Triple-Strength Myomer's effects are fairly easy to understand and track, but getting it to activate and maintaining its effects is the wrong kind of challenge. If used as originally written it's fine, but in the current metagame it's annoying and demands constant, fiddly attention and perverse actions. As first intended, TSM was to provide a bonus to hot-running 3025-era machines (i.e., those with heavy loadouts and single heat sinks). It encouraged an aggressive play style, where the 'Mech "powers up" a little once it joins the action, helping it counteract some effects of high heat levels.
In the current play era, with double heat sinks and more-efficient designs, TSM has become more irritating than fun. It now encourages micro-management of heat, often slowing down the game as players carefully plot out their attacks to stay in the "sweet spot" or even making untargeted attacks merely to raise their heat level. The TacOps solution of selectively turning off heat sinks doesn't actually help, it just adds another variable to the player's planning. While some players enjoy this level of detail and control, for others it just detracts from the flow of the game.
So here's a simple fix: at the beginning of the game, at in the Heat Phase of each turn, a player with a TSM-equipped 'Mech may declare its TSM active or inactive after calculating its heat for that turn. If active, the base heat of the 'Mech is set at 9 instead of 0 and it may use all the standard rules for TSM. In all ways heat is tracked and dissipated as normal, but it will never drop below 9. If deactivated, then the 'Mech may not use TSM in the following turn, but its "heat floor" returns to 0. (Since the declaration is made after heat is calculated, this prevents players from flicking it on and off every other turn.)
I think this should make TSM far simpler to use and increase its utility in "marginal" (low-heat) designs.
eh, nope.
I understand the desire to make bad designs work, and trust me, I know a lot of canon TSM machines are designed without much (any) thought as to how TSM functions and works and aren't designed to work with it.
but finicky teck is actually one of the key parts of the game, from Ultra Jammin' Cannons, to RAC malfunctions, to MASC screwing up your leg actuators if your dice don't like you.
as it is, TSM
is controllable unlike the random-failtech items-assuming you didn't score badly on the 'mech assignment roll anyway.
The whole point of it, is that you have to work for the advantage, and that there's a downside if you do the work wrong.
but not a catastrophic downside unless you REALLY didn't learn heat management before you started messing with it.
as-written, currently, the rules for TSM are not obscure, weird, complicated things with random outcomes, they're understandable and controllable if you know how to manage your heat scale, even moreso if your table allows customized designs that can be built to generate the cook-up and hold it reliably through piloting and careful weapons fire.
or, y'know, by exploiting the other guy's use of plasma and infernoes.
but it's all about knowing how to manage heat, something that...well...those of us who play eras prior to 3050 can usually do in our heads after a short time.
There are, in fact, other rules that are, in fact, overcomplex, niche events or random to the point of being almost useless. TSM isn't one of those.
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