Please, Seerow, second time now, I'm asking you to stop it with the insulting and rude behavior. I've been nothing but polite, even if I haven't been understanding your position perfectly, much less agreeing with it.

That said, since you're so adamant for it, exactly why should agility factor into Limits at all? Why, exactly, is this such a sticking point for you?

From a gameplay balance perspective, Agility is already immensely valuable, so putting Agility into Limits would just add even more value on top of that. Since we've heard from the people making the game that they felt this was too much value for a single stat, we know exactly why they aren't using Agility in Limits.

And from a "realism" and "how the world works" perspective, I've already laid out arguments for why Agility should not factor into Limits, based on the notion that a person isn't strictly limited by their agility, or lack thereof, in nearly the way they are by their strength and fortitude.

So, do you have any compelling reasons as to why Agility should factor into Limits, from either a gameplay perspective or a "common sense" perspective?

~Umi

My question for you Umidori, is simply this:

How, exactly, does Strength or Body EVER figure into the active uses of Palming? It is All about Reaction and Agility. Body and Strength will not have any real input in such a thing, compared to Reaction and Agility. It is about Hand Eye Coordination, not Build and Muscle Mass. I am sure that there could be many cases where this is also true with the remaining Physically oriented Active Skills. *shrug*

Bull:
Your assertion that the caps are so high it only matters if you have 12 dice is based on poor intuition and completely wrong. It matters quite a bit even if you only have 8 dice. It also completely breaks the 'simple' math average you're using. The only reason 12 dice averages 4 successes is because sometimes you'll roll 10, sometimes 2... and the average is 3. As soon as you cap.. the average skews badly to the low end because you end up with a lot of rolls where you can't use the excess.

Just for your point... limit of 4... how many times you produce 5 or more successes on 5+ dice / out of total possibilities.

5: 1/243
6: 13/729
7: 99/2187
8: 577/6561
9: 2851/19683
10: 12585/59049
11: 51195/177147
12: 195825/531441

The only person the limit of 4 doesn't matter for is someone rolling 4 or fewer dice!

At 8 dice we have nearly a 10% chance of rolling excessive results. At 12 dice a full 37% of the results 'cap out'.

Even more to the point... the average result for 12 dice is no longer 4... the average is now 3.36!
(0*4096 + 1*24576 + 2*67584 +3*112640 + 4*322545)/(3^12)~=3.36


The net effect of this is that attributes have become even more important than they were already in SR4. Because they directly skew how many successes you can use! So now, not only do they add dice, but they also raise the caps! Way to make skills completely pointless :(.

Gets a HUGE thumbs down from me on a math perspective. I hope that attributes get priced at least at 2x that of a skill group to compensate in karma. Since skills can only add dice, not raise caps now. If the skill set the limit instead of the attributes it would have been far better.

I've said it before (sometimes quite a bit more forcefully than this), but Limits are my least favorite thing about SR5. I fought against them. Very hard. All that said, once I started actively playtesting, I didn't mind them so much. They don't come up terribly often, and when they do it's still not normally the end of the world; having five, or six, or seven successes is still a lot, and if you really feel that it's not enough, there's always Edge (which does, in fact, refresh very differently in SR5, in an attempt to encourage folks not to be so stingy with it).

I still don't think they're perfect, trust me. I think there was maybe one other guy who argued against them more loudly and passionately than I did, maybe. There are a few house rules for them I'd love to see put into print some day (perhaps utilizing the same formula but presenting it as an SR3-era pool instead of a limit). But in the meantime, practically speaking, in gameplay itself -- they're not as bad as I feared. My disliking for them remains primarily a matter of principle, rather than practicality.

I like the reasoning behind the physical limit calculation from a game balance mechanic. Agility is truly the uber stat in 4th Edition. Even hacker types could dump points into Agility to make them street sammie good since their logic wasn't all that important if they wanted to just buy their programs. Is it realistic to say the hulking ork has a higher potential of sneaking around than a lithe, petite, elf. Not really, but neither is it realistic for physads to throw shuriken at armored trucks and stop them dead in their tracks but hey, it's just a game, not a SIMULATION.... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

I am acting "rude and insulting" only because you are trying to make arguments against things nobody has said. The second that stops, we are able to discuss things rationally. I don't think it's too much to ask to not have to point out in every post "nobody is saying that". Since you seem to have abandoned that tack in this post, let's move on.



