What is it about 3rd Edition? Options

[ShadowDragon8685]

I disagree. Optimization, especially how unevenly optimized characters can easily become, is exactly the problem with Shadowrun. It isn't a matter of 'traps', as it is that given enough min-maxing, you can create characters who are so wildly out of parity power wise that challenges that one brushes off will have a pretty good chance of wiping out the rest of the players.

This is a bad thing to encourage.

Right, so the guy who's actually good at making characters and who likes to come to the table to sit down and shoot things right in the goddamn face for money should be punished for so doing, or prohibited for so doing?


I take a different tactic: Player-capability-blind opposition.

Unless the opposition are prepping specifically for the player characters (in which case, depending on the group, no measures up to and including tactical nuclear weapons, are out of the question,) I prep the opposition based on who they are, what kind of resources they have access to, and what kind of constraints are upon them.

If the opposition is street bangers and one of the players is a combat monkey getting his Human Revolution on, so be it, he deserves to go through street bangers like, well, a pissed-off Adam Jensen going through street bangers. The fact that street bangers would be a good challenge for the hacker who's seconding as a gun-bunny is immaterial. And if the opposition is a moneyed conspiracy with ties to multiple AAA megacorps, prepping for fully-cybered corporate hit squads and awakened assaults by Tir Ghosts or Dragons, and the combat monkey is the only guy in their league, then so be it, the group should try to think of an alternative, up to and including giving Mr. Johnson his down-payment back and walking away.

[tjn]

Staying with that image, parts are a lot easier to arrange if you may sand off a bit here, and add some filling there.

The disconnect you're having is that you have a predefined idea of what the character is, and are attempting to force whatever character generation system to fit that preconceived notion. Of course you're going to have more problems with priority because it has less granularity to "sand off bits" to fit your preconceived notion of what that character is. However a new player going into the system functions a lot better if I ask him "what's most important to your character?" and they say they want to be a skill monkey, I say "Great, you now have 46 skill points, and 10 points to place in skill groups." They're now fitting who the character is according to how many points they've got, and they're not spending any time or mental effort on sanding or filling in. The character has 46 skill points, that's just who the character is.

The goal of character creation from a systems point of view, is to create characters of a consistent power level. The less granularity, the more similar characters are to each other, and thus they are more consistent in power level. This is at natural odds with the desire to customize and differentiate the character from others. This is a continuum and there is no proper answer, because you care much more about customizing the character than say, binarywraith, who seems to prefer having a consistent parity between characters straight from character generation.

As an exercise, have you (and anyone that feels that customization is more important than parity between characters) ever thrown out the character creation system altogether? Have you asked yourself, "how strong is this character?" and wrote down what you felt best fit the character you have already envisioned? I assure you, you will have all the customization you desire, and the character will be exactly as you have envisioned they are. This is a perfectly fine approach, and as an example, Marvel Heroic takes this approach, but it's not for everyone as there tends to be a knee jerk negative response on the part of gamers against this. If you have this knee jerk response, like many do, you might want to ask yourself why is that? If you don't have that response, why are you dealing with a character creation system to begin with? I promise you, you will be much happier just assigning the stats that feel best rather than using Priority, BP, Karma, or any other system.

Quite frankly, optimization is not a bad thing. Falling into trap options is a bad thing, but a good GM should guide players away from trap options.

Quite frankly, optimization shouldn't be needed. That there exists trap options at all is a bad thing, and a good system shouldn't even have them to begin with, and a GM shouldn't have to fight the system to get it into a balanced state. Now I love optimizing and playing with numbers scratches a certain itch, but I've had players in the past who abjectly hated learning the system and just wanted to play. A system with traps either makes it harder on the GM, as I now have to handhold the player through character creation and warn them against things like Uneducated, or as a GM I play russian roulette with player characters that may come with distinctly different power levels or have to somehow posthoc salvage that Uneducated character without gutting the player's concept or letting in an unplayable character.

[tjn]

Right, so the guy who's actually good at making characters <...> should be punished for so doing, or prohibited for so doing?

