Question re: Run and Gun, FFBA Tables incomplete? Options

[Mantis]

Cndblank:
I actually preferred the earlier solution to legendary runners. Namely, don't give them stats. Just use them as plot devices. That way you can keep up the legend and never have to be disappointed by a lousy dice roll. Your players shouldn't generally be fighting legends anyway, which is the only reason you would need to stat them out.

As for the limits, well my example was how they hindered our game. An example of where they are irrelevant were with the face and hacker. They both had high enough limits that they almost never hit them. They would still do very well at their tasks but hitting their limit was just never a factor. This was also true with the dwarf as regards things like stealth checks. It is super weird to me that the potentially sneakiest characters are the strongest characters. That is, a troll with a high strength has such a high physical limit that he is unlikely to hit it whereas a human or elf, who you would think would be more stealthy, are very likely to hit their limit. To get around that you jack up your strength so now you have weight lifters sneaking from place to place rather than ninjas. Blah. That is just silly. Limits sounded like a good idea but the implementation isn't.

I had more points to make but I was getting annoyed just reviewing what I did. The wireless bonuses just completely floored me and we left them out of our game. Silencers with directional mikes that detect whether someone noticed your shot? What the hell? Is it magical? Grrrr. There I go. Getting annoyed again.

[tjn]

Or you could simply ask the player of the Troll soak monster to stop playing like a douche. No, really.

I was coming at it from a systems and game design point of view, not necessarily a player/GM issue. I was going to wait for Wak's troll post, but let's go there.

Okay, as a GM, you're having trouble with the troll soak monster, you tell him about your problem, he understands and asks how can we make this work? You tell him you want to be able to physically challenge the characters with a similar level of threat, which requires mitigating the troll's soak.

The player says, "Great, I'm with you, but here's the deal: I wanted to play the tank, the iconic troll of Shadowrun, and furthermore, I only have two spotlights: taking damage and punching people. Every other character outshines mine in every other way. Every time I get to be the bullet sponge, that is my crowning moment of awesome. But I'm a decent guy, so let's try to make this work, but I don't want my character to have no other spotlights because if I can't take the damage, charging into melee is a pretty stupid plan, which means I can't even use my other niche." So as a GM, you now have generated two different problems, trying to correct one.

The first is, how do you let the player get the feeling of being able to protect his teammates from harm, but at the same time have similar lethality? Telling a player that you have no room for his vision at your table is just as much of a douche move as the player insisting on disrupting play with the problem troll. On top of that, this is an archetype going back for as long as I've been playing SR, so it's got history and players come to the table, or when sitting down with a new version of SR, with the expectation that they can make a troll tank, and being effective in that role at the same time. So, the GM really shouldn't outlaw the concept altogether, so that means you as a GM have to change something, and since it seems like it's mostly a troll issue, let's nerf them.

However this leads into the second thing. This is, under SR5, if you take away the Troll's inherent sturdiness, there is very little reason to ever make a Troll outside of roleplaying reasons, and even then, for choosing to be a troll without that inherent sturdiness, that troll will be mathematically weaker than all other races, because even if they're lowered on the priority table, the attribute caps would put them behind every other race for any role primarily depending on Agi, Cha, Log, or Int. Which is every other role other than meatshield. So no matter what other niche that player wants to try to find outside of a meatshield, another character would outshine that troll, in the troll's own area of expertise. So we can't really take the meatshield niche away from trolls at large.

So we can't nerf Trolls specifically. But only 11 out of the 30+ soak dice specifically comes from being a troll. The other twenty-some-odd dice come from armor, cyber, magic, or other modification. And every one of those modifications are available to every other character. It's equal opportunity! So why aren't we seeing soak pools in the high teens/low twenties for every other character if it's equally available? Because the player has to focus almost exclusively on getting every possible modification to add to that soak pool in order to jack it up there. Cyberarms with armor, bone lacing, dermal sheaths, qualities like exceptional attribute and toughness, getting that mage buddy to cast the Armor spell on the character (who even bought a spell focus just so that the mage always had one free for his use), and then you get into the armor shenanigans. But with every choice the character's essence, karma, and nuyen are going down, usually to the point of, yeah you can shoot, but you've got no more resources left to be really good at anything else, and you're probably not going to hit the ninja adept with maxed combat sense without help. So there is some inherent balance to the situation, but something's still off.

Hell, orcs are only inherently only 2 dice behind trolls, so why don't we hear much complaining about the orcs with 28+ soak pool? It's because throwing that much character creation resources into tanking just doesn't make sense unless you fully commit to the tank role, which means going troll. So it's not inherently about being a troll... so what is it that causes the tanking monstrosities that need tank shells to bring down?

The key, I think, is all those different stacking modifiers to the soak pool, and not Trolls in and of themselves. That's where I believe the change has to go in, but there's so many different moving parts in the gear analysis that it's beyond the scope most GMs should reasonably have to deal with when making house rules, and it's much simpler to nerf trolls because troll tanks are all we ever see... but this would only shift the tanking monstrosities to orcs if nerf goes far enough and not deal with the actual problem. I've still not entirely thought through the idea, but a simple answer might be to make cyberware mods affect Bod and not the soak pool; I know theres some simulationist arguments against it, but all of these modifiers are getting around the +4 modified attribute cap. And I may be wrong, but I think that's the specific loophole that is getting exploited by the 30 dice soak monster, and not the fact that they're specifically a troll.

Other ideas might include changing the Armor spell and set the armor gained at Force+hits, but make it so that it does not stack with any other armor, or make armor gained from cyber/bio as unstackable with other forms of armor gained from cyber/bio and only the biggest modifier applies? Alternate idea is to set a +body for damage purposes cap, but I like the simplicity of treating body like the other attributes and not creating different body dice pools depending on what exactly you're using body for. Cyberlimbs just give me a damn headache, and I've house ruled them at my table, so I've got little thought in the way of dealing with them without changing the entire way they're setup.

But overall if there are no answers for these problems, we might as well take out trolls altogether... and a troll-less Shadowrun, is a sad Shadowrun. Don't let Brackhaven win!

if you explain that you simply don't want to deal with their ridiculousness in whatever manner they are taking the system and breaking it over their knee.

This is another, separate, but related problem. A robust system should be able to tolerate the edge cases such that they don't immediately break the system, and a table should be able to trust that under RAW, the system extremely hard to break over your knee without resorting to Pun-pun levels of system mastery. The need to house rule anything should be a rare event and otherwise done only for the personal preferences of those playing rather than the need to correct an oversight. SR5 doesn't rise to this level of execution and polish. Honestly, SR has never risen to this level but in the 80's and 90's, an RPG really didn't need to; I mean heartbreaker is a term for a reason. But as time has gone on, expectations have risen, and SR really needs someone behind the curtains with authority that understands the entirety of the system, how each piece relates to the whole, and how to adapt SR towards modern game design. My suspicion, based upon reading SR5, is that this is not the case. Maybe I'm wrong /shrug.

[Kerenshara]

Do you want to encourage Trolls to have a high strength and body, reflecting their racial strengths, or do you want Trolls to use those as "dump stats" and focus on assorted mental boosts? How do you encourage play towards the direction you pick, and what do you do to allow for the non-standard design to still have viability? Do you want to change traditional stat bonuses and, if so, do you change any other race (such as Orks) to make room for the new Troll mods?

Wakshaani,

That is PRECISELY the kind of argument I was talking about earlier. It's something an old employer of mine did years and years ago - even talked openly about it - assigning people the tasks they were weakest at to balance the load. End result? Predictably, lower efficiency, performance and morale. Running my own teams I did the exact opposite. Applies to things like character generation as well.

