[X] My Assistant

[kzt]

Mechanical low: my first combat (in First Edition), where I ambushed someone, shot them dead in the face with a .44 magnum, and did no damage whatsoever. Generally, the mathematics of First Edition was pretty dreadful.

I brought this up in the first "Fasa talks about SR" at Gencon the year after SR1 release. The fan boys got all defensive and weren't buying it. But the examples in the books were insane, and the writers had clearly failed intro to statistics.

[Malicant]

What if not the military should be the ultimate force of destruction?

Teh Internets.

[Draco18s]

When (9*X)-(5*E) became less than (5*X)-(3*E) [for all positive solutions] due to the fact that (9*X) was larger than both of them.

(I.E. up until the last few days I considered this forum to be relatively intelligent, albeit some questions that can be answered by quoting the rules, such as "do mages need to move their hands to cast spells?" can be answered by the section on page 168 "Noticing Magic" (It can be overlooked, I understand). It was when basic math stopped making sense that I realized that no, October 1st, 1993 hasn't happened yet--today is September 5703, 1993 and the internet still lacks sensible, mature, and educated discourse).

[Dhaise]

You're finding fault with the game/entire internet because some fellow consumers may or may not be socially retarded/disagree with you?

[Eleint]

Add me to the Immortal Elves/Great Dragons hate. I didn't mind the Earthdawn links per se, but the 'you cannot face an IE/GD, if the players try they lose' is just /stupid/. I agree they should be powerful, but able to be beaten. And definitely statted, not the ultimate GM-wank bait.

Give me Immortal Elves (and maybe a few Immortal Dwarves and other things, I never saw why it was just elves except for elf-wanky porn where elves are so speshul) who sit in the shadows, are as powerful as a high, high end PC but that's all, who got their skill and are rightly not wanting to die so don't challenge themselves anymore and manipulate the world. Give me powerful Great Dragons who can't take on whole nations 'because they're dragons, man!' Yeah, and that's a squad of Apache Assault Helicopters and Missile batteries. Verses the average runner, GDs are scary. Verses a strong nation's military, not so much at least in outright physical power.

[Draco18s]

You're finding fault with the game/entire internet because some fellow consumers may or may not be socially retarded/disagree with you?

No. This just happens to be the latest in a string of forums filled with people who have problems with common sense and/or basic math/science/etc.

There's only one forum I have been on since....oh, 2002 or so that hasn't had this problem.

One.

And it's not a fault with the game, but it is a fault with the game's community. There is in fact more back and forth bitch-fest rules pissing contests here over any other game related forum I've been on. This includes the 40 or so threads that Left 4 Dead's official forum had on the Melee Fatigue.

[raggedhalo]

I never saw why it was just elves except for elf-wanky porn where elves are so speshul

It's because dragons only like the lanky ones (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[ravensmuse]

Wow Draco. That's all I can say.

[Critias]

When (9*X)-(5*E) became less than (5*X)-(3*E) [for all positive solutions] due to the fact that (9*X) was larger than both of them.

(I.E. up until the last few days I considered this forum to be relatively intelligent, albeit some questions that can be answered by quoting the rules, such as "do mages need to move their hands to cast spells?" can be answered by the section on page 168 "Noticing Magic" (It can be overlooked, I understand). It was when basic math stopped making sense that I realized that no, October 1st, 1993 hasn't happened yet--today is September 5703, 1993 and the internet still lacks sensible, mature, and educated discourse).

Well, I think I speak for all of us when I say we're terribly sorry we disappointed you so, but fuck off if you think we're all idiots.

[Draco18s]

but fuck off if you think we're all idiots.

I don't think you're all idiots.

No. That particular verbage applies to only one forum I used to go to (even the moderators all went on permanent hiatus and the admin forgot to renew the domain name...twice).

[Adarael]

Well, let me say you can kindly fuck off if you think that not being as math literate as you also makes us retarded.

