Competitive Balance comes into play when characters have very different abilities. Since these options are meant to compete directly against each other, they need to be roughly equally powerful. For each advantage, a balanced character will have a Necessary Drawback. Each one has a different ability Strenght, speed, defense, healing and attack.
The Jack of all Stats
A member of the Competitive Balance lineup who does not specialize, and explicitly so. Strong but not the The Strongest, Fast but not The Fastest. Good at everything, the best at nothing. His biggest strength is his lack of any glaring weaknesses, but he may have trouble dealing with characters whose skills are more extreme than his if they're allowed to press their advantages.
The Jack of All Stats is often a good character for beginners to use as they get the hang of the controls of a video game. this character lacks the extremes that might trip up a novice. It is also a solid choice for them who do not want to worry about opponents preying on their weaknesses. Whether the character retains his usefulness as the skill grows depends on how much the story rewards versatility as opposed to pure power.
Fragile Super Sonic Speedster
The name about sums it up: the Fragile Super Sonic Speedster is fast. If you blink, he's not there anymore. He appears, strikes, and vanishes in the blink of an eye. Nine times out of ten, his occupation is a thief or a ninja.
Still, being fast has its downsides — what you gain in mobility, you lose in durability. After all, it's hard to keep up that kind of speed when a heavy suit of armor is weighing you down. As a result, the Fragile Speedster is often forced to rely on dodging abilities to avoid getting struck in the first place, and if he does take a hit, down he goes. The racing variant tends give lighter vehicles high acceleration and maneuverability but low top speed. He will often use hit and run tactics to attack his opponents.
The Mighty Glaicer
As the name implies, the Mighty Glacier is one of the strongest people in the world. A single hit can inflict massive amounts of damage on anyone else. Hitting them feels like hitting a solid wall of iron, and they'll usually laugh at anything that is too weak to have them blown across the room. Mighty Glaciers also tend to carry weapons that would break anyone else's arms just to pick up, and can hold open doors that would break a lesser person's fingers off when they slammed shut.
The catch is this: they're slow. Reeeeeeaaaaalllly slow. They would need rocket skates to be described as "inching along". This has the unfortunate tendency to render them useless later in the story, when landing more hits than the enemy is often more important than how much damage the hits do. A greater muscle mass theoretically provides speed but the Mighty Glacier tends to use the heaviest equipment possible, sacrificing any speed for the pure crushing power that only he can achieve.
The Glass Blaster
In short: He can dish it out, but he can't take it. Similar to (but distinct from) the Fragile Speedster, the Glass Blaster is characterized by Crazy attack power coupled with pathetic defensive ability. as they're meant to be far away from combat, or at least in the back of the formation.
Make the Glass Blaster incapable of taking any punishment at all and you've got a very weak character. Glass Blasters often overlap with the Fragile Super Sonic Speedster; characters of that type, who put out high damage and dodge most incoming attacks, but go down quickly if they do get hit, are sometimes called "Glass Ninja." Another type of very common Glass Cannon would be an offensively oriented nuker or is basically like a living artillery piece. Character-wise, The Berserker might also become a Glass Blaster, even if he's not inherently frail, but just doesn't bother whatsoever about defending himself tactically.
The Lighting Fast Bruiser
How can something so strong move so fast? How can something so fast be so strong?
There's the Fragile Super Sonic Speedster; lightning fast, but weak as a kitten. Then there's the Glass Blaster who can dish it out but can't take it, bBut then there's the Mighty Glacier, a strong but slow behemoth that can take and deal a LOT, but can't dish it out fast enough, along with the Jack of All Stats, who can do all of these, but not to the degree the others are able to,
AND THEN there is the Lightning Fast Bruiser. While all previous tropes are supposed to have trade-offs in terms of speed, ability to deal and take damage, the Lightning Bruiser has everything: he is fast, strong and enduring.
This kind of character is often a complete opposite of the Mighty Glacier or the Fragile Super Sonic Speedster: The hulking Big Guy you'd taken for a Mighty Glacier turns out to have lightning speed on top of his Stone Wall levels of defense, or the lean-looking Number 2 you'd for sure pegged as a Fragile Super Sonic Speedster can take damage as well as dish it out! This could be said to be the ultimate Jack of All Stats; truly a force to be reckoned with in any medium.
The Stone Wall
If the Glass Blaster 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.
Depending on the story, a Stone Wall may use one or any of three basic strategies:
•Berserking — Throws himself at the enemy without a thought for defense. Relying on his inherent toughness to keep him alive, he uses kamikaze tactics to improve his dismal attack power. This is especially common for Stone Walls whose toughness is completely automatic, rather than something they need to work at.
•Turtling — The complete opposite tack. Does nothing but defend, defend, defend, with maybe the occasional attack when the enemy least expects it. The fight becomes a patience game — either a battle of attrition to see who tires out first, or a waiting game until the whistle blows. If his defense is something he physically constructs and builds, he can win a fight by slowly expanding outward until he leaves the enemy without a foot to stand on.
•Shielding — A teamwork strategy. Interposes himself between the enemy and an ally. By keeping the enemy occupied, he allows allies with greater attack strength but poorer defense to kill the enemy without getting killed. Characters who do this are called "Meat Shields" or "Party Tanks."
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 Super Sonic Speedster blurs, if it even exists. But toughness is the norm.
The Combat Medic
While a Combat Medic still serves as the primary healer and buffer, he has the ability and incentive to leap into the trenches and kick some butt, too. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, including 'protective auras' that buff nearby allies while the medic fights, or attacks that simultaneously heal the medic's allies. Enemies that try to shoot the Medic first will find that he won't go down as easy as they expected when they can create impenetrable force fields. Last but not least, certain tactics can make their harmless powers lethal, like casting revive on enemies when revive kills a Zombie.
The militant medic isn't unique to stories. Either, healers often find it necessary to pick up some combat ability and kick a few butts every now and then if they don't want to be stuck in the background. After all, in an action series the Hippocratic Oath is a rather overrated thing, and the Geneva Convention is simply quaint and obsolete.
Confusion Kung Fu
Some fighters have speed, some have strength.
Proponents of Confusion Kung Fu have unpredictability. Their attacks and motions are completly random (or seem to be), making them difficult to read and predict, in a matter of fact COMPLETLY UNPREDICTABLE. Perhaps their priorities and motivations are so different from your own that attempting to guess their next move doesn't work, or perhaps their bodies are structured in such an unfamiliar way that you do not recognize the movements that foretell a particular action. Eaither that or there an absolute nut case, your decision.
Fri Apr 13, 2012 8:45 pm
ink this makes for a great writing strategy when working on your stories for the future