See, even in SR4/4A trying to make a troll spell-tosser of any flavor you were already penalized by reductions in maximum Mental Attributes. Crank in not really using your strength for your "job" and that reach and strength just became effectively worthless; A human Sammy could easily match your natural power and then some since they'd have incentive to and hadn't blown the points/Karma/Priorities on being a troll.

It's a hard-rule fix for something the GM ought to be taking care of. If this is all about Campaigns where you have no control over characters... wow, Catalyst just lost me as a customer permanently. Why? See: Living Greyhawk. Plenty of "legal" Gouda there. Writing ANY role playing system with the assumption the GM won't have any control deprives the GM and the players of flexibility to play their kind of game - you have to play the within the narrowly constrained limits of the DEVs assumptions. It also means there are going to be pages of "house rules" to let them make do. The earliest most primitive game systems included under the GM section that ANY rule was changeable if it needed to be, and building in things to cover ONLY people playing in rigid modules (as opposed to the MUCH broader and deeper home campaign players) then you're building failure into your product from the bones out - ask Microsoft how well that kind of weakness worked out vis-a-vis security in Windows XP due to their original business model of "pay to play monthly" with the ability to shut down your OS and then sell copies of your Registry (with software keys) to vendors to help catch pirates. You can't "patch" that kind of problem when you build it in from the very beginning concepts and even "house rules" won't fully handle it. My groups played two of the modules and the consensus was: they suck compared to a personalized campaign. Furthermore, when you're module-oriented you wind up with characters built to MEET that expectation with no emphasis on, oh I don't know... languages, knowledge skills, secondary skills, hobbies or the background that support them. You get Module Monsters™ like you used to see in Living Greyhawk - characters that wouldn't be appreciated by their table mates for the time between runs or in actual - you know - ROLE PLAYING across the table. Best games I've been in, regardless of system, were all about the interactions across the table not "up the table" with the GM. A bad GM can ruin a good group, but a godlike GM can't save a bad group. You don't build that kind of interaction (including things like inside in-character jokes) with "episodic" play - that only really comes from ongoing free form interaction between players/characters; episodic play like episodic TV tends to lead to trite, 2D caricatures instead of organic, deep characters unless it goes on for many seasons. That's over 30 years of RP experience talking with everything from kids to veteran adults in multiple systems in multiple combinations with philosophies all the way from the universe-specific version of "Pink Mohawk" to "Uber Professionals In Mirror Shades". Pink has a place... even I'll admit it (grudgingly) but I tend to think more Macho Women With Guns than Shadowrun for that.

OK, having pushed my own buttons there, I'll reduce it to this: You can't legislate stupid, and trying to make home campaigns play like (or with) pregen modules is a giant mistake. The "pay" modules are designed to fit better into an ongoing campaign or form the basis for one to continue between and/or after they're done. They also tend to be centered around major "world" events or characters, historically speaking. DNA/DOA, Dreamchipper and Maria Mercurial all come strongly to mind. You shouldn't - CAN NOT - try to micromanage groups through hard rules to deal with system-breaking players. That's always been the GM's job. One of the things I love most about the SR4/4A engine mechanics at the core level is that it's more "story driven" than the older versions and I am in love with the 6th World.

There are multiple ways to play Shadowrun, always have been, always will be:

• Game Breakers play like Call of Duty - with just as much depth of character
• Pink Mohawk plays like The Matrix
• Professionals In Mirror Shades plays like Burn Notice
• Middle-of-the-road plays like something between Chuck and later James Bond

I know my preferences and my limits, but it really sounds from your commentary about the base assumptions and inner deliberative process like the primary motivation for SR5 was controlling Game Breakers. DnD 3.5 did a good job of controlling overall cheese levels compared to 3.0 without boxing people in. SR5 seems to have missed that mark. Sorry.

As for the limits, well my example was how they hindered our game. An example of where they are irrelevant were with the face and hacker. They both had high enough limits that they almost never hit them. They would still do very well at their tasks but hitting their limit was just never a factor. This was also true with the dwarf as regards things like stealth checks. It is super weird to me that the potentially sneakiest characters are the strongest characters. That is, a troll with a high strength has such a high physical limit that he is unlikely to hit it whereas a human or elf, who you would think would be more stealthy, are very likely to hit their limit. To get around that you jack up your strength so now you have weight lifters sneaking from place to place rather than ninjas. Blah. That is just silly. Limits sounded like a good idea but the implementation isn't.

Mantis,

The optional SR4/4A dice caps worked pretty well when we used ALL of them - they forced the game to be "skill-centric" instead of just going for maximum attributes. Skills have stories behind them which makes for a deeper character background unless you built a Module Monster™. Once we put those in all of a sudden we wound up with better characters and better player/character interaction across the table and we had a ton more fun. Why? Because it kept us inside the mechanical framework of the base rules which assumed you'd never really expect to roll more than five or maybe six hits. Skill level descriptions suddenly made sense, especially with Keep Caps.

Now, the new limits are purely Attribute based which is less ideal since it artificially pushes people to go for the limit if it's within reach... which you cover pretty well. That's why my first House Rule before I got to Char Gen was to amend the limits for physical activity based on the primary skill-linked Attribute (in other words: an AGI limit, a BOD limit, a STR limit and a REA limit - which had no STR in it at all). Mental I did the same but the Social Limit is just a Charisma Limit anyhow so it worked for me as-is. Haven't gotten to run it and it's added complexity, but I also played L5R and the Roll/Keep model was expected and really little different from SR4/4A skill-hit caps. Penciling in a number for the skill-hit cap right next to the number of total dice made it instantly transparent to a player... no reason it couldn't be "lower of the two" once you're in that mindset.

The House Rule for making a Skill-based Limit would be [Limit=IF(Skill>0,Roundup(Skill/2,0),1] if you can read Excel. Merge that with a stat-appropriate limit as "lesser of" so a puny character with great skill is limited by their punyness as a check against Dump Stats. And as long as the limits were in the 5-7 range you're on-target to keep things within the conceptual limits of the basic thresholds (1-6). That's why I don't object to the ACC on most of the weapons - a 4 or less denotes an inherently inaccurate weapon which will actually limit the skill of the user.

Does that make a general kind of sense? It's a paradigm-wide approach that would cover spells, programs, skills and combat equally with the same core logic and mechanics... and it keeps the results for all but the most legendary 'runners within that (1-6) range. After all, the Positive Quality to improve an inherent Limit could be bought later to indicate learning to transcend as well as balancing "everybody" buys by making it have to be bought more than twice. You're really good with LOGic linked skills? You just buy up that one. I'd probably say cut the Karma cost by one or two per to reflect the narrower focus but keep from getting low enough it's an "out-of-hand" buy for whatever the character's main focus is every time.

S// Kerenshara

[Kerenshara]

I was coming at it from a systems and game design point of view, not necessarily a player/GM issue.

>snip<

So we can't nerf Trolls specifically. But only 11 out of the 30+ soak dice specifically comes from being a troll. The other twenty-some-odd dice come from armor, cyber, magic, or other modification. And every one of those modifications are available to every other character. It's equal opportunity! So why aren't we seeing soak pools in the high teens/low twenties for every other character if it's equally available? Because the player has to focus almost exclusively on getting every possible modification to add to that soak pool in order to jack it up there. Cyberarms with armor, bone lacing, dermal sheaths, qualities like exceptional attribute and toughness, getting that mage buddy to cast the Armor spell on the character (who even bought a spell focus just so that the mage always had one free for his use), and then you get into the armor shenanigans. But with every choice the character's essence, karma, and nuyen are going down, usually to the point of, yeah you can shoot, but you've got no more resources left to be really good at anything else, and you're probably not going to hit the ninja adept with maxed combat sense without help. So there is some inherent balance to the situation, but something's still off.

