Except that "catching them by surprise" means bypassing (1) all those cool adept powers and cybernetic enhancements made exactly for perception tests, as well as (2) beating them in a Reaction/Surprise check (which, once again, is a success test that's dripping with potential augmentations).

"Solid Snake" is not that good. Sorry.

So, uncybered mundanes are only good for sniping?

What are the rules for ruthenium ponchos in SR3?

But not that good for that. They're sacrificing a range of augmentations that dramatically increase their versatility and offensive capability as snipers.

Just like everything else, really. And yes, that does include Faces.

~J

Because the "GM" stopped playing pattycake, gave him a team of real Shadowrunners (whom Dirk was in awe of) for backup, and threw him up against some real opposition.

Yes, without an Edge a uncybered mundane is a total wannabe. With an Edge a mundane is limited to second tier.

I'm not sure, maybe mfb just threw up his hands and quite the playtest too soon. But the theoretical difference of maximums between uncybered mundane is not 3 dice, it is 6 dice. Even though Skill Recorder type implants have not been released in canon yet, those are still quite possible and perfectly fine for a GM to add right now within the rules right now.

Also even 3 dice can make a difference, and 6 dice difference can be very stark under difficult conditions or with difficult tasks.

Requiring 6 or 8 hits in an Opposed Test to succeed can easily happen within even with a moderately powered game and starting characters with purely canon rules.

This is flat out r=1.00. Well not the part about it not being directed at me I guess, or about either system being particularly realistic. I guess mfb, you are talking about Extended Tests, and the rules do state that GM can limit the number of rolls before saying the character just doesn't have what it takes. It doesn't tell the GM exactly what the limit is suppose to be, although it gives a suggestion. Maybe that is a source of some dislike of SR4, the flexibility it gives the GM rather than attempting to codify each and every instantance or having one and only one "correct" canon ruling. Even though SR3 doesn't fully provide either, it tended to try to. Bringing along all the issues that came with that, and slowly weeding out from its player base the people that don't hold that as an extremely high priority for a game system to do.

I peg this is at r=0.92. They simply are not neck-and-neck. Even before the huge difference in combat of multiple IP. Theoretically the difference is less than SR3 because SR3 has the open ended Skill and SR4 by canon is not, but the difference definately shows up in play and it is more than subtle. I can definately see a SR3 player with a lack of experience or desire unable to see the difference when just looking a character sheet. Also in practice it would seem you don't really get to the limits of a character advancing to the maximum in an entire field until at least something like a full year of a 6 hour session every week. And that is to a huge determent of ignoring starting or advancing the character in other fields.

Depending on how generous the GM is with karma rewards and cash.

Yes. I think that's abundantly clear.

You know? That was a stupid argument when you first brought it up and it hasn't gotten any more insightful over time. In SR4 you can become skilled enough that you can reliably perform extremely difficult tasks that real people reliably perform in the real world. Boo-frickin-hoo. In SR3, there were tasks so difficult that barely trained individuals succeeded less than 10% of the time and grand masters of the trade succeeded less than 30% of the time. Excuse me, but how the hell is that supposed to be more "realistic"? If some guy on the street can complete a task in about 10 tries, I would certainly want a globally renowned grand frickin master to succeed in less than 3 or 4.

Can you even read what you write? Those extra couple of dice are the extra boost that allows you to succeed at those impossible tasks thatt you were just fucking complaining about! In your hatred of SR4 you are having it both ways, so I think we should call you on it. Which is it? Is the part you hate:

[*] Characters can only get a small-looking numeric bonus by tweaking themselves out with magic and technology?

or

[*] Characters who put all the bonuses in a pile are able to have enough dice left over after taking massive penalties to succeed at tasks that would be literally impossible if they didn't have those bonuses?

Choose one because those are actually mutually exclusive complaints.

What skill would that be exactly? You only get to add a skill to your ranged defensde rolls if you take your action for Full Defense. So if you only have 1 IP and your opponent has 3, the only way you're going to "stay alive" with your "lots of skill" is if you stay pinned down the entire round, which is a result that is probably fine with the cyborg I should think.

-Frank

No, they can be good at lots of non-combat rolls. If they focused on combat skills and attributes along with Edge they can hang full out with the cybers for about one full Combat turn, maybe two if they don't crank it up too much. But after that they are spent. Being a one-shot and run sniper is an option too.