From a common sense perspective, Agility should factor into the limit for agility based skills for much the same reason someone else gave me for Social needing to be distinct from Mental, because the main guiding stat for a skill should be important to the limits of that skill. It makes absolutely no sense that a hulking brute with 10 strength and body, with no agility to speak of, can get lucky and do better on a roll than someone who is much more agile and sneaky will ever be able to do. Strength/Bod/Reaction absolutely should factor into limits, but agility should have at least some say in agility based skills. I'm not sure how you feel that common sense says this shouldn't be the case.

By your reasoning that the increased dicepool is that stat's benefit, and other stats limit it, then what you should have is a limit for each skill that doesn't include their linked attribute at all. You want to run? Sure your strength gives you extra dice, but you are limited by Body, Reaction, and Agility. You want to Drive? Reaction gives you more dice, but you are limited by your Body, Strength, and Reaction. I could see an argument for such a system, and that seems to be what you think is happening here. But it's not because that's not how it plays out for anything other than agility linked skills. If you try to con someone, you don't get cha as bonus dice, and then use your Logic/Int/Wil to limit it. No, you get cha as bonus dice AND twice cha to your limit. For literally any skill that is not agility based, you will find a limit formula that applies to them that includes the linked attribute in that limit. Agility being left out is arbitrary and completely defies common sense in the context of the system they've actually put forth.



From a Game Mechanics perspective, first, let's examine the claim of Agility being a super stat, and thus needs to be shafted somewhere to make up for it. Because you know what? I can totally agree Agility in SR4 is too valuable. But the reason for that is not that it is a super flexible or all-encompassing thing that all characters need (as opposed to say, D&D where Dexterity really is SR4's Reaction+Agility rolled into one stat, and most of the other stats have even less use, so dexterity is amazing for everyone forever). No, the reason for it is because any character who wants to participate in mundane combat needs agility, and agility is relatively easy to boost.

I mean really, let's look at the skills Agility boosts.
-Close Combat
-Guns/Throwing Weapons
-Escape Artist
-Forgery
-Gymnastics
-Locksmith
-Infiltration
-Palming

It's a decent list, especially when compared to Body, Strength, or Reaction. But people take agility almost exclusively for the first two, and the last two. The ones in the middle are things most people could take or leave, depending on concept. But everyone wants to be able to shoot a gun. Everyone finds passing unnoticed or hiding a gun on their person (among other things) useful.

To me, this says the issue isn't really about an overload of Agility as a superstat, but rather that Agility is so necessary to take part in mundane combat. Limits/Accuracy actually introduced a great way to get around that though. You could, for example, have a set of weapons that aren't very accurate, but have a high base damage, or reduce target's dodge (strong candidates would be shotguns or heavy weapons) to act as a solid choice for characters with low agility to contribute to combat while more skilled characters take advantage of higher accuracy weapons that are strictly better when you have a higher dice pool, but not as attractive for a character who doesn't have that as a focus. Another possibility could have been tying Close Combat into strength instead of agility, so a high strength bruiser doesn't also need to be highly agile to do his job, providing another niche for non-agi based mundane characters.

But seriously, even ignoring other possible solutions, the claim the Agility is a superstat is a copout. Because on the other end of things, we still have Logic. Logic has a list of linked skills literally twice as long as Agility. Logic also gives perks where agility has none (providing free knowledge skills at character generation), and while Logic's long list of linked skills may have meant little in SR4, in SR5, Hackers are being given more ways to interract with the real world, and contribute in combat via hacking. And along with that Hacking is being worked so that attribute actually does something. This means that Logic will have a huge list of linked skills for utility, will be usable in combat as a primary means of attack/defense, and it also has uses for one of the two major Mage traditions. You want to talk about super stats, Logic is where it is at. And yet, despite all of this, we have the Mental Limit which uses Logic*2 right there. This, to me, singlehandedly destroys any argument from Bull or any other developer that the attributes chosen for limits were made with actual balance considerations. Which then brings us back up to common sense, which the current system also lacks.

