Approved Submission [Mechanic] Damage Rating Revision

Submission arguments, please. Though I appreciate @Syaoran also speaking up too.

@Doshii Jun I think the impasse things are at now makes it difficult to actually talk about the system itself. If the system becomes mandatory for submitted articles people are going to want it to change. However if it's not mandatory for submitted articles, people are going to be fine with leaving it and just making a new system that includes the compromise drawn up last night. So I think that's pretty much what people are sitting on the edge of their seats for, knowing that decision.

Here's the way it usually works:

1. Someone with an idea makes a wiki article
2. The article is submitted for approval in this forum.
   
3. Everyone gets a chance to make suggestions to make it better - these are posted in the submission thread, not edited into the original creator's article without asking him.
4. A staff member decides whether the article should be approved.

I think there would have been less fighting about this if the changes that people made to it had actually been suggested to Fred instead of just editing it. The lack of communication created this problem, and communication can fix it.

Note: If you make WIP articles in the WIP namespace, it is against the rules for people to change your WIP article without asking you.

Wes I'm pretty sure the one who made the edits was Eisth, someone who was editing the wiki page along with Fred before submission. It's not like the group went in and just edited things willy nilly. They talked to Eisth who was part of the project. I just want to make that clarification.

Edit: I realized how one sided this sounds. So I'd like to also add, that yes Fred was not informed about these changes. But it was not in an effort to circumvent him but rather Eisth was the conveniently available person and everyone was under the impression that it was a group project.

MFW Reverted:
Here's the deal. Prime players in SARP, I'm talking FMs, GMs, and active contributors, got together and talked to each other, then came up with a system we actually were comfortable with. We are not talking about a system we were 'okay' with, we're not talking about a system that we'll tolerate, we're talking about a system where we had no real objections and felt pretty good about the way things were covered. We collaborated, as a community, working through jaded opinions and general misgivings about the way OOC systems are handled as a whole in our setting, and we made something good. We did this together, with someone who was fully acting in the spirit of community. Eistheid did something good, bringing together people to help work on what he was collaborating with Fred on, Eistheid did what any good designer should do; think of the userbase, and that is exactly what happened, and it was wonderful while it existed.

Now, with a push of a button, and two rapid-fire opinions, the combined efforts of FMs, GMs, and contributing players who would be directly impacted by this system have been rendered moot. Needs of those who must be served by this proposed system have been outright ignored, and honestly it is insulting, and aggravating. There are holes in the way the system is being presented now in its reverted state, creating excess ambiguity for many of our setting assets, mainly those assets that are not on the grand space-opera stage. Folks that actually use our setting elements were thrilled at having a fuller more robust system in place, now, that momentary flash of enthusiasm has been snuffed out.

As a faction manager, I feel it is my duty to outright state that I will boycott a system that will leave players and GMs once again left holding the bag, a bag filled with useless and non-viability.

Syaoran said:

@Doshii JunI think that's pretty much what people are sitting on the edge of their seats for, knowing that decision.

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Fair enough.

In that case -- and after hearing from Eis privately -- this thread is locked while it undergoes review.

At the request of the submitters, this submission is returned to "new" status for further tooling.

Review is suspended.

Thread remains locked.

Submitters want the thread unlocked after all, so have at it.

Resuming work on this. The article is currently being worked from Eistheid's work in progress, before rollback.
Part of the effort is giving Eistheid the benefit of the doubt since he's earned that with his past contributions to this, and heeding, though in hindsight, something @CadetNewb tried to impress to us the last time this was in discussion.

The original version had a solid foundation and balance focused on PC and GM interaction with it. There are problems with the expansion done to the system, and that featurebloat needs to be balanced and fixed in the interest to maintaining a good foundation. It takes more than throwing vegetables in boiling water to make a good stew.

Well, we're going to try and fix that.

My objectives, basically my current ambition for this DR system are:
a) Though the classes were numbered, I was hoping that the weapons, in their articles (and even ICly) might be refered by their labels. "The LASR is mainly a light anti-armor weapon, though it's actually much more effective on soft-targets". I liked that we had the Light, Medium, Heavy Anti-something going on. Adding the "Very" for extremities on a 5-slot range per category for each of the new outliers is the current fix I intend to implement for that. More wordy than I'd like, but it doesn't look like it can be helped.

