Funny. I havent noticed any real difference for that between SR3 and SR4. Usually some one botched.

And I really prefer the 'hits' system over the TN on a D6 thing any day. But maybe thats because I used to play Heavy Gear long before I played Shadowrun. And HG uses a 'hits' system as well. Get more hits than the other guy you 'win' the test. The more hits over the better you do, the more damage you do, etc. Works the same way with SR4

SR3 I'd often wind up with these really crazy TNs of like.. 14, 24 etc. And I wouldnt call SR3 any less dice intensive than SR4. You still roll crazy ammounts of dice in SR3. I've seen plenty of folk with 12 dice in a skill then you have the oodles of KP an old char develops. So they take a really hard test (Like that 24) and just roll tons of dice till their happy.

Also I found SR3 to bog down a great deal in some areas. SR4 well.. havent played it enough yet to be honest. But so far it seems like a quick n' dirty resolution is quite easy to pull off if things start bogging down due to dice rolls.

SR3's complexity over SR4s more simplistic setup IS nice at times, dont get me wrong. I loved the whole coding language difference thing for example for deckers. Used to play one and I really like that aspect of it, long with some of the other 'advanced rules'. But when your running a game like that on actual pen and paper it really really really bogs down. Coded up properly in a MUSH shell it goes pretty damn fast. And in that sort of setup neither is really better than the other I thik, save that SR3 has more options. But thats still mostly because SR4 doesnt really have any companion books to speak of yet.

I think really some of the adjustment for stuff like tactical planning in an SR4 game jsut really requires abity of adjustment on the part of the old SR3 crowd. Cause that hit system is in a way considerably different than the TN style of play.

Keep in mind 1 hit on a perception test is still effectivelyt eh same result as one 'hit' on an SR3 perception test. You only 'sort of' notice something peripherally basically unless it's something really obvious. Like that lisence plate being a morphing plate.

1 hit: Huh.. that plate looks a little funny. Oh well
2 hits: Hrmm.. tehre's something really odd about that. Maybe I should check it out
3 hits+: By jove! Thats a morphing plate!

All you really go from is having TN8 and needing 3 8s+ to 'spot' it immediately as a morphing plate to requiring 3+ hits in the SR4 system. It's.. arguably easier to do infact since you go from TN8 to TN5 basically. So to up the complexity, make an extra hit or two required in SR4. You'll wind up with about the same difficulty level.

Also under SR4 it becomes alot more important to apply modifiers to things like percieving folk who are sneaking. Under SR3 it's realy just an open test opposed roll. Sure the twinkinum suits arnt quite as powerful anymore but I dont think thats actuallyt oo unrealistic.

So assuming the use of the ever cheap twinkinum, which is only even cheaper in SR4 than SR3 (NOt that R12 twink suits are realy that expensive comparably anyway) you kinda wind up with the following under SR4:

Bob The guard: Raiting Average/Professional
Attributes: 3
Skills: 4
Perception Dice: 7

Sneaky McSneaksalot: Typical player focused on stealth
Attribute 4 or 5
Skill: 4 (Group skill assumably. best bang for the buck)
Sneaky dice!: 8-9

So now lets rack up them there modifiers:
Night time, full moon out: -2 Partial Light
Ruth suit: -4 to visual perception test
Bob is bored and wants to go home. He's sorta sleepy too: -2 to being 'distracted'.

Bob now has: -1 dice to notice the Sneaky McSneaksalot.

Lets give bob Some night vision goggles to compensate. Afteral Their cheap!
Bob now has: 1 die vs Sneaky McSneaksalot

Hrmm.. wow that really sucks! Lets give him some other gear! Perception Enhancers for the win! Bob now has R3 Vision mods
Bob now has: 4 die vs Sneaky McSneaks alot

Bob wake the frag up!
Bob now has: 6 die vs Sneaky McSneaksalot.

Sneaky McSneaksalot still has 2-3 dice more than Bob.

