Errr… The best shooter in the world with max attribute and specialization has got 15 dice. Running in pitch black, he can nail an unaware person he detects at extreme range one out of three times. Give him a light wound, and he is pointless.

I'll agree with this post. I didn't play SR3 much, but ran a 4 year campaign in SR2 and then off and on. After playing SR4A for the last three years, I'd say it is the best yet.

Compared to SR2, SR4A streamlined the matrix rules, got rid of the searching for sixes rules, developed and implemented a decent "extended test system" that allowed players to take breaks and 1 did not let them know when they'd finnish until the last test. Character creation still allows for starting PC's to be seasoned runners, no more million dollar "why am I running the shadows" complaints. Hacking got cheaper. Also the searching for 6's problem got resolved by fixing the target numbers. Also glitches are now more likely.

Style differences:
Commlinks replaced decks for hacking.
Wireless replaced the wires (for the most part).
Transhumanism replaced Cyborgs (Bioware, nanoware, genetech are prefered over cyber).
Rules need less cruchy--you can as GM usually just eyeball the situation. Some groups will like this, others will hate it.




Good news about switching editions is the fluff is still the same (mostly). They gave up trying to retcon it to our timeline.

At static TN 5, looking for 4 successes:
8 dice: ~25.87%
7 dice: ~17.33%
6 dice: ~10.01%
5 dice: ~4.53%
4 dice: ~1.24%

7 dice have ~67% the chance of success that 8 dice do, 6 dice ~58% the chance that 7 do, 5 ~42% of 6, and 4 ~27% of 5. That's hardly what I'd call a "similar amount".


Only in the presence of hard caps. Without them, it's simply the natural consequence of repeatedly improving a skill.


When I say that it's unfixable, I'm not saying that it has lots and lots of different problems (it does, but that's a different matter). What I'm saying is that the basic, fundamental fixed-TN modifiers-affect-pool mechanic is unsound, and that because all other rules are built on top of that mechanic there's no change you can make to fix the problem. I will grant that I'm excluding "liberal amounts of case-by-case GM fiat" as qualifying as a "fix", but if you're willing to go that route why pay someone to write rules for you in the first place?


This isn't actually the case. Above and beyond things like the implications the crunch has for the fluff (in the presence of hard caps, especially the way in SR4 they're reachable at chargen, you can have a character that is as good as FastJack out of chargen), and granting that the fluff shift started in the tail end of 3rd edition, the worlds presented simply don't resemble each other. To give one example, governmental power has been seriously amped up relative to corporations, to the point where Seattle can actually get away with firing Lone Star.

~J

Probability Theory, actually (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

I'd considered listing prob&stats, but honestly that was mostly continuous probability and discrete distributions that are irrelevant to our situation—for a bunch of discrete random variables with uniform distribution, they covered everything I needed to know in discrete and combinatorial mathematics.

~J

What you are looking at is the chance to succeed at a very specific task.

What I am talking about is the amount of "ability" you lose when you lose one die.

For the expected amount of hits you will score, that is always the same. 1/3.

Of course, if your pool is smaller to begin with, the modifiers will hit you harder. But if you plot a curve here, it will look rather uniform.

If you do the same for the SR3 system for, say, 6 dice vs. TNs 2-8, it will not look quite so neat.

And that does not even take into account, that under the SR3 system you also have thresholds.

Bye
Thanee

Not if modifiers reduce your pool to zero. Then other modifiers are useless.

And 1/3 of a hit is not at all the same amount for the guy with 12 dice than for the guy with 3 dice. Especially when you talk about "chances to make it".

All editions of SR have their issues. SR4 solved some of issues that earlier editions had, and created some new ones. It comes down to a matter of personal preference over which of the issues bother you the most.

If you had no books for either SR3 or SR4 I would recommend SR4 if only because there are still new sourcebooks coming out, but since you already have the SR3 books its a tougher call. I think the earlier editions have a clear advantage in the writing and the fluff, but you can always use the SR4 rules with the older edition fluff.

