I agree... I started with SR1, Loved the Stories of SR2/3 and far prefer the Mechanics of SR4A.

I disagree that SR4A was all about the Dice Pool inflation... It did not have to be that way. There is no doubt it could get out of hand, but there really is a simple fix for that. Talk to your group about what it is you want and then just don't succumb to the lure of more dice. It really does work. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Haters gonna hate but Harlequin, The "enemy", Immortal Elves, Dragons and all early SR mythology made the game.

So true.

Same here. I still have my hardback SR1 on the shelf, in fact, but it wasn't until SR2 that I really felt the mechanics were truly solid, and SR3 improved them in a lot of ways, even if vehicle combat still didn't work. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

The most absurdly frustrating part of SR5 is that it tries. It really does. It wants to be a fun game that calls back much more to cyberpunk. Unfortunately, the quality just isn't there. The systems design is sloppy in a lot of places despite extensive public playtesting. The writing is incredibly uneven. Despite the high points (looking at you here, writers that hang around Dumpshock) being pretty damn fine, it turns right back in to the same terrible level we've been seeing over the last few years, which produced such wonderful ideas as submarine escapes from the Andes and slaughtering Jewish ghosts for Nazi artifacts.

Tack that on with the absolutely wretched way the Matrix has been handled, and it makes it really hard to have -fun- with the game, much less work the cyberpunk atmosphere of playing Neo-anarchists bucking the system when Big Brother is quite literally watching every move you make, charting the brands of spraypaint you prefer like a web cookie, and the asshole kid down the street with the Renraku shit-box of a deck can make your half-million nuyen worth of reflex enhancers short out before you even know he's doing anything. Not to mention the fact that there are obvious game-breaking powers that have absolutely no in-world explanation.

Seriously, read up in Street Grimoire. Look at Endowment, and Energy Drain, and then try to logically justify why Aztechnology ever used blood magic in the first place when they could have simply been draining a couple points of Essence/Magic Rating and a handful of Karma here and there from their millions of employees without anyone ever knowing or trying to kill them for it. This isn't rocket science, this is basic game design, and it apparently went over the head of whoever is actually in charge at Catalyst, just like the consequences of so many other setting/systems decisions have.

I have said this before about SR5, but "everything has a price" is the most idiotic mantra you could ever embrace as a game design philosophy. Everything in a point buy system already has a cost, both in points and in the opportunity cost of what else you could have bought instead with those points. But "everything has a price" as a game philosophy takes it one step further. It basically boils down to "Every choice you make is going to have an annoying drawback or weakness to it - we are actively going to make the game less fun for you."

If you are a mage, Drain will be higher, because being like a D&D mage who shoots off a few spells and is then useless, is nifty. Direct combat spells will be nerfed to oblivion, while other gamebreakingly bad things like spirits will be made even more powerful. If you are a street samurai, you have a choice between nerfing yourself, foregoing bonuses that used to be the norm, or be vulnerable to unseen attacks that can permanently damage your augmentations, leaving you blind, hobbled, etc. If you are an adept, dependent on low but significant dice pool bonuses from your powers, watch background count turn you into a mundane - or worse off than a mundane. If you are a hacker or rigger, hope you weren't planning on much of a secondary skill set; they are much more rigidly locked in that role by gear requirements. Technomancers are a bit out of my area, but the consensus seems to be that they have been nerfed to the point where there is no sense in not just being a decker. It's like they raised the power level of everything from SR4, then went back through to give everything a disadvantage.

It's a completely different feel than SR3, where you could relax and simply be a decker, or a street samurai, or a troll tank, or a mage.

My honest intro was in the SR2/SR3 range, though a combination of bad GMs and a lack of understanding/education on the game (helped by said bad GMs not bothering to help me there) really didn't get things to stick too well (just rolled the dice, and hadn't a fraggin' clue what it meant).

