House Rules de Santa Cruz, Mostly as regards BPs and Karma Options

[Triggerz]

No, his original draft used karma points. If you look at the draft above, it doesn't mention BP. He just reused his draft but changed karma points 1-for-1 to BP.

Beaten to it by the man himself, it seems. :P

[Triggerz]

[Lorka]

How do you handle Foci in the Karma=BP system. To me it seem you want to remove the weird price jumps after chargen as much as you want to fix the whole skill thing ?

In chargen foci cost BP=Force, this means a Power Focus force 2 cost 2 BP, the foci rules says binding a Power Focus is 8xForce so 16 Karma for a force 2 focus.

So in your system will a Power Focus force 2 cost 2 BP in chargen or 16 BP, and will it cost different after chargen?

Hope you all dont mind me doing some threadnecromancy :)

[FrankTrollman]

I'm totally not against thread necromancy.

I use the bonding costs on p. 191 (or SM p. 85) for Foci during and after Chargen. And yes, this means that some foci like Counterspelling Foci are a "bad deal" compared to just purchasing skills. But since they push you well past what you would be capable of without Foci, people still seem to want them.

-Frank

[Lorka]

I think your house rules are rather good, you can like or dislike the skill rules, but what I find most impressive about your house rules is the reduction in min/maxing at chargen.

Without your house rules I found many taking min/max in both attributes and skills, with the linear rules of continuing using BP people are more inclined to start chars with more balances stats both attributtes and skills - with linear increasement you dont have to take your prime stats at max and you dont have to leave the less used at 0-1.

[Fortune]

[Jaid]

[DTFarstar]

Damn it all Frank! Why can't I live near you? *sigh*

[Fortune]

Because you don't live in Prague? ;)

[MaxHunter]

I have started a new group using Serbitar's Karma generation system and it is working very well, more balanced out chars and all. (though a bit up on the power level, particularly mundanes) Does your BP system churn out more powerful PC?

That they are a little more powerful than before doesn't matter too much because it's a "ghost in the shell" concept storyline based in Neotokio...
Oh, I can't wait for the new book -even though I think I will rip the LA part and feed it to the fishes....

Cheers,

Max

[kzt]

Frank's system produces characters who can afford a lot more skills, as they are half price. It seems to work pretty well when we have used it.

[DTFarstar]

So, any other changes you guys are willing to leak to us? I've found that myself and my players generally really like the changes you guys make it solves alot of the problems we have had when making characters.

Chris

[FrankTrollman]

Sure. Here are some other things we did to smooth things over:

Speeding Up the Game:

Datasearch and Etiquette checks take too long. Better rather than making them extended tests, to make them simple tests. Set a threshold, and if characters succeed at that threshold they succeed eventually. Additional hits reduce the time. A good rule of thumb is that the straight test threshold should be about 3-4 times smaller than Availability or Search difficlty numbers.

Extended tests can be exciting in the middle of combat, but they are a waste of time in most cases when performing ot of combat actions.

Détente

Agents destroy the game. If everyone agrees to not use them at all, the gamemaster also agrees to not hit players with hundreds or thousands of copies of cascading IC. The game goes by fine without them.

A Hole in the Sky

Bloodzilla is... unfortunate. Blood Spirits get Essence Drain and Essence Loss instead of Energy Drain and Evanescence. Furthermore, the Toxic spirits aren't actually there. There seriously aren't enough in any theme to make a full tradition. And that's sad. Also there's no Toxic Spirit creation rules. So I Added Some.

Damage Caps for Poison

I prefer the Disease Rules in Augmentation to the Toxin rules in SR4 BBB. Unsurprising of course, I wrote them. So I actually handle Toxins like Diseases. They have much lower powers and hit a very specific number of times. Gas and the like can be halted by stopping exposure. This neatly prevents the thing that happens in the basic rules where every single person who gets hit by a Neurostun cloud actually dies. There's a maximum damage that a Neurostun exposure can inflict, and it's sub-lethal for most characters.

Hardened Armor and Ammunition

Under standard rules, Hardened Armor behaves quite strangely. Every point of it automatically stops all DV below threshold N (thus acting as N automatic hits on damage soak), but above threshold N it only provides N dice (thus granting about 1/3 N hits on damage soak). Thus, for very large numbers of Hardened Armor, any weapon capable of hurting the target at all is virtually incapable of surviving - which is weird. Some people like this, I don't. I moved to a much smoother system in which hardened armor (modified by AP) simply counts as automatic hits all the time. This makes AP extremely important against those targets and makes APDS the ammo of choice for high-end combat (as its availability would indicate).

