because a) nobody in any reasonable game is going to have enough build points and/or karma to realistically represent the bleedover, and b) that doesn't really address the fact that you can't be skilled in some areas without also being skilled in others.

this entire paragraph is, in the experience of myself and every person whose ability with firearms i respect, almost completely incorrect. a good shot with a rifle is a good shot with a pistol is a good shot with a machine gun. i, myself, was able to score pretty damn well the first time i fired my M-249 (a light machinegun), because the principles hammered into me when i was learning to fire the M-16 applied directly to this new task. nor was i unique--everyone i went to the M-249 range approximated the shooting scores they achieved with their M-16s.

the only real caveat is that a person who starts out shooting shotguns often has a hard time picking up rifles. this isn't because they're different skills so much as it is that a person can be a "good" shot with a shotgun (ie, they can bring their targets down) while using crappy firearms technique. shotgun spread makes up for poor sight picture, improper breath control, yanking the trigger, and all manner of other sins. a person who has a hard time moving to rifles after learning shotguns is having problems because he is a bad shooter, as evidenced by the fact that people who start out on rifles can become fine shotgunners.

Not really. Savage World, for example, handles this all through the use of Tricks. Instead of coming up with a special case for each and every item, a ruleset can instead assign a general set of bonuses. This leads to faster and smoother gameplay.

Incorrect. If you've trained in boxing since birth, but somehow have managed to avoid training in any other combat form whatsoever, your overall skill is going to be d6 or so, with an Edge in boxing.

Once again, you're stuck in the concept that fanatically studying one style, to the exclusion of all others, will make you into a good fighter. That is not the case, and there's a lot of real-world fighters who prove it.

If you've "never heard of them", you have no call in buying the skill that high in the first place. You're better off buying edges.

True as far as it goes, but you still can't go super high. It costs so much to increase a group, your overall advancement is going to be slower. Additionally, you're effectively banned from buying Aptitude until you break the skill group, and you still can't buy specializations until you've broken the group. Under SR4, it's impossible to have as high a dice pool with skill groups as you can get by buying them separately.

The concept is nice, but the way it works out is poor. The sheer fact that raising a skill group costs so much karma is balance enough; there's no need for additional artifical arbitrary capping on them.

The first problem with this is the fact that you have to pay for that low skill. In a more realistic model, that proficiency comes for free. The second problem is that under the SR4/NWOD mdoel, skill is almost totally nerfed by attributes. If your Quickness is high enough, you don't ever need the skill at all; you can have a world-calss firearms instructor, at skill 6 and quickness 3, who's outclassed by a barely-competent elf with Quickness 10 and skill 1.

If you want to model this under SR3, you can buy an Incompetence in pistols; this shows that you've never got the hang of them, but have a good skill with rifles.

This is not the case. In many cases, I'd place my money on the guy with 20 yellow belts, although I do admit it would depend. Someone with a black belt in American sport Tae Kwon Do and tournament karate would get massacred by someone with beginner rankings in 20 street-combat arts. With such a variety of arts, the yellow belt guy has a much higher chance of learning how to counter many different styles.

Also, you have to realize that in every art I'm aware of, you learn about 90% of what it has to offer by the time you finish the beginner belts. From there onward, you're just learning refinements and strategy. Much of what was once considered to be "secret techniques", reserved for advanced-level students, really only amounts to what we'd call "applications" nowadays. Upper-level training really only involves putting the basic techniques together into a coherent style. Our monostylist has learned to understand 100% of one style. Our well-rounded beginner has learned 90% of 20 different styles, and may or may not have integrated them into a unique style all his own. That "may or may not" is why there's room to question the results of a fight, but the yellow belt is still better off.

And if you need proof, think of this: Bruce Lee only ever had a high ranking in one style, Wing Chun. And for that matter, there's an ongoing controversy as to exactly how much he knew; it's pretty clear that he didn't have a sifu certification, which is the equivalent of a black belt. He had only the equivalent of a yellow belt in most every other art he studied. And yet, Bruce Lee was probably the best fighter of his era, and has left a legacy on the entire practice of modern martial arts. "20 yellow belts" describes Bruce a lot better than "One or two black belts"; who would *you* want to put your money on?

