I'm only posting this for clarification:
If I change the player setting from the default (starting the game with 2 lives/3 bombs in stock) to a higher setting, would this be okay? I did see one run that does this on the leaderboard, so I assume this is fine as it is something in the game settings as opposed to using a third party utility?
I'm just wanting to make sure (I'm going for Normal, and was considering increasing my lives at the start). I'm not wanting to get anyone in trouble by any means - the run in question would have been a 1cc regardless - but just wanted to make sure this was allowed before I tried to submit a run.
It's supposed to be default lives/bombs only, though I guess I can leave that run up for the reason you said (must have missed that, sorry)
I added it to the rules for the games for which starting lives/bombs are an option.
Apologies for the confusion
I'm not sure I agree with this rule. More lives could mean more planned deaths when your bombs are low/gone. Which could make boss fights a lot faster since you'd have more of a supply of bombs for things like nons and spellcards. (Where it'd be faster anyway, since I'm sure some midboss fights are timed to the music) I honestly think this should be talked about more before a decision is made
You have more than enough bombs to get through every spellcard in the game. Bomb damage is reduced against nonspells, so not bombing is always faster for a nonspell. Some midbosses are timed to the music, others aren't.
Even if that's not the case, default settings is a standard elsewhere- and routing when to suicide and which spells to spend 2 bombs on is part of the game that gets reduced by starting with 4 (!!!) extra lives. I don't buy the argument here- at that point, why not allow a continue to give even more lives? Why force a 1cc if failing to 1cc would end up faster?
Currently, more starting lives is just more safety buffer for mistakes during stages. I'm in favor of a default lives start because this actually makes skill matter more- not so much for easy, where capping everything is borderline trivial, but for higher difficulties where preserving bombs through stages and nonspells to speed up spells becomes a risk-reward problem.
Some thoughts:
From what I've gathered from experience, this isn't faster. As it currently stands I sit on extra resources upon dying to Hourai Elixer. This includes dying at the start of Stage 2-6 to have bombs going into midbosses/bosses, dying after Mid Keine to have the bombs I need for the boss fight, and occasionally dying while dodging Tewi.
When I first started speedrunning Imperishable Night in 2013, there weren't anywhere near as many people running Touhou games as there are now. I was trying to find other runs/runners but only came up with 1) DS and StB pages on SDA, and 2) a score race on SRL for Imperishable Night. It took a few months for me to even see a Mountain of Faith run. I wanna say Karisa had already posted a HRtP video on YouTube around that time, but I didn't see it until much later.
That may seem off topic, but I'm bringing it up because no rules were in place, as nobody ran the game. When I started running I used max lives. I thought continues would be faster, but they weren't (this is why I don't have a Normal time up as it is - I've only done 2 runs, 4 years ago, which were 2ccs). Noname found my runs on PBTracker, came up with a route that 1ccs, and I saved literal minutes. We're talking from ~25-28 minutes for a good run to my 22:09 in less than a week.
I see that, as noname mentioned, default lives is a standard among other games. I honestly was only thinking of using additional lives because I'm bad (I recently got my first normal 1cc!), which means I would be able to actually complete the run, as I'm not really consistent at dodging (see: I call Marisa ImperishableTroll because I ram into stars on her nons. Always.) I can respect and understand default lives as a rule, because as stated above it is more than enough to bomb each spell, die 1-2 times in a stage, and allot for incidents (Reimu intensifies).
TLDR: Default lives is fine and more than enough for a good IN run. I don't think extra lives or 2+ccs are faster, and I'm terrible at dodging danmaku.
I know i'm a bit late but does that mean we have to delete runs that aren't conform with the rules? I'm not opposed to it, just asking.
Existing runs would be left as is as better times are attainable with default lives, the added lives had no effect on the run and grandfathering.
The only run that used nondefault settings didn't benefit from it in any way, so it seems fine to leave it up there
