Hi,
I fully agree that HARP amd HARP SF should try to minimize the skills needed, especially considering the number of new skills required by the modern world.
Therefore my proposal to change the grouping of modern weapons to 5 categories instead of 6.
I.e. Thrown, 1-H, 2-H, Support, Gunnery instead of Thrown, 1-H Energy, 1-H Projectiles, 2-H Energy, 2-H Projectiles, Gunnery.
The reason behind combining the 1-H and 2-H categories I already explained (see start of thread). Concerning the difference between Support and Gunnery: Gunnery is for weapon systems, i.e. you have targeting systems and so on, Support weapons are directly handled by people. And they are so powerful and different to 1-H and 2-H weapons, that I would not put them in the same category to them.
Another thing: in the current manuscript there are no heavy weapons except machine guns. Therefore it looks as if I introduced more categories. But at the moment you introduce more heavy weapons, you notice in my opinion that they do not fit the current categories. And I would like to have them introduced, as I believe this adds a lot without demanding a lot of rewrite (the criticals are already there...).
What I also believe is that the number of categories is not so important, they are only there to show similiarities (i.e. to use the max. +25+Stats rule with an untrained weapon), the groups are the one that decide the number of DPs required to achieve a certain broadness in weapon skills. And the groups were not yet really discussed, as so far the discussion was more about the categories.
So to finalize: I think the Support Weapon idea is no skill creep and they should neither be added to 2-H weapons or Gunnery. But what we should do is take a careful look at the weapon groups and see what we can combine. A first idea would be also here to only distinguish between
- recoil weapons (needlers, projectiles, shotguns,...)
- energy weapons (flamers, blasters, lasers)
- indirect fired weapons (grenade launchers)
- self-propelled weapons (missiles)
- thrown weapons (grenades)
Then you have in total (incl. gunnery) only 14 clearly defined groups compared to the undefined number in the current manuscript:
- Thrown: Grenades
- 1-H: Projectiles
- 1-H: Energy
- 2-H: Projectiles
- 2-H: Energy
- 2-H: indirect fire
- Support: Projectiles
- Support: Energy
- Support: indirect
- Support: self propelled
- Gunnery: Projectiles
- Gunnery: Energy
- Gunnery: indirect
- Gunnery: self propelled
What do you think?
BR
Juergen