Maybe you need a better example.

I wanted to play a raccoon shaman once and wanted to get shapechange, this was 2nd edition when it was much easier to cast. The GM said fine as long as I was shapechanging into a raccoon, but if it was something else my totem would get pissed.

He asked how I learned I was magically active. I said I got drunk around a campfire one night and met my totem and astrally projected. Wrong! Astral projection doesn't work that way, you have to know exactly what you are doing.

I also had a weapon focus, that I had paid resources for, that he wanted to know how I got. I said that it had been a lost artifact that the Lafitte's had once been rumored to possess, I was from New Orleans, that I had found. BZZZT! Nope, no magic items existed before the awakening.

He vetoed something else and I picked an argument over the next silly thing he wasn't going to let pass and left.

I hear he has changed quite a bit.

Well, you could have slapped him down on the magical items count. Sure, no magic from before the Awakening, except for... say... THE ENTIRE FOURTH WORLD.

~J

Postscript: I see your point, though. I do make an effort to play nice with concepts that don't fit neatly, but again, Sphynx chose an example that I'm not even going to try to play nice with. Sorta like someone wanting a PAC and wondering if silencers work with them.

That's an entirely different situation, Tisoz. The GM you're describing was just being a two-dimensional dick. Sphynx's example is, in my eyes, exactly like the one I gave in my last post about someone getting nailed with social TN penalties because they have a quickened Armor spell on. Note that I wouldn't have stopped the player from doing it, but he would have had to live with the consequences thereof.

Limited to shapechanging of a raccoon? Stupid. No spontaneous shows of magic? Ridiculous (canon material even contradicts that on several occasions). "No magical items before the Awakening?" Point me in his direction so I can bitch-slap him.

He's talking about me actually. When I first met Tisoz, I had played shadowrun once, for 2 hours, at a gaming convention and fell in love with the game. Bought the book at the store, and on that day saw an ad for shadowrun gamers wanted. The guy who posted the ad, came with a pile of SR books, and I came with my very first 2nd Ed book, never been opened. The guy with all the books and the ad said he didn't want to run a game, and I was the only other guy to show up with a book, so I offered to run the game and based my rulings on the rulings at the game-convention. Anyhows, it was long ago, and I'm not apologetic about house ruling things how I did without knowing the rules.

And BitBasher, sorry for not replying to your post. I didn't reply because I don't see a game where Quickening, Tattooing, Wired Reflexes-3, Body ratings of 11+, etc etc etc are 'gritty'. It's a near super-hero game in a better setting to me. And no, I don't like Marvel nor the concept of a world of super heroes, but I do like SR and a near superhero feel. I think the 1st Ed may have been a critty cyberpunk theme, but I don't think it is anylonger (just look at the Anime effects SURGE causes). You're welcome to continue playing in the past with an old genre, but it's not the canon universe from my reading of it.

Sphynx

Just because the effects of SURGE cause superficial similarity to anime doesn't mean that they make the game animeesque. In the least. SURGE and gritty can coexist quite happily.

~J

Well, I wasn't naming names and the whole situation was fragged with misunderstandings IMO, but whatever.

The limiting of the character though seems to describe your second option. Following your explanation of a lack of knowledge/familiarity, could this be why your second examples get limited? The GM filters it through his own perception to grasp the concept so that he won't need to look up how it could work?

I know I've toned down characters from when I started playing. For instance, I had no clue about availability restrictions. I bought the darn books and if it was in there why couldn't a player have it? The only real curb was we played what the PC had, the NPC could have. Bioware drawbacks were overlooked, heck we didn't even differentiate bio index and essence.

But as things got pointed out to me, I implement them. On the other hand, I never thought to layer armor, to combine 2 contacts into one (like the yakuza decker, or the shapeshifting, tribal, bear shaman street doc), etc..

In your example of quickened detection spells, people are pointing out the downsides to the spell as written. After all the PC wants it to detect as much stuff as he's wanting to detect, but will get false positives too. The good GM would hopefully take the ignorant character aside and maybe help him design a spell that does what the player wants it to do. Then again, some GMs hate anything non-canon.

Read my original post as I believe I was the first one to mention the reprecussions for such a quickened spell. Note how I was talking with the player, discussing those very reprecussions with him during the character creation phase. I, for one, am very active with my players during creation.

And if the player was a newbie (a clause not added to the discussion until much later into it), any GM who wouldn't work closely with them, helping them where they could would be a pretty piss-poor GM anyway.

I wasn't trying to say anyone in particular, even Sphynx when I met him way back, was a bad GM. I've played both ways and GMed both ways.

