How to Nerf Steelrunning

[Isilel]

23 hours ago, Duxredux said:

Sure, speedsters can be busted, but they aren't the end all solution to everything,

 

It does seem like trained Steelrunner assassins would be pretty much unstoppable, though, unless their target  chooses to cower in a bunker. Ditto burglars. And that apprehending a Steelrunner criminal would be pretty much impossible until their reserves run out, as long as they are decent shots. Concerning  opportunity cost of storing, the foreshadowed Metallic Arts technologies would require non-murderous ways to create unkeyed metalminds, at which point the cost will become merely monetary. Honestly, the easiest limit would have been to make learning to speed up without injury very difficult, risky and require extensive training. But with dangers being automatically compensated, I dunno.

 

23 hours ago, Duxredux said:

Could be false advertising. They print Jak's stuff and ads for talking tools, so I doubt the newspapers fact check all that much. A company claiming Bendalloy or Speed as a cost lets them charge a premium

 

Well, but shouldn't it come across as completely absurd to the readers, given rarity and limitations of the Metalborn in question? Like if someone had claimed iRL that their restaurant was staffed by star athletes and pop stars? 

Now if they had claimed Coinshots as delivery people, this could have had the effect you describe, since they are actually common enough that it would have been plausible, can actually use their abilities for extended periods of time and are costly enough to employ (as Wax noted in SoS) to justify big mark-ups.

 

4 hours ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

 

I very much agree. And that's before taking into account that, while hemalurgy no longer works for compounding, a single spike of a number of metals can make a Steelrunner even more absurdly overpowered.

[+Lewis Nethur He/Him]

One thing that is important to recall is that, even in Era 2, Scadrial's government has begun maintaining lists of the names of those individuals known to possess access to the metallic arts. This will evolve into watch lists and databases of known relatives and connections unfortunately. Much like how world governments IRL keep track of people's academic credentials. If you've ever submitted an idea for a new type of weapon in any world real or fictional, you are, unfortunately, being monitored.

I still question if steel needs to be nerfed on a magic-system level. A steel ferring can be persistence hunted just as easily as a gazelle by any government or police department that wants them brought in badly enough to risk human lives over the matter, which they almost always do for literally all deviants and criminals. So...I would suggest that this is going to an extremely soft nerfing, in the sense that it will be with soft controls, like labeling offenders as armed and dangerous menaces to society and harassing their friends and family with investigators (not even Inquisitors! Lol) until they are isolated and forced to run out of charge.

[Stormtide_Leviathan]

Anything area of effect is going to be a good counter to steelrunning, since it doesn't rely on someone's reaction time it's just everpresent. And areas of effect seem like they're gonna become more common as ettmetal becomes more present. You could have area of effect leeching, for example that would be a great way to cut off steelrunners.

[Duxredux he/him]

On 4/13/2024 at 7:10 PM, Stormtide_Leviathan said:

Anything area of effect is going to be a good counter to steelrunning, since it doesn't rely on someone's reaction time it's just everpresent. And areas of effect seem like they're gonna become more common as ettmetal becomes more present. You could have area of effect leeching, for example that would be a great way to cut off steelrunners.

Yup, if we're looking for countermeasures and solutions to combat Steelrunners that's a way to balance them without having to actually decrease their capability. There's a lot of ways to do this that don't even require access to Ettmetal or the Metallic arts, though it does make it easier.

• Literal speed trap. Going too fast indoors? Speed detector sets off A-Cadmium bubbles isolating the hallway, or something similar. Difficult to tune, and some work would need to be done to protect bystanders, but it's doable. Maybe use it in conjunction with the Leeching you suggested.
• IRL metal detectors or x-ray machines that ignore the strategies to hide metal from Steelsight.
• Here's a twist on an existing design: some automatic door closers are engineered so that the door closes at an adjustable rate. Try to force the door to close faster than that rate and the closing assembly resists. To limit Steelrunners, simply reverse the direction so that the door can only be opened at a specified rate and greatly increases resistance when someone attempts to open it faster. A lot of finetuning would have to be done to make it safe for other scenarios, like maybe disabling the mechanism in the event of a fire alarm just like how there are already fire alarm triggered doors, but it could significantly limit how fast a Steelrunner could move through a building. Sure a determined Steelrunner assassin could get around it, just set fire to the building and wait for the target to run out, but then no security system is infallible.