MAD Combat

I agree with the point you are making, wholeheartedly. I will refrain from reiterating my point over and over again.

That said, I agree with that you've brought to the table, Lux. When this idea first came to fruition, I was completely against it. As for reasons that don't need to be voiced again. After reading some of the suggestions made, I think this is on the right track to becoming something feasible for everyone to use. And ultimately, that is what I would like to see. New ideas that are capable of being used by the entire community. As of this point I am probably about 50/50 with this idea. The dice rolls would be an excellent way to balance the field a bit more, and if it can be successfully integrated in some fashion, this could actually be hugely successful. However, we came to where we are as a community. The entirety of the community needs to be and should be considered when formulating new ideas. I'm not saying this wasn't, but from my view of things, there seems to be only a select few that actually bring ideas forward. And so far, those ideas have only been tailored to a handful of individuals. This also applies to the Custom Tech discussion as well. Not naysaying or anything, just making a point with that. We need more community input with these ideas. And when I have a better proposal on how to involve the community more, I will happily share it. Until then, I will continue to voice my opinions, negative or positive, on these ideas with the community in mind.

Yes I am a bit of a naysayer when it comes to things on here. Yes I can be negative and repetitive when hammering a point home. I will certainly work on lessening that in future talks.

Ok, I feel as though I should weigh in on this, despite the fact that my opinion may not be recognized, seeing as I did help Nicademus make a lot of the MAD statistics for ships. And I also would like to just weigh in on this whole thing about the role of the RPA in all this, as my opinion.

However, before I start, a bit of a disclaimer. This is meant to offend no one, this is just some random guy trying to get his opinion out on a topic that can and will directly affect him, and just a bit of an opinion, as I feel as though this thread has brought up some of the finer points of the role of RPAs in discussions. I once again stress that I intend to offend no one, I'd like to keep this thread as civil as possible, for the simple reason that endless fighting won't solve anything.

Now, in regards to the system itself, I do agree with several of Aurel's thoughts. It was somewhat daunting to come onto the site, and I regret looking at other's posts before I started. Heck, I was worried that the First Order (or anyone else for that matter) wouldn't even accept me into their ranks merely for my lack of experience. Now, before you get at my throat for having the wrong impression of the community, I was thankfully proven wrong, but even so, I can see where he is coming from. Having (extremely briefly) read up on the current way in which battles are done, I do have to say that it is a bit of a daunting prospect to be involved in, say, the likes of the Battle of Dac that's coming up very soon, and I can see how a standardized system could be useful in streamlining the process so that the likes of me (a garbage to poor writer, and probably garbage at fleet engagements person) won't be quite so bad at it. It's similar to the Fallout S.P.E.C.I.A.L system, which, in my opinion, is a good solution to character creation, as it is simple enough to understand, but still offers a degree of flexibility in gameplay. Similarly, this system has a great deal of potential to make things simpler to understand, as well as making these battles not devolve into out of character beefs and petty squabbles among the community. The last thing we need is to fracture the already small group of active people. We all know what comes next if that should happen...

Now, that being said, I also have to agree with Luxeria's point about how this will affect those who don't want to use it. I don't think we should force people to not battle with each other, as that would, again, be fracturing everyone into two parties (this is not a crack at the political system of America, before someone bashes me for that). Nor do I feel as though the RPA should force people into one system or the other. Truthfully, I think it is something that individual writers will have to sort out with one another. (ex. "I want to battle Zion, but he is using MAD and I am not. I should PM him and see if we can reach a compromise.). One other qualm I have is with the multipliers/bonuses of the system, as I have no idea how they work, and I feel that another new person would feel the same. That is my take on it anyway.

Now in regards to this whole thing about what is and what isn't expected from the RPA, I feel as though it isn't really necessary for an RPA to, putting it bluntly, simply post somewhere and not necessarily give a suggestion or even critiques of the system. However, if an RPA wants to, then is there really any point in trying to stop him/her? I feel as though that may be a battle that isn't worth fighting, and a waste of everyone's energy.

Those are my thoughts and opinions, don't hate me anyone

Well I suppose I can weigh in on this. I don't like it, but I don't hate it.

