Willard skrev:
I've included a bunch of energy weapons and such which have three or more dice. Getting that high is expensive, but then we're building this to allow for crazy expensive and powerful weapons.
You're thinking only of the high end. Pricing based only on average damage means that 1d12+1, 2d6, and 3d4-1 all come out about the same, but the standards established by existing SW weapons say that it should almost always be 2d6, very rarely 3d4-1, and never d12+1. (I'm not 100% certain, but I'm pretty sure I've never seen a published SW weapon that rolls only a single die for damage.)
Willard skrev:
The benefit is that you can calculate it step by step as added damage, rather than some broad and arbitrary number.
The drawbacks are:
- It introduces the exact issue you raised when Min Str first came up: If I have Strength d6, then I would only buy my melee weapons up to a Max Added Str of d6 because anything beyond that would substantially increase the weapon cost, but provide no benefit.
- I've already paid for higher melee damage by spending Advances to raise my Strength. Why should I have to pay for it again with higher weapon costs?
- Umm... I know I had a third one, but I forgot...
Willard skrev:
Watch some more anime!
A rifle with huge bullets is going to be huge, and the bayonet/sword edge will be too.
I've watched plenty of anime. If you want anime logic, I can run a one-shot of Tenra Bansho Zero, Mazaki no Fantaji, or (when it's released) OVA sometime. Or maybe even attempt an anime-themed session of Roll for Shoes. But this is not that game.
Also, as a mechanical matter, one of the balancing factors between one- and two-handed ranged weapons is that two-handed ranged weapons can't be used to shoot someone who is in melee with you. If you say "put a tiny little blade on your 47d10 rifle and now you do that same 47d10 in melee", then it completely negates that restriction.
Willard skrev:
While those things may not make a lot of sense, they do make life a lot easier without really affecting the balance.
This statement neatly encapsulates the differences of opinion we're having here, and does so much more cleanly and concisely than the "weakness of your methods" comment in my previous post.
You've found an elegant formula that neatly describes the primary characteristics of a broad range of weapons and want to force everything else to fit into that formula. I'm trying to model something resembling reality and also to preserve the full range of options and details provided by Savage Worlds while extending those systems to cover more possibilities.
You're focused on balance and simplicity, with making sense an optional extra. I'm focused on making sense and willing to accept a more-or-less arbitrary level of complexity to attain rough (but not necessarily exact) balance. (Design-time complexity is purely an out-of-game factor and I can write software to automate it away anyhow.)
Willard skrev:
nDervish skrev:Have you looked at Savage Armoury?
No, I don't have access to that.
http://www.godwars2.org/SavageWorlds/SavageArmoury.pdf
Willard skrev:
What I'm trying to do is include the accessories in the weapons, so we don't need to browse through poorly structured lists from various sources to get benefits that aren't harmonized with the rest of the system. (Maybe a little too harsh, but it is one of the major ideas. The extras are included.)
One of your first comments when the topic of designing a customizable weapon system was "modularity is the future". Where is the modularity in requiring that a laser sight be hardwired into your gun, where it shall remain for all time, rather than mounting it on tactical rails so that you can take five minutes to remove it and replace it with a flashlight or a smartlink adaptor or some other accessory that might be more useful in a given circumstance?
Willard skrev:
And then it grows a little bit every time you get a pay check,
This is actually something that I want to avoid, at least in general. While it's certainly appropriate for a gun nut/tinkerer-type character to be making constant adjustments, it should not be an automatic thing that everyone says "I just got another few thousand credits - time to upgrade my gun!" after every job.
Willard skrev:
Shotguns and other weapons where damage depends on range can probably be handled without too much trouble by a generous interpretation of the average damage ruling.
There's more to the shotgun rules than just variable damage. They also have short ranges (how meaningful is range-based damage dropoff if your short range is a kilometer?) and get a +2 to hit - unless you're firing slugs, in which case damage is constant, there's no bonus to hit, and (at least in IZ) you can get substantially longer range if you have a rifled barrel.
Willard skrev:
Snapfire, semi, 3RB and auto I would tie directly to the ROF. 1, 2, 3, 3 respectively. I might like to kick auto up to 4, but that's probably outside the weapons model.