I'm not really clear on the need for limits as a gameplay mechanic to begin with. It seems like it comes from the desire to patch over some of the poorer aspects of the SR4 core mechanic, but it all seems rather inelegant, since different parts of the character sheet are now fighting each other.

Contemplating an action will now require an eye on the difficulty of the action, the skill and attribute pairings (and any related modifiers) involved, and the 'sphere' (mental/social/etc) of the activity. This looks like it will involve a hot mess of metagaming since it'll serve to truncate the probability curve. Alternately, at a point it could literally have no real mechanical effect, which raises the question of why it's included -- as evidenced by some of the people close to the development using the fairly mitigating language of (paraphrased) "it's not a huge deal."

To be frank, if calculated weighted average monstrosities related to every game activity aren't a big deal to the system, what's the point of having them? Surely some slightly more elegant solution could've taken their place. It makes me frown to think that it's the best idea that they came up with.

Overall, I see limits as a negative-centered mechanic rather than a positive one. That is, characters start from a point of strength with their dice pool, and then are mechanically limited to only a certain degree of success in order to keep things to a certain probabilistic range. This is rather than starting from a point of relative weakness with the dice pool and using bits of the character sheet in order to rise to that probabilistic range. You might end up more or less in the same place but the journey to get there is odd, at best.

To explain where I'm coming from, take a look at the extra dice pools from SR3. They're calculated similarly to SR5 limits, as an average of a mix of relevant attributes, but the key difference is that they're used as an additive bonus rather than a fixed limit, and they're manipulated as a finite resource in a game turn. This gives players the dilemma of spending these resources versus saving them, and making snap judgments regarding their use. The way it works, the dice are really necessary to do most things since the difficulties involved are pretty high and the dice pools are pretty low -- the dice pools provide a limit on the character's effectiveness, but are presented in such a way that having them is providing a benefit.

That is to say that in SR3 I'm happy to increase my Combat Pool, because that makes my character more awesome. But in SR5 if my Physical Limit goes up I'm merely less annoyed.

Imagine if SR3 had used a negative version of Combat Pool -- starting everyone with more dice to roll, but then forcing you every turn to make the decision to take dice away from those pools until you filled up your Combat Dice Debt. If you were very creative, you could end up with dice pools in the same range, but the experience would be jarring and weird. That's what limits appear to be -- we give you big dice pools to roll but then we take away the benefits unless you spend a special resource (Edge). This is very backwards, and I think it's going to make the game very strange.

Edited a couple times for typos/clarity.

HOLY LONG POSTS, BATMAN!!! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

This is what happens when we get actual mechanics to play with and discuss instead of spending pages sniping uselessly at each other over speculation.

Just imagine when the core book is actually released.

I don't understand why we needed more rules (limits) in an already rules-bloated game, but that's just my two cents.

Which is why I find it so strange for Intuition not to be a factor - after all, it is Intuition in part that represents the ability to read people and thus to know which buttons to press.

Samoth: The basic purpose of Limits is to prevent dice-mod stacking to build abnormally high pools for things which your character otherwise wouldn't be any good at. It won't at all stop a character built for Physical tasks from being good at those tasks, but a character with poor Mental attributes will find that he cannot stack several modifiers to be effective at things like Mechanics or First Aid. In SR4, you could take Logic 1, First Aid 4 (Combat Wounds +2), Neocortical Nanites 3, and a Rating 6 Medkit would have 16 dice to treat combat wounds despite being dumb as a post. SR5's Limits mean that despite high dice pools, he is (as his Attributes would suggest) not good at tasks requiring Logic.

And THAT'S just off the top of my head.

+1. Limits punish the player instead of rewarding them. A passive malus doesn't ever seem like it would be fun.


