Caught me being unprecise on the automatic weapons angle. Thanks for giving the desired answer to the wrong question.

I´m at a loss translating "abrollen" into english, but a "rolling movement" to one side would be applicable to gymnastics dodge IMO, if the description is used. Consecutive full defense actions would look rather silly. As I have nothing to defend here I´m willing to concede the point.

I'm thinking 'tumbling' would be close.

But it still wouldn't be applicable as a Dodge specialization in all circumstances.

I think it's the translation of tumbling, which could be used for dodging, but isn't specific to dodge and isn't the only dodge move covered by the gymnastic skill.
If it really was a dodge specialization, that probably would have been mentionned.

I didn´t. As consequence of me demanding that ware is not excluded from the challenge after the fact, I can live with Intuition 5+Vision/Hearing Enhancement+ Attention Coprocessor -1 for defaulting. I ended the test of concept when it was, IMO, brought to failure already. (You´d have at most 29 BP left to go into "other areas", and I´m rather sure that single skill points are not worth 20k¥ in lost ressources for a samurai. See Attention Coprocessor, Reflex Recorder...).

Tumbling! Thats what I meant. I agree it won´t always apply, so for fairness we should cut it. Now 31 BP to spend, if negative qualities are maxed.

Isn´t tumbling the D&D-thief skill for evading attacks?

Evading attacks of opportunity, and anyone can do it if they have the skill in 3E, and do not wear restrictive armor.

I've skipped about 4 pages of reading because it's become repetative and boring, but I've got a straw man that I think sums up the argument.


B - 1
A - 7
R - 1
S - 1
C - 1
I - 1
L - 1
W - 1
E - 8
M - 0
R - 0
Ess - 6.0
Exceptional Attribut - Agility
Uneducated
Uncouth
Pistols 6 (specific brand +2)

The character concept is that he's a master pistoleer. This character shoots as well as any uncybered, mundane character possibly can. When he shoots things, he has a ridiculous number of dice and always hits what he shoots at. If the shot is basically impossible I can use edge and still consistently hit with a longshot test.He could shoot even better if he were an adept, but that's not part of my concept. He could shoot better with additional cyberware, but I can get that without paying karma therefore I will discount it. He could improve in other areas such as reaction, initiative, survivability, or be more well-rounded but that's not part of my concept either. I only want him to shoot things. Now that I've created the character with this narrow specialization, I can't really improve him with karma, since I'm only willing to spend his karma on things that would improve his shooting. And even if I could improve him a little, it wouldn't be a big improvement so there's not really any point. Wow - that's really horrible and proves that we should hate SR4 and burn the developers in effigy.

Owwww. Dropped to page 2 just when it was getting interesting... can't have that.

LOL This thread is due to be locked anytime now anyway. Cain seems to have dropped out of the argument, and the challenge hasn't even remotely been met, so I figure this is a dead issue by now. *shrug* I'm sure someone will come up with a "Crazy Cain part 3" thread and we'll have some other weirdness to disect with high explosives.

Actually, I've been asked by someone (not necessarily an admin) to not start a flamewar. Make of that what you will.

Cain loses interest quickly when its a thread set aside for him. He much rather prefers to use others' threads.

I must say that I think it has been proven that a hard maxed agility character is just not build point efficient and leaves way too many weaknesses in other important areas to shadowrunners. As for edge, Mr. Lucky is not too expensive for how nice edge is, but without other skills, 8 more dice on 8 tests in the course of a run is not game breaking by any sense. Especially in a lower number party.

Not start flame war != Present arguments

You can still present a side to an argument without resorting to argument ad hominem.

I know I can.

[Edited to remove snarkiness]

EDIT: After MFB smacked me with the sensibility stick (it was a light smacking!), I decided to edit out my own snarky statements here. For what it's worth, the board has my apologies. It won't happen again if I can help it.

no offense, but that post kinda supports the idea that Cain's doing the right thing by dropping this.

You're right, and I'll edit it to remove my own amount of snarkiness. I guess I just get annoyed at someone making wild claims for over 2 dozen pages (including the other thread) that he is *never* able to prove, and just keeps resorting to "it's this way cause I say it is." I think I'll just stay away from any threads dealing with him in the future to keep myself in check.