SR4's my real dive into the game & mechanics, and since having picked up a bit of the 'Target Number' mechanic from previous editions I am kinda longing for that to be used again.

While Shadowrun has always struggled with character balance, SR4/4.5 was the most unbalanced version. It wasn't just that system mastery allowed you to create monstrosities, it was the fact that there was no default power level. So, you could end up with wildly unbalanced characters on the same team, even when you tried to set guidelines.

In my first SR4 game, I told all my players I wanted an over-the-top game. They all agreed to this, and set out to make the most over-the-top characters they could. So I had a rigger/sam who drove a thunderbird, a tricked-out technomancer, and a troll tank who could eat grenades without getting badly hurt. Then my last player handed me a covert ops specialist/melee combatant/mystic adept with a focus in elemental spells. You can see the problem right away: there's no way you can make a character who's good at all that. He ended up being mediocre at everything. He set out with the same expectations as everyone else, but because his concept and system mastery weren't up to the level of everyone else, he was mostly useless.

the target number system, from what i can tell, had both advantages and disadvantages.

the main problem, i think, was the lack of granularity. a 1 point bump in target number was massive. now, sometimes you want it to be a big deal. if difficult circumstances are supposed to make something a lot harder, then just increasing the TN by a couple of points is a pretty effective way of doing that (and likewise in the opposite direction; smartgun systems were ridiculous because they could often take you to TN 2, which was just ridiculously better than someone who didn't have one or even someone who had smart goggles, which were only half as good).

but sometimes you want to be able to give difficulty a smaller nudge, and variable TN wasn't always great for that (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) there's a pretty noticeable difference between TN 3 and TN 4 (each variation in TN from 2-6 changes your success rate by +/- 17% give or take, (edit: in hindsight, i have no idea where i was going with the rest of the stuff after this but before the next paranthesis, you can probably just ignore it mostly) except for multiples of 6 and the number one higher which were actually functionally the same), which meant that even "small" adjustments to TN were a pretty big deal in terms of how much success you were likely to have. (also, since the TN started at a relatively low number and couldn't go below 2, it meant that there wasn't exactly a ton of room to improve TN before it stopped making a difference, unless there were going to be a lot of penalties tacked on first).

the other problem is that it wasn't quite as intuitive to figure out what your chance of success was. most people will be able to figure out how hard TN 1-7 is (7 only because it was the same as 6), but not too many people had the math skills to determine off the top of their head the difference between TN 7 and TN 8, never mind if you actually get up as high as TN 14+ or something like that.

This sums up my objection to SR5 in a nutshell. I got about half-way through the augs section before I wanted to gag. I closed it and went straight out and torrented Eclipse Phase. (Perfectly legal, mods; EP is released on a Creative Commons license that makes it perfectly legal for it to be torrented - the torrent I downloaded was, in fact, seeded by one of the EP devs.)

EP says "You want augs? You can find the money/Rep to get them installed? Go nuts. Essence? What malark are you talking about?!"

Actually, I even riffed on the Shadowrunian paradigm of augmentations having an Essence cost. Recently, my players egocast to somewhere a massive emergency was going down, and Firewall put all the best shit they had at my players' disposal. One of those was an Observer morph that was augged to hell and back, and I made mention that the previous owner had suffered from a severe neurological delusion that having non-biological augmentations was severely damaging to the holistic integrity of her soul, but that if the aug was Masked, it was okay; hence, every single mechanical aug in her body, including the things that literally everybody who is not a luddite has, like basic mesh inserts and cortical stack, are Masked from scans.

See, where you see a lack of guidance on power levels, I see many, many examples of such guidance. If your Tir Ghost Antagonist is throwing 17 Dice and he is supposed to be the boogey man of shadow law enforcement, you like to not build a character that treats them like mall cops (so no Shadowrunners throwing 20+ Dice). So you should be shooting for something along the lines of 8-12 dice. In fact, I would say that the default level of play is that same 8-12 Dice, pretty much across the board. But that is fuel through the exhaust, for the most part.