AHh but then you could arguably start applying those fun little distance modifiers!
Object/Sound is not in immediate vacinity: -2 dice
Bob now is back down to 4 dice.

There's a party going on across the street:
Inferfering sight/ordor/sound: -2 (Or if you dont like that he's back to being distracted)
Bob now has 2 dice.

OH noes! fog rolls in!
But Bob still has that nifty NV: -1
Bob now has 1 die.

Oh dear.. fog is getting pretty thick: NV: -2
Bob now has 0 dice.

Meanwhile Sneaky McSneaksalot hasnt had his dice modified at all. And then we still havent touched uppon thresholds. Bob has at least a threshold of 2 to notice. Since Sneaky McSneaksalot isnt being 'obvious' or 'loud'. Unless Sneaks really screws up royally.

Infact Bobs threashold could infact be 3. Afterall it takes a threshold of 3 to notice whispering. Of course then he isnt quite so penalized if your doing the test based uppon all senses (Such as hearing). But really if you wnat to get complex about it. What about his ability to hear? Assuming your not making two perception tests. Sneaky McSneaksalot makes his roll.

Visually Bob doesnt stand a hope in hell of seeing him. But what about hearing him?
Well Bob could be blind and that wouldnt matter. So lets set Bob back to normal:
Bob now has 7 dice to 'hear' our intrepid runner.
Bob is still 'distracted' by the noise from the party: -2 dice
The sound is assumably not in the 'immediate vacinity' unless Sneaky McSneaksalot is trying to sneak right past him, rather than past him a little ways away.: -2 dice.

Bob is now down to 3 dice for his hearing test.
Bob is up to 6 dice if he's using R3 audio enhancement.
Bob could also be 'distracted'. Paying more attention to the music from the party though, now that he can hear it properly due to the audio enhancement

Bob is now down to 4 dice.

Of course things could go poorly for Sneaky McSneaks alot. Bob could get a warning on the radio that Sneaky is out there!

Bob suddenly is not distracted
Bob is suddenly actively searching!
Bob now suddenly has:
Perception: 7
Enhanced Audio R3: +3
Actively SErachign: +3
Interfering sound from the party: -2
Object/Sound not in immediate vacinity: -2
Bob is left with: 9 dice vs Sneaky McSneaks alot 8 or 9 dice.

But really. The point at which Sneaky McSneaks alot is goign up against guards with that much additional gear. He's not going up agianst 'standard security' anymore. "Standard" security does it on the cheap. Their not going to fork out all sorts of cash for all these fun enhancements. And unless Bob is one of those rare exceptions that takes his job a little too seriously (And most run of the mill sec guards that I've worked with really dont) he's not about to fork out thousands of dollars out of his yearly 24K give for take a few thousand a year salary to buy the stuff himself.

Afterall on that kind of wage hes only living at best a 'low' lifestyle. The rent of a yearly moderate lifestyle is well out of his reach at a whooping 60k a year. Hell.. given that he's only making 24k a year.. guess what? Thats -just- enough to keep in in a yearly low lifestyle. Chances are? Unless he's splitting the rent he's actually in: Squatter lifestyle. Which at elast gives him money to spend on stuff he wants or needs. Like... a car to get to work. Of course this is where the Sprawl Survival Guide's 'modifiers' come into play. What you'd really be looking at is Bob is living in cheap shithole for rent every month and barely making his monthly payments.

That or he's living in a 'regular' lifestyle by splitting the costs of living with some one. Like Oboe his gay lover troll.

I like the fact that attributes become more important when trying a task (using a skill). It never felt right to me that a sucker with charisma 1 could be as good as in negotiation like a charisma-god with charisma 6, when both have the same skill rating.

I think it's a good decision to lean SR4 towards nWoD in the game mechanics. After all, the RPG industry is on the decline and less new players come every year. A lot of them will start with d20 or NWoD, so trying to convert some of them to SR4 by pointing out its cool background and the use of the same game mechanics as in the world of darkness is a clever thing imo.