Booooooooooo, everyones putting on the gentleman's gloves. How are we ever gonna get a pit fight going?

the thing with Cain's claims is, they're ultimately subjective. their validity depends wholly on what the individual gamer enjoys about gaming, and how they enjoy it. i really, really like the idea of diminishing returns and non-linear progression. i view any game that doesn't have these things as lacking. i dislike the idea of hard caps. i like concise control of my characters' actions. you can tell me until you're blue in the face that SR4 either has these things or doesn't need them, and it won't convince me because i tried my level best to like SR4, and it simply does not suit me as a gamer.

Cain feels, and i feel, that you can come out of chargen with someone who is close enough to the cap in their specialty, and high enough in other important areas, that further advancement is superfluous. all that's left is branching out, and while branching out is certainly a fine choice, neither Cain nor i feel it should be the only choice. i feel that further advancement is superfluous because it seems to me that, within his specialty, a well-crafted character can, right out of chargen, overcome any odds that i would reasonably throw at a character. once you can reliably hit a gnat in the right eye a kilometer away in total darkness, i don't really feel there's anyplace left to go. if you're the type of GM who goes from that point to shooting a gnat in the right eye a kilometer away on the other side of a ferrocrete wall, using only your pointed forefinger instead of a gun, well, characters in your game will have to advance significantly in their specialty in order to continue succeeding. obviously, there's a lot of wiggle room between those extremes, and obviously there's some common ground, but in the end, a character that i'm satisfied with, development-wise, might very possibly be woefully underpowered for running under another GM. and that's fine because, to be honest, i probably wouldn't enjoy playing under such a GM anyway.

Depending on playstyle, one has to make some adjustments. I enjoy running long campaigns (several years long), building up a detailed area the runners act in. However, karma and nuyen advancement ran counter to that, since in previous editions one reached a point where running the game started to get rapidly diminishing returns - fewer options for runs, more preparation, higher stats all around, power creep etc.

So the latest campaign started with the "make your character how you like it, we'll not get karma or specific nuyen awards, any advancing will be done by GM approval". SR4 fits that playstyle much better. And with the set up, I don't have trouble with overpowered gear or stats at all, and the players don't have to worry about the GM setting them up for a fall to counter/destroy something he has issues with. Any gear and such is done in the open - the player asks for something, be it a gauss rifle or a new martial art or a spell, and the GM, after approval, sets up an adventure or run during which the character gets/learns it. No more "but I don't want the adept to have a million nuyen to spend on heavy weapons, but the samurai needs it for wired X, so the adept will get hit with a hacker attack on his bank account" "solutions" to player/GM issues.

As a player, I very much prefer characters I can play like I want right out of the box. I dislike playing a character that will have to earn X karma and Y nuyen just to fit my vision of it.

The amount of character "power" (for lack of a better word) depends much on the way BP are spend by the player in question. I have very different player types in my game.

A char is not "well-crafted", if the player of said char wants to advance ingame, and can´t. I´d never go as far as Franks Company Man - sample character, assigning many skills at rating one, but not taking every skill at four is a good way to allow room for meaningful improvement. Yes, it is karma-inefficient. You don´t care, remember?

I personally enjoy playing strong runners. Character-crafting is about reaching sweet spots, having an underlying concept that shows in the skill distribution, having a few cool tricks to show. Ingame, I want to be able to spend karma on branching out, buying knowledge skills that seem fitting/strike my fancy etc. So I rather like that the bases can be covered at chargen. I´ve still to find a build that is unable to "meaningful advance", even in the given spec. If someone was willing to show me how that is done, I might improve my chargen skills. I´ve given the basic idea a fair shot, or so I think.

to me, that's a fault in the system, not the player. i don't think i should have to gimp my character just so i have an excuse to advance in my specialty. see my aforementioned dislike of hard caps.

I'll stay true to the spirit of what I said, and not interact with Cain specifically...

I'm sorta with mfb on his last statement. I dislike the hardcaps as well. Though I could deal with them if they were slightly higher, say at 9's instead of 6's. That way there is *always* room to improve right out of chargen. In our games, our GM already removed the augmentation hardcap. It seemed silly to have a stat of 6, 4 available levels of an aug and only being able to take 3 due to the cap. *shrug* To each their own though.

Well, I do like hardcaps. I don't think you can blame a system for having hardcaps, just like you can't blame it for using n-sided dice. It's a design choice, you can hate it, but you can't say it's a fault.

