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Approved Submission [Mechanic] Damage Rating Revision

Eistheid

Inactive Member
Retired Member
Submission Type: Narrative driven damage guidelines.
Submission URL: https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=fred_s_damage_rating_revision

Notes: Much of default the form doesn't really apply since this isn't a typical setting submission. I hope you don't mind me removing those components.

This is probably going to take some work to get finalized. I will however be more than happy to fill in blanks and update this as we go along. Additionally post-approval I'll be happy to update old DR values as needed, likely including both systems for a while to smooth over the transition.

A final note, the article will probably need to be moved to a new page location as I believe the current one is just WIP storage.

As has been determined the final call of what is done comes down to GM fiat. As such it is best to view this as intended: A set of guidelines to help players and GMs understand the effects of what they're working with rather than hard rules that must be adhered to.
 
This suggestion has been implemented. Votes are no longer accepted.
It's clear to me that this system is utterly failing in smoothly bringing a responsible transition to itself.

Hope that was not too hard of a bludgeoning.
That transition ultimately falls to me, as I'll be the reviewer.

The bludgeoning could have been worse.
 
@Eistheid
So, if we go with the table I thought up of yesterday, do you think there's some potnetial to avoid conversion headaches?

PDR1 (old) - Class 1 (new) - Light Anti-Personnel
PDR2 (old) - Class 2 (new) - Medium Anti-Personnel
PDR3 (old) - Class 3 (new) - Heavy Anti-Personnel
PDR4 (old) - Class 4 (new) - Very Heavy Anti-Personnel
ADR1(old) - Class 5 (new) - Light Anti-Armor
ADR2(old) - Class 6 (new) - Medium Anti-Armor
ADR3(old) - Class 7 (new) - Heavy Anti-Armor
ADR4(old) - Class 8 (new) - Very Heavy Anti-Armor
ADR5(old) - Class 9 (new) - Light Anti-Vehicle
ADR5+(old) - Class 10 (new) - Medium Anti-Vehicle
ADR5+(old) - Class 11 (new) - Heavy Anti-Vehicle
ADR5+(old) - Class 12 (new) - Very Heavy Anti-Vehicle
SDR1(old) - Class 13 (new) - Light Anti-Starship
SDR2(old) - Class 14 (new) - Medium Anti-Starship
SDR3(old) - Class 15 (new) - Heavy Anti-Starship
SDR4(old) - Class 16 (new) - Very Heavy Anti-Starship
SDR5(old) - Class 17 (new) - Light Anti-Capital Vessel
SDR5+(old) - Class 18 (new) - Medium Anti-Capital Vessel
SDR5+(old) - Class 19 (new) - Heavy Anti-Capital Vessel
SDR5+(old) - Class 20 (new) - Very Heavy Anti-Capital Vessel

...then just set lethality, and leave it to GMs to fudge things if they like with all the other variables. Besides, it's been a trend to have GM of a faction have thier toys perform slightly better than another factions toys, so seeing a NAM HPAR not tear holes in a Daisy wouldn't exactly surprise me.

I don't like the Light, Medium, Heavy and Very Heavy terms because having only one 'very' makes it feel uneven... but old SARP articles had very little 'light' weapons and most were 'very heavy' to 'total annihilation' (I'm serious)... so I guess that fits.

Maybe lethality should be a term changed in favor of just penetration or an appropriate synonym. That way it leaves a GM the freedom to decide if a wound just happens to ruin the armor or go deeper to cuase internal damage (KFY power armors, for example, could have their framework and inner insert take damagedfirst even while expressing the unit's been shot up badly). That'd give people like Cadetnewb the leeway of retaining credible portrayal while satisfying people like Koenig whom want to make sure an element remains competitive - especially one like the HPAR which seems to reflect very heavily on the quality of the Neplelsian Star Military.

