Badass Versus Thread

[food]

You don't know yet, Flame has good potential.

It is now a contest of will.

Well food, when it comes down to meaninglessly long wall of texts posts, Mike's pretty good at those.

So far Mike's arguments are pretty sound.

[Tangerang]

You don't know yet, Flame has good potential.

It is now a contest of will.

Is this the part where the difference in experience will show, you think?

So far Mike's arguments are pretty sound.

What were they? The only thing I noticed as I skimmed through was something about how Saber was a crappy king because of the whole Lancelot-Guinevere business. Which I'm not sure has anything to do with a fight?

[eddyak]

Why?

For the same reasons we explained to you several times. Excalibur destroys Rider along with her horse. Invisible Air tosses her a mile. Mana burst beats monstrous strength. Seasoned warrior beats gorgon who only had to fight every so often.

I think you're underestimating her abilities here....

No. She has no way to destroy Hrunting (her daggers would be melted to scrap iron), and if she dodges it, it comes back and hits her in the back of her skull. Archer's tactic would've taken down Saber on her own pretty easily since she wouldn't have bothered to destroy Hrunting and would've dodged it, and it took a Shirou with foreknowledge and Rho Aius, a Saber with full circuits and a Command Seal to beat him, and he still would've won if he hadn't been out of practice at projecting K&B. Nobody (in the fifth war, at least) beats Archer at a distance.

She might be able to, and she might even he able to break them (she's not got that much divinity).

Her strength is higher than her divinity, sure, but those few seconds it'd take her to break the chain would turn her into a pincushion.

Why should the public give a shit if the King's wife committed adultery? Plus, pardoning people for treason was done all the time in the middle ages. Several kingd pardoned their relatives for plotting or even fighting against them, and the people honestly couldn't care less. Why does it matter to them if she chooses to show leniency?

"Hurr dat king arfur carnt evun keep his woife satisfyd, howz he expect to be king? less support dat uvver guy"
Kings, politicians and even dictators need respect.

Yes, that doesn't mean that they didn't teach her anything. I mean, it's not much use for them to train her body if she doesn't know how to use it.... Plus, she's a good enough magus that she can just work a lot of it out for herself. It's just instinctive for her.

They didn't want her to use it. They wanted a puppet that'd win the Grail War for them.

Intelligence isn't generally required from warrior kings. She won respect through battle, not through intelligent and shrewd running of the country....

You've gotta be intelligent to run a country well.

What, and murdering your innocent wife for minorly inconviniencing you by having sex with another guy (when you yourself haven't actually been able to satisfy her and your marriage is purely for show) is moral? That's some seriously fucked-up moral code.

Except practically every marriage by a king or someone in the royal family was done for the sake of connections and keeping the country stable.

[Tobias]

I have no idea whats even being argued anymore, but they look like they are having fun.

[SeiKeo]

Intelligence isn't generally required from warrior kings. She won respect through battle, not through intelligent and shrewd running of the country....

Sure, she won respect through battle, but respect from battle alone won't make the population give you a free pass for being an awful ruler. In his early days, Mao was widely revered as a leader against the Japanese, but that didn't save his image once he started killing people.

What, and murdering your innocent wife for minorly inconviniencing you by having sex with another guy (when you yourself haven't actually been able to satisfy her and your marriage is purely for show) is moral? That's some seriously fucked-up moral code.

This is not a minor inconvenience. Lancelot being involved with Guineiviere could easily lead to a situation where he is forced to chose between his lover and his king. Letting said relationship continue would be impossible to maintain over the long run, and the longer it goes on, the harder the break will be when it happens.

The treason laws are there solely to protect the king and to treat them as "special" and "better" than everyone else. To claim that it's immoral to pardon someone for breaking them beggars belief. If Guineiviere had been someone else's wife she would not have been burnt for it, so why is it wrong not to do so just because the person she "betrayed" happens to have been born into the Pendragon family and pulled some magical sword out of a stone?

The king, by his position as head of state, and in Arthur's case, by virtue of divine right, is "special" and "better." There do have to special laws concerning the king, because some peasant's wife being an adulterer is far less important than the same situation concerning the queen of the realm and one of, if not the most, powerful knights in the kingdom.

Yes, but Rider will use that to her advantage.

Could you make this a little clearer? I'm not quite sure what you mean.

She certainly seems pretty smart....

How smart she may seem is irrelevant. We have no evidence of Rider being especially intelligent beyond what you would expect from a little fighting instinct.

[Tangerang]

And Eddyak makes a sudden play! Will he overtake Mike's lead!?

*cuts to commercial break*

And then LeopardBear makes another play right after Eddyak! Could this be that decisive shift in momentum!?

[Tobias]

How smart she may seem is irrelevant. We have no evidence of Rider being especially intelligent beyond what you would expect from a little fighting instinct.

this is incorrect you know. Rider brought saber into a terrain where she could attack freely with bellepheron, and is described as being like archer in that she chooses a low risk, high return type of warfare

[SeiKeo]

this is incorrect you know. Rider brought saber into a terrain where she could attack freely with bellepheron, and is described as being like archer in that she chooses a low risk, high return type of warfare

Maneuvering to take advantage of a powerful ranged weapon is pretty basic, as is not taking many risks.

