I'm quite curious as to just what 'status' you think I hold. I am neither a developer nor a writer. I am just a dude who posts on an internet forum (a lot (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) ).

Sorry to digress here, but this issue is one of my personal pet peeves: What kind of wacky mindset leads to thinking the only way to handle a mage is to throw more magical threats that nobody else can handle into the fray? If this were a home repair RPG, would you handle the spotlight hogging plumber by flooding the basement? Throw more drone riggers at them! Drones have natural object resistance and are outright immune to many of the spells mages use. Plus, you can't even own a sustaining Focus higher than Force 3 at chargen, which means Physical Illusions and the like will have to be sustained manually in order to beat drones and security camera OR, forcing negative dicepool modifiers. There are ways for mages to cope, to be sure, but the bottom line is that the Samurai, Rigger or Hacker will likely be better equipped to quickly handle the situation than the Mage.

Fortune,
Your posts are well thought out, frequent and on point. Not to mention that you have been around for several worlds (releases of shadowrun). Anyone who has read Dumpshock for some time, knows of you. A Dumpshock elder of sorts.
I played a miniature game called ClanWar for years and the fine Kuni Tetsu was held in high respect. Never was he a developer or writer* but he did contribute to the community. Founding some aspects of said community. When the game was abandoned, he became the defacto choice for rules resolution.

Community is very important to gaming. It should never be underestimated. I would go so far as to say that the international community for Shadowrun has a large influence on the game.

BlueMax
Who works hard to keep SR going in his meat and bones community.

Considering that neither of those is actually going to kill anyone at full health (well, I suppose monowire could kill a neoteny with a body of 1) and that you can very seriously injure yourself on barbed wire and that surviving getting shot isn't unheard of, it seems about right to me. Also, at this point, it's pretty common knowledge that monowire is retarded.

Who? Me? When? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/eek.gif)

Seriously though, thanks. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

To answer your previous question, none of the players in any of my offline games post on Dumpshock (that I know of). Therefore any 'status' accrued through this community would not really be relevant.

I really don't think the rules are the problem in the original poster's case, but the (collective) GMs' implementation of those rules.

hear hear!

Yes, but they don't show someone pressing that same knife blade flat directly into the palm of their hand without getting cut. Makes for bad press and the like, y'know.

The problem there is that with 20+ dice, it can be the answer for everything. Person threatening your face with immediate death? They talk their way out of it with 6-7 hits on average. Johnson jerking the party around? The Sammy hoses them down with their SMG and 6-7 hits on average. Oh? The hosed down people friends got froggy and sends someone after the party? Well, those 6-7 hits before Edge being spent works just as well on those chumps as well.

How big a body count you need before you have to whip out the ol' "Inane NPC of Doom and Gloom" to take care of the problem here?

And the RAW is that smartlinks and cyberware aren't open to hacking unless they're in diagnostic mode so you can't just send someone to screw with this stuff anymore.

I also come from a background of playing 3.5, and SR combat so far has made D&D combat look positively streamlined. A fairly simple combat between our team (of 6) and ~6 mooks took the better part of two hours to run, with people in the team with only 1 IP having to wait about 20 mins between turns.

Yes, with experience it would run faster, but even then, there's just a lot more rolling going on than in D&D. The fact that attack rolls are opposed alone bogs the system down some. Shooting someone in D&D is: attack roll -> check AC -> damage roll -> apply damage. Shooting someone in SR is: we both roll, tally hits -> split difference, add remaining hits to damage code -> roll soak, subtract hits from damage -> apply damage -> modify initiative to reflect wound penalties.



It's not about trust. I trust my GM to make a call if he has to. It's about not having to make the call in the first place. SR4's rule-layout is a bitch to work with. Having come from D&D 3.5 - a ruleset with a similar level of complexity - I'm kind of dissapointed with the presentation. I read the D&D3 PHB once, from start to finish, and I had a working grasp of the rules and knew exactly where to look to clear up confusion about a rule I didn't recall by rote. The only times I had to look up rules were for little-used combat maneuvers (bull-rush, disarm) and for individual spell descriptions.

