Fred
Retired Staff
Hey guys. 
Yes, this time, it's my turn. You can rollover your eyes in exasperation at yet another DR topic. I know I would at this point in time: it's been the cause of way too much annoyance and drama of late in my opinion.
It doesn't mean I didn't see the problems piling up, though, and didn't take notes of the issues aired. I also have concerns about how SARP's gaining an alarmingly larger number of instances where number crunching is required - or where the guidelines are increasingly being used as rules rather than helpful common bearings.
Brace yourselves. Long post ahead:
Let's revise a bit on where we've been.
So...
The two things which distinguish the present DR system is the category grade, and the damage scale within those categories. Damage scales, because those are the most tied to size within one grade (how much an anti-armor weapon will hurt the intended target versus size of target along with concern over what size in the mecha category has a right to wield what weapon potency), appears to be the point which is under the most contention. The stronger point of our present damage rating system are the grade categories.
Because of the above, I'm thinking that streamlining potential damage and penetration values back together might be the way to go.
There was also a concern about weapon lethality that came up, and basically SARP weapons aren't depicted as half as lethal as they ought to be.
The Personnel grade is also woefully redundant. About any weapon on the personnel scale, from knives, to swords, to Miniguns, have the potential to quickly kill a soft target, and that's mostly the perogative of GMs.
Shields are also a concern. Damage tracking on a grand scale is rather tricky to do and involves a factor of book-keeping that we could do without. One of Uso's early disagreements with shields having hit points was simply not the way our technology actually works and I kind of have to give him the argument now that I understand these kinds of things better. As I GM, I believe I can perhaps find ways to tastefully integrate these things.
Also, the way armor SP is being treated hints that SARP armors are mostly ablative/hit point based like Battletech. This comes up to a specific purpose us Game Master seem to trust on power armor: players given power armors are players being granted a pool of hit points, or a depletable plot shield. Without power armor, we GMs have less excuses to spare them harm, and any hurt done to my players during an action oriented plot have resulted in gameplay pacing slowing down. We want to inspire the presence of danger and risk by giving something that can be depleted, while actually being able to afford being able to harm the PCs under our wing to achieve that dramatic impact.
* * *
The above said, I'm inclined to go for the following:
Body armor is essentially a GM excuse for a wearer to survive being hit by Anti-Personnel weaponry and survive the hit. Usually, being hit by a bullet even though someone is wearing a bulletproof vest is a pretty big deal. I don't think body armor deserves a grade of its own, or that a GM needs to have a SP scale for it.
Power armor is essentially made to protect the user from anti-personnel weapons. The idea here is that even though it's made to protect against it, it shouldn't go to the point of invulnerability - an advantage, but not one that should be taken for granted; especially considering the existence of weapons like the Star Army of Yamatai's Nekovalkyrja Service Pistol that can under some setting indeed harm power armors.
I don't think this detracts from power armors in this light. Most power armor players use have self-healing functions, the armor proper, possibly presence of a physical cover like the Daisy's elliptoid shield, and a energized barrier to take hits before that, along with being able to survive environmental hazards and also enhanced strength.
When you use an anti-armor rifle like the LASR, you ultimate expect that it's going to be, well, anti-armor. Meaning that you should expect to be able to swiftly kill the target, barring barrier shielding or opposed reactions.
Such a tweak would render power armored combat more lethal. It'd place more importance on decisive action, the use of cover, the importance of a depleted but recharging energy barrier, and such.
The heftier weapons you could expect from humanoids, such as bazookas and grenades, remain a sizeable threat to a power armor. Because of the short gap between the personnel and armor grade, it validates the use of unaugmented mishhuvurthyar as credible opponents against power armors too.
We enter the realm of the more powerful weapons in the higher end of the mechanized realm. A Daisy carrying a gauss bazooka like they use in my Miharu plot could have this kind of firepower. A larger mecha could rush in, firing its cannons and cripple if not destroy squads of unwary power armors, a tank could fire a missile and shoot down a vulnerable fightercraft, a starfighter could go and destroy a starship's weapon turret or engine port would also portray well the intended effectiveness of the anti-mecha grade.