I was hoping people would eventually come to refer the weapons by their classification names and then figure out any differences in regard to the target's defense easily in their heads rather than go for the colder "Class4 vs Class6; less damage than a potential killshot".

b) One thing I was kind of proud the WIP DR system did was that it made infantry more relevant on the battlefield next to power armors. In my eyes, that was a huge boon, which made feedback like "you're throwing infantry under the bus" didn't resonate with me at all. How many instances of bullets killing people do we need anyways?

But the fact is that someone with a gun could do something to a Mindy, rather than just assuming the Mindy is invincible. and scenes like a whole police force with rifles tearing chunks out of Robocop's armor would've been a possibility.

By widening the sample size of each category, there was much more chances that the outliers would encounter ineffectuality. The lethality table could be expanded, but it still didn't feel like much of a compensation. If not compensated for, it'd make the people wanting more attention on infantry weapons actually shoot themselves in the foot.

Here is the changelog of what was done with this thus far:

• Considering the LASR is no longer an Heavy Anti-Personnel weapon, the example that it was a high rate of fire weapon that did lower than expected damage was removed since it did not seem relevant anymore.
• fixed tables so that content would align to the left, rather than be centered (it was all over the place before so I standardized). Except Comparative descriptions - more work will come for that later.
• Fixed a link name, the name refered to a Lorath craft, while the link was directed to the weapon, and it was a weapon example.
• Changed most textual references to class to match that of the table (the Plumeria's main gun is not Class 11, but Class 17). Running assumption is that 5-sample categories are "Very Light, Light, Medium, Heavy, Very Heavy"

Present concerns:
The examples currently listed for weaponry feel a little arcane. The jargon and racial names involved doesn't strike me as newbie friendly, and there are kind of a lot. For example, I'm wondering if the entries in Class 1 for the two listed weapon shouldn't read as "concealable laser pistol", "light pistol" which each leading to the appropriate wiki article as an example for the weapon. It's likely to be more evocative than "Little Killer" and "Liberator".

I'm thinking that the weapon examples ought to be reduced to 3 maximum. Preferably, different types of weaponry should be showcased. For example, it doesn't feel like there's much point in putting two nepleslian slugthrowers to me when I could stick to the most common/recent slugthrower of the two and throw in a Lorath energy weapon.

There are some items slipping in out of their categories. The Demon in Class5, the Outrider Armored Car in Class8... these feel more like exceptions than examples. I kind of picture the Outrider's entry specifying that as a vehicle, it has a much thinner veneer of armor than usual vehicles for X reasons. As for the M1 Demon, it's something that I'd prop up to replace the no-longer-in-use Harpy armor in Class 6. The Golem Assault armor is in two places at once too. Seems more apt to let the power suits rule the top of the anti-personnel category.

So, some straightening out for examples is still necessary. Some standard needs to be built in that regard for consistency, at the very least. The more you raise the detail level, the more homework required for it to be a good foundation.

A lot of the initial comparative examples for the personnel weapons feel like they ought to have been handled in the explanation of lethality instead. A very light anti-personnel weapon is already going to kill someone hit in the right place, but there seems to be a want for visceral examples of what to expect. It's not a bad idea to give it to them, but putting that one in the class list muddies the waters, I think.

As for the lethality table, we went from 15 to 21 classes, which is 140% of what we started with. The lethality table is a 4-step difference, 150% of that would be a 6-step difference. I'm not sure 4 steps were absolutely necessary, so we could perhaps go on a range, 1-2, 3-4, 5-6

Perhaps it'd be the better place for comparative examples? We have two unit types that we could use for example: the M6 Daisy and the Plumeria - both have ample space above and below them, and they're very identifiable.

For the Daisy, it could go from:

I presently count Light damage as 12.5% of what should have been a killshot, medium as 25% and heavy damage as 50% of a killshot.

