Character Scramble Season 14 Tribunal

[u/FreestyleKneepad]

Here is the sign up for the email list. If you are interested please sign up, as this will keep you up to date with an email for every Scramble post that is made, making sure that you don't miss a thing.

We also have an official Discord channel, so be sure to stop by if you want to talk about the Scramble, or just to say hi.

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Tribunal is officially OVER!

Click here for the post-Tribunal (unscrambled) rosters!

And click here to fill out the Veto/Opt-Out form! It closes at 9PM PST on Saturday, February 13th, so get your vetos in fast!

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Refer to the following links for easy access to all the resources you need to debate cases:

Season 14 Tier Luke Cage RT

Current list of unclaimed backups

Clev’s list of un-scrambled submissions

Signup FAQ

When Tribunal is over, a link will be posted HERE for the Veto / NSFW Opt-Out form. Keep your eyes peeled!

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Featured Submissions

In an attempt to help aid the review process, we will be highlighting a section of the submissions each day to focus the lens on a group of submissions. Understand that these submissions aren’t being picked due to any reasoning or bias beyond their position on the list, our goal is to help you focus on specific parts of the submission list each day in the hopes that characters that would normally pass under the radar are given proper scrutiny.

Here are the featured submissions for today.

The link will be changed each day until we’ve covered the entire submission roster or until Tribunal has ended.

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Here’s how this works.

For the next two weeks, all characters are under review. If you think a character is not in tier, whether they be too weak, too strong, too nebulous, or somewhere in between, here is where you can air your grievances. We'll be going through all of the submissions during this time, all I ask is that you follow along and call what you see.

Tribunal will end in about 2 weeks, on Saturday, February 13, when all cases are closed.

Note that this deadline is subject to change if we decide that there are unresolved issues that warrant some more time. Also, yes, I know what you’re thinking, that’s a long time for arguing about Whispy Woods. If we get done early and there’s only a couple cases left a few days before Saturday, odds are good we’ll wrap those cases up and end Tribunal early. Every remaining case will be notified if that’s happening.

If you have a problem with a character:

• Create a comment with the name of the character in question, a link to that character sheet, and the username (with /u/ to notify them - /u/FreestyleKneepad for instance) of the submitter. Then list what questions/problems you have with the character.

• Please be respectful when calling out characters, and remember that you are probably pointing out problems with someone's favorite character/series.

• Keep in mind that Tribunal is for judging whether a character is too strong/weak for the tier. Whether or not you personally like the character or think they’re good/well-written has no bearing on whether or not they’re in tier.

• Please give a detailed complaint about each character a separate reply to make sure that conversations are organized. Quick thoughts on multiple characters in one post are fine as well as long as you keep each case clearly separated.

• Starting with the initial complaint post, each person involved gets five full posts to argue their point back and forth. If a decision is not reached by that point, judges must be called in to make a decision. If that happens, the person issuing the complaint and the person whose submission is being complained about both get one closing post to argue their case to the judges before they rule on the issue. We will allow a little lenience on this when a case involves several people arguing amongst each other as that’s difficult to manage with a limited number of posts, but if it starts to get really long-winded a GM will generally step in and force a vote.

If your character is called out:

• First, realize this is not a personal attack. We're just trying to ensure that this tournament runs smoothly for everyone.

• Please address the concerns brought forth, either by standing firm and arguing for your character’s inclusion, or by buffing/nerfing the character. Please keep the amount of buffs and nerfs to a minimum. This isn’t a good place to redesign the character from the ground up, and you don’t get any extra Major changes at this point. If the judges determine that it would take more than one Major change to balance the character, your character can also be ruled out of tier that way.

• If it’s agreed that a character cannot work in its current state and can’t be easily edited, replacements from the backup submissions will be issued. If one of your characters is being removed you are free to request a specific backup to replace your submission, otherwise a GM will choose for you.

If you see a problem with the roster:

• Make a post and let us know. Odds are, you will have to resubmit the form with the correct info so if you want to just go ahead and do that and let Free know to look for the new entry, that would save time.