As to your example... I would MUCH rather have a player shoot too low for a proposed campaign level than to shoot so far over it that all the other optimized characters look like newbs. It is EASY to bring someone up to par with the rest of a group... it is often far harder to bring someone DOWN to the rest of the group (because the character proposed is what they were expecting to play, and most are unwilling to LOSE power).

Problem being, Tymeaus, it is not only possible but routine to create SR4 characters that can generate something like those ~20 die pools off of creation. There's no real guidance in what is an acceptable setup other than the pre-gen characters, which were as usual terribly built, so it becomes a matter of player vs GM in a test of system mastery. That's a point of design failure right there, because you've set up one or both of the people at the table for disappointment from out the gate.

It is only routine if you design that way... But I do take your point.
If your design philosophy is 8-12 Dice starting, then you will rarely ever run into a concept that you cannot design with that 10-12 Dice (and your characters will be much better rounded to boot). CAN you exceed it? Of course you can, but why MUST you exceed it?

Self defense, generally. There's almost always someone at the table who, given the option, will do so. So people pre-emptively build to that level so as not to be the one at the table with the uselessly underpowered character. Hell, you even hear it around here, with people criticizing characters that can't at least hit mid-high teens in their primary dice pools unplayable.

Which is easily remedied with a simple conversation with those at your table. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Having played SR1, I'd say the problem was the combination of the d6 dice with the TN adjustment system (note that everything adjusted the TN, essentially nothing changed the size of your dice pool). A huge part of the strategy was getting your opponent to have a TN of 6 or higher, at which point they'd not hit too often nor have the successes to drive up damage. To this end, I recall the low drain stun spell that had base 'light' damage was very potent--the first job of the mage was to get all the opposition to have at least +1 on their TN, cutting their likely succeses by a 6th.

As a smart gun link decreased your TN by 2, it was hugely powerful--both in that under ideal conditions your TN went from 4 to 2, adding 2/3 to the number of successes you were apt to roll, but also because it gave you margin, meaning you could deal with more difficulties before becoming largely useless.

When I picked SR back up again, my plan had been to add 2 to all numbers and move to d10 from d6 (years ago I'd crunched some numbers and concluded this should work out OK), but the variable dice pool system killed off that plan.

I really like the variable target numbers because I tend to run a very cinematic, high-modifier sort of combat when I'm running SR. I like a lot of shooting, and a lot of stuff that isn't shooting going on in combat, so setting players up to need to look for advantage to offset the environmental factors is fun.

Maybe early on it was fun and exciting to have high TN's, but as the edition progressed, it just became more and more tedious, in my opinion. When firearms combat has a TN 9+ WITH the Smartlink, it was just not much fun anymore. Combat Dragged (and dragged, and dragged) on far more than it should have at that point.

I have actually seen the other end of that game happening once . .
I sat in on a game of SR4 one of my buddies GMed for people that had read up on and wanted to actually try SR4, after the rest of our shared gaming group had decided to not touch it with a 10 foot pole and keep playing SR3.
In the beginning, the GM asked the players to not go above a certain dice pool, because he did not want massive dicepool inflation. Which was one of the stated and in my eyes failed pretty hard design goals of SR4 above SR3.
In the end, about 3 to 4 excruciatingly painfull to watch hours later, he finished the wrap up of the session with:
"This was disappointing. you folded like a house of cards back then, you did not even manage to offer a good enough resistance to the npcs to get away. No drama, no excitement."
Let's just say the player reaction was pretty nasty to that and one of them plain out told the GM he would not listen to his demands to a character built at all anymore, as long as the rules in the book stated he was allowed to do something, he would build the character to actually be able to do it.

Yeah...
I get that...
Everyone needs to be on the same page, to be sure. And when the GM waffles with what he is putting up as opposition, well...
Unfortunately, Shadowrun is definitely a balancing act at the best of times. It is so very, very easy to throw overwhelming opposition at a group without meaning to do so.