Hell, orcs are only inherently only 2 dice behind trolls, so why don't we hear much complaining about the orcs with 28+ soak pool? It's because throwing that much character creation resources into tanking just doesn't make sense unless you fully commit to the tank role, which means going troll. So it's not inherently about being a troll... so what is it that causes the tanking monstrosities that need tank shells to bring down?

This ^ precisely hits the nail on the head.

But overall if there are no answers for these problems, we might as well take out trolls altogether... and a troll-less Shadowrun, is a sad Shadowrun. Don't let Brackhaven win!

Win. Sorry.

This is another, separate, but related problem. A robust system should be able to tolerate the edge cases such that they don't immediately break the system, and a table should be able to trust that under RAW, the system extremely hard to break over your knee without resorting to Pun-pun levels of system mastery. The need to house rule anything should be a rare event and otherwise done only for the personal preferences of those playing rather than the need to correct an oversight. SR5 doesn't rise to this level of execution and polish. Honestly, SR has never risen to this level but in the 80's and 90's, an RPG really didn't need to; I mean heartbreaker is a term for a reason. But as time has gone on, expectations have risen, and SR really needs someone behind the curtains with authority that understands the entirety of the system, how each piece relates to the whole, and how to adapt SR towards modern game design. My suspicion, based upon reading SR5, is that this is not the case. Maybe I'm wrong /shrug.

I was typing while you were posting so I kind-of address this in my post right behind yours. I'd like your thoughts on my reply to Mantis.

S// Kerenshara

[psychophipps]

The player says, "Great, I'm with you, but here's the deal: I wanted to play the tank, the iconic troll of Shadowrun, and furthermore, I only have two spotlights: taking damage and punching people. Every other character outshines mine in every other way. Every time I get to be the bullet sponge, that is my crowning moment of awesome. But I'm a decent guy, so let's try to make this work, but I don't want my character to have no other spotlights because if I can't take the damage, charging into melee is a pretty stupid plan, which means I can't even use my other niche." So as a GM, you now have generated two different problems, trying to correct one.

I played an Orc ganger named Bulldog in a 4th campaign with a total of 19 Ballistic soak dice and 17 Impact soak dice. One of my crowning "tank" achievements was the time ol' 'Dog took a point-blank Roomsweeper shot when he was already kind of wrecked up. GM looked at me over the table with a look of grim satisfaction, and after I mitigated two successes with a Reaction roll said, "9 physical". I was a bit nervous to be sure, but without edge because I knew that I wouldn't get a recharge until the end of the adventure I made my roll. Looking up at him, I said completely deadpan, "I soak 11 of it".

As you can see, you can be a very effective bullet sponge without resorting to ridiculousness like 30+ soak dice.

The main issue I have with your above example is that it shows that it's all on the GM, and it's the GM's fault that they don't have the imagination or wherewithal "to handle the situation" without resorting to some perceived underhanded character concept thuggery. I'm sorry, but the 30+ soak Troll doesn't just want to be able to take a seriously nasty hit and keep on fighting. They don't just want to be able to run up and punch stuff. They want to have a carte blanche reason to be stupid and lazy as a character builder and as a player.

Tactics? Who needs tactics when you can use autofire as your exfoliation regime?

What am I doing this combat round, Pinky? I will do the same thing I do every combat round...run up sans cover or concealment and punch people in the head until they die with a few basic Reaction rolls tossed in as deemed necessary.

Heaven forbid a GM enforcing dice pool caps to encourage teamwork, roleplaying, and *gasp* character concepts that involve actually, y'know...thinking.

[Kerenshara]

Kerenshara took a point-blank (one square) full-auto blast from an AK straight to the chest wearing FFBA Half-suit and fashion armor clothing. Rolled up with the limited pool (~13 dice IIRC) and despite the good roll took 6 Physical and even with penalties was able to kill her assailant. Took a very good mage to get her back up but that SHOULD have been fatal. Luck always comes into play. Not a single person in our group was rolling North of 20 dice including the Sammy and even he knew he was mortal IC and OOC. Kerenshara taking that burst bought him the time to get into position to take out the rest of the badguys. It doesn't always take a Tank to save the TPK and being a Sammy isn't a "get out of firefight free card". He wound up needing a "good mage" about 50% more than I did.

On the other hand, we didn't have anybody putting "everything" into the armor and soak mods. Had something to do with a GM who emphasized RP and being smart... and an experienced mature group interested in RP and being smart. Every single person could pass most security checkpoints except for their weapons. And the Sammy (played by a 21 year old) had a preferred music style, favorite sports team and even a preferred brand of liquor. We'd been "training" him since he was 14 (our group had played multiple games together for years and we were friends outside the game). When we got him 2D Pink didn't begin to describe him, so we were quite proud of his development. Took me quite a few more years than that but I didn't have good guidance.

Occurs to me that obsessing over making combat "more lethal" to "let 'runners feel afraid of bullets" hasn't ever been a problem in groups I play with. Of course, when you've put a lot of work and love into a character's background and personality and become attached to them and their relationship with other characters at the table, you're not going to hazard them carelessly. That's not true with a Module Monster™ because the only thing to love is the stats so if they die all you need to do is erase the name and show up at the next game (slight exaggeration, but not too much). I guess at some point I realized it's called a Role Playing Game for a reason; if all I wanted was pure combat I would (and occasionally do) play a dedicated miniatures game. Heck, my last gaming session I played a close-combat Tank with mental stats as dump in Pathfinder, but he still had a halfway decent background and was close with the other party members... well most of them anyway. I created him the night before the game started to fill in a missing slot, putting aside a character I'd spent a full month working up with 30 pages of background; I still didn't want to see George get killed even if he was a DBF WoHP because being not-as-dumb-as-he-looked was a lot of fun.

Your point is well taken and made, but the broader message is that no role is circumscribed 100% and combat isn't the objective of any RPG, only a frequent intrusion. The best 'runs never had a lethal shot fired. DnD gives XP for fights so it's not "avoidable" most of the time, but we never went picking fights either.

S// Kerenshara

[Redjack]

You sound like a ...

Thank you for your reports, this has been dealt with. By mutual agreement in PM based conversations, Epicedion will simply not be posting to Dumpshock again... ever.

We have Terms of Service ( Link at the upper left ), please adhere to it. We are a private board, neither the other members, nor the moderators, are here for you to abuse, nor insult. There is enough political vitriol outside of the boards; I especially will not suffer any immature persons who cannot keep it off the boards.

Finally, we are not the official boards so we are not beholden Catalyst to delete, alter, nor censor posts critical of them. That said, it does make us weary to come to a thread and see the same drawn out rants and/or attacks on the writers. I disagree with a number of the rules, I abhor quality control issues and I find the current state of published errata insulting as a consumer. That said, I can converse with them without veiled insults and long winded rants that include factually incorrect inferences or statements that simple wrong (& that have been contradicted by neutral parties who were present to personally witness events being dredged up). In summary on this third point: Stop dragging every conversation down into the mud. We do not want to add some specific Term of Service that requires civility and respect for others; we are hoping everyone will figure out how to do that themselves and frankly, we have neither the time nor patience to play censors... but our tolerance level is about to bottom out in this area.

