Author Topic: Limitations of Weapons and Dust  (Read 2241 times)

Hobro

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Limitations of Weapons and Dust
« on: November 29, 2018, 07:32:17 PM »
Did some digging around in the template and a thought crossed my mind. Theoretically, what are the limitations of a weapons interaction with dust? Could a sufficiently advanced weapon be developed by say Atlas to "simulate" Weiss' Glyphs? Perhaps projecting them? Or is it more a limit of the dust influencing the weapon (or ammunition) itself? I understand that Weiss' glyphs are a semblance in the case of my initial example but if anything some sort of repeatable 'function of dust' would likely be something that a military organization would want to capture and emulate. My assumption is that projecting dust like effects beyond a weapon requires a semblance that interacts with dust, I just wanted to confirm that.

Vision

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Re: Limitations of Weapons and Dust
« Reply #1 on: November 30, 2018, 03:59:18 AM »
Yeah pretty much as you describe I'll say. Dust is generally thought of as ammo outside of catalyzing with a semblance, that's not to say something crazier can't be done but It would have to have a good "mechanical" explanation and might still have issues in approval depending on how crazy it is. The key part of balancing things like that is to prevent people from getting two semblances for the price of one, for instance we've turned down some Faunus with extremely good senses because there are characters whos semblance is just that.

The show unfortunately doesn't really give us anything consistent to work with so we try to have some internal consistency.

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Kingnoname1

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Re: Limitations of Weapons and Dust
« Reply #2 on: November 30, 2018, 05:53:59 AM »
Following on to what Vision is saying the nature of Wiess’s glyphs being buffs far more often than damaging abilities themselves makes it difficult for an individual weapon, even a highly advanced transforming one to make use of them to the same degree as Wiess. I have a character who uses earth dust to make their punches stronger, there are characters that use wind dust to increase their mobility so on and so forth.

As Vision mentioned we are still going to be careful to make sure the power level is never close to that of a second semblance meaning that you can have all the wind dust in the world but someone whose literal soul is speed is going to be more effective than you every day. It is therefore usually a case by case situation which is probably not the answer you were hoping for but if you have specifics to ask please feel free.
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Hobro

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Re: Limitations of Weapons and Dust
« Reply #3 on: November 30, 2018, 07:07:28 PM »
That's what I thought, but I wanted to make sure. I had an idea for a weapon|semblance combo but the more I thought about it the more I worried it was probably broken and just an excuse to do something that has been canonically written out of the rwbyverse. I appreciate you guys, thank you!