Fred's musing on Damage Ratings

[Soresu]

Thirded on the No hitpoints on bodies.

 

[phacon]

Well I have no current comment on this... though I am kind of suprised I missed it.

I am kind of worried though we get into arguments right now, so I am heistant to say more until I know where everyone is at. Well other than I pretty much like the current DR system.

Plus, I am kind of skeptic that people have the same idea as me as what I see as crucial areas that need improvement. Why suggest something when you know people are going to argue about it?

P.S. Sorry Fred, I don't mean to be downer on your suggestions. I am just really really jaded by past DR discussions.

 

[Wes]

I've been thinking about what personnel scale damage capacities to give characters for some time now, actually, and I support the idea. I don't think it's an exact science, but here's what I had in mind:

PDC 1 to 2: Small animals
PDC 2 to 3: Kids
PDC 3 to 4: Human/Nepleslian/Yamataian Adults
PDC 4: NH-29, with one point healed per round
PDC 5: ID-SOL and NH-27
ADC 2: NH-32 (Prototypes)
ADC 3: NH-28
ADC 6: Mindy M2-2A Power Armor (provided for reference)
ADC 10: Mindy M2-1H Power Armor or Daisy M6 Armor (provided for reference)

Personal damage ratings are primarily useful for determining how deadly a weapon is to NPCs. Damage can be reduced for hits other than direct hits.

 

[Ira]

Now I shall speak up. At first I was quite alarmed by the idea of "Hit points" but after reading what you just put up Wes, I am going to say I think the intentions are good.

The problem I see is people getting beat over the head with such a thing. In reality SARP needs ease of access, and this would be yet another chart people should have to read before they can get to posting.

Honestly, I do not even see why any of this is a discussion. SARP has other things that should be dealt with rather then the installation of a new DR system, or a hit point system.

What about updating the free-spacers? Or recruiting new players? Those are things needing to be addressed, not the DR system.

 

[Toshiro]

Wes, I think that if that is to be discussed, it should be branched off in another thread, because, as I said before, it has absolutely nothing to do with what Fred proposed.

That said, I can't begin to tell you how much I dislike the idea, because it takes the fate of characters themselves that much more out of the player's hands -- even the players who fairly take damage.

Player damage and death should stay 100% narrative. If a GM wants a character to die, they should keep doing so the old fashioned way.


Besides -- half of what you have there personnel-wise is almost never played, but is just NPC fodder, and the PC-class bodies are clustered around the same general values. It's just not necessary.

All this chart really tells me in relation to PC-grade bodies is "The various human knockoffs are comparable", "Nekos regenerate", and "ID-SOLs and NH-27 take a bit more punishment". These are things that are all well known and are already handled quite well.

 

[Fred]

I already made my opinion known on assigning hit point values in SARP. I think it's carrying the system too far - especially considering the nature of our community being a forum-based one and as a freeform roleplay.

I'm going to steer the discussion away from hit point values on people now. It'd be nice if the rest of you kindly followed suit.

To answer Nashoba's previous question, as far as starships went I thought things would turn up fine. In my opening posts, I already elaborated at length on that and there appears to be plenty of variation there.

If we pick a more familiar example the Plumeria-class which you Nashoba are greatly familiar with your Aeon, you end up with:

One Anti-Capital Ship beam weapon,
Two Anti-Starship frontal railguns,
Four Anti-Starship turreted cannons,
a bunch (11?) of Anti-Mecha smaller turrets.

...eww. I can't help but feel the Plumeria is a bad example now, seeing how it's overarmed for it supposed to being a big-single-gun-speed-demon, but I'll keep going.

The Aeon with that has a single large weapon capable of delivering major hurt to capital ships considerably larger than itself. It also is liable to be extremely damaging to other starships more within its size class. It's a beam weapon, so, it travels space quickly and it doesn't require anykind of ammunition.

The positron railguns are the secondary ship-fighting-oomph the Aeon has. Any good hit from those could deal sizeable damage to an opponent (akin to how a human hit with a knife would be hurt - flesh wounds in some places, graver wounds in others, and potentially fatal in choice spots). The weapon is mounted so it has a focused front firing arc. It's ammo dependent and that means limited shots, but that probably means more power that can be focused to other systems.

The anti-starship turrets pretty much have the same role. They just swivel and turn. Personally, I think they don't belong on a Plumeria gunship as they throw the credibility of the other weapon choices out of whack... but I'm not the one whom approved of it (I think the only turrets the Plumeria should've have added ought to have been anti-mecha only).

The anti-mecha guns are weaker, but under the proposal I made, they aren't useless against starships. Sure, they're best used on point-defense against incoming mecha since that is after all their roles - but if fightercraft (which are mecha units) can have the payload to deliver attacks on select targets on a starship (destroy weapon turrets, destroy sublight thrusters, etc...) then a starship's anti-mecha weaponry isn't all that obsolete against another ship - just not as decisive.

