Personally, I appreciate his use of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Oh, and his easily-typed forum handle.

That's about all I got for ya so far, Cain, sorry.

1) You wouldn't need to. Once you've upped the TN, that's penalty enough.

2) The problem would come when characters with a low amount of dice to begin with. If they push the dice pool down to exactly zero, they're still at a base TN of 5. Once there, with or without a guaranteed die, they'll have a better chance with an exploding roll than they'd get with a normal one. So, we've mitigated the problem some, but not totally-- players will still be encouraged to push up the modifiers somewhat instead of going for the straight shots.

With a Body of 16, it'll get an average of 5 successes, true. However, since the heavy pistol will do a minimum of 6 boxes (5 base + 1 for making the shot) the Citymaster will take some damage. Load your gun with EX-EX, and we're looking at a Moderate wound. That could easlily make quite a bit of difference-- and that's not factoring in what would happen if you're using a more powerful weapon. For example, you'd do 7 boxes if you threw a fragmentation grenade.

However, called shots on vehicles have other options, which include targeting passengers. (P 162.) Because a shot on a passenger leaves the vehicle unaffected, its Body doesn't help; the passenger instead gets the benefit of the vehicle's armor. So, let's redo this example, but this time we'll assume the APC is being rigged.

With the Citymaster's armor plus Full-Body armor on the driver, we're looking at 32 points of armor. So, we take a -32 to the roll, plus additional cover penalties-- but with -32, we're not going to have any dice left anyway, so it really doesn't make a difference. Thresholds never apply to combat rolls, so we just need to score one success. Mr. Lucky pulls out his handy-dandy AVS, kicks it into burst-fire mode (an additional -2, which *still* doesn't matter), spends a point of Edge, and rolls 8 dice for his test; getting an average of 2.66 successes, rounded up to 3. The rigger is totally limp, being in full-VR mode, so he only gets to resist with base Body. Assuming a Body of 3, he'll score 1 success, versus a damage code of 13. He'll take a full 12 boxes of damage, taking him and his Citymaster out of the fight instantly. With the driver dead, we may even be looking at a crash test for the vehicle, which would be a test with Pilot of 3 vs a threshold of 3... and a -1 Handling modifier. Not going to happen.

So, with one point of Edge, we've taken out a Citymaster with a flechette-only pistol. We may have even crashed it; and since crashing damage is the same as ramming damage, we've probably killed everone inside as well. (If the citymaster was going over 61 m/t, it'll deal 32 points of damage to itself and everyone inside. It might live, but the tactical squad inside is a smear.) Thanks to the longshot test abuseability, you killed an armored personel carrier, a rigger, an entire SWAT team, the opposition's mobile command post, and most of your GM's plotline in one shot.

They'd be even better off not having so many modifiers, spending the edge, and getting exploding dice on a larger dice pool.

Also, why is the rigger anywhere that you can see him? if he's driving via VR he doesn't have to be in the driver's seat. He doesn't even have to be in the vehicle at all. No book hndy either, but I'm not sure if you can bypass vehicle armor for people inside it with a called shot. I'm almost positive that it doesn't say specifically that you can, and that would definitely seem like a position where the GM would have to say "you're ignoring the giant metal box he's inside with a called shot? Nice try." If that sort of thing were allowed, you could ignore the barrier rating on walls as well. After all, there's no difference between a 3" sheet of steel on a truck than a 3" sheet of steel on a wall.

But yes, by the base rules, it is possible to invent situations where tossing 500 penalty dice and then rolling edge is a good thing. Luckily I don't have to contend with players like that.

And of course, there's always "plotlines are made to be broken, so don't try to railroad people." If losing the city master ruins the entire run, the GM needs to either decide to up the security on the city master, or add 50 more of them. Relying on any one piece of a prepared adventure is just begging to have it destroyed, and you'll end up out there running on the fly again, wondering how it is those ingrates always manage to ruin your fun.

It'd depend on the situation. For example, if you only had 2 dice, you could go for a called shot for +2 damage. One exploding die with +2 damage is a lot better than two exploding dice at normal value.

According to the RAW on p 162, you *can* shoot at a passenger, even if you have to invoke the blind-fire penalty. If you do so, the vehicle armor is added to the personal armor value; the called shot rules just say you can bypass armor, it doesn't matter where that armor comes from. Other than that, page 162 also says that called shots against vehicles are treated exactly the same as personal shots, with an extra option or two. So, the rules definitely treat this situation just like a standard personal shot, with the standard rules in place.

