543217
Quirky doesn't begin to explain him. The guy tossed a cow at me!

543209
Well of course the reviews are good! We are devilishly handsome, you know.

543228
Indeed. You were a genius to implement that. Shame about ID#0094, though. Who knew naked mole rats could do that to a guy's face?

543234
We did, but the rest of us didn't tell him. Sometimes one of us has to go for the amusement of the remainder.

543238
He was a brave man...But did you see the look on his face?! The rats ate it, but did you see it?!

543224 Wait, do you know Arthur?

543228 You're French! How dare you insult me like that!

543244
Of course I know him! Why, I'm Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Film! Surely you know who I am!

543248 I have always wanted to meet you Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Film. I am like, your greatest fan... I have all of your poster! All of it!

543243
Oh, I saw it. Being that we are... were identical, I sometimes make it myself just to relive the moment.

543250
I don't doubt it, I'm one handsome baby, are I not?

543244
There are so many of me, my nationality is rather irrelevant.

543217
Oh no you D.I.D.n't!

543254 But your country of origin is not irrelevant. I hate people who chose to be born in a country I don't like.

543253 Oh baby...

543260
Don't call me a baby, only I can do that! You can, however, call Robin a baby. The man soiled himself twice!

543261 Brave brave Sir Robin... Bruce would probably kick his ass for being a poofta...

543257
Oh, ID#4523... when did you get here?

543268
...late.

543268
On a more positive note, at least my ID is a prime number. What happened to you Razorbeam, why are there so many of us?

543297
Wormholes inside wormholes. It's bad juju, man.

On an unrelated note: I am watching whose line is it anyway....

SO:

1. As far as I understand, you've got the Changelings, the Dragons, and that's pretty much it in terms of Species-lore. Also Tinkermane introduced power-armor and other such gadgetry. Everything else is open-to-personal-head-canon as long as it meshes seamlessly into the overall "Visionary-verse". Is this correct? If not, then a specific query: What do we know about the Equestrian Military?

2. Any limitations on equipment that a character can bring in? For example, if Shining Armor was to participate, would he be limited to a specified arsenal, or would he be allowed to take whatever he needed as per the stuff available in the armory of the Their Royal Highnesses' 1st Foot Guards?

3. Earth Ponies and Pegasi both have "D" in their Willpower. Is this strictly limited to corporeal magic beams/spells/etc. (meaning that Pegasi can still do weather control and Earth Ponies can still be absurdly good at growing stuff), or do Pegasus and Earth Pony characters need at least a "C" to work their natural affinities to the Sky and Earth, respectively, scaling up as they increase the skill? As an example, if Rainbow Dash was to participate, would her Willpower still be "D", or would she need to upgrade to "A" in order to do the variety of weather related things she can do?

4. For Pegasi specifically: Are stunts (Sonic Rainboom, Buccaneer Blitz, etc.) determined by Willpower or by some other quantity?

5. For Earth Ponies, specifically: It's not beyond the realm of possibility to see a Treemancer of an Earth Pony. Is this possible, if someone upgrades their Willpower or whathaveyou?

6. Any recommendations for character backstories for individuals hailing from Equestria?

543325>>543299 Shite! I forgot about tinkermane being set in the same 'verse! I think I need to go and steampunk up my bro... Feh... I'll do it tomorrow.
Thanks Shadow Bro.
@Razor, Yes, I'll go over the stuff with you first

543325
1) That's more or less correct. I'm limited by my time, in that I have many plans for the other races that I haven't been able to impliment yet. For this reason, I would like for the back stories of any loreless-species champions to avoid creating anything too overt. Making cities, and playing off of what can be inferred from the show is wonderful, though, so feel free to do that all you like. If I see anything that really grinds against what I plan for the future, I will be sure to bring it up.

2) You may bring a reasonable amount of equipment, but bear in mind that carrying a whole load of items will affect things like your agility in subtle ways, and that any equipment dropped can be used by your opponent, if they know how. In other words, you may find that carrying too much is less of an asset and more of a burden; how much is too much is for you to decide.

