I'm never going to agree with you that a guy with a nearly superhuman ability with shooting in adverse conditions who knows the exact location of a target should be unable to hit said target with a gun while blind folded. I've actually seen people do that. I will say that Shadowrun gives out range penalties which are somewhat low. Extreme Range actually seems like a harder shot than point blank while blind folded. And of course every edition of Shadowrun has presented per-bullet accuracy which is totally unrealistic and extremely high. But none of that is a condemnation of fixed TNs in general.



Uh... we're talking logs and exponents. In variable target numbers you can add 6 to the TN and then the character will need six times as many dice (or an arbitrary TN reducing ability) to have any realistic chance of success. With a fixed TN you can add two to the Threshold and the character needs six more dice or an arbitrary threshold reduction to have any realistic chance of success. Those statements are pretty much the same, save for the fact that rolling six more dice is tractable and rolling six times as many dice is intractable. A 10 die pool in SR4 is a lot like an 8 die pool in SR3, so which is less daunting to you: rolling 16 dice or rolling 48 dice? Seriously now, are you going to tell me that rolling 48 dice looking for exploding sixes is something that you ever want to do in your whole life?

People at the high end of the dice pool in SR3 don't actually get any better by getting more dice. If you are looking for two elevens you basically aren't going to get it if you are rolling 7 dice or 17. You haven't hit a hard cap, you've just come to a place where getting any actual improvement in the tasks you can expect to achieve requires picking up dozens, if not hundreds of additional dice. And what with skills costing 2.5 times rating very early in that process it's simply never ever going to happen. They are, in effect, capped. It's just that the cap they happen to be at is a result of the fact that they live in a world of exponential difficulty and they advance linearly. They rapidly achieve a state where they are realistically not going to fail at the easier tasks and realistically cannot expect to ever get a meaningful chance at the harder tasks. A capped fixed TN system provides the same result, but it doesn't bother to make meaningless distinctions between people in the upper tier of potential - and instead throws down the very real possibility of actually i=using more potent creatures and things without scrapping the system repeatedly to reset into vehicular and naval reference frames.

Is SR4 perfect? No. Is the math always great? No. But the core math pits exponential difficulty against exponential skill - and that allows the game to at least theoretically be mapped onto an essentially infinite scale. Something that Variable TNs from previous editions could never accomplish. Yes, you can nit pick on weird crap like the fact that extreme range is double the per-shot penalty of pitch darkness (which is just bizarre), and if you really want I can crack open an SR3 text and start reading off inane probabilities generated for ordinary actions by glitches in the TN modifiers. But the fact that you couldn't generate the Universal Brotherhood Infiltrators by actually rolling the dice (it took over 4000 attempts with Willpower 6 recruits to create one "Good Merge") is completely tangential to the fact that you could have written a mechanic for SR3 that did generate the proportions called for in the stories.

The ability to distinguish between "extremely good, but has no realistic chance of doing anything more difficult than X" and "even better, but still has no realistic chance of doing anything more difficult than the very same X" is not particularly important to me. However, the ability to distinguish between "Good enough to do X, but not Y" and "Good enough to do X and Y" is critical. And a fixed TN system does the latter across a much larger field. And by much larger field, I mean literally hundreds of millions of times the field range.

-Frank

I was supposed to stay out of this, but...

Frank, your math is off. Mfb's point is that with fixed TN's, there exists both a point where there is absolutely no chance of success, and essentially no chance of failure. Floating TN's don't have that issue.

For example, if you have 2 dice, and are facing a Threshold of 5, you have no chance to do it. Even with Edge and a longshot test, a simple, basic task might become totally impossible. And at the high end, where people are throwing around 30+ dice, the odds of failure are extremely minuscule no matter what the Threshold is. Add to that the fact that you have to calculate two sets of penalties, you start losing any benefit you might have gotten from a simpler system.

I'm not allowed to discuss SR3/4 comparisons, so I won't go there. But floating TN systems only have one penalty to calculate, and one type of bonus. The fact is, while a straightforward fixed TN system might have a nice linear probability curve, the double jeopardy of dice pool penalties and threshold modifiers really complicates the curve.