For the Plumeria

And to draw from DocTomoe's work to make it clear for unprotected people:

Another point of alarm for me is regarding the listed materials in DocTomoe's examples. I find them inconsistent, for one, based on where they've been positions, and feel they need more looking into for consistency. I did not a trend, though:

From what I'm observing, there's three kind of armor being referenced through the table:
Durandium, which is implied as light, and penetration through it appears ludicrously easy despite it being armor. It's like there's no room for a bigger power armor to carry durandium plating - it's unfeasible to have a Devastator with 30 cm of durandium plating. Durandium is certainly light, but it's not that bad. It should be good enough to serve as ship hull armor - there are those out there - and a durandium window ought to be able to take -some- effort to be breached through by a power armor.

Nerimium, is the heavy armor. Nerimium seems the favored value for decently armored power armor with a noticeable sweet spot on the heavy side of the power armor category. Nerimium is essentially an awkward bias toward Nepleslian equipment. The previous DR sysrtem espoused more faction neutrality there.

Then, there's the exotic Zesuaium, which shows up early on the Vehicle category at the kind of thickness that'd go well on power armor.

That's three tiers of material, but there isn't just those. The distinction essentially for a "light, dense, super-dense" types of armor. Saying with material types fits as what, and then using the type for reference might make it a more faction neutral reference.

You already know my preferences already for materials and that as long as they were used as armor that they'd be all equal in efficacity aside from evocative qualities... so, no need to harp on about it. At the very least, durandium needs to become a more relevant type of armor from power armor to ship level. Not allowing for that would be an oversight to the level of a retcon, considering there are durandium armored vessels that can take some beating in the setting.

It's my determination that the use of lighter materials need to be protected so that it remains relevant across the board.

To that end, I referred to the previous DR system for reference (people were fine with that, so, it seems a good basis to draw inspiration from). As for material thickness, the previous DR system altered Structural Point values by a multiplier which was:

We could base ourselves off that, as in:
for every 10mm of durandium, 8mm of nerimium/yama-dura, or 6mm of zesuaium/yamataium would do about the same job.
We could shorten the comparative description to stick mostly to penetration values, note it in durandium as a standard, and then make a short table of materials perhaps listed as light, dense, super-dense similarily to here: https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=guide:damage_rating#armor_modifiers
(I think going by density might be better, because the language for light, medium, heavy is already taken elsewhere)

The gap is much less wide, but the material quality that DocTomoe seemed fond of is still maintained to a degree too. If a Star Army ship runs low on resources and need to rearmor their broken Daisy power armor with cheaper durandium, they're going to need to have it 25% thicker to achieve an equivalent result. If not, well, the GM could rule on the fly that the armor is less effective than the norm for the Daisy.

. . .

So, at the moment, the changes planned to the article are as alluded to above.

Right now, I'm researching both real life examples and in-SARP examples of how thick the outer cover of planes, tanks, submarines, cargo boat/tankers actually are so we can build a credible basis for armor thickness, and then cross-reference with the expected penetration efficacity of weapons. If you have examples and references to offer and want to submit them here, that would help.

It's important to note - I'm not sure all of you realized it - that this system focuses on killshots per use rather than "Damage per time interval". I'm going to make an evocative example for you:
An Hostile and its primary weapon, the HPAR, are both in the same class at the moment. It means that with a single shot to the chest or head, an Hostile can kill another unshielded Hostile. With a single trigger squeeze aimed at the head, an HPAR will still swiftly take down another shielded Hostile. I want to make sure you're aware of that distinction as the system currently presents it, and I would ask the people invested in Nepleslian tech if it is desirable to have, say in wargames, battles between Hostiles be so decisive. Is it really how it's GMed/adjuciated, or would this kind of shootout last longer?

If it is not, then I'd point you to the Lethality table and ask how much damage it ought to do. Per shot. And keep in mind the firing rate of the HPAR. How much abuse should an Hostile be able to take from an HPAR?

At first glance this looks incomplete, so maybe it'll flow better when it is finished.

Right now it looks like you'be added a bunch of mechanics with nebulous benefits. It's like you replaced Pandemic's card draw system with that of Twilight Strugle. With game mechanics less is more.

I can only mention that I agree. But people wanted it to be laden with more details, penetration values, did not want to abstract the materials a little more, and didn't seem to trust what I first came up with, seeing the immediate over-reaction it received. So, now there's more of the detail and complexity that they wanted - and we'll try to make it work. Benefit of the doubt.