There is not a single real-world fighter that proves it. There are a number of real-world fighters who study a number of styles, and a number who study just one style, and there is a tendency for the former to overpower the latter in direct combat, but such things do not "proof" make.

~J, more pedantic than usual

There is a statistically significant correlation between poly-discipline training and victory in unarmed combat. Is that accurate enough for you, definition Nazi?

How does grapplling with a lasso work?

Which is it? First you said that olympic level abilities are 1d8. Then you said that training all your life in boxing is d6. do you have to train more than all your life to reach Olympic levels in boxing? Or perhaps you have to train with a few melee weapons to get to olympic levels in boxing?

so which is it that enforces that limit, GM Fiat or Player Restraint? Either way it's a flaw in the rules IMO.

So what you're saying is that someone who specializes on a single weapon is going to be better than someone that practices every weapon in that similar category, but only with their weapon of choice. Sounds about right to me.

Skill caps IMO work well. They're certainly not broken or even bent, and they're the easiest thing to house rule if you want to remove them.

What is this quickness of which you speak?

That elf has an agility of super(meta)human proportions. It makes sense to me that he's going to be astounding with anything involving agility. YMMV

I could be mistaken, but Incompetence also exists in SR4.

Sorry hyz. You lose the thread.

C'mon, I also killed about five million other people. Why do people only remember the Jews?

Care to explain? Extraordinary claims and all that.

~J

neither. unless i'm mistaken, it's cheaper to buy, say, a d6 skill and a +2 edge to a single application of that skill than it is to buy a d8 skill. other, less... dedicated fighters go straight for the d8 skill because they want the advantages that come with it. for those advantages, they pay extra.

I'm sorry, what I was trying to say may not have come across clearly.

Sitting at the target range, bench rest or offhand, and plinking away at a target is something that's hard for anyone to screw up if they can shoot. What you're talking about carrying over from the M16 to the M249 are the same things I'm talking about carrying over: how to pull a trigger, how to breathe, how to sight properly. These are the things that carry over quite easily, as every type of firearm out there uses these skills. You could duplicate this effect in SR4 by having defaulting pay a little more attention to skills in the group... ignoring the -1 to the Attribute if you've got a skill in the group, and/or giving a +1 if you've got a skill in the group at 3 or higher. Something like that.

Having actual skill with a weapon type (in SR or RL) represent having spent time using that weapon in it's intended role.

Take someone who's fired bench-rest .22 target rifles, hand him an M-249 SAW, and toss him into a firefight, where he's got no skill at things like handling recoil from an automatic weapon, how to fire an 18 pound automatic from the shoulder while moving, proper techniques for suppressive fire, and avoiding the classic new gunner problem of clenching your hands to hold onto the recoiling automatic (thus continuing to hold down the trigger), and his skills with the .22 aren't going to do him a lot of good.

Take someone who's only been trained on long guns like the M16 and the M249, and give them a Glock, you're going to see similar issues. Muzzle flip is practically nonexistent on an assault rifle... not so much with a handgun. The center of gravity of the pistol appreciably changes as you run through the magazine. The ranges at which you can effectively put the front sight over the target and squeeze the trigger (do they still train that as "front sight press"?) are drastically reduced because of the shorter sight radius... the shooter's training and familiarity with the long gun is not helping him in this case. In a controlled environment, he'd be able to apply those skills he already knew from the other weapon, because they're basic to any shooting. The minute he's into a serious firefight, that extra fraction of a second to get the sights back on target, that extra care he's got to take pulling the trigger because it affects handguns a lot more than rifles when you jerk them... it's unfamiliar territory. His basic shooting skills should carry over, but actually getting his skills up into the ranges where most of the kinds of characters we care about have them requires more than a passing familiarity with those firearms.

My impression from what you posted is that you'd been firing the M16 for a while before you tried out the M249. If the first time you'd ever seen an M249 had been when you were offered a hypothetical choice of carrying it (a brand new weapon to you) or your M16 (a weapon you'd trained with to the point where you at least had the basics of shooting down pretty well), would you have picked the arguably more powerful M249, or stayed with the weapon you had skill with? That's all I meant to get at with my post. I did not mean to imply that the basics of accurate shooting had no cross-platform usage, just that there's a lot of skills unique to each platform that you aren't going to get from shooting something else.