3) For magical characters, Willpower acts somewhat like mana. It determines your magical endurance, while vitality determines your physical endurance. This stat also affects your resistance to magic though, meaning you become more susceptible to the effects of spells the lower your Willpower is. This helps to balance things, as characters with high Willpower may not have high Vitality, and vice-versa. This means, basically, that a magic user has just as good a chance at getting through and putting some damage on a warrior as a warrior does to damage a mage. Generally speaking.

4) For pegasi, all of those tricks and stunts are considered acrobatic feats. They are determined by Agility.

5) In the Visionary universe, that unfortunately is beyond the realm of possibility. While they are skilled growers, earth ponies have no magical abilities. Growing things takes time, too long to be feasible without magic. Sorry for the inconvenience.

543348

At your service, good sir. *salute*

543387 But treemancy sounds like such a legit thing... right next to mathomancy...

543388

543397
If anyone wants a Floramancer, I recommend green dragons. That's more or less what they do.

543387

DAMN.

Granted, I wasn't doing an Earth Pony, but STILL. Ponies making Ents?! BADASS.

I also tacked a question on at the end of my post while you were replying. Sorry about that.

-Any suggestions for characters hailing from Equestria, in terms of backstory?

543408
Keep in mind that peace at this point has been achieved in some form or another well across the board. This is to say that racial tensions may still exist in the hearts of certain ponies, but on the surface the world is a mostly unified place. Such information may not affect your OC directly, but it is worth knowing, eh?

Other than that, cities mentioned in the show and what can be appropriately inferred about ponies is all the rest you need to know for a manageable background.

543416

Coolios. So the inference that there is a Ponitaly and a Germaney and a Prance and all that are all legit?

Also: Any word on the level of development for:
-Ceramics Engineering
-Metallurgy
-Synthetic Materials (polymers, crystals, etc.)
-Chemical Engineering
???

Because Tinkermane's Power Armor uses a lot of super high capacity capacitors to run its functions, and Wikipedia tells me that this implies an extremely high level of advancement in what I listed up there, but I wanted to be sure because such advancement usually does not coincide with steampunk settings.

543425
Sure, but they're really all just places in the blanket nation of Equestria. They still fall under Celestia and Luna's rule, in other words.

As for the capacitors, I bent the rules a bit for the sake of fun fiction. What is realistic and what is done in fantasy fiction rarely coincide at all, steampunk setting or otherwise. Consider them not to be the modern capacitors that we're aware of today.

In other words, keep the metalcrafting, chemical know-how, and other technological things to an early 1800's style time-frame.

543430

Hurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....

Daaaaaamn. I really really REALLY wanted to exploit that loophole and give my guy a railgun. Damn.

Is there a policy Concerning Half lings? As in the child of Two different Species parents? Something like a hippogryph?

543471
Visionary implied that was impossible, except for Changelings, who could mutate to create offspring of a different species.

"Wouldn't they get found iff'n they weren't makin' foals?" she asked, her voice a little louder than usual due to having to force that nervous question out. She had her eyes clamped shut as she asked it, and to all appearances she was even holding her breath.
Her eyes snapped open as Aurus laughed warmly. "Is that what this is about?" he asked, still chuckling.
"Well... yeah," she muttered, her tone going sour. "Ya don't gotta laugh at me..."
"I'm not laughing at you, Applejack," he said, letting out one final, mirthful chuckle. "I'm just glad that that's all you were worried about. Applejack, changelings can reproduce with any race," he said, smiling warmly at her.
"Huh?" she asked, her face a rather unflattering dumbfounded mess of disbelief.
"Well, you do know how reproduction works right? With the egg and the-" he started, but she flushed red hot and stomped on his hoof, causing him to yelp and step back, blowing on his hoof to soothe it.
"Yes, I learned all about that stuff in eighth grade, jus' like everypony else," she muttered angrily, looking at him over her cherry red cheeks.
"Well jeez, it's nothing to get embarrassed about," he muttered under his breath. "Well, when the changeling cells come into contact with the reproductive cells of another race, they adapt. They kind of make an edited copy of the other race's genetics, based on the changelings own genes. Kids are totally possible, and if a changeling and a pony mated, it would be a baby pony," he said with finality, just as if he were ending a biology lesson.

