Had a Troll Ganger who rolled 16+ Dice on all Combat tests he made (and his Unarmed was 19 IIRC), without Combat Pool. Pretty easy too.
Of course, he had about 300 Karma by that point too. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

yes, if you pump every single point of karma into raising skills, you can get skills higher than drek in SR3 . .
but really, usually people build to broaden their characters instead of specializing even more in game . .
and 16-19 dice is easy enough for starting characters in SR4 to achieve.

Well, aside from skills, pools added more dice to the rolls in SR3.

That's an interesting point, as pools also provided a limiting factor since they were split up over multiple initiative passes. So you could burn all (or almost all) your combat pool to double your dice for one roll, but the other 2, 3, or 4 rolls you might make that turn would be straight skill.

And most karma for non-Awakened went into skills back then because it was a complete waste to bother with attributes beyond character generation because they didn't affect jack. Including attributes in the dice pool was the SINGLE BEST thing 4th did because it actually made attributes matter for a change.

Surely melee damage, damage resistance, Reaction (Initiative), magic resistance, perception, and derived pools meant a little. Why is it that attributes should count, point for point, the same as skills for making tests?

The thing is, it was easier to spend you cash on better Cyber (for the attribute bonusses) .... and your karma on Skills. So much better and easier, in fact, that you'd be "gimped" if you did it any other way.

With the higher caps for skills, they should be a more significant portion of the dice pools, at least at the higher levels. I am also wondering if skill in SR5 will also play a role in the base cap for hits (which Accuracy then modifies).

This... I never raised Attributes with Karma in SR3 after Character Creation. Always went into Skills.

TJ: yet in SR4... outside of buying 1 rank or a specialization in this skill or that... all my karma tends to end up in attributes... even for mundanes.... and yes I'll pocket that nice cyber/bio bonus to attribute scores on top of that thank you very much!

Because the SR4 cost structure is just so far skewed in favor of attributes over skills...

That's why I'm looking at the new skill cap with a jaundiced eye... it won't make a difference the higher cap if the current attribute costs relative to skills stay in play.. people will still max out attributes instead of spending on skills if they can if they're trying to spend karma efficiently.

And this tends to become more true the more you gimp karma awards... the rarer and harder to get to advance the more efficient I find people tend to be with those expenditures.

And I am completely the opposite of you in SR4. I rarely, if ever, raise my Attributes outside of Augmentations. All my Karma goes to Skills, Spells, Complex Forms, Magic/Resonance or Initiations/Submersions. Different Strokes, I guess. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Same. I think I've raised an attribute maybe once or twice, and that was always going from 1-2 or 2-3, never higher. Everything else goes into raising skills, learning new ones, or qualities.

Well in earlier editions... all that karma went into skills yes. (and initiations which came with free magic... talk about the gravy train days... just avoid that magic loss!).

Attributes were largely ignored...


But as of 4th edition... that's largely changed... if there are more than 2 skills tied to that attribute it's a no brainer. If it's an attribute like reaction which gets rolled a lot solo... again no brainer.

Again... even individual skills.. it's generally cheaper to raise the raw magic score than worrying about spellcasting, counterspelling, summoning, and binding. (and more effective because of all the other thing magic adds to and sets thresholds for). If each of those is at 4... you're looking at 40 karma to raise them all... 40 karma will buy you magic 7->8 provided you have the initiations (and you *WANT* the initiations anyhow).

Yes even counterspelling... want to neuter a mage without extended masking... see that increase reflexes spell... dispel it (roll magic + counterspelling...) the mage loses extra IP's immediately. And he can't counterspell you doing it like he could a combat spell.


Agility is another good example... how many different skills do I use? a melee... thrown (oftentimes defaulted for grenades)... a ranged... heavy weapons... and that's not even touching infiltration, palming, etc... 25 karma to raise from 4->5 is damn cheap... as is 5->6 at that point.


In general i find the rule of thumb is optimal karma expenditure is natural attribute == 2x skill. And again there are some things attributes can do which skills never touch or help with. It's simply a matter of willpower to avoid spending it early and often on small things... (though 6 karma here and there for a skill + specialization is generally well spent).

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I generally make a habit to not explicitly suggest how to alter numbers or mechanics. Mostly because it's time I could have spent better doing other things and also because I'm not a game designer.

Being a game designer,* I am the reverse. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

*Speaking of, during the making of this game, we were having trouble determining how to take the end-game positions of the players (and other tokens) and converting it all into a single, numerical score to determine the actual winner (i.e. does X have more weight towards winning than Y, and how much more Y do you need to overcome a lack of X?). Offhand I went, "this plus this plus three times that" and promptly did the math for the result on the board, got a reasonable spread of final scores (24 to 36), swapped the positions of two tokens because the setup was "very clearly player 3 won, he has the most X, the most Y, and the most Z" so that a different player had high X, moderate Y, and low Z where player 3 had low X, moderate Y, and high Z (that is, took a losing player and gave him half of the winning player's points, so instead of P3 having dominated in all three categories, the two players had taken different routes: one person monopolized X the other monopolized Z). Recalculated the point spread and....it was a tie game, 31 to 31.

A few more games using that scoring calculation ended similarly, a narrow point spread (indicating a close game even at the end), but clear and logical winner. I think we ended up making one small change to reduce the power of the conversion from resource X to Z, but it ended up not altering the calculation significantly.

I used to do it a lot like post novel long suggestions on the wow forums and stuff...
Came around to realising one day, "Just WTF am I doing?" spending hours telling someone how to run their game?
If Im not enjoying it, I could do something I enjoy, twas quite a boggling moment of self reflection.
On the other hand I think of elaborate designs and machinations anyway, else my muse gets annoyed with me...
Like the time I wrote a 25 page backstory for a 300 year old elf ranger.

I'll make suggestions, but I generally reserve them to things that I know work pretty well, and think that they could work well in the system at hand--such as my suggestion of using the attribute and skill advancement costs that L5R uses for the upcoming new edition of SR, I know that those costs work well from playing L5R and I think that it could very well work for SR.

Why must one only make suggestions when one doesn't enjoy something?

Back when I was still playing City of Heroes, I was very active on the forums. And I made quite a number of suggestions - some of which ended up being done, even.

Turns out I enjoyed the forums nearly as much as the game itself. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Because those who make the most noise get heard.

Back when SR4 came out, I and several others raised such a stink over some of the more broken parts of the game, our fixed were actually adopted. I was the first person to propose capping dice pools at 20, for example. I've mellowed a bit since SR4.5 came out, but I'm still not allowed to discuss some of the examples of brokenness that still exist.

Accuracy still worries me. It's a fine line between setting it so high that it's no longer a limiting factor, and setting it so low that it ruins the fun of having huge dice pools. Introducing Edge as a limit break doesn't make me feel any better, either; my experience is that Edge is severely overpowered as is.

The problem is that those who make the most noise are not necessarily the majority, and they're not necessarily right, especially in the way the problems should be fixed. A good example is the direct combat spell limitation which was poorly implemented and doesn't solve the problem.

I do remember our 3rd ed GM housruling increasing costs to raise dice pools based on the related attribute, because he felt people with inherant strengths in those areas should be better at them, and conversely if you were weak in an area related skills should be much harder to improve.



-k

that's no house-rule at all O.o
skill up to attribute=1 point per level
skill up to twice attribute=2 points per level
skill up to thrice attribute=3 points per level
or something along those lines.

You just answered a question I did not ask. Congratulations.

As I remember it:

Skill up to half attribute: 1x cost
Skill up to attribute: 2x cost
Skill up to 1.5x attribute: 3x cost