Had to split this in two postings ;(


So (re-)acting against a yet not performed action with no direct sensory data to even make the judgement upon is no clairvoyant action in your book?



There seems to be yet another misconception because my statement had nothing to do with "preference" either. So there's no need for defending your preference there.



I'm not thinking that your wrong based on the fact that you opt for using a non-RAW resolution method, but I don't see a requirement to build a consensus around this either. This discussion is at this stage pretty much pointless because neither one of us will change the individual perception with regards to the "clairvoyant aspect" of the inherent flaws of sequential resolution mechanics. I will however comment on some of the things you wrote because I do think that you're opperating under some false premises when trying to "argue" against my statement. Thus causing yourself to argue about something completely different instead.



I never suggested that you consider the act of casting a spell as being "instant". So there's simply no need for such a clarification.



I didn't claim otherwise either. The real problem however will be that those 3 seconds within the combat resolution mechanics will accelerate and decellerate time requirements for actions depending on the number of involved parties and the number of initiative passes the Combat Turn has ... right to the point where the act of casting a spell will indeed functionally become "instantaneous". That's just another one of the inherent flaws of any sequential combat resolution model.



And such a stipulation is anything but "realistic".



Now you're trying to make it a special case of casting an Elemental Manipulation like Fireball. Replace that with Stunbolt, Manabolt as harmful targeted spell or - "worse" - something like an Increase Reflexes spell upon himself ... all things that are not automatically linked to any sensory cues that the samurai could ever pick up. And you're still neglecting the fact that the Mage (or any other character for that matter) could - based on his slower Reaction/Reflexes - come out of his decision making process way after the point where you demand him on the meta-level to make that decision and allow another character to act against that decision in full meta-knowledge about said decision. The problem there is that no matter what the mage actually decides to do the samurai - due to the meta-knowledge of his player - will make a decision based on information that from ingame perspective simply is not available.



No, your initial example had the samurai decide at the very same time X where both the samurai and the mage had decided to act in certain ways react to the mage's decision. My reference to X+Y on the mage's side however indicated that at time X only the samurai actually had made up his mind for any kind of (re-)action and since he's quite obviously reacting to a decsion that might even not have been made at all, he's acting with premeditative powers.



Quite obviously and I'm not certain what could change that.

And now try to recount the number of times where you or your players used a free action to make any such perception test after having heard the action declaration in reversed order.

Btw. the free action is just for a general observation of a situation. One could certainly argue that in order to deduce the mage's intention of casting a spell will require the samurai to make use of a "observe in detail" single action instead of the free one ... particularly for all cases where the mage infact doesn't provide direct sensory cues and the samurai not even knowing that he's dealing with a magician in the first place.



Your example seems to be a bit off because at least one of the initiative 9 goons obviously just made a false action declaration: You say they shoot. Then you let the samurai make a situational test which turns that declaration into "casts fireball" and let the samurai then make a reaction to that action that still is only declared but certainly not in an exectional state that would allow the samurai to make this perception test. Your example clearly shows the clairvoyant aspect in what the samurai is doing.



~hmm~ And you handling that "well" (within your personal perception) changes what exactly about the fact itself?



With your fixation on mage vs. samuraiu I somehow have the feeling that you're trying to turn this into a "Geek the mage first" issue. My initial comment however only ever concerned the general flaws that reversed action declaration have with regards to what you called "realistic". My "objections" to said mechanic are totally unrelated to archetypes of any kind.



Next time try to look at how long of real time you and your group spend on thise 2 Combat Turns. More than often - even if you were to neglect things like taking cover or any form of bad condition - you're still facing several minutes in order to represent 3 to 6 seconds of ingame time. With players and npcs that operate a maximum strategic and tactical level one can easily end up with 2 to 4 Combat Turns taking hours of real time until they are resolved. Additionally slowing that down with reverse action declarations and re-declaration of actions is not necessarily what players like.

Anecdote that I often reference in such discussions: Somewhere between 2000 and 2002 a group of German SR players made the attempt of playing an Combat Bike game with the standard SR combat rules during one of the house conventions (RatCon) held by Fanpro (Germany). Initially 18 players plus IIRC 1 referee entered the game in Combat Turn 1. It took about 2,5 hours to resolve the Combat Turns 1 and 2. By the end of Turn 2 one team - let's call them Team A - had been completely annihilated while the others (Team B) suffered no real casualties beyond some minor injuries. The majority of Team A could not even remotely go through with any of their intended "declared actions" and had Team B known their intentions the outcome would not have been different but the time it would have taken for that exact same result would certainly have been much higher.

1. I've always played spell and control pool being useable outside of combat. In combat, it's important to track how often they refresh. Outside of combat, unless time is a factor, I would generally assume they had their full pool available.

2. To be honestly, I've never had anyone use that specialization. I'd say use it as a supplemental to the intelligence test, with every 2 successes from Alertness counting as an automatic success on the perception check.

3. This was a rule I never paid any attention to. Everyone rolled their initiative and I noted it down. In the rare cases where two people got the same initiative, I'd quietly bump the NPC's score up or down, depending on how difficult I expected things to be. If it was between 2 PCs(even rarer), I had them dice for it.

It tends to favor everything over, for example, lock-picking or summoning though,
which you get no Pool dice on, except karma.
Also, it devalues high magic skills outside of combat, in general,
since you can weigh them up with attribute points easily.
From a balancing standpoint, I would argue against it.