In stark contrast, if I want to look up rules for pinning someone down with unarmed combat in SR4, I know which chapter too look in, but that's about where it ends without having to look in the index and hope they called it 'grapple' and not 'grab,' 'pin,' 'pugilism' or something equally obscure. There are a lot of things I like about SR, but I honestly think it would be a much easier system to get a handle on if they'd made an attempt to have their rules layed out in an intuitive manner, rather than haphazardly inserting rules and fluff willy-nilly the way White Wolf does (love their systems / settings, hate their books).

And let's not even get started on the matrix rules - that chapter is a cross-referencing clusterfuck.



Not true. You just have to be flexible with your story; it's a form of collaborative fiction. If you approach it from the point of view of telling a story set in stone you're right, it will all end in tears (either of anguish or boredom), but that doesn't mean it can't be done.



Having to deliberately curtail a character's advancement in its primary discipline until the other characters have 'caught up' is a major failing of the rules, in my book. Certainly initiations should be notable undertakings by the character, and not just something to do in a week's downtime between runs, but by the same token, the player should not find themselves at a complete loose end for attempting to undertake one. If they wish to go out and find a magical college to initiate under (or just want to start a pet project by which they can introspectively refine their own knowledge of magic, as might be the case with some eastern traditions) then that option should be within the character's reach, unless they specifically took hindrances that would say otherwise.

If I was playing an awakened and I decided to look around at different magical colleges to enroll in, I'd be miffed if I was told I wasn't going to be able to find one untill Joe the street-sam has accrued 50+ karma.

Edit: Also, monofilament wire is silly.

The great thing about SR is that everything has multiple counters. Being the hammer-man who sees every problem as a nail is a great way to die fast. You have to employ smart tactics, always, that applies to both sides. If the GM has to pull out a super NPC to create a challange then he's doing something wrong.

I'm a fellow player at the same table as MasterofM, and was playing the shaman in question.

I think that there are some gaps in the rules as written. For example, the Influence power doesn't list modifiers for the difference between resisting "shoot yourself in the head" vs. resisting "leave me alone" vs. resisting "buy the extra-large side order of fries". It's also less than clear on whether the subject understands that they've been Influenced.

I trust a good GM to be clear about the times when they're imposing an absolute fiat. If the GM wants an NPC to hit on a certain shot, the GM should just say "He hits", and not pretend to be using a die roll.

In this specific case, the PCs bit off more than they could chew. Given the precedents of that campaign, it was reasonable to expect that when Horizon sends a convoy of boats across the Pacific with a value over 3 million nuyen (not counting the secret advanced gear that was hidden in the boats), Horizon will protect that convoy with both a swarm of drones and a stronger-than-PCs mage with a posse of high-Force bound spirits. If the GM had said "One F8 spirit possesses each PC (rolling 16 dice against Willpower), and has you wait passively for Horizon HTRT to arrive, your character will escape only if you burn Edge", I would have called that... fair. The GM instead had one of the spirits take over the boat, and use Fear and Influence to make the shadowrunners go away.

Yes, of course the secmage has a bound spirit or three. It costs ¥4K in binding materials, and that's a quite reasonable price to pay in order to prevent the theft of ¥3M worth of boats. My CHA 7 Elf Shaman PC often has a full posse of seven bound spirits.

My PC told the other PCs, unambiguously, that attacking the convoy was a bad idea, then went along it. He probably should have said "I'm not interested in joining this run"; that might have meant me sitting out the session.

Meanwhile, a teammate who also stole a boat and fled in a different direction, got to escape easily, since the security mage sent both of her bound spirits after the boat stolen by the shaman and the super-skilled adept. So the team as a whole still did quite well!

You're assuming that the player isn't using smart tactics as well. Super characters with smart players using good tactics will beat anything fair a GM can throw at them. The bad part is that this encourages a "Player vs GM" attitude, and you're caught in an arms race to get that next advantage. The GM doesn't have to be doing something wrong in SR4, it could just be that the players are doing everything right.

