technically, that's only with melee weapons. and only P damage.

And it's not clear whether you need to have Sacrificing metamagic to do it. I'd assumed that you did need sacrificing, since otherwise it's a ridiculous place to put a rule on self-inflicted damage. However, given the organization of SR3 rules, maybe that's not valid reasoning....

The entire sentence: "Assume a character can inflict any desired level of Physical damage on himself." Nothing limiting it to the context of blood magic or melee weapons (in either that sentence or the section surrounding it), though it doesn't apply to stun. Now that I reread, though, it doesn't specify that it has to be a weapon—the reference to "symbolic purposes" earlier clearly only applies to blood magic rather than the act of damaging itself.

My take on it is that it's a valid general-purpose rule placed in a special-purpose case because no one thought about its other useful properties.

~J

no, read the rest of the rules. inflicting damage on one's self for sacrificing is a subset of inflicting damage on living creatures for sacrificing. therefore, it follows all the other rules except where noted.

i mean, sure, any reasonable GM will allow any character to kill themselves with a gun, and possibly a knife. but if you're talking about rules...

I'm reading them, and I'm not seeing anything restricting it to the blood magic case.

~J

Like I said: it's not clear.

If the mods take you below one die, and you get one regardless - that is broken. As has been mentioned before, at that point throw caution to the wind. The guy with 8 firearms vs the guy with one both roll one if there are -8 d in mods. Thats not right.

If the Threshold mods take it higher than your total die pool, thats an impossible situation - not fair to the player - as has been mentioned it promotes fatalism - cant succeed, hand me a new character. - That is broken as well.

Things can still be hard, but nothing reasonable should be impossible. Every game session I've ever run for Sr in 15 years has had at least one situation where the players were trying for that TN20 (Or there abouts). And when they get that first 6, and roll again - well thats fun.

Adding up the thereshold mods, looking at their skill/pool and saying, "Sorry. Cant do that It requires 4 success and your pool is only 2." Sucks - It sucks to say as a gm, and to hear as a player.

If edge is supposed to 'level the palying field' then the cyber heavy or magic character may not be able to afford edge at char gen. Having an Edge attribute shouldn't be the difference between Possible and Impossible.

Ok, lets change the example from Combat to computer use. Guy with one die, and the Nerd with 8. -8 die in mods. The mods are all technical in nature. Do you rellay think the skilled guy would have just as difficult time as the unskilled guy?

Lock picking - an incredibly complex lock - -8d to your skill roll. Guy A had a lock picking pool of 8. Guy b has 1. So the guy with years of experience has just as difficult a time as the guy with none?

Survival - Cold, stormy, no gear, wounded, the works -8d in mods.. Guy a with Survival 8 stands the same chance as guy b with 1 die???

Thats not right.

except it doesn't work like that at all, blakkie. what about the guy with 10 dice for a firearms test, in that same -8 dice situation? all of the sudden, it's not the Blind Shot Lottery anymore. your modifiers limit all ranges of skill below a certain threshold to the same chance of success, but allows greater chances of success above that threshold. that's bad mechanics.

Er, I did:

Why not put on a cap, say TN36 in SR3, do you think it would change anything to have the smallest chance of success (beyond which everything has the same chance, even if you are wounded, etc) set at (1/6)^6 which is very very very small.

On a different note, what if (yeah what if, we wont have any idea how anything is being implemented untill we have more information) The number of Dice is largely controlled by the player (say wounds remove dice as one of the only dice penalties) so you might opt to give up dice for some other action (-2 dice for a called shot, etc) The point being, maybe the only thing the GM controls is the Threshold (we dont know how this works either really) and Threshold might be between 1 and 10 (1 easy, 10 increbly hard) with each hit past the threshold being a sucess (or possibly each threshold hits counts as a sucess) Then we wont often have things that are impossible unless you are a nearly dead low skill individual trying at a hard task (which i mean come on, if you have both your arms and legs cut off you are not going to be able to keep Aurther off your bridge)

In any case Edge could do any number of fun things beyond just adding dice or enabling exploding six's (and might refresh how often? no clue, once a week, once a session, once a run, once per scene?)