The first part implies it's impossible for two difference species to produce offspring, and I think the rest is pretty self explanatory.

EDIT: And there's also a typo in there! Shame on you, Razor!

They kind of make an edited copy of the other race's genetics, based on the changelings own genes.

543488

Well then I suppose I will need to create new OC if i wish to participate. Whats the deadline on entering?

543490
23rd of December, next Sunday. We've got plenty of time.

You've answered a lot of the questions I had, but some of the ones I've been wondering about are still up in the air.

1) How are you going to be limiting/adjudicating magic in battle? Specifically when targeting non-magical opponents. For instance, even if you limit players to magic shown in the episodes, many of them will be an instant win if used on non-magical opponents (i.e. teleporting a ground-based opponent 50ft in the air, reversing gravity, or telekinesis). How difficult will it be for a mage to land an ability like that, assuming they have them available, and if they do land, will it count as an automatic kill shot or will we have a chance to try to break out of it?

2) Dragons. All of them and everything about them. Even with no gear at all, they come into battle with a staggering array of natural weapons that can be used from any angle, built in armor plating, and the ability to breathe out fire that, in a normal setting, would incinerate any opponent without magical wards 100% of the time. And that's assuming they're close to the same size as their opponent. A particularly large one would literally rip a pony in half, regardless of what they're wearing in terms of armor, without even having to move more than a single arm. What kind of limitations will there be on dragon OC's to prevent the little ponies from just being completely destroyed?

3) At the time I submitted my character, the only one viewable in the roster had a stick and some shurikens listed as his equipment. Given that, I limited my character pretty heavily in the equipment department to match that level of a base line. In many of the later posts, however, I've seen much more powerful equipment listed. Specifically how will equipment be balanced? For instance, if I step into the arena against an opponent wearing power armor along a similar vein to the Markiver device while I'm wearing more traditional armor, that's game over before anything even happens. I'm just going to be picked up and slammed into the wall or the floor until my body stops twitching. Will we have to worry about ever stepping into a match that leaves us screwed from the word "go", or will there always be some kind of out that will be available to us, regardless of equipment?

543582

Regarding #1:

I'm not the final word on this, but I do have some theories that seem to imply, to me, that you should be okay.

Magic that you list is, as I understand it, typically extremely power intensive and time consuming. Preparing such an attack would require you to have the opponent immobilized OR for you to be insanely good at casting on the go. Such things are extremely rare and, even if they should happen, leave you extremely vulnerable if you miss. While a dragon could just flame-blast the shit out of everything, the time it takes to take in that much oxygen would leave just enough of an opening for anything else to punch it in the neck. The same should be true for all other races.

543603 With the magic thing, Twilight uses teleportation and gravity reversal with little to no effort, and near instantaneously. Granted she's a very, very powerful mage, but trusting my chances of winning to "maybe this one isn't that strong" isn't my idea of a good bet. And telekinesis can be done by all unicorns near instantaneously. All it would take is for them to lift me even just an inch off the ground. Then I'm literally useless and there's nothing I can do to prevent whatever else they have planned. Likewise it wouldn't be fair to mages to give all of their spells inerruptable cast times, other wise they'd never be able to cast anything at all. I'm assuming it's probably going to come down to a call by the judges for how long a spell takes to activate and the power it would have once cast, I'm just kind of looking for a general template for what I can expect mages to be capable of.

