Heyo. It's time to discuss rules for single character Odyssey runs. I will develop in this message my thoughts on the current ruleset, my pro and cons and we could potentially improve them.

The current ruleset is as follow:

• Time starts on "Yes" on the story

• Time end on Final Hit/Final Blow after the final battle

• Level and progress of the character at the start of the story is based off of a new game save

• You are not allowed to have any progress in one of the other storys (except prologue)

• Pre-customization is not allowed

• Buying addional calendar boosts is not allowed

• making use off the Bonus Day is allowed

So the tricky thing about the rules for Odysseys is that if you change one thing, pretty much everything needs to change. And that only is because in the current state of things, Introduction/Preprologue and the Prologue are not included in these runs. And if we change anything, this would void pretty much every single run in the LB. Anyways...

The 1st point I want to touch upon is the "Buying addional calendar boosts is not allowed/Making use off the Bonus Day is allowed". I think the rationale behind this was to have a "low EXP" category, for the Odysseys. But how relevant is that? If we want to speedrun as fast as possible, shouldn't we allow bonus day increases? We would go from a 1.1x to potentially 1.5x bonus, we would increase AP and Gils received from fights... And depending on the character, you might want AP bonus over EXP bonus, so it could be a routing element. However, not increasing the bonus allows everyone to start on a even playing field. So what's best for the category, allow for Bonus day increases or not? And allow bonus day at all? Does it need to change? I think the way it is at the moment is fine.

The second and big issue that needs to be discussed, is the starting point, and all the problems the starting point induces at the moment. "Time starts on "Yes" on the story", meaning that anything that happens in the prologue is fair game, and that can lead to severe abuse. The first thing is pretty straight forward. Since WoL is played in both the Prologue and his Odysseys, all the EXP you gain in the Prologue carries over to the run. Meaning that if you wished, you could easily farm exp in the Prologue by various methods I won't mention here, and you could potentialy start his Odyssey at level 10 for example if you had a dozen hours to waste. And you would still be in line with those 2 rules:

• Level and progress of the character at the start of the story is based off of a new game save
• You are not allowed to have any progress in one of the other storys (except prologue)

The other big issue that was fixed by a "gentleman" agreement in the previous community not to perform it. And it relies on the chocobo. Your chocobo walks along a path that is defined by your chocobo plan, and each time you engage in a fight and terminate it, either by winning, or escaping a fight (not restarting, completely running away from that fight), your chocobo will take a step on that chocobo plan. This will grant you fixed EXP bonuses that occur on specific steps depending on each chocobo plan, random EXP bonuses that occur on random steps, and accessories that you can equip to increase EXP gained after a set amount of steps. The exploit is that you can engage, and escape any battles in the Prologue to make your Chocobo take as many steps as you want, to stack up 99x accessories if you wish to, or to aline certain chocobo bonuses with important fights in any Odyssey run. Which could give you a shitload of EXP as compared to what you what you normally have, unlocking new abilities earlier, etc...

Final issue is that there is nothing in the ruleset that prevents you from doing custom fights with a random character to build gil and PP, and do your Odyssey run with another character, it still doesn't defy the ruleset. And if we allow to increase bonus day effect, doing custom fight could allow you to buy more increases for your bonus day.

How to fix WoL? Add a rule to force him to be level1 when starting? Still doesn't fix discrepancies, simply by doing an EX Burst on every fight of the Prologue, you'd be ahead in term of experience. But it would be a start.

How to fix Chocobo exploit? Force everyone to start with a chocobo chance level of 5%? You could still do the exploit, reset your chocobo plan, and step your chocobo in custom battles and start at 5% (you'd still have the accessories). Not really useful, cuz an advised Mods will see that you are equiping an accessory you're not supposed to.

So aside from adding rules, I am all ears about how to make a fair ruleset that noone can cheese through. The only "Hard Fix" that i have thought about pretty much since I joined the community is change the starting point, and doing so, invalidate all the runs present on the LB, which is not really nice, but it would definitely fix everything. By starting on new game, and therefore including Introduction and Preprologue, everything is included, and it would basically fix everything, chocobo exploit, WoL, custom fights, and even precustomization. But then again it would invalidate all the runs, and that is the only thing that I have some issues with. Mizzow mentionned that having to restart everytime is shity because of Battlegen RNG, and people would have to retry the intro and prologue if they don't get the right Battlegens. To me, that argument is pretty much inadmissible. RNG is an integral part of speedrunning, and this game in general. So that can't be the only argument against it. Anyways, even tho, it's not the best solution, it's the one I am more leaning towards, But I am aware of how shitty that rule would be. But then again, since we are starting anew with the community, if it has to happen, it's now.

Just a final word. The precustomization rule prevents you from accessing menu before your run, meaning you can't skip the tutorial prompts, can't change your button layout, your abilities, or equipment (which is nice in case you decided to perform some exploits mentionned above or not, the mods will be able to see what you equip). I still can't figure out what is best, menuing is definitely part this speedrun, but mashing through tutorial prompts hardly classifies as speedrunnable content...

So tl;dr:

• Bonus day for Odysseys -> keep it? Allow increase?
• WoL -> enforce a level 1 rule?
• Chcobo abuse -> 5% chance at the start of the run?
• Precustom -> Allow it?
• Start -> Start from new game or keep the rule as it is?

When everyone airs what they think about everything, we will take an educated decision to make the right choice between fun and fairness for the ruleset, in agreement with the majority.

Take care everyone, and as MASH said, stay sexy