According to the RAW, there is. Bypassing armor is not the same thing as penetrating a barrier rating. Called shots specifically allow you to bypass armor, not Barriers. And besides, the devs apparently thought that -6 would be enough of a penalty to dissuade anyone. Which is further proof that the Edge/Longshot loophole goes straight to the heart of the mechanic, and can't be fixed without changing some very fundamental things.

Unless you want to get more successes than the other guy.

You could always called shot to bypass armor in every edition, and it's always had it's problems. Saying "the rules technically allow me to shoot someone in a tank while ignoring the tank, so GMs should ignore logic" is kinda silly. Makes me glad I neither play in your games, nor have you play in mine.

Not really. With one die, you have a .33 chance of scoring a success; but if you hit, he'll need 2 extra successes to stage it down. With two, your odds of a success go up to .66, which still isn't very high-- you're still only looking at a probability of 1 success. However, the guy needs 6 less Body to have an average chance of staging it down.

In 3rd, it had problems, but you could technically only call shots to bypass armor on melee and chemical attacks. For some strange reason, you couldn't do that on normal shots. I don't have my 2nd ed book handy, but in 1st there were no called shots, let alone ones to bypass armor.

Silly is an understatement, but it's a flaw in the rules. GM preferences have nothing to do with the quality of a game system. The problem here isn't that it's even possible to take out an APC with a flechette round-- the problem is that it's *easy*. You cannot fix this problem without fixing the entire core mechanic of the game, as well as several major premises.

Then it doesn't matter if you're rolling one or two dice now, does it? You're still only likely to get one success. One exploding dice at +2 damage is better than two at normal damage, since you're likely to score the same number of successes, which means the other guy has about the same chance to dodge.

And once again: if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. You can call it "reducing", "soaking", or "staging", it's still the same thing.

We'll have to agree on some premises first. If we go with my proposal-- guaranteed one die, extra penalties increase the TN-- then we require exploding dice in order to hit that increased TN. Otherwise, we've just made the task impossible, edge or no edge.

The problem then becomes that if someone's at one die to begin with, he may as well toss on an additional -1 penalty-- he'll be at exactly zero, for no TN raises. He'll have the exact same number of dice as before, only now he gets an exploding die-- he'll get a *benefit* from tacking on additional penalties. Since the whole purpose of this is to reduce or eliminate the massive modifier trick, we've just defeated our own purpose. Not as badly as before, sure, but a good system should try and cover *all* exploits. A similar thing would happen if the person doesn't have much edge; and the math is pretty similar if he's at two or three dice.

Now, you're going to say: "Apply logic!" First of all, someone who's using rules loopholes has already got you beat on that score. They've taken their logic further than you have, can back it up with page references, and will make it so that you're using GM fiat instead of logic to stop them. Second, with the first fix in play, the alterations for the smaller trick are going to be harder to catch or forbid. For example, someone with one die might fire in semi-auto, taking the recoil penalty (and getting an exploding die) for his second shot. You can't forbid someone to use semi-auto, so we need a rules-based defense to cover it.

But if we fix this by allowing exploding dice on every roll, then there won't be any benefit to pulling that stunt. In fact, he'll be better off using Edge to gain extra dice. We'll have taken a step further in bulletproofing the rules, which always makes for a better game. The only major problem to fix these flaws is that it requires totally abandoning several major concepts of SR4-- like the entire core dice mechanic and its underlying assumptions.

Because then we get into the slippery-slope thing. You allow X because you like it, but don't allow Y becase you don't like it. Do enough of that, and you've still abandoned the system you were playing. If heavy amounts of GM fiat is required to fix a system, then that system has serious flaws that need to be looked at.

The example was a Citymaster; and IIRC the original pics of the -Master series had a window slot. I assume that the window glass was bulletproof, which only makes sense.

Which is why I seriously consider simply removing the longshot rule.

If your dice pool drops to zero or below, you still can take Edge to get additional dice (which explode then)... but if there aren't enough Edge dice to get you above zero, you are out of luck.