Zack said:

At first glance this looks incomplete, so maybe it'll flow better when it is finished.

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You might have missed it, but the literal first line of the post above yours says:

Fred said:

Resuming work on this. The article is currently being worked from Eistheid's work in progress, before rollback.

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I should hope that makes it clear, that this is in fact at present back in a work in progress state, to try and adapt the changes requested by the community.

Zack said:

Right now it looks like you'be added a bunch of mechanics with nebulous benefits. It's like you replaced Pandemic's card draw system with that of Twilight Strugle. With game mechanics less is more.

Click to expand...

This has made me realize that I made a mistake when creating this thread, since this proposed DR revision is in no way intended to be a hard set of rules or mechanics that must be adhered to in roleplay. There is no statement of, "You must according to these rules" instead it serves to illustrate that if you shoot X with Y this is the sort of result you are likely to expect. It is a framework of guidelines to help players and GMs understand what often exotic, and ridiculously powerful weapons or systems achieve.

This is intended to allow someone to understand roughly what will happen when they use a piece of the setting's vast body of equipment, instead of having to sit down and work out the math of how a matter/anti-matter charge will affect a power armor clad in a material with little to no known aspects. We're a soft sci-fi setting, we're also here to write for fun, not write physics papers to determine the effects of our equipment every time we go to use it. To this end this is supposed to be a tool that allows players and GMs a means to easily and quickly reference what they could expect an offensive or defensive system to achieve.

To this end it is not intended to be thought of as a series of mechanics but rather as a set of guidelines and references to help the members of the community write combat when it comes up. After all not everyone has the time, or desire to dive into the academic sphere of physics both theoretical and confirmed.


For the moment, I'm a little burnt out so I'm not likely to be addressing most of the information proposed in @Fred 's latest post until at least tomorrow.

I will however mention that perhaps instead of "very heavy" and "very light" we use the terms "super heavy" and "ultra light" since I believe those are in use in reality and might be better fits for the flavor of the text.

Also I would like to emphasize that unlike the previous DR system there is no hard wall, or jump between the different steps of the table unlike the previous iteration. You no longer need to worry about PA being virtually immune to personnel scale weapons, and so on. They will be less effective due to being a few steps down from what the armor is rated to endure, but it is no longer a case where encountering a target from a different classification will make you completely ineffectual. Unless you're shooting at a 3+km starship with a 9mm pistol I guess.

Other than that I'll try to keep up with developments in this thread and will hopefully have the energy to properly contribute soon.

I do not see how this fulfills either of the stated objectives.

When it comes to not wanting to do the math, the exsisting DR system is far less complex and easier to use since it just requires addition and subtraction.

When it comes to helping players understand how their weapons work I do not see how 50% of expected damage would be better than dealing 4sp worth of damage in terms of being a useful abstraction.

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I also think it would be nice to have some concrete examples of what you are trying to fix with this. I know Mecha feeling weak is a big problem for a lot of people, but I suppose I haven't heard people complain about power armor being immune to hand weapons.

I have word suggestions to just throwing them out since you wanted to try to keep it to one word phrases. Instead of 'Very Light' it could be 'Fine' or something of the like. And For "Very Heavy" you could use "Intense".

Also while expanding categories does mean that fewer weapons will be tough enough to really hurt things in the 'category' above it. It will really help out Personnel vs Personnel, where right now at least to my understanding pretty much weapons are treated as simply 'light personnel weapon" or "Heavy personnel weapon" mainly because the lack of variety in armor.

As for what what exactly you want try to improve @Fred can you make a list that's a little more concise? Nothing you did wrong, just I wont have a huge amount of focus for a few days with everything I have going on, and I'm getting a little lost in bigger post. And since I bothered to comment in here with some negativity I'd like to at least leave some positive points before I stop commenting.

When GMs manage their plots, from what I've been told, they don't tend to bother with the SP hit point thing. They'll go by feeling, and kind of deal with each hits by their own merit. I know tech submitters have a different take on this and apparently value the extra detail, but it's been my observation that in application, a lot of the detail gets glossed over.

Basically, the mechanics don't get used, or are willingly disregarded. The DR system and the people it should help don't get along all that well, but it still remains the 'submission tax' for NTSE articles.

