Some guidance much needed please!, (new GM modifying the rules already) Options

[knasser]

Hi,

I've posted a couple of times here, but I'm basically new, so I just want to say what a great community this seems. A lot of the posts here have made me really laugh out loud.

I'm hoping to be running my first SR game in the next month or so. I've previously played in SR3 and have mostly got my head around the changes in SR4. The new-style matrix tipped the balance in favour of the 4th edition. There are a couple of things I'd like to keep from SR3 though, and I really need advice on balance issues.

Firstly, I want to remove the caps on skills. My reasoning is that (a) this provides room for longer term play as there's still somewhere for characters to progress in ways that suit them. (b). This might help balance out the magic users with the mundanes later on as it seems to me that magic users have infinite and open-ended potential. The wired might hit 0.1 essence and Firearms 6 and get bored otherwise. ©. There just doesn't seem to be room for the true masters with a cap of 6 (7).

Secondly, 400BP seems too low to make good characters to me, but I could well be wrong. I want the players to start off as competent shadowrunners. Not James Bond, but certainly special forces. I was thinking a little boost to 450BP / 500BP would be better?

Thirdly, and this is the drastic one, it seems to me that the costing for metahuman races is much too low. I don't expect the BP cost to be an exact translation of how much it would cost to buy the same attributes etc. separately. But your troll gets 80 points of attributes boost for half the cost, not to mention other bonuses. Actually, I don't mind the troll so much as at least he loses something in return (charisma, logic, can't fit in car etc.), but Orcs seem far too good a bargain. I'm not going to run a hack and slash, but the game will be mostly mission focused so considerations of 'nobody likes orcs' aren't really going to balance things. Never mind that there are plenty of areas and places where orcs are fine and it's the skinny little human who's going to be out of place. What would be a mechanically balanced BP cost for the races?

Fourthly, I kind of liked the way instant karma reflected growing experience of characters and would like to keep this for flavour. I'm thinking of fixing Edge at 1 during character (2 for humans) and automatically adding to it at fixed levels of karma gain. Would every thirty karma points be a good pace for this or is that too generous.

Finally, this isn't a rules question, but does anyone know when the new shadowrun books are due out? No not Shadow Havens! I mean the real ones - the updated versions of Shadow Magic and Cannon Companion, whatever they will be called. I can't find release dates for these but I think I could really do with them. An updated book of critters would be nice too.

I think those are my main worries and any comments or feedback from those with play experience would really be appreciated. I know that some of this has been covered in previous threads, but clear opinions would really help. It's been several years since I last ran a game and I'm just getting back into it.

Thanks for all your help,

-K.

[Butterblume]

[Mordrid Soud]

Just my 2 cents on the 400 pb. At first I didn't like either as i found it too restrictive. But the more I looked at it, the restrictiveness came from the way I was building my character. The 400 point build makes you stay more focused on a specific character type rather than letting you branch out into other ones. You can't build an awesome mage/sami/hacker with 400 bps. You have to choose one, and then pick a few skills from another category if you want to try and round him out. The other thing with 400 build points is that any stat over 3 is truly special and somewhat unique. By scaling back power, the stats have more of an impact in the game. Increasing your strength from 3 to 4 has more of an impact. The coolest thing about it in my opinion though is that you get to see your runner grow from a rookie into a legend (provided he doesn't get himself geeked). Again, just my 2 cents.Spend it how you wish.

[hyzmarca]

The entire point of the metahuman races in SR4 chargen is the cheap stat mods. They allow you to optimize a character wihtout breaking the BP bank. At least, that is the way to seems to me. I could be wrong. Changing BP caps would make this rather moot.

Removing skill caps is a great idea for high end flavor. Of course, it leads to absurd dice pools.

