What keeps coming up here is that War! is badly written, that its rules are broken, or not there, or ... The issue it keeps boiling down to is that it requires GM intervention, to prevent a PC from having something 'horribly broken' at game start.
Gosh.
Isn't that more-or-less the GM's first job, judging the characters being brought into the game? Aren't there a thousand-and-one ways of creating a 'broken' character, of rules-raping, of acquiring something terribly beyond of the pale, that the GM has to smack the player on the side of their head and say, 'No. Behave.'? Isn't 'everything passing through this space is slowed to 1m/s, thus easily stopped' enough for you, you need 'oh, it takes away all but 1 DV'? Would you then complain about that rule, and say it was broken?? (As a note -- I didn't say that 'the spell goes away, and even if you were stopped the energy returns.' I very clearly said that you could affect objects as their energy is inside the AoE. If that means you land in a crouch, stand, and walk away at 1m/s, that's what happens. That won't stop the 10-ton 5-meter-wide rock you were under from crushing you at a casual 1m/s -- a perceptually slow and agonizing death -- but if there's no 10-ton rock on top of you, I guess you're walking away from that parachute-less HALO entry, eh?)
Taken independently, every single part of every single game in existence is broken. My god, if pawns haven't moved, and something advances through a particular space, they can go ahead and take that piece even though it isn't actually there !! That's broken !! Oh, wait -- en passant takes place in a much larger game. Kings can move two spaces and jump a piece -- broken !! -- if neither king nor rook have moved yet. This isn't chess; there are more than six different kinds of pieces on the board. How much worse must it be in a game with a thousand pieces, ten thousand rules, and a hundred thousand players -- not to mention a million scenarios through which to run those rules and interpret them differently?
APDS was 'broken'. Dikote was 'broken'. Bioware was 'broken'. Initiation was 'broken'. All these things are broken if taken separately. It is the GM's job to make sure they are not taken separately, that use of them happens inside the game world, and that ICA=ICC. For those less in the grip of text-based gaming, that means that In-Character Actions Have In-Character Consequences. If you go around 'killing' your local 'tanks' -- which I would kind of presume means a Knight-Errant Ares MobMaster or some other heavy mob-quelling Barrens-dominating heavily-armored vehicle-of-destruction -- with a couple of precisely placed MRSI-planned AV-headed arrows, then great, congratulations. You probably could have done the same thing with one shot of a remote-controlled AV missile -- you know, 1/10th the cost, probably get it faster (20F instead of 14F, but interval time is 1 day, not 2 days), 16P -6 AP vs. vehicles -- but sure, it's easier to carry the bow and arrows and program. Which somehow is going to make it more dangerous. More broken.
I guess. If you say so.
I don't. My view is -- always has been, always will be -- that bringing military gear to a street fight will get you talked about (that's 'Notoriety' and 'Public Awareness', for the most part). That bringing out the Huge Guns will focus the authorities' attention on you, and you'll shoot straight to Public Enemy #6* and get Detective Tosh Athack and ADA
Dana Oaks hot and heavy on your heels. Or their equivalent in your games. That doing this sort of thing is distinctive, and doing it more than twice is going to earn you, without you getting any points for it, what's called
Distinctive Style.
Every clarification I've made, every explanation I've written, has been shot down with essentially the same whinging -- there isn't a rule for it, or I don't like the rules, or the rule is 'broken' because ba ba ba ba. Every single argument I've seen against it so far has taken the rules in War! independent of the game world, and thereby have been nonsensical, recursive, and self-defeating, made particularly more so with the claim that 'bad rules aren't made good (or even okay) by saying the GM should fix it'. I don't say that; I say that the GM has control over the game world. And that every rule is broken if taken independently.
Ban War!. You don't need our permission. But stop attacking it, apply to be a freelancer, write well enough to be one, and then write something better than it. Something that corrects it. Or go play another game.
* -- ... because Kane !! has #1-5 sewn up all by himself ...