EDIT I will link my example character here. If there is someone that hasn't read it yet it cannot be spam. *smile* http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=11537

All in all uncybered mundanes will tend to be bystanders, sometimes dead bystanders, in high powered, combat intensive campaigns.

oh? you know a marksman who, in real life, can hit targets a thousand yards away that he can't even see, 50%+ of the time? oops, my bad.

it's both. these two are not mutually exclusive, since unaugmented characters in SR4 can regularly perform feats which i consider impossible. the augmentations help them peform them only slightly more often.

the skill for whatever weapon the unaug'd human is using. the whole reason i included the "lots of armor" phrase in the above list is because with a fair bit of armor, an unaug'd human can easily survive long enough to shoot back.

Task that a Skill 1, no pool individual would complete less than 10% of the time: TN 10

Chance that a Skill 8 (grand master of the trade), no pool individual will complete the same task in any given try: ~50%

Chance that a Skill 6 individual (highly trained) will complete the task in any given try: ~40%

Difficulty needed for a Skill 8 individual to have a chance of success under 30%: 12

Chance for a Skill 1 individual to succeed in that task on any given attempt: 2.777%

Chance that you are talking out of your ass: approaching unity.

~J

ah, missed this gem. Frank? there are things that are really fucking hard to do, in real life. there are things that having lots of practice isn't a significant aid for accomplishing. in a realistic game, these difficult things will be really fucking hard to do for everyone who attempts them. the ability to perform the impossible at chargen is something i expect from a superhero game, not a cyberpunk game.

Your bad GMing of the situation, or your bad for cherry picking a particular realism problem when we are talking about a game and comparing that game to another version of the game that also has numerous realism issues?

Sanity by GM fiat defeats the point of paying someone else for rules. There is no way to get around the fact that SR3 made doing the above task hard, while SR4 does not, despite having been made with the benefit of reference to the SR3 rules.

~J

Actually, I was pricing it at Skill 2 and Skill 8 at TN 11, but the fact that you chose similar numbers and got completely different results actually shows exactly what I'm talking about. Minor variations in numbers will send success ratios from 11% and 36% to 10% and 50% or whatever in SR3. That's known.

And that's the point. We can't even have a discussion about SR3 difficulty, because it's so much work to figure out what the real difficulty of any task actually is.

-Frank

SR4, p338-339?

Firearms+intuition at -9 dice (and you're obviously losing any imaging/camera based mods, though it's not explicitely stated). I doubt many mundane characters would have a die left (must spend edge to even make the test, then only with edge dice).

It is a lot more likely to happen in SR4 than in SR3, though. It's still not overly likely without the use of edge.

Another thing I've found I like about SR4 is that it offers a way for average characters to deal with drones, at least temporarily (tasers/shock rounds).

Quoted for truth.

With a guided missile? Sure, actually I know a lot of people who can do that. I'm afraid that if you're going to go off on this particular rant about handheld weaponry like pistols, you're going to need to drop down the range to more like 50 meters. There are no rules for successfully hitting a target outside of extreme range, there never have been.

And yet, I actually do know people who can shoot man-sized objects across the street with a heavy pistol if they know where they are but can't see them.

I don't know what version of the armor rules you've been looking at, but even top-grade armor is only taking 3 DV off the top, which is not likely to save you if your opponent takes both simple actions to shoot you. Honestly, most people who've really played the game have the opposite complaint - it's too easy to drop people in a single round.

-Frank

There is no getting around the fact that both SR3 and SR4 have problems with this. Although mfb has created the ruling himself that causes the worst of this problem in SR4.

Sanity of the GM is indeed a requirement for having a sane game. Not having players that are total rules lawyer twerps helps too.

Reruns are indeed a bane of humanity. But sometimes there are people that didn't see it the first time around. I think there is some good in this thread as many of the errant myths of SR4 are coming out and being addressed and corrected. So for the people that are interested in SR4 and also interested in what is behind things they may have heard about SR4 from their brother's friend's girlfriend's cousin this thread has some value.

oh? sniper rifles in SR4 have an extreme range of 50 meters? or, hey, let's call it 300 meters, so we can pull in assault rifles and sport rifles. at the extreme range of those weapons, hitting something you can't actually see is a feat i'm going to call unlikely, even for a skilled shooter. and it's not like i'm talking about taking the time to steady your aim, time your breathing, etcetera. in SR4, you can hit an invisible target with a quick-drawn snapshot every other time you attempt it. and that's without the benefit of cyberware or magic. yes, i call that slightly unrealistic.

it's a question of which one stretches the suspension of disbelief more. neither system is actually, truly realistic--that would be insane. instead, the question is which one is more likely to slap its non-realism in your face, and which conceals it as artfully as possible.

