Hahahahhahaha, once again your razor wit cuts to the quick! Hahahahahha, ohh, blakkie, you're so clever! Hahahahahahahahaha!

blakkie, your original link was to a post of yours questioning Ellery's use of the word 'linear'. i replied, for her, proving that her use of that word was perfectly legitimate (facts!). instead of saying "oh, huh, i guess i was mistaken about her use of the word 'linear'", you decided that somehow, her posts were off-topic, or something, and charged me to link them to the original post in the thread you'd linked. and, jesus god in heaven, when i tell you that the original topic has nothing to do with either our discussion or this thread as a whole, you bring up james.

seriously, is this some sort of pathological thing for you? maybe you're just smarter than everyone else, or maybe these links between these concepts you skip around to are wholly non-existant. i know where my money is.

Knock it off.

christ, i'm doing it again. i need to just stop posting in threads that blakkie posts in, period.

recap and i-hope-to-god end of sidetrack: ellery knows more about math than most of the rest of yous louses combined, and she links to people who know even more than herself. click and read for facts on what makes game systems tick, and why some tick better than others.

I've never played SR3 before, but I've heard that its decking rules are horribly bloated. Same with rigging. Is this accurate? And is it that much faster in SR4?

SR3's decking and rigging are definately.... complex, im not so sure of "bloated", atleast not as how i think of it.


Don't even get me started on the vehicle creation rules.

So, back to topic:

SR3 had a very flexible system due to core design as well as the copious amounts of expansion material that got published. However, at some point if you apply enough extra bells and whistles to any system then the whole thing starts just getting more noisy than musical.

I'm hoping that SR4's expansion material will bring the new edition back up to something approaching that flexibility without adding inconvenient complexity. As a systems designer/coder IRL I'm all about having simple-yet-flexible core functionality and then tacking on modular add-ons. So that hope I mentioned above might be just a naive pipe dream on my part.

Some people love rigging and decking some people hate them.

Going by the core rules, decking isn't that bloated it is just different. The real problem is that decking during a run is its own minigame and one which only deckers can participate in. The GM has to take time away from the other characters to run the decker's experience. SR4 tries to aliviate this with AR, but the basic problem is still there.

Vehicle rules are, i nmy opinion, marred by vehicle stats. Veheile stats are just hard to keep track of. They try to model too may varriables and model none accuratly.

I've played several SR3 Riggers. And throughout them all, one thing is true: the rules just do not work in combat in a game. Like Decking, Rigging under combat turns into a horrid lateral mathematics contest to keep track of mods, speed, direction and distance. Add in enemies, who can fire and who can't, and THEIR Mods, and combat can take an hour per turn just by maintaining the vehicle chase.

Just doing a light glance over of the combat in vehicles in 4th ed, I think they managed to successfully gut the fat out of them. Passengers don't get mods based on the driver anymore, range isn't tracked to the meter anymore, and more GM judgement calls are allowed.

SR3 decking and rigging are definitely complex. "bloated" is, i think, not too strong a term, despite the fact that i love decking and am comfortable with rigging (if not with the vehicle combat rules). that's one thing that SR4 definitely has in its favor--the decking rules, at least, are fast and fun. rigging i didn't look too closely at, and i wasn't greatly pleased with the vehicle rules when i glanced over them. the vehicle rules at least seemed playable, unlike SR3.

Essentially there is problems with both of them.
The core mechanics in both have probability issues. Where one point of TN can make a major or nonexistant difference in SR3 or where talented characters always succeed and easily in SR4, while less talented often critically fail.
On the other hand, I kind of like how in SR3 the difficulty mods are harsh until you get to 6, then you get a bit of break till 9 where it is still in the difficult but not impossible. Then it just gets more and more difficult as you go along.
In SR3, rigging was a major clusterfrag, decking was slow and annoying.
In SR4, decking flip flops the rules in a strange way (skill program as opposed to attr skill, limited by program like magic.)
In both, magic is a virtually unlimited power level, and as you go along in Karma magic users begin to surpass every other kind of character. It is worse in SR4 though, as in SR3 once you got Will 6 and Body 6, magic had a much more difficult time affecting you. It still would smash the crap out of you if the mage had Force 6 spells though. They would just have to pay for it. In SR4, even those high levels will get blown through by a better than average mage without even trying.