Not that I think you're saying that, mind you. I'm just giving you a pre-emptive finger if you do. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[Draco18s]

Math literate? I barely made it though calculus. And now I've forgotten most of it (I could probably still perform a derivative and an integration of one variable, but that'd be it).

I just happen to use Algebra and Geometry every day.

It's the point at which people start insisting that Math is wrong and then use irrelevant claims to back up their point.

"4 is more than 2, would you like to earn 4 exp or 2 exp?"
"I'd like to earn 9 plz. It's more than both."
"I'm sorry, that's not a choice. 4 or 2?"
"9"

[BlueMax]

NEIN!

Could be a homonym issue.

[Dumori]

Math literate? I barely made it though calculus. And now I've forgotten most of it (I could probably still perform a derivative and an integration of one variable, but that'd be it).

I just happen to use Algebra and Geometry every day.

It's the point at which people start insisting that Math is wrong and then use irrelevant claims to back up their point.

"4 is more than 2, would you like to earn 4 exp or 2 exp?"
"I'd like to earn 9 plz. It's more than both."
"I'm sorry, that's not a choice. 4 or 2?"
"9"

I'll have 6exp please. As that satisfies the OR logically. (It is both 4 and 2 thus one or the other its a stretch though (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif) )

[Draco18s]

NEIN!

Could be a homonym issue.

I'd expect that out of someone who doesn't have English as their first language.

But out of all the years I've spoken to a guy in Bangkok, Thailand the only time he's had an issue telling me something was when I asked him "What's for dinner?"
(It was Fried Rice and he didn't know what us Americans called it).

Sure, that's one person, but it's so frequent that I see a non-native speaker apologize for their bad English in a post only to have better English that most American posters.

I'll have 6exp please. As that satisfies the OR logically. (It is both 4 and 2 thus one or the other its a stretch though (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif) )

Haha. But yeah. It's math like that that makes me just want to bang my head on the wall.
Like:

In SR4A, the cost for buying an attribute went up. It now costs 16 more karma to get [Attribute] to 8 than it used to.
Ok, but the amount of karma you have to spend went up as well.
But that's 16 extra karma I could have spent on something else!
No you couldn't have. You either gain the extra karma and have to pay the higher costs, or you don't gain the extra karma. You can't have the increased karma awards AND the lower karma costs, it doesn't work that way.

[Malachi]

Oh! Is getting more and paying less for everything an option? I want that too! [/sarcasm]

[Draco18s]

It's almost as bad as this guy I corrected a programming error for:
(Flash actionscript)

if(_root.player, hitTest(_root.enemy))

Which doesn't work. If you do if(A, B) the statement is true if and only if B is true. A has no relevance (I did a test wondering why it didn't throw a compiler error, and I still don't know why, but at least I learned what the compiler thought it meant).

What he wanted was if(_root.player.hitTest(_root.enemy)) which caused the player object to call a hitTest on the enemy object not to see if A the player existed (???) and B the enemy was colliding with....some object, likely the stage (or possibly whatever object was calling the function).

I had to correct this syntax error four times, then he called me (and everyone else trying to tell him that making games isn't a copy-paste operation) a jerk (for not giving him the answer), then left and went off to make games in Blender.

[Synner667]

My biggest gripe with Shadowrun v4 ??

The whole change from "Shadowrun is a rich and complex game, with many different types of character" to "Shadowrun is a game where everyone is a criminal".

[Ancient History]

Shenanigans!

[Draco18s]

The whole change from "Shadowrun is a rich and complex game, with many different types of character" to "Shadowrun is a game where everyone is a criminal".

I honestly like the idea that "every PC is a criminal" aspect of ShadowRun. It's so far removed from any other RPG I've ever played.

It's like playing Fable (or other "morality game") and always being forced into the "good" options and then playing again and realizing that no, you can be a douche bag and get away with it and have so much more fun.