The reason FrankTrollman is so annoyed and fustrated is because your example is a ruse of a change from the one you posted on the SR4 board earlier. It still has the same inherent problems, which were pointed out there, such as you the GM are ruling that the target does not get a Reaction roll or ability to use Dodge.

With the proper military grade sniper weapon, and no adverse conditions like haze, crosswind, or slope, it is indeed terrifyingly easy to shoot at several hundred meters range a full man sized object approximately near where a man casually standing behind is likely positioned.

Given all this it certainly is easy and tempting to come to the conclusion that your posts are ingenuie. At the very least it casts serious doubts about the credibitily of the knowledge of SR4. But maybe not so much more than you not having read the rules does.

I don't know, I find mfb's line of argument to be fairly sound. SR4 does not handle large dice pools and heavy penalties well. SR3 had its own mechanical flaws, but they were completely different from the ones in SR4.

The thing is, SR3 is very familiar to lots of people (there was a time when I'd have put my rules knowledge up against anyone and generally win out) and the problems it has are, by and large, accepted. One of the reasons I like SR4 (and keep in mind that I haven't gotten a chance to play it yet) is that it addresses very specifically a lot of the things that I thought were wrong with SR3. A lot of people fiddled with SR3's ruleset to try to fix the inherent flaws (the d8 version, for instance), but it's familiar. When you take all that away and replace it with another set of rules that has unique flaws and advantages, people may not be immediately accepting.

You could just as easily houserule in something like every four or five points of die pool penalties increases the success threshold by one (dropping the 6+6 blind sniper chance to 3.7% for every 4, or ~25% for every five) to fix the problem. In fact, I kind of like that and may use it the second time I run SR4 (never houserule your first run).

I think you can pretty much rule out being able to dodge or avoid an attack that was fired from 1km away in total darkness/from the other side of a window. That's just not something you should be able to dodge (without edge, of course).

If MFB "hasn't read the rules" for SR4, it's only because halfway through playtesting for them he threw his hands up in disgust and quit. There may be things in the final copy of the rules (or, rather, the first printing of the final copy) that have changed since he saw them -- I'm well aware it was MFB's hope that would happen, IE, things he hated would be changed due to his input -- but if the best argument anyone can come up with over shooting something at extreme range with your eyes closed is "no GM would let you do that" (as opposed to "the rules don't let you do that") maybe he's on to something.

Like Kagetenshi (I believe it was, if not I apologize for) said -- if "GM Common Sense" is the only thing holding a rules-set together, what's the point in paying someone money to write rules for us?

you don't need a proper military-grade sniper rifle to accomplish this, in SR4. you can use a beat-up AK. you don't even need a scope. and while it is indeed no great feat to make a shot like that with a proper weapon, it is a great feat to make that shot within three seconds of sighting the target, and being able to do so repeatedly. in SR3, at least, you needed to take a few seconds to aim in order to make long-range shots without a scope, much less long-range shots on targets you can't see. in SR4, aiming when taking extremely difficult shots is almost optional--hell, with 3 dice, why waste time? just shoot twice; you're almost guaranteed to get at least one hit, and you've got a decent chance at getting two.

Wait a second, you do? I don't recall a take aim action being required in SR3 before taking a shot at extreem range. If nothing else, I'd say that SR4 does a better job with image magnification scopes/cyber since you have to take a simple action to lock on a target. In SR3, you weren't required to take aim in any way.

In both cases, you need to know where you're shooting even if you can't see it. Firing blind is all well and good, but both systems give you too much of a chance to hit if you're shooting in the wrong place. EDIT and you're not using a GM sanity check, that is.

EDIT2: One of the fundamental problems with this argument seems to be that the player is able to shoot at the hidden target in the first place. If a player can't narrow down his target's location to, at most, a 2m wide area, I wouldn't even allow the shot. With that restriction in place, I don't find the SR4 odds to be that off for the best marksman in the world (you're really not going to see 12 dice for that roll on many characters since it's intuition based).

