Edge, SR4 luck v. SR3 experience Options

[Rotbart van Dain...]

Attributes are already dirt-cheap ingame. In fact, skillgroups are the best deal to get at chargen.

[Critias]

For the record, Bib, I'm really not meaning to come off as terribly confrontational or even argumentative -- I haven't really run into ANYthing in SR4 yet, so I fully acknowledge I don't know how big a headache and Edge-monkey can be -- I'm just looking at it from, say, a prospective player's perspective.

It seems to me like it would suck an awful lot to invest a goodly percentage of your character points at creation into becoming a sort of "Everyman Hero" like Indiana Jones or something (no chrome, no magic, just relying on a good mix of skills and a lot of luck), and then in mid-game have the GM cripple that character concept as punishment for it working, y'know? Especially if it's only going to be a success-tax levied against those who use one specific attribute (Edge).

If it were discussed ahead of time and House Ruled formally, or something like that, sure. Heck, even if the GM had just pulled a player aside and said "I think Edge is a little over the top, you want to redistribute a few character points before next session?" I'd be just fine with it. But just swingin' the nerf-hammer at some nebulous "When The GM Thinks It's Been Overdone, And You Critical Fumble A Few Times" strikes me as the sort of thing that would just piss off a player, not really resolve an issue.

And this isn't me trying to get in "last licks" since you said you left, or feeling like I won, or whatever. But, rather, explaining my position a little more in an attempt to NOT have accidentally driven you away from the conversation. I was at work when I posted earlier, and might've been a bit more abrupt than I meant to be. I'm fine with agreeing to disagree if you've got your heart set on it, but I prefer discussion to departure. :)

[sunnyside]

Alright lets take a step back and look at this.

Now I don't know which was decided on first. But the whole idea of "luck" in SR is tied in with Earthdawn which has a very clever mechanic for it. There luck works in a similarish manner where you add onto a roll. However it doesn't refresh for free, you have to pay with the earthdawn equivalent of XP to get it back. Therefore if players get in a little over their heads, make a mistake, or, more typically in my experience, want to do something more heric than they could otherwise manage, they can do it. However as a result they will "level" slower. And everybody understands it as an aspect of magic. You actually do magical rituals to regen it.

Now in SR I think it is supposed to serve a different mechanical purpose. In SR you're playing in the big leagues. Unless your players are going up against lightweights all the time or the GM plays with kiddie gloves it's just realistic that semi frequently things would go wrong and character death would be rampant. So again you've got a little bit of magic that even mundanes can use (though in SR I don't think any of the characters really understand what they're doing when they use edge).

And again sometimes you want to try and be a little over the top heroic.

SR4 also added the "get out of death for 1 burned edge" thing. And I like that actually. See I like having my world be deadly, but I also like the deeply developed characters with a rich history people form over time in my campaigns. With the edge thing I can have my cake and eat it too. If a character would die they have to burn edge and instead they're uncoscious or something. So it still feels deadly, but they don't actually die (unless they let their edge dry up).

Burning is also a significant "Mr. Lucky" equalizer (note that I consider edge 5 to be fairly standard for a PC, it's the 7's and 8's I'd consider a Mr. Lucky). Remember in SR4 you only get to spend edge ONCE on any test, so they can't get out of everything, with their extra 4 hits. And sometimes the situation will be something like the building they're in blows up (that wagemage really should have known better than to use fireball on a dwarf runner if they have a large backpack).

And when the do lose edge it's a LOT more painful than when some other player does. They had to pay a whole pile of BP to get it in the first place, and it's going to take a whopping 24karma to get it back.

What's that you say? When your players run the Renraku arcology or whatever they come out just fine? Certainly nothing happens to Mr. Lucky. C'mon. Enjoy the edge attribute. It's time to fire Barney Fife as chief of security. (Though sometimes Mr. Lucky is also clever while the idiot troll sammies unwittingly serve as his meatsheild most of the time, that's a whole seperate issue).


