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Reintroducing the 8 on tier weapon rule.

Alex Hart

Alex Hart

FM of NDC
🎖️ Game Master
So this rule was present in the original DRv3, and I'd like to bring it back so that we have a hard and fast rule for how much weaponry we can carry for large scale things.

The wording in the original version was as follows;
How much weaponry?

Usually, for infantrymen and power armor, this is self-explanatory… or at least easily ruled on. No one expects an infantryman or a power armor to dual-wield bazookas and carry four spares in their back.
However, for mecha and starships, it becomes more nebulous. The rule-of-thumb we offer is: a rough maximum of 8 same-tier weapons as the unit carrying them. Getting a higher-tier weapon costs 2 weapons of the tier below, and vice-versa.
Loadout example: giant robot dinosaur

I'm building a giant robot dinosaur, a heavy mecha, which means I can have:
  • 8 Heavy Anti-Mecha weapons.
So, if I want to have two laser eyes of destruction, I'd convert 8 heavy anti-mecha weapons into 4 light anti-starship weapons, and then convert those fours into:
  • 2 Medium Anti-Starship weapons.
So, in the case of my giant robot dinosaur with laser eyes, it can kill with a glare.
But wait, I wanted it to breathe fire too! And I want my firebreath to cause more damage than my laser eyes. Back to the drawing board: I divide one of those weapons back to 2 light anti-starship weapons. Those two will actually be my laser eyes. The bigger one is my firebreath. So, now, my loadout looks like:
  • 1 Medium Anti-Starship plasma flamethrower
  • 2 Light Anti-Starship Laser beam eyes of doom
And there we go. My godzilla-impersonator is armed and ready to tear Chiaki escort destroyers out of the sky!"
Click to expand...
 
This makes a lot of sense, but maybe that's because my love of binary makes me like seeing things collapse down nicely and in equivalency. Plus, this should make theoretical PvP more reasonable than someone making a hedgehog mech with weapons arrays as spines lol.
 
@Fred I'm looking for the thread where it was taken out but can't find it. Do you remember when and where the 8 rule was abolished?

I loved this rule. It requires a lot of maths to do it right. Every article takes between fifteen minutes to an hour to do the math for, for me, at least. I like the extra work and it really gets the noggin joggin.
 
It seems like it could cause some interference with some past submissions though. Maybe not big ones but just small inconsistencies.
 
Many older articles didn’t follow the 8 on tier rule when their DRv3 updates were approved so those inconsistencies are nothing new.

The rule of 8 was removed pretty much without discussion, and I think there are 2 posts for the entire process somewhere in the approval threads.

Also, this would bring up problems with weapon rate of fire since DRv3 doesn’t account for rate of fire. This means machine guns hit as hard as weapons a few tiers higher, one shot weapons are extremely weak, and continuous beam weapons are just in a super weird spot.

Ultimately, that is a solveable problem and I would rather is be going down the path of identifying and solving problems.

——-


Also, everyone should keep in mind this isn’t about balance or PVP. The goal should be consistency in rules.

A new player should be able to read our rules, make a starship, and be reasonably certain it will get approved. Or: ‘If you followed the rules, your ship will get approved’

We should not put people in a position where they have to guess what is acceptable when they make stuff for SARP. The process should be frictionless and fun, not painfully drawn out.
 
This was a part of the original DRv3. What Wes is talking about there is your system for deciding how many missiles you can have. This is a flat out reintroduction of rules put in place in the original DRv3. And I'd appreciate it if you didn't speak for @Wes but instead let him speak for himself on the matter.

Rizzo said:
Rules cannot will not apply to anything until approved and implemented
Click to expand...
Sorry for confusing wording, what I meant is that if this is approved in and re-implemented, it will apply to all pending submissions. I agree with you completely on that Rizzo.
 
@FrostJaeger thank you for reminding us about this post from Wes. It's good that we keep his ideals in mind since he'll be busierthan ever very soon.

@Alex Hart Alex think we can do better as a team of mods with reasoning abilities than a ruleset can provide. No ruleset can ever be as comprehensive it's a group of people with principles
 
@Rizzo every mod is going to have their own idea of what is acceptable. Putting that into words is the only way to improve the NTSE.

Or are we talking about something else here? I Remeber you were a fan of the point but system we had earlier.
 
Zack is right, everyone will have their own idea of what's ok. A common standard is needed.

I think that having the rules down is a good idea, but exceptions to them can always be made with the approval of all of the NTSE mods together, after discussing the circumstance of the exception requested.
 
Agreeing to an exception means there is a problem with the rules. In a situation where we feel the rules don’t address something properly we should work on fixing the rules rather than making an exception.

Previous NTSE staff have used exceptions almost exclusively to let their submissions exceed the setting standards. That attitude really doesn’t make me happy.


—-


Not that we should have no exceptions ever of course, just that we shouldn’t be using exceptions as a part of our system. If we can explain why an exception to the rules is acceptable, then we can also add to the rules to include why that exception is ok.
 
Of course, we are in agreement about some of the failures hard rules have. That's why I'm suggesting that we focus on principles. If you are submission is declined once you can be reviewed by another moderator. If that moderator denies the submission as well that's a pretty good sign it doesn't fit the setting. If all mods agree to a certain set of principles we should always be in agreement.
 
The problem comes from agreeing on what too many weapons is, which is what this is for. Reintroducing this will give Setting submissions mods a firm ruling on what's too much.

Exceptions can be made though, and if they are we will have to give the rules a hard look, but they're just that.

Exceptions to the rule. That doesn't mean the rule needs to change.
 
Mods have gotten things wrong before, and plenty have abused the authority for their own benefit.

That problem aside. You Want to minimize the amount of appeals made, and the amount of work mods have to do. If you write down what your principals are ahead of time then you won’t have to argue about them as much later. If you make your principals quantifiable then you don’t have to do nearly as much work reviewing submissions either.

If we do this right, we really don’t need approval mods at all. We could have a bit do a basic spelling / formatting check, confirm the ship meets the site guidelines on stats, and be done.... maybe have a mod do a once over for bombastic language too.
 
We got rid of mods for character approval, and look how that turned out. A better system involves less work for everyone.
 
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