• If your problem is that you don't show up in the list, it’s because you never filled out/submitted the form... just go ahead and do that NOW, assuming that you started your sign up process before this post was created. Here’s the form. If you need to make a change because you swapped things out, just make sure you’re signed into the same account you initially used and you’ll be able to update your form. Please let Free know either on Reddit or on Discord if you do this. DO NOT CHANGE YOUR FORM IF YOU HAVE TO TAKE A BACKUP REPLACEMENT FOR ANOTHER CHARACTER. We’ll handle those swaps personally when Tribunal ends.

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Judges

In order to streamline the decision making process, we have selected a small panel of judges that will help make decisions on characters where a resolution cannot be reached. And they are...

[drumroll]

/u/morvis343, /u/GuyofEvil, /u/Voeltz, /u/Cleverly_Clearly, and /u/rangernumberx

Here's how the judge system works:

• If a submission is called out and all parties involved cannot agree as to whether the submission is in tier, ping any three of the judges.

• Once judges are being called in, the argument is effectively over. Both sides of the argument will be allowed to post a Closing Argument which sums up their stance, their argument thus far, and any other major notes they might not have been able to touch on just yet or counter-arguments that hadn’t been answered yet. Be complete on this, as this is your last chance to get your word in before the judges decide on the case and effectively close it.

• Three of the judges or GMs involved will then each make a statement on whether they think the character is or is not in tier and why. If they're able to come to a complete consensus, then that decision is made final. If a complete consensus is not made among the judges, then the resolution defaults to the majority decision. However, in this case, the decision can be appealed.

• To appeal a decision, respond to the post in which the statements are made explaining why you think the arguments made were wrong or inaccurate. After an appeal is made, the remaining two judges will step in and also vote. This vote out of 5 is effectively final. If the previous vote was 2-1 and the new vote is 2-3, them’s the breaks. This is also why an initial unanimous vote among 3 is final, as changing a 3-0 vote to a 3-2 vote doesn’t accomplish anything.

• If a final decision is made, then that decision is completely final. You cannot argue it further. If that means a character is in, they won't be brought back up again. If that means a character gets removed, your options are to choose the backup you want to replace them or let a GM choose instead. /u/FreestyleKneepad is in charge of the backup list, so ping him or have a judge ping him to get any backup swaps sorted out.

• To be clear, GMs can do whatever they want and don’t answer to you. If we want to take the place of a judge in a vote, we will. If we want to singularly decide on something, we will (note that this will be very rare and most likely only happen near the end of Tribunal to wrap things up or in cases where something is clearly un-submittable, such as a character from a literal porn series). If we say something needs to be removed for whatever reason, what we say goes. The judges will handle the majority of the Tribunal process, we’re just here to smite shit from the heavens. That takes work, though, so expect the judges to do more judging than us.

• If a GM takes the place of a judge in a vote, they’re effectively identical to a judge for that vote. That in mind, if the vote goes 2 to 1 and gets appealed, the remaining judges can still step in on the final 2-person vote.

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Veto & NSFW Opt-Out

We will be implementing an opt-out similarly to last season, wherein after Tribunal a link will be posted here letting you designate whether or not you wish to receive a character that is considered NSFW for sexual content. We may also include extreme gore as NSFW.

Additionally, in the same form you will be asked to veto any one character. If you want to, you may designate a character, and you will be guaranteed to not receive them.

A few notes on this process:

• A link to this form will be posted on this thread in the top section after Tribunal has ended. The link will also be posted on the Scramble Discord channel. 2 days (48 hours) after the link has been posted, the form will be locked and the GMs will prepare to scramble rosters.

• We will not be indicating in any way what characters are and aren’t NSFW. This isn’t an opportunity for you to choose to veto a specific list of characters. This is an opportunity for you to decide whether or not you want a character with NSFW content. NSFW generally only applies to sexual content- we don’t typically include violence and gore in this opt-out.

• While we did ask in the signup form whether your submissions were NSFW or not, final judgment falls to us as GMs. We may choose to include characters in the list that weren’t marked, and vice versa.

• Your veto can be for any character you absolutely don’t want, whether or not they’re included in the opt-out or not. If the character is included in the opt-out, you apply for the opt-out, and you also veto the character, you do NOT get to pick a second character to veto.