But expected successes is rarely what you care about, and essentially never the only thing you care about. Take the following two cases, both TN 5:

3 dice, Threshold 1: ~70.37%
9 dice, Threshold 3: ~62.28%

In both cases you expect the number of successes required to meet the threshold, but the actual chance of success is significantly different.


Which is the the issue you ascribed to variable TNs—the same penalty can have a different impact based on the details of when it's applied.


Look at those goalposts move! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

~J

If we're going 'Best in the world', 15 is lowballing it by a significant amount. Without getting into theorycrafting, and trying to avoid the inevitable e-peen contest of who can come up with the most broken character by assuming the GM is a complete moron...

7 Agility
6 Skill
2 Spec
6 Adept Powers
2 Smartlink
Hawkeye quality
Blindfire adept power

You're looking there at 23 dice for the 'best', who can hit a dodging invisible acrobat at several hundred yards with ease.

At extreme ranges of play, SR4 breaks down. With no cap on the presence of magic, SR4 breaks down at moderate ranges of play. I still like it a lot, and think it's pretty fun.

Probably my mistake. I was suggesting something like today's "best in the world" in order to avoid arguments such as "yes but with magic and cyber you should be able to do crazy stuff". By the rule as published, unaugmented mundane humans can pull out some really crazy shoot, contrary to the suggestion that you needed a lot of min-maxing to obtain such crazy result.

But maybe a GM who lets you play such a perfectly legit unaugmented mundane human with a nude rifle is a moron ^^ .

Thats's pretty much my stance too. As said, vehicle rules aren't anything to write home about and while SR4 may have an edge in matrix rules, that is dependent on how important interacting with the matrix is to your group. I was also in a similar situation when SR4 came out. I got the core book, but ultimately decided that buying the rest wasn't worth the money and time since our houseruled version of SR3 worked reasonably well for our purposes and SR4 would have required putting again at least as much effort into houserules.

Because writing things around those probabilities means the system doesn't scale very intuitively in general. SR4 has scaling problems as well but many of them are tied into the combat system and the move away from a proportional damage system. Fixing that would be a ton of work, but even so it's less fundamentally problematic than having such a swingy core mechanic.


Anyway, I wouldn't go with SR4 just because there's still material being printed for it. From about Runner's Companion onwards much of it isn't worth the paper it's printed on--you'd need quite the Con pool to convince me to pay money to check out further releases.

So the basic point of contention is fixed versus floating TNs?

As some one who's not a math nerd would I even notice?

Depends on your playstyle, IMO, Thanos.
Someone earlier summed it up pretty well: If you play fast and loose and eyeball it, you probably will stumble over a few flaws in both systems, but won't notice the loopholes. If you min-max a lot and play very close to RAW, you will notice the weaknesses. This is, I found, a generalization that works for each and every RPG I've come across, though. SR4 has its weaknesses, as does SR3. They are just different.
Whether you build a peasant railgun in D&D, a Mach 3 runner in SR3 or a pornomancer in SR4, all of these cases are IMO fringe cases.

So if no one min/maxs it shouldn't be a problem?

Heh.
Of course you can run into problems. It's just that they aren't as apparent as when you try to test the limits of the rules system (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Min-maxing highlights things in both cases but ultimately it's about picking your poison when it comes to the editions. 4e is weird because an individual die doesn't affect your odds that much and so advancement options rarely look OP in a vacuum. Hell, doubly so if you're converting from SR3--a lot of character defining stuff that shifted Target Numbers was ported over as a straight dice pool modifier, and I shouldn't have to tell anyone that going from 5 dice to 6 dice is way less exciting than dropping your TN down a notch. But in aggregate and combined with Edge use people can totally get a crazy go nuts pile of successes. Rocking about dozen dice on a firearms test simply isn't that weird a thing for a Street Samurai to be doing and so you need to get used to accepting the notion that players can and will occasionally decide to re-roll their misses in order to slap down 6-8+ successes and murderate someone super hard.


SR3 is weird because the goalposts move around like whoa as the TN shifts from 5 to 8 and so the addition or removal of any one given modifier can literally be a life or death moment for any given (n)pc.