Here's a short list of issues and types of issues we've had difficulty with:
SINs: SIN-checking results in getting caught quickly, scrapping ID's
Hacking, abandonment of Stat+Skill+Equipmod makes script-kiddies the equal of skilled hackers. As mentioned above, it is a clusterfuck of cross reference. Matrix Rules: Let's not even go there. Too many threads already.
Jamming: Most effective modern militaries use frequency hopping and spread spectrum. It's highly resistant to narrow-band jamming and broad-band jamming is both ridiculously energy intensive and a fast boat to cancerville, particularly if it's a device you carry in your shorts. Check frequency hopping on wikipedia. A player at our table for a while did comms in Iraq and laughed in bewilderment at much of the e-warfare in SR4.
Sensor upgrading: ermm, yeah. This has been discussed before. Rip out the sensors that can't go above three and you suddenly have a Sensor Rating of 6, even though you have fewer sensors than you started with. That makes sense. Or not.
Vehicle Rules (especially crash damage, ie. Ramming)
Movement Power: conservation of momentum and handling + handwavium = no problem! Add in economics and society shifts tremendously.
Spirits of >F6: Physical attacks rapidly become meaningless without magic to boost them. Spirit Skills rapidly outstrip metahuman skills. Half the time we ask our spirits to Assense and share over the mental link, rather than do it ourselves.


For me, what makes cyberpunk and near future stories exciting is not just the cool gadgets and shiny tech, but rather the well-thought out ways that the tech affects society and interactions. It shouldn't just be Today-With-Shiny-Things-Taped-On. Look at the way text messaging, cell phones and the intertubez have reshaped the social fabric of our culture. Throw in Movement, Wards, etc and security changes drastically, trade changes completely. All too often, though, we find ourselves fighting the crunch to support the fluff or reality. Gun rates of fire are ridiculously low, healing is ridiculously fast, etc.

I love Shadowrun, and have since i first played in the mid-90's. The only version i haven't played was 2nd and i played 2-year stints of extended story arcs in 1st, 3rd and now 4th. I love some of the changes, but look forward to 4.5 or 5th already.

A lot of the issue is also granularity/resolution. If it's a slider bar, picture GURPS at one end of that and Wu Shu/Feng Shui (the games) at the other. SR4 tries to be somewhere in the middle, which is the most difficult (and desireable) place to be, but doesn't feel well-playtested.

BTW, if your response is just to say, "it's not the rules, it's you. love it or leave it" or similar variants, maybe save the electrons and jump to another thread, instead. Our conflict is that we love the story setting and wish the ruleset lived up to it. I guess that's better than loving the ruleset and wishing we had a good story, but, dammit, i want both! Greedy bastard!

I think you are playing the wrong game if you want this. Frank Trollman showed some what a society should be able to do and look like based on logical extrapolations of the rules and the society resulting looks nothing like the fluff.

It's more than a little annoying, isn't it?

Aaaaah, now we are back at the topic.^^

I have read all your statements and after 13 years of running I have to say that I understand the rule-lawyer as well as the handwaving-rulebraking-GM. But IMHO the really big problem with SR4 is, that the developers AGAIN forgot about the developments they made within the 3 previous versions. I mean after THAT time, even if you establish a new rule-basis, you should know about the weaknesses and where you should add further informations so that nobody has to ask for it. But where are all the already solved problems gone?

The SR4 corebook doesn´t even have a summary/index. Some tables with prices etc. are in the section but not in the gear table at the end, finding specific rules is a pain in the ass because some details are covered in endless text-parts and sometimes not even in the part they should be. It wouldn´t be frustrating if it was V.01 but hey....we are in V4, and after all this time, all the topics in several internet forums and i-don´t-know-how-many erratas, especially such things as the runners companion (e.g. Arcane Arrester) are embarrasing.

A lot of those approaches are meaningless for several reasons:
First we have rules covering the use of skills, gears and powers for day to day use by small teams. The rules aren't here to simulate large scale operations. You can compare that to physics. You have laws and equations that can apply for any scale and any situation (in some cases we haven't found them but we still assume there are) but if you want to apply them for a specific scale and situation, you go with a simplified version. The rules are the simplified version adapted to the use in game, not the industrial use.

Second, people in the world don't have rulebooks, and aren't rational entities. For example someone recently stated in a topic that no mage would do enchanting since they can probably earn more as mages-for-hire. It makes sense from a purely gamist approach, but mages in the SR4 world aren't crunching gamists. A mage might prefer enchanting to spell slinging, he might have failed the sorcery class or maybe he chose enchanting because it was the easiest and left more time to party.