[hobgoblin]

like i stated when the limited skills where first anounced, it allows for a game where the runners can be matched, without it turning into SR-supers after some time.

ok, so you risk running out of skills over time when learning, but thats mostly a problem for the mundanes. the awakend have enough stuff to sink their karma into as it stands.

hmm, i forgot to check if the cash for karma rule is in SR4. that should give the mundanes something to burn their leftover karma on.

allso, the timeframe for when skills gets maxed is based on how much karma they get pr "run". and this in the end is up to the GM.

oh, and they can allways make up a new knowledge skill (i think). mostly street tho, like say they relocate to a new city and need to learn new gang markings and so on ;)

[knasser]

Okay, thanks for the comments so far. Butterblume, thank you for your reassurance and I'll try not to worry ;) but I'm kind of hoping for advice about the consequences of these ideas.

Reading Mordrid's comments on BP, I've decided to stick with the default points. It may be a little on the low side for what I want, but with newbie players, I'll need to start off with less-lethal missions than I'd like anyway, so they get a couple of introductory sessions and some generour helping of karma to get them where I want them by around the third or fourth session. So that's one issue resolved.

[Butterblume]

[hobgoblin]

[Jaid]

i would suggest that, to remove caps, simply allow the exceptional skill quality to be taken for the same skill more than once. qualities cost twice as much karma as BP, so that means you're looking at 20 karma to raise your skill cap, and then however much to raise the actual skill... certainly it's possible to go higher than 7 with this method, but it costs a lot, and it certainly encourages branching out, IMO.

as far as non-human races being cost efficient, well that really depends.

if you don't plan on having a high charisma and logic, then being an ork is pretty good... especially if you planned on having a high body (which i acknowledge most people probably would at least like to have a higher body) and high strength (which i think there are plenty of characters who don't really care an awful lot about strength) anyways.

but don't underestimate the power of edge... that extra point of edge for free means that humans get something for nothing, whereas others are getting a discount.

for comparative purposes, if you had a choice between "get one free" and "buy 2, get 3 free" which one is better? that depends on whether or not you want one, or 5. if you were already planning on bod 4+ and str 3+, and didn't want to ever get your logic or charisma to 6 (or didn't plan on 5+ at chargen) then sure, orcs are great. that being said, logic and charisma are more generally important attributes in SR than strength tends to be, IMO...

but definitely, orks are a pretty good benefit for the cost. provided you don't want to be a shaman, a technomancer, a face (you can be a secondary face, but nowhere near a maxed out one), a mage, a mystic adept, or a hardware specialist.

ie, if you want to be a completely specialised melee adept/sammy, and are fine with not having terribly impressive skills elsewhere... then sure, be an ork. if you want to be one of those things i listed above... you're paying for it in potential.

[ornot]

In response to the race issue.

In the game I'm running only one character has elected to play a non-human, an orc, and the other three are all humans. Spending build points on a race loses you an edge point, which is very handy, and exposes you to prejudice (not a problem, depending on the kind of runs the characters go on).

It does seem to me that Orcs and Dwarfs are a pretty good deal, lots of stat increases and the cap on a few stats reduced. Boo hoo. Unless you were planning on maxing out those stats at character creation it's not a massive issue, as the stats all start at one regardless.

Elves are the least worthwhile, as they were in SR3. You effectively trade a point of Edge for low light and increased caps on agility and charisma. The 30 point cost of being an elf would buy you the increased starting stats anyway. Of course it would be possible to min-max an elf to a starting agility of 8, even before adding cyber, but honestly the build point cost is pretty prohibitive.

Trolls I wouldn't want to comment on, as I've not played around making one like I have with the others (can never have too many NPC characters ^^)

[nezumi]

Have you considered SR3? All of these concerns are already addressed there. Barring that, however...

Skill caps...

Yes, raise them or remove them. HOWEVER, increase the cost. In SR3, it costs 1.5 the new rating to raise a skill to less than the linked attribute, 2 or 2.5 (I can't remember which) between the linked attribute and 2* the linked attribute, and 2.5 or 3 to increase it past that. However, keep the attributes capped. This way the skills are open to growth, however you can't just grow to tremendously high skill levels overnight.