Anyways I'd be happy with a maximum -4 dice penalty (you can always add edge dice to get more than the penalty) and with a threshold ranging between 1 and 10, which gives tons of possiblities from insanely easy to insanely hard (but still accomplishable like a TN36)

*shrug* Dunno. The system, as presented so far seems broken. We can 'what if' and 'could be' all day, but until we know more it dosen't matter.

I just don't see how they can make the system work well;

I have to agree that, once a situation gets seriously extreme, skill is no longer the issue, but luck. Once it's pitch black with no light at all, the guy with Pistols 10 is in as much drek as the pistols 1 guy. But it has to be really, REALLY extreme to get to that point.

Yes, stranded in the middle of nowhere with nothing is extreme. But not extreme enough for that sort of modifier; as GM I would say that having training in Survival just means more hits needed rather than a silly dice penalty. Having two sliders for difficulty does make some improvements after all. You don't just have to knock dice off everything, just up the hits needed. Heck, even knock a coupla dice off for the harsh environment and up the hit rate a little, but don't just knock dice off.

Even threshhold doesn't change the issue. If you've got a threshold of 3, either anything that reduces your thrown dice below 3 makes the test impossible or there needs to be a weird kludge that increases the number of dice you get under some penalty conditions.

(Example: for every die under the threshold you would end up at, you get an additional two dice but need to make one additional hit to succeed. It works, sorta, but is messy as hell)

Again, the developers may have a solution. I'm just worried because I still can't imagine what it would be.

~J

actually, with exploding dice, it can.

Edge is a non-starter for me in this particular discussion unless one to six points goes a lot further than it appears to at first blush.

~J

Exploding dice is a mess. Particularly the self-igniting ones. They are just deadly to carry around.

wait a minute. you're throwing out all kinds of projections and what-ifs. your basic argument, as far as i can tell, is "what if it's really cool!"

but eldritch is the one using straw men? okay. i do not think that means what you think it means.

I didn't say I didn't know about thresholds or how they work - I said I dont' remember if they said thresholds would be modified like the Dice pool. If there is a faq or other official statement about thresholds being modified by coditions, then ppoint it out - I've honestly forgotten in all the discussion. I did go back and skim the faqs, but didn;t see it.
So sorry I attempted a discussion with you.

I think you are the one that can't see.

See ya around the water cooler Blakkie.

*Added to my 'Ignore List'*

You know, I'm perfectly willing to admit I've hated the idea of SR4 from the start. But I'm also Man enough to discuss the proposed rule set in a reasonable manner. You see I'm looking at SR4 as a new game. Thats my point of view -it is no longer a continuation of the SR line. It's something new (In My Mind). I've already made up my mind that this is something entirely new, I'm familar with the setting, and have some clues as to the Rules.

So now I discuss these rules as if it were for a new game. And so far I have seen nothing about the rules I like. Nothing that would make me buy it. But out of respect for the Game that this is based on, and in the hopes that I will get some novels, and possible a source book or two in the future - I'll continue to discuss the rules - in the vain hopes that someone is reading what I type. And hopefully I'll make a slim difference to the future survival of the story line/setting That I've supported for 15 years . Crap, I'm rambling now.

even if it is, the mechanic is still pretty broken. you still have lots of situations where level of skill is irrelevant, and you still lack a lot of granularity.

I'm wondering:

I've seen a lot of posts suggesting that penalties will be handled by either reducing dice or increasing the threshold. Has anyone thought that it might be both? For example, add all penalties together. For every three "points" worth, increase threshold by one. The remainder is subtracted from dice. I've not the inclination to run the numbers, but does anyone know what that would do mathematically? To illustrate more clearly, someone is running in the dark shooting at a target 100m away:


Base Threshold 1
Base dice 12 (quickness 6 pistols 6)

running -2
darkness -4
100m range -2

Total -8
Divide by three, and threshold goes up by 2
Two remain, so two dice are removed from the pool
so now you are rolling 10 dice against a 5 with three successes needed. I'm not suggesting that this is the new system, or even that it might work, and the divisor of 3 was chosen arbitrarily, but has anyone considered this?

OSUMacbeth
Probably the World's Greatest SR Fan who's barely ever played

It has some of the same advantages as the raising-threshold system, in that it's less prone to make an action completely impossible, but at considerable expense (most people are not that comfortable quickly dividing by three and calculating the remainder). Given the stated goal of streamlining, this doesn't seem to be a viable option.