Sticking to the old school ruleset of SR3 can be ok for fans, but not for the company.

Amazingly badly. This discussion has been had dozens of times—just take a look at what happens when your dice pool gets really big.

~J

You're upset because the near-impossible is near-impossible? Or is the problem that the slightly more near-impossible is significantly more impossible?

Then use pools. I'm not sure why you're upset that people who use their pools properly will succeed more often. I find dice pools to be an excellent method of adding tactical depth to the game specifically because someone who uses his pool correctly will outperform someone with more skill but who wastes his pools.

'hiccup' is more accurate. I've never had a player complain that, gosh-darn, he has to roll a 7 and it's no more difficult than rolling a 6.

The ability to modify the number of dice rolled and the TN results in a greater degree of fine scalability, and a +1 to the TN is not as tremendous as +1 die at lower levels.

I will agree that the fact Shadowrun uses a d6 instead of a larger die is at times difficult because there's a natural limit in how small a shift in difficulty can be, and because you quickly run into exploding dice which is a notable hiccup in the probability curve. But I have found the mechanics themselves to be more comfortable and sensible than SR4. There are plenty of threads comparing the two, however, and I think it would be better to reserve a full discussion for them.

Read my post above for knowing what I mean by "breaking down at high ratings".

Think. There are lots of tests where no pool applies! You can not use any pool with a negotiation test.

Well, I complain. And there is no such word as gosh. The word you are looking for is god.

The number of dice rolled is never modified in SR3. The lower levels you are talking about are 3 dice.

They may feel more comfortable to you, but from an objective point of view they are certainly not more sensible.

100% of true Scotsme… SR3 players.

It was nonsensical. A difficult task expects few successes. Somehow this is a problem?

Some light reading, for your edification.

Tell me about it.

~J

All the players in my local area, and the people who have stated as much on these boards. The fact that there are people right here on this thread showing how much better they believe SR3 is. None of that happened when SR2 or SR3 came out.

No, we are talking about scaling. I will try to explain it the long way:
Imagine two humans of equal strength. If the scaling of the system is OK, the result of an opposed strength test will be the same, relative to the strength rating, no matter what rating you will give both, or in other words, what you set as your baseline (in SR it is 3).

In SR3 this is not the case. If you set both ratings to 12, most of the time both of them will not achieve any success at all. This case actually occured in SR2 matrix fights with high programme ratings. Fights took forever because both the number of dice rolled could not keep up with the target number of the opposed test.

A strength tests between two rating 5 humans can be handled by SR3, a fight between two strength 40 dragons can not (they will never ever achieve a hit with even 40 dice, the dice numbers just do not scale to the target number).

Same goes for spell tests and all other opposed tests in SR3.

In SR4, the scaling is right. You could give both a strength rating of 100, and the result would be the same, relative to their rating, if you took 10 or 3.

This is what scaling means. And SR3 has bad scaling.

I am aware of this. And it is one of the most blatant cases of bigotry Ive ever seen. If you dont want to use god in your language, dont use it. Dont invent silly extra words that mean god but are not spelled exactly like this. If god cared about spelling and not the intent. . .

This would happen with any game system change. Some folks don't like change, some don't like specific systems, and some like to dip their toes in and then walk away. Certainly some of this is from SR4 being perceived as worse than SR3 by those players, but a lot of it is just that it's a different game system. You'd likely get similar results if you released Cyberpunk 2030 as SR 5.

WoD was a market leader.

~J

Why?

~J

So apparently, despite your tastes, the game in general isn't considered to blow chunks. One opinion (or even 30) is far from damning evidence.

There's a difference between what is considered and what is true.

Let's just pretend we actually went through the rest of this discussion. I think we've had it enough times to do that

~J

I'm running on 7 hours of often interrupted sleep, so I'll try to keep up with your blinding brilliance. Excuse me for my comprehension errors.