The pros are there, I can see them.
-Damage tracking is easier so no calling shots or guess work on how much damage was taken
-It does streamline fleet battles a bit
-It could promote more fleet related RP

The cons are much more significant as the system stands.
-I see a lot of room for abuse
-I can see a lot of being turned off by this idea
-It seems unbalanced

Limiting to three each I'd like to expand on each point and I may have more later on down the road. I'll start with the cons.

This is going to bring back a sense of the gamer mentality, which is not a bad thing at all, but there is the fact that gamers want to win. Abuse is going to happen in almost every system but with his I'm having flashbacks to the facebook days. I see people building the biggest, baddest fleets with the sole purpose of crushing whoever they go against, and with this system, as I understand it so far, it will allow them to do that with ease.

As I said people are going to be turned off by this idea, you can't please everyone, a hard lesson learned in my time in the GRPC/GRPEC/PGC. As has been stated, we are probably going to run into the problem of someone who uses the system and someone who doesn't getting into a battle. How that is handled needs to be discussed. And someone may opt out if they are confident they can win through RP rather than numbers.

And finally, this seems terribly unbalanced. Just reading the examples it's pretty clear. If someone has a good enough fleet they could blaze through whoever stands in their way and take little or no damage for simply having better numbers. It needs to be reworked somehow.

Ok pros! They're easy enough, the first two take most of the headache out of fleet battles, which is my absolute favorite part about this idea. The damage tracking alone should have been implemented years ago.

Whereas I see some people hating this system and avoiding it like the plague I also see many being drawn to it, which is interesting. Personally I didn't have a whole helluva lot to do with fleet battles because I just couldn't wrap my head around fleet tactics, always been more of a story guy, but with something a little more efficient I might try my hand at it.

Now, what if we had something like a character sheet for our ships? Not for each ship in a fleet that would get ridiculous but perhaps for capital ships or personal ships. Things like fighters would be attack bonuses or something. We could use any number of pre-made sheets for our ships. I'll even link a few at the bottom. I also like the idea of rolling dice but we would have to find a way to keep it honest. A d20 system might work better in this instance, perhaps we should consider that instead since the groundwork is already done for the most part. There are online dice rollers that you can link to with friends so that everyone can see what has been rolled, I don't know where to find them though. I simply know of them.

I'm gonna cut it off at that but here are some of the character sheets I was talking about:

As Z said, we have a lot of work to go to get the system balanced right to prevent exactly the kind of 'one class of ship rules all' steamrolling. However, that is the eventual goal. Please, everyone, keep in mind this is a very early beta (very nearly alpha). We haven't even agreed on a way to include the speed stat into the battle yet.

As for one person using the system & the other not? Well, the system is actually set up to handle that as well. As long as you know the other person's attack score (& since the RPAs are being nice enough to stat out a huge chunk of canon ships, that will be easy to find) You can see about how much damage you should be taking per turn. Using the system or not doesn't have any effect on the actual story, it is simply a measuring stick for a consistent way to know how much damage you should be calling on your own ships.

Any help or suggestions are certainly useful, but what we really need is people willing to take their suggestions & run a playtest of it (it doesn't take long, even the vs matches with two people only took half an hour or so).

As for the character sheet idea, that is more or less what the MAD custom tech system is. Though it is a small text box instead of a large page img.

I think something like armor class (AC) might be an easy thing to apply to all ships, and a DC (difficulty class) stat could be in place for the size. An example for this is simple, a large ship like a capital ship would be much easier to hit than a fighter, thus the DC would be much lower than the fighter's, however the composition of the hull and the shielding would make its AC much higher than that of a fighter's. This would mean that while the large ship is much easier to hit it would take much more firepower to take down, whereas the smaller, faster more difficult to hit ship would be much easier to take down if it can be hit. It's a pretty level playing field if you ask me.

I can come up with some stats if anyone is interested in it.

Yeah, the Defence Stat + Size Bonus kind of pull double duty there. Basically for a smaller ship, you’d call it the Difficukty Class and for larger ships it would be the Armour Class.

But I’d be interested to see what you come up with Ade. We can certainly play test it, and see how it goes.

I could cover that in the system I came up with.