To compensate, I reduced Hardened Armor values across the board. ItNW, for instance, adds only (Force) to hardened armor, not (Force x 2).

In other related news, I've used Flechettes with an AP of (+Impact Armor) rather than +2 or +5 and I've been quite happy with the result. Similarly, treating shock weaponry similarly to a one-shot Toxin (you only need to touch, but the damage doesn't scale with net hits) very simply and conveniently puts Stick-n-Shock in its place. Much simpler and more effective than the errata.

Cleaning Up the Regeneration

Did you notice that Regeneration is supposed to be bypassed by mana bolts in 4th edition? That's amazingly underwhelming, and I just ignore it right off. Also the "damage to the spinal cord" rule is right out because the game doesn't have hit locations. Damage in excess of what can be healed is still potentially lethal and the creatures cannot regenerate while in contact with an allergen. That really is completely sufficient to kill vampires without letting a simple Manabolt do the job or worrying about where a bullet landed.

---

But as to leaking future stuff, I am working on a Matrix overhaul. I really don't like what we've had to do with the Agent rules - please don't break the game works at all, but it's not a good solution. Also, Technomancers are rather unsalvageable. So here's a leak of some of the material in it:

---

The Ends of the Matrix
"Let's go talk to our Matrix expert and get him to do… whatever it is that he does."

Throughout the four editions of Shadowrun, no rule-set has been changed more dramatically nor inspired more complete house-rules than the Matrix section. And this is unsurprising, because the Matrix touches upon something which is somewhat real – computers – while at the same time living entirely in the realm of deeply speculative fiction.

But more so than that, the Matrix has always had a tremendously difficult problem with abstraction of action. That is, it is entirely possible for the game to model every single pull of the trigger on a gun, every invocation of a spell, every turn of a car – but it is not possible to model every machine language command that flashes by a hacker. Every time you blink your eyes, a quadrillion processes crank through to completion in the Matrix. Equations are solved, numbers added and lost, and even listing all of them that had past during a heart's beat would be longer than every book ever written. So actions in the Matrix have to be abstracted. And yet, no past or current edition has had a consistent degree of approximation, which leads to wrinkles in the game system.

At the beginning, a computer system that an NPC used was modeled as a separate "room" for each arbitrary part of the computer (I/O, Storage Memory, Graphics Card, whatever), while the computer that the PC used was modeled as a series of attributes which modified the "Decker's" matrix icon (Where I/O was a location in NPC computers, it was an attribute in PC computers). In 4th edition, all processor power is abstracted and programs run arbitrarily somewhere in networks. Except that Agents/IC are specific code that runs on specific hardware and then takes individual actions in the Matrix based on how many copies are running somewhere in the arbitrarily large computer system they are stored in.

What is presented here is not the only method to realize the Matrix. Indeed, there are literally an infinite number of ways you could imagine it. Like Astral space, the Matrix does not exist; but unlike Shadowrun's magic, the Matrix isn't even loosely based upon folklore. What is here is hopefully a manner of realizing the Matrix which is consistent, playable, and fun. After all, if the rules are playable and they agree with the presented fluff to the extent that unplanned events can be extrapolated from the rules – then we can get back to what's really important: playing the game.

But before we can get some answers, we are going to need to formulate our questions.

Why Crime?
"Why yes, Big Brother is watching. However Big Brother has ADHD, so I'm going to sit here drinking my soykaf like any of a billion wage slaves are doing right now. And then Big Brother will get bored. And distracted. And then I'm going to do… anything I want."

One of the core conceits of the Shadowrun game is that crime is possible, and that crime pays. Given the wealth of potential satellite oversight (just look at Google Earth in 2007 – imagine the law enforcement version in 2070), and the incredibly daunting task that is cracking through somewhat decent encryption, it is entirely reasonable to project a future where getting away with any crime at all requires some sort of elaborate social engineering to pull inside jobs that play off of secret limits of the anti-crime system. But this isn't Minority Report or any other Phildickian setup, this is Shadowrun. And in Shadowrun bad people shoot other people right in the face for money and get away with it to do it again.

So here are some quasi-plausible justifications for that:

A Revolution in Data Collection, a Crisis of Storage
"I'm sorry, I seem to have misplaced my 'give-a-damn'."