I did read your above post and, as Kage said, it didn't make a lot of sense to me. I read your below post and it's largely non-applicable. I've never seen an opposed test in the manner you describe, after... wow, 8 years of playing Shadowrun. That isn't to say it can't come up, but it seems unusual. (Granted, I try to avoid 'epic level' campaigns.)

You gave an example of a strength test, for instance if two people are pushing against each other or against a door. As the two push from either side, they both find it is far more easier to be stationary than to make progress. I think this is a reasonable statement. If you watch a tug of war, where there are two very 'strong' opponents, progress is slow and much of the time is spent just 'digging in' and resisting the other side. So in this particular case, your complaint is that the rules seem to accurately reflect reality, in that sometimes when dealing with a pair of opposed tremendous power, progress is fairly slow.

The only other example where I can see this coming up is banishing a spirit where, IIRC, the spirit rolls force against the mages Magic rating and vice versa. If the two are truly uber, both are probably safe from being banished without being softened up through conventional combat. Defense is sometimes easier than offense, fair enough. Since magic isn't something that happens in the real world, again, I find the mechanics acceptable. Sometimes you'll simply need to figure out another method of getting what you want because some tactics won't work between powerful creatures.

So what? I don't have to negotiate while in combat, so the mechanics are different. When someone gets to roll his CP in addition to his skill when shooting me, and I don't get a pool in addition to my negotiation skill to talk the bullet out of hitting me, I'll complain. Until then, with few exceptions (generally because one party or the other lacks the appropriate skill and therefore can't apply any pool), if one party gets to use a pool, the other does as well.

If your complaint is that negotiations, combat, matrix stuff, magic and rigging each have their own ruleset and could stand to be a little more consistent to each other, you'd have an argument. The argument that some aspects of the game use tactical pools and some don't is really completely irrelevant, as long as non-pool skills aren't directly resisting pool skills (and I haven't seen a case where this can happen).

Number of dice is modified by your skill. Anything that modifies your ability to perform modifies the number of dice. Anything that modifies the difficulty of the task modifies the TN. This is why a master is a master whether he's shooting a point blank target or making an impossible shot.

Again, excuse my confusion, sleep has blinded my senses. I had not realized that 'objective' is defined by 'what Serbitar's brilliance tells us is correct'.

I have no desire to hammer this out yet again but I will repeat what I've said on other ocassions: SR4 has outsold all previous editions of Shadowrun in the same time period following release, continues to be one of the top sellers with the big distributers every month, and more importantly IMHO was one of the best selling games on the market in the past couple of years (and that includes several WW relaunches). Furthermore, sales, as well as distribution and customer feedback at various cons indicate that a significant number of players who had given up on Shadowrun because of SR3 have returned because of SR4 (this matches testimonies from numerous RPG forums on the net and FLGS feedback). We've also had more completely new players flocking to the convention booths and mailing in requests for more information than ever before. We're going to a 4th printing at a time when RPG sales are supposedly on the downturn. Sales of Street Magic indicate SR4 was not a fluke and both books remain on distributers best seller lists.

SR4 was nominated and then won the fan-voted Eenie Awards for Best Rules and Best (overall) Product - people can diss it all they want, but more fans went and voted for SR4 in those categories than hard-core fans of Mutants and Masterminds did (and if you know anything about the following of that game, you know that's saying a lot).

Read those facts as you will. FanPro is very pleased with SR4 and Wizkids is too.

Did we lose a lot of old timers with the transition? Yes. We expected that. In fact you'll find that a lot of the people Sphynx is referring to as returning to SR3 are long time players.

But like it or not, the people who contol the SR property decided it needed a revamp and revitalization to survive in the current marketplace and to draw the current gamer, and that required a new system was needed as part of the facelift - fortunately the gamble FanPro took has paid off better than expected. SR4 isn't just doing well, it's thriving, and that's despite the scarceness of new releases. With SR3 sales were stable but the overall gamer population was dwindling. Individual players were buying more books, but playing less. New players weren't making up for those retiring and in large part this was due to the percieved difficulty of getting into SR3. SR4 took us in the direction needed to keep SR alive for another decade - even if it cost us some of the old fanbase.

