I said there was a cyberdeck analogue, and I was correct. If you want to get into the rules, I should point out that without a cyberdeck and a decker, you really had no way of getting into the Engine.

And given how many other rules in the book were shifted to match the various metaplanes, decking is still pretty close. Magic changed every world, cyber and bio could transform or simply not exist, and so on.


That's shifting the goalposts. You said there were many that didn't allow deckers or riggers, and you're struggling to prove one.


The rules actually prevent you from doing so. You're not supposed to do it by dice pool size, even though that makes sense-- you're supposed to build every NPC by the PC rules, with BP. Since my fastest 4.5 character took two + hours, with a program, that was simply not going to happen. And even if you could, BP was a poor way to determining power. Sure, more powerful NPC's got more BP, but then it came down to system mastery to determine how effective they were. Some people can do more with a 320 BP character than others can with a 500 one.



I'm looking at that section, but nowhere can I see "assign numbers who [sic] make halfway sense" anywhere. You might have misattributed a quote somewhere, since nothing to that effect is in the actual rules.

What *is* in the actual rules is a lot of fixed stats. No rules for making it up or making serious corrections, you either have to use the NPC's as written, or make them from scratch. On top of that, the section you cite is under the heading of "Grunts"-- another word for mook. Taking a peek ahead at the Prime Runner rules, we see that all Prime Runners are to be built with BP-- no fudging allowed, by RAW.

"Player characters such as deckers or riggers who need machinery to use their special talents will have the hardest time playing active roles in the story. Some of the adventures simply offer no role for a decker or rigger, even when transformed to make the appropriate to the setting."
Apple do you have a reading problem? I am not making fun of you here ill underline it for you. Everyone archtype gets screwed one time or another in that book turn back to where I read riggers in the west scroll down and read magicians they get screwed in that phase of the astral and other places as well. It was supposed to do that so the group had to pull together as a team and cover each others weakness as in when your getting screwed. I mean your fucking arguing over the astral plane do your throw a tangent if a mage puts trodes on and dives into the matrix. Its the flip side of the coin man. FFS your decker who played that would be one of the fewest deckers on the planet who could say "I been through the astral realm and its a messed up place" "it would be better to be able to say "yea astral realm did it done it and survived it my GM wasn't pulling any punches they don't care if we died but I survived" <that right there would of been earned.

Cain, apple, Smilingfaces: continue that via PM and don't derail the thread any further.

Streetsam. Eletroics BR, Datajack, Sigma. Or, as it was pointed out several pages before: cheap cyberterminals for VR. And as it was said before: it is highly unsatisfiable for a player if he puts hundred of thousands of nuyen, lots of skill points and perhaps lots of essence for cybernetic matrix enhancements just to be reduced to "roll skill against X", nothing else and then use the rules for astral quests which has nothing to do with matrix rules.



I did not. Let me quote

QUOTE

Its neither - even in old SR 123 official adventures it was sometimes advised not to have deckers and riggers.

Please quote these rules. I can only find this BP building rules for very specific nemesis-like NPCs. Which are a very small subset of all possible NPCs. As in "one or two per campaign usually".



Strange. My fastes 4.5 player character took less an 30 minutes. Granted, I used an excel file to add up the equipment by typing the prices into the file to autosum it. Then again buying equipment in every edition was cumbersome.



Oh really? Perhaps you should read closer.

QUOTE

While the gamemaster is free to give NPCs any stats he deems necessary, he should strive to make them consistent with the tone of the game and to take into consideration the challenge or assistance NPCs are intended to offer player characters when devising their stats.

QUOTE

the gamemaster is free to give NPCs any stats he deems necessary

What part of "is free to give NPCs any stats he deems necessary" is unclear?



Perhaps you should read the entire chapter.
Perhaps you should read the entry on what prime runners re supposed to do in the world

Shall I quote it again? The part with "any stats he deems necessary" and "every once in a while"?

SYL

apple, did you reaad my last posting?

Edited and not answered as per request. I saw your request after I answered Cain.