[mister__joshua]

Thank you for your reports, this has been dealt with. By mutual agreement in PM based conversations, Epicedion will simply not be posting to Dumpshock again... ever.

We have Terms of Service ( Link at the upper left ), please adhere to it. We are a private board, neither the other members, nor the moderators, are here for you to abuse, nor insult. There is enough political vitriol outside of the boards; I especially will not suffer any immature persons who cannot keep it off the boards.

Finally, we are not the official boards so we are not beholden Catalyst to delete, alter, nor censor posts critical of them. That said, it does make us weary to come to a thread and see the same drawn out rants and/or attacks on the writers. I disagree with a number of the rules, I abhor quality control issues and I find the current state of published errata insulting as a consumer. That said, I can converse with them without veiled insults and long winded rants that include factually incorrect inferences or statements that simple wrong (& that have been contradicted by neutral parties who were present to personally witness events being dredged up). In summary on this third point: Stop dragging every conversation down into the mud. We do not want to add some specific Term of Service that requires civility and respect for others; we are hoping everyone will figure out how to do that themselves and frankly, we have neither the time nor patience to play censors... but our tolerance level is about to bottom out in this area.

Welll said.

I do think you should let Epicedion back though so I can continue getting my Elder Scrolls Online updates (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

[Redjack]

Welll said.

I do think you should let Epicedion back though so I can continue getting my Elder Scrolls Online updates (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

To be honest, I had no intention in banning him. I simply wanted him to not increase the vitriol. He chose instead to piss in my eye (as well as the other mods) as he went out the door and disabled his own account.

[Sengir]

TBH, I found Epicedion's comment pretty funny. Hermit likes to call out what he perceives as a WASP (or WAS-Mormon) bias behind everything, giving him the same tune sounded more like a quip than any serious political flame...of course, flaming mods generally is a rather bad idea...

[psychophipps]

...of course, flaming mods generally is a rather bad idea...

It's like kicking the local mob boss' dog. You shouldn't have done it in the first place, so there's a general feeling of 'sympathy is between "shit" and "syphilis" in the dictionary' when you see them go.

[X-Kalibur]

I hate to have to hang on this any longer, but time and again nobody has trouble with being critical of weird or poor rules. But start attacking the people directly and it's crossing a line. Mistakes happen and just because person X was responsible for writing section Y doesn't mean that everything they did made it to print. Bitch about the rule, come up with a fix that works for your group, and you're good to go.

As for FFBA, I actually like the route they chose to take for 5th with it. Not because everyone was stacking it in 3rd and 4th, but because it was mathematically superior to do so. I really like that it has a niche now other than "wear this under your other armor for more armor with less encumberance". That said, I'm totally guilty of packing an FFBA shirt under armor on a couple of characters. I'm still not sure how I feel about the higher lethality in 5th or if it truly is a higher rate or not. I haven't had enough time to actually play it at a table, but in the one or two sessions we did, guards dropped quick for sure, not sure how well the team would have faired, and I'm not sure how well that translates into "fun".

[hermit]

I really do not see how FFBA is different to a Second Skin now, though. Except the Second Skin can do camouflage too without adding it as a customization.

What bothers me about SR5 in general is that the rules seem never - or at least, very often - made to specifically adress a problem or "problem", and never evaluated for their interaction with other rules. And the wording of the rules, the descriptions (as with the pee tags) is often less than informative.

[X-Kalibur]

Well, the Second Skin is more expensive, yes? I don't have access to my PDF right now to check.

[Mäx]

To put it another way, if FFBA was a +2 armor for a shirt, +4 for a full suit, at the same prices, and stacked without causing stacking penalties, would you take it? Would anyone *not* take it? Those answers are "Yes" and "No" respectively, making it a non-choice.

Except its not nearly that simple, for example my main build is a female combat face and FFBA is simply not an option considering what else she wears.

Really everyone is always talking about what a no-brainer full FFBA is(in SR 4), when the fact is thats its a full body condom you cant get away with wearing in almost anywhere.

[X-Kalibur]

Except its not nearly that simple, for example my main build is a female combat face and FFBA is simply not an option considering what else she wears.

Really everyone is always talking about what a no-brainer full FFBA is(in SR 4), when the fact is thats its a full body condom you cant get away with wearing in almost anywhere.

That's only if you wear the full suit. There were other options available.

[Mäx]

That's only if you wear the full suit. There were other options available.

I specifically said full FFBA, witch is exactly what was pretty much always recommended for every character.

[Stahlseele]

it's very formfitting, as long as you're not in a bathing suit or revealing dress, it works with everything.
the gloves and the hood make you look a bit daft usually though . .

[Wakshaani]

Wakshaani,

That is PRECISELY the kind of argument I was talking about earlier. It's something an old employer of mine did years and years ago - even talked openly about it - assigning people the tasks they were weakest at to balance the load. End result? Predictably, lower efficiency, performance and morale. Running my own teams I did the exact opposite. Applies to things like character generation as well.

See, even in SR4/4A trying to make a troll spell-tosser of any flavor you were already penalized by reductions in maximum Mental Attributes. Crank in not really using your strength for your "job" and that reach and strength just became effectively worthless; A human Sammy could easily match your natural power and then some since they'd have incentive to and hadn't blown the points/Karma/Priorities on being a troll.

Alright, got some time freed up, so time to chat a bit more on this one.

What we were seeing in 4th edition, and this was backed by many a GM doing Missions stuff, not *just* zipping through forums and seeing the assorted "Troll dwarf" builds, was this: It was more points-efficient to take Troll for the high Body and Strength than to be a human with the same stats, especially for a spellcasting type. The hit to mental stats wasn't that bad since the Magic attribute did most of the heavy lifting. What you *didn't* see much of were big meaty Trolls because Strength was a dumpstat. Heck, people would call out Orks and Trolls as having a "Strength tax" that made you pay more for them than you really should for teh Body increase.

Now, the question you have to face is this: Should that be what the race is designed for? If Yes, then leaving them as-is was fine. If no, then they'd have to be addressed.

The first option in repairing this would have been to simply adjust the stats. Few games have any race with such deformingly large modifiers as Shadowrun Trolls. Making those changes smaller would have made life easier, but it had two issues: One, it would cascade through the other races (If Trolls get less Strength and Body, then you need to shrink Orks. if Orks get smaller, you need to weaken Dwarves. If Dwarves get weaker, what's really the point of being a Dwarf?) ... two it would invalidate a lot of older fluff and characters. The SR5 crew is willing to do that as a last resort, but whenever possible they'll go to the wire to keep tradition alive. (Cuethe baying of hounds. I know we killed your favorite thing and I apologize, but honestly there's a lot of work to keep as much as possible. Some things simply have to die in order to ensure a healthy body keeps going. See also: The removal of Dikoting. For what it's worth, I personally miss Program Carriers and naked decking from 1st ed. I share your pain.)

The concensus was that we wanted Trolls to live up to the stereotype of big hulking powerhouses. Rule interactions with them changed chargen to accomidate them remaining true to their traditional bonuses. Humans got better to try and keep up with them. The way stats are purchased got changed to keep Trolls from being totally boned. (And whenever work starts on a karmagen-type system, if one's eventually going to be made, Design will have to groan and dig back into that whole thing again. They're a serious issue.) The bullet was bit to ensure that big lug was a viable build but those who wanted to go a different way still could. You're *encouraged* to play the stereotype and get some free bonuses to nudge you that way, but you don't have to go there.