Some say SR4 dumbed down the game. Some say they don't care for the new setting. Some don't like the WoD-style mechanics. Fine, everyone's entitled to an opinion. I'm a hardcore SR gamer who has been playing since SR1, I liked SR3 so much I even took the time to teach people how mistaken they were about the Matrix rules' complexity, I got into freelancing because I loved the game at the time and the mechanics behind it in all their flawed beauty... and, as a fan, I disagree on all counts.

Does SR4 currently lack the depth of SR3, yes. We're behind on the core books and I have no doubt the complete set will broaden play options. Heck, I've got a bunch of drafts on my HD for upcoming books that virtually guarantee it. But let's get this clear and get over it once and for all: like it or not SR4 is here to stay. As I've noted the game is not only healthy, it's thriving. We're making future fluff books as easily accessible as possible to people who prefer staying with SR3 rules by keeping mechanics out of setting books, but make no mistake SR3 will no longer be supported, nor will it be revived.

I think you are looking at the past through rose-colored memories, because I sure as hell recall this very same kind of thing happening with the release of SR3. Over the years there have been many people (here and elsewhere) that have bitched and moaned about SR3, and how they still play by the older (SR2 or even SR1) rules.

Ditto.

They could have kept both lines alive. The decision looks to have been to abandon SR3 and force the purchasers to take up SR4 to keep getting their SR fix.

With variable size damage tracks? Or the fully healed from Deadly wound in 2 days simplicity?

Or who liked playing with the game as a simulation rather than just roleplaying/fudging your way through things.

I totally agree, and the part I bolded is why shadowrunning should be extinct in SR4.

Origins and/or Gencon.

From reading your posts, it seems you favor luck over tactics or strategy. Why? You seem to abhor dice pools, which do alter the number of dice rolled in SR3 (just to contradict one of your fallacious statements.) In your scaling examples, you would rather have the outcome determined by a die roll than by the underlying stat, someones skill or attribute they have invested in.

In SR4 the identical stat vs rating opposed rolls are rolling the same number of dice at the same target number of 5 or 6. So there is a greater chance for more variance in their outcome than your example of SR3 and TN12 or TN40 outcomes. Not only is it harder to gain a success, but it is just as hard to gain multiple successes.

As a player, or a great dragon, I would be pissed if I was defeated due to a single bad roll. At least the near impossible high TNs tell one that it is nearly impossible to succeed in such an action, not that with a little luck everything is possible.

So you have never made an opposed test?
The symptoms of the problem do not only apply at ratings of 40. The start at 5-6. A good example is the preference of spells with a force rating of 6. this has completely vanished in SR4.

Sorry, no. You dont get it. You could set the baseline wherever you want. You could make standard human strength 40 (instead of 3) and Dragon strength 533 (instead of 40). Nothing should change (if the system scaled right), but it does. Again, SR3 does not scale. Is that so hard to comprehend?

The point is, that there are two mechanics. In combat everybody has a hilarious ammount of hits. In most other skills, they dont. There is no way to compare the quality of pooled and non pooled test. Thats just counter intuitive and a big pain in the ass.
And with the Few number of dice that are rolled in a non pooled test, the outcome is so completely random that it does not make much sense.

Yes, the single tests itself are consistent, but still, we have different mechanics.

We were talking abut the fact that even the smallest TN modifier +1, has severe consequences. Please do not turn the argument into something else.

Math, consistency and universality certainly are criteria that should be objective enough even for you.