Punished? No. But unequal levels of optimization leads to problems at the table, usually in either a spotlight problem where the properly optimized character does everything better than the poorly optimized character, thus leading to the player of the poorly optimized character having significantly less impact, influence, and interaction with the game, or problems for the GM when creating a properly balanced challenge for the team, when what's challenging for one player would make road pizza of another (or leads back to the first problem where the optimizing player runs through the challenge as if it wasn't there, eliminating the agency of the unoptimized player.

To flip your question around, should a player who isn't good at optimization have innately less agency as a player, simply because they'd rather focus on acting and playing the part of their character than placing numbers within a system in a mechanically efficient manner?

[Fatum]

I disagree. Optimization, especially how unevenly optimized characters can easily become, is exactly the problem with Shadowrun. It isn't a matter of 'traps', as it is that given enough min-maxing, you can create characters who are so wildly out of parity power wise that challenges that one brushes off will have a pretty good chance of wiping out the rest of the players.
This is a bad thing to encourage.

A bad thing to encourage is players incompetent enough to be unable to even make a character.
Of all systems, Shadowrun does not have a party powerlevel problem, because unlike, say, D&D, every character essentially faces his own set of problems. What does a samurai care whether a hacker roll 10 or 30 dice, other than the latter is more likely not to bring trouble on his head? Similarly, what does a hacker care if the sam has 2 IPs or 3, other than the latter being more likely to keep him alive? The archetypes more likely to be directly comparable, like adepts and sammies or hackers and technos, when done right, produce characters quite alike in powerlevel.

I take a different tactic: Player-capability-blind opposition.

Unless the opposition are prepping specifically for the player characters (in which case, depending on the group, no measures up to and including tactical nuclear weapons, are out of the question,) I prep the opposition based on who they are, what kind of resources they have access to, and what kind of constraints are upon them.

If the opposition is street bangers and one of the players is a combat monkey getting his Human Revolution on, so be it, he deserves to go through street bangers like, well, a pissed-off Adam Jensen going through street bangers. The fact that street bangers would be a good challenge for the hacker who's seconding as a gun-bunny is immaterial. And if the opposition is a moneyed conspiracy with ties to multiple AAA megacorps, prepping for fully-cybered corporate hit squads and awakened assaults by Tir Ghosts or Dragons, and the combat monkey is the only guy in their league, then so be it, the group should try to think of an alternative, up to and including giving Mr. Johnson his down-payment back and walking away.

Yes, absolutely, you're as if reading my mind. The only problem is you still have to give players something to do no matter their powerlevel. When characters can come out of chargen with teen-sized pools, that means you're somewhat restricted in the themes chosen if you want the opposition to be both believable and challenging.

[Fatum]

Punished? No. But unequal levels of optimization leads to problems at the table, usually in either a spotlight problem where the properly optimized character does everything better than the poorly optimized character, thus leading to the player of the poorly optimized character having significantly less impact, influence, and interaction with the game, or problems for the GM when creating a properly balanced challenge for the team, when what's challenging for one player would make road pizza of another (or leads back to the first problem where the optimizing player runs through the challenge as if it wasn't there, eliminating the agency of the unoptimized player.

It puzzles me why people seem to link spotlight with character powerlevel. These can sometimes be linked, but player personality and roleplaying skills affect this immeasurably more. Say, for example, your sammy can be as optimized as humanly possible, but if you make him a grim loner and don't speak up at the sessions, you're at the very best rolling a bit more dice than the others - or even getting no spotlight at all, faces and/or hackers solving the problems the troupe is facing.

To flip your question around, should a player who isn't good at optimization have innately less agency as a player, simply because they'd rather focus on acting and playing the part of their character than placing numbers within a system in a mechanically efficient manner?

Why should a player who can't read a couple dozen pages worth of rules be encouraged? We're not dealing in rocket science here, making a decent character does not involve solving equations, even 5th-grade-level ones, or wading through obscure supplements like in some other systems. And it's certainly not mutually exclusive with desire for acting, rather, these are completely independent personal characteristics no more linked than the hair colour and the sense of humour. If anything, a player who put more work into his character is easier to engage.