The worst part about SR4.5 is there's no guidance on dice pools. It actively embraces characters with dice pools of 10-12 equally with characters in the 20+ range. Unfortunately, running those characters side-by-side leads to serious imbalance issues. (The character creation rules don't even address dice pool inflation, they suggest that if you want to lower the power level, you should reduce BP. In my experience, that just makes min/maxing worse.)

Yes, an experienced SR4.5 GM can set the dice pool levels to the right point for their campaign. However, there's nothing in the books telling you what that point is. You have to learn it the hard way. That's an awful lot of suffering and not-fun games while you try and figure it out. The NPC rules also don't tell you how to adjust characters to fix your campaign, you're supposed to know how many BP goes into a mook, a lieutenant, and so on, and doesn't account for system mastery. It's a huge mess.

I agree on the balance issue to an extent, Cain, but honestly, SR5 doesn't really change that. Limits don't do much (the concept had some potential) - characters with high dice pools tend to have high limits to go along with them, and Edge can be used to bypass them as well.

You can start out with 12 power points, or a 12 Agility, or a 12 Reaction, or a 12 skill, or a primary dice pool in the 20's, just from the core book, without any dodgy tricks. Even looking at the archetypes and comparing the street samurai with the bounty hunter shows a massive discrepancy in power.

Some things, such as the new initiative rules, the expanded skill ratings, and rolling two Attributes to dodge damage, make the power spread between PCs and NPC grunts less - but that puts a low-powered character in an even more precarious position. On the one hand, that character will be outperformed by the min-maxed character, but on the other hand, the lowest of the listed NPC grunts rolls 6 dice to hit you and 6 dice to avoid your attacks. So with a dice pool of, say, 8-9, you will be uncomfortably close to the level of the weakest opponents you will likely face. One of them could get lucky, and two of them will be a challenge.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending SR5. I haven't experimented with it like I did 3 and 4.5, but the few things I've come up with were definitely overpowered. Limits aren't a limiting factor (no pun intended); they're just a trap for the unwary. Adepts are scary good-- in the game I play in, we're all adepts of some stripe, simply because street sams and cybered combat characters underperform next to us. With three physical adepts and one mystic adept, the only thing we're missing is a Decker, and adept Deckers are more powerful than mundane ones, too.

I worry less about die pools than about gaps.

Let's say I have a table playing unstoppable ultrastuds. 28 dice for sorcery? No problem. 32 for sniping? All good. That tells me I have people who are dearly in love with solving problems by rolling polyhedra.

Then I give them problems where the polyhedra don't matter.

A little girl is crying and says she can't find her mother. Ultrathug A is all sad and wants to help the innocent moppet. Ultrathug B can't contemplate being slowed down by NPC cannonfodder and puts two in the moppet's cerebellum to shut her up. Suddenly Ultrathugs A and B have new problems, which are each other. I sit back and wait for them to return to reality.

Alternatively, there's a lot to be said for: "I don't give a damn what your face's charisma score is, your pet ork muscle back there just tried to get frisky with the consiglieri's moll, the deal is off." Let them deal with the weaknesses they all min-maxed into themselves.

Of course, I tend to run a black trenchcoat and mirrorshades sort of game, where actions actually have consequences and the long term matters.

that doesn't necessarily work well to prevent building large dice pools. it just means that i should build more large dice pools of marginally lower amounts.

instead of 32 dice for sniping, i'll have 25 dice for sniping and 15-20 dice on every social skill. instead of 28 dice in sorcery... ahhh, who am i kidding. sorcery pretty much fills in for almost everything else, too, anyways.

Wait, your team's Faces rely on Charisma? Mine seem to always back it up with Control Thoughts, which is essentially unstoppable right now in SR5. Magic is absurdly out of whack right now because whoever was responsible for it apparently didn't correlate how any of the things being put in would actually interact. Story of that whole system, though.