That makes perfect sense, but Cain said that Olympic level was 1d8, not 1d6+2. A guy that's d6+2 is going to tear the floor up with someone that's straight d6 in a TN4 system. It would also mimic reality better.

I assume, given his quote, that most olympic athletes would be d8+2, the base level of olympic caliber plus the edges. Perhaps someone with the book can say whether Cain's statement about what the book considers Olympic caliber was true or not?

liberal Jew-run media.

One is never proof, but large numbers do become proof. Once you've repeated an experiment enough times, you can call your results "conclusive proof".

You mean, using a lasso or grappling or other Fighting move as a Trick? Let's pretend you're using a flail: you tell the GM that you're going to entangle the other guy's weapon, then you roll an Agility Trick. If you win, your next attack against the guy will have a +2; if you win with a Raise, he's Shaken as well. So, in-game, you've lassoed his weapon and yanked it so far out of line, it's useless for a while. If you got a Raise, you also pulled him out of position, forcing him to stutter-step and leaving him struggling to remain upright.

You can do the same thing with any other weapon. If you want to pull off an Agility trick with a rapier, for example, you might describe it as slicing his forehead open and letting the blood pour into his eyes. On a success, he drops his guard; on a raise, he completely loses sight of you and flails blindly. You might reflect the sunlight into his eyes, pull off the classic of throwing dirt into his face, use a super-secret martial arts nerve strike, and so on and so forth. You just pick the appropriate description; the mechanics are all the same. This is how a truly unified system handles things.

"Olympic level" skills do not necessarily translate into real-world ability. I've ripped apart national-level tournament fighters in full contact sparring, and I don't even have a single trophy. If all you have is boxing, then you don't have Fighting at d8; you've got Knowledge: Boxing at d8.

Neither. GM and player intelligence does it. In Shadowrun, you can't have a character who's got Pistols 6 and has somehow never even heard of a revolver before. Same idea, just broader categories.

No, what I'm saying is that no matter how hard you try, you can't have equalized high-end skills. If you're one of the best in the world with your trademark pistol, you're not going to be totally incompetent with every other pistol, let alone all firearms. Skill caps work poorly at best, but skill group caps are what really make skill groups worthless; you can't buy a skill group aptitude.

Yeah, and it's totally unworkable in this model. In Sr3, it represented additional difficulty you'd have in using a pistol: no matter what, you simply could not ever be as good with pistols. In SR4, you're magically incapable of pulling the trigger on a pistol, even if you're a living god with machine pistols and SMG's. There's no "increased difficulty" mechanic in SR4, it's an all-or-nothing tradeoff.

The same thing would happen if you tossed him into a firefight with a 22LR. In all honesty, the skills required to make it through a live combat are noticeably different than the ones you need to score points in a competition, or hit target rings on a paper target. This is why James' "olympic level boxer" gets creamed by inexperienced street fighters who've never stepped into a competition ring; real combat is always a better teacher than simulated combat.

It's not that specific, but it can be assumed based off of certain calculations. For example, your Swimming Pace equals 1/2 your skill. At a d8, that gives you 4 inches of movement per round, which translates into 8 meters; at 10 rounds per minute, that's 80 meters. The Olympic swimming records for the various 100m styles are all around 1 minute, so the average Olympic athlete will have a skill of about d8+2 or so; Olympic champions and record-holders will be at about a d10.

Ummm... What makes you think my question about using a lasso can be answered with a flail example? I guess "grappling with a lasso" was too generic for you? I'll clarify: how does one go about roping someone with a lasso, involving tossing the lasso onto them, and drawing it tight, preferably with the target's limb(s) entangled?

Doesn't answer the issue. You yourself said that olympic level was d8. Are you now saying that it is not?

