And in other news, Cain and Savage Worlds have announced their pending marriage this summer. Good luck to the happy couple!

So far my group has not had any issues of stepping on toes. We have 2 different types of Sams, a Faceman and a Technomancer.

Savage Worlds is a pretty cool system.

most of the previous page is dedicated to explaining in detail what my point is. if you are unable to read it and/or understand it, i'm not going to waste time re-explaining it--especially in light of the fact that, judging from your posts, your only purpose here is to bait people you don't like.

there's no point. the relevant parts of the character are complete. the rest is just details that will not make or break the character in terms of its intended purpose. unless you can show me how the character i created doesn't make my point, using the remaining resources available to the character?

this post tells me that you have not read and/or understood the previous page's worth of posting. there's no point in discussing things further until you rectify that.

you've read, it, now work on understanding it. if you're still talking about 400bp characters, that means you don't understand it.

if you don't see a guy with 12 base dice in his main combat skill, who has no real combat weaknesses (once you've dropped a few points elsewhere and bought up Dodge and Perception, as noted previously), as not dominating combat, i don't know what to tell you. unless he's caught unwares (which will greatly reduce the combat effectiveness of any character not specifically geared towards improvisation in combat), he's going to be rolling more dice than anybody else on his team, and probably more dice than most of the opposition he faces. wise expenditure of his remaining resources will net him 2-3 IPs, decent armor, and decent weaponry. in any combat his team runs into, he's going to be getting a higher body count than anybody besides--possibly--a combat mage. maybe you've got a different idea about what 'dominate' means, but that pretty much covers it as far as i'm concerned.

but if you're calling a basic comparison of percentages "voodoo", i'm not sure what more i can do in the way of helping you to understand.

Just finish the character so there are hard numbers to deal with and these things can be addressed.

you finish it. i don't care about the damn character. it's proven my point to my satisfaction.

the percentages do mean the same thing if you're looking at the question of how street-level a character is in SR3 versus SR4--which is my point.

only if you houseruled the difference away

for the love of Mike. i'm not talking about the in-game difference. i give up.

actually at a threshhold of 1 the difference was pronounced.

and yes setting a threshhold is standard procedure but in the specific example setting it at other than 1 is against the spirit of the rules because the additional difficulty is already in the dice pool modifiers, and adding it to thethreashhold as well ismerely using GM fiat

I would preface this by saying that I completely disagree with mfb, although for reasons entirely different than the objections brought forth recently. That being said, I think this whole "finish the character" thing is a little silly. I think his example illustrates the faults that he sees rather succinctly. Let's look. (I apologize if I am identifying you as the wrong gender mfb, damn my lack of non-gender specific pronouns.)

We are spending 50 points on Elf + 3 Edge. 350 to go.

We blow all 200 on stats. Even with a 6 Agility that leaves a decent spread:

3 Strength
7 Agility (With the PQ that let's us have an 8 agility this should cost 50, not 65)
5 Reaction
3 Body
3 Logic
4 Intuition
3 Logic
3 Charisma

200 points, not bad all around. Nothing lower than average. 150 points to go.

Positive and negative qualities: We need the thing that lets us have a stat 1 higher and the thing that lets us have a skill one higher. We can grab some negative qualities to balance these. Take stuff that will be neat/fun to play/that you can exploit depending on the style of your game. Still 150 to go.

Gear!
We want Synaptic Accelerator (1), Reflex Recorder (Firearms), and some muscle toner (I think we can get 3 for 12 availability)
I think that is 80k + 25k + 24k= 129k. (Sorry no book at work) We grab cybereyes for smartlink and vision modes for, what, 10k at most? Add 21k for toys and a decent commlink and thats 160k for 32 BPs. 118 to go.

Let's spend 10 on contacts. 108.

Now we have 108 for skills. This gets a little tight I admit.

