2016-11-12 4:47:10 ¶ ●

The way I like to look at it is that Alternia operates on video game logic (and was essentially engineered by Doc Scratch to be as such).

There are legendary weapons, which are rare, and only a couple of people can have them - usually people who work for them (FLARPers, for example). They’re powerful and obviously give an immediate advantage to anyone who can get their hands on one; but they’re not an immediate win, especially against someone with a weaker weapon who has actually trained in combat in order to catch up (see; Eridan with his white wand versus Kanaya with a standard lipstick chainsaw).

And then there are guns. To use a gun is just to play a gun-user character. A gun-user isn’t more powerful than any melee warrior, or any mage; they just have different strengths and weaknesses. A gun-user can fire quickly and deals some relatively heavy hits, but they have to reload, are limited to what they can carry in terms of ammunition, and are considerably disadvantaged at close range.

These facts aren’t helped any by the fact that I tend to think of Alternia’s firearms as being more like futuristic biological spacemuskets and blunderbusses than the equivalent of today’s assault rifles and such, but that’s probably an elaboration for another post.