That's not "neither" it's "a combination fo both." Of course, when others say their games use a combination of both to fix problems you call it being a nazi GM. LOL

Not true. You can become good with that pistol. You can even become world class. But first you'll have to buy off your incompetence. The "increased difficulty" comes from having to spend 10 karma to start learning the skill. Someone without incompetence could put those ten karma towards the skill itself.

I'm not talking about olympic level boxers in fights against world class MMA people. But as usual, you like to twist a discussion to a point where you feel confident in arguing it rather than actually respond to the post. What I said was that someone with Olympic level boxing skills (d8) will also have olympic level skills in all other forms of combat without some sort of GM Fiat or player self-limitations.

You said d8. People aren't usually that specific without a rule behind it. Does it or does it not specifcy soemwhere what each die level equates to: d4 - average, d6 - trained, d8 - olympic, etc.?

And I'll repeat my Savage Worlds cChallenge. Mail me a copy of the rules. I'll play it with my group. If we like it I'll pay you back double and buy every SW book out there. If I don't like it I'll mail it back to you.

Or do you not think your game is good enough?

For the third time. Call for a Trick. On a success, he's distracted enough that he can't defend himself properly. On a Raise, he's Shaken; you represent this by leaving him helpless until he can manage to get loose. Just like I said in the last two posts.

It's neither. It's based on having a workable system.

Assuming a SR4 elf with Quickness 10, he spends 10 karma, and immediately jumps from "incapable of pulling the trigger" to: "Better than trained marksmen". He hasn't even started learning the skill yet. This is still an "all-or-nothing" model.

Do you ever get tired of being wrong? If you only have a Boxing skill, you can't have a d8 in all other combat skills. You'd maybe have a Knowledge: Boxing skill at d8, but not Fighting. You could also have a Fighting skill with edges in Boxing, representing the fact that you actually know how to use Boxing in a real fight.

Sorry, but every hardcopy of Savage Worlds in my area has sold out, and my FLGS is backordered on it. But, instead, I'll make you an offer. Buy a copy of Savage Worlds, and do a Grubman challenge: play nothing but Savage Worlds for 101 days. If at the end of that, you don't agree that it's faster and smoother than any version of Shadowrun, I'll take Kremlin's joke out of my sig.

I think what you'll discover is this: less skill groupings makes for faster game play, and doesn't sacrifice realism to nearly the degree you seem to think it will. There's a lot of heavy detail in crunchy systems that aren't really necessary to have a fun and believeable game; they lend themselves to a certain style, but that style isn't necessarily more realistic. What ultimately matters is how well the game runs, how well the mechanic holds up under player stress, and how much fun you're having in the process. And when it comes to fun, less is more.

I dislike the problems I see in the test drive rules. PEople have made some good points about unified skills systems here and I'm not downright opposed to the game. I would probably us GM and Player collusion to determine what sorts of weaponry a charater's Fightin / Shooting / Throwing skills represented, but I don't think I'm predisposed to disliking it, at least not the entire game. The only problem I have with the test drive rules is the overgeneralization of the combat skills. The rest of it looks to be fairly smooth.

Silly me. When you answered my specific question with a completely different specific example I just thought you were being stupid.

So you're saying there are no rules for grappling other than doing a trick with a possible raise?

Call it what you like, but you've already said that the GM and player combine to determine what is appropriate for the character. You can ignore the fact that it is therefor a case of GM and player collusion if you want, but that doesn't make it go away.

So? He's got a higher agility than the vast majority of beings on the planet. It makes sense that he'll be great with agility based skills. He won't be better than the best of the best with those skills, because they'll have both high agility and high skill. He will be able to eventually join their ranks though, despite your assertion that "he is incapable of pulling the trigger."

So you can beat people up with knowledge skills? LOL

I'm not disagreeing that it's faster than SR4. I never have. The system rolls a single die against what is normally a TN of 4. By virtue of that alone it'll be faster. I'm assuming there are die roll modifers and/or TN modifiers that will slow it down somewhat, but if there aren't as many of them as there are in SR then it'll still remain faster and smoother. My point has never been that it isn't smooth.

Smoothness and speed only goes so far in a game. WoD LARP with it's rock papers scissors is incredibly fast and smooth. That doesn't make it a great system.

