Our Stamina Page - Basic Guidelines

[Agnaa]

I really don't like the "Basic Guidelines" section of our Stamina page, as it seems to take the worst of all worlds.

It doesn't allow people providing descriptions to provide useful shorthand like "high"/"very high"/etc. It lumps everything above human levels that aren't infinite in "superhuman" which is ridiculous due to how far stamina can extend beyond what humans are capable of. Anyone who can fight for longer than a boxer, run further than the best runners, walk for too long, etc. no matter how far outside the scope of human stamina they are have to settle for "superhuman".

In short, my issue is that we ask people to avoid generic terms, yet the only official terms we provide are laughably useless.

I think we should either stick with generic terms, and properly write some higher ones out, or allow people to use generic terms if we consider ourselves incapable of writing useful terms.

I believe those terms were introduced with this thread, I haven't found the time to read through each one of the 250+ posts, but reading near the start of the end...

• The OP (Crabwhale) asks for some standardization of values. Fair enough, but what we ended up was too truncated to be useful.
• Ant posts an old draft which was rejected due to not incorporating different types of stamina or time compression. I think those can be pretty simply solved by adding in those things. Add in a few descriptions for pain/injury tolerance and what levels those would give. Add in a note that if we get an idea of the time compression/relative time extremely fast characters operate under, that that time should be used instead of real time.
• Armor gave a suggestion which seems close to the accepted page. Saying that a lot of types of stamina are incomparable, and so nothing should be included between superhuman/infinite. This doesn't really make sense to me; why include multiple levels of arbitrary granularity for human levels (which really don't have that much variation), and then lump anything from fighting constantly for 1 hour to fighting for a trillion years under just superhuman? That seems about as useful as merging every level of Regeneration between Mid-Low and Mid-High. Some stuff's arbitrary and hard to compare, in the face of that we persevere and try to write categories anyway, we don't give up. Literally every single thing that we give general ratings for could just be explained, but we include the ratings as well so that people can get a good idea at a glance.

On another note related to this, a fair few people in the thread seemed to say "We don't need to apply these standards instantly, we just need to suggest them and then fix any new pages which don't comply!" In practice, that did not happen. I made this page 2 months ago; it uses "High" in the stamina section, it was not corrected, no-one warned me, so I didn't find out about these new standards until today. If y'all were hoping to actually change things outside of whoever regularly checks pages like that, you're gonna need to step up enforcement.

 

[Armorchompy]

Armor gave a suggestion which seems close to the accepted page. Saying that a lot of types of stamina are incomparable, and so nothing should be included between superhuman/infinite. This doesn't really make sense to me; why include multiple levels of arbitrary granularity for human levels (which really don't have that much variation), and then lump anything from fighting constantly for 1 hour to fighting for a trillion years under just superhuman?

Because AP can be measured with a precise number (you are going to rebuke that that misses a lot of subtleties in tiers so small, and while that's true, it is still an objective method of measurement) or easily assumed (given everyone has an understanding of what an athlete is) while superhuman stamina is a lot less intuitive to estimate and has a thousand factors that leads to a lot of feats that we can't easily gauge the superhuman-ness of.

Ultimately you need a justification for a rating and I (as well as many others) hold the opinion that the justifications for stamina will always matter more than the ratings, so I don't see why we should make the latter so complicated. We don't need thirty ratings for every single tiny fraction of our indexing system

 

[Agnaa]

Because AP can be measured with a precise number (you are going to rebuke that that misses a lot of subtleties in tiers so small, and while that's true, it is still an objective method of measurement) or easily assumed (given everyone has an understanding of what an athlete is) while superhuman stamina is a lot less intuitive to estimate and has a thousand factors that leads to a lot of feats that we can't easily gauge the superhuman-ness of.

Intelligence. Regeneration/Healing.

 

[Armorchompy]

Intelligence. Regeneration/Healing.

Regeneration can very easily be quantified, Intelligence not so much but every rating above Extraordinary Genius (which is effectively Superhuman intelligence) needs very specific types of feats and is otherwise completely difficult to achieve. I do not think a version of that is beneficial to stamina.

I will be taking a backseat in this thread as I already wasted enough of my time with the original and have enough hope that the community will reject something so counterproductive, so don't expect me to reply much unless necessary.

 

[Agnaa]

Regeneration can very easily be quantified

A lot of the separations are subjective, and run into issues with non-human physiology, and strange assumptions over which parts of human physiology are easier/harder than others to regenerate. And because of that, it sometimes runs into conflicts with fiction (a fairly common one is Mid regen characters not being able to regenerate from decapitation).