Alright there are three categories that I'm going to go over for the defense portion of this, obviously this is going to look more complicated than it actually is. And it's customizable to your preference, easy to upgrade and such. Assume that all of the numbers are plus (+) unless otherwise specified

AC = Hull Plating + Shields
DC = Hull Plating + Shields + Size Modifier

AC is the number you have to beat to do damage to the ship while DC is the number you need to need to beat to hit. Meaning a ship might be easy to hit but difficult to do damage to and likewise a ship might be difficult to hit but much easier to do damage to. The two separate numbers serve as a narrative device, "We're not doing anything while those shields are up." "I can't get a lock on the target!"

Hull Plating
Havod - 20
Laminasteel - 18
Impervium - 16
Duranium - 14
Matrix Armor - 12
Sedrellium - 10
Duralloy - 8
Ferroceramic - 6
Durasteel - 4
Titanium - 2

Shields
Class 1 Deflector Shield - 11
Class 2 Deflector Shield - 10
Class 3 Deflector Shield - 9
Class 4 Deflector Shield - 8
Class 5 Deflector Shield - 7
Class 6 Deflector Shield - 6
Class 7 Deflector Shield - 5
Class 8 Deflector Shield - 4
Class 9 Deflector Shield - 3
Class 10 Deflector Shield - 2
Ray Shield - 1
Particle Shield - 1

Light Starfighter <26m - 15
Medium Starfighter - 13
Heavy Starfigher - 11
Support Class (26m-100m) - 9
Corvette Class (101m-250m) - 7
Frigate Class (251m-400m) - 5
Cruiser Class (401m-650m) - 3
Star Frigate Class (651m-900m) - 1
Light Star Destroyer Class (901m-1300m) - -1
Star Destroyer Class (1301m-1800m) - -3
Heavy Star Destroyer 1 (1801m-3200m) - -5
Heavy Star Destroyer 2 (3201m-4000m) - -7
Light Star Cruiser Class (4001m to 6,000m) - -9
Star Cruiser Class (6001m to 8,000m) - -11
Heavy Star Cruiser Class (8001m to 12,000m) - -13
Star Dreadnaught/Pocket Battleship Class (12,001 to 16,000m) - -15
Star Battleship Class (16,001 to 20,000m) - -17

Now, as I've said this is fairly simple so don't let the numbers intimidate you. Here's an example that I think will make this much more digestable for most of you:

An X-wing (Medium Starfighter) with titanium plating and a ray shield would have an AC of 3 and a DC of 17 (2 + 1 + 13)

An Imperial I-Class Star Destroyer with duranium plating and a Class 4 Defelctor Shield would have an AC of 22 and a DC of 19 (14 + 8 + -3)

Of course Hit Points (HP) is another stat that would have to be discussed in conjunction but here's a rough mock up.

Light Starfighter <26m - 2HP
Medium Starfighter - 3HP
Heavy Starfigher - 4HP
Support Class (26m-100m) - 10HP
Corvette Class (101m-250m) - 25HP
Frigate Class (251m-400m) - 40HP
Cruiser Class (401m-650m) - 65HP
Star Frigate Class (651m-900m) - 90HP
Light Star Destroyer Class (901m-1300m) - 130HP
Star Destroyer Class (1301m-1800m) - 180HP
Heavy Star Destroyer 1 (1801m-3200m) - 320HP
Heavy Star Destroyer 2 (3201m-4000m) - 400HP
Light Star Cruiser Class (4001m to 6,000m) - 600HP
Star Cruiser Class (6001m to 8,000m) - 800HP
Heavy Star Cruiser Class (8001m to 12,000m) - 1200HP
Star Dreadnaught/Pocket Battleship Class (12,001 to 16,000m) - 1600HP
Star Battleship Class (16,001 to 20,000m) - 2000HP

This is a very rough mock up to show the basic math concept, obviously the HP of some of these is a bit ridiculous and we would have to come up with how damage would work but this is the roughest of outlines so far.

We could also do workups for additions to ships such as countermeasures and advanced targeting systems and the like. Perhaps your ship has a stealth field generator, that would definitely make it harder to hit and that would be calculated into the DC. Or your an advanced sensor array could make it easier for you to hit your target.