So, the idea was to make something which was relateable, and would give GMs a helpful guideline which would then help them decide how to adjuciate. And by the same way, still give roleplayers an idea of how effective their tools were. Which is the why of the lethality table. Most of the people that commented here already admitted that the play-by-post format doesn't support game mechanics all that well. It's not how it works in real life, and it's not that relateable in the roleplay either. Someone being shot in the helmet is not -4 SP; it's part of a story.

I still give a percentile value for two reasons. The first is that people still want to be given an estimate. The other is that it might be helpful to people in regard to shielding "Shields down to 80%!"

but I suppose I haven't heard people complain about power armor being immune to hand weapons.

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I can just say that I have, multiple times. As I GMed my own plot, as justification for personnal shielding to be a thing in SARP, for GM whom have unarmored people and would like to use a power armor as somesort of 'boss' encounter, for wanting to validify mixed unit tactics and so forth.

Yeah power armor is actually a problem @Zack. It's not that big a deal for military plots, but for indie plots the old system it was almost impossible GM 'fairly' if a PA was present on either side of the field.

Also @Fred, at least in my GMing experience the reason the old DR system is pretty much ignored is because it's so hard to make heads or tails of it. I think things like the %s will come in handy for making the guidelines easy to understand the intended damage, and while they still wont be perfectly followed(cause no rule set ever is) it'll help keep the difference in performance between plots using the same weapon small.

About armor.

Here's the pickle. If we look at Durandium for what it is, aluminum infused with carbon nanotubes, we can easily assume that it has a strength somewhere between rolled homogeneous armor, and real-world composite armor. If we use this as a basis, the starting point of Durandium being used in the table places it at being defeated by a .50 BMG equivalent projectile. This is entirely in-line with real-world established fact for what a .50 BMG can penetrate in regard to hardened steel armor, and ballistic plate.

Moving up the line, we have Class 6. Wepaons in the Class 6 bracket include an anti-armor railgun rifle, a pulse laser array, and an assortment of other sci-fi tier goodies. Stating that these weapons can punch through 50mm (two inches) of real-world composite armor is a no-brainer.

Class 7, this includes the NSP, and the armored infantry combat-oriented LASR. Here's the deal, what I've seen in RP is that a heavy-setting NSP is a hard-hitter, able to reliably punch through PA plate armor, and, has even been used to maim a TASHA when applying fire to the joints of the tank, the tank comprised of high-end materials such as Yamataium. Stating that it can reliably punch through 3 inches of aluminum and nanotubes is a given. (Perhaps the NSP Heavy should be bumped up a class), and this very matter is exactly why Nerimium makes the list at this point, at a quarter inch.

Once we hit class 8, we start getting into thickness comparable to real-world tank armor. Defense Vs. Offense here remains consistent, with a plasma rifle and a 30mm chaingun serving as examples of the hurt that is being applied. We know what a 30mm can do to 3 inch armor plate from real-world examples. If anyone reading this is unaware, google "brrrt".

I could keep going and going through this, but, it is going to end up being a major waste of my time and the time of anyone reading this. What I'm getting at, is that the listed armors and thicknesses are directly in-line with established canon, and real-world comparisons when possible.

What appears to be the issue, is that PA armor suddenly seems far less useful, and unfortunately its a simple truth that ever since PA have been de-escalated in power, that they have become prone to small-arms fire due to incorporating inferior armor in the form of durandium. Now, if someone were to write a durandium variation using zesuaium nanofibers, then we'd be on to something, but, that is not in line with current policy.

Now, about taking a beating, it is not about the armor material itself, but how it is applied. Ships sporting durandium hulls do what they do because their crews are not stupid enough to let opposing weapons fire hit at a 90' angle. Sloped armor, angles of deflection, supporting materials, powered hulls, these are the things that make durandium hulls viable and allow them to continue to be used in-setting in a useful way. There is no reason to worry about the established canon, because this is all in line to how things have been established, the way IC has played out for over a decade now in regard to how durandium armor is treated.