...

So, you've got a bunch of weapons here of various roles, whom all seem to have distinct purpose, despite damage values being narrowed down to roles. Their descriptions again spice things up, within the realm of common sense - of course. That, however, is just one of the nice things that give submissions their identities in SARP.

* * *

According to Doshii - and I'm not sure why he didn't share it - there are some nuances in the anti-personnel scale. Those felt more important to him than they did to me... but he's a gun-nut and I'm mostly uniformed of firearm specs.

In regards of firearms, something that went: pistol, rifle (or pistol with AP rounds), and rifle with AP rounds. He feels the difference is important when taking bodyarmor into account (bodyarmor might stop bullets, might not stop armor-piercing rounds, and the wearer will still bleed profusely if knifed).

Personally, those things I initially waved away as 'the GM with interpret that on the fly if he chooses that matters' - the fluff descriptions are for that kind of evocative imagery after all. but I'm not sure of how strongly you feel about that, and how you think it'd be better to be implemented.

* * *

Finally, to the detractors, things are not fine. There wouldn't be 8+ supporters to change if something wasn't amiss with the present DR system. At the very least, it does not represent mecha units adequately, but I don't feel as the system is that just slapping another 5-points DR grade is going to solve things. Any fix there needs to be more than just a lazy patch up. Not all mechas are not quite five times as powerful as the best power armor, and the best mecha five times weaker than the smallest starships.

Me personally, I felt going away from numbers and leaning more on evocative imagery made a stronger case than trying to rigidly iron all of this out. It certainly seemed to help with the unit scale issue - as perceptive common sense of a GM would be more credible in the long run than arbitrary values.

 

[Zack]

Since this is a discussion on the DR system:

The two problems that adding a DR rating to bodies would address is PDR level weapons all feeling same-y and elaborating on how tough some bodies are in comparison to humans.

The difference between PDR3 and PDR 5 is essentially a pistol round putting you down and a pistol round almost putting you down. I think this difference would be fine for Nepleslians and Yamatain (or NH-29) bodies to have since a Yamatain body is more optimized to handle damage but isn’t really that much tougher than a Nepleslian body. That means that about the same amount of damage would nearly kill both, one would go into shock while the other would stay awake. Since we’re trying to give some differences between body types I think it makes since for Yamatains to have a few more DR over Nepleslians.

I would also like to see ID-Sols get closer to PDR 10 or so. ID-Sol are portrayed as massive creatures that can absorb a lot of hits but aren’t any more resistant to damage than regular humans. I feel the same way about the NH-27, that the warrior bodies should be at least twice as strong as the regulars. This would also serve to make a greater difference between PDR 3 and PDR 4-5 since you’d need 4 rounds of shooting from a PDR 3 pistol to put down an ID-Sol compared to 2 from higher end anti-personnel weapons like machineguns or sniper rifles.

Any ‘heal per round’ abilities should be removed. After all even with perfect regeneration you can only regrow an arm so many times before you run out of mass to use to regrow that arm. One per round (about every 10 seconds or so on average) is regenerating an entire person every minute which is even beyond some of the crazy wolverine regenerations. Right now I don’t think that the DR system is set up to handle regeneration, which would work better much smaller increments and perhaps a reserve DR pool to work well. I also think that this has the greatest potential for abuse by bad players, so it would be best handled as just a descriptor in the body page, Nepleslians bleed out, NH-29 don’t.


Also, keep in mind Tosh, that while you may know the differences between these very well new players will not. Naturally, when a new race is introduced, you won't know what to expect from them anymore than anyone else.

---

As for Fred’s suggestions.

The way forward isn’t to wipe out the system we’ve been working on with a more ambiguous system that does not provide real benefits over the old system. I’m not really interested in seeing all starships falling into two classes: Big and small, or all power armors becoming the same. I’m not interested in an extremely ambiguous system for determining how damaging that last hit was, or towards something that further nerfs the Aether Shock Cannon which should be one of the instant-kill if you’re not shielded weapons anyways.

By continually replacing systems, we’re just playing musical chairs with our problems. Simply removing a lot of the differences between weapons just blands out the setting. When you consider that tank and aircraft submissions don’t have the same problems as Mecha, and that power armors are supposed to be able of going toe to toe with tanks, there really is no reason for mecha users to complain other than being upset that they can’t have overpowered units. After all they can always move into the starship scale if they really want. I would rather see us target and remove problems in the current system without destroying what we’ve made already.