Ultimately, I believe the use of mecha is to serve as credible 'boss' encounters in my plots so I don't necessarily want them to be overbearingly powerful, but I think - put in this light - that if gives them the sort of portrayal people like Fiver and Exhack might've felt they deserved. What power armor are to unarmored people, mecha are to power armor - that sounds fair to me.
Most SARP plotships rather neatly fit in this category. I think the scale ratio between personnel/armor, armor/mecha and mecha/starship should be self-explanatory by now, and the idea that anti-starship weapons should prove a potent and immediate threat to starships should also be obvious too.
I'm not broaching Structural Ratings at this point. I'm fairly confident most GMs actually have a good grasp on deciding what sort of damage a ship out to take when hit by whatever-weapon. The actual 'mechanics' behind what renders a starship more susceptible to damage may be more important - I'll broach that later on.
...and this should pretty much be the strongest weaponry we have in our setting.
To give you guys an idea of potential application of the above elements...
A Plumeria gunship could have an Anti-capital weapon with its aether shock cannon. Both its railguns would be anti-starship weapons. Most of its turrets would be anti-mecha and anti-armor in potency.
* * *
On to defenses.
I broached body armor earlier, and mention how they could be treated as the ability to survive a lethal attack such a person would usually not have survived.
Power Armor and Mecha shielding would work more or less the same, effectively being temporary depletable plotshields. For example, the M6 Daisy power armor is a armor-grade target, with an energy barrier or according strength.
That barrier is made to protect it from anti-armor attacks, but it wouldn't be always active, but rather on 'hot-standby' when in combat conditions. Because the Daisy has an AIES quantum computer, it has pretty advanced predictive software... so whenever the power armor gets fired, at, it 'braces' for the attack and activates the barrier.
Given how the power armor has light and highly minaturized gear, there could be a limited amount of power reserves actually available to afford having the barrier active like that. Energy use also has ties with the strength of said barrier: the AIES is decidedly not going to have to use as much power against small arms fire as it would need to use to stop an anti-armor railgun.
Because were dealing with a power armor's barrier generator, there's only so much the barrier generator could do when struck with an anti-mecha tier attack, so its more than likely that the damage will not only deplete the available barrier power, but also still seep through and cause damage to the armor itself.
So, with the above set of conditions established, we could get the following results:
In this case, the use of an anti-armor weapon would be doubly worse.
In this light, anti-personnel weapons become a much larger staple of power armor combat, as they are indeed useful. Anti-armor weaponry in itself would be very deadly to power armor and maintaining a healthy barrier (with a physical obstacle like the elliptoid shield on hand) becomes pivotal.
I could easily convert the above into somesort of hit point system, sure, but that's not the objective. Setting expectations is much more important than number crunching here, I feel, and that's what I believe we should try and promote.
I won't cover the armor to mecha comparison and the mecha to starship comparison because they'll probably look mostly the same on the level of progression. I did want to bring up starship/capital ship protections as those could work somewhat differently.
In an early discussion, be established some changed to the way propulsion was going to work. We'd have normal sublight thrust for near-planet navigation, limited sublight/lightspeed travel for in-system locomotion, and then superluminal speeds provided by hyperspace-style propulsion.
In that discussion, I proposed that each propulsion means also be tied to a certain defense type, perhaps as a sort of tie in as to why ships could not afford superluminal combat, or simply to imply the costs of greater resources during starship combat.
Electro-magnetic fields, mostly conformal around a ship, would be propulsion independent and serve as hazard shielding as well as polarize the armored hull of a ship to allow it to sustain more punishment/diffuse incoming directed energy impacts. This sort of technology actually exists today with ceramic armor - so far, in SARP, energized/forcefield-nested armor is likely the present equivalent.