And so it will be with stamina; a lot of the separations will be subjective, but at a point the difference is extreme enough to be subjective, but still have most people agree.

If you don't like the idea of i.e. pain tolerance and physical energy pools being compared, then we could have ratings such as "Godlike with energy exertion, unknown with pain tolerance", similar to how we treat Speed.

As you yourself have said offsite, why would we just give Superhuman to a mage who can spend hours in intense mind-duels, but gets tired climbing up 10 stairs? We should already be separating out these ratings as-is.

 

[Armorchompy]

Regeneration can very easily be quantified

A lot of the separations are subjective, and run into issues with non-human physiology, and strange assumptions over which parts of human physiology are easier/harder than others to regenerate. And because of that, it sometimes runs into conflicts with fiction (a fairly common one is Mid regen characters not being able to regenerate from decapitation).

Decapitation is I believe considered "more advanced" into Mid than brain damage, so I think that's not a contradiction.

And so it will be with stamina; a lot of the separations will be subjective, but at a point the difference is extreme enough to be subjective, but still have most people agree.

If you don't like the idea of i.e. pain tolerance and physical energy pools being compared, then we could have ratings such as "Godlike with energy exertion, unknown with pain tolerance", similar to how we treat Speed.

Speed (minus perception, and that is numerically rated too) is all treated under the exact same lens, just applying to different parts of a character. I don't like comparing fighting for an hour with a sword in your heart to fighting for a month restlessly but without serious injuries, it's fully arbitrary and ultimately gives us basically nothing.

Not to mention, the ratings intersect to a degree, "energy exertion" is made harder with injuries, fighting for 20 minutes with a slit artery is superhuman "energy exertion" despite the numerical value of the feat being relatively unimpressive.

As you yourself have said offsite, why would we just give Superhuman to a mage who can spend hours in intense mind-duels, but gets tired climbing up 10 stairs? We should already be separating out these ratings as-is.

That can very well be done already and our Stamina page acknowledges that already. You'd list that as Superhuman mental endurance, Below Average physical exhertion or something like that.

 

[Agnaa]

Intelligence not so much but every rating above Extraordinary Genius (which is effectively Superhuman intelligence)

Not quite; Genius is our default for superhuman intelligence. Not just from description, quite a few blatantly superhuman feats can just land you in the Genius category. You need specific types of superhuman feats to get Extraordinary Genius, and then further specific types to get Supergenius. This is clear both on the page, and from practical patrols of these ratings by those such as Ant.

Speed (minus perception, and that is numerically rated too) is all treated under the exact same lens, just applying to different parts of a character. I don't like comparing fighting for an hour with a sword in your heart to fighting for a month restlessly but without serious injuries, it's fully arbitrary and ultimately gives us basically nothing.

If you want a more similar example, then Intelligence can be split based on topic. In which case, we do compare whether someone coming up with ingenius martial arts strategies is superior to someone inventing AI in the 1980s or to someone predicting the opponent's next 10 moves in chess, and stuff like that.

What it gives us, is a better indicator at a quick glance of a page. These quick indicators are incredibly useful, which is why we use them in every statistics and even some abilities, instead of requiring people to read the descriptions.

Not to mention, the ratings intersect to a degree, "energy exertion" is made harder with injuries, fighting for 20 minutes with a slit artery is superhuman "energy exertion" despite the numerical value of the feat being relatively unimpressive.

I do feel like at a certain point, if you've had a spear through your heart for 48 hours, that you can probably just deal with that sort of thing without much issue. But if you want, some combination ratings could be given, "10 hours with no injuries, 8 hours with light injuries, 6 hours with severe injuries, 4 hours with instantly lethal injuries" or whatever people end up finding acceptable.

 

[Armorchompy]

Not quite; Genius is our default for superhuman intelligence. Not just from description, quite a few blatantly superhuman feats can just land you in the Genius category. You need specific types of superhuman feats to get Extraordinary Genius, and then further specific types to get Supergenius. This is clear both on the page, and from practical patrols of these ratings by those such as Ant.

To my understanding that is mostly to prevent feats that are only possibly superhuman from making it into EG, but I digress.