IMO there has to be a benefit to complexity. I can roll up a bunch of stats, completely ignore individual skills and have a go. There will be little differentiation between chars, but anyone will get what´s happening ruleswise within seconds. On the other end I can have the old-school Rigger handbooks - vehicles with individually modifiable parts that still make up maybe 1% of the game. SR4 was a massive step in the right direction, even for the experienced rules-loving munchkins that make up most of my group. Any complexity you do have has to provide a benefit to the game. Weapon porn will be bought as porn, not for the stories (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Unfortunately we as the user base of DS have little influence over the development of the game. We can change the attitude to be more productive (@Method: nice post). There should be no explicit statement that positive, helpful posts are expected. That should be a norm. It´s hard to separate if one is looking for solutions or just wants to rant, but the latter should be rare. And followed up by a search for solutions. One great strength used to be "ask a question - wait 10 minutes - read answer". Regarding the actual ruleset that won´t be possible, so we have to do the "softer" GM and background questions even better. The fresh blood can then handle the rules stuff (*totallydidnotsaythatcanthavehappened*).

Point taken.

Though the second point entails some of what I tried to describe,
I did not take the tinkering into account,
mostly because it is something I do not do consciously, I just happen to loose hours on it.

It is simply impossible to run Shadowrun without improvisation, imo, because players will constantly surprise you even if you have them locked in an empty room.

Beg your pardon? The vast majority of NPCs are built with guesstimating stats and equip that are currently relevant, and rolling with that. Hell, even a Prime Runner you can stat up on the fly, if you don't show your rolls and unless you believe they will be killed and looted.

No doubt low level games take less effort to make a low-level character, but even starting Shadowrun characters are world-class pros, remember? I'd say in D&D they'd be in their tween levels.

That's half the fun of building out a Shadowrunner for me. All the little fiddly gear choices that convey both things about the character (why's he use that old piece of trash Predator, anyway? 'Cause it was his Dad's) and about his place in the world.

Which is why the NPC rules in 4.5 miss the boat.

Not by RAW, they won't. Fact is, most people ignore RAW when it comes to building NPC's. Which is fine, but also means that part of the game system doesn't actually work.

Still not as hard as you might think. I've made a couple at middling levels, and it didn't take very long.

Besides which, do you think that point will matter to new player? "Hey, I've got this really fun game where you can have a professional character ready in two hours. Or we can play a really fun game where we make beginners and will be playing in ten minutes." If character creation is long enough that new players get frustrated and quit, it's too long.

SR 4.5 basic book


You *can* create special characters with the BP/Karma-System to ensure that the characters stay comparable with the player characters (and have their own development). But it is not the only option nor the default option. RAW is: give them the stats they need. And that works without any issues.

SYL

Nice fluff, but what do the actual rules say?



So, every prime runner should be built with BP. That's the actual rule. And don't try and say prime runners are rare, they crop up all the time according to the rules:


So, pretty much any recurring named NPC is a prime runner, as is a lot of supporting cast members. Technically, Bill at the Stuffer Shack is supposed to be built by the prime runner rules.

Beyond that is the fact that: "Make stuff up" is a really lousy set of rules to be selling. I can make stuff up without paying $50 for a book, I buy books for guidelines and help in making stuff up. A book that doesn't help me is not worth it.

Cain, apple: continue that via PM and don't derail the thread any further.

You really enjoy using words like "can't." Which is not a word I've used in my posts and misses the point of what I am saying. But let's talk about how I run games, because I think that does help illustrate the obstacles with Shadowrun.

I've been playing and running tabletop RPG games for roughly 25 years (that really makes me feel old), but these days I am an adult with a day job and a gaming group that is scattered geographically. The current campaign I am running is a Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition homebrewed setting played online using Roll20. We meet up on Roll20 on Tuesday evenings for a few hours and play. In between those Tuesday sessions, typically after work or on the weekends, I prepare for the next game: planning the campaign, building encounters, creating battlemaps, and setting up the scenes and tokens in Roll20. I have four players in this campaign: three are experienced tabletop RPG players and one is fairly new to tabletop RPGs, her first game being my previous campaign before this one (more on this below).

