Soft Mechanics and how to Exploit Them
Naron's Dive Into the Eldritch Truth
Well... here is something that 90% to 95% of the entire audience will never need, and the remaining number will love while also cursing it in the same breath.
Soft mechanics should be familiar to most of the attentive readership already, though mostly in the understanding that those cover everything not covered by hard mechanics. Which is true, but also not the whole truth.
You see, even the hard mechanics run on soft mechanics, as weird as that sounds.
And after recently discussing the matter with Crys himself for a little project of mine, I now have a good enough understanding to try conveying it to everyone else who might want to know. Which is... the handful of core people who are way too deep into the whole thing such as myself, and the spinoff-QMs.
It is not that the topic is difficult. It does, however, add somewhere between one and two layers of complexity due to requiring a lot to work through for any one character.
Hard and Soft Mechanics
The big difference between hard mechanics and soft mechanics is that while hard covers the
what, soft covers the
how.
Yes, that is it. Sounds like an easy distinction, but one actually has to understand what it really conveys.
Let us look at an easy general example: Detonate.
The hard mechanics of Detonate are "this attack hits additional space instead of just one spot".
The soft mechanics of it are "this is how it attacks the entire area".
In this case, I can think of two potential ways off the top of my head. The first is a shockwave being emitted from the epicenter, such as from a grenade. The second is a projection of the attack itself encompassing the entire area of effect, such as a sword slash hitting every spot in that area simultaneously.
And as that second example shows, it can get crazy once magic gets involved.
However, the part that makes this such a troublesome topic is that such effects exist not only for a character's weapons and Spells in general, but also for
every single Ability on any of the former, as well as personal ones. And most importantly,
no two instances of the same Ability necessarily have to work the same way.
They can, but they do not have to, so you have to start from scratch for every character.
The Golden Rule
In order to actually work with soft mechanics, it is required that one knows exactly not just
what a character does for a specific action, but also
how.
Now remember that even baby sheets mostly appear with no less than two weapon Abilities, two Spell Abilities, and two to three personal Abilities. That is already six to seven effects for a starter sheet. Unusual weapons can also require additional thought as for how they work, increasing that again.
For a high-level character, it will take several hours just to determine how all their stuff works.
So, the rule:
Know how your character does their stuff.
The Actual Exploitation
Now that we know how soft mechanics work, how do we exploit them?
Well, that is simple: once you know
how they work, think of creative ways to use them. This can go from small to some incredibly horrifying things.
An easy one would be going back to the Detonate used above. If we go with the third example, an attack-projection into every part of the area Detonate covers, there is a potent magical effect there.
Now, seeing that it already hits every spot, the owner of this effect could either polish it to make sure all strikes hit at exactly the same time for an effect akin to Omnipresent, or try to focus them on a smaller area to stack several slashes against the same target, either as Double Hit to Slash Hell or even Hit by Level.
You can usually assume that a seasoned character has at least a handful of such exploits. But once it gets into the big leagues, specifically the top 20, Crys himself stated they went over everything in their kit in search of every exploit they can get.
Oh, one last thing: Talking to someone else, it was said that this is in parts just the creator being clever by making it so specific exploits are possible. And this is true, but also completely fine. As long as it fits a given character, there is no reason not to do it. The smart ones here are the characters in question, who figured out they can use their powers in a new way.
Examples
Now for something bigger. Something greater.
I spoke to Crys about a few exploits we already saw or heard of before, and he gave me two prominent examples plus one to keep your interest.
White Soul:
Yes, her. The psychopath who murdered her way through the Old Guard and semi-recently tried to put Nepgear five foot under.
Her most visible exploit concerns her ability to clone herself and keep up to two instances of herself around, being able to delete one of them at any given time.
Due to the fact each instance of White Soul is separate, her bodies also possess separate Spell-limits.
Follow the Waves creates a fresh version of White Soul instead of directly copying her, thus the new one comes with an unused Spell.
With these specific effects, White Soul is able to create a new body, delete the old one in that same moment, and use the new one's Spell to repeat this song and dance a great number of times, but at least 20 times per turn.
Due to the fact the instance she deletes from existence is entirely separate, an attack that targeted it will miss. Even something undodgeable or even Unblockable may be evaded because the actual target no longer exists.
In other words, White Soul abuses her cloning to get several dozen free hyper-dodges per turn.
But now for the part where it gets fun; dodging is not the only thing this particular trick lets her do. You see, with each time she clones herself, The White River, her weapon, is also cloned.
The White River is basically a white mass that she can form into whatever shape she wants. And what can contorting masses do really well? Merge.
Instead of deleting a body's weapon as well, she instead merges it into the remaining White River, thus steadily increasing its mass and volume. Aside from the fact this allows her to do more with it, this also increases its Base Damage by the regular amount each time a new one is merged into it.
Once it grows big enough, she can simply submerge an enemy and crush them to death; a technique which, coincidentally, falsifies both Bind and Crush.
To quote Crys on the matter:
It's actually how she beat the very first Dark Lord. She simply played keep away until she had what amounted to a small lake worth of the River and simply kept squeezing until something gave.
The demons that witnessed it still have nightmares about one of the strongest demons to ever live going out screaming in agony and begging for help.