Both mfb and myself don't have issues with the idea of SR4. We have issues with the implementation of it, how it causes corner cases that really blow the system apart. That's why one-shotting a Citymaster (or the new example, knifing a Citymaster) causes such an uproar. We don't think that they system works as well as you apparently do, and we think the direction taken has several gaping holes in design philosophy. We'd like to see a different direction taken, one that avoids the mistakes that SR4 has built into itself.

without aiming or any other sort of preparation? given the right equipment and time to set up, sure, it's certainly possible--that's the whole idea behind sniper/spotter teams, after all. but this is hip-shooting.


"X but not X+n" is extremely important to me, because it provides a grounding in reality that makes fantastic things actually fantastic. it provides a constant pull back towards the baseline without actually limiting you to that baseline. yes, with a fixed-TN system, you can 'scale' the game to any size, but it's meaningless inflation--tasks outside the range that you set your scale to are either impossible or negligible.

Only thing I'll say is that if you're seeing "simple, basic" tasks with thresholds of 5, you need a new GM. That's neither simple, nor basic. That's a hypercomplex or extremely difficult thing you're trying to accomplish, in which case a dice pool 2 person really should be failing on that. Joe Blow with average luck don't do quantum physics. On the other end of that, a person with 30 dice is so fraggin' good at his job that he should rarely if ever botch it up. That's just how it is once you reach a certain competency.

except that it really isn't. given no opportunity to prepare, a trained sniper does not have a significantly better chance of hitting a target 1km away than does some greenhorn who's never picked up a gun. that specific example is one i like to harp on because it's so glaringly obvious, but the idea remains flawed even in instances where those flaws are less noticeable.

So wait a minute... having No Chance of Success or Essentially No Chance of Failure is bad, but having Essentially No Chance of Success or Essentially No Chance of Failure is OK? Seriously man, what the hell?

Notwithstanding the actions in SR3 which require multiple successes and thus also provide people with mediocre dicepools with actually No Chance to succeed, what is the big difference between handing out a TN in the mid-teens which is unlikely to ever be achieved at any point in any game you ever play astoundingly different from handing out an SR4 threshold of 5 which is literally unavailable to any character who doesn't have a professional-grade dice pool? If you think that people having essentially no chance of failure is a bad thing for fixed target numbers where dicepools = 4 * Threshold, why is it not also a bad thing for variable TNs where dicepools = 9 ^ Log6 (TN)?

-Frank

because dicepools which = 4*threshold are much easier to reach.

EXACTLY!

With the fixed TN you can actually have characters with real differences in their abilities. With the variable TNs, the difficulty scales up into intractability so rapidly and so haphazardly that you really can't. Anything that a world class super ninja can do with any kind of reliability can be done by a basic professional wage slave half the time. If you take Patricio the line cook (SR3 rules) and throw him head first into the finals of Ace of Cakes he will seriously win that competition one time out of three. It's an open test, and Patricio's 3 dice have the same individual chance of being the highest as Duff Goldman's 6. That's completely retarded.

World class people do bigger and better things than run-of-the-mill professionals. Joe Wageslave in turn does things which are bigger and better than rank amateurs or even hobbyists. And they do these sorts of things consistently.

The variable TN system is fucked on the low end (Our friend Patricio will seriously fail to make a TN 3 omelet breakfast more than 11% of the time). And it's fucked on the high end (A 6 way free for all Iron Chef competition between 5 guys from the kitchens of Applebee's and fucking Morimoto will go to the Iron Chef less than a third of the time).

And if you looked at the math, and I mean really looked, you'd see that. The numbers don't allow normal people to be good at normal tasks, and they don't allow competent people to be good at difficult tasks. And they don't let anyone have a statistically significant chance of doing anything which is "very difficult." Fixed TNs solve all that. People are good at the range of tasks that are within their skill level, things easier than that are trivial, things harder than that are difficult, and things astoundingly more difficult than that are essentially or even actually impossible. That's exactly what you'd want to portray the existence of your mother, Patricio, and Bobby Flay side by side.