* I do not favour luck over tactics, that is an untrue assumption
* I said that there are no dicepool modifers in SR3, nothing else
* I do not abhore dicepools, I abhore different game mechanics, where there should be none. Either give pools to everything or nothing, mixing is silly
* I do not get your critisism of my example. In every roleplaying game, the outcome of a test depends on dice rolls, if you abhore dice, play chess
* maybe I shloud again explain what scaling means again: Scaling means, that when you multiply every stat in a test, the outcome of the test relative to the stat is still the same. This is not the case in SR3. 6 dice vs TN of 6 give you 1 hit per 6 rating points. 12 dice vs TN 12 should give you 2 hits, if it scaled (because rating 6 gave you one hit. But no it gives you 1/3 hits per 12 rating points. It is not scaling. Scaling means: Multiply everyting by 2, then the hits you get should be the hits before multiplied by 2. Is that so hard to comprehend? Ive explained that 3 times now.
* Your reasoning about great dragons is flawed. I was talking about somebody with high stat ratings not being able to do anything against somebody with equally high stat ratings because of the flawed not scaling mechanics. why shopuld it be impossible for somebody with rating X to succeed against rating X just because X is high? The rating itself should be irrelevant for determining the outcome as long as they are equal. what counts are the relative ratings. but do to bad scaling, the absolute ratings do count.

please think about this scaling issue first. It is a mathematical fact. I am not inventing it. And it is not hard to understand.

Ehh.. thing is look at the world today. Just about everywhere you go? You leave a data trail. Yet still to this day people manage to commit illegal acts and get away with it.

The really smart criminals yeah either invest in a ultra high end commlink and have their hacker friends (I still keep wanting to call them deckers damit.) keep their software up to date. Changing a few bits here and there should more or less keep the heat off you. If your really paranoid. Yeah go the disposable route.

And worst case? Wow... turn it of. Sweet jesus. Also while you leave a trail behind you. Also keep in mind just how many trails are created every nanosecond in the world of 2070. It's like taking 500,000 needles. Then telling a person to find you the one needle 'with a slighlty blunt tip'

They can find it... in time. Assuming they dont get fustrated and give up. And by the time they do, is it still even relevant? Probably not. Sure they -might- get lucky but the odds are against them seeing a quick resolution to their problem. And their also likely to make a few mistakes along the way, thinking they'd found the needle with a 'slightly blunt tip' when really they found the needle with the 'slightly less sharp tip'.

So then, if nothing else consider the time and resources it takes to track down this one needle. Is it -really- that important? Probably not most of the time. Mitsushima has one of it's labs hit and the prototype stolen. Finding the runners who did it is really not going to be one of their primary questions in most cases. Infact the biggest question should be "How the -hell- did the runners even know about it in the first place?"

Find the security hole and plug it. Then find out who stole it so you know where the item will more or less eventually wind up. Track down teh runners maybe sure. But chances are they dont even really know who their working for and if they dont have the prototype with them at the time. You've really just wasted a whole lot more time, money and resources. Time far better spent in many cases on damage control and tighenting security so crap like that doesnt happen again in the future.

There will allways be exceptions of course. But alot of the time it's just a setback. Instead of releasing a product in 4 years it's released in 6. It might not even really hurt them in the long run. I mean look how much Half-life or Half-life 2 was pushed back. The sales of both games in the end wasnt really hurt any by it.

I mean really the only time a corp is goign to seriously crack down and do eveyrthing it can no expenses spared to track down a team of runners after a steal is when the products proffit is either guaranteed, or damn well likely to pay it all off in the long run. That new armor tech that's going to net them billions a year for easily 10+ years is sure well going to be worth spending another million or two when it's a 'sure thing'.

But alot of the time it isnt sure fire at all. Or in other cases the deadline is so tight that even if you tracked down the team, it's far too late to get the ball rolling again, you product wil be out after your competitors is and you loose the contract....

Unless....

You hire more runners to sabotage the competition in a bid to buy yourself more time?

I think this is one thing I'm really loving about alot of the -old- books. Not the rules. Those change and there's allways complaints/arguments about it. But the fluff. THe fluff from some of the old games is just about priceless to the setting and in some ways I think it's a horrible crime you cant get these books new anymore, or at least in PDF format. Because quite a few of the older SR fluff books really seem to have their fingers on the pulse of the SR world. It may be old and outdated by SR3 SR4 standards. But by god it really explains alot about why things are the way they are now in later editions.