FInally while it kinda fits the worldview of edge being slightly magical, I don't really like characters "using the force" to pull off a really long longshot. However I kinda like that the basic mechanic is there, because I don't like when an NPC ghoul can't even swing at the distracted character because their dicepool is just reduced to 0. Of course if I do switch to the option rule of using thresholds instead of dice pool modifiers that problem will go away.

[James McMurray]

If you curtail long shot abuse, most edge problems disappear.

[Solomon Greene]

It seems to me that SR4 was written to be more cinematic in certain aspects - I see Edge as part of that. Edge as a game mechanic allows your characters to accomplish the impossible or prevent the inevitable - neither of which are "gritty". Since many people define SR as gritty, there's going to be conflict.

The burden of how to apply the rules rests firmly on the table of a group of friends. If Edge is causing headache (or heartache) in your game, there are suggestions in the book for how to tone it back and you can always talk to your players about the effect rampant Edge use is having on your games.


From a pure, game mechainc standpoint, it's easy to say that Edge is broken because of the numeric advantage it allows when optomized and used to excess. I'm just not that concerned about it because of the filtering effect a GM and his group of players are supposed to have on the rules - common sense is meant to fill in the gaps in your personal game and rulings will vary from table to table.

[sunnyside]

Just to touch on something else I've found works.

The Mr. Luckies of the world are made more problematic by unluckies in the team. As a GM you aren't just supposed to shoot down chars you don't like. You're also supposed to ensure each player has a char that will play well in your campaign. So when someone gives you a character with edge 1 you are doing them and yourself a disservice by not discussing that with them.

If Mr. Lucky has 8 die and everybody else has 5 or 4 I really don't feel there is much of a problem. Especially if you don't renew edge frequently, that makes the extra stuff the other chars bought with their BP more telling.

[Dashifen]

In two years of SR4, I don't think I've seen an Edge above three in my games. I have to wonder what these players are sacrificing to get their Edges that high. 'Course, with the Long Shot rules as they are, sacrificing for Edge is not always a bad thing, I suppose.

[sunnyside]

[Ryu]

Edge is like any attribute - once you have rating 4, more is better at chargen. The power of edge depends on the amount of dice rolling at the table, in addition of the refresh rate of course.

While we have seen our share of "efficient" characters, none has been an "edge build". I guess none of us likes to have either sub-par attributes or close-to-none skills, even if the first is fast to fix.

Like other things, you need to find a group power level that is accepted. Our characters tend to have dice-pools up to 14(est.), edge 4, and only the cybered have 2 IP. All of us GM once in a while, so that might change the perspective.

[bibliophile20]

[Talia Invierno]

Gah -- logged off just before I could have headed off that particular rehashed discussion at the pass.

For the record, the original question wasn't whether Edge was broken, but whether it should grow directly as a result of experience (even the Earthdawn example draws on this direction) or whether any relation to experience should be, at best sidewise -- and how that changes how we look at the game.

The current understanding of Edge is very nearly not experiential at all. At chargen, there are few optimised builds which don't try to get Edge to 5 (6 for humans). After all, considering how generally valuable Edge is, why wouldn't you try to maximise it at chargen?

Additionally, as the rules are currently written, any Awakened, technomancer, or metahuman PC will permanently be worse at Edge than any non-Awakened, non-technomancer human. The metahumans are capped differently, while the Awakened have an extra stat/spells/skills/initiation and the technomancers have an extra stat/forms/skills/initiation which eat up available karma -- and which they do have to feed to maintain their level of effectiveness within the party.

Consequently, since the relationship of Edge to attained karma (actual experience under a PC's belt) isn't direct, you no longer have the highly experienced metahuman (or Awakened or technomancer) PC able to be matched in Edge even with many newbies. It's no longer experience that allows you to do the awesome things. It's luck, pure and simple.

I'm drawing back a quote from Crusher Bob, because it's been largely overlooked and it clearly shows how, while both are cinematic, Edge and the old karma pool are cinematic in very different ways.

