Could you please elaborate who, exactly, it is you target with that comment?

Yes, I suppose you can be "a bit" more blunt. But does it come off as holier-than-thou and judgemental, and make you look like a huge jerk? A bit. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

(To be fair, I'm just as guilty of being a huge jerk, but I'd like to change that fact. Think positive!)

~Umi

He appears to be simply expressing his personal perceptions (negative and possibly flawed as they may be). If he isn't overtly targeting anyone in particular, we really shouldn't suspect that he's doing so secretly.

~Umi

I'm pretty sure there's some sort of fallacy here involving taking the arguments of a bunch of different people, and combining them into a single argument that makes no sense. Yes, some people think limits will be useless because they're high enough they rarely come up, and just add book keeping. Yes, there are some people who think limits are the worst thing ever and take all of the fun out of the game, because even with relatively small dice pools you can get big numbers of successes. And yes, there are also the people who feel the limits will get in the way of their min-maxing. But each of these is different groups. They all dislike the same mechanic, but have different reasons for doing so. And each is valid from their own perspective and the types of games they run/play.



For what it's worth, I don't actually mind the concept of a limit system. I do see how it could be made to work well. What I have disagreed with (and I note your lack of response to my post on the subject) is the specifics of the implementation we are seeing. Gear replacing your base limits, rather than modifying them. The base limit formulas being nonsensical from either a game design or common sense perspective.

But ignoring those things, I see potential where Limits are concerned. For example having gear raise your limit on tests, rather than providing dice pool mods. Penalties/debuffs reducing limits, rather than sacrificing dice pool. I mentioned in my other post the idea of a category of weapons made assuming you have a smaller dice pool, with low accuracy, but the abillity to reduce/negate enemy dodge, so even a low agi/skill character can contribute in mundane combat without that being their main focus. Or rather than a rating 6 medkit giving you +6 dice, it sets your limit for first aid tests. Or having a debuffing spell that reduces enemy limits, rather than their dice pool, making it easier to render an enemy helpless through these sorts of spells so they're a viable alternative to just knocking out/killing the enemy. I can see the system as a whole working, there's just too many moving parts and variables for it to judge yet. If it's fully integrated into the core of the system, and is made to take everything into account, it could work out well. So for now I am withholding judgment on whether the system as a whole is flawed. My problems are instead with specific things we do already know.

I disagree, WoW patch notes tend to have a lot more lobbying and complaining about someone else. You don't see people saying "Man I can't stand gear" you get people going "OMG Mages are OP NERF NAO" or "My class sucks! Buff me moar QQ"

We (myself included) already covered that part in the previous preview threads. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)

I'm not combining arguments into one, I'm merely dismissing in general the ones I've seen in one fell swoop. Assuming your representations of them are correct, all three of the groups you used as examples are being narrowminded and only looking at the issue in a single light, missing or ignoring vital information about how limits tie into the larger system as a whole. I'm arguing from the position of a broader perspective.

"Limits will just add bookkeeping." Well, no, they'll also limit high end imbalance, and make gear selection matter.
"Relatively small dice pools can get big numbers of successes." Yes, they can. But you can exceed limits with Edge on those rare occasions when they do.
"Limits get in the way of min/maxing." Yes. Yes, they do. Thank Glob.

The only group which has any sort of validity to their perspective (at least as reprsented by you) are the min/maxers, but if the cost of having a more mechanically balanced game is to discount and disvalue their perspective and the types of games they run/play, so be it. Min/maxing is inherently problematic and toxic for the larger game system and community.

~Umi

But in those games, high end imbalance isn't occurring, because their players don't play that way. You can't discount that for them, they're being forced to track extra stuff because of what someone else is doing at their tables. Once again, this is a point of perspective. In their games these limits will show up rarely enough it's probably not worth the hassle of calculating and tracking it.



And if you've only got a couple points of edge, and you used them on something else before this lucky roll? It can happen. It's great for someone maxing out edge, but remember the point of the more lenient regeneration of edge is to encourage players to spend it faster. Telling them they're supposed to horde it in case they get a great roll they were not expecting instead is a complete reversal of that design goal.




For all your talk of other people lacking perspective, you seem to show a strong inability to see things from anyone's point of view but your own.

