Well, Let me ask you a question... How much variance do you see in the various (Hundreds) of different .45 Caliber handguns out there on teh market today... Same round, Many, Many variants in gun style, design, ammo capacity, etc...

Let me just say... there is absolutely no difference in damage capacity of the caliber itself... it is all fluff difference in presentation... I think that this is mimiced fairly well in the game...

You may think that it is useless fluff, but many people that play the game do not...

Keep the Faith

Nothing wrong about fluff – just that's what a variant system is there for.

Reducing the listed models a bit and adding a "Similar Model" line to each of the weapons will in fact produce more fluff.

Do you really need to keep quoting things a hundred times in each post? It's pretty annoying. That said, four rebuttals:

1. Fine. House rules rock. I use 'em like crack cocaine. SnS as shotgun shells only for you. That still doesn't make options a bad thing. At all. Your ranting and raving about SnS is exactly that; you ranting about SnS ammo.

2. Flechette ammo is more than a bunch of needles. It encompasses a wide array of things. Apparently, all of the Heavy Pistol variation of flechette ammo consist of ceramic wheels like what's used in the Slivergun. Except the Roomsweeper uses it, too, and describes it as random shrapnel or shotgun shot. (But that can't be; one ammo type can't encompass a wide array of similar ammunitions!) The price, rules, and functionality of flechette ammo is very much different than that of any other ammo type, too. Your issues with the balance of those stats doesn't change the fact that they're all still different from one another, and each one offers something the others don't.

3. Yes. I do consider people who only choose Stick-n-Shock ammo because it's the "best" of the best as munchkins and powergamers. You're the only one allowed to have a biased opinion?

4. It's not the Stormwind Fallacy. How shocking people throw around fancy words willy-nilly. For it to be the Stormwind Fallcy, that would mean that "roleplayers" would avoid Stick-n-Shock simply to avoid being "powergamers." Which isn't the case. (And, actually, it means that powergamers can't be rolerplayers at all. The point still remains.) Powergamers cling to it solely because it's a powerful ammo type, but that doesn't mean it's the only thing they use or that only they choose to use it. It's their reason for choosing it that makes them a powergamer/munchkin, not the fact that they actually chose it.

Yes, but it's not like the real world if limited by 'page count.' Why do people persist in taking one of the issues and focusing on it out of context. You need to focus exclusively on real viable options because

A) Bad options are a trap for new players

B) Redundant options waste space that could be spent on other things

you're looking at point B, so lets have a thought experiment with an obviously exaggerated example:

Would the core rulebook be improved if they took out all the art to provide a bazillion tiny variations of pistols or rifles to mimic the variety in the real world? No, no it would not. Why?- there is clearly a point of diminishing returns at which further options that do not offer stark differentiation are pointless given there is a limited space inside the rulebook and the space could be spent on something else.

For every assault rifle you add you have to take something else out of the book. This means redundant options directly detract from the game because that redundant option could have been taken out and the word count used on something else, like a new spell, or a new skill, or a useful piece of equipment, or some cool flavour text or a piece of art.

Bottom line: Redundant options damage the game because of their opportunity cost in word count because you are talking about an RPG which is printed in a book.

It could well be that they'd just make the book shorter, though. It's not necessarily true that 'your' pages are being 'wasted', anyway.

You mean that the Weapons section has more wasted space? Actually, in Arsenal (The book you chose)... there are 27 pages to the weapons section, and there are 29 pages to the Vehicles section... vehicles get more space than weapons do in the book designed to have a bit of everything... and just to point out... the characters I play often make what you would call Sub-Optimal choices, as I choose based upon Concept and Style... after all, in Shadowrun, Style trumps Substance, even for the Ice Cold Pros

My Current Character MUCH prefers the HK PSG1 over the Barret anyday of the week and twice on sunday... Why? Because it is a more reliable weapon overall (Fluff), even if its stats are a bit lower than the Barret's (Mechanics)... Notice my choice is a fluff based reason, not a mechanical one...

And for the record, neither the Weapons section nor the Vehicle Section has any wasted space in my opinin, more choices makes the world more immersive... you can argue the import of it all you want, but that mimics real life quite well... Hell, in our world (at the table I play at) we are free to take a real life weapon, compare to the current examples and put it into play... I tend to keep my latest Gun Digest in hand for just such a purpose... even though the only realistic differences are in the statistic line, and often not any real difference exists at all...

As a result, I think that your estimation fails...

Just sayin'

Keep the Faith

Printing mechanics dictate that you would not, you need to print books in multiples of 16 or 32? (I think that's it, it might be 8? You get the idea though) so chopping out half a page of wasted space requires putting something else in, even if something else is only 'improved layout to capitalize on increased white space budget instead of jamming everything together'

Plus SR free lancers have said on these forums before that stuff has been cut due to word count limits, so pretty sure that yeah, if you could cut pointless stuff you could add stuff somewhere else.

