SR5 Preview #3, In which is discussed character generation Options

[Black Swan]

You know, it occurs to me that I would like them better (and maybe other dumpshockers though not likely since as a group we hate everything), there would be less resistance and worries of players getting upset about "I can't use all my hits", it would make more sense in explanation wise, and probably be easier to implement mechanic wise, if the limits had just applied directly to dice pools. So you had DP caps as a mechanic. Obviously they would have to be higher than the current limits, but it would keep a handle on things while allowing a second knob for tuning things.

i.e. A top of the line fully modded sniper rifle might have an accuracy of 20, meaning you can use 20 dice if you've got them but pushing your pool to 25 doesn't help you because your gear can't match you. But if you're using the dented hold-out pistol you bought second hand it might only have an accuracy of 8. So you only roll 8 dice regardless of whether you've got a pool of 8 or 80, because no matter how well you aim the grouping on that thing is terrible.
Or, you can be the best, smartest hacker in the world, but if you're using the cheapo deck that caps out at 10 you're not hacking any government mainframes without a lot of luck. You could still potentially get 10 hits and use them all, but the system is just not fast enough to keep up with your uber fast matrix skills.

You can even keep dice pool modifiers if you want with such a system. In fact, if you were to make it so that penalties adjusted the limited dice pool size down more than the dice pool penalty you make it so that low level people still have there chance at a shot in the dark while professionals are impaired.

i.e. Maybe the penalty for concealment power at force 6 is -3 to dice pool and -6 to total dice pool penalty. So the guard with perception pool of 5 and a dice pool limit of 12 (mental limit?)- instead rolls 2 with an adjusted dice pool limit of 6. He's effected but still has a chance of success, though slim, and he doesn't have to worry about the limit since he's not near it. While the specialized spotter who usually has a perception pool of 14 with a limit of 14, is reduced to a pool of 8. He still has a good chance of success, but the penalty is harder to shake off.

Just an idea, kind of pointless though since the rules are already written. Might be something I try as a houserule when/if I run a 5e game. Might just take the current limit rules and multiply by 2 to get new limits.

I like it.

[Black Swan]

Mind you, I also want Etiquette broken into, like, ten, so. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

I whole-heartedly agree. Etiquette should be broken up again like it was in earlier editions. I forced it into SR3, but not in SR4.

[Stahlseele]

a) ...they did
b) no no no no, this actually is the WORST way to solve this issue, because probability curves become unpredictable
c) ...they did

CGL did (a), ©, and new rules to "cap" success.

This is somthing i really don't get when people complain about variable TN's. .
You roll dice to randomize, so why is randomizing even probability bad then?

[Critias]

No. It's not. Simply put, if conjecture like this ...

So when I say it's too early to be "quite sure" of something, your defense is to call me wrong, but then admit that much of your argument is just conjecture. I'm not even sure what to say to that. It's like you're agreeing with me, while angrily shaking your head. "Yeah, we haven't seen what gear does yet, so I'm just guessing, but I'm sure it's going to add a bunch of dice to your pool, all the time!"

But -- okay! I was basically trying to calm things down by reminding you that not every piece of gear is going to work like it did in SR4 (which is certainly what you seem to be assuming, since you insist that the core problem of not controlling pool bloat is still here). Since you'd rather argue with me than admit that we don't know how gear works yet in SR5, I'll just leave you to be frustrated and stuff, I guess, and sorry for reminding you that the entire "what gear does" part of the equation still hasn't been released.

Since I'm not particularly welcome in the thread, I'll just go back to lurking, I guess.

[Draco18s]

@Draco18s
Wow. That's... quite a list.
I imagine that would impose some actual bookkeeping. I can just picture trying to remember the difference between Moral, Divine, Sacred, and Exalted types.

Obviously some of those don't apply to some areas (ie. a shield bonus and a dodge bonus will never stack, simply due to effecting different things).

But a good portion of that list does stack against a single number and I've heard of builds that get as many single bonuses to a single stat as possible.

Oh, and one more that wasn't listed.

Defending (from defending weapons). A defending weapon allows the wielder to transfer some or all of the sword’s enhancement bonus to his AC as a bonus that stacks with all others.