This campaign is going fantastic. Character creation was easy, even for the player that is new to tabletop RPGs. D&D5E's streamlined rules have meant that I haven't needed to consult a book at all yet during play. The universal ability check mechanic combined with the simple Advantage/Disadvantage system has meant that I pretty much know how all the rules work without checking a book and if a player comes up with an idea that is outside the box, I can quickly figure out how they could do it. Two nights ago, one of my encounters was clearly a bit hard for these low level characters, so I quickly adapted a couple of numbers and it went great (I only nearly killed one character, but she'll be okay).

Now, my last campaign, which three out of four of these players were also in, was a Pathfinder campaign, running Paizo's Kingmaker adventure path. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Pathfinder. It's a well-written, beautiful game with a really rich setting and tons of support. But it's mechanically complex. It is built off of D&D's Third Edition, which is many times more complex than Fifth Edition. Character creation took these players a lot longer and there were many more questions for me. Setup between games was also more time consuming, especially building encounters when I deviated from the ones built for me in the Kingmaker adventures. And then during games, there was a lot more flipping through books to clarify how grappling worked or what a particular condition meant or how some buff spells stacked. At least Pathfinder, being built on the Open Gaming License, has most of these rules freely published online, so Google can help a GM out. Eventually, around level 10, this campaign collapsed under its own weight. I had trouble setting aside the prep time and I was getting frustrated with how much time during games was spent consulting rules. This was also about when D&D 5th Edition came out, so we all agreed to start a new campaign using that and I'm glad we did.

Shadowrun, like Pathfinder, is crunch-heavy. And yes, I know some people love that. I'm not saying that's wrong. But I am saying it creates a steeper learning curve for players and a greater time investment for GMs, two things which sometimes don't work well for sustaining a game with new players or GMs who have a busy life. Pathfinder I am less worried about in this regard because Paizo is a machine when it comes to on-ramping new players and supporting GMs. They have beginner boxed sets, a great card game tie-in, wonderfully strong demo support, a great cross-media marketing plan, an open rule set posted all over the web, and open beta testing of their major rules supplements where anybody can download the draft rules and provide playtesting feedback. And their pre-written adventure paths are great for taking a good chunk of the work-load off of a GM's shoulders.

Shadowrun I am more worried about, because it lacks some of these things. Further, its problems with editorial control have created more headaches for players and GMs, evidence of which is common on this forum and on their official forums. Combine all this together and I simply don't have the time or patience to deal with Shadowrun, as much as I love it. I'll be playing my D&D5E game, which the players easily jumped into and runs so damned smoothly each week.

Finally, to go back to the original poster's concerns, while I put a lot of responsibility on CGL and Shadowrun for the current state of the community, some of the responsibility lies with us, the fanbase. The very complex, inconsistent rules and the weight they bring with them have made us more argumentative and divisive. We divide up into camps of RAI versus RAW and differing opinions within both and we lock ourselves into partisan camps and argue endlessly until a moderator feels the need to shut it down. To come full circle, we use words like "can't" in our responses to criticize players and GMs instead of supporting a community of people united in their enjoyment of imaginary elf games.

I'll elaborate a bit further. Because Shadowrun is a crunchy system, it takes longer to prepare for. Even simple NPC's take a lot of details to generate, and more important ones can take a long while. And if you forget a detail, you're suddenly facing a huge problem: if you run with it, you're screwing yourself; but if you gloss over it, you're cheating and/or screwing over the players.

Some things you can gloss over, like if you forget to buy ammo. But if you forget something important, and you treat the NPC any differently than you'd treat a PC, that's cheating. For example, I always equip characters (PC or NPC) with nonconductive mods on their armor, because lots of people use electrical weapons. But it's a fine detail, and one I might forget. So, if the players are using stick-and-shock, and I look at my sheet and see I forgot to add nonconductive, what do I do?

If I say: "What's there is there, I wouldn't let a PC get away with it, so he doesn't have any. Even though all the grunts do.", I might have destroyed the entire encounter balance. Instead of being a challenging fight, it might now be a cakewalk. But if I go: "He's a smart NPC, he'd have it anyway", not only do I swing things back too far in the opposite direction, I'm being very unfair-- I'm showing favoritism to my own NPC's.