Sure, you can be "chaotic" or "evil" (or even "chaotic evil") in D&D, but it's not that much fun. In ShadowRun I can run over 50 innocent bystanders while driving through the underground Renraku mall in order to escape a Lone Star helicopter firing anti-vehicular rounds out of a heavy machinegun and have the deaths hand-waved.

Only to come back a week later and put a wailing spirit on their cardboard memorial (making them keep it up) while we do an extraction run.

Best.

Fun.

Ever.

In D&D being evil and doing bad things is more comical, like being becoming litch and trying to kill the rest of the party (one of our former players did that in a game once). That's funny. Running over several dozen people is a sad and terrible deed, but normal.

Edit:
I should post the game logs of that SR game...

[Glyph]

My biggest gripe with Shadowrun v4 ??

The whole change from "Shadowrun is a rich and complex game, with many different types of character" to "Shadowrun is a game where everyone is a criminal".

Sorry, but... no. I look at my copy of SR1, and for types of shadowrunners, it talks about whether you are a decker, or a magician, or a street samurai. I look at my copy of SR4, and it talks about Johnsons who might be other than corporate, runners who can be proactive, or politically motivated, or motivated by social justice, etc.

The only change affecting the "richness and complexity" is that the game is more street level. Not in the sense of weaker characters, but in the sense of characters who do their own thing rather than being railroaded through set-pieces for every significant event that happens for the timeline.

[Dikotana]

Maybe I'm violating some great unspoken rule, but my understanding is that the BBB and various other books provide rules and fluff for our enjoyment. There is an entire world described, and several sourcebooks have at least touched on how to play as something other than shadowrunners at all.

Criminals out to make a buck? Easy. Non-criminals who need to survive and clear their names? Easy. SWAT team, hired muscle, street gang, military squad, assassins (political or for hire), or CorpSec? All easy.

But what about Humanis nutjobs out to kill all the degenerates? Or a cadre from a conspiracy trying to bring down all the megacorps, one at a time? Or a group trying to do it absolutely alone? Vigilantes trying to police the Barrens because Lone Star sure ain't gonna show up and do it? Yes, the rules cover all these as well. You may not go by the term "shadowrunner," but you've got all the fluff and crunch a GM needs to make a story and run with it.

How many different kinds of characters and Johnsons are described in the book don't make the world. The worldbuilding makes the world, and the four editions and dozens of sourcebooks have provided literally decades worth of world, from the mean streets to the corporate boardrooms to the hospitals and armies.

In my favorite SR campaign, all the players were employees of a shockingly innovative and lucrative tiny corp (garage level, home computers, and basement labs, really), and most of the campaign was about trying to keep the company from being swallowed by bigger fish. There wasn't a single "shadowrunner" on the team; shadowrunners were goons sent by the AAA enemies to make life hard. And this was in SR2. Were there rules for it? You bet: weapons, cyberware, combat, magic, everything! If you need the rules to tell you what your characters can be, you need to start thinking bigger.

[GreyBrother]

My group plays civilians for the last half year. We all have sins, had nothing to do with the Shadows and don't plan to run because we all have SINs and regular Jobs. That's when the Assassins came and tried to kill us. So Yeah.

[Tunnel Rat]

And now, for a little rebuttal:

When (9*X)-(5*E) became less than (5*X)-(3*E) [for all positive solutions] due to the fact that (9*X) was larger than both of them.

(I.E. up until the last few days I considered this forum to be relatively intelligent, albeit some questions that can be answered by quoting the rules, such as "do mages need to move their hands to cast spells?" can be answered by the section on page 168 "Noticing Magic" (It can be overlooked, I understand). It was when basic math stopped making sense that I realized that no, October 1st, 1993 hasn't happened yet--today is September 5703, 1993 and the internet still lacks sensible, mature, and educated discourse).

That's fine, except that we were arguing that your equation didn't apply to the problem at hand. It wasn't a question of math, but of application.

BTW, since we're going around insulting the intelligence of others, I must say that it's wonderfully bright of you, after having a forum admin close the topic you are discussing (because the topic was getting too hostile), to go onto another topic in the forum and insult the intelligence of the people who disagreed with you.

