I think most of us have long gotten over the fact that SR isn't fully realistic when it comes to guns. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

The accuracy stat exists to offer one more thing to factor into the decision making process for the player when picking their firearm of choice. It's an abstraction, designed to represent general weapon quality, reliability, and ease of use, but it also serves a mechanical purpose.

If you have to choose between two similar guns and accuracy isn't a factor, you're probably going to pick either the cheaper gun, or the gun which holds more ammo, or the gun with better recoil compensation. It's typically not too tough a choice though, and in SR4 we ended up with a lot of weapons available that were just kind of redundant because there were other, objectively better choices. It made the other choices nonsensical - why would you take the gun with less ammo, or the gun with less armor penetration, or the gun that costs twice as much with the same stats?

Adding in accuracy allows for the system to be slightly more robust and offer more interesting choices and tradeoffs - do you go for the heavy hitting pistol with the low accuracy, or the slightly less powerful one with pinpoint precision? It's one more factor on the sliding scale of benefits and tradeoffs, and it makes choosing your gear carefully just that much more interesting.

...that and it's a pretty natural extension of Limits in general.

~Umi

Erm... First, the "farther than" limitation has NOTHING TO DO with Accuracy - distance may actually make Accuracy less of a factor, because range reduces your dice pool, and not your accuracy. Hitting a stationary or unaware target requires only 1 hit; that means that, hitting the limit without a smartlink or laser sight, we're looking at ~13P for a heavy pistol. On average, that'll oneshot any printed mundane critter.

So, not seeing the validity to this specific complaint.

Well, maybe not ANY printed mundane critter. They've printed things like Moose and Blue Whales, ya know.

Dogs and cats and whatnot? Sure.

~Umi

Printed in SR5, specifically. That includes sharks, and great cats - aka, lions and tigers.

adding in a smartgun or laser sight increases your accuracy, so whatever it is, it certainly isn't the mechanical limitations of the firearm. unless, that is, smartguns make your gun actually shoot straighter rather than just helping you with knowing where your bullet should land.

(of course, if you swap the usual wireless bonus the way i've seen some people say they do for smartguns, it makes a lot more sense... smartgun gives you a bonus to hit because you know where it should land, and making it wireless so it can somehow get magical weather updates that can't be replaced with just having weather sensors all over the area and such lets you have a better calculation as to where your shot should land).

I admit, smartguns and laser sights probably shouldn't improve physical accuracy from a logical standpoint. They should just make it easier to line up a shot, effectively giving you an artificial skill boost represented by more dice.

I just file that away as one of the casualties of the wireless bonus nonsense. They couldn't leave well enough alone.

~Umi

Accuracy and Limits are a good idea in theory, but in practice they don't seem to be working.

In theory, it limits system abuses. In SR4.5, power was solely dependent on the size of your dice pool. So, powergaming was easy: Just build the biggest pool you could. The system heavily rewarded munchkining, but since the strategy to power was simple, system mastery was not as big of a deal.

In SR5, there's now Limits to consider. The most powerful characters will combine huge dice pools with ways to upping/breaking the Limits. That means system mastery is a bigger factor, because it's now about the optimum decision instead of just adding dice.

Huge dice pools break the system, it's not meant to handle more than 15 or so dice. Limits were supposed to disincentivise building huge pools, since you couldn't use all of those successes. In that regard, I'd call it a failure: I'm still seeing huge pools, they're just combined with limit-increasing advantages. Edge is a game breaker, if used right: you can declare it after you see how many successes you rolled, which not only means more dice to roll, but you just blew the limit out of the water *and* got to add more successes.

Well, there's always a house rule option to hang the limits and move on...

@Cain

Yes, but the idea is that increasing limits ostensibly comes at a cost.

Previously, you only paid for a high dice pool. Now, you pay for a high dice pool and for a high limit.

Now, maybe the numbers need tweaked, certainly some fine tuning and balancing can't hurt - but the basic underlying concept of requiring people to pay for both their dice and their limits does add some inherent limitations to the "Buckets-o-Dice" problem.

And certainly we don't see 30+ dice builds anymore like you found in SR4.

~Umi

That's not actually true - the concern was where the dice were coming from; the dev posts were very clear on that point. They wanted a system where your ability was as much as possible to do with the character, not with other stuff.

To be fair, they did cut out a lot of external dice pool modifiers.

That's probably why they mucked with smartguns, too. Take away the old dice pool modifier (unless you open the door for hackers to brick your gear), replace it with a bonus to the new Limit system. Sure, the limits become unimportant, but that's not the point - they managed to quietly destroy the dice pool bonus.

Classic misdirection. Clever.

~Umi

...

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see how you go from "the thing they explicitly said they were trying to do" to "something they did quietly with misdirection". That transfer of dice pool bonuses to limit bonuses? An explicit element of their explanation of the "more dice from skills" idea.