• You cannot veto your own submissions or backups you pick to replace a Tribunaled submission. If you do, the veto will be ignored.

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Discord Rules on Tribunal Discussion

In order to ensure that every scrambler is equally able to contribute to the Tribunal, discussion of specific Tribunal cases will NOT BE ALLOWED on the Discord channel. Linking to a discussion with the intent to have a Discord user comment on that chain on Reddit is perfectly fine, but actual discussion of the cases will result in the users being warned the first time, and kicked the second time. We have a zero-tolerance policy on this situation.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly]

/u/HighSlayerRalton

Doctor Who

The Doctor's speed isn't as good as Cage's, and they're in trouble if Cage takes or destroys their gunstick. But if they can maintain range, they can keep hammering Cage with the gunstick until it eventually wears him down. If the Doctor loses the gunstick, his martial arts won't prove terribly useful against Cage's skin, but there's an outside chance that he could use the environment to incapacitate Cage for long enough to use tactile telepathy.

It seems like the idea is "He has a bunch of gadgets, some of which are in-tier offense, and he has in-tier speed, but he will get one-shot if Cage hits him". This is a very similar case to Lupin the 3rd, who was unanimously judged out of tier. It was unlikely that he would use his in-tier offensive options given the amount of weaponry he has, making him a one-shot or get one-shot character that mostly gets one-shot. This case isn't exactly like Lupin, but every way that it differs from the Lupin case is worse.

• He only has one option that is argued to really affect Luke, the gunstick. I don't know why the Doctor would default to using this when he has a bunch of other options, especially considering it seems like he has only used a gunstick once.
• The gunstick's offense is really bad against Luke, It could potentially hurt him based on this (although normally they need multiple daleks to cause that kind of damage), but the projectiles are not fast. If Luke determines these blasts are a threat to him, he can dodge them after they've been fired.
• The Doctor does not have in-tier speed. Here are all the relevant speed feats
  • This says that the Doctor fired "at the same time" as Cosgrove. He's matching Cosgrove's aiming speed, not moving after the bullets were fired.
  • This isn't dodging a bullet, this is dodging some blue energy blast
  • This is ridiculous, the gun wasn't even pointing at him and even if it was, it's a flintlock pistol, that fires slower than a modern bullet
  • If we're meant to take this seriously then the Doctor would be able to act and react in a couple of nanoseconds, making him highly out of tier. I feel like, if he was actually that fast, that speed would have come in handy on multiple adventures.

This is in addition to the issues with Lupin, which is that he has no durability and that he's unlikely to use his weapons that will hurt Luke.

[u/rangernumberx → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

Alright, I'm going to try and argue for him, because I think he can just make it in at the bottom of the tier.

Speed

Honestly, I do think this meets the tier through the Cosgrove feat. He is largely tracking Cosgrove's aiming, yes. However, while it's unclear because it's literature, the fact he's shooting the bullets out of the air makes me think that he's reacting to the gun firing than anything else. Being almost 20 meters away, as well as looking up at the attacker because they're in a helicopter, makes me think it's unlikely he's seeing and reacting to him pulling the trigger. It's awkward, but if we're willing to err in favour of awkward feats, such as when we both decided on the Nemesis judgement to count this as bullet timing, I think we can count this as some level of bullet timing.

Gear

One clear difference between Doctor and Lupin is that, as per the specification that he only has stuff in the 12th Doctor mini RT, there's far less stuff for him to sift through in order to get to the things which may do something to Cage. He only really has three weapons: Two of them are swords, which aren't going to be doing much but Doctor's going to be smart enough to know that a big bulking man without any weapons is going to favour close range combat far more, and the gunstick, which is the right choice. Everything else is more useful if the situation arises for something a bit more tricksy, but I'll get to that in a bit.