[toturi]

Punished? No. But unequal levels of optimization leads to problems at the table, usually in either a spotlight problem where the properly optimized character does everything better than the poorly optimized character, thus leading to the player of the poorly optimized character having significantly less impact, influence, and interaction with the game, or problems for the GM when creating a properly balanced challenge for the team, when what's challenging for one player would make road pizza of another (or leads back to the first problem where the optimizing player runs through the challenge as if it wasn't there, eliminating the agency of the unoptimized player.

To flip your question around, should a player who isn't good at optimization have innately less agency as a player, simply because they'd rather focus on acting and playing the part of their character than placing numbers within a system in a mechanically efficient manner?

To me it is a question of effort. Someone who has made an effort to optimise his character should have his character fare better than someone who did not.

So to answer the question the player who isn't good at optimisation would have to focus on acting and playing the part of his character and live with the consequences of his non-optimised character. He does not have innately less agency as a player because by focusing on acting and playing the part of his character, the GM should (and is encouraged by the rules to) reward the player. So a player who optimises his character AND acts and plays the part of his character reaps both sets of rewards.

[Glyph]

Priority may reduce your rough point allocations to several big choices, which is good for newer players who might be overwhelmed by something like build points. But it is also bad in three ways:

First, because it requires prioritizing a character correctly, at least from an optimization standpoint. Take the character creation example of the technomancer who wasted his A priority on resources. How do you think that character would compare to one who used that priority for something more useful, such as Attributes or skills?

Secondly, it is within the priorities that newbies will still make suboptimal choices. They will take average Attributes all around instead of soft-maxing important ones, and they will spread their skills too thin instead of getting high primary skills then filling out the secondary ones. They won't know which adept powers, spells, or augmentations are useful, and which are... less so.

Finally, priority doesn't stop lopsided builds - it encourages them. You have to take something for those D and E priorities, so guess what, that street samurai with A for resources, B for Attributes, and C for a high Edge will wind up with a limited number of skills outside of his specialty areas. He may very well be more min-maxed than the same character would be with some form of build points, where the player could, for example, shave off a single Attribute point and reduce Edge to 6, to get five more skill points.

[toturi]

Yes, absolutely, you're as if reading my mind. The only problem is you still have to give players something to do no matter their powerlevel. When characters can come out of chargen with teen-sized pools, that means you're somewhat restricted in the themes chosen if you want the opposition to be both believable and challenging.

The question is must the opposition always be challenging? Opposition should be believable to avoid breaking of suspension of disbelief. But challenge? To me not all opposition faced by the character should be a challenge. Also challenge should be in part chosen by the player. If the player doesn't want to face a challenge and take reasonable steps not to like avoiding tougher jobs, then he should not be forced to face tougher challenges.

[Cain]

The problem with unequal builds is that when your best tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

Let's say we have a table full of imbalanced characters. The scary powerful one is a pornomancer, the poorly-optimized build is the combat monster. It's going to rapidly reach the point where it's always better for the pornomancer to social-fu their way out of combat. When it comes to gathering intel, the pornomancer can step on the decker, by getting more critical successes while talking to contacts. And the covert ops specialist will feel useless because the pornomancer can just talk his way in, instead of needing stealth.

See, people think systems mastery should be rewarded. Well, in a game like Shadowrun , it is-- during game play, a player who understands the system better can make better moves, regardless of which character they're playing. They don't need to be rewarded twice: once for building a superior character, and again for superior game knowledge.

Finally: Back when I helped with Virtual Seattle, I saw dozens of priority characters come through. I never saw the same character duplicated, not once. Every single one was unique. Points, however, encouraged optimization more, which narrowed the field somewhat. In SR4.5, all effective characters had the same basic pattern: same gear, primary dice pool of 20+, same set of secondary skills, etc. SR3 priority also has the benefit of minimizing the effectiveness of system mastery-- the difference between an optimal and suboptimal spread in, say, attributes is much smaller than you would get under SR4.5's BP.

[Glyph]

The question is must the opposition always be challenging? Opposition should be believable to avoid breaking of suspension of disbelief. But challenge? To me not all opposition faced by the character should be a challenge. Also challenge should be in part chosen by the player. If the player doesn't want to face a challenge and take reasonable steps not to like avoiding tougher jobs, then he should not be forced to face tougher challenges.