Gravimetric Drives allows a ship to proceed to relativistic speeds and cheat inertia/acceleration under normal circumstances. Weak fields can also be generated fore of the ship to help deflect spacedust/micrometerorites when navigating. In combat circumstances, most of the available output of the gravimetric drives would be set on hot-standby, much like my above example with the Daisy's barrier (similar tech?) in order to mitigate incoming attacks. Beams would be diffused, striking the hull armor for less damage. Missiles would prematurely impact, and thier explosion would cause less damage to the hull, and projectiles fired by railguns would be stopped or deflected.
Fold drives would be tied to distortion shields when in combat and not preparing for a fold jump. Distortion shields would bend space and be the primary IC reason why battles needs to be done at closer distances than 3 light seconds, since a quantum computer would have the time to have the distortion barrier adjusted to bend and veer off an incoming attack. The closer the attacker, the more likely the attack will not be adjusted in time to avoid it hitting the target.
Ideally, all of the above protections could be, like the Daisy barrier example, on hot standby, with limited capacity to use them within a certain timeframe. Starship combat could be less about piling up successive damage directly on a ship target and more about defeating those layered defenses (it'd make sense, figuring how much starship weapons are supposed to be destructive on planets, asteroids and such).
Furthermore, to spice things up there are several weapon types which could be quite effective against certain defenses and less so against others, in a kind of rock-paper-scissors relationship. In this case, we have shield, barrier and energized armor as our defense values.
Examples:
I also think each respective defense system could have alternate features which would add to their gadgetry and offer useful alternatives to science officers. A few examples could include:
I look above, and I see a lot of text and ideas which may look overwhelming (holy wall of text, Batman!). I'll stop here. I'll just reiterate in parting that the point is more to set guidelines and conditions rather than focus on number crunching. This is new, and I could understand the conservatives balking, but at this point I'm starting to feel it's very important to eliminate as much number crunching as possible. Denoting possibilities, options and expected consequences is likely something that has a much stronger place in a freeform roleplay such as ours is meant to be.
Yes, this time, it's my turn. You can rollover your eyes in exasperation at yet another DR topic. I know I would at this point in time: it's been the cause of way too much annoyance and drama of late in my opinion.
It doesn't mean I didn't see the problems piling up, though, and didn't take notes of the issues aired. I also have concerns about how SARP's gaining an alarmingly larger number of instances where number crunching is required - or where the guidelines are increasingly being used as rules rather than helpful common bearings.
Brace yourselves. Long post ahead:
Let's revise a bit on where we've been.
- When I first got on Star Army five years ago, we already had damage ratings. From power armors to mighty warships, these usually were clumped in the upper very heavy, super-heavy and total annihilation bracket. Everything was supposedly extremely powerful and even a power armor's rifle could be fired from orbit to raze city blocks from afar.
That was refined, mostly on my request to Wes, into the beginning of what we've been calling the DR system. We got a scale from 1 to 10 drawn up, with weapons and materials going all around it.
Those were mostly penetration/resistance against penetration values, though, which said that if a weapon was 4 points below the target's armor rating, it wasn't bound to accomplish much.
Shields also cropped up with a 'higher than this and you can't hurt me' and if you went over the shield's target number, it'd increment down by 1.
After some time, I got annoyed with that layout and introduced the present system. I wanted a much clearer demarcation between the weaponry a power armor and a starship could do. I wanted starship weaponry to be more powerful than power armor weaponry. I wanted starships to feel tougher than power armors. I wanted shields to be able to have a limited capacity to absorb damage, and to be depleted overtime too. I wanted to establish size categories which would be tied to the power of weapons, the defensive potential of shields, to have smaller ships and larger ships have more of the kind of presence I felt they would have (because then, the pocket battleship ruled, and everything else seemed to suck by comparison).