(Similarly, you can play a low-Agility Elf with a high strength and body, or a Dwarf Face. They aren't optimized, but they're *way* fun, and I always have a hug for people who'll do that for good Roleplay.)

It's a hard-rule fix for something the GM ought to be taking care of. If this is all about Campaigns where you have no control over characters... wow, Catalyst just lost me as a customer permanently. Why? See: Living Greyhawk. Plenty of "legal" Gouda there. Writing ANY role playing system with the assumption the GM won't have any control deprives the GM and the players of flexibility to play their kind of game - you have to play the within the narrowly constrained limits of the DEVs assumptions. It also means there are going to be pages of "house rules" to let them make do.

Snipped a bit here as I wanted to focus on this part.

For one, another big line for this edition is "Shadowrun your way" ... encouraging people to tinker with the system, go with house rules, play teh narrative that they want to see... these are *awesome* things. I'm not great at design, which is why I'm mostly a monkey chattering along and asking questions, rather than cranking out the rules themselves, but I love to tinker and have been doing it in asorted games for decades. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but having that freedom is faboo. At some point I want to write up some bits about taking a wrench to your game and seeing how a few changes can work, but, that's for down the road. Short form is, I absolutely defend this.

At the same time, there also has to be a "default" style of play, one that is supported at the convention scene, one seen in modules, and one showcased in suppliments. It shouldn't be seen as THE RIGHT way to play, but it's the default, simply because we have to have a baseine to work from. If one writer's talking about Lone Star cops as dweebs with Firearms 2, Agility 2, and swatted aside in droves while another does the same as Agility 6, Firearms 9 machines of death, well, we have problems. Establish the baseline, let local GMs change things up to make the games they want.

If you want to run a pink mohawk game, great! If you want a mirrorshades game, fantastic! If you want a noir detective story, a gritty street drama, or a rollicking Yiff-venture of the Starship Starfox, more power to you. We ain't rolling in to your living room and flipping your table, honest. Heck, if I could, I'd love to open the official page to a "Fanhacks" sub-page, where people submit their house rules/house games to a central database so people can see how they run things differently, maybe get inspired to do their own thing. Way above my paygrade that, but I think it'd be tres fantastique.

Does that make a general kind of sense? It's a paradigm-wide approach that would cover spells, programs, skills and combat equally with the same core logic and mechanics... and it keeps the results for all but the most legendary 'runners within that (1-6) range. After all, the Positive Quality to improve an inherent Limit could be bought later to indicate learning to transcend as well as balancing "everybody" buys by making it have to be bought more than twice. You're really good with LOGic linked skills? You just buy up that one. I'd probably say cut the Karma cost by one or two per to reflect the narrower focus but keep from getting low enough it's an "out-of-hand" buy for whatever the character's main focus is every time.

S// Kerenshara

I think limits will gradually be improved over time. The concept is based on older stuff (Force limiting successes from magic), then applied across the assorted mechanics. There are some improvements to be made, a few bugs to catch out, but it's a new design and that's to be expected. Your approach ain't bad. It's a tad different than what's in my head, and somewhat different than what others have suggested, but I think, in time, we'll get it to a point where everyone can run with it. I know some people have tossed them out of their home game entirely, and, as noted above, that's fine. I dig them, but the execution needs a touch of refinement IMHO.

Hopefully this smooths out some issues you might have had. Dumpshock's a family ... yeah, we roughhouse with one another and sometimes doors get slammed, but some of us have been here for ten years or more. I want everybody to get along is possible.

If you have any questions or issues, feel free to ask me and I'll answer as best I can. I accept criticism as well, but I ask that it be constructive if possible. (An old boss of mine said it best, "If you come to me with a problem, try to bring a solution with you.") If it's a small one (For example, "Why is there no statline for a FFBA shirt?" then it's probably an easy one. Broader ones might take a bit more time. Some things I *can't* answer, due to non-disclosure stuff or not being privy to such decisions, or just, you know, flat-out not knowing, but I'm always happy to help where I can.

[Mantis]

Kerenshara, I get your idea on limits and that can certainly work. In fact I would have been fine with limits if they had been set out that way in SR5. I too have played L5R so the concept is familiar. I would have preferred, I think, for weapons to modify those limits rather than being a limit on its own. This way weapons become less of a single choice thing. There really seems to be just 1 or maybe 2 weapons at each category that are worth looking at.
Most guns in the real world throw bullets just fine and accuracy of the weapon matters less than the skill of the user. At least it doesn't matter much until you get out to longer ranges where those differences become more noticeable. But most SR combat never happens in those longer ranges so I don't see the need to model it.
Anyway, we've gone back to our SR4 game and just lifted the stuff we liked from 5th edition into it. Yes, despite how it may seem, I do actually like some of the stuff in 5th ed. There were some excellent concepts in there but the execution lacked. I like the matrix mechanics but not the idea of bricking gear. Just changed that bit to causing gear to reset. Causes the same short term effect of the character losing access to the gear without the insanity of having that gear burned out until you get to a repair shop. Dumped the wireless bonuses entirely because they make little sense. Dumped the expensive cyberdecks and reworked commlinks so they could have an attack and sleaze module added for hackers. This is pretty expensive so it becomes something you do because you want to fill that roll rather than because you bought an agent and were going to script kiddie your way through.
We kept the cumulative recoil and strength based recoil compensation. We went with the rules for learning skills and attributes in 5th. I liked that idea better than the 4th edition version. We addressed the issue of combat spells by modifying the 5th edition solution. Damage from direct combat spells is net hits x2, with no force addition. Force acts as a limit, just as it always has. This has worked quite well so far. We took the 5th edition movement rates. This was one thing from previous editions I do like. It always bugged me that 4th ed characters of a given race all move at the same rate.
I also use some of the optional rules for 4th edition. Increased lethality for example. We haven't used the dice pool caps suggested but we might in the future.
While play testing this to make sure it worked, the first thing we noticed was that while characters get injured more, we weren't seeing the deaths we got with 5th edition, even using increased lethality. The spell caster wasn't an 'I win' button with stun ball either. He hurt the baddies but they could still function unless he got a good roll or edged his roll. The matrix ran much faster for the most part. It does seem that matrix combat needs some clean up though. Too much of a reliance on a bad luck roll to win, which seems odd. The basic mechanics are just melee combat and we don't see this in melee. More testing needed.

Wakashaani, I appreciate your comments on the development side of the game. I like getting some insight in to how things were done. The thing I see is that there seems to be a frequent disconnect between what you guys put together in the rough draft and what actually gets printed. I saw this with stuff Patrick Goodman did for 4th edition quite a bit too. It makes me sad when I see some good idea revealed and then see them actually implemented so poorly. Of course it is always easier to point out the flaws than to offer fixes. Anyway, I don't really share the idea that there is a problem with trolls specifically. I like them being tanks but in our games, we play with characters running around in suits and more casual wear rather than maxed out armour options so we don't run into the 30+ dice monsters often.
I think the problem lies in all the mods you can get to stack up. A troll would be better off in 4th ed wearing layered armour and cyber limbs with orthoskin than he would in military armour. That is weird from a concept level. Law of unintended consequences I guess? Or lack of adequate play testing? There are too many ways to add soak dice that stack up in 4th.
I find the opposite in 5th, in that there isn't enough armour. The increased damage from weapons and their increased AP makes the little bit armour went up in value to be pointless. Especially with APDS available at character generation and things like spirits getting AP equal to force for certain attacks. I think this is why I saw so many more character deaths in 5th than I did in 4th, even after we modified our 4th ed campaign to use the increased lethality rules. For everything up to SMGs this is basically what 5th ed did, add +2 to the damage of weapons. After that point though, while the weapon damage may be closer to real world rifle damage, it isn't really survivable with the armour options available. Those damages went up a lot more and in some cases included increased AP.
This would be fine if rifles were rare in the game but it seems every adventure writer out there gives the bad guys an AK-97 at the least. So if the players stick with the concealable weapons, they end up out gunned. So they carry the big guns and this escalates things. I think this is an editing issue though. The published adventures need to be checked for this sort of thing. Should corp sec always have FN-HARs or should they instead be geared up with HK-227s? Anyway, that is more game design stuff and I'm not sure I want to make this post much longer.