Throughout human history the creation of data has exceeded the capacity to store it. It starts in infancy where a babe simply doesn't remember every single thing she sees, and it continues on through the Age of Bronze where not every conversation or every play gets written down, and it continues today. It could very plausibly continue in the Shadowrun future and for the sake of playability we're assuming that it does. The cameras in the world exceed the number of people who could watch them, and they collectively generate more video footage every day than can be stored on all the world's storage media.

And that is amongst the things that makes crime possible. When you go to the bathroom, a computer is measuring the mass of your deposit. When you flee a crime scene you're being watched by every store front you pass. But likely as not, none of that information will actually be saved anywhere. Some of it may be, but it quite likely isn't organized enough to actually identify you as the perpetrator (of the crime or the leavings). More importantly, information getting deleted isn't really news. If 18½ minutes are missing or overwritten by elven pornography, that's not weird.

Furthermore remember that in the world of 2071, it is entirely possible that a "legitimate" information request from investigating authorities will simply be refused. There's nothing in it for a Wuxing or Aztechnology subsidiary to share their security footage with Evo security to assist in the investigation of a crime against Evo or one of its subsidiaries. Corporations, especially major corporations are in competition, but beyond that they actually are regularly committing crimes against one another. Even showing what footage Aztechnology has of an event would be tipping its hand to Evo and it isn't going to compromise itself that way under normal circumstances. Further, it is in the interests of Aztechnology to make investigation and enforcement as expensive a proposition as possible for Evo as this reduces the company's ability to compete with them in other areas. So even when data is successfully stored, there's no reason to believe that investigating authorities will ever be allowed to actually see that data – which when you think about it is a lot like that data being lost or simply not recorded in the first place.

-Frank

[DTFarstar]

I like that. I like that alot. I actually explained the Big Brother issue to one of my players in a very similar fashion just the other day. I like the poison changes too. I made a point in my friends game when I used gas grenades and a Super Squirt fill of stun damage to kill alot of people. Not sure about the hardened armor though, I would have to playtest that. It seems like that would make most spirits pretty easy to kill. I mean APDS would completely negate the mystical protection of a Force 4 spirit. Hell, a Ruger Super Warhawk with APDS completely negates the magic armor of a Force 6 spirit. I mean.... that just seems really easy to kill. Which I guess might work out ok, since most mages I've seen can summon a Force 6 with little to no drain at all, but it seems to trivialize spirits a little bit. I guess they can be a little powerful as is, though. I'll have to run some combats and try it out see how it goes.

Chris

[Ryu]

I will have to take a look at your "poison" rules again, might actually be a great idea.

Your take on hardened armor is a good improvement! It might be desireable to model a vest with plates as having a hardened armor rating of 4 or something... isn´t that close to the way SR1 did armor? Started playing with SR2, myself.

Concerning the matrix rules, your reasoning is plausible. The level of abstraction is indeed inconsistent. As programs have the additional problem of not beeing freeware, we might get rid of all ratings and limitations for pure matrix programs. Any test in the matrix can use an attribute+skill mechanic, system ratings provide thresholds. No extended tests at all. Your own comlink could limit dice from both attribute and skill to Response. High end tricks need high end ware to run...

[Penta]

My fundamental explanation when I explain SR meshes neatly with your last point, Frank. You just explain it better.:) Nonetheless, I'm going to throw out something, I'd like to hear people's opinions on it:

Everything may be stored...But anybody who's tried to organize and maintain even a moderately large amount of data can tell you, that does not mean it is either catalogued, accessible, or not degraded. It is entirely possible that in our libraries we have the entire sum of all human knowledge stored...But that nobody can find half of it.

I forget if anybody's found out the "shelf-life" of optical data yet? That puts a stark limit on how long data can be stored.

More to the point...SR4 says that data storage is practically unlimited. That does not mean it is -entirely- unlimited. Just that the limits are beyond one person's ability to reach. A corporation (particularly a AA and AAA corp) or government produces truly massive amounts of data, and if they didn't have regular schedules of data archiving or destruction, they would quickly be overwhelmed by it.

My rule of thumb personally is that audio and video data is kept close, in most areas, for 2 weeks. Secure areas, 30-90 days. After that, select data may be archived permanently. Most is destroyed. I'm unsure what the deal is with samples for tissue cloning/ritual sorcery use - is there a limit stated anywhere?

"Paper" data is kept anywhere from 3 months to 1 year - digitization holds down the "data tsunami", but only to an extent.

Meaning that a shadowrunner who lays low for a few years can, for better or worse, slip completely from view. But it takes a few years.

[Kronk2]

[kzt]

Have you ever heard of this new "google" thing? I've heard it's quite popular with people who want answers to questions.