And it does impose actual book keeping. For D&D games I no longer use paper sheets. I have custom excel sheets set up that instead of going "oh, I have a +3 to this" and just add a "+3" to the formula, I reference another cell as to indicate where that +3 came from ("oh, cell CA43, ah that's from my shield.")

[Umidori]

I like it.

I don't like it.

There's a story floating about how the government was once trying to reorganize tax brackets. They had some beancounters figure things out, and they came up with an interesting scaling idea, where each bracket of your income was taxed at a different rate. You paid 5% tax on the first $30,000 (or whatever, I'm just making up numbers) you earned in a year, and then 10% of the next $30,000, et cetera, up until you hit 100% on anything you earned past $600,000 per year. Then someone stopped and said, "Guys - if we do this, people are just going to stop working once they hit $600,000 a year", and the whole plan fell apart.

Same sort of thing with dice pool caps. If your pool is capped at 20 dice, you have absolutely no incentive to ever go above that. People will just pick out a single favorite weapon with a high accuracy and build entirely around the dice pool cap. They'll do just enough to "cap out" one dice pool, then start investing in the next one.

~Umi

[StealthSigma]

Funny, D&D 3rd edition has used that solution in a very elegant manner. Bonus types.... competence, dodge, enhancement, circumstance.... with bonuses of the same type not stacking. The only difference between what WotC did and what CGL did is that WotC did it in a positive manner while CGL's implementation is negative.

Customer psychology is important. It's not something a developer can just dismiss. It's what sells a game, ultimately. People buy on emotion and irrational thought more often than most will care to admit.

I'm in sales. I manipulate customers all day. I can say the same thing twelve different ways, but there are always a couple that work better and several that will turn the customer right off of buying.

As I said, I appreciate the mechanical advantages of Limits, but I can't help but think that players will feel they are punitive.

Did I ninja you or pre-emptively overtly support your post?

--

Except that WotC kept coming up with new bonus types. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sarcastic.gif)

Of course, but that's not a problem with the system of bonuses. There was at least a method of controlling the problem even if further developers of product decided to add new bonus types to get around it. SR4 included no such mechanism and as far as I can tell, SR5 contains no mechanism either and in fact causes bloat along two metrics rather than one and SR5 is just as vulnerable to the bloat as SR4.

[Black Swan]

There's a story floating about ......

A story eh? Well, that proves me wrong. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

[Wakshaani]

The Increased costs for trolls was one of the balancing things we tried to do for SR5. Pound for Pound, Point for Point, especially under Build Points, trolls be BROKEN in SR4. Rebuild the SR4 Archetypes sometime using a Karmagen method, it's crazy how many Karma points the Troll is worth.

Bull

And the solution was making them impractical to play rather than adjusting their racial bonuses to not be staggeringly large?

That's... a little backwards.

Okay, a lot backwards.

This one's been mentioned in the past, but here's another round of it for those late to the show.

One of the things that SR5 was doing (And, keep in mind, I'm not the SR5 rules crew, I just got to watch and make suggestions/find errors) was trying to be more fun. Another bit was 'No Retcons'. This is pretty darn important. If magic suddenly allows time travel, or if Ares had never been a corporation, people would go ape, and rightly so. Changing the bonuses Trolls got *was* discussed, but it'd be a retcon in a way that would need laying out for people. If you lowered their stats, you'd probably need to lower Orcs as well to keep the races different. Then you'd need to say why Orks *and* Trolls were shrinking.

That way doesn't end well.

So, keep the bonuses as-is, figure out how to work them into the system.

L:et's take an arbitrary point cost of 100. Let's say that Body costs 5 points per point. If being a Troll gave you +4 Body, and cost 10 points, you'd get more from the investment than you put in. If it cost 30, you'd be getting less so more benefits (Like a higher Str) would be needed to compensate. Since a penalty to something you rarely use is les disadvantageous than a bonus to something you use a lot, a straight balance (_1 to four stats for +4 to one stat) isn't actually equal, especially if those penalties come with a caveat, such as "-1 to this stat, to a minimum of 1" ... which means that if you had a 1 to start with, there was no penalty at all. Whee!