I do have one question that has been bugging me since I saw the previews for 5th ed. Why did dwarves get a body boost? They went from have a +1 body in 1st through 4th ed to getting a +2 body in 5th edition.

[cndblank]

Cndblank:
I actually preferred the earlier solution to legendary runners. Namely, don't give them stats. Just use them as plot devices. That way you can keep up the legend and never have to be disappointed by a lousy dice roll. Your players shouldn't generally be fighting legends anyway, which is the only reason you would need to stat them out.

Good points.
I liked how they tried to provide wireless bonuses to show why everything is interconnected.
I didn't like how they rammed it side ways down our throat after retconning the standard "Professional" grade countermeasures.

I agree with you on statless legendary runners, but some runners are more legendary than others.

In 4th for Boss fights using Edge really helps but if I wanted to run the group against a martial arts master, I was SOL since he likely only had a couple of skill dice more than them.

With 5th, I can add up to an extra 6 skill dice which makes a REAL difference.

[Kerenshara]

Wakshaani,

Thanks again for the reply.

In sort-of reverse order:

I think limits will gradually be improved over time. The concept is based on older stuff (Force limiting successes from magic), then applied across the assorted mechanics. [ed: emphasis mine] There are some improvements to be made, a few bugs to catch out, but it's a new design and that's to be expected. Your approach ain't bad. It's a tad different than what's in my head, and somewhat different than what others have suggested, but I think, in time, we'll get it to a point where everyone can run with it. I know some people have tossed them out of their home game entirely, and, as noted above, that's fine. I dig them, but the execution needs a touch of refinement IMHO.

Right, I picked up on that bit, but my feeling was that it was come at backwards and the logic and reasoning - as you admitted - was about discouraging "dump stats" which is all about limiting Module Monsters™ instead of encouraging Skillful Professionals or just organic (meta)human characters.

If you like to tinker, give the notion I proposed a shot keeping in mind the assumptions in the 'verse about levels of skill. Funny how suddenly people with 2 skill wind up acting like at least they know which end to point at the other fellow but aren't godly from mods and good AGIlity. IRL, cops should be "professional" with firearms at 3, but look at ALL the news reports - if they weren't ex-Iraq/Afghanistan-military then the later reports show appalling hit rates even at close ranges... "gang banger unarmed kid shot 17 time!" is the headline but the report admits the three officers discharged their 15-round magazines at a distance of 20 feet. That's appalling. It also keeps people with a high REAction from trying to pull stunts without the appropriate Drive skill since they'll be limited to a single hit.

Other place this comes into play: With a max limit on hits for generic skills tied to the rating of the skill, you can do things like dredge up the old Concealability ratings and apply them to the modern guns and convert the old numbers to thresholds (I had an OLD thread about 5 years back talking how to do it but the short version is: the old Conceal 2 was Threshold 1; Next two levels were a -1 Dice Penalty at the same threshold... third increase adds to the Threshold and zeroes the modifiers. Repeat up to whatever. Makes it easy to see if any of the NPCs has a realistic chance of spotting the concealed item rather than having every punk in the room roll a check looking to get lucky. And it gets rid of Palming as the basis which is just silly as Kerenshara demonstrated over and over to my GM's amazing annoyance until he broke down and used my system and suddenly his life got better and she got more circumspect. Yes, it hurt my ability (accidental synergy of Adept Powers and skills + stats) but it played "right". Conceal 18 = Threshold 6, -1 die.)

Another thing we did to cut down on dice was to compare the "buy hits" level and compare it to various tests; The GM determined how "hard" things would be based on the fluff descriptions and if you had enough skill you could "buy" enough hits and keep them then we didn't even bother for non-combat rolls. I guess you could compare it to the d20 System "take 10" and it made things SO much simpler. (Eg: since "hacking" -so glad to have 'decks back again- was so tedious, if it wasn't going to involve Black IC or a Spider the GM set a difficulty and looked at the character's skill and if it exceeded the threshold he just waved his hand and it happened over whatever appropriate time.) For things like security gates and ID checks, if the item's level beat the system, we skipped the rolls. If they tied the GM would make a quick call if it would get in the way of the story if things went awry (Basically, it did a very good job of encouraging people to get expensive IDs and Licenses and not to do stupid stuff IC that would get them burned. Amazing how circumspect people got because they "lived" their good ID and "becoming" another is a pain since you can't "live" the old one any more. "I LIKED being Larry Garber of Wisconsin!"

That rambled, so let me retry this:

1. IF ( Item RTG > Opposing System, Pass, Roll ) for IDs and Cyberscanners and the like.
2. IF ( ( ( Skill+Stat+Fixed Mods ) / 4) >= Threshold, Pass, Roll ) for non-dangerous "hacking"/Decking and the like.
3. IF ( Threshold > Kept Hits Cap, No Roll, Roll ) for Perception and such. (Combined 2, if the NPC is "guaranteed" to see the shotgun under the long coat, there's no OOC dice roll to tip off the player.)

Amazing how well those combined with the caps I listed (minus the Attribute-based caps new to SR5) to make people play smarter at the table and keep things flowing AND keep the events in line with the expectations laid out in the book for difficulty. Bottom line, the players and their characters couldn't count on modifiers and high Attributes (easy to add to with magic, 'ware and gear) to carry them through everything without care; having a trained spotter and a competent driver and such became pretty important and as a result each person got respect for their role on the team. Ran a couple different campaigns like that with different "extras" to our core crew of players and it's pretty surprising how consistent the results became and everybody had fun.

*deep breath*

OK, to your first part.

We're talking circles around each other instead of AT each other, and I'm pretty certain of that now. Bear that statement in mind because I don't want this to even seem a dig at you.

You're missing my point though I'm pretty sure I've gotten yours. I'll paraphrase yours: trolls are a problem and balancing them has caused issues both mechanical and philosophical. Same goes for combat et. all. You expect people to "tinker" with the game (though a Mod on the "official" forum cautioned me against "tinkering with" the caps because of "unforeseen consequences" which didn't sit well with me) but try to set a default. Got that.

I'm trying to make a subtler point.

The "Default" for fluff and concept (your Lone Star Rent-a-Cop Rookie vs. Lone Star Death Machine is awesome and really makes the point well) stuff is not your problem. I'm looking deeper.

The problem is that IF you approach a problem with one or two "key" things in mind as nails needing hammers, you're going to inevitably hammer them just fine BUT it will ALWAYS color your group's thinking about the project on a subconscious level. You touched on it in your reply making reference to Cons and Missions (read: one-shot modules, even if they are related to each other, because the same party won't run all of them by design due to table changes per time slot). If you try to balance the game to handle 2-dimensional Module Monsters™ who are just stat sheets not characters then every single rule you (collectively) write will subtly reflect that bias. Balancing the game towards modules M U S T balance it against long-campaign home play. It's just the way it is, and just like the tradeoffs you keep talking about with trolls and the way things cascade away from the decisions made. This part is no different but much subtler. It strongly encourages home campaign GMs to adopt more House Rules than were necessary in SR4/4A.

