Discussion Main / CompetitiveBalance

It's just plain not part of the definition of Stealth Expert. A Stealth Expert is "a guy who's good at stealth." Full stop.

I don't disagree with you that often, as a part of game balance, a character who is an expert at stealth is also made either squishy or poor at dealing damage outside of stealth, but it's not universally the case and it's not part of the definition of the trope.

There are, for example, plenty of single-player stealth games like Dishonored in which the player character is more than capable in combat outside of stealth. In these cases, Competitive Balance is not an issue because there are no other player characters to be competitive against.

There are also plenty of non-gameplay examples like Batman. Batman is undeniably a Stealth Expert; he is also a master of hand-to-hand combat. Depending on the setting and continuity, sometimes he's relatively squishy (compared to a powered hero like Superman, for example) and sometimes he's not (in Batman Begins, for example, where he wears bulletproof body armor and nobody has superpowers). Being stealthy is a core part of his character; squishiness or lack of offense is not.

Now, I think that the concept of "sneaky but squishy" and/or "sneaky but weak" is probably tropable, but you can't just redefine an existing trope that way by fiat. You'd need to either create a new trope in YKTTW, or take the existing trope to TRS to redefine it. Personally, I'd be in favor of the latter, since as of right now Stealth Expert is kind of under-defined and plagued by Zero Context Examples. Also, it doesn't seem to be very well distinguished from The Sneaky Guy, which has a lot of the same problems, so they could probably both stand to be redefined in relation to one another.

This trope page is about the balance between archetypes and tropes of characters or classes. It wasn't about listing different tropes all over the place. For example, I would easily consider a Ditto Fighter to be a gimmick trope rather than a foil trope because in a competitive balance perspective he would often need to waste his first strike on turning into someone that is more effective than his real form from a balance perspective. He would be perfectly free to choose how he would acquire his weaknesses and strengths at some cost that I cannot directly associate with. However a Stealth Expert from a Competitive Balance perspective is more of a brute force no-no because that if he was capable of executing someone while remaining indestructible he would easily dominate games.

This trope page is about balance between classes, not about listing every trope you see and just going by the trope's definition rather than the context of the page itself. A Stealth Expert from the page's context needs to have a lack of direct firepower to avoid game-breaker territory. From a regular perspective this encumbrance is unnecessary.

Great, but you can't redefine Stealth Expert that way without going through the proper channels. If it doesn't fit the page, then don't list it on the page. If it doesn't fit in the part of the page specifically about archetypes that balance a strength with a corresponding weakness, then don't list it there. Don't shoehorn it because you feel like something similar should be there.

Let me put it another way: to be competitively balanced, a Stealth Expert needs a weakness. That weakness doesn't have to be lack of direct firepower specifically. It could be a high unit cost, it could be an exploitable Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors weakness, it could be a lack of mobility while in stealth. It could be lots of different things.

Since the specific weakness is not specified in the definition, we don't lump it in with the tropes that are defined by one specific strength vs. one specific weakness (e.g. Glass Cannon, strong offense / weak defense), but put it in the second list.

You didn't even look at my original post when you made the third comment here at all, did you?

I have said that I have found Stealth Experts that can thrive in direct combat to be a game-breaker, especially considering that they always have a first strike advantage unless they do something retarded, for which they should be punished for. If the US gotten a first strike advantage against the Soviets for their nukes, and it was clear and decisive enough, considering how powerful nuclear bombs are and how much of an effect they could have in a war zone obviously the US would have won by nuking the shit out of the communists.

In a competitive balance perspective, a Stealth Expert that can play well in direct combat and overpower others in direct combat is a retarded concept.

That's all fascinating, but none of it has anything to do with the placement of the trope on this page.

Yes it does. The first strike advantage of a stealth expert combined with his ability to thrive in direct combat directly contributes to my view of a Stealth Expert being placed in the foil sections of the page. You cannot whittle down a Stealth Expert because the Stealth Expert has abilities that are supposed to make it able to attack first before you are aware of his position and whittle you down instead. And you cannot directly engage someone that is directly built for brute force and has Mighty Glacier tendencies. You use a Lightning Bruiser to justify a brute-force stealth expert, then you just made two classes of which the regular interpretation of a stealth expert might as well be facing a fragile speedster. Either you have a Game-Breaker or you have no Mighty Glacier Stealth Expert at all.

I now officially have no idea where you're even going with this. This is seriously not as complicated as you're making it.

Stealth Expert = Guy who's good at stealth.

Boom. Done. Full stop.

Competitive Balance = How competitive games balance character or class archetypes.

Done. Full stop.

I could do that too.

Any Competitive Balance considerations of the Stealth Expert trope would belong on an Analysis/ page.

^^ I'm not claiming anything different. I'm not trying to de facto redefine tropes outside the proper channels. You are. Apples and oranges.

Just make it either/or. A fast character can easily have high defense if their damage potential sucks balls.

For example, mitigation tanks.

That edit reason is characteristic of that thinking that all of these tropes are part of a so-called "offense/defense/speed" triangle or somesuch. I am inclined to disagree with it.

Agree with @Timing. There needs to be some mention of the character's relative staying power for the example to count.

The name, laconic, and trope description of Fragile Speedster all agree with each other and are quite clear. FRAGILE. Not "weak." FRAGILE. The description specifies that it can and often does overlap with Glass Cannon and the example section is replete with examples.

You can't "just make it either/or" without redefining the trope, which can certainly be done, but the discussion section of a related trope isn't the place to do it.

The offense/defense/speed triangle went out a long time ago when we realized Three-Stat System didn't have to be those Three Stats.

Fragile Speedsters are implicitly weak because the definition points out its overlap with things like Spam Attack and other quick attack styles that have low output but high attack rate. And points out that having high offense will usually be qualified by overlapping with Glass Cannon IMPLYING that on its own it has low offense.

The definition of power and mobility changes from game to game, and Trope Drift or decay or redefinition overtime has pit Fragile Speedster and Mighty Glacier as a foil pair. I did wick checks that prove it last time we had this argument.

That said Glacier and Speedster are still written like they're governed by the old offense/defense/speed triangle and need to be updated to fit how Competitive Balance is viewed now. I'll make another push for redefintion.

Well, that's the thing: it can overlap with quick attack rate / low-output styles, or it can overlap with Glass Cannon, meaning that on its own it IMPLIES neither. At least as it's currently defined, and the examples bear that out.

(Edit: Note that Spam Attack only specifies a barrage of fast attacks; it doesn't say anything about those attacks being collectively or even individually weak. So even when Fragile Speedster does overlap with Spam Attack, that doesn't stop it from also overlapping with Glass Cannon.)

If you go the redefinition route, you'll probably need to accompany it with a name change, because "Fragile Speedster" indicates fragility but not weakness.

High Speed+Defense=Evasion Tank. Sort of. Don't know about high attack and speed, sadly.

That was under the old system. The tropes arent about the three stats really they're about foil pairs.

Don't know, but it would be fairly easy to do in Inkscape. This IP thread chose it; it might say in there.

I used Microsoft Excel's graph function to make the triangles, and imported a special comicbook font. The collage was tricky, I used a Photoshop like program called Gimp to resize and place the individual graphs together into a larger pic.