Playing with the notion of removing numbers from starships

[Jorus Merrill]

I say this as someone with no preferred course of action and no skin in the game.

At the risk of people taking things personally, I'm seeing a lot of arguments that are divorced from reality. Most of the ship abuse issues I've seen are a product of more detail, not less, as a small fraction of Chaos learns the system better than the rest and creates better ships than anyone via loopholes and nickel-and-dime minmaxing and often a smattering of implicit privilege. Apart from Spencer, every single person in this thread has been guilty of that, myself included. That's not something that can be solved by quibbling over more or less detail.

However, I find myself siding with Raziel in the sense that simpler templates increase the number of people who know the system and can use it to its potential. We saw that increase with our transition to the current system. 3.0 was supposed to simplify things, and it did, and then the ship rules inevitably got more complex over time. If I have any opinion relevant to this issue, it's that we need 3.5 and it needs to be simpler again. As for what form that takes, I'm open to whatever.

 

[Allyson Locke]

I can see this being viable to combat ships yes, but I do want to keep the complexity to those that love making the numbers and such. I don't want to kill the fun for the 10% that really get behind ships.

As for starting it with non combative ships, I wanna see how people respond to it. I mean people could utterly hate it. So instead of overhauling everything I'd rather start small.

Maybe even we could actually figure out a rule set and guide for fleeting...so we could adjust this non number thing to have a guideline. Like a board game saying low = 1-5 or something like that. Just a thought

 

[inactivechar01]

With the walls of texts that I have read, my opinion might look simple af but despite the risk, I will state it:


Why don't we offer both templates as an option?

Cater to both hardcore fleeters and to those who are trying to get in the game. In the end, it's important that there is no abuse so it stems down to the writer rather than the submission, no?

 

[Valiens Nantaris]

Maybe even we could actually figure out a rule set and guide for fleeting

I would be happy to group with anyone who'd like to do a guide for fleeting. I started doing one about a year back but ran out of time. Many hands make light work.

Would you be opposed to me putting out a board wide request to get a fleeting guide together?

I also agree with Spencer that starting with non-combat ships is a good idea. If it's successful, we can expand it later.

 

[Allyson Locke]

I love that, but what if person a uses the no numbers and is going against a fleet that was made with numbers etc. it's the issue that's would come of that sadly.

 

[Valiens Nantaris]

[member="Spencer Varanin"]
If in time we switch over to no/reduced numbers then it doesn't matter.

 

[Gir Quee]

[member="Raziel"], it's all good.

Maybe even we could actually figure out a rule set and guide for fleeting...so we could adjust this non number thing to have a guideline. Like a board game saying low = 1-5 or something like that. Just a thought

One of [member="Valiens Nantaris"] previous fleet guides actually was able to handle both the armament and defense portion without using numbers by just using rough descriptors based on the old 2.0 system. I think we could work out something similar based on that. But I really think that the hardest part of working without numbers will be movement:

Smaller ships are faster and more maneuverable that bigger ships with the same rating. It doesn't really matter.

I think that this works well when comparing ships of the same size, but what happens if you're comparing ships of different size categories?

One option is to simply state smaller ships in one size category are always faster than larger ships.

But in doing so, we effectively limit certain concepts from being created (like the space equivalent of a monitor or a large, fast but unarmed blockade runner).

Then again, these are admittedly niche ships, so maybe it's worth the simplification.