The quote below was sent as a notice by Nadir to the new CD Citizens group.

After much thought, we will be requiring the use of a combat meter in CD. IC confrontations will be settled by the fastest shooter and the best weapon. This should cut down on the ooc issues that spawn from text-based RP.

Please feel free to discuss on the forums.

Details TBA.

After a quick skim through the forums I haven't found a thread for discussion about this subject, so I decided to create one myself.

--- My two cents: ---

Personally I have never RPed someplace requiring a combat meter for very long, mostly because the places I stumbled on that did usually housed players who had very different styles of RP from the one we have in CD (such as having no sense of Post Order, everyone posting multiple one-liners consequently etc.). Now, I am not saying that combat meters make people suck at RP. But I do believe that a sim using a combat meter attracts more people that do not exactly know what RP is, that just want the Call of Duty *bam-bam-dead* style of roleplaying (if you can call it roleplaying).

Also I have some concerns on whether this meter system would create lag in the sim. Nadir has mentioned various systems to be incorporated to the sim already, such as seeing how much time a character spends in the sim, in the cells, in the gang turf areas and so on, for the various online systems we'll be having. Won't each of these also create some lag? Would the addition of a combat meter not increase this lag? Would this lag grow exponentially by the number of people on sim?

The addition of a combat meter raises other questions in my mind. I am assuming that firearms will be made available for use again, and I'd like to hope that there will still be restrictions on their use and the people who can use them. But if only some people can use them, and everyone has to use the meter, wouldn't that create conflict?

Of course it is possible that the meter we use caters for melee weapons as well, maybe even hand to hand combat without any weapons at all. But this raises other issues. While a meter would be fair in the sense that everyone can be hurt equally, this does not always make sense ICly. For example: Bo (my giant Russian brawler) would realistically cause much more damage with a punch, or a blow with his sledgehammer, when fighting some girl half his size (perhaps because she refused to show him her 'tittiez'). But the meter would not know that one of the characters is a giant and the other a midget (unless such meters exist) so it would give the same amount of damage back should the girl decide to return the favor with a punch of her own. Ever worse, she could be using a baseball bat that causes more damage than the sledgehammer according to the meter, even though swung by a frail character with (possibly) much less experience in combat. Similarly, not everyone has the same IC experience with firearms, leading to people who have never handled a weapon ICly to (for example) manage to kill a cop, just because the 1st player is better at First Person Shooter games.

All in all, as is probably obvious by the above, I do not like the idea of a combat meter being used in CD. Although I do agree that it could reduce OOC drama and arguments on who wins and who loses, I (and I believe many of you out there) still think the point of RP is not to win or lose, but to participate. So perhaps it would cause more issues than it solves, especially if we have a sudden influx of trigger-happy people who come on the sim, buy a gun and go bam bam bam.

Final question: If the meter is introduced, will the participants of a scene be allowed to jointly decide -not- to make use of it during said scene? For instance if my character is about to try and beat the shit out of some other character, can me and that player agree OOCily to play it out with just text, and ignore the combat meter for the duration of this scene? And what happens if a passerby decides to be a hero, get involved with either side, and insists on making use of the meter? Or if a cop wants to interfere and wants to make use of the meter?

Wolf