If a person could "prove" it's a problem for reasons x, y and z, then it could be viewed as a fault. Either way, it's subjective and a matter of perspective. I personally think hardcaps are fine, just that they were set too low. Others, like yourself, love them, others like mfb (I'm assuming here) don't like them in the least. Everyone has an opinion. You're right in that it's an intentional design choice, but that doesn't mean it's beyond the ability to be "flawed."

We've increased the caps to 9 for skills and removed the caps for augmentations and it didn't break the game. Still, I can't understand why they had been introduced into the game at all.

*shrug* from the wording in the skill level descriptions in SR2 and SR3, it could be argued that they intended to have hard caps all along. I'll agree that 6 is lower than I'd prefer though.


edit: thinking about it, a soft cap implemented using a variation of the old SOTA rules would have been mechanically & logically pleasing, but an utter pain in the butt to implement.

This is quite an interesting way of doing things. The only thing that really prevents my characters from being like I want them to be is usually the cost of skill groups and the availability of Rating 4 Skillwires and Muscle Toner.

How do you decide when they can/cannot get a certain piece of gear? I can see this working for skills quite well. Those skills the character constantly uses can be upgraded after (X) runs, X being the new skill rating * n (GM choice).

If you have any more specific deals on how you work this, or examples, please post. I am eager to hear a new way.

It may seem rather silly, but one solution is actually lowering the cap on skills bought at chargen. If you simultaneously remove the 50%-cap on bought attributes, or but it at a fixed 300 BP, you are much closer to an SR3-feel.

I like the hardcaps because they allow to consider where a dicepool can end. They can easily serve their function at a higher level, you just need to tune thresholds a bit. Did the mages get worse with that change Grinder?

heh, well, another reason i don't like SR4 is that it works even less well without hard caps. someone with 6 attribute and 6 skill can already accomplish some ridiculous things; removing the caps means you could reach the point where an unaugmented human can do a called shot to avoid a Citymaster's armor and end up with a positive dicepool. a character with, say, 10 skill and 10 attribute would divorce the game from reality too much for my tastes.

So (other than SR3 or before), how would you prefer it to run? Just curious.

i'd prefefer a system where the cost and benefits of progression are both nonlinear. the cost gets more and more expensive, and the benefits become less and less awesome--so that there's less badass between 7 and 8 than between 6 and 7.

Any examples you can think of that are like that? Non-linear would certainly more accurately represent real life, but not sure how to do that in a game system without fairly complex progression tables/info.

pretty much any multiple-dice-per-roll system with variable TNs will do it. at high TNs, increasing your dicepool tends to be worth less than lowering the TN; at low TNs, increasing your dicepool is much more beneficial.

But doesn't that still have linear progression? (may be a steep climb, but it seems to be there) SR3 had fixed formulas for karma costs that went in a very linear path. Variable TN's, I agree, do allow for non-linear resolutions during the game though.

Non-linear is pretty easy for limited skill ratings - print a cost table based on whatever formula you desire.

er, sorry, not necessarily nonlinear progression, just not flat. in other words, going from skill 6 to 7 should cost less than going from 7 to 8. to clarify, SR4's progression is fine with me in this regard.

i never claimed to be a math jeanyus...

edit: we've probably derailed this thread enough. i think if we want to discuss game systems further, we should probably start a new thread.

Seems to me like its a natural progression from the original topic, though. The original comments seemed to be that one could make a starting character character that was already at the top of his field. Some people like that, and some don't.

That being said, it naturally begs the question of how to fix it.

• You could remove the caps so there was still room for improvement.
• You could lower the starting caps, so that starting characters weren't as good out of the box. Say for instance "no skill above 4, only one skill above 3".
• You could do both.

If Option 1 creates characters who push the limits of believability, you could make skill advancement exponentially difficult at higher levels to discourage skill 10 marksmen, or you could change the threshold requirments so that that dice pools of 20 weren't that great (i.e. give average tests thresholds of 3-4. Of course, this pretty well hoses guys at the lower levels.

I don't really know the answer. But I suspect it would be different for many of us dependant on our individual tastes/preferences/gaming styles.

This may be true, but so far we didn't play often enough to come only close to this point.

Well, the most recent example is a player coming to me, and asking if his character can have a rail gun, and showing me a 3D picture of a high-tech gun. Since the character has had an assault cannon for years, and no problm's cropped up, I don't see any objection. I pick the Thunderstruck Gauss Rifle for stats, and tell the player that I'll prepare an adventure once they finish the current one, during which his character can aquire one of those.