This gets into the problem of assigning boxes and categories in a RPG to real-world things that aren't so easily define-able. I think Charisma would cover the ability to read people and so on (according to the SR definition of Chr). From SR4A, "an inability to read body language or subtle hints are just a few traits that can give a character low Charisma. A character with high Charisma...may excel at making friends and/or manipulating people...". Intuition does say something about "reading a crowd", but it more talks about mental alertness and noticing small clues and working from instinct (seemingly in non-personally-social situations).

Judge Intentions is Charisma+Intuition, which I'm using as a basis for the identity of Intuition in that case.

A vanishingly small part, yes.

Well as much as I'd like to see that made its own skill keyed of Intuition, that's not how it's setup, at least in SR4.

Yes. Couldn't agree more. Was very, very disappointed to learn that SR5 was essentially SR4 with MORE complexity.

Again, couldn't agree more. I still hold out hope, though.

So, how positive are we on the Limit formulae posted earlier (apparently from the Pegasus forums):

---------------------------------------------
Mental Limit: (LOG x2 + INT +WIL) / 3
Physical Limit: (STR x2 + BOD + REA) / 3
Social Limit: (CHA x2 + WIL + Essence) /3

Round up.
------------------------------------------------


The reason I ask is because if they're accurate, then every single one of the Sprawl Ganger pregen's Limits (from the 3rd preview doc) is wrong.

Physical 8... by the formula (7*2+7+4)/3 = 8.333, which should round up to 9 (stat averaging from the cyberarm *may* account for this)
Mental 4... by the math (4*2+3+4)/3 = 5
Social 5... by the math (4*2+4+4.8)/3 = 5.6, should round to 6

I know there have probably been a lot of iterations through playtest, and rounding may have been an issue, but something's not right.

Limits seem kind of like the dice pool caps they introduced in SR4A; they are applying a clunky fix to something instead of fixing the underlying problems. For social skills, there was too much pointless dice pool inflation, negative situational modifiers that didn't do enough to ameliorate that bloat, and vaguely defined rules for social skills that let them be used to essentially turn other PCs into puppets. The lack of thresholds for opposed tests was a mechanic that really hurt social test resolution, turning it into a binary resolution, despite the implication in the examples that more successes caused more dramatic results.

Social tests were much better in SR3, where defending Attribute as TN, not too many qualities reducing the TN, and situational modifiers raising the TN all combined to make someone with a high Willpower difficult to convince, and someone with average or even weak Willpower would be similarly difficult to convince in drastic (lots of negative modifiers) circumstances. And you didn't have to have social skills just to be any good at resisting them!

Hopefully they will revamp social skills in SR5 to make them more clear with regards to what they can, and cannot, do.

I'm still on the fence. They don't seem like they've found the fine line yet: if limits never come up, then they're not doing anything. If they come up too often, they're causing problems. I'm also not fond of having to figure yet another stat in this game.

It would have been better to deal with dice pool bloat directly, rather than trying to patch it after the fact. I don't think this will prevent min/maxing at all. Quite the opposite: I think clever min/maxers, who are better at gaming the system, will get even more advantages over those without the same level of system mastery.

... "Prevent min/maxing" would be one of the most ludicrous design goals that you could set, because you could literally never so much as approach it.

You can contain it. I use dice pool caps in my games, something that Bull copied for Missions. Since you can't have a dice pool over 20, the min/maxers stopped trying when they hit that point. Those with less system mastery knew what they should aim for, and were better able to keep up. It made for a better game overall.

Trying to contain min/maxing is a good design goal. I just don't think that this will do it; it just makes things more complicated. Those who are good at complicated will have an even bigger advantage than before.

You admit to be rude and insulting and not even able to excuse yourself...

Arguments are fine, but this is a direction they should not go into. So, please, stay away from going into personal attacks here.

Bye
Thanee

Although it was the topic some pages ago and the discussion has moved on, i just wanted to ask, if anyone has thought about the old 10 point system from SR3(?) Companion for character generation.

When i remember correctly it was something like:
A = 4
B = 3
C = 2
D = 1
E = 0
and you could choose the priorities however you liked as long as the final result was 10.

Maybe this could give those who don't like the strict priorities system more variation to build their desired characters.