And that's just one example. Here's a real example of how this can screw over the players: I went through a replay of a Mission recently, "Chasin' The Wind". I was playing a face, a Leadermancer with Commanding Voice. I was trying very hard to avoid a fight, so I commanded the mage to come down from the tower and open the door. Somehow, in the one action it took him to get down, he no only realized he'd been commanded (without looking astrally), but decided we were hostile, readied a fireball, and developed cyberears with a select sound filter specifically tuned to my character's voice. The last one was the biggest cheat, though-- the GM later said he thought the guy should have had a counter to commanding voice (no one had seen it before) so the mage should have had it all along. This particular GM is a nice guy, but he's got a really horrible habit of suddenly giving NPC's stuff they "should have had" in the middle of a scene. Part of the reason Shadowrun is crunchy is because it's supposed to prevent things like that.

Thats because (at least from the rare times I talk to him) Jordan is a 2e fan still who seems neutral or at a minimum careful not to be negative on 3e but wont hold himself back on talking trash about 4e or 5e, at least privately...

I'd argue that some of what you are saying here, is subject to personality, because while I agree the the GM should never screw over the players, I have absolutely no problem with the GM changing stuff on the fly, in order to provide a better encounter experience. And the more crunchy and elaborate the system is, the less problem I have with it. Why? Because while I expect the players to adhere to the rules, and not use stuff that their characters aren't carrying, I don't expect a GM to completely stat up X number of random NPC's by RAW character generation rules, because the GM has a life, and I don't expect him to spend the 5-8 hours per character it can easily take me, to create an SR PC (because of the equipment. Stats and skills take maybe 1 hour). Sure. Things should always keep things resonable, and the scene you described is IMO pushing it, though I can follow the oppinion that maybe the encounter in question shouldn't be possible to solve with a roll or two worth of Commanding Voice. I'll give you an example of something I've done as a GM in a Star Wars Saga Ed. game. The ending encounter in the mini-adventure we were playing, featured a gigantic monster the size of a freight train. During the 2nd round of the encounter, after this gigantic monster explodes out of the ground and attacks the characters, the Sith Lord (the players were playing Sith during the Old Republic age) in the party successfully cast Move Object on the monster, lifting it off the ground. RAW he could have kept the monster there until the rest of the party could have blasted it into oblivion. RAW the monster would have been able to do excately nothing to get out of the force power's effect. Had I played it RAW, the ending encounter that culminated the adventure and loads of hinting at the monster's existance. The encounter had effectively been over in a single dice roll made by one player. There would have been no sense of achievement in defeating the monster. No drama, no memorable experience, nothing. Just a culminating encounter effectively over in a single roll. In stead I elected to rule that the monster got a chance to cancel the effect due to some environmental effects that had played in during other encounters as well. The result was that the players got a fight with a scary monster. They still won, but they had to work a bit more for it. Now I hadn't planned on the monster getting additional force power resistance, but at the end of the day, I believe that the encounter became better for it. RAW? No. Cheating? Not in my oppinion. As a GM, my role is not to follow the rules, it is to provide the best possible experience to the players and myself, and that occasionally require that you change stuff on the fly. At least in my oppinion. But of course you have to keep things fair. Do what you need to challenge the players, but don't deliberately screw them over.

Happy New Year.

Your assertion is understandable, laudable even. A veritable self imposed code of honor.

You do get that a LOT of other folks don't think that way, yes?

Hell, there are RPGs that deliberately make NPC generation different than PC. Shadowrun itself at one point had Professional Ratings, which PCs couldn't get and provided a floating dice pool bump where needed.

My personal gaming style, I will fudge things if they appear too easy or hard. If I forget to put X in an encounter, which would result in the PCs steamrolling the encounter and the players left with nothing to do and a feeling of dissatisfaction from the lack of challenge, I damn well will adjust the encounter on the fly to include X. If conversely the players are struggling with an encounter, I might scale things back, like reducing the number of opponents behind the next door, or not using abilities to the utmost. Either way, I try to do it invisibly, such that the players never realize the adjustment was made.

