DR Idea.

[Kai]

Get all your groaning done beforehand and listen to my Idea. I know some of you will hate it but it has some merit in my opinion, in terms of making Materials act they way they should as written, when the DR system is taken into account.

What I propose is this: Giving Materials Thresholds, as shields have.

Don't you find it odd that Zesuaium is suddenly vulnerable to everything, while you can have a shielding system that can shrug off an Aether blast with zero damage?

I think that it might be cool to give Armor materials thresholds, meaning that there is a certain point below which weapons are simply deflected, absorbed, or otherwise mitigated by armor, as that's the point of armor, yes? in the current system it is simply blown off and you are screwed, no matter how powerful your armor is.

Things like Zesuaium would have high thresholds, say in the 4 or 5 range, while something like Xiulurium would have a very low threshold, say 1 or 0.

Obviously, Aether and Antimatter would negate a threshold, being what they are, but that makes sense, seeing as antimatter cancels atoms and Aether is white beams of death which turn matter into energy.

I know there's those of you who hate using the math, and hate doing the DR system anyway, but this doesn't change what the DR system is, a Guideline for GM's to use. As it is now, Many GM's already mentally tack 'thresholds' onto certain armors such as Zesu, but this allows the system itself to reflect that and make it more even across the board.


Yes, I know, Groan, moan, Kai's crazy, but this is just an Idea. I'm typing up this rough idea here so we can discuss whether we want to or not, then, if this is allowed, I'll present a nicer version on the tech forum to be debated at large.

If it's just a resounding no, then Okay, I won't press any further.

 

[Fred]

No groans. You're not crazy. That's actually already being applied.

Armor grade. It's implied that if you use a weapon of insufficient potential that it isn't going to leave much of a nick on the material.

It could go beyond that, I agree. The first time I tried to instate the revised DR system, I actually put in a factor to materials that dictated how well they reacted to attack. I used a multiplier value then. It wasn't very well received, despite being one extra simple step you could easily solve by memorizing a table (or looking it up).

Soresu would argue differently. He'd be partly right. I made things more complicated.

Therefore, the decision came out being that if zesuaium was going to be protrayed as non-electricity conductive, non-heat conductive and utterly impervious to newtonian forces on its own, that it would be the GM's job to make it appear so to the playerbase by taking its properties into account when making up in his head what damage was being dealt.

DR's after all supposed to give someone an idea of the relative lethality of the said weapon against said vehicle. 'An idea' is pretty much the key word here.

We could certainly get more flexible and allow for other things, but so far it's a Pandora's Box that's not been opened, and perhaps wisely so. Allow for one 'open' exception and tons of others will follow.

My take? More power to you, Kai, if you want to implement that in your own plot. Bring up a wiki sheet of special rules for your plot and officialize it. That allows you to bring things up the way you wish, it doesn't shove how you want things forcefully on other Game Masters, and if the other game masters like how you've implemented it, they might follow your lead.

In this case, copying you would be a form of flattery.