* * *

@Koenig808 your HPAR is still Heavy Anti-Armor, and consideration is being put into keeping it so. The only thing I see that would knock it down by contrast would be a weapon on an even heavier Nepleslian armor (like the Devastator) with a weapon that would be obviously better than the HPAR but still not Class 10. And to this caveat I'd mention that nothing to that effect has leapt to my eyes so far. Besides that, the whole idea of making it lower to account for its rate of fire being sufficient to destroy the same kind of target has been dropped, to preserve its credibility as the badass anti-armor weapon you have stressed it should be.

I would also mention that you did not participate in the thread before this one, where this revision was shown to the community and met with favorable reception. This is not a condemnation - simply fact - but it remains that there was a community effort involved, and later the result was what was presented in this thread. You have aired your disagreement and framed it as a community effort, but there was no way I would - or should have - immediately caved in. There was a revert, I had the chance to touch base with Eistheid, and since then it's been several pages that there's been effort to meet preferences aired at least halfway.

This effort is not one made to make me, or the guys whom already liked the revision concept happy. It's still being done for other people.

Also, as a sidenote, I'd like to point out I think it was classy of you to not let raised hackles here have anykind of IC impact in what little roleplay we had in the IRC thread.
For that, I thank you.

* * *

Nice post, @Syaoran. Though still not my preference, it shows this is worth more looking into. If I may ask, how do you feel about the 4-steps I again brought up to Eistheid? Is this still workable in your eyes in terms of having enough variety for the edge cases you spoke of? As I said before, the advantage I find to it is mostly on level of conversion.
 
@Fred
I'll be honest, I'm a little wary of utilizing 'cross over' sections even if it is just to ease conversion. One of the biggest issues with the present system is that most weapons tend to want to sit on one of those points, PDR5/ADR1 and ADR5/SDR1 because I guess it is a psychological thing encouraged by the present DR system. I worry that by having 'transition' points in the scale that people will once again cluster upon those points as a 'sweet spot' in the system which would further the issue of having polarized weapons. This is assuming that for some reason they don't just label the weapon by its intended purpose...

This does curiously inspire the idea of assigning class only to the part of the weapon that actually interacts with the target, for example the ammunition. So in a high ROF weapon you would have it labelled by what the "bullet" alone would kill, and possibly detail in the article fluff that it is used against whatever target pleases the writer. To this end it would help ease the confusion between "usual target" and what it will reliably kill. I say this because I'm still of the opinion that weapons are designed to kill targets based on what a single shot will achieve and that volume of fire is merely an aid to ensure that the target is destroyed. Rather than designing a weapon that relies on its ROF to achieve any effect on the target at all.

Moving on to adapting the scaling... From the way I was looking at it, I was actually sort of enjoying using something vaguely analogous to 1/5 steps. The initial exploration was 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, 20%, 0% with it scaling in the opposite direction as well, admittedly this was a much more gradual transition than the original one so I modified it. What I found was that if you keep going from four steps to five, things weren't too bad. At present we go from 100% to 50%, 25%, and finish off at 12.5% from there I considered adding on 6.5% instead of dropping to nothing seemed like a decent way to give a bit more breathing room before weapons became ineffective. This worked for me, I'm not sure if it would be agreeable to others though. (Conversely it would increase from 100% to 150%, 200%, 300%, 450%, using a multiplier of 1.5 except for the conversion between 150 to 200)

Given that I see the lethality scale as not only reduced damage, but also sort of a 'probability' I would as a GM consider that a weapon might have a rough 6.5% chance of dealing notable damage to a target with intelligent use in a scenario. To this end if the player is using their weapon intelligently, I might decide to write that they 'got lucky' and managed to damage a much larger foe with a smaller weapon. Though this would depend on circumstances...

This was however just an option I considered, I'm not sure how it would appeal to others...

As for the way of handling lethality/armor penetration, I would have to say that it would probably be best that the others comment on that, since for me I would assume that it would be up to the GM to decide if the circumstances would allow for a potentially lethal shot to work out. There are so many variables, not even addressing the narrative needs of a GM to consider that in my opinion that would obviously be left to GM fiat. I'm honestly not sure what changing the language would do, since they seem fairly interchangeable to me, but if it would please the GMs and FMs, then modifying the language would be a simple step to take.

