Last time I showed you the rewrite of one of the optional rules in the Remaster. Now it's time to show one of the new optional rules. There are several of those, but I think the one that will be of most interest to people as a whole will be the Custom Weapon Creation system.
Custom Weapons are something that's been requested intermittently over the years and was very close to getting made multiple times. This is for good reason, because while BCG+Z provide enough weapons for a wide variety of niches, some important niches (most notably beam weapons with specific energy costs) remain empty. Custom Weapons address this problem.
The way Custom Weapon Creation works is very simple. When you create a Custom Weapon, it has a number of Weapon Points that you spend on Advantages (conditional or innate) and Keyword abilities. Additionally, you can also add drawback Keywords to increase the number of Weapon Points your creation has. It's nothing revolutionary and if you've played GGG or any of the classes with custom techs in MP it should be familiar to you. The most interesting thing about it, on a mechanical level, is the sidebar full of suggestions and examples for coming up with your own conditional Advantages.
Having said that, there are some caveats to this system. First, not all Keywords are supported. You can't make your own Techniques or Bursts because balancing those two would be impossible. Second, most unkeyworded recurring abilities cannot be replicated. That means no adding Tension to Damage, destroying whole Levels of Threshold, debuffs or any other fancy properties. The third is that you cannot use this system to customize the existing Weapons in the game. It might sound obvious but it's a real thing people will try to do and then they'll wonder how come their unlimited Bombardments break the game.
An additional thing I want to point out is that, going by the Custom Weapons rules as written, several of the existing Weapons in the SRD are unbalanced. This is the result of years of doing consistent buffs to Weapons that were underperforming. I tried to keep the numbers consistent with how most Weapons are costed these days, but a few Weapons will be better than any equivalents you try to craft with the system. That's not great, but I think most of us will agree that the older versions of many of the Weapons buffed in these past few years were, frankly, rarely worth using. If the price to pay to have all those Weapons be viable is to make some of the math inconsistent, then I'll pay it.
Now in theory I could redo all the Weapons until all of them have consistent math, but I don't want to be rocking the boat that much when we're one month away from release. There's a significant chance that I make a mistake in doing that resulting in some weapons becoming unviable again. I would rather have a handful of Weapons that cannot be replicated yet do their jobs than a perfectly consistent Custom Weapons system in which some Weapons aren't viable.
Having said that, some of the disparities between what can be made with the Custom Weapon rules and the premades are... Notorious. In particular two Weapons (Shocking Swordship and Charge Cannon) are still underpowered to the point that they're weaker than Custom Weapons made in their style so I'll be giving them minor boosts to ensure they can keep up with the competition.
I know I said two months ago that the rules for the SRD were already locked down and there wouldn't be any more changes, but I think this is important enough that it merits going back on my word. More importantly, the main reason to not want to change the rules late in development is to avoid disrupting games that are already using the rules or to not potentially break the game in accidental ways. I don't think two niche Weapons getting minor is going to break anything or bother anyone.
I'm less sure what to do concerning other Weapons that the system shows are clearly overpowered. These are: Finger Net, Bombardment, Lockdown Missile and Radiation Bomb. I would rather not nerf anything, but honestly these Weapons have radiuses so big and effects so powerful that I probably should give them a relatively small debuff so they don't feel too imbalanced.
I might reduce the Blast size from (2) to (1) for the sake of simplicity, give them all a Disadvantage to attacks, or a combination of those two. I still haven't decided. I'll let you know closer to release. Which, fingers crossed, should be next month.
Gimmick Out.