With skills, it's a bit different - I tell players to pick the skills they want at the level they want at chargen, and not to expect advancement during play, apart from some more background-driven new skill aquisitions (One character got a martial art kick taught after a few sessions spent touring the underground pit fighting circuit.)

But the main goal (which worked so far) is to avoid power creep and arms races, and to be more up front about what fits and what doesn't. I don't want a player to save up for some item, only to find out I don't like it afterwards. It also makes it easier to keep the team balanced since I don't have to deal with a widening gap of abilities between the more efficient at optimisation and the more meandering between background skills players.

I had a few campaigns (SR2 and SR3) where karma awards led to double-digit initiation grades, and the nuyen to go with it for the cybered characters (who invested the karma into skills, so you get the picture). It was fun at the time, but not something I feel up to these days.

I was referring to SR4 only.

Yes. Just saying that given my playstyle, without hard caps, and without other measures to curp power creep, I'd end up game mastering that "I'll call a shot down the barrel of that gun right when they open the breech, planning it to richochetting inside and hit the driver. After the dice pool mods, I'll roll 6 dice, plus edge" run because I ended up doing it in the past already.

So you say that you do not allow skill advancement, but what do you do about skillwires? Also, 5pp is just enough to start my hunger as an adept. If you allow the sammys to "Quest" for new guns, how do you handle adepts? That is what I like most when I play a character is increasing skills and initiating. 400BP is hard to split between skillgroups. I find it hard to even afford More than 120BP on skills. That is hardly enough to buy all necessary skills up to 2, much less the 4 that is desired for pros.

Also, if you quest for gear, then what happens to contacts? What is the point in buying good contacts if they only get you info. I rely on contacts to supply me with the gear I need as well as provide info to keep me alive.

I should have been more precise - we do not do character generation by the starting character rules. It's more like "make the character how you want it to be, don't sweat the ratings, availability, or money, all that matters is that it fits into the campaign, and has a sort of in character explanation for it". That does lead to some starting troubles with a new character, until one has trimmed it down/boosted it up to a comfortable spot, but it means a player is not limited to starting characters. It also means I don't care about BPs efficiency. I'd rather have an adept with 3 points spent in increase attribute than 0.75 in attribute boost if that means he's balanced compared to the samurai.

Contacts in my campaign are not there to get the runners gear, they are there to get the runners runs, information and other roleplay opportunities. Also, they are not bought, but either writtten in (since we don't use BP limits) or acquired through roleplay.

"Advancement" for adepts could come in learning new martial arts, studying under a master, winning a tournament and earning fame and fortune, and so on. It's usually not stats/ratings, but intangible stuff.

To sum it up: The campaign is, in a way, the ultimate "no advancement, but you start witout any limit on BP other than team balance". As long is a character concept is not overshadowing present characters (not just stat wise, but also rp attention wise), I don't care how many BP were paid for it.

But if you make it too hard to get higher skills, it'll have more or less the same impact as hard caps.
Lower starting caps prevents the players from creating specialists, which probably won't please those against hard caps.
Another solution would be to raise the hard caps, so that there's a difference between the starting caps and hard caps without preventing players from creating specialist... But it'd lead to the problems of Options 1, except not too far.

Another solution yet would be to limit the effectiveness of ratings above the caps. For example you could have different colored dice with a TN of 6. This way, past a point, you'll be able to improve but not that much, as in SR3 (and other variable TN systems).

A simple soft cap would be to allow stacking of "aptitude" post character creation, and price it accordingly (probably raising costs with each take as well). That way, someone who really, really wants to get an additional dice could buy the quality, and then the new skill rank.

The problem with having there be less badassitude from 7 to 8 in the manner of a variable TN is that representing someone or something which is specifically more bad ass requires absurdly larger numbers. The most obvious is toughness. When damage is scaled on a Target Number bump, then each additional amount of actual toughness requires a multiple more dice. And when you multiply a multiple, that's starting to look an awful lot like an exponential. Getting just two hits at a TN of 6 requires an average of 12 dice (and your chances still aren't great). Getting two hits on a TN of 12 requires 72 dice (to again get just over a half chance). Getting 2 hits against a TN of 18 requires 432 dice.