There are issues with both. My main problem is they went from a completely unique system that was gritty and painful, where wounds really hurt and difficult tasks were really difficult, to a system that was just like a variety of other systems and had very few actual reasons to switch to it.

Can anyone explain why the switch to attribute + skill fixed TN? It doesn't make things simpler by itself. Especially with thresholds. That gives two ways of modifying the pool. In SR3, modifiers to your pool came from the character in one of two forms. Bio or cyberware/magic or the pools. The GM gave the modifiers to TN and if necessary, extended tests. He gave you the target number, you decided how much pool and you rolled.
It could likely be made simpler.
I guess you pick up your characters pool which will always be the same, choose to use edge or not and then the gm subtracts however much from your pool and gives you the potential threshold and you roll it.
The thing I liked about SR3 is that you controlled your pool and the GM controlled the TN. Seemed simpler that way even if SR4 has less steps.

In SR3, your chances of success were based on the number of dice rolled, and the target number. Changing the number of dice rolled had a linear impact on your probability of success, and changing the TN had a geometric impact on your success.

In SR4, your chances of success are also based on 2 variables: the number of dice rolled and the threshold. Changing the number of dice rolled has a linear impact on your probability of success. Changing the threshold also has a linear impact, but is 3x more significant than just adding a die (i.e. 50% chance of 1 success with 3 dice, takes 6 dice to get 50% chance of 2 successes.)

To me the SR3 engine was significantly more comlicated than SR4. (Quick-without looking at the calculator- do you have a better chance of success rolling your Car 2 skill against a TN of 3, or defaulting to your Reaction 10 attribute against a TN 7?) Maybe I'm just slow, but it takes me a sec to figure out.

Also, because a +1 TN doesn't mean the same thing at TN 2 as it does at TN9, it can really lead to situations that model reality in ways that are less than ideal. (Personal opinion here, feel free to disagree).

On the other hand, SR4 can be more arbitrary. Difficulty is left entirely up to GM discression, so I can imagine whiny players arguing "What do you mean that's an extreme task? It should have been just difficult!" It can sometimes be easier to support TN calculations in SR3 (base 4, add 2 for smoke, minus 2 for SmartLink, add 3 for range, add two for target moving, final TN 9...)

In my mind, both systems have their shortcomings, but either one is reasonably workable and can do a good enough job of predicting probability so that it doesn't have to detract from game play.

Car 2, depending on what you're doing (IE, do you need more than 2 potential successes?). Similarly, if you've got karma to spend on rerolling failures, the Reaction 10 is a better deal.

Oh, sorry, what? There was some other conversation going on.

To expand on Apathy's point regarding arbitrariness, one of the biggest problems I've heard from SR GM's, is that either they have to do a lot of detail wok to flesh out simple npc's and combat, or have to have the books almost memorized by rote to improvise, mainly because of SR3's interconnected web of stats. Moreover, it takes a lot of creativity to prevent players from reverse engineering an NPC's stats after seeing a few rolls.

SR4 has changed that somewhat. Yes, they are using elements from other systems. But those elements also give GM's a lot more flexibility wihtout having to dive into countless books looking for the mod to a roll.

The biggest hurdle for SR has always been the same: finding a competent GM, willing to spend hours working on a game session to document and plan out the whole thing, week after week. SR4 is a giant step in making the game more accessible to GM's. It puts a lot more free-form control in their hands, without forcing them to rely on the obscure rules that might be found on some website, or one they had to come up with

I have been gaming long enough to see multiple re-releases from various established lines, here's my take.
The streamlined system and basic newness of the system will open the game up to new blood who no longer look and see a minimum of five books before they can feel like they have everything. Been plenty of times I've bitched about the clunkyness of the machanics for SR3.
However SR3 has been really well road tested.
You just carn't get the playtesting equal to a couple of million devious fraggers (I include myself in this number) to destruction test a system.
It ain't perfect but we know the kinks, the rattles and stalls so its comfortable and streamlined for our use.
FanPro's gotta make a profit, fair enough. They seem to have done a good job with SR4.
Personaly I spent the last three years and too much money,(now in FanPro's possesion) to run my game smooth and out manoeuvre my players in the SR3 system. After over a decade of play I can wait a few more years to pick up a worked through system.
Do the math and make a your choise.

so that's why you wanted all those assorted organs and limbs from the morgue. you're mad. mad!

