Ok, so philosophically, if you are designing rules for a game already created you either protect the game content, or you craft it into something more desirable for you. These are the only two choices. If you protect the game, then you set up a list of standards, like I did with my two-point criteria, and you only remove what needs to be removed to preserve an environment for competitive play. You aren’t concerned with protecting character choice. In fact, it doesn’t need to be protected. Good characters in the game are good, and bad are bad, and we’re ok with that because it’s the game. If you play a bad character, like a bad opening in chess, you’re stuck with the consequences.
Advanced slobs is perfect for this system; the beauty is that everyone has access to all the options (characters), and stages with more extreme adaptive elements are relegated to counterpick selections. If Green Greens is chosen, both players can choose Fox. Then it comes down to the players’ skill in the game. Yes, the Fox-main will have an advantage, but it’s his counter-stage! He’ll have an advantage anywhere he goes, if he plays it right. The point is that you set the maximum capability bar as high as you can, and give players as much room to develop their abilities as possible, and this includes multiple characters. In this case, the non-Fox main will have to develop a Fox that at least has a shot, or will have to take his best shot with his main, or whatever. It’s his choice how he chooses to develop, but the system gives him opportunities to develop.
Conversely, if you are interested in crafting a game that is more desirable to you, then the designers of the rules are rather arbitrarily shifting the metagame with every new rule made according to their whims. The elite decide if Fox is too favored here, or if this stage is “too weird,” or if the game could be just a little bit “better” (of course, a subjective quality) if we tweaked it differently. You’re no longer bound to any firm criteria, and players in the community will be affected by these decisions whether they agree or not. It’s much more likely that elements of the game will be trimmed by the lack of popularity rather than solid game theory. And the problem that keeps coming up: the more you trim out of the game, the lower the ceiling of game knowledge, the less room you leave for truly elite players to distance themselves from the pack.
This debate has evolved from the early FD-only vs. All-stages on to a much more subtle incarnation, but the essence is the same. Do you strive to preserve as much of the game as possible, serving as a steward and removing only what is necessary to keep the game viable? Or do you take the craftsman’s approach and whittle it into something that you feel is better?
The real problem, though, and the reason why most people don’t like my stance is that they fall in love with their characters, and somehow come up with the belief that they should never be “forced” to change by a “bad” stage. I’m not sure where it came from, but this is a huge reason why my stance is not very popular. It’s not like I haven’t compromised when working on national rulesets, so I understand the other side. I just find it to be a bit shallow, and I’d prefer that people pursue excellence in the game more than their characters.