I'll admit I didn't read the entire thread, but the gist I'm getting is that, in the new system, you'll need a variable amount of 5s to get a single confirmed success? This sounds similar to SR1 where you had weapons that had different staging amounts (some might be pairs, some 3 successes, etc.). Granted, SR1 had a the situational TNs instead of the # of dice being rolled changing, but there was a reason that SR2 and 3 abandoned that variable number of dice staging system. Yeah, its not the same, but it sounds a little too close for my comfort.

Regarding D&D mechanics, I liked having the chance to pull off the impossibile that SR had with the open ended sixes. For example, in SR, if I'm trying to pull off some amazing skill my TN is ungodly high but I still have a chance to roll it. However, in D&D, if my DC is 30 and I only have say a +5 to my skill roll I can never get a success (my max roll is 25, natural 20s=success only applies to combat). Yeah, I can get people to help me, if it applies, but I can never do it on my own. Kinda cheesy if you ask me. Anything is possible, not easy, but possible. I like how SR allowed for that. This new threshold system seems to abandon that spirit of hope.

So let's take into consideration some other situational modifiers:

(I haven't read through the entire string so some of these may already have been touched on)

Smartlink: SR3 = -2 to TN, SR4 +2d6 to attack?

Recoil: SR3 = +1 to TN per round fired, SR4 = -1d6 per round fired?

Reach: SR3 = -1 per reach to TN or +1 to opponent TN, SR4 +1d6 per reach? (egad.'s, watch out for the troll adept swinging a power 4 weapon focus polearm.)

Defaulting from Attribute: SR3 +4 to TN, SR4 -4d6 to roll?

Cover: SR3 +2 to TN per level of cover target has, SR4 - 1d6 per level?

Just to bring up a few.

from what i understand, by spending edge you can enable a exploding dice mechanic. so rather then it allways being in effect like it is now it will come into effect when it needs to happen no matter the odds

I wonder if variable penalties will come into play.

As Kyoto wrote about smartlinks for instance, they may add two dice, thus roughly a 2/3 chance of scoring an additional hit.

What if penalties work in the same fashion? Instead of simply subtracting a d6 from the number of dice rolled you roll that d6 and if it comes up a 5 or 6 it negates a success. Thus every 2 dice of penalties give a 2/3 chance of making life rougher on the runner.

I don't think this would be a terrible mechanic. Use two different colors of dice and make the person attempting the task roll them all. Sort of an oppossed roll within the roll itself.

I think that'd work better too, but I don't think that's streamlined either.

I'd say that a mechanic like that would be too different from the base manner in which dicepools function to be seamlessly integrated into the new rules. One of the major stated goals of the new rules is to avoid the schizophrenic mish-mash of rules that work and feel differently linked together in such a way as that they model very similar situations (but with different rules) or are integral to other sets of dissimilar rules. Vehicle combat versus personal combat is a good example of this.

SR3 actually reaches the point I'd describe as "unplayable" (or at least, requiring GM fiat rather than reference to the actual rules) when the not-uncommon admixture of standard and vehicle combat applies. Non-drivers fighting within a moving vehicle, non-drivers fighting between multiple moving vehicles, non-drivers attempting to engage a moving vehicle from another, any of the above actions where the driver periodically looks up from the wheel to fire a shot or two, they all cause major problems in the existing rules set.

All of those typical action-movie scenarios result in the rules having a nervous breakdown (or at least becoming so different from moment to moment that you essentially have to switch modes of play with each subsequent action that you're inclined to either act unnaturally to avoid doing something intuitive that would cause rules insanity). Now, imagine if a similar admixture occurred every time you calculated penalties, which work differently from calculating contributory bonus dice or other pool components. This adds a mathematical step in the chain needed to determine ultimate degree of success in a diceroll. The overhead this will produce, as the game progresses, is too great to justify it given the objective of the SR4 rules.

The real problem, for the most part, is deciding upon a mechanic which doesn't easily emulate its predecessor, then attempting to tack on all manner of minor and major exceptions and conditionals to the mechanic in order to attempt to achieve the aforementioned emulation. At the end, you're left with what's essentially a greater complexity in order to achieve something that still doesn't work quite like the target mechanic. That's why I think dramatic mechanical shifts like the SR3 to SR4 transition are a bad idea. It's better to keep a game to the same basic mechanic.