This thread has covered the spread from broken rules to not enough realism with a dash of can't tell the story I want. The rule-set is vague, I admit that; but I believe that was intentional. Its designed to accept actions not outlined in the rules without designers having to regulate every last action of a character in the game. You may call this lazy on the part of the designers, but SUPER-regulation is neither time efficient or cost efficient when trying to get a book to press. Game Masters have needed to make rule calls since the dawn of the hobby. I believe that this system (SR4) expects that to happen, so it wrote its rule books accordingly. I know there is errata, I downloaded it, printed it out, and tell all my players to look it up when things get confusing. If that doesn't help, I know I will have to judge exactly what the grammar, used by the creators of the book, is trying to convey (as GM and sometimes as player). In SR4, with RAW, I accept this reality. I think GURPS (Generally Unplayable Role-Playing System (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif) ) or HERO system (Champions "of the Universe") would make a good conversion game, as their rule-sets come first in design leaving flavor and story up to teach individual GM. This requires an amazing amount to set-up, but once in place; the world created will tell the story you want with a solid and well defined rule-set.


Realism doesn't sell.
This forum is rife with "rules vs. realism" arguments, trying to hash out just exactly what is going on at a given moment. And the conversation is usually just over a given moment like it is here. Something happened in a game someone doesn't like, and they post their frustrations on this forum. That is what the forum is for, community support. I support everyone's right to bitch about something that happened to them in any edition of Shadowrun (no "falling" rules in SR1). But I also support everyone-else's right to comment on the original bitch. But that's not my point.

No dice system ever created, in the process of being created, or ever will be created will ever map the course of reality. It can't be done, and I don't think is what is being asked for in this, or any, thread. What is being asked for is a dice system that explains exactly how I (and by I, I mean all of you) view the universes I live in. Unless I write the dice system this will never happen. I applaud F.Trollman for his dedication in creating dice systems to help better understand the world of Shadowrun. I would never use them because they don't represent my view, but he has the discipline to do the work when there is something he doesn't like about the game. My approach is to accept what the book says and fudge it when I need to bang it into my story. But stories aren't real. Even the ones I tell about something that happened to me personally are sprinkled with edits and wild abandon, and still I can't see all ends.

With that in mind: I have had extreme trouble with the lexicon to the game, and I'm not talking of the fictional aspects. I am computer stupid. I'm the guy most IT guys complain about when they go home and kill that kobold in effigy. The "dash " of "realism" applied in SR4 (mainly Matrix chapter) had me going to reference material to find out what the hell certain words meant. I know what a Node is. I thought I knew what a Node was. It's different in SR1 (where I'm coming from) than it is in SR4. The difference is subtle, but it is there. But the post which speaks of sensors (stromcrow's), talks of the lack of reality in that aspect of the game. So at times the game is too real, and not real enough. Sorry, my rant, but it leads me to my next point.

Equality is an Illusion.
This is a personal statement and in no way represents the views of Dumpshock, it's members or guests, or of anyone that I know of. But I still believe it. There is no such thing as equality. The only true equality is that none of us are equal. The only peice of reality that RPGs get right is that their is always somebody better. The concept I supporting here is: I believe in the SUPER-NPC. Deus ex Mechana (or a facsimile there of). One day, in the not to distant future. In some RPG I will be playing. AN NPC that is much better than me at everything will descend from the heavens and step on my balls. I accept this. It has been a literary device since the dawn of story-telling. I stepped on the heads of plenty of low powered NPC. Payback is coming. It's coming for me, and its coming for you.

Shadowrun is for thelling Shadowrun stories.
The last complaint I believe this thread suggests is that their stories can't be told due to the rules. This is not so much a question of mechanics as it is a question of Mythos. All game systems have actions that can't take place in "real" life. I cannot fly. I cannot give birth to elves. I cannot find spirits (but somebody else could). These action must be regulated into the actions that are "realistic" and can be carried out in a physical world. I can jump a ravine. I can drive a car. I can shoot a gun (but I won't). But the dice system regulated to these physical actions have physical observations and scientific formula to back them up. There is a basis of comparison to how these things are accomplished and what effects they have. A dice system can be applied to them using these observations (but so rarely are).

