It makes me sad that people want to "prevent Tinker".
Sorry; bad choice of words. I only really mean to prevent the metagaming/unbalancing portions of Tinker, since that's what people have actual issue with.
Though, honestly, the more I think about it, the more those portions seem intrinsic to Tinker.
Don't want to bog down with the rest of the discussion (since I'm in the minority here, apparently), but - why allow "flawed" items to be considered "balanced" in the first place? If something is a glaring engineering flaw, then it cannot be "average" or "good" by design at all - at best, it can be "marginally viable"
Simple. Piecewise is an
abysmal engineer, and is generally unlikely to recognize a significant flaw. Even if he wasn't, it would still be possible to come up with a decent idea, get an item balanced for that, and then repurpose it for a
great idea. Nobody is perfect and capable of instantly seeing all uses for something.
1. There are no scifi items. Everything in the list here is just normal stuff. And not every high tech at that. There's not even a plasma screen in there. And the lack of high tech stuff means that it becomes a lot harder to make reality defying things.
There won't be any magic either? Sounds more boring than I expected. This will likely help, since it's harder to come up with new ideas for stuff that actually exists, but won't prevent the issue. Say someone makes a gun that fire cheesewire bolas with little motors, and gets you to specify that each shot does x damage--if they then find a better way to utilize the cheesewire, problems happen. If someone
can't make a cheesewire bola gun, then you aren't rewarding creativity, which makes the game even more boring.
2. Guns and damaging dealing weapons in general have a set damage. No rolls. This pistol does 3 damage every time you hit with it. Armor has set block numbers. This armor has 5 HP. When the HP is gone, it breaks. There are upper limits on both. Is it possible to make a rocket launcher that does far higher than any normal gun? Yeah. but it still has set damage
So? If a flawed pistol does 3 damage, and I fix the flaw, would it not do more afterward? That's what I'm saying would happen. If it
doesn't do more damage, you're just rewarding people for jamming a bunch of parts together in a vaugely gunlike shape, and not for being creative or intelligent with the parts.
3. Stupid maybe, but the alternative seems massively boring and also really strange. So you pick up "Generic Electronics" X3 and combine that with "Generic structural" x 2 and get a tv? That seems like it's begging for abuse because whats to stop someone from saying "I have 300 generic electronics. I build a death star." It also kind of ruins any attempt to have areas you scavenge this from be unique.
I stated what I meant poorly. I'm getting worse at conversing at one in the morning, apparently. I meant to categorize parts based on their function; you could have "metallic kinetic fasteners" (nails, screws, rivets, etc.) and "fabric wrapping fasteners" (tape, straps, rope, etc.). These are in a roll table, and you can choose something more specific if that category is rolled, and maybe the specific item has some influence on how it can be used. Mostly, this serves to have the list of parts be built around things that can be used in some fashion, rather than a bunch of worthless bullshit that'll probably just be melted down or ignored. It would also help ensure there's sufficient coverage of useful items for crafting.
Prepostedit:
I suppose the good thing about me making the recipes is that there's more freedom in what I could make; since I can defy reality where I want.
As long as people can't improve on your designs, sure, that would work well. Otherwise...