We grab Longarms 6(24)
Pistols 4 (16)
Automatics 4 (16)
Dodge 2 [8]
Influence group 1 (10)
Athletics group 1 (10)
Data Search 1(4)
Computers 1(4)
Perception 2 [8]
Infiltration 2 [8]

That's the last 108.

Now what we have is a starting character with 2 Initiative passes and throws 19 dice to shoot a smartlinked longarm and 17 for other guns. He can grab a specialty in-game for his longarm of choice and get 21. He only needs one more agility, one more longarms, and one more muscle toner. After that, all his karma can go to improve his skills, which are not bad, but need some work.

I agree with mfb that one can make a character like this, at chargen, that is within a few dice of the top (tell me how to get more, I may have missed some). It looks like he is 5 dice from top and three of those (Specialty and muscle toner) are pretty easy to get. Thus his complaint is legit as far as I am concerned.

However, as I have said before, I would never make a character like this to play. I feel that this does NOT represent a "beginning" character, and this is someone who has received a LOT of training in the fine art of raining bullet-laden death on one's enemies. I still feel that the ability to make such a character is not a reason to do so, and I do not fault a system for letting me do so.

EDIT: Cute putting an 8 in parentheses creates an emote like so: ( How frustrating.

Hey, waddya know? Shift a couple of skills and stats around considering he's an ork, add some cyber for variety, and that's the sam in my current group.

hey that guy remins me of the killer in 'The Professional'

@Waltermandias

EDIT Oops, looked a little closer. Toner is limited to Level 2, Avail is Rating x 5.

That character is still at least 6(?) dice short of topping out that Skill+Attribute, not including the Specialize. Sure those 18 dice will do fine shooting paper discs down at the range. But give him 6 boxes of P and S, shooting a smartlinked longarm through a smoke grenade in otherwise favorable lighting at medium range and he is down to about 8 dice. Against a modestly cybered Reaction of 7 standing out in the open and not using Full Defense the shooter is going to score a hit on the target roughly 50% of the time, and one-shot kill the target far less often than that.

At that point those extra dice definately mean something. They mean a hell of a lot infact. The difference in the specialized Skill between a strong, functional starting character and a developed character only shows strongly when they are faced with at least a moderately difficult task. For a difficult shot try giving that target cover while it is actively using Full Defense, and top it off by making it critical that the target be brought down within that IP by the shooter. If the target has halfway decent armor and a bit of Edge to defend with things are looking very bleak for the starting character succeeding.


For better or worse, SR4 gunfire does generally favor the attacker over the defender. If it didn't you'd end up with a lot longer combat sequences. However the character you built is nothing close to dominant in the so-called field of shooting longarms. His Edge of 3 and only 2 IP alone hold him short of that even before being short on dice.

you feel threshold 2? still 14% vs 26% that is a significant difference, but not awe inspiring.

and that was the 12 dice guy
if ya make him the 15 dice guy vs the 18 dice dice sr3 guy (top end starting adepts, both of them, not fully rorted but chunky)
you get 65% versus 15%

now the differences are significant and frightening

oh and the blonde thing... well I always like to add a joke

speaking of jokes, look at michael Jackson

he whittled it down to three dice

and i used the odds calculator table in the community projects site for the sr4 stuff
and did the sr3 odds on a calculator

I am not searching for the link
but he has always used tghe 12 dice sniper
ad blind is -6 while extreme range is -3
12-6-3=3

funny I was working on clue based sniping from Enemy at the Gates

Frank is correct. SR4 specifically states typical situations where Full Cover/Blind Fire modifiers apply and none come even close to not knowing where the target is in the first place - and before anyone gets their panties in a knot, neither did SR3 RAW.

just read the list
and yes they list the ways it applies
Enemy at the Gatesstyle sniping and 'that @#$%^&* mage just used an iinvisibility spell" are the two that applied in both sr3 and sr4

the first is less common that the second in any SR game I have played... the second is far too common

You bet! And that signature will be worth a lot of money when I am all rich and famous-like!