But imaginary action must be quantified as well. So the people at Shadowrun (I think it's Catalyst this week) have to determine just how powerful the fictional aspects of the game must be. I believe this was the problem the original poster had. That there was no defense for the imaginary. I'll go one better. I believe the game master had designed the run so the characters would fail. I've been in games where this is the case. Was the GM my enemy? No. Was the story he was telling about my success? No. The point he was trying to make was that in this story I was in, I was the NPC. I was the "innocent observer" because the playing field was set to a higher bar. There was information I needed to know in his game, but that information had a price: my failure. But failure is a part of life, and I accepted it. Hell, I relished it. Here was an NPC I could learn from. My character went right into fan boy mode, and almost got arrested watching the NPC in action, instead of getting while the getting was good. SO there is no defense for a GM destined to see you fail, just as there is no defense for failure in the real world. Damn realism, creeping into my games again.


The arguments here are not over rules, as I see it, but over concepts and play style. ANd these vary as the stars. I'm not telling you not to argue, I cannot turn that tide (although I have a dicepool to do so). All I'm asking is to remember that arguing these point will not bring you satisfaction. They will bring more opposing view points. But through that lens, you own argument may strengthen, and through that you will gain enlightenment (sorry, went zen for a moment)

Apologies for the length of this post, but I wanted to address everyone's point of view. I most likely have failed to do so, but I hope you still take away something from this.

Thank You
Floyd

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/notworthy.gif) Indeed.

Impressively readable for a long post (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Very much. Bravo, you've said many things I think I had in my head but couldn't figure out how to put into words. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Whoa....this was really long. But did we have a problem with realism? ^^ Of course SR is not about covering the reality, but it shows at least a possible world so the rules shouldn´t conquer the things even WE know as (theoretically) granted. And hey...if SR rules would be without mistakes, there would be NO SINGLE SR-forum. Then if we are honest, this is 90% of the purpose these forums are made for.

I laughed as you said the lack-of-definition in the rules was intentional. This would be the same as if I would shit my pants and would tell everybody it is art. Espeially at RC it left an impression to my whole group like the old Compendium did...not finished, just thrown on the market to make money. The longer I think of it, the more it remembers me of the German Computer Game "Gothik". This game is the home of all the bugs that infect other games and for me, most of the SR books are also some kind of "bugged". (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Don´t misunderstand me, I love the game, but this doesn´t say anything about the quality of the rule-books.

It was a tangent, but some posts (the one concerning monowire) had addressed it. Although, since i interpreted the OP as: "there is no defense against the imaginary", I felt an aside on realism to be appropriate.

And don't misunderstand me, I love your poopy-pants; and would support your decision to sell them to the Guggenheim.

Cain, I agree with most everything else you've said on this topic, but here I have to disagree strongly. If the GM really is fair, then they will survive anything the GM throws at them. if they get stupid, even for a short time, the survival clause may not apply. But beat it? Nope. There are too many things stacked against the Runner. If they can simply rock roll every time if they avoid stupid mistakes, then you loose WAY TOO MUCH of the flavor of the setting. Sometimes the smart Runner runs away and hides in the Shadows, simply because sometimes the hornet nest is just too big.


Isshia

Right, but never forget that GM´s are also just humans, and humans sometimes get pissed off and i never heard that humans are fair at all.^^ So never forget to bring extra chips and coke for the GM, you never know how he´s feeling today.

But to get seriuos again. We are talking about SR4. The rules have changed a bit and nowadays it is enough to roll bad dice to get your character out of the living world. The times that target numbers of 2 are possible are over and even with 20 dice you can easily make critical boobs (i swear, this word is a translation of the german wird "Patzer", www.dict.cc says that). The last time that I thought "oh, only 2 successes with an assault rifle, I don´t take a action-phase to dodge" was the day my troll-tank died. and he had way more than 20 dice. So not only stupid GM´s or even more stupid Players are against you, also the dice are evil in SR4.^^

That's why Edge is more available to starting characters than Karma pool was in SR3.