As for the dragons, I can see the fire breath having a prep time so that we can either try to run like hell or stop it in some way. But it still ties into my question about dragon size. If the dragon is pretty large, a simple kick to the neck, assuming I can even reach its neck, won't do crap except leave me standing right in the middle of the blast zone.

543582
Seeing as someone has sort of answered your first question, I'll see if I can give an answer for the other two:

For Dragons, while they are extremely powerful, they are not impossible to defeat. Humans are believed to have fought and killed Dragons for centuries, with swords and shields being their main weapons. A pony could easily do the same, if they manage to outsmart it. Dragons aren't believed to be the brightest of creatures and can be easily defeated, at least mentally. Using their weaknesses against them in an intelligent manner can cause a Dragon to lose pretty quickly.

As for armor and weapons, if it's what your character uses, than I'm certain that they have a technique or certain style of using it that gives them an edge. And plus, there is always a chink in the armor. It's just about finding it, that's all.

Even then, there are no to-the-death fights in The Unity Games, as Razorbeam has stated before, so being ripped in two won't really be a problem. I hope this has somewhat helped, and I'm sure Razorbeam will give you some better answers later.

543612 Dragons are intelligent in Razor's little universe. Not counting the really big name dragons (Spike, Nethrezir and the like), they're all portrayed as being of fairly average intelligence, and even in the game stats they have a base intellect of a "B" (that's more intelligent than the average Earth Pony). That's not to say that some won't be much smarter, and others not so much, but to have that be their only significant disadvantage is not gonna work.

And don't even get met started on medieval literature regarding knights fighting dragons. Every one of those stories takes a giant dump on Physics and does what they please with whatever nonsense is left over. I mean, sure, if were going by medieval fantasy literature rules and covering yourself in metal plates is a valid defense against being cooked, then yeah, I'm set. But Razor has a tendency to at least stick to the shallower depths of artistic license when it comes to telling physics to piss off.

I didn't mean that the dragon would literally rip me in half, I was using hyperbole to demonstrate the fact that, if it's large enough, it could. Even with max rank strength, if I'm only the same size as one of the dragon's hands, sheer difference in body mass will leave me completely defenseless if it manages to hit me with literally anything.

And yes, every piece of equipment has a weakness, but in some cases that weakness is something that might not be possible to utilize. In my example with the Markiver device, the only weakness it really has in that scenario is that it has a very limited power supply. But, like with the magic, I don't relish the thought of my entire chance of victory riding on which one runs out first: my stamina or his battery.

543603
I think the only way that telekinesis could be considered fair if they used it as a short duration root, like for 6-8 seconds making an earth pony's rear legs rooted to the spot, or being able to use it to deflect flying objects and possibly redirect them at the attacker. Of course, for anyone not Twilight, Celestia, or Luna there is the trade off that they would be still concentrating, leaving them open for a fairly massive attack.

543582 This.

@#1: Thanks for that, now I need to grab a parachute...

So... I submitted my guy to Razor, and got approved, but I completely forgot about giving him a description, other than whats implied from his background...

Fail.

543661 I'm assuming there will be some kind of concentration component to it for lifting heavy objects at the very least. I've seen some magic systems that treat moving things with telekinesis as requiring the same amount of energy as moving them bodily, just that the strain is mental instead of physical. If taht were the case then a mage could pick up an opponent and move them across the arena or whatever, but if they were doing that to my OC for instance (max strength, max endurance Earth Pony in full-plate armor), it would be very draining and probably not a wise use of their limited mana unless they're setting up for a finishing blow.

I could see a quick burst used to deflect small objects (arrows, shurikens and the like) being instantaneous and not require concentration, and since a mage's life in battle is essentially over when they run out of mana, even a small drain like that can be the difference between winning and losing. Mages would need that kind of versatility to be viable against high agility fighters like pegasi adn rogue-type characters.

543701

Interesting, my character is a pony wearing plate armor as well, although mine is a a unicorn that specializes in pyrotechnic spells and has max Willpower and max Intelligence. It will be very interesting to face you in battle, if we ever get paired up. You do bring up some very good points about magic users, I'll try to keep them in mind once this whole things starts to prevent my character from being too overpowered.