[Tangerang]

this is incorrect you know. Rider brought saber into a terrain where she could attack freely with bellepheron, and is described as being like archer in that she chooses a low risk, high return type of warfare

Isn't this just common sense?

I mean, not many people are going to go 'Hmm, between high risk, low return, or low risk and high return, I'd rather take the former.'

[Keyne]

Besides, Rider didn't take into consideration the thought that Saber might be able to pull something more than just slashes with her invisible sword.

[Tobias]

Isn't this just common sense?

I mean, not many people are going to go 'Hmm, between high risk, low return, or low risk and high return, I'd rather take the former.'

saber, lancer, Heracles, and occasionally Kojiro just charge in with no heed for the risks, I think he was just saying rider can plan tactically?

[eddyak]

this is incorrect you know. Rider brought saber into a terrain where she could attack freely with bellepheron, and is described as being like archer in that she chooses a low risk, high return type of warfare

Isn't Archer high-risk, high return? IIRC he was choosing to leave fatal openings against Lancer, and chose the path where he'd die instantly if he fucked up instead of slowly being worn down.

[SeiKeo]

Besides, Rider didn't take into consideration the thought that Saber might be able to pull something more than just slashes with her invisible sword.

And in the Grail War, that's an awful bad assumption. Saber knew Rider probably had something waiting at the top, but she was committed to the move already. Rider's thoughts: "Hm, I shall maneuver her into a position where I can use my NP. What are the chances that she's some kind of hero that either has a shield that could block, or a counterattack? Meh, not much."

[Tobias]

Isn't Archer high-risk, high return? IIRC he was choosing to leave fatal openings against Lancer, and chose the path where he'd die instantly if he fucked up instead of slowly being worn down.

yes, but he would much prefer standing on a building a mile off and spamming broken phantasms at saber in a position where she cant excalliblast back.

[agentzero]

Actually she could excaliblast back pretty easily, both from feats and statements. The reason she didn't is Shirou thinking "Archer, knowing Saber's cards as well as he does, probably has some kind of answer to Excalibur".

EDIT: That and the fact that it would probably take down not only the skyscraper but the surrounding buildings as well.

[Tangerang]

Isn't Archer high-risk, high return? IIRC he was choosing to leave fatal openings against Lancer, and chose the path where he'd die instantly if he fucked up instead of slowly being worn down.

That was more because in that situation, he could only use a high-risk, high return option. Or in other words, there was no low-risk, high return option available.

saber, lancer, Heracles, and occasionally Kojiro just charge in with no heed for the risks, I think he was just saying rider can plan tactically?

Heracles can be excused because he's well, you know, 'berserk'. He's not actually that dumb in the original myth.
How the hell can Kojiro charge in? He's stuck in the same spot. He's consistently keeps the higher ground advantage, except for when he wants to Tsubame Gaeshi somebody's ass.
Lancer is shown to be perfectly willing to take a low-risk high-return battle, since he suggests just nuking Assassin from afar. His battle with Archer was all low-risk high return. And the other fights, he was kind of under the command spell which sort of forced him to make stupid mistakes (lol do not win?)
Saber... relies on her instinct? To an almost annoying degree actually. Yeah, I'll give you it on Saber. 'I'll charge into the enemy territory and rely on my instinct to pull me out of any mess'

[food]

Really, Rider did nothing wrong in Fate route.

Probably like 5% of all NP's can halt the Pegasus charge. It was just bad luck that she ended up fighting one of the super br0ken Servants in the war.


EDIT:

Anyone besides Gilgamesh and Sabre would either run away like crazy or be turned into a crater.

[Keyne]

Saber... relies on her instinct? To an almost annoying degree actually. Yeah, I'll give you it on Saber. 'I'll charge into the enemy territory and rely on my instinct to pull me out of any mess'

The King leads her army from the front. Always in the first line. In her times, meeting the enemy in any other way than head-on was considered an insult.

[SeiKeo]

Heracles can be excused because he's well, you know, 'berserk'. He's not actually that dumb in the original myth.

Man, as much as I understand their reasons for summoning Berserker, that was an awful move from the Einzberns. If they had summoned Herc as Archer or, God forbid, Saber, Ilya could have swept the war in three days flat.

[Tobias]

actually I was thinking about how lancer decided, "eh, fuck it. caster, archer, and maybe assassin? I can take that." when enlisted in UBW, or when he takes on gil in fate.

beside that though, I dont really think its anything like charge in or dont, its the ability to plan a battle from the ground up to maximize victory potential.

I am gonna drag saber up a building, and whittle her down while I have an advantage due to my agility, then hop on my phantasmal beast and take her out when we reach the top as opposed to things like

meh, why dont we blast them from far off, or, gee, if we should be randomly attacked by the greatest of greek heroes (lol, like that would happen) I should lure him into that graveyard.