-Frank

yes, exactly--anybody can achieve the level of ability available to someone who has spent thousands of years practicing. the only way to prevent it is hard caps, which suck.


hey, whoah, i'm not arguing in favor of open tests. those have always been retarded, and their retardery has nothing to with the utility of variable TNs.


under SR4, Patricio will fail to make a threshold 1 omelette a little less than 9% of the time. (having survived on army chow for four years, i think i could grow to appreciate a cook who only burned my omelette ~10% of the time, but that's another subject.) on the high end, it depends on what mechanic you use. if you go with open TNs, then yeah, the results are going to be fucked because that mechanic is fuckin' clown shoes. if you go with a more reasonable mechanic, like rolling vs TN 4 +/- mods and counting successes, Morimoto will enjoy a more reasonable rate of success. that's really more the mid-end, though; on the actual high end, hard things remain difficult even for people who really know what they're doing. i like that. i want people to have to stop and spend lots of Take Aim actions to make difficult shots. people with skill who use Take Aim can make shots; people without skill who Take Aim can't make shots. this pleases me.

OK, as we agree that the Open Test was the dumbest thing to come out of Shadowbeat (an impressive achievement in and of itself), we will say no more of it.



This is practically speaking true of Variable TNs to an even greater extent. What dice pool does a guy with thousands of years of practice have in SR3? 20? 30? 40? Let's go crazy, and say that Harlequin rolls forty dice when making an Athletics test to climb a wall. A more difficult wall has a higher TN to climb. And as it happens, that means that he is slightly more than 67% likely to succeed at a TN of 12 (or 13), and slightly less than 90% likely to succeed at a TN of 11. If we instead throw down a starting character Adept Super Athlete Biojunky who rolls 16 dice (6 + Improved Ability 6 + Synthacardium 2 + Oxyrush 2); he has only a slightly better than 36% chance of succeeding at a TN of 12 (or 13), and only a slightly less than 60% chance to succeed at a TN of 11.

So against a TN of 11, 57.91% of the time our starting character performs just as well as Harlequin. Over 6% of the time he succeeds and Harlequin fails!
Against a TN of 13, our starting character Adept performs equally to Harlequin over 45% of the time, and actually wins that challenge nearly 12% of the time!

In either case, his chances of failing the climb while Harlequin succeeds are substantially less than 50%. And this is with a completely gratuitous version of Harlequin and a starting character who focuses heavily in this skill. There just isn't any real difference between characters once they hit the soft caps, or even the starting character caps in SR3 rules. And while you can nominally keep spending stupidly massive piles of Karma to shoot the moon with an additional couple of dozen dice, it really seriously doesn't make the kind of difference you'd actually notice. When it comes to larger TNs (like say, 16), our friend Harlequin still finds that he fails his task more than he succeeds. Indeed, once you start throwing in the very large TNs, the distinction between characters who are very good starting characters and characters who are uber-l33t-Mary Sues from thousands of years ago actually shrinks as the very random nature of hoping for exploding sixes starts shifting the success chances of both contestants into the red. Remember that if both characters succeed or both characters fail at a task you can't tell any difference one from another. To actually show a difference you have to keep repeating things until one succeeds and the other fails. And at a TN of 13, it's going to be our starting Adept and not Harlequin 27.3% of the time.



So you say. Why? Do you object to capping the strength of humans and superheroes in Champions? Eventually you have to accept that your system can only measure trivial distinctions between extremely competent humans or move on to measuring the differences between high end humans and giant gorillas. The higher numbers have to correspond to something, and if you never put your foot down and start assigning the higher numbers to non-human stuff your game can't represent non-human things. And considering that the game does have giant gorillas in it, that would be a terrible terrible shame.

-Frank

Yes, I do object to hard caps in Champions. That system is supposed to represent superheroes, and it's supposed to scale from Aunt May to Superman on steroids. Even in a much more limited system, a fantasy game needs to have a fantastic range of attributes. And non-superhumans need to be able to access that range. For example, I can think of several books where a human arm-wrestles a troll and wins, or the equivalent. Shadowrun is still a type of fantasy system, even if it really requires a classification all its own.

As I said, I'm not allowed to discuss a SR3-4 distinctions, so I'm going to use two other floating TN systems I'm familiar with: Savage Worlds and oWoD. Savage Worlds isn't a dicepool system, but it is essentially a fixed TN of 4 +/- modifiers. It works very well, and resolves incredibly quickly. And due to the way the system runs, those exploding dice pop up on a regular basis. In oWoD, IIRC, the extra granularity of a d10 meant that you didn't have to rely on the exploding dice as often. Both these lessons can be brought into a dicepool floating TN system: set a base TN, (which SR3 never had) and redefine the amount of distinction between the numbers, thereby adjusting your granularity.