I think I mostly succeeded at those goals. I think it was an actual improvement at the time. But times are changing, SARP as a setting is growing more complex, and I'm concerned that this complexity will have it sag under its own weight as people wish to refine and better depict the things added to SARP, etcetera. For example, the mecha scale worked when power armors were treated as fightercraft, with the larger mecha being relatively rare. With the Iroma in, this is no longer the case.
And again, I'm getting increasingly worried about the kind of number crunching, or the attempts to detail the DR foundation further which may lead to even more number crunching. I want the DR system to remain something that's intuitively easy for the GMs to use to depict their plots in our setting. I also think some tweaks could be done here and there.
This is why I'm having the conversation here, away from most of the natives. This is ultimately a GM's tool, and I don't want to give this free discussion widely on the boards yet.
So...
The two things which distinguish the present DR system is the category grade, and the damage scale within those categories. Damage scales, because those are the most tied to size within one grade (how much an anti-armor weapon will hurt the intended target versus size of target along with concern over what size in the mecha category has a right to wield what weapon potency), appears to be the point which is under the most contention. The stronger point of our present damage rating system are the grade categories.
Because of the above, I'm thinking that streamlining potential damage and penetration values back together might be the way to go.
There was also a concern about weapon lethality that came up, and basically SARP weapons aren't depicted as half as lethal as they ought to be.
The Personnel grade is also woefully redundant. About any weapon on the personnel scale, from knives, to swords, to Miniguns, have the potential to quickly kill a soft target, and that's mostly the perogative of GMs.
Shields are also a concern. Damage tracking on a grand scale is rather tricky to do and involves a factor of book-keeping that we could do without. One of Uso's early disagreements with shields having hit points was simply not the way our technology actually works and I kind of have to give him the argument now that I understand these kinds of things better. As I GM, I believe I can perhaps find ways to tastefully integrate these things.
Also, the way armor SP is being treated hints that SARP armors are mostly ablative/hit point based like Battletech. This comes up to a specific purpose us Game Master seem to trust on power armor: players given power armors are players being granted a pool of hit points, or a depletable plot shield. Without power armor, we GMs have less excuses to spare them harm, and any hurt done to my players during an action oriented plot have resulted in gameplay pacing slowing down. We want to inspire the presence of danger and risk by giving something that can be depleted, while actually being able to afford being able to harm the PCs under our wing to achieve that dramatic impact.
* * *
The above said, I'm inclined to go for the following:
Body armor is essentially a GM excuse for a wearer to survive being hit by Anti-Personnel weaponry and survive the hit. Usually, being hit by a bullet even though someone is wearing a bulletproof vest is a pretty big deal. I don't think body armor deserves a grade of its own, or that a GM needs to have a SP scale for it.
Power armor is essentially made to protect the user from anti-personnel weapons. The idea here is that even though it's made to protect against it, it shouldn't go to the point of invulnerability - an advantage, but not one that should be taken for granted; especially considering the existence of weapons like the Star Army of Yamatai's Nekovalkyrja Service Pistol that can under some setting indeed harm power armors.
I don't think this detracts from power armors in this light. Most power armor players use have self-healing functions, the armor proper, possibly presence of a physical cover like the Daisy's elliptoid shield, and a energized barrier to take hits before that, along with being able to survive environmental hazards and also enhanced strength.
When you use an anti-armor rifle like the LASR, you ultimate expect that it's going to be, well, anti-armor. Meaning that you should expect to be able to swiftly kill the target, barring barrier shielding or opposed reactions.
Such a tweak would render power armored combat more lethal. It'd place more importance on decisive action, the use of cover, the importance of a depleted but recharging energy barrier, and such.
The heftier weapons you could expect from humanoids, such as bazookas and grenades, remain a sizeable threat to a power armor. Because of the short gap between the personnel and armor grade, it validates the use of unaugmented mishhuvurthyar as credible opponents against power armors too.