I was all for it when he was "experimenting" by trying to add a brain to SR4, but I really don't see what all those arms and guns and more arms and more guns need to be attached for!

Oh, no. That's something else... er, I mean. What are you talking about?

My copy of SR4's being used in a behavioral psych experiment.

As a GM, I'm liking what I'm seeing in SR4.

How many of you out there preferred to have an NPC decker? How many of you, in order to keep gameplay rolling and avoid the rest of the crew going out for pizza, would just have your decker make a Computer (X) roll (or even an open check) and improv what happened from there?

How many of you out there chopped rigging down to a basic Drive modded by terrain/damage/what-have-you check, rather than bothering to dig into the rigging book and break out the *enormous* tables of modifiers every time the rigger wanted to do something stylish?

The wheelman and the decker, both pretty important members of a group, had *so many* ugly rules associated with them that I always felt I was trading off between short-changing them on their experience or grinding the game to a halt when an opportunity to involve all of their rules came about. Magic had some complicated stuff, but most of the time-consuming parts could be handled during downtime (spell design, intitiation, etc) or on the "client-side" by the player. Shooting, martial arts, facework and networking were all relatively easy to deal with on my end. As a GM, I've got X players (usually 5 or so) that I'm wrangling, and so when a particular player "class" starts eating up a much bigger chunk of my time and effort than 1/X for systemic reasons, I start getting annoyed. NPC deckers (and drivers, for that matter) are a fairly common phenomena with the SR3 groups I've played in and GM'ed for, and it's not because people don't want the job... it's because the job is a pain in the ass to do.

SR4's die mechanic is simple to implement. Player digs up his pool, decides whether or not he wants Edge, adds/subrtracts dice equal to modifiers, rolls, and hits on a 5+ (rerolling if Edge was used, instead of all the damn time). GM takes number of hits, and either opposes it with a similar check or subtracts threshold to determine net hits. Quick, clean, and while it has some statistical oddities, it's really nothing compared to the curve shift in SR3.

And I'll be honest... I like the new damage system a lot more than the old one. No more of this massive fear of a flesh wound or a pimp slap giving you a single point of damage and massively skewing your rolls for the next chunk of time. Armor feels like it's more effective at keeping you in one piece, now that it can stage things down to Stun. Damage figures on weapons have shifted around enough that carrying something like a light pistol no longer screams "I'm trying for style, but can't actually hurt someone in a fight," and players don't find themselves gravitating towards the heavy pistol as the go-to gun of the system, now that low-end recoil is more manageable and rifles actually go through armor better than a 10mm handgun.

A lot of the stuff that got house-ruled or ignored in SR3 to make it playable and enjoyable seems to have been altered or removed in SR4. Comparing SR4's sole release (the BBB) to the comprehensiveness we had in SR3 after it's major supplements (Rigger, Matrix, Cannon Companion, SR Companion, etc) were released is kind of unfair... you're looking at 1-2k pages worth of game rather than the 350 or so in the SR4 BBB. When I compare SR3's main book to what I get from SR4's, I'm quite happy with the change... and while I'm looking forwards to having the supplements, I feel like I've got more than enough in my hands to give *all* of my players a good game, even the ones who want to drive or deck.

To recap:

Ellery's primary complaint was that people had a noticable chance of failing on "easy tasks" if they sucked. His favorite example was people who had a dice pool of 2, which he compared to characters in SR3 with a dice pool of 2. This despite the fact that a character in SR3 with a dice pool of 2 has an actual skill of 2, and a character in SR4 with a dice pool of 2 has no skill at all.

So a normal human in SR3 with no skill is forced to default to an attribute, which means that the "easy task" (TN 2) is now TN 6, and he rolls 3 dice and fails 42% of the time.

A normal human in SR4 with no skill also has to default, which gives her a base dice pool of 2. The task is easy, so she gets 4 dice, and therefore she can buy a hit unless there is some kind of danger or distraction.

