If that's brief, never let me get you going at length. This post is very impressively thought out, and I agree with the bulk of the top portion of it. Where I start to disagree is the sort of "DRv4" type system, and I think that updating again to a new system even when we've yet to finish updating DRv2 things to DRv3 might be jumping the gun. Of the ideas presented in the bottom portion of the post, there is one I'm particularly fond of, even if I don't know whether it's wise to try and implement it.
The idea of "Many/few/single" designations for the effectiveness of a weapon feels like very nice information to have and I do often prefer the aesthetics, if you will, of things taking many hits to kill a target. If there were a way to implement this without eliminating the defensive distinctiveness of vehicles and armors and starships (For example, how much tougher is a big old tank vs a jeep) it might be pretty cool.
I realized that'd I'd completely forgotten to address this as I was walking to class, and then I realized that - in my opinion - there are basically two ways of going about representing the defenses of vehicles, armors, starships, and so on.
The first way would be to take what I said in my previous post but keep the Light, Medium, and Heavy designations on the defensive side of things and have it so that:
- A weapon would have to put less rounds into a lighter unit to damage it; as an example, an anti-power armor rifle that would ordinarily take a "few" rounds to achieve its intended purpose would instead only need a "single" round to achieve its intended purpose against a light power armor.
- A weapon would have to put more rounds into a heavy unit to damage it; as an example, the aforementioned anti-power armor rifle would have to put "many" rounds into a heavy power armor to achieve its intended purpose.
On the plus side, this would lessen the amount of MBL rework needed; on the minus side, it adds a layer of complexity that could very,
very easily be confusing if not explained properly and, as Eth rightfully pointed out in his post, doesn't really address the possibility of weapons being rated at too high a tier. It, in my opinion, also resembles DRv3 in its current form...
...thus bringing me to the second proposal, which was inspired by what Alex posted
here:
Keep the Damage Rating system as-is, but change it from a per-bullet to a per-attack system - essentially turning it into a descendant of its
predecessor but with no HP system and a much more nebulous timeframe (a weapon's DRv2 value, if memory serves, was originally supposed to represent the amount of damage it did over ten seconds).
Though this approach would preserve the defensive attributes of units and be relatively simple to implement, it wouldn't really address the possibility of weapons being rated at too high a tier - and could, in my opinion, possibly even lead to a bit of "bloat" at the max tier of each weapon class due to faster-firing weapons needing to be uptiered to properly represent their role.
Edit: Another thing I forgot to mention in my first post is that the system I proposed would be based around regular hits,
not critical hits like it currently is.