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Okay, so regarding the SBA, it is currently written as such:
"Starting distance: The characters start as far away from each other as the highest range of the fighters is."
While the intended purpose is to separate combatants as far as possible, at the same time, putting someone like Phoenix Wright up against, say, a Hippopotamus would not really look like a safe fight in any capacity (in fact, under the current logic, any human character would easily become hippo food). As much as the idea of Phoenix Wright or, heck, even Sonic the Hedgehog or Frieren being eaten by a hippopotamus would amuse me, the whole reason I brought up hippopotamuses is that hippos are likely to be right up in someone's face or in an otherwise VERY unsafe distance for anyone to be beefing with them without a good weapon or hax.
The same uneasiness one would have being close to a hippopotamus would be felt in a street fight, where you'd be in some dark, backwater alley where people could be right up in your face beefing with you, with the possibility of you being knocked out the moment the first hit lands. That wouldn't be a fair or safe fight, would it? No. At that point, every game of Baldi's Basics may as well start with you getting the buzzer sound because you got caught by a trigger-happy Baldi.
See, unlike hippopotamus encounters and real-life street fights, fictional battles are generally more organized almost like boxing matches and tae-kwon-do matches. If you look at Dragon Ball Z, for example, the only times fights started up with combatants right in each other's faces are obvious blindsides like the times Dodoria got blindsided by Gohan and later Vegeta. Most of the time, Dragon Ball Z characters organize matches from a certain distance before even getting into melee combat.
If that isn't enough, let's look at Pokemon. Generally matches are started at a very safe distance, usually about five or ten meters. Even wild Pokemon, which are basically wild animals, respect this sort of distance maintenance in a battle, most notably in games.
Heck, think about every fighting game you can think of... Street Fighter, Tekken, Soul Calibur, Fatal Fury, Mortal Kombat, whatever! Every match in those games get started with characters being a certain distance away from each other, said distances never being as right-up-your-face as a back-alley street brawl.
Basically for melee-range characters and such, the current guideline assumes that every fight is some back-alley street brawl, which are usually dogwater. The goal of this thread is to educate people on the workings of organized matches so people can more readily apply their logic to melee combat regardless as to whether this would change anything or not.
Now, let's start with the most popular of organized fights here in the US where I'm from: boxing. If you watch this fight between Evander Holyfield and George Foreman, you can get an idea on how boxing matches start up:
As you can see here, boxing matches start with a sort of handshake that involves two boxers tapping their gloves before walking over to the real typical starting point of the match: the opposing corners. A boxing ring is typically 16 to 24 feet on each side inside the ropes. Using the Pythagorean Theorem, we are looking at a starting distance of 22.627417 to 33.9411255 feet (6.897 to 10.345 meters).
Of course WWE is a little less organized than boxing despite having a similar ring, but a distance is still maintained:
From what I am seeing, Kane started beefing with the Undertaker from a distance as far apart as Undertaker stands tall more or less. Given Undertaker's billed height is 6'10", that's still a far shot from being within arm's reach or up in anyone's face. While the WWE is a bit more disorganized than most fighting venues, there are more organized forms of wrestling out there. One of which is sumo.
As you can see, I borrowed a stock photo from an image website for the sake of measuring the two lines indicating starting distance. A sumo wrestling ring is 15 shaku (150/33 meters) in diameter. I put in the measurements for the lines and got a distance of 177 pixels from the back ends of each line. The ring is 967 pixels in diameter. Let's do the math here.
177/967*(150/33)=0.8320015042 meters
Each sumo wrestler must be behind these white lines, so I would estimate that the starting distance is more like 1.5 meters apart rather than the 83 cm indicated by my calculations here. Still a far shot of being within arm's reach from people. I would imagine the fictional variant of Sumo called "Keijo" would follow the same logic given the sport is essentially the same thing only with anime girls smacking each other with their bums.
Sticking with Japan, we have Karate, which... As you can clearly see here, there is a distance to be starting with, indicated by the red rectangles in a championship karate ring:
The outer starting lines are for the traditional polite gestures, but the inner starting lines are where the combatants start before being given the signal to start. One organization in Texas puts the distance between starting lines at 12 feet (3.6576 meters): https://texaskarateleague.com/rules-and-guildelines/
And still sticking with Japan, we have Kendo, which is a Japanese swordfighting sport: http://www.kentokukai.org.hk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11:2009-02-10-15-30-09&catid=6:2009-02-10-10-20-14&Itemid=11&lang=en
I'm surprised there are still HTTP sites out there in 2024, but according to this site, the starting distance in Kendo is nine steps apart. Quite a bit far apart, even though a regulation shinai (the swords in Kendo) are 120 cm at most.
Last but not least, I shall present to you fencing, which is a bit faster paced than Kendo afaik. And... There is a set distance the two combatants must be in fencing, which is 2 meters apart. I checked.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fencing_rules
What can we draw from all these examples? The way I see it, given organized fights as noted in these sports start at a distance that are nowhere near where the combatants would just be in arm's length, it would be best to set a precedent for not having opponents be up at each other's faces. While I think a well-written explanation with the information provided above would be a good bare minimum, my line of thinking is a minimum starting distance of 2 meters for SBA. This should allow for fights to feel more organized given the typical organized nature of fictional fights. This also means less up-close cheap-shots or fictional characters getting eaten by hippos, but still. Heck, even Death Battle start fights with contestants being a good distance apart even if the first move is to get up close and personal.
About the only issue I see with setting the minimum distance to 2 meters is all the bug-sized (or smaller) characters we have, but people usually set distances if SBA doesn't appeal to them anyway, so I think that consequence is only a small one. But yeah, there you have it. Better to make sure fictional characters can still have their (usually) organized fights while SBA still exists.