It doesn't address the problem. It addresses the symptoms. The problem is that the way the system was designed in SR4. Bonuses all stacked unless otherwise stated. The rules were poorly written and there was no real overarching editor to keep track. The system, as a whole, was in a state of an arms race with each additional splat book. That 25+ shooting dice pool was, unfortunately, necessary because of the existing of various bit of 'ware. Let's start out with MBW3. 3 reaction and 6 dodge. Right there, that's one piece of 'ware that reduces that 25 dice pool down to an effective 16. Add 3 reaction and 3 dodge (idioticly reasonable) and you now have just a 10 dice advantage. It's also trivial to eat away at a significant portion of that 10 remaining dice with just a higher reaction or dodge among other augments that would provide a defensive bonus. That arms race created a necessity for such characters to exist.

I doubt anyone truly plays a pornomancer, it's an optimization experiment but it does illustrate the problem of how easy and cheap it was to get and stack modifiers (emotitoy).

Both of those are examples of poor control over the content making it into splats or not putting a sane mechanism in place to avoid the need for control. Those are solutions that they could have pursued that would have fixed the problem but instead they decided to treat the symptom and put limits on successes leaving the inherent problems intact which means that those exploits are still available with an ever so slightly higher bar to jump over. Plus they won't be readily apparent due to a lack of initial splat content.

Logic was a problem. My group ran into this one very quickly. "Why are went spending build points on skills that we never use? The hacker with 6 logic an a logic augmentation, and one rank in the skill out performs us." That just exacerbates the problem with glass cannons or one trick ponies. When once character can do a wide array of skills BETTER than the other character, there's very little reason to invest heavily in them and consequently that leaves you much more to invest in your "one trick" or "glass cannon".

a) ...they did
b) no no no no, this actually is the WORST way to solve this issue, because probability curves become unpredictable
c) ...they did

CGL did (a), ©, and new rules to "cap" success.

Why would you even spend the edge. It's one of those false choices of edge use (like add edge dice or reroll non-hits) where the actual use cases are going to be narrow and far apart, which makes the limits even more pointless. They're likely high enough that all the successes you need will be under that limit and given that almost anything above 4 successes had mostly indeterminent outcome (based on GM fiat) it just makes the whole thing absurd.

It's a question of costs.

How much extra bookkeeping do limits impose? Not a lot. If it's too much for you, house rule it. The rules aren't meant to cater exactly to every whim and playstyle - they're supposed to cater mostly to the greatest number of whims and playstyles. Limits impose very little annoyance in exchange for actually meaningful gear selection and a massive reduction in min/maxing.


So giving people an opportunity to spend Edge is going to encourage hoarding?

The entire point of using Edge to exceed your Limits is to offer you a choice. Spend it now, and not have it later when you might want it? Or don't spend it, accept the very respectable 5 hits you're limited to rather than the not much more useful 7 hits you rolled, and keep that point of Edge at the ready? Moreover, the larger your dice pool, the more often you hit your limit, the more often you are given a choice between spending and not spending Edge.

Let me put it another way - how would taking away limits encourage people to spend their edge, rather than hoard it? How does having players choose whether to spend or keep a point of edge less often combat hoarding?

~Umi

No, I mean in the context of having no modifiers for anything at all.

Limits are, from what has been released so far, just putting the modifiers on something different and not on DPs. (for instance, material has already mentioned that stuff like laser sights and smartgun systems for guns just modify the Limit, not the DP)

I think you're missing that quite a few of the old die-pool-bloat pieces of gear will now manipulate Limit, instead of bloating the die pool (which is to say, the symptom is being treated but so is the inherent problem).

I also think it's a little early in the game for you to be quite certain just what exploits are still available and which ones aren't, don't you?

There'll be more on those later, I'm sure. I normally wouldn't have put a cyberlimb on a street ganger since, you know, street ganger, but it was in the art notes, with an additional notation that it didn't fit right and was, generally junky. So then I was, like, "ah HAH! Ganger lost an arm in a fight, and either A) he rips the arm off a dead guy or B) they get one from a street doc who was fired for being bad at his job. Either way, it doesn't fit right, but what'reyougonnado? Have no arm at all? Pssh."

That won me over. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Let's put it this way. You are playing a game. You have one stat, it's called Awesome.

No awesome <----------------------------------> Really Awesome

Gear modifies your Awesome stat in various ways, the higher your Awesome, the better you do....except that everyone agrees that once you hit a certain value of Awesome (right around 15 to 18) the game breaks down and stops being fun.