So Ellery's claims about the effects of easy tasks on unskilled people was completely false. Ellery's complaints about the ease of profoundly difficult tasks performed by extremely talented people is harder to evaluate. Certainly in SR3 it took six times as many dice to reliably succeed for every +6 TN, while in SR4 it takes 6 more dice to reliably succeed for every -6 dice pool penalty. :shrug:

---

That being said, blakkie is still being an asshole, even though his basic premise that Ellery was consistently using obfuscatory apples/oranges comparisons in the math to demonstrate points is completely true.

I don't give a crap about the tool kit/tool shed analogy being thrown around, it honestly doesn't mean a thing on close inspection. The fundamental fact is that SR3 has more rule books published for it than SR4 does. I have faith that the rules presented in Unwired will be more playable and comprehensible than the rules in Matrix 3 or Rigger 3. But those rules do not yet exist. Therefore it comes largely down to people who would rather have extremely convoluted rules they could barely understand than have no rules at all - and that's reasonable. I found that mostly people ad hocced the rules in Rigger 3, so I don't personally see the benefit. But I could see how one might.

-Frank

Those aren't the only things Ellery asserted, and to be fair they aren't all totally lacking merit. But largely Ellery didn't, for whatever reason, shake the variable TN mould her mind was in, and fixed TNs don't work well when you try use them like variable TNs.

Quick note: Not everyone dissects their game until all they have left is an overblown math problem.

As to "easy tasks", what is it that you're calling "easy". I know in our game, if it's "easy" and your character doesn't have an IC reason for not being able to do it, he/she can.

The mathematical problem with having the dice results affected in three dimensions is that it's not a simple thing to judge the difficulty of any given roll. If the TN is only 2 but you're at -4 dice and need a threshold of 5, then is that test supposed to be easy or hard?

You start to create all sorts of mathematical artifacts representing "sweet spots" in those 3 dimensions, as well as "sour spots." I, as a player, even went so far as to program my graphing calculator to figure up the optimal number of dice to roll once I found out the TN and other modifiers. That's a hanging offense in Vegas, but it sure made my PCs more comfortable when the dice started rolling.

Nowadays the math is simple enough to eyeball the odds without the need for a programmable calculator. I have 10 dice with a net modifier of -3 to get a threshold of 2? Okay, odds are I can do that.

That's handy from a player perspective, but it's even more handy from a designer standpoint since you can pretty easily guess at someone's performance level given X dice and Y threshold. Overall, SR4 seems pretty well balanced from a numeric standpoint (with a few exceptions).

a) since when are thresholds a major part of SR3, and b) those sweet and sour spots are good. they reward players who are experienced with the system, without unduly punishing those who aren't familiar with it. they put challenge into the game part of the role-playing game. like i've said before, if you view an RPG system as nothing more than an engine to carry your stories, go for SR4. if you enjoy the gaming part, though, SR3 is a richer experience.

No. Sweet and Sour spots are bad. They punish gamemasters who are trying to learn the system by having tasks they assign arbitrarily end up being crazy difficult or hilariously easy.

-Frank

If you're stupid, sure, you don't like 'em. If you know how to use them -- and so does your GM, and so do the other players -- they're a lot of fun, and they reward you for understanding a little math, and the SR3 rules set.

SR4 should be right up your alley if you're looking for a more basic, no thinky-thinky, sort of game. Have fun with it.

extreme sweet and sour spots are bad, yes. that's part of the game designer's job, is to make sure those spots aren't massive game-breakers.

Sweet and Sour spots mean more time calculating, and less time playing and developing plot. This is a bad thing.

This is something I'm really starting to like about SR4 -- it is extremely easy to judge the difficulty of a test, and the odds of success. This means that as a GM, if I have to improvise, I can do so quickly and fairly.

I was originally a big fan of the variable TN's of previous editions. Until I remembered that either I was prepared, and operating in my chosen field (target number 2ish) or unprepared and doing something I didn't have all the gear and skills for (target number 12ish). I really can't understand how people criticize SR4 for being "too easy at the high end" and "too hard at the low end" compared to SR3; as I recall rolling well over a dozen dice against TN's of 2 and at other times rolling two dice against TN's of 10 and higher.

The only real "clunkiness" in the SR4 die system is that the odds of a glitch are worse on odd-numbered rolls than the lower even-numbered roll; and the odds of a glitch are actually much higher with 3 dice than with 1 (depending on how you decide to round, as there are no default rounding rules in SR4?)

