Boy, miss a morning and posts come fast and furious.
For the record, I'm a former mod. So far, we've had no actual mods speak here other than Ame, who is appealing straight to Wes. If they have a different opinion, they can wipe mine away without any hard feelings on my part.
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- Zack proposed a lot of questions he wanted answered, in the name of solidifying rules for NTSE mods. I'll take him at his word for the sake of argument.
- Frosty has proposed an answer for many of those questions, leaving out "size" as a concern.
- Others have come in with their own opinions, questions and concerns.
That's the review.
Let's take a larger step back. We need to determine what problems we are actually trying to solve.
My take on it is this: We are creating a lot of work and rules that are not required. No one has fully expressed, in my view, WHY we are creating this work and these rules beyond making the lives of the NTSE mods supposedly easier.
We have no examples where combat has gone awry. We haven't even really touched on where we
think combat might go astray from a responsible, capable GM — which is all we have. Whether it is Macross-style missilespams, well-placed proton torpedo shots or (heaven forbid) HOLY HAND-ROCKET blowing up a capship in one go, we don't have any evidence that there's a problem.
We've got v3 already calculating how single-shot projectile weapons factor into the tacked on "weapon capacity" rule. We
don't fully have a handle on how smaller projectiles packed into launchers are supposed to be treated, but we can reasonably use repeating, being-portable arms as an example.
In that example, found in v3, we see that pistols and submachine guns fall into the same tier. Shot to shot, they roughly deliver the same amount of lethality. But we know that a submachine gun has the potential to kill more efficiently and effectively at the loss of concealability (and its associated subfeatures).
Launchers with small missiles seem able to be treated the same way when compared to larger brethren IF they are tacked at the same tier. With that in mind, I would thin the NTSE mods have all the guidance they need.
Yes,
guidance. Not a rule or series of rules. They get to call those shots as they see them, hewing to the spirit of v3.
When it comes to the possibility of sodacan missiles wrecking a capship ... I think that is a moment where you especially should not have rules.
Counterintuitive? Perhaps, but v3 as written is implicitly permissive about how powerful a weapon can be. It's
not so many hard numbers; there are times when 2+2 could equal 5. That's because we trust our NTSE mods, and our GMs, to reasonably adjudicate what is possible and what isn't.
Rulemaking removes any semblance of reason and any chance of grey. It commits us to certain outcomes that we might not always like. It takes away the point of v3, which is to give GMs and players more power to just make things look cool.
I think that can be said about projectile defense and speed too. Are we seriously worried about how fast a missile exits an atmosphere? How big a gun we need to shoot it down? Can we not really talk to each other and figure out how that might go here, there, anywhere? Are we so afraid of each other?
There's only one time that we are afraid.
PvP.
V3 isn't about PvP and makes that practice more — and less — difficult. More in that you can't just throw a bunch of numbers together to get an outcome. Less difficult because it means people can
talk about how they want something to go.
The one thing I can understand is speed, but even that can get covered by other rules we already have.
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tl;dr: We don't need all of this. I said that in Zack's thread, I say it here again. Jaegerman's submission is well done, of course, but it's
a complexity we don't require.
If we want to keep things lean, and give NTSE mods the power to maneuver, this submission should be rejected with hearty thanks to Jaegerman.