"Starting distance: The characters start as far away from each other as the highest range of the fighters is."
While the intended purpose is to separate combatants as far as possible, at the same time, putting someone like Phoenix Wright up against, say, a Hippopotamus would not really look like a safe fight in any capacity (in fact, under the current logic, any human character would easily become hippo food). As much as the idea of Phoenix Wright or, heck, even Sonic the Hedgehog or Frieren being eaten by a hippopotamus would amuse me, the whole reason I brought up hippopotamuses is that hippos are likely to be right up in someone's face or in an otherwise VERY unsafe distance for anyone to be beefing with them without a good weapon or hax.
The same uneasiness one would have being close to a hippopotamus would be felt in a street fight, where you'd be in some dark, backwater alley where people could be right up in your face beefing with you, with the possibility of you being knocked out the moment the first hit lands. That wouldn't be a fair or safe fight, would it? No. At that point, every game of Baldi's Basics may as well start with you getting the buzzer sound because you got caught by a trigger-happy Baldi.
See, unlike hippopotamus encounters and real-life street fights, fictional battles are generally more organized almost like boxing matches and tae-kwon-do matches. If you look at Dragon Ball Z, for example, the only times fights started up with combatants right in each other's faces are obvious blindsides like the times Dodoria got blindsided by Gohan and later Vegeta. Most of the time, Dragon Ball Z characters organize matches from a certain distance before even getting into melee combat.
If that isn't enough, let's look at Pokemon. Generally matches are started at a very safe distance, usually about five or ten meters. Even wild Pokemon, which are basically wild animals, respect this sort of distance maintenance in a battle, most notably in games.
Heck, think about every fighting game you can think of... Street Fighter, Tekken, Soul Calibur, Fatal Fury, Mortal Kombat, whatever! Every match in those games get started with characters being a certain distance away from each other, said distances never being as right-up-your-face as a back-alley street brawl.
Basically for melee-range characters and such, the current guideline assumes that every fight is some back-alley street brawl, which are usually dogwater. The goal of this thread is to educate people on the workings of organized matches so people can more readily apply their logic to melee combat regardless as to whether this would change anything or not.
Now, let's start with the most popular of organized fights here in the US where I'm from: boxing. If you watch this fight between Evander Holyfield and George Foreman, you can get an idea on how boxing matches start up:
As you can see here, boxing matches start with a sort of handshake that involves two boxers tapping their gloves before walking over to the real typical starting point of the match: the opposing corners. A boxing ring is typically 16 to 24 feet on each side inside the ropes. Using the Pythagorean Theorem, we are looking at a starting distance of 22.627417 to 33.9411255 feet (6.897 to 10.345 meters).
Of course WWE is a little less organized than boxing despite having a similar ring, but a distance is still maintained:
From what I am seeing, Kane started beefing with the Undertaker from a distance as far apart as Undertaker stands tall more or less. Given Undertaker's billed height is 6'10", that's still a far shot from being within arm's reach or up in anyone's face. While the WWE is a bit more disorganized than most fighting venues, there are more organized forms of wrestling out there. One of which is sumo.
As you can see, I borrowed a stock photo from an image website for the sake of measuring the two lines indicating starting distance. A sumo wrestling ring is 15 shaku (150/33 meters) in diameter. I put in the measurements for the lines and got a distance of 177 pixels from the back ends of each line. The ring is 967 pixels in diameter. Let's do the math here.
177/967*(150/33)=0.8320015042 meters
Each sumo wrestler must be behind these white lines, so I would estimate that the starting distance is more like 1.5 meters apart rather than the 83 cm indicated by my calculations here. Still a far shot of being within arm's reach from people. I would imagine the fictional variant of Sumo called "Keijo" would follow the same logic given the sport is essentially the same thing only with anime girls smacking each other with their bums.
Sticking with Japan, we have Karate, which... As you can clearly see here, there is a distance to be starting with, indicated by the red rectangles in a championship karate ring:
The outer starting lines are for the traditional polite gestures, but the inner starting lines are where the combatants start before being given the signal to start. One organization in Texas puts the distance between starting lines at 12 feet (3.6576 meters): https://texaskarateleague.com/rules-and-guildelines/
And still sticking with Japan, we have Kendo, which is a Japanese swordfighting sport: http://www.kentokukai.org.hk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11:2009-02-10-15-30-09&catid=6:2009-02-10-10-20-14&Itemid=11&lang=en
I'm surprised there are still HTTP sites out there in 2024, but according to this site, the starting distance in Kendo is nine steps apart. Quite a bit far apart, even though a regulation shinai (the swords in Kendo) are 120 cm at most.
Last but not least, I shall present to you fencing, which is a bit faster paced than Kendo afaik. And... There is a set distance the two combatants must be in fencing, which is 2 meters apart. I checked.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fencing_rules
What can we draw from all these examples? The way I see it, given organized fights as noted in these sports start at a distance that are nowhere near where the combatants would just be in arm's length, it would be best to set a precedent for not having opponents be up at each other's faces. While I think a well-written explanation with the information provided above would be a good bare minimum, my line of thinking is a minimum starting distance of 2 meters for SBA. This should allow for fights to feel more organized given the typical organized nature of fictional fights. This also means less up-close cheap-shots or fictional characters getting eaten by hippos, but still. Heck, even Death Battle start fights with contestants being a good distance apart even if the first move is to get up close and personal.
About the only issue I see with setting the minimum distance to 2 meters is all the bug-sized (or smaller) characters we have, but people usually set distances if SBA doesn't appeal to them anyway, so I think that consequence is only a small one. But yeah, there you have it. Better to make sure fictional characters can still have their (usually) organized fights while SBA still exists.