So if you want to represent that a character, a vehicle, a dragon, or a building has the kind of toughness against Thing C that a proportionately less resilient one has against Thing B as an even less resilient one has against Thing A - then you are throwing around hundreds of dice whether you like it or not. And previous editions had to contend themselves with special kludge rules where things went to hand wavy "Vehicle Damage" and "Naval Damage" to scale through those quandaries. And the edge cases made the math go straight to fucking hell. And that's before we get into the fundamental and ridiculous bad math that is having a TN bump of 3 -> 4 coming with a 25% reduction in per-dice effectiveness while a 5 -> 6 bump came with a 50% drop.

---

Having a linear increase in dice come with a linear increase in hits allows the game to easily and effectively simulate the essentially logarithmic nature of the world very easily. Pretty much the only thing that's missing from the damage scale is the reverse transform. That is, what should happen is for things to work pretty much exactly the way they do now, save that 2 Damage is a Light Wound (1 Box), 4 damage is a Medium Wound (3 Boxes), 6 Damage is a Serious Wound (6 Boxes), 8 Damage is a Deadly Wound (10 Boxes), and 10 Damage is a Mortal Kombat attack (15 Boxes). Then put everyone back on the 10 Box scale.

Getting rid of LMSD damage was a bad idea, as it is the essential reverse transform to get real damage effects out of a logarithmic system. But going back to variable target numbers and the corresponding dice inflation that requires to represent real events is not a solution to anything. By putting things n linear dice pools with fixed target numbers you can give non-linear effects to linear success increments and represent a scale of effect that is hundreds of thousands of times larger than you can with variable target numbers and linear success gradients. And in a world which has sparrows and armored low altitude vehicles that's important - the world really does include things which are different one from another by hundreds of thousands of times.

If I was working on 5th edition (which I am not), I definitely would not get rid of the fixed TN. I'd iron out the math at several specific points on the scale, but the basic TN = 5 mechanic would certainly stay.

-Frank

i said i didn't to derail the thread... but it doesn't seem like anybody's posting on the original topic anyway.


that's not a problem, that's the entire point. inhumanly-difficult tasks should, barring the presence of TN-reducing factors, require inhumanly-high dice pools to accomplish reliably. generally, though, the mitigating factor that allows (for instance) dragons to be badass without requiring hundreds of dice is TN-reducing factors such as armor.


outside a certain narrow range of possible dice pool sizes, you either autofail or autosucceed in a fixed-TN system. while that's technically true of variable-TN systems (or almost any system in which more dice = more awesome), the range is much, much broader. fixed TNs scale terribly.

Yes, that is a problem. It's a huge problem, because there are things which aren't humans that accomplish tasks. Forklifts. Trees. Moose.

The world is huge, and it has a lot of stuff in it. And if you define inhumanly large dice pools as piles of dice which are physically too large to pick up and roll, then the game becomes completely unplayable as soon as you want to use any of the inhumanly large things that are in it. If you define inhumanly large dice pools as a pile that is still possible to lift and count in a reasonable amount of time, the world becomes scalable and within reach.

When you pop out target number reductions, or damage code resets, or any of the other kludges that SR3 uses to attempt to bring the world of the large into the realm of the game mechanics, you are admitting defeat. You are coming directly to grips with the fact that your proposed game mechanics straight up don't work for those larger numbers and events.



You've already admitted that you aren't a math guy, so I'm going to simply assume that this statement is a direct result of you not having the slightest clue what you are talking about. Fixed TNs scale beautifully, over huge ranges. That's the entire point. It is variable TNs which can't even accept inputs over a very proscribed range without a complete system overhaul

-Frank

this can be easily managed with the use of TN - reducing factors. allow certain types of machines to reduce the TN for lifting things by some factor of their body, give trees armor, etcetera.


if fixed TNs scale so well, then why does it require GM intervention to prevent unaugmented characters from making 1km sniper shots in complete darkness without aiming? scaling with fixed TNs requires increasing threshold and reducing dice pools. if you are at the shallow end of the dice pool, you will quickly reach the point where you don't have--and can't get--enough dice to succeed. if you are at the deep end of the dice pool, you will quickly reach the point where no amount of pool-reducing or threshold-increasing can stop your mighty power. the whole reason SR4 requires hard caps because fixed TNs don't scale well--they had to artificially box the mechanic in.