Er...isn't oWoD the system that, for any task with a TN harder than 'average' (IIRC that'd be a 7+,) had the odds of a botch actually increase with skill?
Or am I thinking of an different version? (d10s, 1s counteract successes, any 1s left over = botch, rolling a 10 = bonus die IF you have a matching specialization)

And, isn't the scaling the point of the caps in Champions? No matter how much Aunt May hits the gym, she's never going to get into Supe's ballpark.

In a fixed-TN system with thresholds, each DP can be assigned a range of thresholds that are meaningful.

Below that, you might have a range of things you can do with little to no risk of failure.

Above, there are things out of your league.

It has less of a luck factor, which is good or bad depending on circumstance. But that is a question of execution, not principle.

right, there isn't a substantial difference between low skill and high skill at high TNs. i seriously do view that as a feature, because at high TNs, i think the focus should shift away from raw ability and towards TN reduction. in reality, of course, 'reducing the TN' is a frequently a function of experience with the task, because you know the best ways to get the 'TN reductions'. but in game mechanics i think it's desirable to make a distinction because there are situations with any real-life task where 'reducing the TN' through the usual methods isn't possible for some reason. rolling against extremely high TNs should, in general, represent 'rush jobs'; it should almost always be possible to lower the TN by taking longer to complete the task. and when the TN is lowered by taking one's time to do it right, the Harlequins will prove their ability.

i have a confession to make: i don't actually like the way SR1-3 handles TNs, generally. i think the best variable-TN mechanic is to set a base TN of 4 (or 5, if you like) for just about everything, and then raise or lower it through modifiers. that, in combination with thresholds, would make it pretty easy to lay out different levels of success; lower levels of success (1, maybe 2 hits) would generally represent 'treading water'--not really succeeding, but not failing so badly that you suffer consequences. because that's one thing that the fixed-TN mechanic has going for it: levels of success play, or can play, a much larger role.


it has more to do with how i think advancement should work--and how i think most gamers want it to work--than anything else. jacking your stats way up high is (or should be) a difficult exercise in critical thinking. it's the type of exercise that really, really attracts certain types of gamers, as demonstrated by the number of character optimization threads that pop up. slamming hard caps down levels the playing field, which i view as a bad thing because i think gamers who are good at the game should be rewarded for it. there are, obviously, limits to that; making a good character shouldn't be so arduous and difficult that only true masters have any chance to survive, and the system must be playtested carefully to avoid horribly overpowered hacks. but if someone spends hours and hours poring over Augmentation to build the perfect high-Agi shooter, i think capping him is worse than a kick in the nuts.

And with that, you bring us back into the main topic. I think the amount of threads on optimisation proves that there is need to crunch. The hard caps can even be pushed (right choice of ware, qualities and race).
I´d really like a mod to the chargen rules that limits skills even more, but opens up for the attribute points. I´m fully for tweaking SR4, allthough the base mechanic is (IMO) at its strongest now.

Balancing is ugly because of what Frank said. Each die added represents exponential increase in ability, and if you get to add a few to many mods, you are no longer where you were supposed to be. Take the theoretical Max-DR builds, those would be much more annoying ingame than any High-Edge build could ever hope to be. Think about it, Reaction as a dump-stat for non-riggers. "You win initiative!"... "I let the guards go first."...

But then your "skill" is completely meaningless. Once you have a somewhat decent dicepool, a TN reduction is so much larger than any vaguely reasonable amount of dice that it's not even funny. You may as well not even have variant dicepools at that point, because they seriously don't matter. Rolling 12 dice against a TN of 6 leaves you seven times more likely to fail than rolling a mere 6 dice at a TN of 4. Your ability then is not whether you have 6 dice or 36, your ability is how many Target Number Reductions that you have. And indeed, that happens to scale very much like having a Fixed TN and varying the dice pool. Except of course that unlike using a fixed TN your TN Reductions model gives out sinusoidal bonuses against exponential difficulty instead of fixed linear bonuses against exponential difficulty.

But requiring a guy with 6 dice to hit a threshold of 4 is a lot like requiring a guy with 6 dice to hit a Target Number of 15 (~11% instead of ~12% chance of success). The difference really is that varying "skill" (that is to say, dicepool) makes a very real difference in addition to varying "difficulty" (threshold or target number depending upon system).

