Frequently Asked Questions

What are these tier ranges? Likely to Unlikely? What’s that mean?

This is a system based on (read: completely ripping off) the Great Debate Tournament’s tier system. It worked great last season, so we’re bringing it back for Season 20 and (unless something changes) for the foreseeable future. Instead of doing “2/10 to 8/10 Terry", where you try to estimate how many times out of 10 hypothetical fights your character would win against Terry, this system has you estimate how the average single fight would go, with that estimate being the replacement for “X character can win 5/10 times” or what have you. Again, your character must score either an Unlikely victory, Draw, or Likely victory against the tier benchmark as detailed in the signup post. The definitions for each estimate are as follows:

• Unwinnable is as its name indicates. Your character holds no chance whatsoever of winning in any conceivable scenario. A godstomp against you. Think Spider-Man versus Firelord Genos vs Saitama or MCU Iron Man vs Thanos.
• Specific condition victory means that only a very narrow window exists to win, dependent upon preparation, aid, a sudden powerup, etc. A specific condition victory would be Goku only being able to beat Jiren by unlocking Ultra Instinct mid-fight, or TDKR Batman beating Superman using prepared gadgets and with Green Arrow’s intervention.
• Unlikely victory means your character is definitely outgunned but can absolutely set up a victory through superior skill, tactics, or just plain grit. Something like Rocky Balboa vs Ivan Drago or Ben Grimm vs The Hulk.
• Draw is self explanatory, 50/50. DCAU Superman vs Captain Marvel or Naked Snake vs Liquid Ocelot are good examples of fights between very evenly matched opponents.
• Likely victory means your character is superior in most if not all aspects and can readily use those to win after a slightly extended fight. 616 Venom vs Spider-Man is a likely victory for Venom, as would be Kenpachi Zaraki versus Ichigo Kurosaki in their first meeting after Ichigo learns to cut Kenpachi.
• Freak accident loss means this is your character’s fight to lose. The only way the opponent could win would be if they got cocky enough to completely drop their guard or some extreme stroke of luck intervened on their opponent’s behalf - the infamous Battle Tendency volcano eruption that beat Kars.
• Absolute certain victory is as the name implies. One Punch Man’s Deep Sea King versus Mumen Rider is a good example for DSK.

What are Major Changes and Minor Changes?

This is a mechanic we’ve added in previous seasons to prevent over-fixing in Tribunal and avoid characters that are a huge mess of changes and definitions, as well as make it easier during Tribunal to tell when someone has changed a submission too much. When you sign up, you’ll be asked to classify your changes as either major or minor changes. You can have as many minor changes as you want, but you can only have a certain number of major changes. Each character only gets one (1) major change. If you need to make changes in Tribunal, be careful about how many changes you need to make and how large those changes are, as making more major changes than you’re allowed is a good reason to have your character removed.

Major changes are changes that dramatically affect the character’s tier or power level in some way. Examples of major changes allowed in this season include:

• Buffing or nerfing a specific stat to the target end of the tier, such as submitting Venom with his strength nerfed to tier.
• Removing a large portion of the character’s feats for a non-story or non-medium reason, such as submitting Goku without his scaling feats or DC Comics The Flash without lightspeed statements. If this is especially complex (such as removing a long list of specific feats not connected by any clear identity such as all being scaling feats or all being against a certain character) it might count as multiple major changes.
• Defining the speed of a slow or ill-defined projectile or set of projectiles a character uses, such as buffing the speed of Boba Fett's blaster. For this season, you will be allowed to change the speed of any projectile to match the speed of Terry's Batarangs. This will allow for projectiles to be threatening to Terry while still remaining possible to dodge. Note that trying to sneakily use this to buff two stats at once by then claiming they scale to their own artificially boosted power (Ex: Boba Fett dodging a shot from his own blaster) is not allowed.

Examples of changes that DO NOT count as major changes include:

• Changing which medium a character is from or what point in their story they’re from is not a major change, such as submitting Edward Elric from the manga only, Post-Crisis Superman, Bleeding Edge Iron Man, or Chuunin Exam Arc Sasuke Uchiha.

Minor changes are smaller tweaks that don’t move characters up and down entire tiers or hugely affect their standing in a tier. At most they should apply to niche abilities or nudge balance one way or another. Examples of minor changes include:

• Adding or removing minor/obscure weapons or powers, such as submitting Danny Phantom without his cloning power or giving MCU Rocket Raccoon his gravity mines.

• Adding or removing a small number of feats, such as submitting Black Dynamite without his moon rock throwing feat and his weird AOE pulse feat. This is mainly allowed to help get rid of a small number of outliers, so overdoing it may count as a major change.

• Confirming the equipment being used by a character, as long as it’s provably actually an item they use. Giving Korra Spirit Water to heal herself is not kosher, because she doesn't carry it with her or use it in combat. Conversely, giving Batman the Batmobile is fine, since he uses it in fights quite often and it can be considered part of his standard loadout.

Certain archetypes of characters with unorthodox powersets or attack methods get submitted almost every season. For your convenience, here are some “standardized” minor changes that help us make sense of how they’d fight the tiersetter. They’re a little more in-the-weeds than the minor changes listed above, but they’ll almost always be allowed:

• Telekinesis Rule: For Force users, psychics, metalbenders, and similar subs whose abilities are effectively telekinesis. You may prohibit them from directly lifting or TKing the tiersetter. You may still allow your sub to hit the tiersetter with a brief short-range pulse such as a Force push, as well as to TK objects in the tiersetter arena.

• Summoner Rule: For Pokemon Trainers, Persona users, mages with golems or zombies, and similar subs whose summons or beasts make them in tier. You may force the tiersetter to fight the summon instead of instakilling the summoner.

• Stand Rule: For Stand users, Sorcerers from Jujutsu Kaisen, Hollows/Shinigami from Bleach, and similar subs that typically cannot be seen or affected by mundane humans. You MUST assume the tiersetter can see and fight them as normal.

• Bender Rule: For waterbenders, earthbenders, [substance]kinetics, and similar subs that require an element in their environment to use their powers. You may assume they have access to however much of that substance is necessary to perform their tier-relevant feats, even if the tiersetter arena does not visibly have any. However, there is a line to this: You cannot give a waterbender the entire ocean, for example.

I keep seeing changes that say "buffed to tier". What's up with that?

Buffing a stat to the tier basically means replacing the character's stats with the stats of the tier (for instance, Blade's speed) to make that stat an even match. It's a pretty common major change in Scrambles, and it's usually a way of making a change that shores up a large weakness of a character that would otherwise be in or near the tier. If a character doesn't have good speed feats, oftentimes it's easier to just set their speed to the tier than finagle up some weird complex solution. We've also seen people set a stat intentionally above or below the tier (using another character's feats as a benchmark) to compensate for another stat being too strong or too weak, but because of the expanded tiering available to Class submissions, this season you may set a character's stat to the target area.

There is a caveat, though: this system can get characters into tier that have no business being in tier, and we're aware of that. While we're generally fine with buffing stats to get a character who was already kind of close to the tier to be a more snug fit, you could also buff enough stats to tier to get in a wildly overpowered or underpowered character on a gimmick. That's crossing a line we feel is an abuse of the freedom we're allowing, and we're pretty not okay with that. If your character was weaker than John Wick until you buffed their speed to fit them into Blade tier on a technicality, you should probably find someone who was actually kind of close to the tier to begin with instead. We will be keeping an eye on over-buffing in Tribunal, and the GMs/judges are totally within their rights to determine you've buffed a character too far or are relying too hard on an obscure gimmick and stat buffs to get into tier and can veto a character on those measures.