All while Soul just laughed and laughed.
Absolutely no one doubted Magical Girls after that regardless of how silly they could get.
Goddess Gold:
Because of course we have to talk about her. Rei was already the subject of a previous tutorial, that one about False Abilities, which are a subset of soft mechanics exploits.
Just like over there, we will take a look at the two most powerful parts of her sheet.
Oblivion "Fuck you and die"
Awaits and
Chains of the Earth, the inescapable chain-bondage by another name.
Let us start with
Oblivion Awaits which is an energy wave originating from Rei's hand. Yes, her hand, no sword-swinging involved. It is projected in a cone.
Through rigorous practice, Rei brought it to a point where she can not only lower the projected amount to but a sliver of its true power, but also assume direct control of the Spell and move it at will. The previously noted effect she uses this for is to keep an instance of the Spell active around herself to create Auto Counter, an automatic intercept against anything trying to attack her. It is basically a form of Spell Cartridge, too.
The other big thing she does with it, and which apparently earned her
Overwhelming Presence its particular effect, is to spread the energy wave evenly all around herself, creating a kill field in all directions which also carries Omnipresent, and can thus not be evaded except by not being where it hits.
Crys also noted:
Its difficult as all fuck but she's been doing it for so long that it's more or less natural by this point.
Bonus points in the fact her armor and affinities make her immune to [Oblivion Awaits] as well.
So things like spell reflect are useless against her.
Quite potent and insanely powerful. Now let us look at what
Chains of the Earth brings to the table. It is actually less noticeable, mainly because Rei likely needs it less often. The amount of opponents that can push her on the defensive is quite low.
As we already saw toward the conclusion of Operation Soul Collector, Rei throws up entire walls of chains instead of just a handful. They reach far and the mass is dense enough to obstruct magically enhanced sight, allowing someone to hide behind them.
Or, in Crys words:
Since they're fundamanetally inescapable Rei likes throwing up walls of them to catch attacks that she recognizes as capable of otherwise breaking through her deflector shield.
Which leads to a lot of funny scenes of attacks being halted centimeters from her because her opponent ran into a chain net thinking she was open.
Looking at just these two things, we have found that not only are they an incredibly powerful offense and utility, they also make for a just as powerful defense by fiddling with how exactly they work.
Solid Core:
Yep. Nepgear herself.
Crys actually gave me a few of her exploits, some of which I think Nepgear has yet to get. So with that as an incentive for people who want to optimise the main character, let us look at them, starting with the Spells.
And honestly, I can quote him on that immediately:
To start with, her Spell Celestial Severance is a 2-dimensional cutting edge that pretty much severs everything along the swing arc.
The white pane left behind could best be described as a dimensional wound where one part of reality has no connection to the other, making it ouright impossible to pass. Mostly via the "there is zero ways forward" error if you would
Aside from being horribly sharp at the edges, this wound also lasts for about a second. If Nepgear swings correctly, she can create an inassailable shield with a 50m radius. Anything that does not literally teleport to the other side or can spill over the edges is blocked.
You can also walk on it, though that is less useful because it does not stay for long. Still interesting for someone fast enough to make use of it.
Next up is
Starshine. Which, I was told, can fake
Interceptor Fire, which is
Unmatched Skill but restricted to ranged attacks; the sheer amount of bolts and the fact Nepgear is potentially capable of controlling each one individually allow her to shoot down not only one attack, but tons of them. Alternately, she can strike against individual enemies instead of just glassing the earth with some practice.
Another exploit for this one is similar to Rei's protective deathwave, which Nepgear can achieve by holding the individual bolts close. In difference to Rei however, she can cover allies with it as well.
Due to how far it can be micro-managed and the amount of fine control Nepgear can reach,
Starshine may also be used to augment her regular attacks, or intercept attacks aimed at allies. With how many bolts she has per cast, she is capable of keeping up a powerful presence on the entire battlefield.
Aside from those, Nepgear also has some defensive exploits. They are passive and already in effect, though.
I like how Crys phrased it, so let me quote him again:
The first, and biggest, is that there's a solidness to her that is superior to virtually all other magical girls. Mostly caused by the fact Indestructable Core and Supremacy Zone together practically shut down most soft exploits via forcing them into a Hard Mechanic confrontation. Which they lose as a matter of course.
That's not to say that they shut down everything, but Nepgear is built in such a way that she can easily force a hard mechanic confrontation.
And at the truly top level combat, that can be lethal.
To be concrete, anything soft that tries to affect Nepgear is shut down. Body Modifiers, shut down, fake status effects, shut down, etc.
Anything that affects things not Nepgear operate as normal, such as White Soul's teleport and growing damage, though we did not see the latter in their confrontation. Rei's Auto-Counter would also remain unaffected.
Closing Words
That should suffice for an idea of what this is about. I hope it is clear enough.
Now look back over the actual explanation and compare its length to the examples, each of which just cover a few exploits for the given characters.
I think you understand the effort involved in doing such examinations for their entire kit.
Soft mechanics have a lot of depth to them once one actually starts to look for how stuff works. It is time-consuming work to nail every effect down and figure out what to do with it.
However, if one actually goes through that effort, they can get a much better understanding of the character they actually created and how they work.