To this end, I feel I should mention that I only added elaborations to the lethality and armor sections of the article as an attempt to follow the game developer creed that when something seems obvious to you, it isn't obvious enough, so you have to make it even more apparent to the player, or in this case potential GMs. I suppose I would rather over explain and let GMs decide whether they want to micromanage aspects, rather than leave things ambiguous and have people complain that they don't understand, or come away with the misconception that something is either useless or too powerful. Basically it is better in my opinion to have information discarded as obvious, than leave people to make avoidable mistakes.

As for the terms, I felt that going from "ultra light" to "super heavy" fit since it was vaguely in parallel to the classifications of items in real life. Though with the personnel scale I might argue that going from something like "unarmored" to "anti-materiel" or something might work, but I'm uncertain on that and it would mean that only the PA and vehicle sections share terms. So I don't know how viable that is.

None of this is very firm, and is largely just ideas at the moment. So feedback and corrections would be appreciated if possible.
 
@Fred To get something clear I am technically 'okay' on a personal level with 3 4 or 5, if this was a fresh RP with no history I would recommend 4. But since this does have history and formerly used a 5 point system it's just easier on the conversion process and familiarization if a 5 point system is used.
 
@Syaoran
Actually, like I've been telling Eistheid, the most faithful conversion would be going by 4. My original revision concept reduced this to 3 (I mostly felt people varied between 'plain', 'near best in category' and 'best in category', a.k.a. DR1~3, DR4 and DR5) whereas what was requested by some people in this thread was to increase that by two.

If you look at the current second-gen DR system, you can see how it converted across categories.
https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=guide:damage_rating#conversion
You had PDR1 through 4, and then PDR5/ADR1 were basically the same. Then again up with ADR2 thorugh ADR4, and then ADR5 was the same as SDR1.
It's why I had brought up the 4-sample one.
Because there had always actually been four and then the crossover point which was just called different things from the perspective of the category itself. But before, it was really hard for anything in a different lower category to even scratch something in the next higher one, whereas in this third-gen concept, it's how big the difference is rather than the category that actually helps define what can hurt what. The categories are effectively fluff text to help organize what is where in our heads.

I don't think the bundling up Eistheid is concerned about will happen all that noticeably beyond straight conversion; especially considering it's the difference between target and means of attack which plays a role in helping determining a ballpark of what kind of damage to expect rather than the category.

Less obvious, though, is how resilient targets would end up being. Power armor went from 1 to 3 on the ADR scale, and tanks/fightercraft/shuttle held 4-5 in terms of ascending hitpoints. But now, power armor will have one extra category to grow into (seems fine for something like a devastator). Vehicles like tanks/shuttle would need to populate the four vehicle samples. Most ADR5 weapons would likely need to be considered to how far they might encroach into the vehicle category (many people seemed to feel ADR5 ceilinged too early for the vehicles they wanted to make).

It doesn't have to be four-samples. but transition-wise, I see advantages. Question is if those advantage are worth exploring over the advantages offered by the 3-or-5 item sample size.
 
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@Fred I know it was 4 and then cross over, but I'm not so much talking about which one is most accurate, but rather what numbers are already in people's heads. Of course this is just my opinion and all. But when I make things for IRC RP systems I tend to try and use mechanics or number patterns that the players already know just to make it easier on them to learn the new things.
 
That's a sensible argument, on top of what Eistheid already said. I guess I'll put my efforts back on making the 5 work rather than brainstorm for alternatives.
 
Okay, so, back to thinking about the 5-sample listing per category, there's one uneven thing that bugs me, and it's the ships. It doesn't follow the 5 formula the other categories do, so any range refered to by lethality gets kind of skewed there.

I know there was a complaint that there was initially more ships than what other categories offered and that it was even decried as unfair, but there was a method to the madness.