From there, you also had a concept issue. Trolls were intended to be big strong dudes that could take a thumpin'. Obviously, you wanted to encourage big strong dudes, but one chargen method had stat adjustments made before stat costs, so, a Troll would find himself paying obscene levels of points for only +1 or +2 strength and could ever get full-on big-n-beefy. Adding the stat mods afterwards resulted in Trolls that were too cheap. When a formula was finally figured out that was properly costed, Trolls wound up being so expensive that they essentially became an archetype in and of themselves.

Trolls were a bugbear all through the character generation work, believe me.

At one point, it became clear that the ideal Troll build as "Woody Allen", a Troll who enjoyed the baseline Body and Strength of being a Troll, never sank any points into either stat, and instead boosted up his mental attributes. These guys were cheaper than a human with the same statline, *and* flew in the face of "Big strong dude" that Trolls should (usually!) project. Fine for an RP hook, but when it was mechanically superior in all ways, well, that was a problem.

And we'll probably have another go'round if a full-blown Karmagen system gets assembled for those who want more options than the Priority system. (Those of you who want to take a crack at balancing Trolls, I suggest starting a new thread on it. Who knows? Jason might pop in, lay out some numbers, and see what you can do. I can't, NDA and all that, but I know we have a bajillion guys who love looking under the hood and tinkering, so, it's possible you can unlock a good balance.)

(Next post is new stuff, by the by, not quoting stuff form page, like, 2!)

[Umidori]

A story eh? Well, that proves me wrong. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

No, it just cleanly and simply illustrates a concept I use immediately after in my post?

~Umi

[Black Swan]

No, it just cleanly and simply illustrates a concept I use immediately after in my post?

~Umi

Relax, I'm just teasing. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Umidori]

Dangit, I forgot my smiley at the end when I formatted. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wacko.gif)

~Umi

[tasti man LH]

Bull mentioned the 'slush fund' that pops up at the end of chargen, and while I can't give away details (NDA and such), those little 1 point skills were *not* taken instead of giving him a push in, say, Pistols by 1. They were cheap lil' add-ons after the fact to give him color. A ganger should be able to work his commlink (even if it is a piece of drek), and he has a guitar somewhere that he plinks away duing his downtime, helps with the chicks, right? Throwing weapons because there's always a good time to chuck something at a guy's head ... bricks, empy bottles, whatever. Plus chucking knives is just cool. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

As for Intimidation? Yup. Talk trash, get people to back down, establish yourself in the pecking order, give people to give you stuff without having to kick their teeth in ... it's really useful, and used far more often than, say, plinking away with an AK-97. The average bouncer doesn't fight all that much... they just come over, loom, ask, "Is there a problem?" and the situation resolves itself. Same thing here. Looking tough can keep you out of fights but keep legitimacy. See also: Police saying "Move along" instead of whacking them with sticks. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I dunno, it just seems odd to me taking so many rank 1 skills at chara gen, when you could be putting putting your skill points to some of the more useful stuff.

Then again, I'm not going to argue too much on having the character sheet match the backstory, since I myself beat that notion into my players all the time. So I'd leave it at that. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

(oh the silliness of someone bringing to me a character whose initial background was as a nurse...and then trying to justify to me why they have Heavy Weapons 3)

Personally, I'd love to see it broken into three different skills. Mind you, I also want Etiquette broken into, like, ten, so. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Well, glad we're of the same mind of this. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Not an error. People are guessing why, and some are much closer than others.

"Wait and see" again, huh? Very well then...

Damage went up across the board, as did armor, but since +1 DV is about the same as +3 armor, well, damage got an overall boost. Combat is really dangerous right now. Once again, avoiding it is good for you.

Guess it does help a little bit that while DVs and armor are getting buffed, health isn't.

It's one way of really drive home to players: "Yeah, getting an armor vest is a REALLY really good idea, you should do it!"

That one's on me. The archetypes I put together almost all had art ready when I got started (And those that didn't had art notes) ... I know I had a reason for going outside the lines on this one, but I don't recall exactly why now. (Tho he doesn't have "molotov cocktail" on the list either, so. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) ) Hrm. I'll have to get back with you on that one. Another archtype was listed as having cybernetic eyes, but the art showed goggles, so I changed it up and went with goggles instead.

