Smash Bracket’s Rules for Powerscaling
Smash Bracket is much more strict with scaling than other people in the VS community. For a while, this was something that we were basically navigating by feel, but I’ve put a lot of thought and effort into clarifying our guiding thoughts into something that we can consistently use across all characters.
I think that trying to come up with guidelines for literally every situation where scaling should and shouldn’t apply is a doomed endeavor. We couldn’t possibly cover everything, especially when you take into account franchises that are unique enough in their approach that they deserve special consideration. So instead, I’m hoping to combine our general approach to feats into something that works for scaling as well. It will be more lenient than the approach we’ve been using up till now, but also more consistent and it should still preserve the feeling that we were aiming to capture with our “no scaling” rules.
The guidelines
Abilities and Hax
In general, abilities and hax do not scale. For abilities and hax to scale, we need to be able to quantify how impressive they are and they must be compared in a way that meets our other scaling criteria.
So if two characters with telekinetic powers fought each other, the winner doesn’t automatically have stronger telekinesis. But if, during that fight, character A was trying to throw and object at character B, and character B overpowered that attempt and sent the object back at character A, then character B would scale to character A’s telekinetic lifting strength. But like everything else, we can only compare things that have directly been demonstrated, so this wouldn’t automatically mean that character B had just as much control or area of affect as character A.
Physical Stats
A character can scale any physical stat to another character, but only when the stats are directly demonstrated to be comparable. Beating someone in a contest of strength or speed is a good example of when those stats would scale.
Statements are not enough to scale a character without a feat to back it up. Character B saying “Character A is stronger than me” is meaningless unless we also have a scene where that is proven.
Characters only scale to the specific point in time where the scaling is demonstrated. They do not scale to future feats of the other character unless they have another feat demonstrating that they are on equal footing. This holds true even if both characters are portrayed to be stagnant in power.
Characters being portrayed as generally equal in strength or fighting similar enemies is not enough to have them scale to each other. They need some explicit feat showing that comparison off.
Beating a character in a fight is not enough justification on its own for scaling any stat. All stats need a specific instance where they are demonstrated to be on equal power in order to scale.
Hitting a character is not enough to scale to their speed in any capacity unless the following possibilities have been specifically ruled out: one character being skilled enough to hit a faster character; one character aiming where the faster character would be in the future; one character getting a lucky shot; the fast character slowing down in any capacity; one character simply firing off so many attacks that there’s no room to avoid the attacks.
Hurting a character is not enough to scale to their best durability feat. Instead, it will scale to their weakest durability feat where they took a meaningful amount of damage (e.g. didn’t no-sell it).
One shotting a character is enough to scale to their max durability, but only from the same piece of media (or if a firm timeline can be established and there isn’t significant variance in max durability between entries in a franchise, their best durability up until that point).
If a character consistently blitzes another character throughout the entire fight, that is enough to scale the character’s speed to the blitzed character. It is not enough to blitz a single hit, especially when one character is surprised.
Fighting on equal footing is enough for characters’ effective combat speed to scale to each other, but it is important to make sure that the actual speed of the fight can’t be measured to be slower.
Determining What Level a Character Operates At
Many characters have different levels of strength that they operate off of. It isn’t unusual for a character to show massively higher levels of power when they go “all out.” For scaling purposes, we will consider the levels that a character typically operates at unless there is a specific and trustworthy statement that the character is giving it their all.
Even if we have a specific and trustworthy statement, it still needs to meet our standards for acceptance. If a character can shatter solar systems with a punch but doesn’t even harm the building when they say they are going “all out,” they are demonstrably wrong and will be treated at their “standard” level instead of their peak performance. They don’t need to show the same area of effect for their attacks, just a level of destruction on the thing they hit equal to their power.
When a character only has a small number of showings and they are all at radically different levels of power, we will use the one that best matches the other effects shown in the fight.
If a character can be measured at a different level of power in a fight, that level of power will be used. This is most relevant for speed, where it will often be measured to be far lower than what the character’s are theoretically capable of performing.
This is enough for one character’s durability to scale to the attack power of the other character, but it is still limited as per the above points.
Compositing vs Scaling
We will usually composite characters, which isn’t something that is limited to scaling rules. If we are looking at a goomba, for instance, we don’t need specific demonstrations of how each of its stats can scale to other goombas. We just combine them all into one composite creature.
Scaling Durability to a Character’s Own Attack Power
A character’s durability doesn’t scale to their own attack potency in most cases. While this is how physics works in the real world, it is almost always overlooked in fiction. This will only be considered in cases where Newton’s third law is shown to be a real factor in the character’s performance.