That's kind of like a 10th level D&D party staying in the first level of the dungeon all the time, killing kobolds and giant rats. It might be fun for awhile, but I imagine it would get boring eventually, and they would probably also get tired of coming back to town with a few sacks of silver and copper coins, when they know they could be bringing back chests of gold and magical wands and swords, if they braved the lower levels.

Challenge in shadowrun is hard to do, but it is less about balancing weak vs. strong characters, and more balancing out the many roles and abilities that shadowrunners can have. This is harder than it looks, because a lot of GMs probably focus on some aspects of the game, and ignore others. If it is a game with a lot of talking, legwork, and planning, then the walking death machine might be bored a lot of the time. If it is a game with lots of combat, the smooth-talking detective with a tricked-out commlink and a mastery of disguise might be wishing he had put more into his pistols skill.

Look at the street samurai and the bounty hunter archetypes. If the game is mostly about combat, the street samurai will outshine the bounty hunter. For the bounty hunter to feel useful, he needs to be able to use his wider array of skills - animal handling to know that those guard dogs won't go for those poisoned steaks because they typically won't accept food other than from their trainer; intimidation to bluff past a group of gangers when the group is already pretty banged up; locksmith to get past the rusty padlock on the gate, or climbing to get over the fence if that doesn't work; survival to help the group find shelter in the barrens.

The GM should insure that everyone gets a chance to shine. Just keep in mind that not everyone wants equal spotlight time, and that not every character will equally rock out in their spotlight time - but some players might prefer playing an average Joe to a tough guy.

[toturi]

See, people think systems mastery should be rewarded. Well, in a game like Shadowrun , it is-- during game play, a player who understands the system better can make better moves, regardless of which character they're playing. They don't need to be rewarded twice: once for building a superior character, and again for superior game knowledge.

I think that system mastery should be superior character played with superior system knowledge and that is not rewarding system mastery twice. A player that understands the system can make better moves, regardless of how optimised the character. But the best move may well be different for an optimised and non-optimised character and the results of the best move may vary due to what move it is.

[Cain]

I think that system mastery should be superior character played with superior system knowledge and that is not rewarding system mastery twice. A player that understands the system can make better moves, regardless of how optimised the character. But the best move may well be different for an optimised and non-optimised character and the results of the best move may vary due to what move it is.

See, I disagree. I think it is rewarding them twice. As a result, they do even more amazingly than other players, which can lead to hard feelings. If a character creation system is more consistent, the differences in character builds is minimized, so the optimizers get a small edge, but not an overwhelming one. They get the rest of their advantage in game.

[binarywraith]

It puzzles me why people seem to link spotlight with character powerlevel. These can sometimes be linked, but player personality and roleplaying skills affect this immeasurably more. Say, for example, your sammy can be as optimized as humanly possible, but if you make him a grim loner and don't speak up at the sessions, you're at the very best rolling a bit more dice than the others - or even getting no spotlight at all, faces and/or hackers solving the problems the troupe is facing.

Because sufficient powerlevel obviates the need to share the spotlight. When one character can solve nearly every problem the group faces, everyone else has their fun at his sufferance, which is how you get players to quit playing at your table.

[apple]

If you have a problem with player using the build point / Karma system for powergaming (whatever that may be): why don´t you create the character together with the player? I mean, sit together, go through the early years, spend points on how he developed during this late 1x / early 2x years, end with choosing the equipment. SR do not consist only of newbie players how are totally overloaded 120 points (*sarcasm*) but after some time the become vets as well. And to be honest, since using the point buy system starting in SR2 I always found it far easier to explain the point buy system to completely new SR/RPG players in opposition to the priority system, and I have never seen people having any issues with the point buy, but I have seen a lot of vets and newbies alike who had problems with the priority system.

Considering that a lot of other RPGs, from the more rule oriented like Pathfinder to the more stylish like SLA are using some form of point buy I simply cannot see any advantage in regarding of easiness or speed of charactercreation, for old or new players. 90% of character creation is equipment buying for the characters with a lot of nuyen. Chosing 40 BP to increase magic from 1 to 4 or choosing priority A for magic is in the other 10%.

