SR4 - current FanPro D newsletter Options

[Grinder]

There exist a sb about hungary. Iirc it was a fan-based development and never translated into english or german.

[hermit]

[MYST1C]

[ENHenry]

This news sounds promising to me - I don't have a lot of Shadowrun experience, but the new target number system sounds a heck of a lot faster-resolving.

[Dizzo Dizzman]

Opps. Typo on my part. My appologies.

[Synner]

[hermit]

I stand corrected.

Any Hungarian here who could scan in that book's artwork? It looks mighty cool.

[Nikoli]

Thing is, why are these books divergent from the main publishing company storyline?
Why was it considered a good idea to make every country have it's own little version?
One game, one canon. Though I am happy to hear about the German storyline being done away with and brought into the fold so to speak. Had there been an English translation of the German sourcebook, I might had had German shadows in my games ove rthe years, but because of that German language only book, nothing from Germany aside from the occaisional SK reference was ever in my games.

[Shadow]

I don't know about you guys but I would pay big money ($40) for an SR Almanac that layed out the history, all the important events, the non important ones etc. I think it is sort of a stick in the mud that FanPro is only making a german version.

Don't you guys think that a book of all tha is SR just might be popular in the states?

[Synner]

That's the way FASA (back in the day) decided its licenses should work. And it did so for very practical reasons. The original Germany sb (which by the way is and has been available for years and years) was a translation and adaptation of the original DidS and was rather a big dissappointment in terms of sales (you can still find the first printing available in some stores). So much so that FASA deemed it a bad idea to translate all the other books (even for the purpose of content revision) which were getting increasingly specialized and specific. If you ever got to read C&D and WSI a considerable amount of the contents would go right over your head (since they are in fact tailored and play to a German audience rather than an American, French or even Portuguese one). The Germans on Dumpshock will also back me up when I say that they also present unique integration problems with canon.

However, that has been changing under Rob and Christian, and most material post-DidS2 is compatible and cross-referenced. DotSW dealt with the major frag up that Germany had 5 great dragons coexisting, SoE brought Austria and Switzerland into a very different light than they had been portrayed in the original German books as well as integrating the AGS in a wider European stage, Loose Alliances will visit many polticial groups including several introduced in German canon, and the list goes on.

And the same thing is happening on the German end, B:ADL (Target:AGS) includes lots of German-specific info that crosses with the SOTA64 hermetic schools as represented in German Thaumaturgic universities as well as information on other facts of everyday life specific to the German setting.

As far as translating everything it simply isn't feasible. There isn't a market for stuff that specific outside its homeland.

[Eldritch]

So the final word is that this "Shadowrun Almanac" is not to be published in English??

...It would be nice to have the last fifteen years of history in one place.

[Zeel De Mort]

Well, I don't know the exact details of the new system but by the sound of it - is it really much better?

Okay so in SR3 you roll a number of dice equal to your skill + any applicable pool dice + possibly a few bonus dice. The target number starts at a particular value, e.g. 4 to shoot at someone within close range. Then you apply modifiers to the target number for lighting, cover, movement, recoil, injuries... a whole bunch of things which you have to look up from various tables, probably in more than one book, at least until you know them off by heart.

Or, from how the proposed new rules appear to work: You roll a shitload of dice: Presumably attribute + skill + pool (I assume they're not doing away with pools, are they? please god no) + any other bonus dice, i.e. even more dice than you rolled in SR3. Right, so we assume the target number is always fixed at 5. Great, that's nice and easy. But wait! We now need to modify the number of dice we roll depending on such factors as lighting, cover, movement, recoil, injuries... Oh, hmm, really? Where do we find out about these? In tables, in books. Maybe they'll even be in one place, to start with. Finally we work out how many dice we should be rolling on this particular attack, grab a nice big bucket and flood the gaming table with them, start picking out all those 5s and 6s.


So.. what's the advantage of this new system? By the sound of it you end up rolling even more dice, and instead of modifying the target number you're now modifying the number of dice you roll instead. How is that much of an improvement?

I am, of course, just speculating, based on what one developer has said and then has been (rather well, as far as I can tell) translated for us into English. I actually still believe SR4 will be pretty good and that everyone will do a good job with it, but things like this really perturb me.

P.S. Yeah, I'd pay to have an almanac of the entire history of the 6th world and all the events since the awakening, as well as anything significant to the 6th world previous to that. Even if it was all just reprinted material gathered together from other books, old and new (and even ED!).

[Adam]

Before everyone goes off and starts fighting a battle that doesn't exist -- there is a planned SR4 sourcebook that covers much of what the German-only worldbook will cover.

[Eldritch]

[Catsnightmare]

[Adam]

[Zeel De Mort]

[Tanka]

[Catsnightmare]

You ever seen anyone burn 6+ karma in re-rolls on single test TN 5 with 8 dice before. My fellow players have on a regular basis. I've been nicknamed "Karma Platinum" due to the unspeakably high rate I have to spend karma to keep characters alive.

In "that other game" I take 10 on every roll the GM will let me cause I rarely roll higher than that on a 20 sider. Even when playing a high bonuses fighter I'm one of the first ones put down in battles cause I can't hit shit.

[Zeel De Mort]

[Kagetenshi]

[Tanka]

It does also say "5+." Which means it can go up. I'll assume that means it can also go down.

So if, say, a Shaman with Wil 5 and Sorcery 6 needs to conjure something with a TN 5 (since we don't know mechanics, this will do fine for now). Let's say he throws 3 of his Spell Pool in for good luck. He's rolling 14 dice against TN 5. That's not too shabby at all.

Nowhere does it even note removing or adding dice. It just says "fixed TN of 5+." So, yes, a contradictory statement in one way or another, but that does not immediately mean it will only ever be 5, nor does it automatically mean we add/remove dice depending on circumstances.

[Kagetenshi]

My personal guess is that that's an artifact of translation and that it's a 5 or greater that is successful rather than the TN being variable. Either way, there's absolutely no evidence that the TN drops.

And again, the only other apparent solution is a variable number of successes required to actually succeed, which makes things impossible to low-skill/low-attribute people (or, on the extreme, to everyone). If you've got another I'd like to hear it; maybe it'll be both ingenious and simple, but all other solutions I can think of get very complicated fast.

~J

[Jérémie]

Argh, I really hope the translation is wrong.

We need less, far, enormously less dices to roll, not the same amount, not more, but LESS dices.

[Tanka]

Personally, I don't find it really worthwhile to rip into something we barely know anything about.

What was given to us was so ambiguous, we can barely pull any information from it other than the apparent basics of the skill system.

I think we should stop ripping into the devs until we know exactly what they're doing and have played with it at least once. But that's just my opinion.