In short, I really feel like it's a frying pan vs fire situation and find it a li'l weird that people tend to be so partisan on the subject.

No. Fixed vs. floating does, however, have the advantage of being both important (as everything else is built on top) and relatively amenable to objective analysis.

Again, if you want an overview of all of the issues, look at the board archives for… I'd say 3-6 months before and 4-8 months after the release of SR4. To say that things have been discussed to death might be an understatement.


Depends on how closely you're paying attention. It would certainly affect you, but people played WoD back when TN 10 meant chance of success was independent of how many dice you were rolling. Hell, before I repented I would often dispense with dice entirely and just fiat everything in games I ran.

~J

I started playing Shadowrun back in First Edition. Didn't really care for it as it was complicated and it took a while to 'get-it'. Once I did, running games became easy enough. Once SR2 came out, we immediately shifted over to it after we saw how much they streamlined things and got rid of variable staging that SR1 had (OMG, that needlessly complicated things).

SR3 seemed to be a rehash of SR2 so I didn't get much of it. Got into SR4 and truthfully, I found myself wishing for SR2. It made more sense and was better in that it was more well-rounded. The quality of game material / content was higher than SR4. Not to mention retooling SR4 stuff for SR2's system isn't that difficult. SR2 was rather modular. Our group was also toying around with using D10s instead of D6s. We didn't get far in testing that idea (we didn't have that many D10s is part of it) though our initial discussions seemed to point that it would have worked well enough, especially if we made sure to use all applicable modifiers.

My biggest pet peeve with SR4 is how vague the rules are. IMO, some of the rules are vague unless you know how that section worked in a previous edition in which case, those rules make sense. An edition should be self-standing. It should NOT require knowledge of a previous edition to make sense of it. Some of the stuff in the Magic sections is like this (Astral stuff in particular).

SR4A is fun. it's very flexible however it is not as tight as the D20 system. There huge gaps in the rules, that the GM needs to fill in. I do however love shadowrun. I do hope that one day, it gets brought by a more proper RPG company like paizo or green ronin.

To my limited knowledge, the infamous D&D 4.0 system is indeed the closest you get to having a "full fledged" rule system. But it requires a grid. And could be played easier at a PC (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

This is very wrong. 4e is weird because the effect of an individual dice (a modifier) can range from pointless to saving your life. If your dice pool has been reduced to almost nothing, getting a +1 rises your odds a lot. If your dice pool is 18 dice, getting a +1 doesn't mean anything. And I don't see any ways to correct it. Going from a pool of 1 to 2 gives you 100% more hits. Going from a pool of 10 to 11 gives you 10% more hits.

In SR3, people liked the fact that whatever your skill, going from TN9 to TN10 lowered your successes the same way. It was clearly weird that going from TN5 to TN6 didn't mean the same as going from TN6 from TN7, but it was the same whether your were a beginner or world class. Raising TN by 1 actually gives you on average about 25% less success, at best 0% less and at worst 50% less. There are ways to shorten those two extreme values. In my game, it goes from 16% to 33%.

I don't see why people wouldn't be partisan about it. You see it as frying pan vs fire, but to some people, the weird of edition X is minor stuff compared to the weird of edition Y.

The biggest problem I always had with the TN modifiers is, that it negates the core concept of the dice system, which is roll x dice vs TN y and count your successes. The more successes you get, the better.

It only really works (as it is meant to), if tests are unmodified or there are extremely low modifiers.

Once you get to TN 6+ the chances to roll multiple successes quickly become nonexistant.

And you get there really quick, so this is true for the vast majority of rolls you make.

Hence the system degenerates to roll x dice vs TN y and you succeed if you get 1 success.

Thus, the dice system fails to do what it intends to do.

Not to mention that moving from TN 5 to 6 has the same effect on your chance to succeed as moving from TN 6 to 10. In both cases your chance is halved.

It is not for everyone, obviously, but I am much happier with the new edition and its quirks. It has different problems, but it catches the spirit of the Shadowrun rules system much better IMHO.

Bye
Thanee

What do you mean with "full fledged" in this context?

Bye
Thanee