The first is that the starship and capital categories communicated a different environment and scale.
Starships is mostly dominated by the more common plotships: Chiakis, Yui scouts, Plumeria gunships. Light cruisers like the Urufu were chosen as the edgecase because leaping from the Plumeria to the Super Eikan seemed like too big a leap.

Then there are the capital vessels, and those represent plotships like the Heitan carriers, battleship like the Sharie, and heavy cruisers like the Super Eikan. You have fightercraft, a lot of crew, and to lighter vessels you're expected to be much harder to take down. There was also a feeling that weaponry kind of ceilinged early here too, so, having them scale more with a greater size of ship and adding one extra seemed to work out well.

Now, I see a few choices as to how these two upper categories might operate:
- Keep as 2 groups of 3 for a total of six. Discrepancy with the narrower lethality range here just glossed over even if it'll turn out being somewhat uneven compared to what is below.

- Keep it as 5 in a single category, going back to how it was layed out in the second-gen DR system.
1- Small Escorts and Patrol Craft
2- Light Destroyers, Gunships
3- Medium Cruisers
4- Heavy Carriers, Heavy Cruisers
5- Battleships

- Make it two categories of 5-samples each. Will scale well with the lower categories and references to lethality ranges will be consistent. Complaint that ship representation exceeds the other categories may again become a thing. I admit not being sure on how to populate 10 increments of starships - it might be too granular.

- Internally consider the 2 ship groups as a bigger 6-sample group that the category titles are mostly psychological, and that the lethality will probably still work out.

...

I think what bugs me about the 5/5/5/3/3 discrepancy is that I initially designed the lethality range to have a weapon be capable of doing something up to its analog in the next higher category. As in, back when it was 3/3/3/3/3, a Class 5 Medium anti-armor weapon would do light damage to a Class8 Medium Vehicle. It was 3 across. But for the 5 samples, the go-to image in my head is saying "if five, then it needs to go across to a similar label in the next upper category"; as in, from super heavy anti-armor to super-heavy anti-vehicle.

sidenote: it's starting to sink in that I really don't like Ultra Light and Super Heavy as terms. I first thought I was just used to Very Light/Heavy and tried to get used to it... but I'm growing to think I'm just not fond of it. I don't relate with Super Heavy all that much because early in SARP, damage went from Very Heavy to Total Annihilation. There are some mentions of super-heavy weapons (it usually showed up for positron weaponry for the SAoY and the SMX); I've never heard of Ultra Light before. "Very" is also one letter shorter than Super/Ultra.

Right now, a Class 15 Very Heavy anti-vehicle weapon would be able to go across to Class 20. It'd be able to lightly damage a Medium Capital Vessel. As the provisionary examples currently stand, it means that a Maximus heavy tank could use its turreted cannon to cause "very light" damage to a Sharie Battleship (it's not that I don't doubt that an anti-matter round could damage the hull so much as the scale of that damage be considered significant for contributing to downing a Battleship). The same cannon would be able to significantly savage the smaller ships.

This said, I'm totally cool with tanks being capable of hurting ships - I actually had something very similar in a simulation where Miharu's auxiliary ship - Hoshi - was making a pickup for a squad of power armors and it was important that they get to the extraction site within the allotted time because if they tarried, the NDI Diamondback tanks that were coming as enemy reinforcements would get into missile range, and it'd only take a handful of missiles to destroy a Kanzashi-class corvette like Hoshi.

As it stands, my worry is that anti-vehicle weaponry can actually do something credible to sink capital ships and that even the lighter armanent in ships made to kill small ships can put a sizeable dent in comparatively massive capital vessels. That's why the range going up to 5 as applied to other categories ends up feeling uneven at this point.
 