We enter the realm of the more powerful weapons in the higher end of the mechanized realm. A Daisy carrying a gauss bazooka like they use in my Miharu plot could have this kind of firepower. A larger mecha could rush in, firing its cannons and cripple if not destroy squads of unwary power armors, a tank could fire a missile and shoot down a vulnerable fightercraft, a starfighter could go and destroy a starship's weapon turret or engine port would also portray well the intended effectiveness of the anti-mecha grade.
Ultimately, I believe the use of mecha is to serve as credible 'boss' encounters in my plots so I don't necessarily want them to be overbearingly powerful, but I think - put in this light - that if gives them the sort of portrayal people like Fiver and Exhack might've felt they deserved. What power armor are to unarmored people, mecha are to power armor - that sounds fair to me.
Most SARP plotships rather neatly fit in this category. I think the scale ratio between personnel/armor, armor/mecha and mecha/starship should be self-explanatory by now, and the idea that anti-starship weapons should prove a potent and immediate threat to starships should also be obvious too.
I'm not broaching Structural Ratings at this point. I'm fairly confident most GMs actually have a good grasp on deciding what sort of damage a ship out to take when hit by whatever-weapon. The actual 'mechanics' behind what renders a starship more susceptible to damage may be more important - I'll broach that later on.
...and this should pretty much be the strongest weaponry we have in our setting.
To give you guys an idea of potential application of the above elements...
A Plumeria gunship could have an Anti-capital weapon with its aether shock cannon. Both its railguns would be anti-starship weapons. Most of its turrets would be anti-mecha and anti-armor in potency.
* * *
On to defenses.
I broached body armor earlier, and mention how they could be treated as the ability to survive a lethal attack such a person would usually not have survived.
Power Armor and Mecha shielding would work more or less the same, effectively being temporary depletable plotshields. For example, the M6 Daisy power armor is a armor-grade target, with an energy barrier or according strength.
That barrier is made to protect it from anti-armor attacks, but it wouldn't be always active, but rather on 'hot-standby' when in combat conditions. Because the Daisy has an AIES quantum computer, it has pretty advanced predictive software... so whenever the power armor gets fired, at, it 'braces' for the attack and activates the barrier.
Given how the power armor has light and highly minaturized gear, there could be a limited amount of power reserves actually available to afford having the barrier active like that. Energy use also has ties with the strength of said barrier: the AIES is decidedly not going to have to use as much power against small arms fire as it would need to use to stop an anti-armor railgun.
Because were dealing with a power armor's barrier generator, there's only so much the barrier generator could do when struck with an anti-mecha tier attack, so its more than likely that the damage will not only deplete the available barrier power, but also still seep through and cause damage to the armor itself.
So, with the above set of conditions established, we could get the following results:
In this case, the use of an anti-armor weapon would be doubly worse.
In this light, anti-personnel weapons become a much larger staple of power armor combat, as they are indeed useful. Anti-armor weaponry in itself would be very deadly to power armor and maintaining a healthy barrier (with a physical obstacle like the elliptoid shield on hand) becomes pivotal.
I could easily convert the above into somesort of hit point system, sure, but that's not the objective. Setting expectations is much more important than number crunching here, I feel, and that's what I believe we should try and promote.
I won't cover the armor to mecha comparison and the mecha to starship comparison because they'll probably look mostly the same on the level of progression. I did want to bring up starship/capital ship protections as those could work somewhat differently.
In an early discussion, be established some changed to the way propulsion was going to work. We'd have normal sublight thrust for near-planet navigation, limited sublight/lightspeed travel for in-system locomotion, and then superluminal speeds provided by hyperspace-style propulsion.
In that discussion, I proposed that each propulsion means also be tied to a certain defense type, perhaps as a sort of tie in as to why ships could not afford superluminal combat, or simply to imply the costs of greater resources during starship combat.
Electro-magnetic fields, mostly conformal around a ship, would be propulsion independent and serve as hazard shielding as well as polarize the armored hull of a ship to allow it to sustain more punishment/diffuse incoming directed energy impacts. This sort of technology actually exists today with ceramic armor - so far, in SARP, energized/forcefield-nested armor is likely the present equivalent.