"A" is only true if you buy into the argument that a sub optimal character is a bad thing.

As for "B" well what other things would be referring to? You seem to be arguing that options are not needed at all. Just pick the best and print only that. You can not claim to want fewer options and imply you want more in the same sentence. Oh, and you have yet to show that options are redundant. You have only shown that you do not like the other options and see them as inferior. Which, by the by, and option can not be both inferior and redundant.

Yes!

Yes!

Not to mixed up with my ranting about cutting down the handgun listing deadwood with a "Similar Models" entry.

Yes! Capsule Flechette, sintered shards, shard streams, regular shot… all that is "Flechette". Still, isn't it odd that S&S, an intricate miniaturized high-tech system is cheaper?

Weren't you elaborating how great lengths people you know go not to use it, except in the case of emergencies… how few NPC are equipped with it (even though using shock weapons would make perfect sense for peacekeepers) and the rest are "powergamers"?


And what would be that "reason", specifically? Just "because it's the "best" of the best"?
So people wanting to survive combat are "powergamers"? Because choosing the option that stops your enemy killing you the fastest would be that.

To be honest, I'm tired of the repeated quoting, so I'm just going to go with the lame "agree to disagree" comment and be done with talking to you. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Offset printing (still very common) can be done in multiples as low as 8.

But that still does not equal that cutting out a half a page requires putting something in. It just means you are paying for space you are not using. Unless of course you can cut out enough to reach the lower multiple.

Note: Information comes from my father who is a Master Pressman for a very large printing company.

What the heck?

A is silly - in a class based game, you could have a duelist class (or whatever). Some guy wants to play 'Zorro' so he goes to the duelist class. As the game designer you can either give him something that is balanced against the other options in the game, or you can give him or the other players a shit sandwich by making the class crap or OP respectively.

I cannot think of any possible reason you'd want to give out the shit sandwich over the balanced choice. If you do you're just beating people up for wanting to be a duelist or whatever, and I'm not cool with people randomly sucking or being overpowered just because they wanted to have a rapier or be a wizard or whatever. It's really not good for the game - people rage endlessly about power gamers and munchkins ruining the game - if the options were balanced while retaining differentiation, it wouldn't impact balance if someone was a wizard and some other guy was zorro allowing people to play what they want without flinging 'power gamer' at each other (see Doc Funk vs Rotbart, and how it wouldn't be an issue if the ammo/gun choices were differentiated options that offered balance.)



You've listened to me endlessly take about differentiation, and then said options are not needed at all? No! NO! NO!

Players need to have a ranged of highly differentiated options! The more differentiated options the better! However, they need to be different, and real options. Guns A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H should all have real points of difference, and equally viable reasons to chose them all.

Incidentally, an option can be both inferior and redundant. Imagine two skills, one called 'Swim' and one called 'Swimmy-er' The only difference being that 'Swimmy-er' is twice as good as 'swim'

Swim is both inferior (as it does half as much) and redundant ('Swimmy-er' duplicates the functions of 'swim' and the game only needs one option for swimming - one is 100% fine)

If you want some SR examples, Doc Funk posted a couple of good ones when observing that I must hate some of the current SR equipment listing.



As I said, content is cut due to space reasons all the time according to people involved with the SR production posting on this very board. If you're printing dumb options you're killing space that could be used for something else.

"I am sure they are sour."

Funny, that's all I ever see in class-based systems. Gross imbalance.

The best part is that you're just not seeing it. All those classes are options. Each one offers something different, even if some are similar (Rogue vs. Duelist vs. Fighter, or Sorcerer vs. Wizard, or etc.). Some are easily more powerful than others (especially if you move on to prestige classes/paths). So, by your argument, all of that should be abolished in favor of a minimalist class system consisting of two classes: Magic-Users and Non-Magic Users. Everything else is then dependent upon the customization options you make. Which, incidentally, would all have to be exactly equal or else you're wasting space. Which can only be accomplished by making everything the same. And even with this scenario of only two classes one is GOING to be more powerful than the other in some fashion. Oh noes! Prepare for the world to explode.

It's an absolutely ridiculous and absurd notion. "Variety is the spice of life." That phrase exists for a reason. It's one thing to have issue with the individual choices, but to say that having those choices is a bad thing is... well, I'm damn glad you have no way of impacting the game with nonsense like that.

Umm no. Because we are playing Roleplaying Game in which the goal is to have fun. Not to see who can make the most optimal character. Maybe you get some kick out of trying to min/max your way out of an inferiority complex, but some people prefer to roleplay a character without regard to optimization.