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Personally, I still favor 5 categories across the board, even for the two starship categories. It's a bit more granular, and I think you're right, we might not have an entry for all 10 spots, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Weapons will pretty much always have a wider spread of options than armor will, so I don't think it's a huge concern if one or two of the categories don't have an example. To slightly borrow from your example of part of why I think that would be a good idea... I think it makes sense that a tank could be a legitimate threat to the smaller classes, like frigates, corvettes, and so on, but a tank being a legitimate threat to the bigger ships just feels a bit silly. It's one thing for the vehicles to be legitimate threats to ships in general, but for smaller vehicular weapons to be a threat to the... Well, to steal the Honor Harrington term, but the "Ships of the Wall" just feels a bit strange. If they're mounting full on anti-ship weapons, sure, but a weapon designed to kill a fighter or tank shouldn't be doing much of anything to something designed to take punishment on that grand of a scale.
 
I'm also in favor of having two categories with 5 classes for starships in the aim of keeping their importance given how the lethality scales more broadly with the extra steps per categories now.

Currently, the only thing that gives me a notion of the scale between them is EVE online, and it takes quite a beating to destroy capital ships in subcaps. I'm not sure how the sense of scaling between subcaps and capships is supposed to be on SARP, since this new system considers battleships to be the capital ships of the setting

If the problem is still populating these categories, then this is the example I have to offer:

1- Gunships, Corvettes and Scout Ships
2- Smaller range escort ships such as frigates
3- the bigger range of escort ships such as Destroyers
4- Fast, light Cruisers
5 - Cruisers, battlecruisers and their equivalents

And now the capitals, assuming battleships count as these

6- Light end of the battleship scale
7- Battleships
8- Biger Battleships
9- Capital Vessels (flagships, I guess)
10- Space-Fortresses, even bigger ships
 
That's the other big comparison I tend to use mentally, Foxtrot, so you're not alone there. I think I'd clarify the 9s as more or less the Carrier range of weight, and the 10s as Titans, but everything else is pretty much dead on how I think of it.
 
Okay, let's explore 5-samples for starships and 5 more for capital ships. I'll need some time to wrap my head around that one, since it skews things that seemed to already work for Wes before. Even though the examples were provisional, I still feel we ought to have a benchmark Wes can agree to on submission.

Another thing I wanted to revisit:

Lethality, in the article, currently stands as:
4 Below Negligible (nothing significant)
3 Below Light damage (around 12.5% of expected damage)
2 Below Moderate Damage ( around 25% of expected damage)
1 Below Heavy Damage (around 50% of expected damage)
Equal Potentially lethal
1 Above Potentially lethal ( around 150% of expected damage)
2 Above Quite lethal (around 200% of expected damage)
3 Above Very lethal (around 300% of expected damage)
4 Above Assuredly lethal (instant destruction)

Following the idea that we commit to a sample size of 5 for starship and capital ship, it kind of feels like we nee dto finalize this 5-across thing with lethality.

Another thing I was thinking about was making potentially lethal damage not 100% of expected lethality, but a number lower than that that a GM can feel free to fudge in favor or not in favor of... and also perhaps a nice visual aid to how barrier damage could be interpreted.

...and then I tried to build a list for a total of five items above and below, and I was struck by the granularity of it. I kind of flung my hands in the air and gave up on it, but it doesn't stop that the information needs to be communicated. That it needs to be kept simple. But still needs to convey examples. Perhaps more "show" and less "tell". This article has a lot of "tell" already.

So, I revisit what's actually written in the wiki for Lethality here. Something that might replace the table.

So, striking a person with a weapon that comes equal with the defense it faces might cause a wound which, depending on what kind of wound it is, could be life-threatening. Then as the gap between weapon and protection leaves the latter wanting, this could get worse: from complete penetration and gaping wounds, to traumatic injuries like losing limbs, evisceration and such. At an extreme once the gap is five classes wide, you could expect incineration via energy weapon and explosively losing body parts via projectile trauma.

But a person is a soft target, at the bottom rung of our listing. What about spaceships?