I don't see what the problem is with thinking and planning. Even -- or, rather, especially -- mid fight. It's a fantastic way to make you feel in character as a hardened killer that knows what he's doing. It's a great way to simulate the feel of a high combat skill or SUT (or both).

Take two seconds, and figure out if it's better to aim and invest combat pool in a single shot, or take cover and snap off multiple shots, playing it more defensive and hoping for a lucky roll. Do a little tactical thinking. Allocate your own die pools, make your own decisions, take your character's fate into your own hands. Look at the difference between a pair TN 6 shots or a TN 5 shot if you take the time to aim, think it through -- same number of dice, twice, at higher TN? Or half as many dice (only one shot), with twice the chance of a success per shot? Look at the smartlink ammo-counter on your gun, think about how many baddies are left, think about your teammates and how bad they might need this guy to go down. Then make a decision, after looking at your available pools and TN modifiers, and do what needs doing to win the fight.

I don't see those as bad things. I see them as awesome things. If the above paragraph takes you 5+ minutes to do before every action for every character (PC or NPC) in every gunfight, I can certainly see why SR3 isn't for everyone; however, I've never said it is for everyone. I've just said I like it, and so does my gaming group.

We accept it for what it is, and use it accordingly. The things that needed fixing could have been fixed without the over all dumbing down/streamlining. The ability to manipulate your TN and add/subtract from your die pool was (or, rather, is) amazing, in the RPG industry. But because it requires people rub two brain cells together, it's been chucked out with the bath water, and Edge is the poor-man's replacement.

Which is too bad.

i don't see what y'all are talking about, with calculations in SR3. sure, you could break out the calculator if you really felt like it, i guess. but i like to think i'm pretty damn good at SR3, and i've never bothered with calculations at all.

there's quite a bit more clunkiness than that, Feshy. impossible tasks can only be made difficult through GM intervention--i call that pretty clunky.

Now see, this again is what I have the problem with; the insults. You give a perfectly good reason right here:

The reason I can't help but pepper my speech with insults is that I've been saying the same thing(s) around here for probably 6 months. If Blakkie can use that as an excuse to be "an asshole" smilingly, I'll use it as an excuse to flavor my comments with a bit of condescension.

You don't need a calculator for SR3. . The probability of success is always [7-(remainder of TN/6)]*[(1/6)^(1+(the quotent of TN/6))] for any specific die. I don't see how the math could get any simpler.

Thresholds, on the other hand, I have no idea how to begin to calculate the probabilities for those.

I understand -- and I've said as much -- that the SR3 level of complexity isn't for everyone (and I'm just talking basic combat here, that's the bit I use/like/enjoy the most). But what bothers me is that it was among the first games to offer you that sort of thing, and now it's back to not offering you that sort of thing. It's a backwards step, I think.

SR4 feels like "Shadowrun Basic," to me, by comparison. If that means there'll be some future book that has rules for recreating Combat Pool or something, great. It might be enough to make me switch to SR4 (yes, really).

But if not, it just feels like something is missing. I might as well be playing D&D (add up modifiers, roll dice, laugh or cry) or WoD (add up modifiers, roll dice, laugh or cry). Edge is better than nothing, I guess, but I see it only replacing one of the old pools/modifiers you used to be able to call upon (karma pool), and the much more common and everyday usefull pool (combat pool) is still conspicuous in it's absence.

I guess I am odd - in my group, we don't calculate what we do beforehand, we say what our character tries to do, then we check the TN and such and roll. No big deal at all. And I fail to see what the big deal is about the 6/7 controversy.

For those among us who don't really care about rules to the degree of running probability calculations in their head, and already simply most stuff down to a few rolls, SR4 may be worth it for the wireless concept and other such "Fluff" ideas as well as other concepts.

(And, for those who do care: I always go by a rule of thumb: 1 in 6 will roll a six, on average, and half of those will roll 4 or better, so a skill of six means one success for a TN of 10, as an example. Karma pool makes up the difference, and dealing with the odd fluke row of misses is often fun.
That's coming from someone who likes to let players roll 1d6 often, as a sort of "fate/random encounter" check - 1 means something bad comes up, maybe that cop at the corner dislikes the character's metatype, 6 means something good comes up, maybe the stolen car turns out to have a tuned engine - which may result in some gang boss getting angry at the runners stealing his wheels, but those are typical SR twists....)