And note once again, not a single logical argument in the entire post. In fact, this is what's known as an Ad Hominem fallacy. Because your statement can be demonstrated to be fallacious, we can discard your entire premise. Sorry, but insults aren't the same thing as logical refutation.

I'd almost agree with you on this one. I definitely still say that it has less to do with fixed vs floating TN, and more to do with how the overall system is structured. For example, I think the way nWoD and White Wolf's Aberrant and Adventure! books handled fixed TNs is better than SR4's, largely due to the shrinking dice pool problem.

That's good, because you still haven't succeded, no matter how hard you try. What happens is that I post the problem, you and others try a few things, I point out the errors, then you give up and start in with the insults. If you have logical proof, post it, because no one here has seen it yet.

Saying that "it's already been proven, so I don't need to actually prove anything", is also a logical fallacy. You're 0 for 2 so far; do you think that enough logical errors will make you more credible?

It's really nitpicky, but that isn't a logical fallacy. It could be a faulty hypothesis or even a false statement, but not a logical fallacy.

You've said that yourself, albeit in different words.

Oh, I haven't said that there aren't other options. I've said that a floating TN is best, and I've demonstrated my reasons mathematically. No one has posted conclusive counterarguments to the contrary. Some people might prefer something different, strictly on a personal playing style level, but that doesn't mean there isn't a single best mathematical option given the general criteria that SR4 is supposedly aiming for. Several people have posted other options, but they've all run afoul of the issues I've mentioned. For them, these issues might not be problems, but they're still showing up.

As for the longshot test, it's a problem in every group that uses them. You go from either zero chance, to a strictly predetermined chance, with your skill level or task difficulty not mattering a whit. It's a really whacked-out, unfun, binary dichotomy that detracts from the enjoyment of the game. Basically, characters lose their spotlight time, because the lucky characters can do just as well as they can under the right circumstances-- and those circumstances are usually during the big dramatic moments of the game.

Generally, the best option is the one that works, yes.

That being said, technically the Maneuver Score from SR3 works as well, and everyone knows how much I despise that piece of crap. There's a slim probability that the Maneuver Score might actually have been functional for someone out there, but I seriously doubt it. And while it may actually be possible to make the by-the-book Maneuver Score work, I have yet to meet anyone who found it to be /workable/.

I have significanly less of a problem with the Longshot test than I do the Maneuver score. The only difference is that it's much easier fix the problem: pretend the Maneuver Score doesn't exist. You can't do that with the Longshot test, since it's an inevitable result of how penalties are applied in the core dice mechanic.

I was just being trollish, gottcha.

edge dice don't explode on longshot tests, do they?

And you'd be wrong on several counts. The fixed number system was pretty much the first thing to be decided and it was integrated from the very beginning of development more that a year before SR4 went into playtesting and a couple of years before it was released (a decision made primarily because of the perception of simplicity and flow associated with a fixed TN system and a decision which has, despite criticism, more than paid off in players returning to the game and new players joining the ranks of fans) . Playtesting was neither truncated nor haphazard, though some people might be inclined to say so since they entered the process late and dropped out soon thereafter.

No, Edge dice do not explode on a Long Shot Test.

The Long Shot Test simply allows someone who would otherwise be unable to accomplish a Test because his dice pool has been reduced to zero by circumstancial modifiers to still attempt the test by:

a) Spending 1 point of Edge (if s/he has it)
b) Rolling his Edge as a substitute for the dice pool (ie. going on pure luck).

I'm sorry, did that sound too much like I was presenting facts? I apologize; all of what I said were just opinions gleaned from reading the debates here on DS. Synner's the one with the actual experience, so his words obviously mean much more than mine. That should be a lesson to me to not rely on rumor and guesswork as a substitute for actual fact. I still think fixed-TNs are a cop-out, and that the only simplicity or streamlining they add to SR is an illusion, but thanks for pointing out the facts that I'd missed.

And that's really odd that Rule of Six doesn't apply to long shots. If that's true then why have the rule at all? The whole rule seems kinda silly if it only allows certain people to even theoretically succeed, and only at certain tasks. *shrug*

Actually, the new World of Darkness system is based on the Aberrant and Adventure! lines, and both of those came out in the mid-late 90's, IIRC. Long before SR4 was though of, at any rate. I won't go so far as to charge outright theft-- and as others have pointed out, you can't actually *steal* a dice mechanic-- but let's just say that there are too many coincidences for this to be an accident. And, you know, it's not plagarism if you properly reference your sources.

As others have pointed out, the problem is that Edge dice do not explode on longshot tests. So, we're still faced with the impossible task issue. Using that example, Joe Average (Quickness 3, Edge 1, Automatics 0) cannot hope to hit anything when spraying lead in full-auto, no matter what.