Hrm.

At any rate, there was a lot of "What makes sense?" on this one. I wanted gear that was commonplace (Like the Colt) or cheap (The streetline special) and that would be fairly easy to carry around or ditch when needed, the axe being a noted exception for when things got serious. He had enough cash to get, say, an Ares Predator or avane an Ares Alpha, but my mental image of gangers looked at that idea and went, "Nope!" and moved on.

STreet Gangers are big on 'rumbles', brawling with whatever's at hand, rather than breaking out guns. When gunshots ring out in the 'plex (And you aren't in the Barrens), Lone Star rolls in quickly, and nobody wants that. Beating a guy goofy with your bare hands, or knocking him upside the head with a baseball bat or a piece of rebar, gets the message accross and doesn't fetch the cops.

...yeah, not really thrilled if there's that big of a disconnect between the writer and the artist. Especially it it's to write around the art. I personally think that the working the other way around produces better results, but that's just me. And as Critias mentioned before, CGL aren't making comic books.

...

Although, now I'm just amused that CGL apparently follows the Marvel Way of producing art w/ accompanied text.

[Wakshaani]

Phew.

Okay, lastly, on chargen, since there's some stuff talked about before that hasn't come up, so I can talk a little here.

The big one:

How long does making a character take?

Well, I did between a third and half of the pregens (So, anything you see wrong, chuck eggs at me as I'm likely the guilty party), so I'm probably the closet thing to an expert at this point in time, but that'll quickly be eclipsed. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Keeping in mind that I did this via PDFs and printouts, flipping through pages and sometimes having to tug the rules people for updated rules on X, Y, or Z, it came out to just about 90 minutes each. Everything was done longhand, then typed into Word files, which took another 30 minutes or so (I didn't have a format, so it was all blank page and go).

As time went on, and documents gelled better, that time dropped to about an hour, most of which (as always) is spent shopping. Because buying stuff is COOL but also because I went over the lists several times to make sure I didn't forget anything. Having, say, a decker who didn't have a deck, or a driver who didn't have a vehcile? That looks kinda BAD, right? Ditto a samurai with no sword or a gunbunny without ammo. My perosnal mantra was "Commlink, SIN, lifestyle, stuff", to make sure nothing got missed. If we get a new PACKS system, it'll make life much, much easier, and I actually put together several packages of my own to make life easier. If I get permission from above, I hope to toss those up on the web when SR5 launches, to make everyone breathe a little easier. Lord knows it made my life better. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

What archetypes are there?

NDA, sorry. I can only talk about what's been announced officially. Feel free to make your best guesses below!

Is (blank) gun/augmentation/car in there?

Again, NDA, but the guys who put all the gear together did excellent work.

Overall, it was both a hoot and a holler, I dare say, and I hope to do it again sometime. Archetypes in the core book are, perhaps more than anything else, the guidepost of "This is how you should play" and, as such, are important to get right. Yes, the experts in the house will be making these guys a hundred time sbetter down the line, butout of the gate, each and every one of 'em's playable. Good at what they do, even! There're little RP hooks snuck into each one as well, such as ouor guitar-playing ganger, here, and his drekky used cyberarm. I hope you'll enjoy reading them half as much as I enjoyed making them.

I'll be heaidng to my nephew's third birthday party in about an hour, but when I'm back, I'll answer any questions that I can. Until then, feel free to suggest what archetypes you'd like to see. Always room for more previews. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Epicedion]

Here's a more elegant solution:

Ditch Attr+Skill. Create Physical, Social, Mental, and Magic/Hacking/Resonance pools sort of like Limits. Try to push these into the 4 to 8 range for most characters.

When rolling a test, only roll Skill dice. As dice pool modifiers, add any gear bonuses. Then add relevant pool dice up to a maximum of the Skill rating (the exact amount chosen by the player). That is, a person with Physical Pool 7, Pistols 5, and a smartlinked (+2) pistol rolls 7 dice plus up to 5 pool dice.