I would NOT raise the BPs. From what I understand, one of the major problems with SR4 is that it starts to break down as the PCs increase in power. Increasing the starting BPs results in less play time with the characters before stuff goes crazy.

Go ahead and boost the cost for metas. In SR1, metahumans took priority A in the priority system (the same cost as making a full mage, I guess would be equivalent), plus you got a random allergy at a random level. People still made plenty of metas. As it stands, not a lot of people make humans, and why should they?

Go ahead and limit edge by karma. That sort of makes it like karma pool, which is what it was meant to replace. However I personally would let humans start with an edge of 2 rather than 1. After all, that's they're only starting advantage, so don't steal it :)

Hope that helps. Good luck :)

[mfb]

one thing to consider, if you remove the cap on skills, is that it will quickly become impossible to challenge any use of a skill through standard modifiers and thresholds. when you've got 30 dice to roll, a -16 dice modifer and a threshold of 4 aren't going to slow you down much--especially with judicious use of edge. when you look at the kind of modifiers you have to stack up to get -16 dice, it should be obvious why removing the caps is something you should consider very carefully before implementing.

[Teulisch]

under RAW, you can get a human with 16 dice before modifiers at chargen. 18 dice if you get ware to boost one of your stats. an adept can get 23 dice on a test, 25 smartlinked. if its a metahuman, the dice could be even higher.

6 dice is professional quality. 12 dice is elite, with a critical hit on the average roll. 16 dice is practicaly legendary. an adept with 23+dice is nearly godlike in his skill. And if you remove the cap, then why play an adept? anyone else can get more skill for less karma. whats special about being able to be twice as good, if everyone else can too?

the basic rules create a feel for the game. if you change the rules, you change the feel. Its okay if thats what you want to do, but be aware of the consequences. Take your house rules, and build the worst min/max you can with it. does it break the game, would it make it less fun?

If you want more than 16 dice, you need either magic and/or advanced technology. you can change that limit with houserules, sure, but it raises the bar for what is actualy considered high skill. If an unmodified mundane human can get 25 dice in your game, then I need 25 dice to be good.

[Hida Tsuzua]

By removing skill caps, you're replacing a hard cap with a much softer cap. This cap is due to the linear increase in skill cost. For example, take a character raising a skill from 6 to 7 to 8 for a net increase in two rolled dice. The total cost for this increase is 30 karma (14 and 16 karma for each level). That's a very large chuck of XP. With that much karma you could get a whole new skill to 4 (4+4+6+8) with 8 karma left over. You could get almost any positive quality for a similar price. So it's costly. However, it could be still worthwhile to buy up the skill. Two extra dice on your most important skill will give you 2/3s of a success on your most common test.

Now let's see how adepts are affected by all of this. The most expensive improved ability cost is for combat skills at .5 power point per. That means at every initiation the adept gets 2 dice. Even at the high initiation costs, it's better than straight point buy until you pass Grade 6 (10+6*3) which itself costs 28 karma. And that's not counting the extra initiation perks like masking.

All of this will mean however that the skills can be higher than before which will have the effects mentioned by others. The key to figuring out the degree of change will be asking yourself "based on the gameplay and my player's plans how much will they raise the capless skills?" If it's advantageous or desired to hyperspecialize, they will.

[Cain]

[Ophis]

Having rebuilt several sr3 characters with my players the skill caps aren't a problem till about 800 karma as long as your players are trying to have a good range, Sure the character can't get any better at their "thing" but if they're trying to be well rounded it's not a problem (though I do have very reasonable players). I have relaxed one thing I allow multiple Exceptional Attributes as long as they spread along specific lines (using my patent pending attribute web). This is mostly because I see a limit on being able to effectively increrase the skill as fine (you reach a point were you have to practice to maintain your "edge" rather than improve) and the difference between masters in in their base talent for a sort of task, ie the attribute.