EDIT3: It occurs to me that the actual worst case is 14 dice for the roll (6 skill, sniper rifles spec, 6 intuition), which leaves you with 5 dice instead of 3. 5 dice is enough for an automatic hit. However, again, you're rarely if ever going to see that number of dice. As a GM, I'd have no problem giving that hit to the best marksman in the world, given that he knows where to shoot in the first place.

That makes sense, then. However, as I stated in one of the edits to the last post, if the person is that good of a marksman and knows approximately where to shoot... within 1-2m, I don't have a problem with the shot being made.

I think the flaw comes down to thoroughly and accurately framing the situation.

He's not even checking the range table. Which is understandable since he isn't openning up the book. The beat-up AK is a different class of weapon that has a maximum range that is 1/2 a sniper rifle. Regretable that a mint Ares Alpha is in the same class range wise, but there are some details that get lost in abstraction.

He knows this. That was pointed out the first time he brought this up, and he still insists on dragging up and clinging the same tired and bankrupt senario.

Keep in mind that mfb came up with those odds for SR4 based on his interpretation of the rules, and that there is definately room for other intepretations. The way he constructed the senario so the attack roll is no longer Opposed it is not unreasonable for the GM to switch to a Threshold Test. Setting the Threshold at 2 would reduce the chance of landing a shot at 26%, Threshhold 3 gives 4%.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a SR4 sniper rifle loaded with standard ammo will not kill a character straight off, even if they score no hits on their Body + Armor roll. I guess the best sniper rifle against a Body 1 or 2 character will knock them unconscious if they don't roll any hits on Body + Armour, and they are likely to bleed to death from there without intervention. But other than that you need to have better ammo or roll more than the minimum hits to have a chance of killing them straight off, and even then the odds are fairly slim that you will one shot them as long as they have Body 4 or above and even just an armored vest.

All of this of course excluding the complications of someone using Edge somewhere along the way. But the SR3 senario odds exclude Combat Pool, which for snipers are usually relatively free dice to throw in on attacks. Those SR3 Combat Pool dice can easily push up the chance of making the shot well past 50%. While using Edge in SR4 requires a bit more forethought using it makes an impact outside that single Combat Turn.

keep up. i'm talking about making shots at extreme range, not any specific distance. sniper rifles with an extreme range of a klick or so are simply the most extreme (heh!) example.

there are any number of situations where it's possible to know the approximate location of a target without being able to actually see it. if your spotter tells you the target is sniping from a particular window, or if you see a muzzle blast in total darkness, or if you call your target on the phone to confirm that he's at his desk in a room you're outside of, or... the list goes on.

i don't, either. i have a problem with the shot being so easy that you can do it without bothering to aim. if the shot were only possible after lots of aiming, i'd be fine with it. but it's not; it's fantastically easy.

the fact that there are a number of possible interpretations for an action so basic to the game as shooting someone with a gun is a big part of my problem with SR4.

And I in turn constructed the scenario such that dodge tests were eliminated.

Notice: the math in the following section, or rather the line of reasoning from which it came, has been found to be in error. I'm too tired to do it properly right now, so I'll leave it—it should be relatively close, but I suspect the odds are somewhat more likely than my calculations would have it.

An average human has 4 pool dice (if I remember the rounding direction correctly), so we multiply the odds I quoted above by (1/2)^4. With rounding errors, that'll be .44% for the unaimed no-pool shot, 1.26% for the aimed no-pool shot.

I advise you reacquaint yourself with the definition of the term "less than double" as applied to ~20%. With full pool, a Skill 8 individual against TN 13 task with 8 pool dice has a (staggeringly high, but still decidedly sub-50%) 36.28% chance of success.

~J

missed this one. the thing is, this problem isn't merely limited to extreme-range blindfire--it applies in every case where something should be almost impossible. things which ought to be nearly impossible are, in SR4, achieved regularly. that kicks me, at least, right in my suspension of disbelief.

and i swear to god, if anybody tries the "how can you worry about suspension of disbelief in a game with dragons" argument, i will kill a goddamn panda.

