at improving your life."

Some of these almost skirt the edges of battleboarding specifically, but they've always been my favorite category. They almost become /r/writingprompts material, but WritingPrompts often reimagines the characters for the purpose of having a good story instead of just realistically thinking of what would actually happen.

[u/Verlux → u/Trim345]

Linking to threads is verboten per sidebar rules, specifically number 5

[u/Trim345 → u/Verlux]

Ah, sorry. Edited.

[u/Verlux → u/Trim345]

Alrighty, thank you very much!

[u/CoolandAverageGuy → u/Trim345]

I love making "who is the weakest character who can <insert some non-combat challenge here>?" threads cuz it's interesting to see how various superpowers can be used in non-combat situations to do the otherwise-impossible or how some character that in their canon story only ever uses their powers to murder innocent could hypothetically use their powers to cheat on game shows.

Of course, Casper the friendly ghost, Contessa, and The One Above All are going to be answer 99 percent of the time but oh well.

[u/Gray_Walker → u/CoolandAverageGuy]

The latter is why... their are so many cosmic entity characters that are known more of their appearances in battleboarding then in their original canon stories.

I feel like I've been seeing less of this on battleboards recently. A lot of people these days actually seem to realize that at least Galactus does, in fact, have a personality, and seem to like him based on that.

[u/CoolandAverageGuy → u/Gray_Walker]

Now that Disney owns Fox, we might see him in the MCU in a few decades.

Also i've never read any of the comic books but the gimmick of EATING ENTIRE PLANETS seems like it would be really good way to make him stick out among the other cosmic horror supervillains.

[u/Gray_Walker → u/CoolandAverageGuy]

Now that Disney owns Fox, we might see him in the MCU in a few decades.

And then we'll be aaaaaaaaall the way back at square one from the ye olden days of battleboarding, desperately trying to explain to the misinformed masses that (comic) Galactus's power doesn't cap out at destroying planets, let alone trying to explain his appeal as a character rather than a force.

If you want to read anything involving him, this is a good place to start, and it's probably my favorite story involving him. It's only like 12 pages long. I'm dreading him being in the MCU personally because I don't think he works well with the setting's tone. Realistically, they won't take him seriously in-universe because of his appearance and absurdity of his premise, and I doubt they'd even address that he has a personality to begin with.