Bravo.

Because I'm certain that your opponents from the previous topic won't notice what you say in this topic ... wait, too late.

What you have done is neither sensible, nor mature. In fact, I find it rude, and immature.

No. This just happens to be the latest in a string of forums filled with people who have problems with common sense and/or basic math/science/etc.

There's only one forum I have been on since....oh, 2002 or so that hasn't had this problem.

One.

And it's not a fault with the game, but it is a fault with the game's community. There is in fact more back and forth bitch-fest rules pissing contests here over any other game related forum I've been on. This includes the 40 or so threads that Left 4 Dead's official forum had on the Melee Fatigue.

Now you continue to insult those who disagreed with you in the previous thread, but further generalize to attack everyone in a vague notion. You complain about sensibility and maturity while displaying neither. It's no wonder why people were giving you the finger. If the discourse on this forum is so horrible, perhaps its because people such as yourself choose to 'elevate' the discussion by insulting everyone else.

Math literate? I barely made it though calculus. And now I've forgotten most of it (I could probably still perform a derivative and an integration of one variable, but that'd be it).

I just happen to use Algebra and Geometry every day.

It's the point at which people start insisting that Math is wrong and then use irrelevant claims to back up their point.

"4 is more than 2, would you like to earn 4 exp or 2 exp?"
"I'd like to earn 9 plz. It's more than both."
"I'm sorry, that's not a choice. 4 or 2?"
"9"

I didn't 'barely' make it through calculus. Nor did I barely make it through my statistics class. Nor did I barely make it through another class in which we spent time studying things like the time value of money, and how to do cost benefit analysis. (Which, apparently, was irrelevant to the discussion. Except for the fact that it was very relevant.)

(For those of you who want the crib notes version, my argument is that the changes in SR4A mean that you are better off when you must burn edge to live, but you are much worse off than in SR4 should you burn edge when you could get by without burning edge.)

The reason why your equation is wrong is because this is a comparison of benefits. The basic idea here is that if G - C > P, then the alternative is worth the cost. 'G' would be the gain, 'C' would be the cost, and 'P' is the 'do nothing' alternative (The result if you decide to NOT burn edge).

There are two possible values of P. Either your character is dead, and you get to restart, or your character survives whatever made you consider burning edge. At which point, your value is however much karma you would normally have (That 9 karma that you insist we can't have).

The value of C is obvious in both equations. It is either the 5*(rating) karma, or 3*(rating) karma.

G however, is an abstract. Why? Because you can't truly measure the value of burning a point of edge mathematically. This isn't a problem, however, when G is 'character survival' and P is 'Character death and replacement'. In this situation, you have two measurable quantities.

On one hand you have a starting character who gained 9/5 karma, but lost 5*(rating)/3*(rating) karma in order to survive. On the other hand, you have a completely restarted character with 0 karma. This tells us that if karma spent in order to survive exceeds 9/5 then you would be better off letting that character die.

Now, in a burn or die situation, I would agree that you are most definitely better off in SR4A. 4 being better off than 2, after all. However, the discussion was about whether or not the changes made it more worthwhile to just burn edge for critical successes, or even to create a character around burning edge. The 'recreational use' of edge, if you will. In this case, I was arguing that you were *worse* in SR4A because the value of P was no longer a guaranteed 0. True, the situation might end in your character's death (forcing you back to 0), but it might also be a value of X (where X equals the karma you have currently plus the karma you'd get at the end of the night) should you character survive. So, if you have a 90% chance of surviving the test in which you are burning edge, that would make P a value of .9X.

G, as I mentioned before, is hard to evaluate, but C is not. So, let's take an example, the cost of burning 1 edge with an edge of 1 versus the alternative, 90% chance of survival:

SR4: G - 3 > .9*5 or G - 3 > 4.5
SR4A: G - 5 > .9 * 9 or G - 5 > 8.1

Our value of G, of course, won't be the same. G being equal to an intangible (critical success) and your tangible karma level.