When someone gets shot at, they roll Reaction plus Physical pool dice (limited by their Dodge skill).

Pools refresh every full turn.

On a full-turn action, like with an extended or social test, the pool pretty much gets used every turn to double the skill dice (so a person with Negotiation 6 and a Social Pool of 5 would be consistently rolling 11 dice per action). Social pool probably needs a rule that allows you to spend pool dice to negatively influence your target (forcing them to roll fewer dice, or somesuch).

And so on. Dice pools are virtually cut in half (from SR4) initially but can be brought back up to decent levels using the pools, but you tend to run out of those quickly and have to rely on pure skill and gear in higher IPs. Combat actions tend to drain the pools quickly, so combat beyond the first couple initiative passes slows down (fewer dice being thrown per action) unless the combatants are very advanced.

Skills are now cleverly a limiting factor while simultaneously adding dice. Attributes are important to get your pool dice but require competency in skills to get the full use out of them. Gear lets you get flat additions to your rolling, but doesn't let you draw more benefit from pools (making gear dice prized differently than skill or attribute dice). Guns could even get an accuracy stat and provide a little -1 or +1 or however, balanced out by improved or mitigated features (single shot light pistol might get +2 accuracy or more for its relative weakness and slow rate of fire).

See, that's the sort of system that makes me happy. Limits make me sad.

[Wakshaani]

...yeah, not really thrilled if there's that big of a disconnect between the writer and the artist. Especially it it's to write around the art. I personally think that the working the other way around produces better results, but that's just me. And as Critias mentioned before, CGL aren't making comic books.

...

Although, now I'm just amused that CGL apparently follows the Marvel Way of producing art w/ accompanied text.

Well, art takes way longer to do and costs more... you give them priority. I can pretty well assure you that creating that ganger took longer than writing about him and going on a shopping trip did. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) To my knowledge, him not having the gun (and cocktail) shown is the only hiccup out of the rest. Shotguns went to shotgunners, katanas to katana-wielders, and so on. Heck, upthread someone grumped about shotgunners never having special ammo. One of the ones I put together has at least three different rounds. Editing might change things up a tad (I know at least one ammo changed in a different archetype), but they generally let fly.

Getting to contribute at all was a HUGE honor, and I thank everyone for the opportunity. Their rules made it fun!

[Trillinon]

Here's a more elegant solution:

Ditch Attr+Skill. Create Physical, Social, Mental, and Magic/Hacking/Resonance pools sort of like Limits. Try to push these into the 4 to 8 range for most characters.

When rolling a test, only roll Skill dice. As dice pool modifiers, add any gear bonuses. Then add relevant pool dice up to a maximum of the Skill rating (the exact amount chosen by the player). That is, a person with Physical Pool 7, Pistols 5, and a smartlinked (+2) pistol rolls 7 dice plus up to 5 pool dice.

When someone gets shot at, they roll Reaction plus Physical pool dice (limited by their Dodge skill).

Pools refresh every full turn.

On a full-turn action, like with an extended or social test, the pool pretty much gets used every turn to double the skill dice (so a person with Negotiation 6 and a Social Pool of 5 would be consistently rolling 11 dice per action). Social pool probably needs a rule that allows you to spend pool dice to negatively influence your target (forcing them to roll fewer dice, or somesuch).

And so on. Dice pools are virtually cut in half (from SR4) initially but can be brought back up to decent levels using the pools, but you tend to run out of those quickly and have to rely on pure skill and gear in higher IPs. Combat actions tend to drain the pools quickly, so combat beyond the first couple initiative passes slows down (fewer dice being thrown per action) unless the combatants are very advanced.

Skills are now cleverly a limiting factor while simultaneously adding dice. Attributes are important to get your pool dice but require competency in skills to get the full use out of them. Gear lets you get flat additions to your rolling, but doesn't let you draw more benefit from pools (making gear dice prized differently than skill or attribute dice). Guns could even get an accuracy stat and provide a little -1 or +1 or however, balanced out by improved or mitigated features (single shot light pistol might get +2 accuracy or more for its relative weakness and slow rate of fire).

See, that's the sort of system that makes me happy. Limits make me sad.