I haven't seen any 30+ builds, but I'm still seeing lots of 20+ builds floating around here, and I've even got one myself. And given that only the core book is out (and that most abusive stuff tends to come in the splats), I'd say we're headed down the same path. Limits don't stop dice pool inflation, they just penalize you for rolling well-- unless you can outsmart the system, which I have seen done.

For example, Edge. Spending Edge before the roll nets you extra dice, all your dice explode, and you can ignore the limit. But if you wait until after the roll-- after you know you've got more successes than the limit-- you can spend Edge to ignore the limit *and* get extra dice. Only these extra dice explode, but that doesn't matter, since you already know you've got a ton of successes.


You're sort of right. I read the dev posts too; they were concerned with both the source and the enormous size of the dice pools being rolled. Under SR4.5, attributes and skill might only make up a small part of your overall dice pool, the rest came from modifiers, gear and the like. They especially wanted skills to matter, which is why they raised the cap to 12. Also, they did remove a lot of dice pool additions, at least in the core book.

Problem is, under the current system and with the current assumptions, you can only go so far with this. If new modifiers affect the Limit, not the pool, then you'll rapidly reach a point where the Limit is so high, it doesn't really matter. If they overcorrect for this, make the limits too low, they'll just succeed in annoying everybody. There is a theoretical happy medium, but I don't have faith in the design team to find it and keep things there. These are the same people who put out War! as an example of a rulebook.

Also: while the new rules sorta helped, skill still sometimes only makes up a small part of the dice pool. Allowing multiple rating 6 skills actually helps, because players will want to invest in higher skills over expensive bonuses. But since you can only start with 6 in a skill (7 with Aptitude), when someone is thrwoing 20 dice, it's still not even the majority of the dice pool. Yes, you can increase it to 12, and then it'll be the single biggest part of your dice pool; but at start, skill still doesn't count for as much as it should.

Except I never saw those builds EVER, except in Theory Crafting on Dumpshock. It isn't a problem if you never see it. *shrug*

Except that I have seen those builds in SR4A games. Sometimes on my own sheet, other times on other people's.

You are one of the exceptions and not the rule, in my experience. *shrug*
And at your table, it is obviously expected, so again it is not a problem... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

TJ, i'm pretty sure the general consensus is that your table is the exception (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

My table tends towards TJ's interpretations for the most part. I just don't usually see any use in pointing it out most of the time (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

i'm not talking about his interpretations, i'm talking about the fact that he apparently has an entire group that doesn't even care about powergaming even a tiny bit. that's pretty danged rare, in my experience.

I include under "interpretations" the power levels of characters that make sense [to us] to bring to the table, i.e., the amount of powergaming applied to said characters.

our table tends not to have 20+ dicepools (except for soak) because those of the group who're good at powergaming don't really care to while those who care suck at it.

And yet, it is not JUST the ones I consistently game at. I have played the game since it came out, and I have rarely (I saw one once, in SR2, that was Stupendously Stupidly Powergamed) ever seen such monstrosities as show up on Dumpshock as Theory Crafting (or optimization for the Vocal Minority tables that are represented here). I do not think that I am unique in that regard. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

On the (rare) occasions that I am inclined to do so, I find the characters very unfun to play. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
Unless I am proving a point (as I did once in Champions). (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Story time please?

Champions is pretty well known for the blind, deaf, mute, quadriplegic that could one-shot half a city with his once-per-day explosive power. Needless to say, they took changing his Depends immediately and his daily menu selection very seriously...

All joking aside, I have found that despite being able to power game masterfully, my groups have done a pretty good job of keeping our dice pools reasonable. We recognized early that 11-12 combat dice is pretty much Tier 1 Spec-Ops level in combat and didn't see a whole lot of sense in going much higher. Bulldog, our resident close combat blunt-force instrument and Total Badass ™, had and Agility of 4(7) and a Blades skill of 4 with an (Axes) specialization for the extra +2, add Personalized grip (+1), and the +2 situational reach dice with a Combat Axe and he capped out at 7 + 4 + 2 + 1 + (maybe) 2 = 16 dice. To be frank, I didn't see a whole lot of point in throwing more...pretty much ever...so I called it good there. He hit what he swung at, what he didn't hit every time was pretty much the big baddie and it was still fun to go "Dammit!" when I missed now and again because I didn't add Edge to the roll.

His soak was Body 8, Dermal plating 3, and an ArmorJack for 8/6 with Fire and Electrical resistance of 6 each due to being on the wrong side of each in-game. 8 + 3 + 8 came to 19 dice Ballistic/16 dice Impact and I'm pretty sure he was the biggest tank in the group. Again, I never once felt "Well, dammit. I need more soak dice..." so the game stayed relatively reasonable and a full-auto AR, especially with APDS, was still a pretty serious threat which I think we all enjoyed for the tension in our fights.