Erm... Go reread SWD 48-49 and see what those weapon qualities actually do before writing them off as just a side-effect of ROF:
- Only a tiny, tiny fraction of ROF 1 weapons are subject to Snapfire penalties. ("Snapfire Penalty: Certain weapons, such as sniper rifles, are very inaccurate if fired “from the hip” rather than using their excellent sights or scopes. If the character moves in the action he fires, he suffers a –2 penalty.")
- Semi-Auto, by definition, is only applicable to ROF 1 weapons; any weapon with ROF 2 or higher is full-auto. And not all ROF 1 weapons are Semi-Auto. Revolvers, single-shot weapons, and the like are not.
- While ROF 3 is the minimum needed to have 3RB capability, many ROF 3+ weapons do not have it.
- As I mentioned in passing a page or two back, the Auto quality is misleadingly named. It does not mean "this is a full-auto weapon" or "this weapon has a high rate of fire", but, rather, it means "this full-auto weapon can also fire single shots". That is clearly not a side-effect of a high ROF. On the contrary, weapons with higher ROF tend to be less likely to have Auto.
Willard skrev:
Multiple ammo types and other combo weapons I suppose would be handled by designing and paying for another weapon with the desired properties, then adding it to the other one. The same for melee/ranged combos.
So a shotgun is really nine different weapons all glued together? It can fire standard shot, flechette, inferno shot, sunder slug, standard slug, rifled slug, saboted slug, tazer slug, or tracker slug ammunition, each with its own damage values and special properties.
When I initially mentioned multiple ammo types, I was actually thinking about weapons like the AGA Mjolnir AMR (new equipment chapter 86), which can fire either APDSF or high explosive ammo, but I had just mentioned shotguns, whose characteristics are influenced even more heavily by changing to a different type of ammo. Plus there are nine ammo types, making for a much more absurd example.
(Come to think of it, a grenade launcher would probably have even more ammo types and more variation in properties than a shotgun...)
Willard skrev:
Move or shoot could be the default, also eliminated by something like 10 points.
First off, my mistake on the name. IZ sometimes calls this "Move or Shoot", but it's "May not move" in SWD core.
"May not move" is applied to tripod-mounted weapons and the like, where you simply can't move and fire in the same round, at all (even beyond the limitations of Snapfire). This is clearly not the default.
Willard skrev:
A tweak that I'd like to make is for weight to be a function of both damage and ammo capacity. Probably their product. In addition to the obvious reason it helps make heavy weapons heavy, and balances excessive ROF and spare ammo capacity.
I had been thinking slightly differently about it, that the calculated weapon weight is the weight of the weapon alone and the loaded weight would be increased by 1.25 lb (i.e., 1/4 SI, per earlier discussions) per ammo token.
Weight = Damage x Ammo gets absurdly heavy absurdly quickly. Replacing an M-16's 2 lb standard magazine with a 4 lb extended magazine does not cause the loaded weapon to increase from 8 lbs to 16 lbs.
Willard skrev:
And min str requirements should depend on weight, not damage.
Encumbrance already deals with how strong you need to be to carry the weapon.
Given that the SWD rules state that, when firing a ranged weapon whose Min Str is greater than your Strength, you take a -1 to hit for each die type of difference (SWD 49) and that this penalty is negated if the weapon is braced, it seems clear to me that Min Str on firearms models the difficulty of controlling the recoil, not just the weight of carrying the weapon. Min Str should, therefore, be based primarily on damage, perhaps with ROF also factoring in. If weight figures in at all, it should
lower the Min Str. (Higher inertial mass makes it easier to control the recoil. But I'm sure the effect is so small that it's not worth modeling.)
I post in English, but can read Swedish. When replying to me, either language works.
) me. I tweak rules constantly in the same way that a gearhead is always adjusting the timing on his car's engine. It's not that there's anything wrong with it, it's just fun to poke at it and see whether I can make it a little better (even if it's only "better" in a way that only I will ever notice).
) firearms should all do 2dN damage, or at least be substantially incentivized to roll exactly two dice, regardless of how linear the pricing curve might otherwise be.