Your viewpoint of course has worth, Brutus, as does your opinion as a colleague and fellow roleplayer. And, of course, we can see where you're coming from. The Epic quality TRF has enjoyed has, in the past, often stemmed from the raw strength and strategic mastery people have relied on, knowing exactly how much they command and micromanaging it.
But the thing is, that was the way TRF was run for ages, years. Practically before the beginning of time. Well, maybe not that old, but you get the picture. The system is hard to maintain, requires quite a bit of knowledge and regular imput, and not only that is highly debatable. The arguments are occasionally fun and interesting, but much more often they're shouting matches between sworn enemies. No one wants to lose ships and no one wants to admit defeat.
That epic quality is still here, it has just been left more open to interpretation. Although at the cost of some of the "Realism" appeal (I admit, it was often fun to watch your assets grow and scheme) the rules have changed to allow for more heroic stories. I think you might have missed a bit of the gist of what was being said, namely that characters and writing help DECIDE combats and stories, but they do not DEFINE them.
Anyways, I think I see what you mean, although I doubt I have presented my position too well. If you give these new rules a chance, and perhaps experiment with what you can do, I would not be surprised to find you can enjoy what you liked about the old rules just as much in the new rules. Feel free to discuss it further.
Considering the members of TNO, I would say you have the least to worry about from our corner. Certainly, some of our members have have been attatched to our fleets. Brutus summed it up very nicely in saying that it was fun to look at your manifest and know that you earned all that.
But what TNO requires above most else in its members is a solid head on their shoulders. Which means sensibility. Which means no one in TNO is going to claim they can run around with ten Eclipse Star Destroyers and rampage the galaxy.
I totally disagree on the "realism" point. The old rules worked for TRF, but they didn't easily allow for realistic combat in the true manner of Star Wars. It would have been nearly impossible under the old rules for any of the "Rebel Alliance" groups to do anything more than Empire build to compete with TNO.
Under these rules, even the smallest of groups here at TRF could (in theory) take TNO apart. It would be hard, but that's realisatic too!
I was hoping for a reform of the planet rules to make that idea even easier, but perhaps sometime in the future.
Brutus, Theren and I spesifically mentioned you, and had your group in mind when we drafted the first version of these rules. We're not trying to change the 'Grand Scale' as you name it, in fact, we want that to stay. TRF has always had a focus on running your own government, and feeling 'big'.
The focus here was to do away with the mathamatical impossibalities that seemed to stop smaller groups from taking on the big ones, and to nix the counting and stuff. Sure, it's fun to check the manifest, and gaze at it (I always liked looking at a completly updated manifest, mostly because I was done though...) but have we ever had a real war with this method? Every time we had a small fleet skirmish, we had hundreds and hundreds of OOC posts arguing over who lost what.
The idea here is to make it not so important over who looses what, but rather, who's ideas and writing is better.
I doubt TRF will loose its grand scale, and large plotlines. In fact, I think TRF will get more of that. Rest assured, if TRF looses its focus, and that special touch that made it different from all the other IC forums on other boards, we will be doing some seriously heavy work on something to fix it.
I'm a bit scattered here, no time to edit this all into a coherent post.
Brutus, your group and writing has always been origional, different, and (at least from an outsider's viewpoint) been well planned out. That will give you a significant edge with the new rules. I don't think you have much to worry about us loosing what makes TRF different from everyone else.
TRF became Mini-Swfans, you mentioned you did not want to look just like them in your post on the rules. You failed in this respect. TRF's new rules are exactly like SWFans 'Clean Slate' ruleset. Im not posting to change anyones mind, I already know a good 95% of the players here support the rules change, so balking the staff would accomplish nothing. My views are well known, and the reprocusions of this are equally known now. I just felt it was worth mentioning that you just removed the primary difference between TRF, a RP Universe of less than a hundred players, and SWFans, a RP Universe of Hundreds. Not a good move in the realm of attracting new players.
And On a side note.
<b>Have Fun, Good Roleplaying to you and... <h3>Join BDE</h3></b>
I can definately see where Brutus is coming from, when I first read the rules I was pretty shocked. Especially because I had surpassed BDE in meterage if they were to attack me (so it didn't count their 200 000m of planetary defenses) which had made me feel real proud. Yes you get a sense of pride from looking at your manifest, but I think that these rules are beneficial to everyone (including yourself seeing as how your group has been RPed out) even myself. Because to compete with BDE or TNO, I'm going to have to get way more planets than them, because their takeovers are based on military assests, while mine are more based on diplomacy with some military stuff thrown in. Or I will have to learn how to get more military takeovers done, but still seem like a good lightside guy. This, for me, throws a whole new challenge at me, one I'll want to over come. I'm sure everyone (except maybe TNO), if they looked hard enough, could find a challenge for their group to overcome in the rules.
As well it might start people fleet RPing with a new style and get people to do small engagements, like border skirmishes. But I guess the staff thought that might happen with the last fleet restart and it never did.
I guess what I'm trying to say (and doing it in a potentially confusing way) is that while these rules are different to what we had, and what I originally liked and got used to, change is not necessarily bad and you can find something in the rules that can benefit your RPing style or find something in the rules which will make the game more challenging and interesting.
And Vodo, yeah I'm more scared of TNO now then before. Before they kind of ignored most of their shipyards and their fleet manifest (leaving it 4 months out of date). Now they don't have to worry about it and just have to calculate what is reasonable for their 90 or some planets (please realize thats I guess, I really have no clue how many planets they have).
And this will open up new realms of combat as well. Since factions no longer have hundreds of ships, this will open up the realm of ground combat, something that has been largely ignored in the last wars thanks to the avilability of, surrender or I go base delta zero all over your planet.
Origionally I was quite concerned about becoming a SWF clone. So, I and Beff Pike drafted a system of leveing up characters, with attributes, and crap. But, in the end, it started to turn into what we had before.
Rest assured that if TRF starts loosing what it had, and what has kept its members here, the Staff will be working on something different. The last thing we want is a dead board, and the second to last thing we want is to be a clone of everyone else.
