Pool Noodle Paladin — v0.2

Current draft

The Pool Noodle Paladin is a slow frontline tank who turns his body and equipment into movable terrain: a wet pool noodle that clears space rather than dealing a heavy hit, a dented garbage-can-lid shield that protects a completed line from low frontal fire, and a too-tight wetsuit that makes him resilient to spray. He is provisionally around eleven, broader through the torso than his peers, and physically self-possessed rather than embarrassed. His civilian name, family context, and the incident that made pool safety so important to him remain deliberately unresolved rather than invented to look complete.

He is not a reluctant tank. He sincerely believes the strongest kid should stand in front, and pool-safety rules are his code of chivalry — he would rather follow them than win.

What changed

• Renamed Pool Noodle Knight to Pool Noodle Paladin.
• Changed the weapon from a substantial slow hit to a low-soak space-making sweep.
• Changed the shield from a passive personal block chance into a physical formation object with facing and counterplay (design proposal, not yet implemented).
• Made the completed straight line his signature tactical posture.
• Added the Lifeguard's Code, his moral rigidity, and the Towel Snapper foil relationship.
• Raised the originating character's provisional age to approximately eleven.
• Added five paired artwork studies covering brace, sweep, care, conflict, and repeatable-unit formation.

Why it changed

The earlier Knight concept explained resistance and interruption but not why a player would put this kid in front of someone else. The Paladin revision makes protection spatial, visible, and personal, and gives the archetype a clearer inner contradiction: genuinely good, genuinely brave, and frequently insufferable because he believes safety rules confer moral authority.

Evidence and playtest marginalia

• docs/characters/pool-noodle-paladin-v0.1.md: the full circulation draft this revision condenses, including the Lifeguard's Code, the "We Had Positions" story beat, and the paired-art translation studies.
• docs/art/prompts/pool-noodle-paladin-studies-reconstructed-v1.md: a transparent reconstruction of the five lost prompts from the surviving WebPs and dossier. The five compressed derivatives were approved by Anthony for GitHub storage and public Artbook display on 2026-07-25; the reconstruction is not represented as verbatim historical source.
• docs/seventh-street-charter-v8.md §8: the inherited roster-table matchup this character reskins.
• The current prototype (sim/constants.gd, sim/simcore.gd) still implements the earlier Knight numbers — a 20% melee hit, spray/splash resistance, and a shield-block check only during windup — not the low-soak sweep or physical shield object described above. This dossier is an aspirational character revision, not documentation of shipped behavior.
• Artwork studies 1–5 (see the published artifact records) are visual questions about whether the shield, plod, hot-pink noodle, and protective scowl communicate the unit before any rule is explained; none of their observations is a proven finding yet.

Rejected or alternate directions

• Protective aura or formation-wide statistical buff.
• Permanent passive shield resistance.
• Shield protection only during attack windup.
• Deterministic shield loss on first melee contact.
• Cosmetic shield loss followed by automatic reappearance.
• Fixed stocky bodies for every tactical copy.
• Autonomous refusal or delayed response to "unsafe" commands.
• Bossy junior-lifeguard personality as the central trait.
• Purely plain dialogue or constant mock-medieval dialogue.
• "Pool Noodle Pallidin" as an intentional misspelling.
• Separate names for the story character and the tactical unit.

Still unresolved

Featured question: does he read as protective before he reads as hostile or bossy?

Secondary unknowns:

• his civilian name and family context;
• what made pool safety morally important to him;
• his relationship with the original Towel Snapper outside the war;
• what forces him to admit a broken rule can still protect someone;
• his signature elimination or dinner-call moment;
• which voice lines survive repetition without making his sanctimony exhausting;
• whether the physical-shield-object and formation proposals survive playtesting.