SYL

[Cain]

My experience is exactly the opposite. I could teach new players Priority in a few minutes, because it's a simple step-by-step process. You do X, Y, and Z, in that order. Certain builds cold be made on a low Resources priority, like adepts. Point buy, by its very nature, is not as simple and has many more possible combinations. Thus, it's not as easy to do things is a simple order, there's always back and forth.

If you have a problem with player using the build point / Karma system for powergaming (whatever that may be): why don´t you create the character together with the player? I mean, sit together, go through the early years, spend points on how he developed during this late 1x / early 2x years, end with choosing the equipment.

I did that often in SR3 and earlier, because other than gear, building a character under priority only took a few minutes. However, in SR4/4.5, the fastest viable character I saw took over two hours, and some of mine took days. If I have four players, that means I need to spend eight hours, minimum, building characters with them. That could easily consume two or three gaming sessions, just building characters. One session I can deal with, but three?

And mind you: two hours was just for a viable character-- the bare minimum to function as a shadowrunner. I encountered more than a few characters that had to be sent back to the drawing board, because the player forgot or missed some crucial detail. In my first SR4 game, I had a player come late, so I didn't have a chance to fully look over her sheet. She was playing an otaku, but forgot to buy any Complex Forms. As a result, she was useless, and we had to stop the game so she could rebuild. Optimized characters took much longer, but even then, there were many fiddly bits that were overlooked, some of which caused a massive rewrite of the character.

Considering that a lot of other RPGs, from the more rule oriented like Pathfinder to the more stylish like SLA are using some form of point buy I simply cannot see any advantage in regarding of easiness or speed of charactercreation, for old or new players.

Not true. Shadowrun wasn't the first template system, but Priority inspired many other systems, like White Wolf. They essentially used a priority-like system, only with different categories. Savage Worlds also uses a template system. Even D&D-- 5th edition uses an array as the standard option. You can have speed and ease of use in a system, while still keeping flexibility. Point buy is not the only way, nor is it the most popular way: White Wolf is still huge.

[sk8bcn]

To me it is a question of effort. Someone who has made an effort to optimise his character should have his character fare better than someone who did not.

So to answer the question the player who isn't good at optimisation would have to focus on acting and playing the part of his character and live with the consequences of his non-optimised character. He does not have innately less agency as a player because by focusing on acting and playing the part of his character, the GM should (and is encouraged by the rules to) reward the player. So a player who optimises his character AND acts and plays the part of his character reaps both sets of rewards.

I tend to disagree.

In shadowrun, the debate tend to be biased because if the Street-sam just min-maxed and the decker did not, they have different areas to play with.

But I'll take Earthdawn as an exemple. If 1 or 2 guys optimize and the rest don't, as a GM you can't keep fights interesting because:
1-Either min-maxed characters walk through like a piece of cake.
2-Either the weaker ones can only hide and hope not to die.


DD isn't prone to min-maxing (just luck at stat rolls maybe). But give 2 characters lvl 5 characters and the rest lvl 1. You'll see how much of a problem it is.

[apple]

I did that often in SR3 and earlier, because other than gear, building a character under priority only took a few minutes. However, in SR4/4.5, the fastest viable character I saw took over two hours, and some of mine took days.

What part of character creation? I admit I only created a handful of characters for myself and another handful for my group (complete newbies), so perhaps 10-15 max. The attributes, skills and special gadgets (magic etc) were done usually in less than 30 min - it was the equipment of street samurais, riggers and hackers which blow up the process (that and the dreaded sensor rules in SR4). But that is no difference between SR12345, regardless the creation system.

Of course the BP system could be improved (i like smaller numbers and never understood why we had to go from 120 points to 400 with costs from 1 increasing to 4 for the same attribute for example).

Point buy is not the only way,

What do you say to the problem that a priority system creates vastly different characters, depending on the choice of order for priorities (if you re-calculate it back to the karma or point system)?