One of the big problems with the difference between ADR and SDR is that ADR is breaks things and SDR breaks planets. If we want to get rid of a lot of the gripes in the system (as well as make ground combat more viable) I’d rather see SDR being brought down in effectiveness. After all, starships are supposed to be fairly lightweight and fragile. I’d rather see them having enough firepower to destroy cities at most, instead of planets, and I’d love to see the SDR scale opened up for use in more planetary submissions (like naval battleships, structures, ect) and the ADR scale opened up for starships (like a lightweight ADR 100 gunship)

 

[Toshiro]

I'd like to note that the reason tanks and aircraft don't have the problems of Mecha is because they are planet-based vehicles, and planet-based weapons typically deal less damage than space-based weapons. They simply function differently in the RP.

Because of this, it's to be expected that the problem not be as pronounced in ground warfare -- it doesn't mean it's not a problem.

 

[Zack]

A mecha is a planetary vehicle as much as a tank is. Units like the TASHA can operate in space and there are many dual role aircraft in the setting.

The only reason people complain about mecha, is because they want their mecha to be more powerful than everything else.

 

[Toshiro]

Rules which were written before the niche was widely explored, and are flawed because of it. As new things come into the setting, we have to be willing to revise things to fit. That hasn't happened with Mecha, which have a massive amount of internal space for power and weapon systems compared to a mostly hollow Power Armor.

It's alright to look at amending rules when there is justification for it, and I have a hard time believing the machine I'm making has seven times the mass of a Mindy, but has the same maximum firepower for each weapon.

 

[Zack]

Tanks and aircraft don't have this problem.

This is because power armors are supposed to carry anti-tank weapons. Mecha are larger so they have more DR and more room for weapons much like tanks which have much more DR and carry more weapons with power armor but are otherwise still in the same category. If you want your unit to have more weapons, add more weapons. If you want to have more powerful weapons then go up to the SDR scale.

I don't see how Mecha don't fit into the current system other than people whining that they can't have overpowered mecha.

 

[Aendri]

Except that you're being obtuse about it. For example, with Toshiro's new mecha, he wants to clearly show that it's got more firepower then a standard PA, but he doesn't want to sit there and give it a bunch of SDR2-3 weapons, because he thinks (and I agree) that would make it overpowered. So if nothing else, the issue with the current system is that something which is easily 2 or 3 times bigger then a PA, but is still completely dwarfed by ships, has to choose between being completely underpowered and being completely overpowered, because in the current system there isn't enough differentiation between the scales. What Fred's system does is it basically eliminates the smaller parts of each scale, and adds additional scales into the mix instead.

And your complaints aren't really valid about it eliminating any differences between the weapons within each scale, because the whole point of this switch would be to leave it up to narrative writing and GM discretion. There is still differentiation, it's just up to each GM to include it as it makes sense to them.

 

[Soresu]

What's the point of adding hitpoints to people when you already know a Neko can take ungodly amounts of punishment thanks to its 'hemosynth' and heal itself. A human being shot anywhere is generally bad, and we all know ID-SOL are big. Beyond this being another "my guys are tougher than your guys." thing, I don't see the point of adding points to people. Do we really want to have new people come in and start "Race Wars" like how we had arms races, tech races and so on in the past?

So before some of our more argumentative people come in and respond to this I will say this. SARP isn't Dungeons and Dragons. Starships, vehicles, PA and Mechs have ratings, but the only way I'd assign a person a DR rating without body armor or splint mail is if I am going to go into a dungeon and be looking for a Lich's Phylactery.

-----
The only problem I see with Fred's Idea is this, what stops people from saying, "Aether is king" or "Anti-Matter is god tier" or, "Railguns suck." etc etc?

 

[Zack]

So basically the mecha guys just want to have armor level weapons that are more powerful than everyone else's armor level weapons.

There is nothing wrong with putting the single large SDR scale weapon on units with ADR 20+, this is already done a lot anyways. After all the complaint is 'you have more space so you should have a bigger weapon' and SDR is a bigger weapon...

---

Having less options, or no options in the case of leaving everything up to people's whims, didn't work in the past and ended up causing a lot of the 'tech races' that people are complaining about since there were no limits on what could be done. Examples of this would be black hole guns, transposition cannons, Zesu, and a lot of SARP's dealings with the NDI (back before we had a standardized system). The better rules systems we've had in the mean time have always had more options rather than less, and simply gutting damage amount and vehicle toughness from the system does not seem like an improvement.

---

Finally we have DR ratings for everything else we want to shoot at, why not body types too? For all the complaints people have about what adding a DR system to something new will do, those issues haven't come up when we added the system to starships.

 

[Doshii Jun]

I draw the line at bodies. How many times do we have to repeat "This is not D&D?"