I would also argue against it from a conceptual standpoint.
Generally speaking, all skills, which require time, and calm, to a certain extent, get no pool dice.
This includes the aforementioned, as well as any technical skill you can come up with, and Charisma-linked skills.
All situations however where you are under mental, or bodily stress, and need to show a mental and physical edge,
which may be fueled by adrenaline, or sheer force of will, have assigned dice pools.
The way I interpret it, which of course is only my opinion, is that the dice pools represent the amount of strain the characters can put themselves through to excel, when it is truly needed.

The way I see it is this:

A control pool is the advantage conferred upon you by your VCR. It represents your augmented ability in all situations where it is applicable.

A spell pool represents your natural ability with magic, your raw potential instead of your training (sorcery skill) or mental fortitude (Willpower). Which is why you can't use more pool dice than you have points in the skill: the better you know what you're doing, the better you can apply your power. This also is what gives high magic skills their value; you can't make full use of spell pool without skills to match.

In the case of control pool, I feel that taking it away in non combat situations benefit neither affects balance nor degrades other skills. It does make you inherently better at driving than non-augmented characters at all times...but then, isn't that kind of the whole point? The VCR represents a high-quality tech advantage that consumes a great deal of nuyen and essence. Restricting its benefits actually seems unbalanced in the opposite direction, since while combat is the most obvious use of the VCR, it is far from the only one.

In the case of spell pool, the difference between using magical skills and nonmagical skills is that with magical skills you run a significant risk of inflicting drain on yourself. There are a lot of situations where you may not be in combat at that exact moment, but knocking yourself unconscious would be a Bad Thing. Spell pool allows for you to decide if you want to try to boost the effectiveness of the spell or resist the drain. This is a legitimate decision to make at any time, given the circumstances, and I don't see how it devalues non-magical skills.

I present:
The explosives skill. Less dice means an exponentially higher chance of 'The rule of one' happening. Could mean you explode (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) .
Biotech. You fail, they die.
Athletics. You try jumping over a gap between a couple of houses. *player rolls* 'Oh!'

The control pool is a good argument though,
since it does not apply for non-Riggers.

I guess I just feel the extra time is enough of an advantage already.
Getting extra time AND the pool dice is an unnecessary double-whammy in my mind.
(Getting defensive here (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) )

So the moral of the story is if your buddy wants to do something between battles, shoot at him.

Your helping by activating his dice pool. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

1. Well, unless you're rolling with a magic skill of 3 or below, it's not like the dice pool is making all that much difference, at 5-6 dice you have such a low chance of getting Rule of 1 that it's practically indistinguishable from rolling 10+ dice. It does help with the rigger, but why would the rigger have a low Drive skill in the first place?

2. Biotech outside of combat conditions is far preferable than biotech in a firefight.

3. If you're jumping without cyberware or magic boosting you, and it's a long jump? Yeah, it IS a huge risk, and should be. If you have some kind of boost, then you have much less to worry about.

I think what it comes down to is just that some skills get pools and others don't. Why do pistols get combat pool? Why do computer skills get a hacking pool? Why do magic skills get spell pool? In a pinch, I'd say it's to lend tactical flexibility to the core skills of certain archetypes: when a sammy fires his gun, when a decker cuts IC, when a rigger drives, and when a mage throws a spell, you want it to be more than just "Roll a number of dice equal to skill and check the target number." You want some level of input from the player that allows them to say "I'm going to put a little more into THIS action so I can street it towards THIS result."

Let me ask you this: if a Sammy wanted to do some trick shooting to impress a johnson at a meet, would you not let him use combat pool?

Come to think of it, if the street sammy wanted to plink cans off of a fence in his free time or to impress a Johnson or whatever, I'd still give him combat pool.

Also, don't worry, this isn't meant to be some kind of attack. I've honestly never thought about restricting pools in that ways, and its an interesting idea. My only quibble is that I'd rather players had flexibility when using their core skills.

I have a raw question of my own:

What skill is used for lockpicking?

Lock Picking. Not being a smartass, just going by NSCRG. Under technical skills, linked to quickness. Didn't find it in the main book, not sure where it came from.

That - by RAW - depends upon the type of lock:

Maglocks with all their variants do require a (stupid) combination of "Electronics" and "Electronics B/R", including suitable specializations.

Classic cylinder locks (which are said to be a rare commodity) use the [mechanical] Lockpicking skill with further specialization possibilties with regards to the exact cylinder lock type. IIRC that skill was introduced in one of the final SR3 products: State of the Art 2063 ... the book that also brought stuff like crowbars.

Well Cochise, I did read most of your arguments and:

a- you turn it way to much into an ego-fight for my taste. It's exactely what displease me in Dumpshock. And I don't think anyone execpt both of us are still reading us.

b-I have not much more to add. I developped my argument about why I don't concider it as clairvoyance with my "X+Y versus X'+Y' acting times", gave an exemple too (and yes, if it was a stunbolt and beeing cast discretely, the samourai couldn't react to it). You still consider me wrong. Well, I have hence nothing more to add.

c- But well, I handle my combats pretty well and I keep them in check in length. The reversed order declaration I use is very dependent of the situation. It doesn't happen often, only if their's something important that could occur. But it's not for everyone, I agree. I know my rules very well and calculate everything quickly enough. So well, on a personal level, it works well. Can say so for everyone.