If your predominant audience (as a business model) is the people who don't make it to Cons or play the Modules as part of their own ongoing home games (read: a big majority of your fan base) then balancing the rules toward the stuff they aren't using creates friction and alienates people. As the posts about events (true or false) at CGL demonstrate, it's very easy to sour good will and very hard to overcome bad will. The people who post here aren't a good sampling of everybody who plays and I'll give that point up without quibble; however, people like us do tend to speak for the spirit of the body public and we do tend to cover both extremes (the endless and mostly good-natured Pink Mohawk vs. PIMS debate being a great example) on most issues... but have you noticed even the "moderates" on here aren't stepping up to strongly defend CGL? Individual writers and contributors like you, absolutely; but the "face" of the SR-X system? No. You mostly hear at least veiled grumblings and the low level grumbling now is broader than it was right after the events in question (at the time you had people strongly saying "benefit of the doubt" or "wait and see" to oppose the firebrands... now the people formerly waiting are done waiting and they have a bad taste in the mouth despite remaining loyal to the 6th World as their continued posting here amply demonstrates and the "haters" still post indicating Shadowrun is important to them but their anger hasn't dimmed a watt). Me? I have a little aftertaste that's less than pleasant but the books started coming out again and the quality picked up (did I mention my digital copy (don't own DTF) of 6th World Almanac has an entire full sidebar which is missing because they duplicated the text of one a dozen pages earlier? War and 6th World Almanac represented the trough of the curve and I think it recovered pretty well for the most part...) but that's my opinion and YAMMV. And my loyalty to the 6th World? My spouse has MANY times asked in exasperation after listening to a piece of music or watching a movie or even talking about politics and the approaching Corporate Extrateritoriality "Is it ALWAYS about Shadowrun for you?!" That answer the question? *wink*

Lastly, let me bring up Mil-Spec Armor. Had the same Mod on the official board where I asked my OP question (who never even addressed the question other than to agree FFBA was intentionally Nerfed) say stacking Second Skin was worthless when I suggested it was as good or better than FFBA. I replied that adding YNT Softweave and stacking it with the Executive Suite yields Armor 14 / Capacity 9 which is pretty favorable compared to Light Security Armor (in the old days, the real bar you measured against being the intro to "heavy" armor) at 15 and 12 respectively and a cost/avail of 28,000¥/12&14 vs. 8000¥/14R. Their response? Toss back Hardened Mil-Spec Battle Armor with YNT added (to a "hardened" armor??). That's part of why over a couple threads, reading Run & Gun, and reading between the lines that the DEVs seem - collectively - to view the SR-X community as playing the game like Call of Duty rather than the other examples I offered above in this thread. I remember when the meme making everybody laugh was the assault to free Morpheus from The Matrix and the caption read: Shadowrun - admit it; this is how you really pay it. I get the impression that these days it would be the "How the public sees me, how I see myself, how my mother sees me" with "how the DEVs see me" with a picture of Call of Duty.

Have I finally (my fault, not yours) managed to explain what it is I'm really on about here? It's like... tone of voice. Almost a dismissive derision saying "Yeah, we want you to Role Play not Roll Play but you're Players and we know you're really just going to try to break the system we wrote so we're going to let you make House Rules if you really do want to (air quotes) Role Play and otherwise we're going to write rules for the rest of you Munchkins."

Why else would we see gear in the first major supplement to SR5 that will probably never actually show up outside a war zone or the players being monumentally stupid? That stuff used to show up way down the line. Even the regular militaries of the 6th World don't routinely go into battle wearing M-SHBA - usually they have on a heavy (stacking) vest over something akin to Ares Victory Big Game Hunter. It's the same logic that just having gotten an implant in the military doesn't make it Beta Grade; it's just more likely to get a Beta implant if you're Special Forces than working at a desk. And people with Beta Grade implants very likely wouldn't be wearing M-SHBA (unless Canon changed between SR4 and SR5) because in the kind of ops they get sent on, that kind of gear gets in the way of the mission. You're more likely to find M-SHBA in units that are Heavy Armored Cavalry or something similar - veteran special units which are still short of SpeOps. Why? Even in Heavy M-SHBA if you do a real assault against military-grade heavy weapons, you're still going to have a lot of casualties. A single set of Beta Grade Cybereyes nearly matches the price (84%) of the HEAVY armor minus the helmet. In the 6th World, "bodies are cheap; 'ware is expensive". You can install RIG and a BioMonitor in a suit and have a full feed on the trooper and give them the equivalent of DNI to the suit for all the sensors and add-ons. Since I mentioned it, I'd love to see the stats for regular-infantry "battle-rattle" like I described. Getting your hands on THAT as a shadowrunner is a lot more likely and you could be mistaken for a SWAT unit (as opposed to HRT in Security Armor) if you pick your weapons right.

Hmm, having said that, I DOUBLY want to see Canon stats for that because the characters would likely face off against that if they fail to clear an area after the alarms go off. Since you were involved with the M-SHBA (M-SHeBA like HMMWV became Humvee?) I'd love your take on the armored battle uniform with the matching stacking vest. Not Canon of course until/unless you can sell the idea to the rest of the CGL/SR5 team for a later supplement. My take? Make the vest "hardened". Ooh, right. Make the vest the primary piece and have the under-uniform be equivalent to big Game Hunter but with a stack bonus (that isn't hardened) when added to the vest. That would look like 14/+3 for the uniform and the vest would be like 11 (enough to bounce some assault-rifle fire) on its own. Add on some kind of minor-ish movement or encumbrance penalty for the vest itself so it's not "free" and come up with a price South of Security Armor. Now you have something with slightly less total protection the the armor suits while offering a bonus over civilian gear, less capacity (no thoughts on that yet), and very attractive for mass-issue. What's your thought on that as an off-the-cuff answer to a stray thought that fills a blank I hadn't really identified before but is glaringly obvious when you look at it? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

>>I forgot and sticking this in the above ramble would be lost: I'm very happy with all the hostile environment stuff and the much MUCH better explosives stuff in R&G compared to Arsenal and delighted to have it so early on. After all, once the 'run is blown, "there are few problems which can't be solved by the appropriate and judicious use of high explosives", and it makes having a level of the Temperature Tolerance Adept Power really meaningful mechanically instead of just for RP value. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) <<

Heck, if I could, I'd love to open the official page to a "Fanhacks" sub-page, where people submit their house rules/house games to a central database so people can see how they run things differently, maybe get inspired to do their own thing. Way above my paygrade that, but I think it'd be tres fantastique.

I think that's brilliant and I've always been more than willing to put up complete ideas. I had an idea for expanded mentor spirits a few years back I completely wrote up and posted in a thread that I got a lot of PMs asking permission to use. I appreciate the requests but if I wanted to keep it to myself I wouldn't have bothered to make it pretty and post it. Anything I share is fair game - even for Canon - so long as if money gets attached I get a copy of the book and attribution somewhere in the credits.

Hopefully this smooths out some issues you might have had. Dumpshock's a family ... yeah, we roughhouse with one another and sometimes doors get slammed, but some of us have been here for ten years or more. I want everybody to get along is possible.

I'd like to think you see my comments -even back years ago - as meeting that test.

"If you come to me with a problem, try to bring a solution with you.

How'd I do?

S// Kerenshara

[Kerenshara]

I agree with you on statless legendary runners, but some runners are more legendary than others.