----

Basically it comes down to the fact that you are correct that you can create more different probabilities if you tweak dicepool, and threshold, and Target Number. But you are incorrect that this is in any way necessary or helpful. You can already essentially cover any probabilities you want with just dicepool and threshold. And you personally aren't enough of a math guy to actually make use of those extra probabilities in any kind of vaguely useful or simulationist manner.

-Frank

personally, no, i'm not. but a) i have a solid enough grasp of TN difficulties that it actually doesn't matter much if i can spit out exact numbers, and b) i know guys who are good enough at math. as far as being necessary or helpful, well, i've tried doing it with fixed TNs and i've tried doing it with variable TNs, and i've fared a lot better with variable TNs.


depends on what you're facing. if you're pitting your dice pool against someone else's, as you do in every combat test, then dice pool is crucial. if you're facing a task of static difficulty, dice pool beyond what you need to accomplish the desired level of success is superfluous--unless, of course, you don't have access to your usual array of TN reducers, in which case the slight advantage of a higher dice pool is better than nothing.

Only within a limited spectrum. And only if you want to allow for impossible odds. In essence, even the most crunchy RPG system allows for cinematic rolls of some stripe. However, it doesn't take much for a threshold and dicepool system to produce rolls that are completely impossible to hit. A floating TN system doesn't have that disadvantage.

Basically, while fixed TNs and dicepools work well within a limited range, they break down at both the low end and the high end. And the hard caps don't really prevent SR4 from reaching the high-end breaking point; all they do is frustrate players. Also, as Frank demonstrated, floating TNs are better at showing an exponential progression of difficulty, as opposed to a simple linear one. Climbing a mountain twice as high is not twice as difficult; the difficulty scales up much higher.

At any event, in actual gameplay, modifying both thresholds and dicepools is more complex than simply modifying a target number. Instead of calculating two things, you need to only keep track of one.

Rousing discussion! At least, for the last page, which is all I've read. Frank is right.

Also...



Umm... Are you trying to say that knifing a citymaster is an artifact of the SR4 system? Because I can make you a hand razors character in SR3 who can do that -- probably without needing to be a troll. Apparently when you use two hands worth of razors, it becomes 50% more powerful in terms of armor penetration. But not two knives, because those aren't attached to your fingers.

Being able to one-shot a riot control vehicle might be silly, but it's not unique to SR4. Both SR3 and SR4 use a vehicle armor system where up to a certain point you have no damage, and then once you breach the armor, the vehicle is dead. You can't really say that it's a problem with SR4's implementation, unless you mean that failure to correct the wacky SR3 hardened armor rules is an implementation problem. To be honest, fixing the whole "two cyber implant weapons = half again as much damage" thing is something the devs deserve kudos for...

I'm sorry but the whole "omg broken corner cases" thing just fails miserably when you're talking about SR4. SR3 characters were infinitely more powerful, thanks to the lack of hard caps, as well as a bloat of munchkin-friendly rules. SR4 characters can do some nutsy things, but they really don't compare. This is especially true of high karma characters. SR3 high karma characters were actually superheroes, more or less, while SR4 high karma characters are more like... people. Now, maybe you criticized SR3 just as much as you did SR4; if that's the case, you should be specific -- this is not an SR4 problem, it's a Shadowrun problem. Though I get the feeling you think that SR3 was better. Which, to my knowledge, the data does not support.

As I said, I'm not allowed to discuss a SR3-4 comparison. So your arguments are meaningless, except in the context that the devs didn't learn from past mistakes.

I can say that not only are high-karma SR4 characters superheroes, so are starting ones if done properly. There's tons of threads here on Dumpshock that pimp the hell out of every conceivable character concept. The only two places with this much character-pumping are, to my knowledge, here and the Wizards of the Coast forums. Heck, WotC has an entire subforum dedicated to character optimization. I know I don't see anything like this on the Wushu or Savage Worlds forums.

SR4 needs to not be compared to SR3. Instead, it needs to be compared to its competition: every other RPG out there. This is where the flaws become the most glaring. Comparing SR4 to SR3 is just saying: "We still suck, but now we don't suck as hard as the Open Test!"

That is because there is significantly less character options and a smaller player base for those games. Savage worlds and deadlands combined have less character options than just one of the billion WoTC splatbooks.