As for mechanics, stop, just stop. Keep it simple. What we have right now is a reference table, a guide, exactly what our damage rating system has always been meant to be. This reference table gives us a bearing on where things are in the lay of the land, in respect to other setting elements. At no point does this article ever say that anything is absolute... Well, aside from a 4-above weapon strike against a 4-below target, but that just makes sense. If people are worried about being able to damage class 19-21 ships, and structures, just refer to the comparative effects, and think about firing on the same spot to get a penetration in, or aim for spots on a structure that are not going to have a meter of zesuaium armor.

What the article in its current form stresses, is the importance of using the right tool for the job, and using the right method for it. It is not about stats Vs. stats, it is about comparative values, with a touch of subjective reasoning.

Subtracting 4sp from a target tells a player nothing about what their weapon has done. If you tell me I shot something and it did 4sp damage, I am going to have to look up the target, then compare the amount of damage done to that specific unit's statistics and then try to work out how much damage was done relative to the pool of sp. If on the other hand you tell me that a shot has done 50% damage, I can immediately imagine that the target is either half dead, or in a state where its structural integrity has been reduced by half. It is much easier to imagine that you have achieved half the needed result to kill or cripple a target than it is to understand what taking four points from an arbitrary pool has done. As it is written the player or GM needs to worry less about DR statistics, and instead can focus on portraying the state of the enemy based on what a weapon will achieve.

With the new system as it is written you do not need to do any math, since you don't need to preform calculations to determine concepts like half, or a quarter instead drawing upon experience. With how it is written a direct hit on a same Class target has the potential to kill it. A direct hit with a weapon one class below will be half as effective, so it is simple enough to assume you would need to fire twice as many times to achieve the same effect.

SARP is not a pen and paper game, we don't usually roll dice to hit, or subtract from player pools of HP when we get injured. Instead we write a story more akin to the flow of a book, where wounds are treated as wounds instead of subtracted points. As such it does not suit the medium to treat things as having hard crunchy numbers that you have to subtract to defeat a foe. We aren't looking to reduce SP to zero. We're looking to destroy or kill an enemy through our written actions.

As for what this is trying to fix, with the old/currently in place system most people cluster their submissions around PDR4/5, ADR5, or SDR5, because the way the DR system is presently written it lends to the impression that you need to have the most powerful system possible to have any effect. Especially clustering on the transition points between the DR scales. People wanted their infantry weapons to be able to do something against PA, so they all were clustered on the border since by the old rules only an ADR weapon could harm a PA. Similarly, in order to make PA a threat to ships at all, they had to cluster on the ADR/SDR border to allow them to have any sort of impact.

With the way things are presently written, there is no border between the classes, and a well placed shot from a weapon 2-3 Classes below can still be a viable threat even if it goes from PA to Infantry for example. To this end infantry with GP-1s could threaten a Mindy to a point where the Mindy pilot might die, where before it was written that a GP-1 would be unable to threaten a PA at all. This makes it clear that infantry can threaten PA, and upward it goes on the list. It is also important to note that with the eliminated barriers between the tiers of unit, even though a weapon might not pose a lethal threat, it could still potentially have an effect on a target. You might not be able to kill a Plumeria with a .50 cal, but you might be able to damage more sensitive portions of the ship such as weapons or engines. With how the old DR system was written is was implied that anything below SDR1 would have no effect on a starship.

Another issue with the old SP system is that with vehicles there was a huge issue where in something like a Maximus RUSE, doesn't even have 4x the sp of a Mindy... Given the size difference alone of the units it is hard to believe that the Nepleslian tank that is more heavily armored, and larger than the Mindy would only take a few more shots from a weapon that would rapidly kill a Mindy. The proposed system gives a better idea of the differences between units where before they were all clustered under the same section and allowed for little variation.

Is 80% any different from 8/10?

People ignoring the DR system seems to solve the problem of people wanting hand weapons to deal damage to power armors.

I also don't see how this system addresses people ignoring the DR system. If the problem is the DR system being too complex, using a more complex system is just going to make the problem worse.

Syaoran said:

I have word suggestions to just throwing them out since you wanted to try to keep it to one word phrases. Instead of 'Very Light' it could be 'Fine' or something of the like. And For "Very Heavy" you could use "Intense".

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Or how about, along those lines: Very Light could go to Negligible, and Very Heavy could go to Devastating.

I just really want to shout DEVASTATING when I attack something so let's just go go go