SYL

[binarywraith]

Not seeing a problem in priority system generating different characters than point buy. It has a greater set of limitations which make it harder to twink without making actual sacrifices.

[ShadowDragon8685]

To flip your question around, should a player who isn't good at optimization have innately less agency as a player, simply because they'd rather focus on acting and playing the part of their character than placing numbers within a system in a mechanically efficient manner?

No, and they won't have to. It's easier for a GM and infinitely less objectionable to the players, to adjust a weak character up than to adjust - or nerf - a strong character down. If someone's proving weak and lacking for agency? Hey, how about that, 10,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) just fell into their lap, go buy yourself something nice. Or maybe a nice Force 4 focus or something.

[binarywraith]

Yeah, and then what do you do for opposition? There's only so far you can scale up street gangs and generic corporate goons before you start breaking suspension of disbelief.

[toturi]

But I'll take Earthdawn as an exemple. If 1 or 2 guys optimize and the rest don't, as a GM you can't keep fights interesting because:
1-Either min-maxed characters walk through like a piece of cake.
2-Either the weaker ones can only hide and hope not to die.

I think (1) is precisely what should happen and I think that if the players do not have a problem with fights not being interesting, then there is no problem.

But if the players think that the min-maxed guys (which incidentally I think is a misunderstanding of what min-max is) walk through like cake, then just handwave combat and get on with the important bits of the story.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

Full Auto, like so many things in SR4.5, were pretty much insta-kills. In my experience, wounding people was rare; it was usually all or nothing. Stunball was the ending move, though, because it dropped large numbers of people with little drain. It was also silent, and harder to resist.

It is all in how you approach character design. Wounding was by far the most common instance of combat at our table, with very few insta-kills. Even what you call the ubiquitous Stunball was not as useful as you claim it to be since most opposition take such things into account and did not bunch up.

[sk8bcn]

I think (1) is precisely what should happen and I think that if the players do not have a problem with fights not being interesting, then there is no problem.

But if the players think that the min-maxed guys (which incidentally I think is a misunderstanding of what min-max is) walk through like cake, then just handwave combat and get on with the important bits of the story.

I should have said beeing a Munchkin. Min-maxing is fairly close, but not exactely.

Min-maxing is getting the best for the minimal cost.

For exemple, using the priority system, he will max Quickness and have minimal Stregth because it will cost him less karma to reach an average value than start the game beeing average, then develop his character.

It's the guy that picks the ennemy flaw, because with 95% of GM that flaw just creates story hooks, not really a flaw like if your character was blind (real flaw).

It's the one that will calculte the Average damage output if he takes a feat at +1 damage instead of +1 attack in DD.



The Munchkin is somewhat different. He's usually weaker at min-maxing. He just want to be a fighting monster. It's the one that picks the biggest axe, the heavy mini-gun, the troll.

Usually, he's surprised when his troll is beaten by the min-maxing elf and his combination of unfair powers that makes him invulnerable.


-----------------------

That beeing said, I don't like a group with too variable scale of power. I find that it drags down the intensity of the fight.

At my biggest surprise, Munchkin and min-maxer are usually happy to walk through like a piece of cake.

I've never understood that.

[Jaid]

That beeing said, I don't like a group with too variable scale of power. I find that it drags down the intensity of the fight.

At my biggest surprise, Munchkin and min-maxer are usually happy to walk through like a piece of cake.

I've never understood that.

munchkins just want to be the best, not to be challenged. min-maxers/optimizers derive their challenge from other things, like figuring out how to make the system work for them. some will even deliberately choose suboptimal starting points (for a D&D 3.x example, a rogue that uses a quarterstaff as opposed to, say, dual-wielding kukris) to provide the challenge. also, it is entirely possible for a powergamer to derive their enjoyment while gaming from the roleplaying aspect.

i seldom find myself with a pressing desire to roleplay a bumbling idiot, and would much rather roleplay someone who is effective at what they do, and character optimization is one way to make sure that happens.

[Stahlseele]

A Min/Maxer works inside the rules.
Bending is not prohibited.

With munchkins you can be glad if he adheres somewhat to the rules usually.
Bending them into pretzel shapes as needed to work within his interpretation.