I might even seriously contemplate murder to see such things updated and revised for release under SR4. Mmmm actually yes on serious contemplation it's really not worth murder. But I'd definately egg for it if I ever became 'T3h UbAr Rich!'

And really when it comes down to 'what system has more' for on topic disucssion. I dont go by the rules. I go by the fluff. By fluff material SR2 beats out SR3 in many areas, in overall SR3 beats SR4 hands down. But the SR4 line is still a baby. What really is needed to make it all shine I think is to take alot of the old fluff as I've said, and just polish it up. Update it all and re-release it.

I mean between all the old books I got my hands on I'm having a 'mental orgasm' with all the nifty stuff in all these books I missed before.

Smartlink? There's probably tons of other examples, but the good ol' SL and SL-II is the most prevelant one.

Someone mentioned astat of 533. Out of curiosity I plugged that into the dice probability calculator and got 0.00% chance of a hit. I multiplied the dice by 10 to try and find how many times you'd roll to get a hit and the response (for 5330 dice at TN 533) was NaN%. Not sure what that means.

And you get upset with me for not paying attention.

No, I've never encountered an opposed test with such high numbers that neither side has a chance of getting any successes. But that said, I'm still of the opinion that moving something with a strength of 500 should be, basically, impossible. It would be like trying to stop an asteroid the size of Texas from hitting the earth. You really shouldn't be able to do it. If another asteroid the same size hits, then it should be a damage test, not a strength test.

In other words, I don't see your scaling problem in this example because some problems (not the dice system, but the real world problem) shouldn't scale. It ceases to become an opposed strength test and becomes a different test.

Maybe if you made another example other than strength, an example where in the real world, something with a state of say 40 and something else with a stat of 40, come into competition in what would be an opposed test, and the results in the real world are different from the results in Shadowrun.

If your complaint is simply that if you took the character sheets and multiplied everyone's stats by 10, that things would cease to work, I would say then don't multiply everyone's stats by 10.

I feel like your argument is 'well I have this car that works fine up to 90mph. But if I put a rocket engine on and launch it into space, the steering goes out.' Alright... Well don't launch it into space. SR3 is made to handle a particular range of actions, and does so well. If you really, really want a system that can be expanded to ridiculous numbers, none of the Shadowrun systems (SR1-4) are appropriate. Don't use them for your Gods of Olympus game where character stats start at 10,000 and go up from there.

I guess not. Like I said, why should things scale if you intentionally bump stuff up to unreasonable numbers? There's no conceivable reason to use numbers like 533. If two dragons get in a strength test trying to force a door, just say each lays on their side of the door and no progress is made. Have you really had a strength test with a dragon that was so terrible it made you hate SR3?

I can agree with this, and I feel that the unifying systems aspect of SR4 was a plus. But when that single, unifying system sucks, it kinda takes away from that plus.

I believe I answered your question and you conveniently snipped out that paragraph.

Smartlink makes the target easier to hit. It helps identify the target and adjust for things like wind and bullet drop, which are things external to the character. It just means your equipment functions better, basically. It's like the difference between shooting with a pistol and shooting with a rifle (which determines the TN in the first place).

I would argue that wound modifiers should affect the number of dice thrown though. Your wounds should decrease your effective skill, forcing you to shoot below your ability, rather than making the shot more or less difficult. The shot is just as difficult as it was before, you're just not as good.

You are aware that FanPro doesn't exactly have unlimited resources, right? What, two full time employees, one of which is fully dedicated to keeping Classic Battletech going, so he's not available for helping with the Shadowrun workload.

Besides, even with the differences between 2060 and 2070, the games concepts are still virtually identical, so the two products would be in direct competition with each other for market share. Ever play tic-tac-toe by yourself? Best you can hope for is stalemate. Same principle applies to selling two near-identical products.