And it's a very easy thing for a Gm to start saying: "You can't tie your shoes, because it's physically impossible for you with your Quickness of 1." Well, I know more than a few quadrapalegics who can tie their shoes, crochet and sew and knit, drive cars, and play the piano. "Impossible" is an objective term, not a subjective view. If something is just very, very unlikely, it's not impossible-- and Edge was meant to pull off the very, very unlikely. And if the action is going to add to the dramatic tension of a game? Why on earth should any GM forbid it?

GMs cannot just step in and say: "Nope, not possible" every time a player comes up with a trick the GM thinks is unlikely; otherwise, what's the point of even rolling dice? "Nope, not possible for you, you only have one dice left" might become "Nope, not possible for you, you only have five dice left" to "Nope, not possible, even though you've got forty-two dice to roll and the RAW says it's a threshold of 3-- I think it's impossible, so you can't do it."

In combat, you can't apply thresholds at all. And even then, you run the risk of the "impossible task" situation, where dramatic actions aren't possible due to a lack of dice. The only workable fix I've seen so far is to reinstate floating TN's; the default TN is still 5, but enough penalties drive it upward.

There's a word for this: "House Rules". If you have to invoke a large number of house rules in order to make your game work, then the system is not very complete or well thought-out. I mean, once we've rewritten the core dice mechanics, the skill/attribute caps, the matrix loopholes.... at what point are you still playing the same game anymore?

Yeah, but I haven't often seen a system that didn't even bother to try. And while most of the abuseable holes in other systems involve finely-detailed obscure rules that can be bent together; I can't recall seeing a system with flaws this heavy baked right into the core dice mechanics. Some things are acceptable, and are just par for the course... but something this major?

Ahem. Casting fireballs is impossible. Being able to move in hyper-time is impossible. Wirelessly connecting your brain to the internet is impossible. I've yet to see a Shadowrun character that *wasn't* based on doing a few impossible things.

If you want to ban a character that twists obscure rules in arcane ways to produce ridiculous results the system wasn't designed for, that's one thing. However, if someone creates a perfectly straightforward and legal character that follows the rules without bending or twisting their letter or intent, and happnes to have an extreme powerplay, that's a different matter entirely.

The players share that responsibility. Alltough we like to discuss the crazy things we could do, most would never try to do it.

Edit: 'We' means me and the people I play or played with. I'm not as sure about some of the people on this board ^^.

Yeah, really.

I hereby dub that as an "attack of imagined opportunity."

Apparently, the point at which you choose to define "players being smacktards" is different than where I do. Mine is usually somewhere around "makes the game fall apart." The only one that really has game-breaking issues, in my mind, is some of the "swarming" strategies that are possible under the matrix rules, and that was an easy fix... "don't do it, wait for the Matrix book."

The core dice mechanic works fine if the GM is there to say things like "Stop piling on penalties out the ass just because you're going to long-shot it." This isn't a "house rule," this falls very firmly into the realm of the GM's right to tell players to knock off stupid shit.

If an extreme powerplay is going to break the game that I'm running, I'm going to say "not happening." The worst thing that can happen is the player doesn't join the campaign and gets snitty about it, which accomplishes the initial objective of keeping the character out anyway.

I hear all this talk about how various characters "follow the rules" and "are a legal build" but are still totally ruining someone's game. One of the big, fat rules that any game system made in the last couple of decades has written near the beginning of the book, and which SR4 uses as one of it's primary building blocks, is that what the GM says, goes. One fix to broken characters is to slap on about 200 house rules to the existing system... the other is to invoke a rule that already exists, and tell the player to build something else.

Well summarized. If I may:

"Taking the rules as written but ignoring this particular one, a problem occurs."

I wasn't trying to suggest that a GM needs to decide in advance every single thing the players can and cannot do in order to prevent "abuse." I mean, it's a tabletop game, where the hell do you draw the line between fun and abuse? I'd assume you draw it where people are starting to not have fun anymore. If players taking longshots and actually passing them and mucking up your whole idea isn't fun, I don't know why you're GMing. It might take more thinking, but being creative is something that many people enjoy about GMing, and fast thinking is virtually required. If your goal is to railroad the players every single time, then yeah I can see how longshots would ruin your fun, how they would be a "loophole all the way down to the core dice mechanics."

I wasn't suggesting that any GM pull a "you can't do that," not ever. That's stupid. Just use some freakin tactics once in a while huh? Maybe the man the runners are trying to assassinate has hired a rigger or mage to keep watch for them, and if they're not smart about it they'll get noticed and he'll get in cover? That way if they're clever enough not to be seen, they deserve to take the longshot (and probably not kill the man anyway with just one shot at DV8). Maybe their goal is protected by something big and nasty that requires wits and not just one lucky roll to beat.