And besides, why would I care about your sig? My response to his original post was that if it kept him out of my game I was happy to do it. It being there is just a constant reminder to me to never have Luke shoot at the Death Star if I run Star Wars, because otherwise Kremlin KOA might magically appeear at my doorstep wanting to play.

I think the reason the game runs faster is not because of the unified skills but because of the simplicity of the rules. As I said earlier, I've never had a problem with multiple skills slowing down a game. YMMV

Having discussed it with people on this thread I see now that it doesn't give up as much realism as I thought it would, but it still gives up more than I want it to.

Thank you for reiterating my earlier posts.

True.

I don't think that is always the case. You are free to disagree, but you already knew that.

I believe you mean "more is more."

~J, fighting the urge to put calculus into SR3R since 2005

Wait, does this mean we won't need background in differential equations to calculate blast damage for a 5 kilo chunk of C12? Drek that, at least make it an optional rule (in the same way dice are optional).

i'm not sure why you're laughing. the world is full of people who are masters within their chosen figting style, but who are next to usless in an actual fight because they're too used to the limited focus of their own sport. case in point: the goal of Olympic boxing is not to beat people up, but to score points. one of the possible ways to score points is to beat up your opponent, but that's not actually necessary. it's easily possible, in Olympic boxing, for a boxer to win a match even if he gets knocked out.

FWIW, one thing the book does mention is that the skills are always set as appropriate to your setting. For example, the Drive skill would be cars nowaday, but would be hovercars in the future and stagecoaches in the past. If you've got a guy from the Wild West who's time-transported to the modern day, he wouldn't be able to use his Drive skill on a truck, since it's not appropriate to his setting. If you want to do something similar to the other skills, that's fine as well.

Not with a lasso, not really. I just loaned out my book, so I don't have a page reference to give you. However, it's all you really need: you can call for a Trick, and describe it however you like. Since it all works out to be mechanically the same, you have one rule doing the work of dozens. This is how a unified system should work.

Under SR4, with an Incompetence, he can't even default. So, despite the fact that he might be one of the world's greatest riflemen, he can't even find the trigger on a pistol; somehow, he's never even seen or heard of a pistol before. Once he buys off that incompetence, not only does he miraculously find the trigger after weeks of searching; suddenly he's outshooting people who have trained their entire lives, and teach pistol shooting for a living.

The problem here is the all-or-nothing model of the rules. There's absolutely no middle ground, he swings from one extreme to another almost instantly.

As mfb pointed out, tournament skills seldom equate to real-life combat skills. In reality, sport Tae Kwon Do would be better classified as a knowledge skill than a combat skill; it's almost completely useless in a real fight. I hold no advanced belt rankings, and I've torn apart tournament winners in full-contact sparring.

At any event, Savage Worlds uses the same open-ended knowledge skill system that Shadowrun does; it's a catchall category, and occasionally it includes active skill abilities. For example, if you had Knowledge: Skateboarding, in either Shadowrun or Savage Worlds, it would represent your ability to ride a skateboard. Another example would be Knowledge: Ballroom Dancing.

I'd be very hesitant to call the rules simple or light. Wushu is simple and light. Capes is simple and light, although it's also so bizzarre as to be about as confusing as a more complex system. Savage Worlds is solidly middle-of-the-road on that spectrum, it just runs faster than the simpler and lighter ones.

Fair enough. I submit, though, that if you gave it A Grubman Challenge, you would find that you missed the realism far less than you think.

I do, and I can give you the classic example. Which is more fun: when you're playing the game, rolling dice and interacting with each other; or when you're all flipping through various rulebooks, citing obscure references, and arguing over minute details?

No, I'm sure that's still in there; he said calculus, not differential equations.

But I'm a bit sad we're tossing the idea of doing a line integral of a randomly-generated vector field representing friction to 1) determine whether or not a Crash Test needs to be made for vehicles attempting a hairpin turn, and 2) determine if a weapon hit has enough force to cause a Knockdown test. That's two places such a rule would be used; we'd actually be streamlining!

Ah, that's a relief.