And even if we allow for exploding dice, we have now scaled the task to near-impossible levels. In the previous example, Joe would need to score 8 successes on a single die in order to hit anything. That's effectively the same thing as a floating TN of 48! The variant I was discussing-- raising the TN by 1 per penalty-- would make this much more manageable, taking us to a more sane TN of 11. Still difficult, but the odds of being hit by a panicked newbie's spray-and-pray shouldn't be *that* astronomical.

We also have issues that emerge, since combat tests are never supposed to have thresholds in the first place. That leads to all kinds of wonky results, when one person only misses due to an artificial increase in the threshold.

At the moment. Anything new is going to move; if Fanpro had only released SR3.5, it would have sold just as well. I can also say that my actual playtest experiences don't bear out what you're claiming. I had a lot of complaints about the system when I ran the game for that review... and yes, I knew I would be writing a review in advance, so I stuck very closely to canon. It's only fair that everyone experience the system as written, so they actually experience SR4, instead of Cain's Repaired Home System. No one said that they were more likely to buy the BBB after the game, even though they had middling to good amounts of fun with it, the system just wasn't standout enough. And since this was in a game store, the fact that the store copy of SR4 is *still* on the shelf, all this time later, is telling.

You're absolutely right. It's more to do with the overall design of a system that increases simplicity and improves flow. Fixed TN's don't really do much of anything on their own.

Yes, but you've also demonstrated that you're ignoring or house ruling large swathes of the rules. Like all versions of Shadowrun, a lot of what makes the game run faster is when people deliberately decide to ignore large sections of the rules. In SR2-3, it was the maneuver score. In this case, I will say that the writing quality is good enough that everything just *seems* to work much better.... but that's not really because the system is better, it's because the rules are presented in a better fashion. People like Synner deserve kudos for cleaning up the crazy FASA prose and layout problems, and replacing it with clear and easy-to-read English.

Which is exactly the way the mechanic was designed. Joe Average with 1 Edge is an unlucky sod and will typically miss when he has to fall back on luck alone (note that there are other useful applications of Edge aside from the Long Shot Test so its not 1 point entirely wasted). On the other hand an exceptionally lucky Joe (Edge 6) will be able to hit about as well as he would if he were using a Automatics 3 + Agility 3 dice pool going on sheer luck alone and despite the modifiers. A very exceptionally lucky street sam (Edge 6) will still be a lot less effective with a Long Shot Test than with his normal dicepool (normally averaging 11 in my experience).

If somebody got it into their mind that the Long Shot Test was devised to reflect something else that's their misunderstanding.

Correction - "at the moment" is whole a year later. A whole year was enough for WW's nWOD line to drop 50% in sales according to some sources and that was "new" too.

Judging simply by Dumpshock more old fans have come back to the game in the past year than in the previous three because of the new system. SR4 is still selling strong and has outsold SR3 in the same time period and with a very different market (SR3 was the best seller of the previous 3 editions and was, significantly, released at a point when the RPG market was thriving as opposed to today's reality). SR4 is already going into its fourth printing and if it stays true to form a goodly portion of that is already allocated on (continuing) preorders. Perspective is everything.

As has been previously pointed out on this subject your local reality does not reflect the reality in other parts of the country nor FanPro's actual sales figures.

This is untrue. He's demonstrated he's tweaked minor rules to fit his game style, you know, the sort of thing the basic book actually suggests you do - that is a far stretch from "house ruling large swathes of the rules". A situation which is, at least partly, due to the fact that the whole system isn't yet available so some rules and subsystems aren't sufficiently filled out for some people's tastes. (ie. Matrix, Rigging)

Do you really need a rule book to explicity tell you that you can run the game in your own style?

I mean, realy, as mfb said, it's much easier to choose not to use some of the more detailed rules that do exist, than to have to create the more detailed rules because they didn't exist in the first place.

On the other hand, I might be have a somewhat biased opinion, since I am a fan of the whoel Rolemaster system, but I do happen to like (almost) everything I have seen about SR4 so far.

Dave

oddly, that is exactly what i don't like about SR4. as for being free within a detailed ruleset, i'm not talking about making houserules. i'm talking about the GM handing out modifiers to tasks as he sees fit, ignoring the detailed tables. the only difference between a setup like that and a setup like SR4 is that the detailed rules are there to be taken advantage of, for those who wish to.

but this has been discussed before.

Well, the thing about detailed rulesets is that people feel that they are obligated to actually use them. It's fairly common knowledge that unless you are very familiar with the ruleset (like everyone here on DS is likely to be) it's usually not a good idea to be changing a system willy-nilly. It usually just gets you in trouble; see some of the threads with whole sets of house-rules, started by newbies, that actually make the balance problems *worse* then they were before.