Within a difference of 5 classes, ships can credibly sustain damage conductive to their destruction. From the lower edge cases, you might expect only nicks and scrapes on the hull as a result, but as weapons become more competitive against the target, you can expect causing more signifiant pockmarks and gouges, twists, tears and cratters into it... until the weapon's class comes equal with the vessel's representative class, where you can reasonably expect that landing a hit might cause a hull breach. Depending on where that hull breach happens, this could cripple the ship. Then as weapons become better and more lethal in comparison to the target, the damage gets worse: there could be compartment-wide damage, wide sections opening up to space, loss of major structural components on-hit, until we could expect a weapon rated 5 or above the target to destroy the vessel if it was hit centermass.

The message I wanted to get across was that the damage gets less worse the more the weapon is under the target's class, and the worse it gets, while showing that the range before ineffectuality/overkill is a 5 class gap. I also tried to include comparative description of the kind DocTomoe first introduced here.

Then, I was thinking about examples which might help build a better picture of this.

Example of an equal potentially lethal anti-personnel outcomes:

Joe and Steve put on their hockey masks and storm into the drug store, threatening the clerk with knives. The matronly woman behind the cash register though loses no time in fishing out a Little Killer - a small concealable pistol - and fires at Steve straight in the chest. The man collapsed limply with a muted grunt as Joe's eyes widened and he promptly made to flee the drugstore. The woman still managed to draw a bead on him and he felt burning pain flare across his shoulder before he made it to the exit.

It was only once he reached the relative safety of an alley that he stop to look at his shoulder wound. The bullet had not gone through, and the wound was bleeding rather profusely, which made him worry that an artery might have taken damage. He hurried to a clinic he knew where the staff knew better to ask questions.​

Example of less than lethal and worst than lethal anti-starship outcomes:

The explosion of the NMX Carrier buffeted the squadron of Plumeria gunships that had taken it down on, one of their numbers flying in too close, too recklessly, ended up seeing its Combined Field System barrier failing from the abuse.

Scenting blood, an NMX scoutship jousted past the vulnerable Yamataian vessel and both vessels opened against each other with broadsides. The Plumeria came much worse from the exchange, as the NMX scoutship's anti-fighter turrets marred its enemy's smooth hull with smelted black scars, its anti-ship turrets destroyed one of their counterparts on the Plumeria's dorsal hull while another shattered through the pylon-mounted CFS shield-shaped emitter. Most telling, though, was the handiwork of the NMX scout's underslung turreted positron cannon which also managed a hit. Struck straight in the ventral front, the resulting anti-matter explosion opened up most of the vessel's engineering components to space.

It's beating heart stilled, the crippled gunship drifted listlessly, its surviving crew likely not able to bring the vessel back to life before the NMX Scout swung around to make another pass.

Though briefly isolated, the Plumeria was fortunately not alone, and the rest of its squadron came around to give the beleaguered vessel the time it needed to limp back under its own power.​

How do those sound? Would that be better than the current table and very formal wording? I notice that the current DR article has much less formal wording too (maybe we're trying too hard and trying to make it too technical is making it sound more complicated than it is).
 
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Sorry that I have not responded to this before now, however I'll be quite honest... I'm one of the easier people to please. So long as the general structure of If you shoot X with Y you can expect Z with the minimal ambiguity/math work is maintained I'm okay with it as I have mentioned before.

Honestly, I've been keeping quiet in part because I wanted to see if those who are more opinionated among this review process had any complaints with what has been presented above. I do however want to say that I'll probably not get a more thorough response up for at least a couple of days. Circumstances IRL have not left me with much by way of energy to critically assess this and I didn't want to waste your time with a response that was written to just to meet the criteria of responding to it.

So consider this an acknowledgement that I have seen it, I just have not had the time to respond.
 
Okay, so let me try to get some proper feedback in.

First I'll start by saying that while it does make things much larger, it also provides more resources for differentiating ship classifications given that the scale goes from around 50m to several kilometres that is a much larger spectrum of size than going from a roughly human sized unit like a Mindy to a tank.

Even going from a Mindy (Class 7) to a 25m tall Mech like the Whirlwind (Class 15) isn't as big of a jump as going from a Yui (Class 16 at 76m) to a Sharie (Class 20 at 1.2km) for example.