Maybe part of the reason for the tone down is the product. I remember in Dreamchipper about motorcycles with AR mounted. A lot of the art seemed to suggest it was an urban war zone and you could get away with walking down the street in armor and carrying weapons in plain sight. They even had a product call DMZ the downtown militarized zone.

Something I personally don't agree with is how some peoples SR world is just todays world with magic, metahumans and high-tech thrown in. The quickest/easiest way for me to describe mine is a bit more post apocalyptic.

It also depends where you're at in the Sixth World. Walking the streets of Downtown with an assault rifle slung over your shoulder isn't going to slide, but you could easily get away with it in the Barrens.

The problem I have more than anything are the players and GMs who don't take full advantage of the setting (as opposed to just the rules). In my opinion the coolest thing about Shadowrun *is* the setting (much moreso than the metaplots).

Does your GM read a description like, "You see two, three hit dice orcs in a 10 x 10 room look up and ready various weapons and a +1 scimitar"

or

"You two orks snarl and dive for weapons as the door splinters inward, the clatter of automatic weapons fire shattering the night as you make your presence known."

-Siege

Actually, if you want to make your players pucker, tell the character with demolitions to toss the dice behind your screen, but to keep his eyes closed.

-Siege

No, Gritty is not limited to the telling of the story, sorry. Again, half of any game is the mechanics. The idea of a roleplaying game is to tell a story, a good story with the characters as the central point. Now read a SR book, and compare your characters to those in the 'good stories'. Although I often compare SR to Marvel, it's in the power levels, not the story. And even then, the powerlevels are very different (unless half of your team is flying everywhere and shooting fireballs out of their hands/eyes without taking any drain). But think about it... You can play a flying/invisible/telekinetic character, tell me that doesn't sound like a Marvel comic book character. The gritty roleplaying part isn't the discussion here, the comments by BitBasher were in reference to game-mechanics, to be more precise, Quickening the spell with a bunch of Karma. That's great that you want to play in a 'gritty' game where you can't use half the rules (like Quickening spells to yourself), but not in my world.

Now to take a few off-topic moments to address the questions directed at me again....
Let me ask you, are the NPC's you face just as decked out and "superhero" as you are? The main nemesis are, but not the goons.
Are all the runners at the same levels of competency as you decked out in the same way? Not sure I understand the question... the entire team I'm with is as decked out as my PC, yes.
What typically provides you a challenge? Same things as anyone else. As stated before, a guy with an assault rifle can take me out pretty easily.
What goals does your character have in life, why does he run the shadows? He doesn't, he's a Merc, but his career is a quest for goodness, saving the world from the horrors that afflict it.
What does he want out of life? To die in a fight.

Point remaining that most of you have done what I've asked about. Burn the character for the idea. I agree that it makes sense to predetermine how spells work, but it makes more sense, for the story, to hear how a player sees a spell working, and work towards that. If Detect Life was such a burden to cast, who would ever learn the spell? Hell, even if you only cast it for a split second to find the people who have disappeared, you suffer the negatives of "False positives", "seeing mosquitos and thinking it's a man", etc, etc. You take a spell and make it useless because you don't want someone to Quicken it due to a GOOD concept.

BTW, OurTeam, thanks for that quote, somehow I missed that one, so I'll add it to my list of House Rules. There's no way I'm going to have everyone auto-resist detection spells. You might as well just never cast the spell then (since the TN to see those you're looking for would start at 6) unless you only had the spell at Force 6+.

Sphynx

I don't see what the big fucking deal is, it's just not a spell that lends itself to Quickening. Really, if someone wanted to Quicken the Flame Aura or Physical Barrier spell, wouldn't you talk them out of it?

It sounds like your complaint/question boils down to a GM being very flexible vs. very rigid. I don't think it's fair to demand that we all fit into one category or the other. There is a wide spectrum to choose from.

I don't recall anyone demanding anything at all. Just curious as to why people change from so flexible to so rigid. I see it as a spell that DOES lend itself to Quickening (as a matter of fact, one of our current players has had both spells Quickened for over a year now), and it was one of the players bringing up to me that if he ran the game he'd screw the player over and over with it that made me curious as to: Why?

As Tisoz stated, wisely, a good GM would take the player aside and at char-creation, create a spell that does what they think their spell does (a uni-directional, spell which increases the TN by 2, but keeps the same drain, or maybe just a plain TN 6). Or, as our GM did (and I think he's a Good GM who I try to model my GMing after), just accept the player's definition of how the spell works and play the game with the player having a nice Detection spell that has a cool effect but isn't unbalancing.

Sphynx

Pure flexible Zazen. I also don't allow shapeshifters (I don't allow regeneration actually, if you wanted to play a shapeshifter without Regen I'd allow it just so you could play what you imagine), and amnesia is defined as a "GM Fuck with me" edge, and anything illegal that is flagrantly obvious is going to mess with a player.