[Ravor]

[JonathanC]

[Talia Invierno]

This disparity of views might be the distinction between power straight out of the box and long-term potential for powergaming. (Ah -- here we have a nice example of that potential for growth we were discussing earlier.) Comparing humans and metas who start out together, the human would have the larger karma pool, yes. However, any meta could potentially develop exactly the same karma pool as any human. It would just take longer.

(If you used the optional staggered karma growth rules, it wasn't even really an issue.)

Also, the karma which didn't go into the karma pool wasn't lost. A major balancer to the slower growth of karma pool is also the "extra" good karma point that could be used to build up the PC's abilities. This is precisely the reason so very many players took the Bad Karma edge, while it still existed.

[Whipstitch]

And "privelege" in this case is best interpreted as "the right to be beaten to death by a mob of Humanis". :(

[Moon-Hawk]

Personally, I've seen all edge values at my table. (except 8, not one of those so far)
I've had people completely dump on it and only take the base 1, and just figure that they'd rely on large pools and be able to get one reroll or negate a glitch if they really needed it.
The most problem I've had with it is with the Adept Face in my group. I don't mind when she uses it with a thrown weapon to explode some security guard's head with a playing card, I really don't care. The biggest problem is that she rolls it for the right social skills and manages a pretty absurd DP. Basically, if I let her roll for it, after assigning every conceivable penalty, she still gets lots of hits, and if I don't let her roll I feel arbitrary and mean. Oh well, my usual problem is no one wanting to play a face at all, so if the face gets away with some stuff I really don't mind.
By and large, the most common result is for people to take edge up to the "soft cap", meaning as much as they can get for 10BP/point.

[JonathanC]

[Critias]

In much of the setting, humans are the targets of racism, too. In higher power levels, the increased racial maximums of metahumans can matter quite a bit (not as much as karma pool, but still it keeps costs from adding up quite as fast). Not all metahumans have stat penalties, and generally speaking metaspecies is chosen so that those penalties will matter the least for character concept anyways (and you yourself point out how easy it is to circumvent mediocre stats, "with magic or cyberware anyway).

I'd like it if the costs for metaraces came down a little bit (I'll admit I'm biased, but the "cool factor" cost for Elves still bugs me), don't get me wrong. But I don't think things are quite as imbalanced as you're making them out to be. And, to be fair, the points-based system (in SR3) did make it quite a bit more feasible than the old priority based "bend over and take it, meta" chart for character creation.

[tisoz]

[Talia Invierno]

[JonathanC]

A single point of karma to spend on improvements is absolutely NOTHING in comparison to a point of karma pool. I think it's laughable to consider that a fair trade.

Likewise, the increased racial maximums aren't that big of a deal, and yes, all metahumans have some kind of stat penalty. While you could argue that Elves and Dwarves are a good trade, for the extra Quickness and Willpower, orks and trolls in the old system were just a complete rip-off. The best you could do was make an unbalanced troll that could instantly kill anything with a polearm (that no GM in their right mind would allow anyway), who for all that power could be dropped by a fledgeling mage and a manabolt spell.

I hated the old system's rules for metahumans. It didn't make sense; you've got flavor text telling you that orks and trolls aren't really dumb, unpleasant, inferior beings who deserve to be wiped out, but if you wanted to be a non-moronic ork or troll, you had to pay through the nose for the privilege, and even then the smartest troll was about as bright as an average human child.

[Talia Invierno]

[sunnyside]

Could maybe we stop debating about SRs from the old days? Or maybe take it out of the 4th ed forum. I can see bringing it up for background or contrast but open debate just seems silly.

[Talia Invierno]

...

sunnyside: where would you suggest is appropriate for a comparison of an SR4 game mechanic with an SR3 game mechanic?

And how would you suggest it be compared if no discussion of one side of the comparison is to be allowed?

[sunnyside]

Just something in passing, perhapse to explain why someone now has problems with SR4s system. I think that was done on page 1.