D&D2E to d20/3E/3.5E was an evolution, rather than a system change. It works in a lot of the same ways, and I think the feel was pretty well-preserved from one phase to the next. L5R to L5Rd20/Oriental Adventures was a complete system change that attempted to maintain the feel of the original L5R system while riding the d20 gravytrain into the sunset. It ended up getting lukewarm reception from the d20 crowd and something resembling virulent hatred from those who'd started off on L5R. End result, the switch to a new system almost destroyed the line and was undone with the latest revision. Very few systems have seen major success with a new rule set. The only one I can think of, off the top of my head, would be nWoD. This is arguable, however, since nWoD is an almost D&D2E-to-d20 shift from oWoD, and not the atomic mechanical functioning shift that L5R saw, or that SR will be seeing.

And yes, people can argue that the static TN# system is not as major a change as I'm making it out to be. But if you sit down and think about what exactly needs to be retooled, modified, or outright rewritten in order to accomodate the now-unchanging TN#, without the crude and ultimately ineffectual direct conversion of TN# bonus/penalties to dicepool bonus/penalties on a 1:1 scale, you'll see that a lot of Shadowrun is going to be very different when SR4 hits the shelves. I think that most(if not all) attempts to make SR4 work similarly to SR3 may be misguided or self-defeating.

That's... unfortunate.

Which is why I am still so opposed to the radical change in system mechanics.
Like Wireknight pointed out, look at what happened with the whole L5R to L5Rd20/Oriental Adventures thing. I've also seen it among Star Wars players too, the old D6 Star Wars books are few and far between around here in Austin, yet I still see several HPB stores with plenty of D20 Star Wars books just sitting on the shelf.

Well, considering that there is a whole generation of players that never knew of WEG version, the d20 version was ripe for the plucking with the poorly done Prequels.

A wonderful point made with the L5R reference: I've never personally played the game, but I'd read through the original sourcebooks heavily, and also the d20 conversion. The impression I got was that the d20 version was paler, more watered down. A lot of fun, interesting mechanics fell by the wayside.

My post above is, I suppose, a shot in the dark attempt to make some sense of what is currently my biggest concern with regards to SR4: the changed test system. Anything else you don't like you can just ignore or change (changes to magic, decking, combat, etc.) but it's far harder to ignore the fundamental base upon which the entire game is built. Let me preface this by saying that I realize we don't have a complete picture at this time, and all this is conjecture, but I'm beginning to fear that this game's base may in fact become its biggest weakness. It's the fact that we really *don't* have a clear picture of how things work that keeps me from worrying too much at this point. It will either be well-implemented, or it won't.

Of one thing you can be sure: some people will hate the new system. But on the other hand, math is math, no matter how it looks. I've little doubt that if the new system is numerically unbalanced or broken, some enterprising individual will come out with an optional conversion system for making tests. That's the hope anyway.

OSUMacbeth

7th Sea to d20 didn't go very well
Deadlands to d20 AND GURPS

I think the worst part of the attempts to radically change the system were the books that were left by the wayside to bring out the new editions. I don't think that the "Great Wierd North" book ever hit the stands for Deadlands (so much for official information for my planned Calgary campaign). I'd rather have one or two more sourcebooks/worldbooks for my favorite games than a new ruleset when I already like the present ruleset.

Look at what SR4 is already doing to cock-up the release schedule. I've given up on seeing the book that explains how all this happened before seeing the results of the change and SoLA sounds to have fallen by the wayside. I'm sure no one here would be interested in seeing those books first and delaying SR4...

Really. If it were in print, you wouldn't find any either, cause I'd buy them all again, hahahahahaha!

I thought a games success could be measured with how much of it you find in game stores not how little. WEG´s Star Wars filled entire shelves in it´s day, but that was different times. At least in Sweden, the stores that used to sell roleplaying games are now mostly selling computer games.

That's why I say that SR is doing really poorly in my area. Very little shelf space is given to it whereas other companies/games such as White Wolf, Rifts, D&D get tons of space and recognition.