I do feel like at a certain point, if you've had a spear through your heart for 48 hours, that you can probably just deal with that sort of thing without much issue. But if you want, some combination ratings could be given, "10 hours with no injuries, 8 hours with light injuries, 6 hours with severe injuries, 4 hours with instantly lethal injuries" or whatever people end up finding acceptable.

I think that is way too mechanical and arbitrary for something that, again, doesn't actually gain us much. So no, I don't care if there's something that could vaguely be interpreted as "precedent" in the way we rate other statistics, we have a system that works for stamina and I will oppose anything that makes it clunkier and less objective.

 

[Agnaa]

Bump?

 

[SamanPatou]

Imho I prefer the current format, it might be generic but it also limits every arbitrary term.
It doesn't really matter if Superhuman covers an enormous spectrum of cases, description still matters the most.

 

[HammerStrikes219]

Plus we just went into a huge CRT for this recently. https://vsbattles.com/threads/stamina-a-veritable-clustertruck.128627/

 

[Agnaa]

Plus we just went into a huge CRT for this recently. https://vsbattles.com/threads/stamina-a-veritable-clustertruck.128627/

That happened 7 months ago. And I know about it; it was mentioned in the OP.

 

[HammerStrikes219]

That happened 7 months ago. And I know about it; it was mentioned in the OP

Yeah, but the main reason why I say it recently is because there isn’t a specific timeframe to the word “recently” other than within a few years or if you prefer I say recent times.
Either way, you have to inform everyone that has involvement in that thread for this one.

 

[Antvasima]

I personally definitely think that we should keep the stamina values that Promestein constructed after our very long-lasting previous discussion.

There is no particularly good way to define them due to time compression at extreme speeds combined with different types of stamina, but we needed to use something, and eventually agreed that our currently used standards seem like our least bad option that we could come up with.

We cannot constantly make sudden drastic revisions of our fundamental character statistics standards, and Promestein is no longer directly active in our community, so I think that we should mostly keep them as them are, and that you should read the entirety of the relevant thread for further perspective. I did suggest several much more specific stamina levels, but they were not practically workable.

https://vsbattles.com/threads/stamina-a-veritable-clustertruck.128627/

 

[Agnaa]

Welp, seems like my arguments aren't convincing. Guess that's that.

 

[Antvasima]

Sorry about that. If you only suggest some minor objectively good improvements I am willing to listen, but I don't want to suddenly cause a big mess by rushing drastic and likely detrimental revisions after our very long-lasting previous discussion.

 

[Agnaa]

In short, the suggestion would be to expand Superhuman into further tiers. With strictly (or loosely) defined ways of qualifying them, with wholly different requirements depending on the trait being discussed, that would be rated separately on the profile similar to how Speed/Intelligence can be.

I believe the issue with time compression at extreme speeds can be solved by using whichever relative time difference the verse shows, if they show it, or giving a "possibly higher" rating if we know there's a relative time difference but it's never properly quantified.

I do not see why something like this would not be practically workable.

 

[KLOL506]

I am unfortunately forced to accept what Armor and Saman has said. Too arbitrary and confusing for too little benefit. Current system is fine where it is.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

Yeah, Armor makes more sense here and agree with Ant's statement. But I still at least see the OP's points. It's often preferred to be be elaborate with the different types or categories of stamina and list various notable stamina feats if possible.

 

[Antvasima]

In short, the suggestion would be to expand Superhuman into further tiers. With strictly (or loosely) defined ways of qualifying them, with wholly different requirements depending on the trait being discussed, that would be rated separately on the profile similar to how Speed/Intelligence can be.

I believe the issue with time compression at extreme speeds can be solved by using whichever relative time difference the verse shows, if they show it, or giving a "possibly higher" rating if we know there's a relative time difference but it's never properly quantified.

I do not see why something like this would not be practically workable.

I have suggested more stamina ratings in at least two different lengthy revision threads over the years, but was rightly downvoted by other staff members, and Promestein's solution is much better in retrospect.

 

[Antvasima]

It doesn't really matter if Superhuman covers an enormous spectrum of cases, description still matters the most.

Agreed.

 

[Agnaa]

Feel free to close this thread then.

 

[Antvasima]

Okay. My apologies for any potential offence caused by the rejection.

 

[Armorchompy]

I have suggested more stamina ratings in at least two different lengthy revision threads over the years, but was rightly downvoted by other staff members, and Promestein's solution is much better in retrospect.

I don't wanna sound like a glory hog but I think I was the one to originally suggest that

 

[Antvasima]

Okay. My mistake then.