The major difference between sr3 and sr4 isn't that fixed TNs inherently make things simpler and more streamlined, or at least not meaningfully so. There are, however, three important differences between sr3 and sr4 that make sr4 substantially better, despite in many ways having *more* rules in the core book than in sr3's core book:

1) Fewer corner cases. One thing that made the sr3 rules so incredibly annoying and difficult to use was how so very many things implemented in the rules did not follow the core mechanic of rolling skill/rating versus variable TN. Magic and decking had stealth-inserted Thresholds into their rules; decking had Ratings add and decrease TN rather than be rolled against the TN; rigging had the god-awful Maneuver Score; stealth had that weird Open Test rule; rolling for Magic Loss and nearly everything else healing-related was a chore; the list goes on and on. A scant few thought this was fun because you were essentially playing an entirely different dice game with each character aerchtype, but for the majority--GM's, especially--learning each new ruleset was a pain in the butt.

Again, this isn't to say that variable-TN systems are better or worse than fixed-TN systems. I *am* saying, however, that the way sr3 implemented a variable-TN system was sorely lacking. Honestly SR3 wasn't even one variable-TN system; it was more like five or six. And that leads us to the second reason SR4 is better than SR3:

2) Better layout. It's pretty obvious that SR4's rules were presented much better than SR3's rules. The index and table of contents are well put-together, for starters; many sr3 supplements didn't even have an index. Rules that are logically grouped together are also physically grouped together, and not scattered haphazardly throughout the book as they were in sr3. The core book in general was put together to promote easier comprehension of the game rules than with sr3. Hats off to the devs for that.

3) Fewer rules... for now. Naturally SR4, being a new system, isn't as bloated with rules as sr3, what with its dozens of supplement books. This difference will liely shrink as new books are published, but for now it's a big reason for why sr4 is simpler and more streamlined than sr3.

Anyway, it's pretty clear that SR4 is far better, in system and presentation, than SR3 ever was. I still think that a variable TN system can be better than a fixed TN system, however. I just don't really consider SR3 to be a very good implementation of a variable-TN system.

Whereas I'm saying that te fact that SR4 *does* employ a cohesive system is precisely what makes it better than SR3. It's kinda hard to say that SR3 is a better system when it's really not very systematic to begin with.

Hasn't it all? I thought that's why we came to DS: to beat dead horses.

And this shows yet another disconnect between what was "intended" by the press releases, and what we actually get. Combat is supposed to be more threatening than before; but now, full-auto sprays are actually less deadly than single-shots. Joe Average with a SMG should be able to threaten the PC's, in a "gritty" system. (If I recall the Fantasy Gamer's Bible entry correctly, this was even lauded as one of Shadowrun's strong points.) You're now telling us that SR4 was *designed* to make it so the PC's could mow through average guards, left and right? Because under the base mechanic, they only can possibly hit *anything* maybe one or two times per run.

Yes, it is. And I can say that in the last year, I've had a harder time bringing in new players to Shadowrun than ever before. John Dunn will tell you about the recent flap on the ShadowrunSeattle list, where partially thanks to SR4, the entire Missions campaign has been scrapped in this area. Among the people I know who have bought SR4, I know fewer people who are actuallly *playing* it than ever before. Take a moment to look at what the mythical "average gamer" is being offered to him, as opposed to the dedicated Shadowrun fans, and things look different. I can tell you that nothing has killed Shadowrun in my area quite as strongly as SR4, and that includes the GM who had Harlequin's kid brother as his GMPC.

Also, I do know that the sales figures are difficult to compare, but they also happen to include pdf's in that figure. The pdf market runs under different dynamics than the print market does. However, you can expect that sales are going to drop off in the near future: SR4 has been out for less than a year, and I predict that the new announcements for GenCon and Origins 2006 will cause gamers to start saving up for this year's big releases. SR4 came out at the tail end of last year's big announcements, but we're coming into the new season.

Judging by Dumpshock, I've seen the same number of fans come and go in that same time. I've been around here for a fair while-- since it was known as Deep Resonance-- and I know that things tend to flow back and forth. Things here can stay stable for a long time, then change dramatically almost overnight. Just ask anyone at FSA or U93.

Look, *every* game has something saying that the GM should set his own thresholds, etc. But let's face it, I would really hate to pay 35 bucks plus read 300+ pages, to have it all boil down to one paragraph: The GM makes it all up. The reason I forked over my money in the *first place* was because I didn't want to come up with all that much stuff! It's easier to ignore details than it is to make them up, because when you make them up you have to make sure they're balanced, fair, etc. This is what we're paying the publishers for.

What's even worse is when the details are unfair or unbalanced in the first place. Then, you have to do just as much work fixing them. Once you've gotten around to fixing every core rule in the game, you're effectively playing a house system with some similarities to the original material. Which is fine and dandy, but don't try and tell me that the RAW is valueable because you can play something else.