Building, with the player, the character they see, is flexible. Fucking with them because their view doesn't match your own is rigid. Fucking with them when their view does match your own (amnesia) is flexible. Fucking with them for being non-commonsense/idiotic (flashing guns in cops faces or walking about with a glowing armour spell) is part of playing.

Sphynx

Doctor Funkenstein wrote:

Oh good lord. I'm not in the mood to be attacked by some whiney little munchkin trying to save face this morning. See you around.

Heh, leave it to DF to bring up shit from 4+ years ago in order to call someone a hypocrite, and then complain about being attacked.

The problem BB is that he's discussing 'his' viewpoint with them. "those very repercussions" being nothing at all what the player sees the spell as doing. If I, as a player, got a talking to about how the spell 'really works' by the GM (DF's) viewpoint, I'd not take the spell either. But then I would have to come up with another character concept entirely.

Sphynx

PS. Zazen, 10+ years ago (1992 I believe) and between you and me, I don't even think I made those calls, I just don't want to call someone a liar since I very well could have. After all, what do you remember of your 3rd hour of the game 10+ years ago? All I remember is someone storming off because there were no Walls in Denver, and the only reason that is in memory retention is because we still shout that out at some point in every game (usually when someone argues a point with the GM).

Fair enough, maybe I'm just seeing things strangely. I'll quit reading/posting on this thread.

Sphynx

Personally I'm in favour of background puppet-master NPCs who grossly outpower the PCs at first - but who almost always work through minions who become more and more powerful as the PCs progress and learn more, until the PCs might potentially be able to challenge the mega-threat directly. I'm also in favour of games where the PCs, while they can start out with anything canon, leave themselves at least some initial visible room to grow (within that first crucial 50 karma points ) so that they are able to see their PCs progressing in leaps and bounds especially near the beginnings of the game. If there's a prized piece of equipment or focus or spell, my experience has been that players on average prefer to earn it (even if relatively early on, for less powerful pieces) rather than begin with it. Most players (again in my experience) seem to enjoy an in-game discovery of first-time initiation more than having their PC pre-initiated. It's all part of the growth process.

Still, my experience, only.

A question:

Suppose a GM is working with fitting a new player into an existing group. The group has an (existing) specific tone and power level. The player might have a somewhat different power level for the image of their PC in mind.

To what extent would you (any of you) feel it appropriate for the GM to push or limit the new player in terms of possible (canonical) power level?

The memory I have of my first few hours was of a rather large (300+ pounds) female player getting frisky and flashing us every few minutes. Man, that was freaking weird.

She left the group shortly after I joined, but the image is burned into my memory forever.

The SRComp rules for group Karma pools can be really useful for integrating multiple new characters into an existing group- it cuts back on the top player's Karma and gives the n00b's some hope.

Sorry, maybe I didn't word this well, but nezumi came closest to catching what I had in mind.

The distinction of the new player is not that they are using starting stats (starting karma and/or bps), but that their PC image and construction is based upon a different view of the specific game level of power relative to that of the existing group. (After all, as we all know well, equally canon starting PCs can end up with drastically different power levels: what constitutes a solid starting PC in one type of game might be a fish out of water in another.)

[Edited to try to bring the intent across a bit better.]

Some of the experiences I've had with new PCs in running games indicate that there is a bit of a disjoint. Every GM is different and ever group of players is even more different. The group I most commonly play with has quite a few taboos that a new player probably wouldn't be aware of. Not "the way things work" per se, but things like "no sniper rifles on arial drones" and the like. Things which were banned for the very OOC reason of saving the game's ability to function (aka, the Great Sniper Drone War).

Originally posted in THINGS PLAYERS DO THAT WE GM'S HATE by Sphynx Mar 7, 2003 7:54 AM

Psht. No walls in Denver? Absurd.

~J

I remember that post back in march. though what the thread was about i can't remember.

Though todays Sphynx seems a different person thenthe one back then. But i think i see why you bring this to light (tho personally i wouldn't have).

I brought it up because he was suggesting that I may not have remembered correctly. It also reminded me while I posted that he did bend rules to fit how a player saw his character working, which is directly relevant to the topic.

It also let me refute the other thread, which I was willing to let slide after exchanging emails at the time it was active.

There are usually at least two sides to a conflict. I had no idea why I got treated like I did until I read that he was pissed that he had to GM. That's why I previously said there were a lot of misunderstandings. And I did later contact a player from his group about joining another group I got together because I figured he'd be getting screwed as he wasn't an original acquaintance of Sphynx. Evidently Sphynx isn't so bad because the kid said he was having fun where he was. Of course, he probably saw me as a lunatic.