To Have or Give a Gameplay Mechanic?

[Nep Heart]

 A debatable subject (if not controversial depending on how you prefer to look at it) that I have seen around at both MFG and MFFA from various sources that had me curious about viewpoints on the topic to a point I've seen it influence the direction of how an author designs their character in the creative process. The question is do you believe a character should benefit from an interactive gameplay mechanic or should the opposing character that they're fighting enjoy it? Some examples based on my observation of people's opinions on these very specific gameplay mechanics would include dizzy systems, guard crush systems, guts system and a lot more. There are characters who only benefit from these mechanics themselves (so, as from the examples mentioned, only P1 can dizzy and guard crush P2 while enjoying marginal defense boosts based on how low their life is), there are characters that only grant these boons to their opponent (which means only P2 can guard crush and dizzy P1 while P1 has to apply additional scaling to their attacks to emulate P2 having a guts system).

 

 As for my opinion on the matter, I personally prefer it that P1 utilize these mechanics to their own benefit. Why? First off, I don't really believe in the idea of giving P2 mechanics that they normally do not operate in much in the same way non-interactive mechanic is only owned by P1. With exceptions such as necessary fundamental interactive balances such as damage scaling that P2 can't really emulate, I don't think P2 should be benefiting from things they weren't design with using in mind. 

 

 Second, there is a potential risk of mechanic overlapping that can't really be reliably predicted and accommodated with too many character variations that have been created with new ones continuously being made. It would kinda suck if P2 already has a built-in guts system while P1 applies guts scaling for P2, meaning their attacks suffer from triple scaling when you factor the overlapping guts system of both parties and P1's damage scaling system combined, rendering combos extremely ineffective as a consequence.

 

 Of course, this can cause some compatibility issues, but I think that can be said for any personal mechanic really since it's a long known fact that mechanic clashing is an inevitability of a highly customizeable engine like this... we have to live with it and we do.

[KaijuCakes]

In a perfect world, everyone that plays mugen would consider these things when building packs, and would edit them to be balanced.

 

However, I agree that the mechanics should only be there to benefit the person playing the character. Of course, if you're playing with Warusaki3's DIO against GM's Akuma, of course you're going to like it when Akuma gets dizzy'd and you get free damage. But what if it was the other way around?

 

What would be real interesting is if such a mechanic was programmed into a character (once again, like Akuma with the dizzy mechanic) it only affected P2. It might get annoying, but then it's 100% authentic to how a person who mains Akuma would play him in the real game. On top of that, P2 would just have to come to expect that, "ok, he's playing a character where dizzy is normal. I'll have to watch out for that."

 

EDIT: You know, I just realized what I said. If a character already had a dizzy mechanic on them, and then the opponent applies dizzy again, then they'd get dizzy'd in like 2 hits. So maybe you're right in that it should only be something that benefits P1. BUT, if everyone knew how to code, they could just swap it on over, right? I'm not a creator myself so I'm not totally sure.

 

 

[Nep Heart]

 Yeah, basically, mechanics overlapping like that can feel like the shittiest experience. Double dizzy as you have mentioned or (as I have had the personal misfortune to experience using 586's EFZ characters vs Muteki's Guilty Gear characters) double guts for example. That's probably one big draw some people find in Add004 since it has a very customize-friendly commons system the can be edited to enforce all characters to conform to specific mechanics. Only problem is you need decent coding skills to work with it and you'd still need to edit characters to rid of overlapping mechanics.