Because my focus isn't on maintaining some self imposed code of behavior. Nor is it because I have some control freak complex and get upset if the players aren't following the script. My focus is on trying to make sure the players have fun. Too much or too little challenge is not fun, and I always build in slack to account for player variance.

This is especially true for convention style events where I may have never met the players before and don't know how thay play.


-k

Fudging on rolls is a separate issue, and very much a personal one. But that gets into personal GM style, outside the scope of this discussion.

Let's get specific to Shadowrun. Under every edition's rules, you're supposed to fully equip every NPC, and write out their gear. This is a rather expected part of the game, really, but sometimes mistakes happen. Let's say you forget something silly, like ammo. Now, I don't think any player will complain if you gloss over this, and hand them a clip of regular ammo.

But... let's say every other NPC is packing APDS. You can justify giving the boss a clip of APDS, but it changes things dramatically-- it's not just a quick fix, it's a serious boost. It gets even worse if the boss has a high capacity weapon, and is blowing through it like crazy. It gets even worse if he runs out; if you give him a reload or two of APDS, that's a lot of spendy ammo. So, you've gone from covering a mistake to suddenly, magically, equipping him with thousands of nuyen in gear. That becomes progressively less okay. The final insult is, of course, when the players defeat him and loot the body, only to discover that since APDS wasn't on his sheet to begin with, they can't recover any.


Adjusting a bit is fine. Adjusting too much is cheating. And how much is too much is a judgement that can only be made at the table.

For me: if an encounter ends up being too easy, I'll look for ways within the scene to amp it up. Let's say the runners are fighting a street gang-- it's fair to add more gangers, or maybe even a tougher friend of theirs. What's not fair is to suddenly decide one of them has a brother who works for Renraku, and suddenly five squads of Red Samurai come parachuting in. (And yes, I've seen GM's do something similar. I did, once upon a time.)

Beyond that... ultimately, the success of my encounter design rests with me. If I screwed up, and got things horribly wrong-- the big battle ends up being a cakewalk, because I didn't expect something-- that's on me. The players beat the challenge, fair and square, and so I need to fall back and come up with another plan, and not take away their victory. Players can be forgiving when they see you're trying to help them have fun. That's not as true when they think you're out to get them.

I would have felt cheated if I was playing and I had known that my GM changed something on the fly to counter something we have already done. RAW the force user would have to maintain the power and there still might be a chance that he fail to do so. I would have felt terribly cheated if I had rolled well, used a Force Point or a Destiny Point on that roll.

As a GM, I feel that my role is to provide the most enjoyable experience for my players (but not necessarily so for myself) and that, in general, requires that I follow the rules. I don't necessarily have to challenge my players, indeed, if they derive their enjoyment from building the "best" characters and using those characters to easily overcome the challenges set before them, then I will not make those challenges any harder.

Again, that's a very personal choice. My feeling is again, it's all on me-- if I didn't anticipate something, that's my fault, and I shouldn't be mad at the players for being more clever than I am. Now, a few adjustments here and there are fine, but suddenly pulling a trick like cyberears on a mage crosses the line, IMO. (The reason I mentioned that was because it's a published module, you can actually see what the mage is equipped with, and cyberears aren't on the list.)

And besides, things happen. I've spent hours designing combat encounters, only to have the players figure out a way to bypass the fight entirely. And you know, that's fine. And I've done it to other GM's, especially in Shadowrun. Shadowrun has encouraged me to think outside the box, and so I've lost count of the crazy plans I've help in or observed, that skipped us right past the huge challenge that was set up for us. To me, that's part of the fun of Shadowrun.

And even when there's combat, you can't predict what'll happen. If the players all roll well, and the GM rolls poorly (which happens to me on a regular basis), even a well-designed challenge can be beaten with ease. For example, I remember when I had a boss fight set up: someone made a potshot at him, but I thought: "Oh, he's got 13 Combat pool dice to spare, he'll dodge no problem." That was my SR3 record fumble: all 13 dice came up 1's. Shortest boss fight on record, that bad of a roll meant an insta-kill. On the opposite side, recently I did a Chicago Mission where someone pointed out that the troll over there wasn't really a troll, but an impostor. So I spent Edge and NERPS, and started rolling.... and ended up hitting the final boss with a surprise shot for 32 successes. He went down ignominiously, and that was fine.