No awesome <----------------- Really Awesome -----------------> Boring

Clearly the solution is to limit Awesome, right?

Well...how about this idea, let's add another stat.

Our first stat is called Awesome and our new stat is called Cool.

No awesome <----------------------------------> Really Awesome
Not Cool <----------------------------------> Really Cool

Now we have two stats for our gear to modify! Now rather than limiting awesome to a maximum, we can shift some of our modifiers from Awesome to Cool, and without having to put hard caps on things and without removing items, we have twice as much Fun Potential before the game breaks down.

You're advocating the former, CGL went with the latter.

It only address a part of the problem. An inflated 25 dice pool will loose the possibility to get 8 hits or more but it will still retain the possibility to get 7 hits 78% of the time. It will also still be able to withstand negative modifiers of -6 or more that are supposed to make things difficult or impossible (full auto recoil, long range or blind fire). Limits alone won't fix these issues, hence the need to also directly address them with regards to the size of dice pools.

No. It's not. Simply put, if conjecture like this shouldn't be foisted about then they shouldn't tease bits and pieces while admitting that SR5 is similar to SR4. This shows how some things have changed. It is perfectly reasonable to take knowledge of how things worked in SR4, modify them as knowledge permits and make judgments based off that. Further, this exactly the sort of publicity that is going to make the product less marketable. I'm not going to order a rulebook to a game when there's concepts that I already greatly dislike just to see if maybe they fix the whole of problems in a satisfying way.

If equipment were a significant portion of the problem for dice pool bloat then you run into the issue where you reduce the dice pool while raising them limit which basically means you marginalize the limit. I believe you've said yourself that limits weren't coming up often so why even have the mechanic at all? You solved the dice pool bloat problem by eliminating gear as a sorce of dice but now the gear nearly functionally useless. I'd actually argue that this doesn't fix the inherent problem. Gear dice pool bloat is still just a symptom of the lack of control over bonuses or stacking. In this case, they just foisted the problem and the symptom to a different area, now you get limit bloat from gear which will just lead to marginalizing the whole mechanic and making it a pointless waste of bookkeeping.... unless you put a limit on limits but then were getting into meme territory with that.



Funny, D&D 3rd edition has used that solution in a very elegant manner. Bonus types.... competence, dodge, enhancement, circumstance.... with bonuses of the same type not stacking. The only difference between what WotC did and what CGL did is that WotC did it in a positive manner while CGL's implementation is negative.

I can, as a sometime rules designer, appreciate the benefits of the limit system. Dice pool caps affect Potential, Hit caps affect Results. They both attempt to curb power, but in different ways.

But I wasn't talking about the mechanical aspects of one over the other.



I rarely engage rules discussions from the point of view of a player. I look at the subject as a designer more often than not.


This is exactly what I was getting at.

Customer psychology is important. It's not something a developer can just dismiss. It's what sells a game, ultimately. People buy on emotion and irrational thought more often than most will care to admit.

I'm in sales. I manipulate customers all day. I can say the same thing twelve different ways, but there are always a couple that work better and several that will turn the customer right off of buying.

As I said, I appreciate the mechanical advantages of Limits, but I can't help but think that players will feel they are punitive. Reality and Perception are two different things.



-k

...I'm guessing I wasn't clear in my other post then.

What I was getting at was the other directions they could have gone in addressing the "bloated dice pool" problem, and how the three that I mentioned (that I quickly thought off the top of my head while eating lunch) aren't really that good of an alternative.

So, in summary, it was just me thinking allowed about "Well, what other ways could they have gone to solve this problem other than Limits" and if they could/could not work.

I'm not advocating for them to ACTUALLY do my suggested alternatives. That would be silly. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)



For what Limits are, I'm currently in the "wait-and-see" crowd. On one hand, I get the primary goal of what CGL is trying to achieve, and I overall am glad that they are addressing the issue. On the other hand, I get all the general concerns and complaints over how Limits work.

I've just decided to not make any final judgements until the damn book is sitting in my hands. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

So you're saying that Limits don't go far enough? Intersting how broad the opinion sprectrum is on this topic.

I personally don't like the idea of hard capping dice pools. If someone wants to keep bloating their dice pool, that's fine. They'll have a higher chance of succeeding, and they'll be less impacted by negative modifiers, and they'll almost never glitch. But they'll also be paying a high cost to do so, with somewhat diminishing returns. Getting those 25 dice in a single pool is going to be less efficient than adding a handful of dice to several different pools. You should get better bang for your buck by being well rounded, but at the same time we should also allow people to specialize if they really want to - they just need to have reasonable costs and lose efficiency to do so.

