Star Wars Versus - Guidelines & Advice

GUIDELINES:

Members reserve the right to dictate the stipulations of any thread that they have created. This includes restricting characters to Disney continuity only, allowing composite (i.e. both Legends and Canon) versions, banning George Lucas statements, etc. However, unless clarified otherwise, the following stipulations stand:

(1) Legends continuity only. If a thread states "Darth Vader versus Yoda" and provides no further context, then anything published by Disney is not applicable.

(2) UPDATED! Suspect Insight Forums no longer requires members to follow Lucasfilm Licensing continuity policy nor the internal continuity rankings of Leland Chee's Holocron database system. Members are free to debate with whatever methodology and system they want as long as they apply its logic consistently and fairly. Debate the merits of individual methodologies and systems within the threads themselves, but please always be respectful and tolerant of other opinions.

(3) The combatants will fight in-character, with morals on, and are at their peak combative state bar external amps or other circumstantial power boosts. They will start 100 meters away from each other on open grass fields. Victory necessitates permanently killing or destroying the physical body of the opponent.

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ADVICE:

These are not part of Suspect Insight's formal rules; they're just general debating tips that you may find helpful. 

1. Don't be too reactive. If you spend the entire debate just passively responding to the other side's arguments with "well, maybe it was just..." and not having any active points for your side, at best you're just going to make it a wash, and at worst at least some of what they say is going to come through and you'll have no arguments for your case. Of course, it's important to address what the other perspective is saying, but not at the expense of your own arguments.

(As with all of these tips, there are reasonable exceptions depending on the situation - an example would be if the main conversation is about an argument for a character and you're trying to debunk it - in that case, it makes sense to focus on beating the argument specifically)

2. Ask for sources with context. It's very common for feats and other pieces of evidence to be exaggerated, sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently. Just taking major claims at face value is going to make it easy to miss obvious counters.

3. Look for diluting circumstances. A TK feat can become a lot less impressive if it's done on an extremely potent nexus, or if the character had to charge it for 90 seconds. There can be more nuanced extenuating circumstances as well, e.g. the question of whether Palpatine's Force storms reflect his direct power.

It should be noted, however, that some sort of mitigating circumstance doesn't necessarily invalidate the feat outright. If character A oneshots character B, the fact that character B had a nosebleed probably doesn't change the conclusion that character A is far more powerful. Just because someone can point out some mitigating factor in a feat of yours doesn't mean your feat is totally worthless.

4. Challenge assumptions. Almost every long scaling chain is founded on a lot of assumptions. It's easy to frame an argument (often inadvertently) in such a way that its assumptions are implicit and require some thought to pick out. E.g. "Mace Windu's disarming of Palpatine scales him above Plagueis in Force power" assumes that Mace Windu beating Palpatine in a lightsaber duel relates to their relative strength in the Force. Likewise, "Sidious lifted twice as much as Plagueis could, so Sidious can beat two Plagueis" assumes, among many things, a linear relationship between the lifting ability of your TK and how many of an opponent you can defeat. As with all these rules, there is a balance to be struck; you don't want to overly nitpick, but you can make reasonable challenges if you think that the assumptions in question are unwarranted.

5. Draw connections between sources, characters, and chronologies. Some of the most notably creative arguments synthesize feats and accolades across time and sources. For example: Revan does X, this source says that X is really hard relative to Y, and this other character struggles to do Y, which is evidence that Revan > that character, and then later Revan does X like 100 times easier, so peak Revan >>>> that Revan > that character. Of course, this can be done incorrectly or in convoluted ways - but when done right, it can greatly expand the space of arguments you can make.

6. Distinguish upper and lower limits. Character A oneshotting character B with minimal effort means that character A can at least do that, and probably much more. It does not mean that character C who oneshots two character B's is stronger.

7. Look for counter-evidence. The Star Wars universe is broad enough that someone can string together a lot of disparate sources into almost any particular conclusion, and sometimes it's actually not trivial to beat that argument just by looking at the sources that had been provided. It's perfectly acceptable to not constrain yourself to those sources just because the other side only used them.

8. Frame the debate. It's not just a matter of responding to individual arguments point-by-point; there's usually a few key points of contention, and a few general themes of disagreement that you can emphasize and more succinctly give your case on.

9. Ask around for sources and ideas. Nobody is an Island, and there's no reason to come up with everything by yourself unless if there's some context that requires that.

10. Realize that you could be wrong. It's OK. While it's possible to be too flaky, I think in this activity it's a lot more common to be overly stubborn in the face of new information and ideas that you may not have known before coming to your conclusion.

11. Don't get needlessly hostile. Remember that we're here to have fun, and this is a fictional universe.

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UPDATED RULES:

Suspect Insight Forums no longer requires members to follow Lucasfilm Licensing continuity policy nor the internal continuity rankings of Leland Chee's Holocron database system. Members are free to debate with whatever methodology and system they want as long as they apply its logic consistently and fairly. Debate the merits of individual methodologies and systems within the threads themselves, but please always be respectful and tolerant of other opinions.