I'm going to answer you directly on this one. I've been playing Shadowrun since 1989. Over those 17 years, I've probably gamed with *hundreds* of people, if not thousands; and I've lost count of the number of people I've introduced to Shadowrun. I've brought dedicated Shadowrun-haters back into the fold. Heck, I've been able to get math-dyslexics to enjoy playing Chartmaster, Roleplay snobs to enjoy playing Rifts, have beginners stat up GURPS Supers characters in under forty-five minutes, and gotten religious fundamentalists to allow their kids to start gaming as a therapeutic hobby.

If I'm not the type of GM who can draw in new audiences, I hate to see what you're doing to new players!

Exactly! But there's been this guy here who keeps saying that you can simply ignore problems in the rules, or put up house rules to prevent the most egregrious abuses in the system, or just lay down a GM hammer when things come up that he doesn't like. I wish he'd say things like that: that it's far, far better to have a cohesive and unbroken ruleset in the first place, so we're not forced to come up with exotic rule fixes.

You're absolutely right on #2 and 3. But by themselves, they don't make SR4 a better product. The layout and rules presentation is now up to industry standards; we just got so used to the bad FASA layout that the significant improvement makes it looks like it's actually better than other things out there. The trend nowadays is to try and cram more and more into a single book, so the more rules/fewer rules dichotomy isn't really anything special.

#1, however, isn't quite as true. As mfb pointed out, SR3 has a more durable and solid core system. SR4 is running with a relatively new mechanic, with several major holes already showing. Every time I mention the Million Agent Army, someone will blow a headgasket, and then come back with a dozen patches that they can slap onto it. I've yet to see a single developer realize that the Burly Man Brawl is only a symptom of the flaws in the Teamwork test mechanics, and come up for a fix at that level. We're looking at a Microsoft-style issue, where we're going to see a lot of patches being tossed onto a system to make it work, when we should have simply fixed the system in the first place.

Why? Why should you feel obligated to follow a rules system for a fictitiuous setting? I mean, there are no game police going to knock your door down. That ended with AD&D 2nd Ed.

I mean seriously, whether you are new to the system, new to gaming, or an experienced player/GM, whats the worst that could happen if you change the rules in a bad way? So your game doesn't go as well as it could. So what. Start over, try again. Or don't, stick with the stock rules. Whatever suits you.

However, if the stock rules are well fleshed out and detailed to begin with, it's much, much easier to trim them down, than if the stock rules are bare bones and you have to build them up. Unless, of course, you're a budding game designer, then things are a bit different. Even then, though, it's easier to remove things than to create new things.

Really, though, I have few problems with the SR4 rule set. I do really dislike the fixed TN, but then, I disliked the hard, jagged edge in probability of the D6 in SR3 (which my group solved by using D8s, with 8 counting as 0, so that you rolled 0-7, with 7's being lucky and rerolling, which was detailed in one of the SR webzines) Couple of other things I dislike, but this is not the thread for it.

As for Jack:

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I preferred RMSS, although I had played RM1 and RM2 quite a bit, I found that RMSS really, really cleared a lot of little problems up. RM1, by the way, is when Spell Law was separated in 4 little books (Of Channeling, Of Essence, etc... with neat runes on the covers, and different colors. Back in the early, early days of ICE) ICE is still around, by the way, and they simplified RMSS down, repackaged it, and resold it as RMFRPG, then went bankrupt, got bought by a bunch of the fans, and started selling things again. Try www.ironcrown.com They've got forums there as well, though I am not active on those.

Dave

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Again perspective is everything. As a GM I've wasted a fully loaded troll sam with a ganger with an SMG using narrow bursts and the teams adept with long narrow bursts on an old assault rifle (neither had significant recoil comp or targeting bonii). So honestly, I fail to see your point. In fact, this week an old lady shot the team decker who was harassing her for information with a hold out and got him for 3 boxes of Physical damage (pretty meager but better than SR3).

I said nothing of the sort. I simply outlined one of the functions of the new Edge attribute and one of its various associated mechanics. Edge has several other functions which can make Combat seriously dangerous, especially when the GM is familar enough with the rules to use them as much as players do. All the rest is erroneous and misleading extrapolation.

Oddly enough I haven't figured in the pdf sales which would have bloated figures even more. I'm just running by the hardcopy printings SR4 has gone through.

I've been around since the Deep Resonance days too, and the number of returned players and newbs has never been so high—many of those specifically people saying they've returned directly or indirectly because of SR4. You may chose to read that as a normal flow, I certainly don't.

This is incorrect. I've basically told you already in another thread one of the various systems that is intended for the Unwired expansion and which was covered in SR4 development. You may call it a patch all you want but its simply one of the many things that simply didn't fit in the core book and was deemed better to leave for the Matrix-specific expansion.

Since when does something cease to be a system when it ceases to be simplistic? Does not compute.

Just sayin'.

Oh, and it's not hard to say SR3 is a better system. I do it all the time.