Hax

## Summary

**Hax** is a catch-all term for abilities that can be used to ignore/bypass one or more of a target's statistics, rendering them irrelevant.

The most common hax are the ones that ignore durability, and their scale/potency are unrelated to their users' AP & Tiering System, however, they can be measured with their effectiveness against their targets' Durability. This is because, depending of the hax, the statistics bypassed may actually counter it if they have a higher enough scale. This, however, is not the case with certain hax, examples include Reality Warping, Probability Manipulation, Conceptual Manipulation, and other abilities that simply & logically cannot be countered by high statistics.

Having resistances to certain hax can help characters/things to withstand them, but only if the specific resistances are around the same scale as the hax being used against them, or better.

**Note:** When a profile's Powers & Abilities indicates something on the lines of "As before but to a greater scale" this doesn't necessarily mean that their hax has a higher scale/potency, but rather, that the characters/things have become more powerful and/or proficient with their abilities. In this cases, the scale of their hax would only become better if specifically indicated in their Powers & Abilities, Notable Attacks & Techniques, or elsewhere.

**Note 2:** When judging the potency of hax-based abilities such as Mind Manipulation and Soul Manipulation, and the resistance against them, there is a variety of factors to be potentially considered. Such as the mechanisms involved, how many people the power can affect, whether it has demonstrated to break through resistances, how great the effects are, etc.

These factors need to be examined with the mechanism in mind, to determine if they actually demonstrate potency. For example, for a mind-controlling gas simply affecting more people with it, by using lots of the gas, would not indicate an increase in potency of the gas as simply more of it was used. The effect couldn't be accumulated to be as strong on a single target as it is on all affected individuals summed up.

Whether a power can overcome a resistance against it based on certain feats has to be determined by comparing the various factors at play. For example, a resistance can be overcome by Mind Manipulation with higher potency in any factor, if the resistance is equal, less or unknown in all other factors. When it comes to resistance that is above the Mind Manipulation in some factors, while the Mind Manipulation that is superior in other factors, one has to see on a case-by-case basis whether a convincing argument can be put forth. Otherwise, such a situation will have an inconclusive result.

How the mechanism of the power (Such as the before-mentioned Mind Manipulation) interacts with the mechanism of the resistance is, of course, also relevant.

**Layering** is the ability to break through resistances to one's ability/hax. Successfully using an ability against a resistant character means that the ability is "layered." Further, resisting a layered ability is an indication of layered resistance, so on and so forth. An ability becoming stronger does not automatically mean it is layered unless it is shown to overcome a resistance. Crucially this is not the same as resistance negation, which overcomes resistance via a special additional ability rather than the hax itself being more powerful.

Moreover, layering should not be thought of as applying to abilities which intuitively can be overcome with magnitude, such as heat resistance or analytical prediction. For instance, it is not layered fire manipulation to burn someone with a heat source hotter than they can withstand.

As mentioned in Note 2 above, layers are just one way to prove exceptional potency of an ability and could be overcome by abilities that have shown potency by other means. In reverse, an ability with many layers could also be potent enough to overcome a resistance that worked against a hax that is exceptionally potent in other ways. How exactly different showings of potency compare is highly case-by-case and in general might be inconclusive.

## Smurf Abilities

A fan term that originated in MMORPG communities where a player restarts their game and is matched against newbies after having years of experience and resources. However, in the vs-community, it has come to instead refer to characters who possess abilities capable of harming characters who are in durability qualitatively superior to them by means which should be impossible for regular abilities. I.e. they possess abilities which in themself can, at least in some aspect, be considered qualitatively superior to their regular counterpart.
Due to that, they can often circumvent certain defences against the abilities, although this depends on in which aspect the ability can be considered qualitatively superior.

The two big aspects to differentiate between are power/potency and range/area of effect.

### Power / Potency

Abilities that in terms of pure power are qualitatively superior to the physical stats of the character, e.g. a physically Tier 7 character capable of casting a 1-A fireball, or hax which has potency qualitatively superior to the baseline potency, e.g. soul hax which can affect a character that sees them as mere fiction.

The typical way for an ability to be proven as being smurf in the aspect is it having showings or statements of being able to affect a character, which it shouldn't due to them transcending them in a way that it would require such a higher potency to affect them. A typical example would be affecting characters which see them as mere fiction. See here for details on why characters with certain transcendence resist certain things.

It's important to separate the case of Power or Potency from the case of Range or Area of Effect. A higher-dimensional character might be immune to regular mind manipulation due to being outside its range, but not due to their mind being fundamentally infinitely harder to affect. Of course, exceptions may apply if there are statements or feats of the opposite.

Another way an ability can be shown to have smurf potency / power is if it significantly affects a structure of qualitatively superior size. E.g. existence erasure which can affect a (tiering-applicable) higher-dimensional structure or character would qualify. Note that if the ability can't have its potency focused on a small object, it's not necessarily considered to have smurf power / potency.

Lastly, if it overcomes a resistance which is known to operate on a qualitatively superior level it would also be considered smurf.

The main advantage of an ability being considered smurf in power / potency is that it is assumed to be able to overpower all resistances that don't have feats or statements of being able to perform on an equal or superior level. That in practice means that, for example, a 3D character that has abilities with Low 1-C smurf potency would be able to overcome all the regular Tier 2 or lower resistances as if they weren't there.

### Range / Area of Effect

Abilities which can in terms of range or area of effect reach structures outside of the reality the character itself exists in. Examples include a regular human who can attack points in different universes or a character physically Tier 2 who can erase 16-dimensional (1-B) structures.

The importance of smurf range and area of effect is that without it many entities with certain kinds of transcendence over the user can not be significantly harmed. A target with Reality-Fiction Transcendence may, for example, exist beyond the book in which the user's reality is contained. And even if a character had enough brute strength to kill a higher-dimensional character, they may not be able to do so in practice if they can't project their strength to a more then 3-dimensional area of effect, as they then can't affect a significant portion of the target's body. See here for further details.

It is important to note that, contrary to abilities that (additionally or exclusively) have smurf power or potency, abilities with smurf range or area of effect alone do not necessarily bypass all regular resistance on the level of the user.

## Examples

* Reality Warping
* Probability Manipulation
* Law Manipulation
* Physics Manipulation
* Conceptual Manipulation
* Void Manipulation
* Mind Manipulation
* Causality Manipulation
* Plot Manipulation
* Etcetera...

## See also

* Durability Negation
* Resistance