Gravimetric Drives allows a ship to proceed to relativistic speeds and cheat inertia/acceleration under normal circumstances. Weak fields can also be generated fore of the ship to help deflect spacedust/micrometerorites when navigating. In combat circumstances, most of the available output of the gravimetric drives would be set on hot-standby, much like my above example with the Daisy's barrier (similar tech?) in order to mitigate incoming attacks. Beams would be diffused, striking the hull armor for less damage. Missiles would prematurely impact, and thier explosion would cause less damage to the hull, and projectiles fired by railguns would be stopped or deflected.
Fold drives would be tied to distortion shields when in combat and not preparing for a fold jump. Distortion shields would bend space and be the primary IC reason why battles needs to be done at closer distances than 3 light seconds, since a quantum computer would have the time to have the distortion barrier adjusted to bend and veer off an incoming attack. The closer the attacker, the more likely the attack will not be adjusted in time to avoid it hitting the target.
Ideally, all of the above protections could be, like the Daisy barrier example, on hot standby, with limited capacity to use them within a certain timeframe. Starship combat could be less about piling up successive damage directly on a ship target and more about defeating those layered defenses (it'd make sense, figuring how much starship weapons are supposed to be destructive on planets, asteroids and such).
Furthermore, to spice things up there are several weapon types which could be quite effective against certain defenses and less so against others, in a kind of rock-paper-scissors relationship. In this case, we have shield, barrier and energized armor as our defense values.
Examples:
- a guided torpedo will not be diverted away by a distortion shield. Contact with the gravimetric barrier will likely cause it to explode. Some part of that explosion will reach the hull and possibly soften it up.
- a guided torpedo with a gravimetric warhead (modern single-target subspace detonator-equivalent) could be a warhead designed to strike against a gravimetric shield and temporarily cancel it out.
- a ship devoid of gravimetric barrier is vulnerable to 'tractor beams'-style equipment, thus being less mobile and easier to hit.
- railguns can be deflected away by the vector control of distortion fields and easily deflected away by gravimetric barriers, but if they directly connect against armor, they can prove devastating (especially considering they often carry anti-matter ordonnance). Extra punch can likely be justified on the finite ammunition (something SARP in the future wants to make a concern of).
- torpedo warheads, similarily to railgun projectiles, are also very powerful when striking directly against the hull. They are, however, still vulnerable to point-defenses to make up for their extra versatility.
- aether weapons are touted to be able to pierce through distortion shielding, but this is never represented. Under these guidelines, aether beams become very potent for their ability to ignore a distortion shield's bending effect, ensuring more precise long-range attacks.
I also think each respective defense system could have alternate features which would add to their gadgetry and offer useful alternatives to science officers. A few examples could include:
- Scalar Shockwave: Star Army ship shielding is supposed to have a scalar boundary which is in turn supposed to prematurely blow up incoming missiles. That never seems to happen, though, on the excuse that the torpedoes are shielded anyways. So, I figured a nice gimmick could be to voluntarily deplete the distortion shield in order to create a wide spherical shockwave that would have all incoming warheads prematurely blow up.
- Gravity Quake: Similar idea - expend the gravimetric shield in order to smash/repulse/knock away a nearby (likely approaching) space object. Might even hinder the FTL abilities of nearby ships (it might be a costly substitute to a graviton beam).
I look above, and I see a lot of text and ideas which may look overwhelming (holy wall of text, Batman!). I'll stop here. I'll just reiterate in parting that the point is more to set guidelines and conditions rather than focus on number crunching. This is new, and I could understand the conservatives balking, but at this point I'm starting to feel it's very important to eliminate as much number crunching as possible. Denoting possibilities, options and expected consequences is likely something that has a much stronger place in a freeform roleplay such as ours is meant to be.