The issue with a randomly generated vector field is that the relevant net forces can be furthur approximated into a single random value. So the only difference is whether you want to roll 300 D6 and have them almost always cancel out (or be ignored) or if you just want to roll 3 D6 (open) to construct a net friction vector.

No.
No.
No.


Those who practice full-contact sparing regulary will have a great advantage over those who practce tournament-rules point sparring.That is a fact. To win a fight you must know how to hit and how to be hit.

Boxing is a full contact sport. The point of the game is beat your opponent senseless so that he cannot stand up. An Olympic level boxer has Olympic-level full-contact combat experience.

As mfb pointed out, Olympic tournament boxing is sufficiently removed from real combat, that isn't necessarily the case. Your point is more true for other styles of boxing, but even then, it's not really the case: boxing is loaded with illegal moves, places where you can and cannot be hit, and depends on a referee to ensure fair play.

The fact that it's a contact sport helps some, but it's not remotely the same thing as full-contact sparring, or real-world combat training. Boxing is a game of points, not a self-defense or fighting art.

This would be a case of Incompetence not being appropriate for the character coupled with the downside of the seperated skills system. The flip side of that in Savage Worlds would be a guy that has high shooting but has never seen bows and blowguns being able to use them with no problems. Both systems have flaws, that's already been said. I prefer the flaws of seperated skills, you prefer flaws of grouped skills. It's cool.

The flip side for grouped skills would be the all-or-all model of the rules. Unless you purposefully limit yourself through GM Fiat and/or roleplaying drawbacks you know all things within your group, even those that don't make sense for you to know.

So then what you're saying is that you can beat people up with knowledge skills. Are there rules for this? It definitely sounds interesting. Can you give me a book and page reference so I can check it out the next time I'm at my FLGS? It might be something I could modify for use in other games.

Is there a built-in correlation to knowledge vs. fighting, or can you have d12+12 (exaggeration) in knowledge: boxing and be unstoppable in the ring, but completely useless on the streets if you didn't spend the points on Fighting?

Untrue. Those would represent your knowledge of skateboarding or ballroom dancing. You need an active skill to actually do it, although SR3 had complimentary skills which would let your knowledges help your actives. I don't recall offhand if SR4 has those or not.

Mail me a book and I'll tell you if I agree or not.

Toss me a book and I will. I don't feel the need or even desire to buy a book I don't know that I'll use. We play a bunch of systems already and I could instead spend the money on supplements for those RPGs, cards, or even (gasp!) food for my kids.

Two problems with that:

One, some people prefer digging through rulebooks and arguing examples. They didn't invent the term "rules lawyer" out of thin air. Munchkins also frequently do this.

Two, you're assuming that more rules means you're digging through sourcebooks a lot. Rolemaster has a ton of rules. Star Fleet Battles has even more. I rarely have to dig through rulebooks on either of those. Other systems in our group have their own experts, so we don't dig through the rules in those much either. The only time digging through rules is an issue is when we play a new game. Toss me a copy of SW and I'll tell you how much we have to dig through.

Tell that to the kids that beat up a bully because their dads taught them to box.

Regardless of the name of the group, Knowledge skills in many RPGs do not purely pertain to knowledge. For example, see: Talismongering (MitM pp. 30, 40-42). Applications of Knowledge skills in SR3 can be just as or more physical in nature than those of certain Active skills. It is often said that Knowledge skills would more accurately be called Background skills or Secondary skills, or something of that nature. The only problem I can think of in placing very physically demanding skills in the Knowledge group in SR3 is that Knowledge skills are all Int-linked.

Flipping through sourcebooks, citing obscure references, and arguing over minute details, of course. Why do you think I spend so much time here?

~J

You should. Get a monologue on pre-post-impressionist literature going and many people will react in a way that is very similar to their reaction to getting punched in the gut.

You can't win a fight without hurting your opponent. If you're winning your olympic level fight using knowledge: boxing, there there is a correlation between knowledge and fighting.

Or are you saying that knowing where you're allowed to hit is where the knowledge comes in? If so, then how do you limit a character's fighting skill when he finds himself in a situation where he can't use it all (such as a tournament)? Are there rules for that or is it strictly down to what the GM decides (possibly with player input)?