The Edge system is the tool that players have to make things interesting, to make the GM think fast. The lucky character can do amazing things (a limited number of times), but they cannot take over the game world with Edge, the GM still has the power. And NPCs have edge too... The GM's job is to make things fun, and hopefully dealing with the unexpected and throwing the unexpected right back at the PCs is fun. There is no "abuse" unless the GM is too stubborn or slow on his feet to deal with the unexpected. I guarantee you that before edge existed, players were still mucking up slow-thinking GMs by doing things so stupid they weren't ever accounted for, and houseruling edge won't change that. Edge is not a loophole in the system down to the core dice mechanics. Edge is part of the core dice mechanics. If you don't like it, play SR3. Edge is the players' chance to cheat fate and stir things up, which I see as a tool for enjoyment, not abuse. As long as a GM is good, they have the attitude of wanting to see what happens next, not an obsessive need to determine it.

Yep, but not necessarily from skills. I wasn't trying to say that edge is free, just that it is possible to have high skills and edge, something your statement didn't allow for.

According to the RAW, if you forbid them from taking the shot that'll take down a Citymaster with a flechette pistol, you've forbidden them from taking a valid action. They're not necessarily asking for anything outside of what the rules allow. If they're asking for something that the rules are meant to forbid, that's a different matter.

I created a sample character that's floating around here somewhere. Basically, it is possible to create an Edge 8 character who lacks any significant weaknesses in relation to anyone else of that archetype. In fact, you can have a double-specialized character, with one extreme trick and high Edge. And I'm not event *taht* good of a min/maxer.

Not necessarily. The cap for most characters is going to be 6, and probably lower than that., depending on concept. That's like saying a higher level character is going to have a higher Body; if you're taking about an Infirm Otaku, that's simply not going to be the case.

That's always a problem. However, if you as a GM need to constantly fix the core mechanics, then the line gets pretty damn thin. I prefer it when the ruleset is robust enough that I never have to get near the line in the first place. I may occasionally have to make a few unfavorable calls, but clear and stable rules make that happen a lot less often.

I'm sorry, I wasn't meaning to refer to you. James is the one who's advocating frequent use of the: "Nope, you can't do that" tactic. My apologies.

The problem is, Edge is broken-- I think I've adequately demonstrated that. Especially with the Longshot test rules, but also in the Escape Certain Death trick, the teamwork test trick, and so on. While there's always a way to pull a fast one on a GM, the question is this: How easy is it to do, and how easy is it to fix?

Since Edge is part of the core dice mechanics, as you pointed out, you can break the system without invoking any arcane or obscure rules tied together in mysterious ways. You can break the system just by using the core RAW, no bending or twisting required. That means it's very easy to break SR4, all you need is a high Edge. And since it's part of the core dice mechanics, you can't really fix it without altering the core dice mechanics. You could totally forbid longshot tests, but then you couldn't do "amazing things" with Edge, which you said was the whole goal of it. You could start restricting it, but then you start mucking with the entire power balance of the game, and toss things completely out of whack.

The only workable solution I've seen is to totally abandon fixed TN's and non-exploding dice. And once you've done that, you're pretty much not playing SR4 anymore.

Not quite. You've forbidden them from taking an action which is allowed in the rules. That doesn't make it a valid action. Saying "I ignore 3 inch thick metal with my pistol because I'm lucky" is an attempt to cheese the system, not an attempt to perform a valid action.

No, I'm advocating playing a realistic game. In a realistic game you don't have to use that line very often because players know that pistol rounds don't punch through 3" thick steel to hit the guy inside just because you're lucky.

Obviously you think you have. And just as obviously you haven't.

What's wrong with that? If a player finds themselves in a situation where they are certain to die, you can either kill the character or let them live and continue the story. The latter choice is almost always the more enjoyable one, unless the player wants their character to die.

And a GM who is willing to let the impossible happen just because you're lucky. And a player willing to try that. Again, it isn't the edge system that's broken in that situation, it's the player.

We went through that already and found a few other options. They weren't your pet option, so you basically ignored them in an attempt to continue hammering home the "need" to go back to floating TNs.

Which is exactly where you're at, and that works for you.

I was replying to somebody who had implied that high edge = high skills