So, let's say that G = U + X (The tangible and the intangible). Using a starting character, with burning 1 edge with an edge of 1 versus the alternative, 90% chance of survival:

SR4: U + 5 - 3 > 4.5 or U + 2 > 4.5; 4.5 - 2 = 2.5 So, if U > 2.5 then burning edge is a good choice.
SR4A: U + 9 - 5 > 8.1 or U + 4 > 8.1; 8.1 - 4 = 4.1 So, if U > 4.1 then burning edge is a good choice.

What this means is that for SR4A, the intangible benefit must be worth more than in SR4 to be a good choice. Now, admittedly, the odds of survival without burning edge is a key factor here. However, it's one that is most difficult to calculate. Especially, since you can't put a number on how nice your GM is going to be.

So, I'm saying that SR4A, in comparison to SR4, encourages you to burn edge to survive, but discourages you from burning edge should death not be very likely.

Haha. But yeah. It's math like that that makes me just want to bang my head on the wall.
Like:

In SR4A, the cost for buying an attribute went up. It now costs 16 more karma to get [Attribute] to 8 than it used to.
Ok, but the amount of karma you have to spend went up as well.
But that's 16 extra karma I could have spent on something else!
No you couldn't have. You either gain the extra karma and have to pay the higher costs, or you don't gain the extra karma. You can't have the increased karma awards AND the lower karma costs, it doesn't work that way.

We were discussing the cost of burning a point of edge, and whether or not it was more worth it or less worth it to burn edge in SR4A. Last time I checked, no one was holding a gun to your head and making you burn a point of edge. Even if the benefit of burning edge was the survival of your character, you can always choose to NOT burn the edge and recreate your character. (Maybe even correct the flaw that got you killed in the first place.)

In fact, I would counter that while 4 is preferable to 2, when edge > 2, 0 karma is greater than the amount of karma you would owe to return to your previous "0 karma" state.

I must add that I love how you leave out exactly what was being discussed while giving just enough detail in order to mislead everyone as to what the argument was about. This must be the wonderful 'educated discourse' you were talking about earlier. The one in which you obfuscate the truth in order to paint the opposing side as idiots.

Perhaps if you are truly interested in improving the discourse, you should start by altering your own. Everyone makes mistakes, even the brightest amongst us. Even if you could prove that someone is mistaken, that doesn't make it right to use that to paint others as fools and idiots. That's just plain rude.

[Eimi]

My biggest gripe with Shadowrun v4 ??

The whole change from "Shadowrun is a rich and complex game, with many different types of character" to "Shadowrun is a game where everyone is a criminal".

I've been on a real SR nostalgia kick for the last month or so, (I'd gone into heavy withdrawl after running out of painkillers to counteract the side-effects of a chronic disease around this time of year, a few years back, while reading the Denver sourcebook. Needless to say, I think of SR whenever I think about that experience...in a weird, comforting, way), going back and re-reading at least couple dozen pre-4e books, and acquiring much of the 4E line I hadn't owned previously, too. Part of why I finally registered here a few days ago.

And I've just gotta say...the contributers to Shadowland have been calling themselves criminals, unabashedly, since 1e. I like it. Consider, a vital part of Science Fiction Dystopia (not including Post-Apocalyptic, here) is the overwhelming control various organizations (governments, corporations, etc) have over their citizens, far out of proportion to what we have today (or had back in the 20th century). To the extent where anyone that isn't not only a law-abiding, but WILLFULLY complacent and submissive, citizen is, by definition, a criminal.

In the world of Shadowrun in particular, that means anyone that's a shadowrunner, a mercenary, a smuggler, a hacker, a magician that doesn't work for one of those major organizations, or even a person that dares question, or even think a bit too freely, the wisdom of keeping those organizations in power. If you don't belong to them, you're a criminal. Simple as that.