To this end I believe that a 5/5/5/5/5 system when fleshed out will benefit us all in the long run even if it isn't as streamlined as was initially intended.

Moving past this I maintain that the most important aspect of this system to preserve is the reliable metric that if you shoot a Class with a weapon of the same Class, that a clean hit will kill it. If GMs want to fudge they just need to write that the weapon did not strike the target cleanly.

Given the chaos of combat this isn't something that would stretch anyone's suspension of disbelief. Unless your players are purposefully taking action to set up a good shot or are very skilled, they shouldn't be getting clean kills on every foe.

So I suppose I see the 'softening' of a same class weapon interaction as sort of lazy since GMs shouldn't be reliant on that same Class interaction proving less than fatal. It would be like having purpose made anti-tank missiles that never killed their target. No military would field that, it doesn't make sense IC, and it seems a strange crutch OOC.

If GMs really need softer hitting weapons they should go the route that led to the development of the LASR and make a softer hitting weapon and make it standard for their players. That way they don't suffer the problem of overkill on their enemies. (IC reasoning such as not wanting to harm friendly assets when using weapons within your own starship for example make a compelling reason to have these softer hitting weapons.)

For the purposes of the damage conversion chart, with the old 3/3/3/3/3 system the way it was set up was four steps, to maintain a similar balance, a 5/5/5/5/5 system would require six steps. At least going by raw numerical comparison.

I am partial to the idea of a more narrative example demonstrating the interactions between different Classes and that could potentially work. I'm just wondering if it would create too much ambiguity in a guideline that is supposed to help players and GMs have an idea of what their weapons will achieve.

The purpose of this system is after all to give us as players a reference point without having to do the math to determine the effects of a weapon system and then compare it to real life events or phenomena.

So to this end while I feel that the narrative examples give a good way of visualizing how the different weaponry interacts with their targets, I am not able to confidently say that it won't lead to future confusion where a GM or player will have to shrug and admit that they have no idea how their weapon is supposed to interact with the target and that they've been fudging it.

So I guess my stance is that it has both benefits and downsides and that it would probably be best to see what would help out GMs more.
 
It has not yet been confirmed for review, so right now it's not available for IC or submission usage.
 
I'll take care of this. Time has just been scarce, and I have other things on the chopping board.

Expect the following:
- Change the language used for the article. Formal doesn't seem to work. Everytime someone reads, doesn't understand it or finds it conveys information in a convoluted fashion, I've managed to carry the intended meaning informally in posts. That indicates a change is needed, despite my original expectations.
- Scale still to be extended from 21 to 25 to give ships two 5-sample categories.
- Examples will mostly be neutered. The table will still have samples, but they will be Yamatai centric since it's much easier to have this system be implemented as intended baseline as desired by the one relevant source, which is the Setting Manager. It's been impressed upon me by the powers-that-be that it's neither my perogative or any FM's perogative to assign definite values at this time. It will also dodge a lot of added drama. If/Once this goes through, then the people interested in grandfathering their submissions in can settle in thier own threads that intended adjustments for the hardware they will present, and it's be up to the NTSE mod to approve that, or not.
- Sticking to per-shot lethality, as originally intended.

Once that's done, I'll submit this to be reviewed.
 
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I'm bringing this back into the grinder.

https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=fred_s_damage_rating_revision&rev=1456422128

A lot of people whom had disagreement with it have left. Wes alluded to it being the version he liked best and was willing to approve.
I've noticed some people in chat expressing regret this wasn't actually a thing. I also happen to like this version best too.

The article could probably use refinements, but in this state, it's serviceable. The mechanics underlying it are from my point of view both sound and relatively simple to grasp. I think what it needs is rephrasing with more everyday terms rather than 'officious' terms to be a user-friendly reference, as most of everyone I've talked to whom had trouble grasping the article grasped the explanation posts I did just fine. But before bothering with that, I want this to reach an initial state of approval. Given the weapon as categorized will come under scrutinery afterwards, even approved this is very much going to remain a living document for some time.
 
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