This statement is so arbitrary it hardly deserves a response. (But it is Dumpshock, so what the heck.) The problem here is that you seem to want to be the judge of when an option in "highly differentiated" enough for it to count as being worthy. I has apparently never occurred to you that other people want want to make up their own darn minds and seem perfectly content with the level of differentiation. The game designers included.

Except that you have not shown that the Shadowrun System has both an Inferior Option that is Redundant... Much of what you are posting is pure opinion, and as such is not capable of providing a valid comparison as such... Opinion is not fact... what you declare as Inferior, someone else will contest... so, it actually does not progress anywhere productive...

I will say this... could the Arsenal Book been just weapons? Sure... we could have had 200 pages on just weapons and weapon systems... hell, my current Gun Digest is well over 500 pages and does not include ANY military options at all, just civilian variations... so, we could have gotten an extremely questionable book (quality may have been go or bad, depending upin how they approached the subject)...

We could also have a Book on Vehicles only, with the same parameters...

What we got was, I Think, a very good mix of information, with some thoughts as to differentiation... there are no entries that are exactly identical... which is good... Could they have cut down each of the secitons and provided more "Similar Model" Mechanics? Possibly, but that is not the way they chose to go...

I think that they produced a fairly good mix of entries... Unfortunately, You cannot please all of the people all the time... and I think that this is what you are running up against... You think that it could have been better, others disagree...

As The Doctor has said... I guess we will just have to agree to Disagree...

Keep the Faith

Again, what the heck?

I just specifically nominated 'duelist' as an archetype that people might want to play. Someone else might want to play Conan the barbarian. Someone else might want to play an Arthurian Knight.

These are all characters that I'd expect to see crop up - and as such they should be differentiated (which they clearly are as concepts), and equally viable (so the duelist and the Arthurian knight should both be equal contributors in their own way). Having a situation in which Conan can do everything Zorro can do and more sucks balls.

If you want to talk about D&D, the problem with D&D is not that it offers differentiated choices (as you point out, it does). The problem is that some of the choices are crap: A 3.5 ed monk for example cannot handle quite a number of level appropriate challenges (as defined by scoring the same success rate on a CR 5 same game test that a wizard, cleric or druid might).

Didn't they actually do this?

I thought that it was called Dungeons and Dragons, 4th Edition... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

Keep the Faith

The Doc posted a number of examples in this thread in response to one of my posts if you would like some.

I did? I only recall posting examples of items and skills that were inferior to other options. Not a single one of them lacked something different from the other options. There were still reasons to choose them even if a powergamer wouldn't dream of doing so in a thousand years.

You're looking at this from the wrong perspective. Think about it as a game designer NOT a game player. The designer should facilitate your goal of

by ensuring that your choices are balanced so optimisation doesn't enter into the discussion. That is precisely what I am arguing for, but you seem to be suggesting that the game designer facilities roleplay by making choices grossly unbalanced. As we have seen in this very thread, that just results in people calling other people other people names. If the choices were balanced in the first place by the game designer, Doc Funk wouldn't be calling someone a powergamer or munchkin about their ammo selection.

Taser darts are cheaper than Stick N' Shock ammo. Also the tasers can be clearly non-lethal weapons, a pistol with stick n' shock in it is no different to a gun with regular ammo in it. It may be preferable to have the mall cops carrying tasers than pistols. Tasers have less range so you're not going to be hitting innocent bystanders so much with a taser dart, again - see mall cops. Once you step outside the view point of a numbers-focused PC, reasons for variants to exist become apparent even just mechanically. Though basically you're arguing from the point of view that you're not interested in having that variety whereas other people like it (myself included).



Well you can make up any rules and fluff for yourself if you want to, but we buy these games because we want them done for us. And I crack open my copy of SR4 and I find that they've done exactly what you suggested - made up some names and changed some stats slightly. Perfect - job done. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

K.

Seriously? You don't think there are still redundant handguns?

Ok. Let's go for a clear, unambigous case of redundancy, then:

Given that this is the only ear cyber added in Augmentation…

If tasers had the same ammo capacity as a light pistol with S&S, that would be true. Like I said:

If you take the technology involved in creating S&S by RAW, you could build tasers that replace firearms n a large scale.

Just they cut down on wordcount for other things, instead of adding a "Similar Models" line.

"It's an absolutely ridiculous and absurd notion. 'Variety is the spice of life.' That phrase exists for a reason. It's one thing to have issue with the individual choices, but to say that having those choices is a bad thing is... well, I'm damn glad you have no way of impacting the game with nonsense like that."

In case you missed it the myriad other times it was mentioned.