I don't mind limits, but the system you propose sounds awesome. It's something to think about.

[thorya]

So you're saying that Limits don't go far enough? Intersting how broad the opinion sprectrum is on this topic.

I personally don't like the idea of hard capping dice pools. If someone wants to keep bloating their dice pool, that's fine. They'll have a higher chance of succeeding, and they'll be less impacted by negative modifiers, and they'll almost never glitch. But they'll also be paying a high cost to do so, with somewhat diminishing returns. Getting those 25 dice in a single pool is going to be less efficient than adding a handful of dice to several different pools. You should get better bang for your buck by being well rounded, but at the same time we should also allow people to specialize if they really want to - they just need to have reasonable costs and lose efficiency to do so.

Now, soft-capped dice pools could potentially work, but that's kind of what limits do anyway, so I dunno. And we've been told that dice pools are going to be smaller anyways thanks to changes in modifiers, so hey, it may be a moot point.

~Umi

Soft-capped? Something like, the negative modifiers to dice pool come from your total pool, but you still can't roll over your cap pool? So the extra 5 dice past 20 help with negating modifiers, but not much else?

yeah, I'd be cool with that. You still get some utility from your super dice pool, but it's heavily reduced.

[Umidori]

I was thinking more like sliding caps, perhaps based on your attributes as Limits are. Kind of like the soft-capping on armor without encumbrance in SR4.

There are a lot of ways to soft-cap things, though, and each has certain merits of its own.

~Umi

[thorya]

I don't like it.

There's a story floating about how the government was once trying to reorganize tax brackets. They had some beancounters figure things out, and they came up with an interesting scaling idea, where each bracket of your income was taxed at a different rate. You paid 5% tax on the first $30,000 (or whatever, I'm just making up numbers) you earned in a year, and then 10% of the next $30,000, et cetera, up until you hit 100% on anything you earned past $600,000 per year. Then someone stopped and said, "Guys - if we do this, people are just going to stop working once they hit $600,000 a year", and the whole plan fell apart.

Same sort of thing with dice pool caps. If your pool is capped at 20 dice, you have absolutely no incentive to ever go above that. People will just pick out a single favorite weapon with a high accuracy and build entirely around the dice pool cap. They'll do just enough to "cap out" one dice pool, then start investing in the next one.

~Umi

Which is exactly what they hoped to achieve with limits. People diversifying. And if the caps are variable, rather than fixed across the board, you have an incentive to keep investing through diverse means. You invest in one set of things to raise caps and another to raise dice pools and hopefully each of those have diminishing returns so that you can maximize them but it's kind of pointless to.

To use your tax example. If you are taxed at 100% for $600,000 of income, but you are taxed at only 50% for investment gains, you'll diversify to include some gains in how you earn money (in fact you'll probably diversify to earn $300,000 income and $300,000+ gains, just like the tax system works now anyway) and companies will diversify to reward you with other things than additional income. More vacations, better benefits, stock options, etc.

[thorya]

I was thinking more like sliding caps, perhaps based on your attributes as Limits are. Kind of like the soft-capping on armor without encumbrance in SR4.

There are a lot of ways to soft-cap things, though, and each has certain merits of its own.

~Umi

So exactly what I proposed earlier, that Black Swan said "I like it" and you responded "I don't like it" and went into your tax analogy? Did I miss something?

[Nath]

It only address a part of the problem. An inflated 25 dice pool will loose the possibility to get 8 hits or more but it will still retain the possibility to get 7 hits 78% of the time. It will also still be able to withstand negative modifiers of -6 or more that are supposed to make things difficult or impossible (full auto recoil, long range or blind fire). Limits alone won't fix these issues, hence the need to also directly address them with regards to the size of dice pools.

So you're saying that Limits don't go far enough? Intersting how broad the opinion sprectrum is on this topic.

No. I'm saying Limits barely have anything to do with solving the dice inflation issues. It will solve some very specific subset of it: large dice pools winning opposed tests even when the opposing side "makes a good roll", and large attacking dice pools dealing very large amount of damages.

The actual fix is reducing the number of gear positive modifiers available. Limits rather is a fix to the fix, by giving gear another modifier to grant.