I think a couple of you are forgetting the context of what Cain is debating about, specifically:

What I think Cain is trying to get at, is that in this case RAW is flat out ignored for the majority of the playerbase in favor of a different system, because reasons. I wouldn't go so far as to say RAW doesn't work, just is critically flawed and personally I feel that a variation of the professional rating system should have been used in its place.

Those of you saying you use a different method than RAW? Awesome! Look at the above quote: Cain said it's fine! You can stop tilting at windmills now; he's cool with you not using RAW, and is not about to inform on you to the gaming gestapo. Still doesn't change the fact that RAW is rather bad in this area.

However with the fact that most players reject RAW on this point, on something of an instinctual level, leads to an assumption that some form of fudging house rule effecting npcs will take effect. This the assumption I have a problem with, because RAW is a contract between everyone that sits down at the table and RAW shapes our expectations. Diverting from RAW with house rules necessarily gives rise to differing expectations as a result of those house rules being taken into account for. Similarly if I sit down at a table, especially at a con table, and if no one tells me otherwise, I expect RAW to be the default, even if it's stupid. This is because there's no notice of the use of house rules and thereby no reasonable expectation that house rules even existed in which to be used, and if you start attempting to enforce your house rules without notice, I'm going to be calling bullshit really quick.

My problem, for the most part, is that people just assume everyone else knows RAW in this particular place is bunk and uses their own variation of fudging. If you're going to do this, you damn well need to tell your players before you do it. I've seen more than a few tables break down into arguments over this exact house rule. There are those who are very gamist, and changing the expected capabilities of NPCs "just to give a challenge" would make them fly off the handle. This is because in their mind, the challenge wasn't in the play but in the use of the rules, and that was where they were deriving their fun. People really need to understand that what's fun for one person isn't necessarily fun for another.

Kyrel- just because you cheat to enable those at your table to enjoy a more dramatic story does not change the fact it's still a cheat. If your players know, and have expressed that they are okay with you not following the rules in the pursuit of drama, then awesome. It's still a cheat against RAW, but an acceptable one, as it has now become a house rule.

This part I don't get.

In a convention game, like Missions, I can understand, the scenario is written ahead of time. You run as written.

But in a home game, why would it magically not be available? If you added a clip of ADS, why would you as the GM incapable of simply deciding on the spot that even if it wasn't in your original plan, you added APDS, so the PCs get to have a clip or two.

You post reads like once you write a particular scenario, it is mostly locked in stone and cannot be altered. I really don't get that. It just feels unnecessarily rigid to me.

It may be my GMing style. I generally don't write out an entire scenario ahead of time. I write out a basic outline of stuff that might happen, and the details get made up on the fly at the game table. I write down any significant details I create for later continuity.

I got fairly good at making stuff up on the fly without it looking like it's improv. Waay back in college, I started GMing for two different groups, and there was enough demand for games that I often had nothing at all prepared for a session, spinning out something in the 15 or 20 minutes it took for people to get settled in for the evening's game.

As a result, most times my home games are run fluidly, the details getting hashed out as I run, little more than a handful of index cards with my basic plot outline as a base.

It's also probably why I get annoyed at calling it "cheating".

I can understand stuff like making up a counter on the spot to block a player's creative solution being called "cheating", but that falls more under "Dick GM" territory.

But making changes, even big ones, to a planned encounter in response to changing conditions is not in and of itself "bad". It's the reasons behind the change that determines such.

But I think I've said my piece.



-k

I think that this is where the different definitions of "fun" and "challenging" come in. The GM might feel that his NPC should have APDS to make things challenging, but he needs to keep it out of his players hands because it won't be so fun once that stuff get into his players hands. Or it may be that the game needs to be challenging for his players but fun for him.