Sorry, hard to keep up to the rate you are shoveling at. Please keep in mind that I was talking 1000m distances, and you changed the distance somewhere else. Doing it at 300m is certainly different than doing the so called same thing at 1000m. I covered this right? Just changing it from a handgun to a sniper rifle didn't make the underlying flaw in your arguement go away. You thought changing it again to assault rifle would?

I suspected as much, which is why I wrote about that a number of pages back. Please try to keep up. *chuckle*

Basically the SR4 system allows a bit more flexibility to the GM to make the world work how they want it to. If your GM is a dork, or just sees the world differently than you then to some degree are going to be unsatisfied with their rulings. Congratulations on demonstrating this by playing both sides and being unhappy with your own decision.

So to see the root of your problem with SR4 I guess you just need to look in the mirror?

Of course this happens in SR3 as well as there are alternate interpertations for some obscure combat situations. Even after SR3 has been around several years. That's even before you get into the enormous number of intentionally house ruled games.

In SR3 it wouldn't happen either as a standard sniper rifle with regular ammo is just going to deliver an S wound with one success and no scaling down. The big bad boogyman of the sniper rifle discussion is generally the barret. I'd expect it to be something like 10P/-7 when it's converted (automatically uses APDS ammo, and delivered a 14D wound in SR3. Compare to the Walter which was 14S and is now 7P/-3). All in all, the effect of the hit is about the same in both systems (possibly slightly lighter in 4e, depending on the luck of the body + armor roll) so it's a wash.

Good examples, but as a GM, I'd probably require the PC to specify where he is shooting. If there's a window, the PC needs to know left side, right side, or bottom. If there's a desk, you'd better know the layout of the room ahead of time.

This goes back to GM fiat, to which the argument is that you're paying for someone to write rules. My personal feeling is that I want rules that move quickly and flow well more than I want every instance spelled out. I've spent far more time arguing about rules in SR3 than I feel was productive and often the resolution was still not clear.

I'd rather have no rule than two rules that contradict each other or a rule that I have to disallow because it causes imbalance. Then again, I liked the dice system in Exalted, which SR4 resembles in many ways (I guess it's the very similar to new WOD system, though I haven't touched any of those games as of yet).

Once I've had a chance to play and run a bit of SR4, I have a feeling that I'll adopt a rules variant to cope with the probability curve. Either increasing threshold automatically every so many points of penalty or using one of the suggestions in the book that has range increasing threshold instead of removing dice. Ie, shooting at short is 1, medium is 2, long is 3, and extreem is 4. However, this only fixes ranged combat and doesn't help at all with other situations. In fact, it makes blind fire with a scope even worse, as the worst case scenario now has 8 dice with which to make the shot.

As would I. I would rather pay for two contradictory rules or a rule that I need to disallow, though, because while I'd vastly rather pay for noncontradictory, balanced rules, at least the former give me something for my money.

(I'm sure at some point someone's going to pipe up about buying books for the story. That's all well and good, but is not the same as buying rules—and when you change systems (like from nothing to your first system, or SR3 to SR4), you are using the rules that you bought. To put it another way, if you buy a gallon of milk and you get a free potato, you should still determine whether or not to use the potato based on its own merits rather than based on the fact that you already have it.

I told you I was tired.)

~J

yes, you were talking abut 1000m distances. i, however--the person who brought up the problem with extreme range + blindfire to begin with--was talking about extreme range. the problem remains whether the weapon in question is a sniper rifle or an assault rifle.

that's one way of looking at it, and i've stated several times in several threads that it's a perfectly legitimate view. the way i look at it, though, the SR4 system dumps a huge portion of the load of making the game work onto the GM. when i'm running a game, i prefer to let the mechanics handle as much of the gaming portion as possible--that's what the mechanics are there for, after all. the problem with SR4 is, the GM has to devote too much attention to it, which detracts from his ability to manage the in-character side of things.

I suppose, well see how high up the sniper rifles come out at. Scaling down just a little bit to save your skin is a hell of a lot easier in SR4. Even at 10P, with the extra box for the net hit, a good deal of the time Body 3 and Body 4 is going to suvive with a box remaining. Trying to stage down the Barret was usually a pipe dream.

It would be a lot easier to just bump up the Extreme range penalty to -4 or maybe to Extreme -5 and Long -3. But the priority for that sort of tweak is fairly minimal since it mostly works as is. Besides at those really long ranges haze, wind, or heatwaves should be giving penalties most of the time.