Revision history: Off-banner

An off-banner result is a top-rarity pull that is not the banner's featured item: the 5-star from the standard pool when you wanted the event character. Fate/Grand Order communities call it a spook, and the word has spread across the genre.

What happens after an off-banner result is one of the sharpest dividing lines between gacha designs:

• In 50/50 systems (Genshin Impact and its successors), an off-banner 5-star is also a state change: it arms the guarantee, so the next 5-star is the featured character. The loss has value. [1]
• In fractional rate-up systems (Fate/Grand Order, Blue Archive, NIKKE, Granblue Fantasy), an off-banner result changes nothing. The featured odds on the next pull are identical, and only a spark ceiling, where one exists, moves closer. [2]

The distinction drives real cost differences that headline rates hide. Two games with similar top-rarity rates can have very different featured-item costs depending on whether off-banner results carry protection; the comparison table tracks the guarantee column for exactly this reason.

Off-banner results are not always losses in the larger sense: standard-pool characters obtained this way are often strong, and in games with dupe systems a spook can be a copy of something worth upgrading. The term describes intent, not value.