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Beam Weapons and DRv3

F

FrostJaeger

Banned Member
@Wes and @Fred - how are the damaging effects of beam weapons handled in DRv3? Does, say, a Tier 10 weapon capable of continuously firing for 10 seconds deals light anti-starship damage every “instant” of those 10 seconds - or does the Tier 10 value describe the sum of the weapon’s output over those 10 seconds?

Based upon my personal interpretation of DRv3 (that tier values describe a weapon’s “per bullet/shot/etc.” damage) the former reading is correct, as the latter seems to be more along the lines of DRv2’s “output over 10 seconds” rule - but I’d like for an official ruling in order to avoid any confusion or drama in the future. >.<

(Please do not attempt to derail this thread, Zack, by saying that DRv3 is broken and needs to be fixed. You and I both know that this thread isn’t the place for such discussions.)
 
Lets be honest here, tier 10 damage for every infintesimal amount of time during the shot would be waay to OP. I think that a continuous beam is basically a machine gun for things like laser/aether weapons. A pistol modified to be a machine gun might get like +1 or +2 tiers of damage (probably +1).
 
It’s still an issue because an on-tier beam would rip an equivalent group in half in a matter of seconds. The best weapon to use for everything would be a beam.

Remember DRv3 measures per shot or bullet, not per few seconds. This is why beams are so crazy strong if you really think about it. The ambiguity is really bad for the purposes of...anything really.
 
Yes, but if you look at machine guns designed for certain things, like the Light Armor Service Rifle, it’s actually a tier lower. Not beams, though.
 
Addendum: Most rapid-fire armaments are actually quite low tier. But high tier (+3) weapons should normally fire incredibly slowly.
 
Most machine guns can fire many rounds in under a second, that's why I thought it was reasonable to rate a beam weapon by damage per second of sustained contact. In a fight every second counts, so the necessity to hold a beam on target for multiple seconds can be more dangerous than just giving a quick spray of your machine gun. It would be good to know an official way to grade their damage output, but that was the best I had.
 
The problem is, how often does the beam tick? That’s actually a big problem since like you detailed, having it too long will absolutely ruin the beam and it’ll be useless, but having it too short will just make it so you can jump out and make a disco rave for a few seconds to kill everything in the direction you pointed it in.

Someone is going to kill me for this, but with beams it’s actually better to think of it like a game.
 
Okay wild idea: What if we made beam weapons have a spool-up time? Like if you tap a beam at someone it does a relatively low amount of damage, but the longer it’s kept on a target the more it does.
 
I like the idea, @META_mahn, but in all honesty that's how I've always envisioned beams: weapons that "burn" their way through targets through constant contact. The way I see it, a beam first overloads a target's barriers, then burns through the target's outer armor, then through the wall/ceiling/etc. of whatever compartment(s) it breached, and so on...
 
Ah, one of Zack's favorite quibbles.

Most of the approximations here are actually fairly good. Commonly, a continuous beam will rake over a surface rather than bore in a single spot, so it behaves as most high Rate-of-Fire weapons.

There's actually one good example of a continuous beam weapon: the aether saber-rifle used in melee. Usually, determining the result of such slashes are pretty much eyeballed. Same difference, really.

It seems you already have a good mental picture of how devastating a continuous beam is... so, any damage/5 seconds approximation seems beyond the point.
 
How does damage/3s sound? We start at Tier -2, power up to Tier -1 after 3 seconds, and then power up to marked tier. Or we could start at Tier -3 if it’s too much.

The saber-rifle is a slashing weapon, so it’s sort of exempted because its beam hits more area.

I actually really like how it feels. I’d go so far as to say beams should be the only +3 weapon allowed on ships, since it gives small ships a lot of damage but also a lot of risk.
 
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The explicit answer is that it isn’t handled in DRv3 and is up to the GMs to figure out in their own way.

Since the NTSE doesn’t seem to care about rate of fire, it doesn’t really seem to matter for approval. This makes for a nice double whammy of ‘doesn’t matter’ and ‘doesn’t say’

—-

There is also the cheese route, where we can just make the case that there aren’t really as many beam weapons as we think there are. A typical laser meant for combat will hit a few thousand times a second. A saber rifle is a melee weapon and doesn’t fall under DRv3. One burst from a particle beam is still just one burst. Etc.

—-

If you want to fix the damage over time problem then you’ve also got to start pulling apart DRv3 so you can fix it. The obvious solution is to view weapons as having an effective tier (or Effective Level Raiting for you DnD guys) weapons at a certain fire rate are on tier, increasing the fire rate sends you up a tier, decreasing the fire rate removes a tier.

Extend this a bit further and single-shot weapons have a huge negative modifier to their effective Tier, giving you a mechanic to also handle missiles/bombs with.
 
RPG-D RPGfix
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