Wes, you can implement it if you want. Your sandbox. But you have more than half the site's most active players signaling displeasure with the idea. You really want to go down that road? You want to give into Zack again, when the rest of us not only don't like his idea, we vehemently oppose it? Besides which, giving bodies HP (especially how you've designed it) won't help submissions and it won't help the RP.

The best reason for you to avoid this, Wes, is that the DR system is optional. Most GMs ignore it anyway. Please don't go pissing off a bunch of us like this, OK? Please?

 

[Zack]

If you want to admit it or not, DR values have greatly contributed to improving RP through providing consistency and helping cap power players. It is logical to apply this to bodies too, since we like to shoot at those as much as armors, tanks, and starships. This will certainly help with people wanting to make their new races, better explain some of the new bodies coming out (Yamatai does make a new NH-series every year or so), and help cap power players.

The only downside I see is people wanting to go back to the free-for-all style we got rid of back in the day because it was bad for RP.

 

[Fred]

Uso, it's not an issue of admission - it's an issue of preference. Many people feel that adding hit points to people further exarberate one of the perceived flaws of the Damage Rating system, making it overshoot the mark even more and compromise its nature as a freeform forum roleplay.

Sorry, but by this point you no longer have the credibility of saying "I'm right, you're wrong" in your arguments. Maintain an opinion favorable to it if you'd like, but don't knock down the views of others - they're as valid as yours are, as they are equal participants to this forum community. Respect that.

I've scant time to really touch on this more because I'm on break at work, but one thing occured to me: going for wider, vaguer damage values wouldn't as be detrimental as it might've been in the past simply on account of SARP being an older community and setting by now. DR system or not, it's grown enough so for me to hold faith that if such measures would be taken... it wouldn't be as bad as Uso implies it would be.

People grow, settings grow and that happened to SARP; the DR system might have contributed, but the level of its complexity is no great factor on it.

Uso, do me a favor: from this point on, drop people hit point. From this point on, accept that some people want some credence given to the greater scale of mecha and that's it is not going away - the reason this thread even exist is because many people are discontented with that very issue. Instead of playing ostrich-sticks-its-head-in-the-sand and ignore the issue, we're going to try and satisfy this.

If you can constructively help explore that avenue, it'd be appreciated. We're going to try to find a solution to it beyond a status quo "because as is should be good enough".

There's no need to get hung up on my 'proposed system' as long as the end result is functional and elegant. That's why we're talking about it.

 

[ShotJon]

First thing I am going to say is that I completely skipped last page. Since it is more or less Uso arguing and putting words into other people's mouth.

I am going to go back to the main point of this thread and that is Fred's idea. I must say I am all for it. Some argues that it makes all the things the same.

Well if you just take it as it is, that is true. It seems that shot in chest from .22 short and fifty cal does the same, since both are anti-personal? Well I would like to say it is not really like that. We have narrative way of playing, we also use common sense. I mean we are using all the time.

I just checked all my character that encountered combat. Some was personal grade combat, some was armour and one was mecha. And I would like to state that NONE of these plots used DR system. As the guideline at the most. I looked at it and said "Hey this is very familiar to what Fred is proposing." And wanna hear something? I had fun in all those battles. It was free-style narrative and I still had a sense of danger. But there were no number crunching.

For example I received one burst of Fire from Ripper and my Daisy's shields were down? While with DR system it would need 10 seconds of constant fire to even damage that (which is pretty stupid and un-fun). How so? Because GM took narration and fun over math and it worked. So it seems what I am trying to say is that way of playing similar to what Fred is proposing is already in use! And it works!

Oh and i would also want to say two more things. Wes already says that want DR system in tech submissions and other then that GMs are free to use whatever they please (but seriously who uses DR system more as a guideline at best?).

Oh and one other thing. Hit Points in narrative style roleplay are bunch of bollocks. They really are. What comes next? Hits in head does double damage? Groin shots stuns you? Like I said. Bollocks.

 

[Zack]

I'm providing examples of what I am talking about, and I'm generally right when it comes to rules issues. For example, when I predicted that during the last round of speed nerfs that Fred proposed that Yamatai GMs would give their ships higher speed values than everyone else (especially if the other ships in the setting were converted first).

People complain that the DR system will lead to us playing DnD, and quite frankly that hasn't happened, nor has predictions that the DR system would remove the freeform aspects of the site.

Consider that the mecha scale was rejected once for a good reason and that we might get some use from the PDR scale if we put it to use.

 

[SSharp]

Uso.

No.

----

My opinion hasn't changed. I feel that the DR system is lacking. I didn't really care for it when I was a Tech Mod and -- past making sure someone wasn't trying to make a SUPEROMGPLANETBLASTER -- ignored it.

Ignored it because it isn't actively used in roleplay BECAUSE of its failures.

If we aren't using it, why keep it? And if it's broken and we want to keep it, why can't we fix it?