For the gunstick's offense, it's not just the concussive aspects of it, but the electrical side. While Cage can tank electricity which KOs people with a touch all day, blasts which outright kill in a single hit are a different story. It's still going to take a fair few hits, but he is going to go down sooner than just relying on the plane destruction feat. While they aren't the fastest, I feel like we may be able to find a feat showing better, more concrete blast speed somewhere, we could say that Luke's fondness for tanking damage lets the first few blasts hit him for free before he realizes they genuinely hurt him before using the invisibility watch to sneak around and try and score the other hits, or we can use the Dcotor's possibly temporal ability to know how things can turn out (or whatever the hell this is) to say he can score hits even with the speed disadvantage.

The Fight

So, as I said, I think there's a reasonable chance the Doctor will use the gunstick given the sign up prompt puts him in a scenario where he's not caught fully unawares, he has some time to figure out what's going on. He uses the gunstick, it hurts Cage but he keeps going and presses forward. Given how smart he is, he likely goes for his invisibility watch here, allowing him to sneak around and get the remaining shots he needs here. This can be through the regular route of just shooting him when he's not looking, using his equipment to cause distractions before shooting him, or using the dimensional shift bomb to create a hole from nowhere / gravity core to stun Cage and pull him in a specific direction and shoot him before he's fully aware of what's happening.

There is a very real chance, and basically guaranteed in every situation where the Doctor doesn't immediately go for going invisible, that he gets the gunstick disarmed from him. This on the surface isn't the worst, as if he manages to tank enough of Cage's hits due to his increased durability before managing to break away from him and turning invisible, he can go grab it while Cage is looking for him, use one of his items to use a trickier way of obtaining it if Cage is guarding it, use his sonic screwdriver to activate it from a distance and cause it to shoot him in the back when he's not expecting it (especially if he makes himself reappear just before to distract Cage), and so on. I don't think it's a stretch to say "The Doctor will go for the smart plays in any given situation" since that's what his whole character is. The problem arises with the fact the gunstick doesn't have any durability. To solve this, could it possibly be tied to the Doctor's as a minor change, in a similar way that we have Pokemon trainers not take damage until all their Pokemon are knocked out? I'm not saying to make the Doctor unbeatable until the gunstick's destroyed, just to include it in the already present durability buff, in the same way we'd assume a gadget user's gadgets (such as Vi's gauntlets) would have their durability set to tier if the character themselves received the buff. I hope that made sense.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/rangernumberx]

Speed

The problem isn't that it's a vague literary feat, the problem is that we are given textual suggestions that he isn't moving faster than bullet speed. Considering who the Doctor is, I actually find it much more likely that he is reacting to Cosgrove's aim from 20 meters away while he's in a helicopter, than that he's moving his arm fast enough to interact with individual bullets after they've been fired. None of his other interactions with bullets suggest that he is a bullet timer.

Gear

I'll grant that he has less gear than Lupin, but this still seems very shaky. I find it difficult to believe that the Doctor will rely on his gunstick and move around while invisible to get potshots in, since that isn't really how the Doctor operates. Also, electricity that kills a person isn't likely to be much more dangerous than electricity that knocks out a person. If you're getting knocked out by electricity, you're already pretty close to getting killed by it. The fact that these arguments are based on possibilities or potentialities ("maybe he can use his temporal powers to know where Cage will be to mitigate the speed advantage, if that's how it works" "maybe Luke Cage will just let himself get hit a bunch of times before realizing that he needs to dodge") makes me think that the Doctor is just not in tier at all.

The Fight

Again, I don't really believe that the Doctor would fight this way just because his options are limited. This is a combination of factors that the Doctor has never used at the same time before, the invisibility watch and the gunstick. How is he supposed to get his gun back from Luke Cage, even if he's invisible? He would never be strong enough to get it out of his hands.

I don't think it's a stretch to say "The Doctor will go for the smart plays in any given situation" since that's what his whole character is.

I do. I think that your argument relies entirely on maybes and it-could-happen-like-this-s. I'm arguing from an empirical perspective. I don't see anything that lets the Doctor be in tier. I don't want to rely on the idea that he will fight in some newfangled way because "he's the Doctor, he'll find a way". Is sneaking around while invisible and sniping people with a Dalek gun really what Doctor Who is about? I don't think so.

[u/converter-bot → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

20 meters is 21.87 yards