Now, soft-capped dice pools could potentially work, but that's kind of what limits do anyway, so I dunno. And we've been told that dice pools are going to be smaller anyways thanks to changes in modifiers, so hey, it may be a moot point.

~Umi

Except that WotC kept coming up with new bonus types. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sarcastic.gif)

Alchemical
Enhancement
Size
Inherent
Resistance
Natural
Armor
Shield
Deflection
Dodge
Racial
Moral
Competence
Insight
Luck
Divine
Perfection
Circumstance
Profane
Sacred
Exalted
Dodge
Epic

b) I am a fan of the "it's not impossible, just highly improbable" mentality as a GM. No matter how crazy the chance is, I am still happy to allow the possibility. Variable TNs allowed for this. SR5 limits will squish this.

What I would have liked to see was the Edge rule of 6 on all rolls, without using edge; and made the thresholds the variable modifiers, as opposed to dice pool mods or limit mods.

I am also a fan of skills being more important than attributes; however, since they are using limits based on attributes, I think my hopes on this one have been squisheed!

Bull mentioned the 'slush fund' that pops up at the end of chargen, and while I can't give away details (NDA and such), those little 1 point skills were *not* taken instead of giving him a push in, say, Pistols by 1. They were cheap lil' add-ons after the fact to give him color. A ganger should be able to work his commlink (even if it is a piece of drek), and he has a guitar somewhere that he plinks away duing his downtime, helps with the chicks, right? Throwing weapons because there's always a good time to chuck something at a guy's head ... bricks, empy bottles, whatever. Plus chucking knives is just cool. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

As for Intimidation? Yup. Talk trash, get people to back down, establish yourself in the pecking order, give people to give you stuff without having to kick their teeth in ... it's really useful, and used far more often than, say, plinking away with an AK-97. The average bouncer doesn't fight all that much... they just come over, loom, ask, "Is there a problem?" and the situation resolves itself. Same thing here. Looking tough can keep you out of fights but keep legitimacy. See also: Police saying "Move along" instead of whacking them with sticks. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)



Personally, I'd love to see it broken into three different skills. Mind you, I also want Etiquette broken into, like, ten, so. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)




Not an error. People are guessing why, and some are much closer than others.



Damage went up across the board, as did armor, but since +1 DV is about the same as +3 armor, well, damage got an overall boost. Combat is really dangerous right now. Once again, avoiding it is good for you.



That one's on me. The archetypes I put together almost all had art ready when I got started (And those that didn't had art notes) ... I know I had a reason for going outside the lines on this one, but I don't recall exactly why now. (Tho he doesn't have "molotov cocktail" on the list either, so. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) ) Hrm. I'll have to get back with you on that one. Another archtype was listed as having cybernetic eyes, but the art showed goggles, so I changed it up and went with goggles instead.

Hrm.

At any rate, there was a lot of "What makes sense?" on this one. I wanted gear that was commonplace (Like the Colt) or cheap (The streetline special) and that would be fairly easy to carry around or ditch when needed, the axe being a noted exception for when things got serious. He had enough cash to get, say, an Ares Predator or avane an Ares Alpha, but my mental image of gangers looked at that idea and went, "Nope!" and moved on.

STreet Gangers are big on 'rumbles', brawling with whatever's at hand, rather than breaking out guns. When gunshots ring out in the 'plex (And you aren't in the Barrens), Lone Star rolls in quickly, and nobody wants that. Beating a guy goofy with your bare hands, or knocking him upside the head with a baseball bat or a piece of rebar, gets the message accross and doesn't fetch the cops.

(As an aside, a few years back, street gangs in ... I want to say Portland? ... started a new thing. They found that gangers were always showing off bullet wounds and scars as trophies and getting 'cool points' for it, rather than intimidating people to not mess around. So, new plan ... They'd round up opposing gangers, yank down their pants, and shoot 'em square in the buttcheeks. Just as painful, but not something you could ever show off for being tough. Surprised it hasn't caught on more widespread, truth be told!)

@Draco18s

Wow. That's... quite a list.

I imagine that would impose some actual bookkeeping. I can just picture trying to remember the difference between Moral, Divine, Sacred, and Exalted types.

~Umi