I'm going with an earth pony badass normal. None of that magical exotic crap.
Did I say Batman is the best superhero?

543397
Mathomancy!? My new favorite superpower next to technopathy!

If anyone has ever played AD&D, you know what a trickster gnome is. If you've ever had one in your party, you know what a nuisance they will be. Now image one of those, as a zebra. Boom, you have my OC.

543734.......I really don't want to fight you.....
Mages, minotaurs, dragons, all of that jazz? Nothing some stupidly heavy armor and a solid backhand with the 25 pound metal plate bolted to my arm can't handle, but you tricksy, tricksy little agility whores..... that's ok though! I have a defense against you. A very stupid and painful defense, but one that works none the less. Still....ummm.....you can go fight someone else, I won't mind. I promise .

543582
1) Magic of that nature is factored in part by your character's willpower. Having read it, I am sure that you've realized that in terms of magical spells, willpower acts a bit like mana. You only have so much energy at your disposal, and how that degrades based on your spells cast is up to the judges assigned to the match.

Abilities like the ones you've mentioned would require time to execute, and I will not permit wide-effect spells like gravity, as these would affect the crowd. There will be no possibility of an instant kill so early on into a match, when both opponents are fresh. As they tire later, it might be possible to find the time to make one of these moves against a tired opponent, and succeed. Initially, it would be very difficult. Can Twilight teleport large numbers of things at a moment's notice? Yes. Can you? No. Limits of the game, nothing more.

2) Yes dragons are intelligent, and very strong, however they are slower than their miniaturized opponents. Unless, of course, the battle goes airborne, in which case they're faster but less maneuverable. Also, dragons have a limit to their breath weapons the way mages have a limit to their magic; again, Willpower is the deciding factor there.

There are many ways to stop what you see as the unstoppable. A dragon's tail will hit you hard if it hits you at all, but that's conditional. A dragon's breath would burn you, if you weren't quick or clever enough to redirect it or evade it. Again, that's conditional to your creativity, not what a dragon is.

3) Such a thing as the Markiver won't be allowed, however technology isn't frowned upon. Either way, its power supply would be insufficient to sustain an entire match, and you may recall that while it is very good at anti-magic combat and throwing things around really hard and really fast, it technically does no real damage on its own.

Suffice it to say that while you have valid concerns, I would expect you to have at least some faith in the fact that I won't be allowing items, creatures, or abilities that would be impossible to beat, even if you consider it implausible. At the end of the day, these battles are won by the creativity of the writer and their ability to use their OC, not by what their OC has, is, or can do.

I hope this helps!

543761 I have the utmost faith in your abilities, and I didn't mean to make it seem otherwise. At this point I'm just going around poking things with sticks and rattling this little contraption you're putting together to see what falls loose. Better to get all this stuff out of the way now than to have somebody go all the way up to the first day of competition expecting something to work (or not work), only to be told at the last second that they were dead wrong.

I'm still curious how the size issue with dragons will be handled. A sufficiently big dragon would be effectively unstoppable for a normal Earth Pony simply because I wouldn't be big enough to do more than beat on its toenails and incapable of otherwise reaching some kind of vital area due to being land-bound. Same with their attacks. While a dragon even 2 to 3 times the size of a pony could still be blocked or deflected by a sufficiently strong character, if they start getting too big, unless we're completely throwing physics out the window for this, their attacks will simply be too massive to be blocked or effectively dodged by low agility characters.

You mentioned redirecting the fire from the flame breath. Does that mean we're assuming a non-magical shield is capable of withstanding dragon fire without cooking the pony wielding it?

My issue with the Markiver device (or one along a similar vein since that particular suit is banned) is specifically that throws things around really hard and really fast. When the thing being thrown around like that is me, it doesn't need to do damage on its own. The ground will take care of that for it.