My actual opinion was that most of dice pool inflation was actually caused by a limited number of items: muscle replacement/toner, cyberlimb Agility enhancement, adepts' improved physical attribute, improved ability+kinesics, empathy software, vision enhancement+attention co-processor... which I think could have been each fixed separately (among other things, the 4th edition should never had carried over the 1st edition legacy of muscle replacement rating going up to 4 while including Agility in attack dice pools).

There's a story floating about how the government was once trying to reorganize tax brackets. They had some beancounters figure things out, and they came up with an interesting scaling idea, where each bracket of your income was taxed at a different rate. You paid 5% tax on the first $30,000 (or whatever, I'm just making up numbers) you earned in a year, and then 10% of the next $30,000, et cetera, up until you hit 100% on anything you earned past $600,000 per year. Then someone stopped and said, "Guys - if we do this, people are just going to stop working once they hit $600,000 a year", and the whole plan fell apart.

That's actually exactly how it works in France, except it stops going up at some point instead of reaching 100%. The current rates are 0% up to 5963€, 5.5% up to 11,896€, 14% up to 26420€, 30% p to 70,830€, 41% up to 150,000€, and top at 45% above that threshold (they recently added another tax on top of tht that kicks in at 250,000€).

Which reminds me of another story on how, when the politicians comes up with an idea the French revenue service don't like, they make sure to implement it in way that will quickly backfire and kill the idea. Making the rate goes up to 100% typically is the kind of things they could have come up with.

[Umidori]

So exactly what I proposed earlier, that Black Swan said "I like it" and you responded "I don't like it" and went into your tax analogy? Did I miss something?

I don't really see anything in your proposal about "soft-caps" or "sliding caps". I see hard flat caps, with a few modifiers. Did I miss something?

~Umi

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

Regarding exceptional rolls and not being able to use all the hits you were "lucky" enough to get on a stupidly large dice pool, remember there's always the option to use Edge to exceed your limits.

~Umi

Since when is 15 Dice stupidly large?
And you should not HAVE to spend Edge to use all your Hits. *Shakes Head*

[Black Swan]

Here's a more elegant solution:

Ditch Attr+Skill. Create Physical, Social, Mental, and Magic/Hacking/Resonance pools sort of like Limits. Try to push these into the 4 to 8 range for most characters.

When rolling a test, only roll Skill dice. As dice pool modifiers, add any gear bonuses. Then add relevant pool dice up to a maximum of the Skill rating (the exact amount chosen by the player). That is, a person with Physical Pool 7, Pistols 5, and a smartlinked (+2) pistol rolls 7 dice plus up to 5 pool dice.

When someone gets shot at, they roll Reaction plus Physical pool dice (limited by their Dodge skill).

Pools refresh every full turn.

On a full-turn action, like with an extended or social test, the pool pretty much gets used every turn to double the skill dice (so a person with Negotiation 6 and a Social Pool of 5 would be consistently rolling 11 dice per action). Social pool probably needs a rule that allows you to spend pool dice to negatively influence your target (forcing them to roll fewer dice, or somesuch).

And so on. Dice pools are virtually cut in half (from SR4) initially but can be brought back up to decent levels using the pools, but you tend to run out of those quickly and have to rely on pure skill and gear in higher IPs. Combat actions tend to drain the pools quickly, so combat beyond the first couple initiative passes slows down (fewer dice being thrown per action) unless the combatants are very advanced.

Skills are now cleverly a limiting factor while simultaneously adding dice. Attributes are important to get your pool dice but require competency in skills to get the full use out of them. Gear lets you get flat additions to your rolling, but doesn't let you draw more benefit from pools (making gear dice prized differently than skill or attribute dice). Guns could even get an accuracy stat and provide a little -1 or +1 or however, balanced out by improved or mitigated features (single shot light pistol might get +2 accuracy or more for its relative weakness and slow rate of fire).

See, that's the sort of system that makes me happy. Limits make me sad.

So, in other words. . . . basically SR1 to SR3 dice pools.

P.S. Don't get me wrong, I really liked the old dice pool concepts.