Like you said: "good points".

Remember when the Great Dragons didn't have stats because it was inconceivable for any PC to actually survive engaging one unless it decided to let the idiot live?

S// Kerenshara

[Kerenshara]

*sigh* okay, I eat crow when I'm wrong... *Om Nom - choke*

The moderator on the main board clarified their comment and gave a way to hit their numbers with civilian armor. Hadn't considered their route since I thought we were trying to stay with less-than-obvious gear and you'd have to find a way to justify keeping on a Greatcoat indoors even using the Fashion Spell whereas Second Skin and a business suit can be Fashion-ed to look right almost anywhere. Doesn't changed my argument, just my sentiment and feelings. Editing the Wall-o'-Text would be too tedious so I just made it a separate reply.

Sorry.

S// Kerenshara

[tjn]

I was typing while you were posting so I kind-of address this in my post right behind yours. I'd like your thoughts on my reply to Mantis.

Sure thing, this will get long, so I apologize to everyone =p

See: Living Greyhawk. Plenty of "legal" Gouda there. Writing ANY role playing system with the assumption the GM won't have any control deprives the GM and the players of flexibility to play their kind of game - you have to play the within the narrowly constrained limits of the DEVs assumptions.

Shadowrun Missions are a thing. Whether they should be a thing is another thing entirely; you obviously had some negative experiences, but I don't think they're going to go anywhere any time soon. So I'm just going to take it as a given when getting into the nuts and bolts of the system but because Missions is a thing, RAW becomes rather important. This is because, as you've alluded to, there is as many different ways of playing rpgs as there are players and every approach is as valid as everyone else's.

While you and I lean probably more towards the playing of a role aspect of rpgs, there are others that treat their characters similarly to game pieces, and the infinite possibilities for challenging scenario play is what gets their juices going. And they aren't wrong for it, but those two differing playstyles probably shouldn't game together without a lot of talk and compromise on every side to come to a consensus. This is another way of setting foundations and a shared basis for understanding so that everyone can come to play on the same page.

But the thing is, Missions is an official doohickey and because of that, if a player wants to play in Missions, it's important that Missions allow them in.

But I just got finished talking about how players with differing playstyles probably should talk and compromise prior to ever sitting down at the table, and Missions is in a convention atmosphere, where it's likely that everyone else at the table is a stranger. Talking it out before every Missions game at a convention is just implausible, so we need another way to set that baseline for a shared experience, and the only baseline between every player, from the eldest grognard to the 13 y/o who only just got the mainbook today... is that mainbook. This is why RAW, and polishing RAW to a point where it shouldn't need house rules, is important. RAW becomes ever player's shared basis for understanding SR.

So the flexibility? You can still do whatever you want in your home games; I've got more than a few house rules myself, but when making a game under the assumption that it is going to played, together, by people with vastly different playing styles, Rule 0 cannot be invoked because so many different players have different versions of what Rule 0 means to them, which just gets people off on different pages again.

My groups played two of the modules and the consensus was: they suck compared to a personalized campaign.

My group played through some of the missions stuff and had fun, we also played through Ghost Cartels and absolutely loathed it. It's a mixed bag, and always will be, because of that whole different approaches to gaming. However a personalized campaign will always be better, because it's specifically tailored to your table, and the stuff that's published has to take into account the entire gamut of playstyles.

Furthermore, when you're module-oriented you wind up with characters built to MEET that expectation with no emphasis on, oh I don't know... languages, knowledge skills, secondary skills, hobbies or the background that support them.

And by playing at your table, which does put an emphasis on those things, you are now creating an expectation in which the characters built for your table are now built to meet your expectations. Because your table has had some history together and people know what the general playstyle is. Missions doesn't have that, Missions only has the main book, the actual Missions themselves, and whatever Bull (the guy who took on the job of organizing Missions) can publish, either to volunteers at Cons or across the internet.

So the only expectation that there can be for Missions is that they've read the main book, which then means the only expectation for building characters for Missions is: "Is that character rules legal?" Which again comes back to RAW, and making sure the dev gets RAW right.

OK, having pushed my own buttons there, I'll reduce it to this: You can't legislate stupid

You can't legislate stupid, but a good dev can make a system robust enough to handle that stupidity, while at the same time encouraging a certain style of play by making "optimium" choices encourage that style of play. A good dev will make a player's system mastery work for the game, rather than breaking the game.

There are multiple ways to play Shadowrun, always have been, always will be

And every one of them is equally valid. But Missions needs to be able to accommodate as many differing views at the same table as possible in order to accomplish its goal of fostering an overall Shadowrun community. Letting your buttons be pushed because Missions and the other pre-gens aren't specifically suited for your table is only going to lead you to be angry, because Missions, and to an extent RAW, have to specifically not be suited to any one table, so as to be as inclusive as possible in order to bring in more players to the Shadowrun community.

That's why my first House Rule before I got to Char Gen

Question: did you ever play the game as is? To see if it was actually a problem in play and not just something you felt was wrong in theory? Personally I'm not a fan of limits, but they did add an additional dimension to gear that I felt was needed, and creates an additional pressure on Edge use, and highlights the really good rolls as being important, because of that pressure on Edge. That said, in play things like the combat axe become nigh useless and any limit under 5 in a contested test.

Does that make a general kind of sense? It's a paradigm-wide approach that would cover spells, programs, skills and combat equally with the same core logic and mechanics... and it keeps the results for all but the most legendary 'runners within that (1-6) range.

There's two small wrinkles I could see from your house rule, and they totally depend on the type of table you're at. The first is, that it's kinda computationally heavy. Not the worst that has shown up in an rpg by any means, but I had one player once that refused to do any math more than simple addition and subtraction. He just wanted to show up and have a good time, and as math was relatively hard for him (pretty bad dyslexia), and a player like that would balk. I got tired of making his sheets for him and doing all the calculations for whatever system we'd use, but when we tried out WoD, he really liked it... because of that lack of maths. But that's a table by table thing and you don't need to be inclusive of everyone; just everyone at your table.

The other thing is a little more serious. Most of SR is based off of contested rolls which means even if you max out a combat skill, that limit is going to mostly be a 3 for a starting character, no matter what weapon they're using. I already dislike Combat Axes for having a limit of 4 and never hitting, 3's across the board would mean whiffville for everyone. Most characters are going to be able to get 3 hits on their dodge test, which has no limit, and so even the best shooter out of chargen is going to miss most of the time. That's just the most obvious thing, but it extends to other opposed tests like social tests, because if the character has at least a three in the skill, he will always win (unless he rolls rather badly) when faced with anyone with less of a skill than he has. Secondly, a lot of the electronics gear uses device ratings as their limits, which in general are higher than three, and might lead to unintended consequences such as using sensors instead of perception for everything, including what's right in front of the character.

Maybe you can fix this by applying the limit to net hits instead of after the roll is made, but if your goal is to keep things in the 1-6 range, the lower of anything and a skill/2, round up, limit puts every skill limit for a starting character in the 1-3 range. Or maybe you can reduce the amount of limit given by the attributes, and add a factor generated by the skills, or maybe use the higher of whatever attribute limit and the skill rank. But these are the kinds of unintended consequences that happen when monkeying around with the system in a way a GM shouldn't have to. Limits shouldn't need GMs to polish them because they are so core to the entire system, and effect everything =/

Alright, got some time freed up, so time to chat a bit more on this one.

Thanks =) I appreciate the insight, were you going to open up a new thread on trolls, or just keep it here?