Also, savage worlds has significantly less players than D&D. The deadlands reloaded forums are *dead* compared to the WotC forums. I am not surprised there is significantly less discussion of options.

Now straight onto personal attacks. Deadlands reloaded is laughably balanced (contrast a blessed to the kung fu adepts in terms of points invested to power produced ratio, a blessed needs 1 trait and 1 skill and can cast every spell in the game, wereas a kung fu adept needs a trait and a skill *per spell known* in addition to a trait to be a kung fu adept. And as the spells are the same, I am not even sure how that pretends to be balanced at all), and the underpinning system has many flaws.

And comparing wushu to D&D or shadowrun is a totally flaw exercise and you know it as the games have extremely different underpinning mechanics and wildly different objectives.

So we compare it to its most obvious competitor: nWoD. More unified mechanics, faster resolution, more reasonable wound effects, more satisfying combats, and more balanced special powers. Shadowrun 4 is a much better system than nWoD. To the point that you are better off simply folding nWoD into SR4 mechanics and moving on with your life.

-Frank

So does SR4. Your point?


I dunno about the DL:R forums, I don't go there much. I stick to the general SW forums, and I see a fair amount of traffic there. At any event, I challenge you to find any gaming forum that has nearly as much traffic as the Wotc forums. Dumpshock is dead in comparison to RPG.net, and RPG.net is a pitiful backwater when compared to WotC. One's the moon, one's the earth, and one's the sun.

Most of the rest of what you said is simply wrong, but would require us to go way off topic to demonstrate. However:
D&D is the basis for every role-playing game out there. It remains the gold standard for what an RPG should try and accomplish. Granted, Shadowrun is a lot less like Wushu; but it's a hell of a lot like D&D by design. I could also point out that most of the SR4 core mechanic was ripped wholesale from nWoD. According to the Rob Boyle podcast I listened to, it was done on purpose, at the suggestion of Steve Kenson.

So, don't go trying to weasel out of the fact that SR4 needs to be compared to other games, and fares poorly when the comparison is made.

The last three are a matter of opinion. As for more unified mechanics and faster resolution, I can only say that in my personal experience, combat in Exalted is faster and more exciting than SR4. I don't have a lot of experience with nWoD, so I can't comment too much. However, I should point out (again!) that Rob Boyle has publically stated that SR4 was a direct steal from nWoD. I can also say that nWoD is easily five times as popular as SR4 is; and that's not including the similar White Wolf products, Scion and Exalted-- both of which are outselling SR4.

I endorse frank's view that it compares extremely well compared to the obvious competition - nWoD, and comparing it to Wushu is completely stupid.

Rpgnet review of Wushu


I'm not sure how it compares unfavorably, when a meaningful comparison of it to shadowrun is faintly ludicrious. It's like trying to compare panzerblitz to the settlers of Cataan.

Intresting traffic Comparison

Pinnacle enterainment groups froums have 2 Registered users and 32 guests

Dumpshock has 10 registered users, 10 guests and 1 invisible user

white wolf doesn't have those stats

WotC has 42000 active users, but doesn't break up between guests and members, though checking a few subforums indicates that about 20% of those (8400 will be registered users, and the balance guests)

From this we can conclude that if only registered members post, dumpshock is significantly more active than SW forums, and is tus going to have about 5 times to the number of posts on any topic. You'd want numbers over time too, but there you go.

Do you think that is a problem? SR1-3 suffered massivly from the separation of attributes and skill, so the step to go wth WOD-path and use dicepools based on attribute plus skill is only logical.

And the fact that WOD seems to be doing well with that system did help too, I'm sure.

Not really. We only have 8 more active users. And, of course, WotC blows all of us out of the water. Anyway, as of right now, RPG.net has 169 active users and 313 guests by way of comparison, so apparently having more guests than active users is standard. So, while Pinnacle might be smaller than Dumpshock, it's not by a whole hell of a lot.


Once again: I am not allowed to comment on SR3-4 comparisons. What I can say is that ripping off another game is generally not a good idea, and it didn't seem to help Shadowrun's popularity any.

Just to put the record straight this is not what Rob said - as usual Cain is putting his spin on things. Rob said that there were bound to be inherent similarities between the two systems since they played off the same core mechanic (ie. Att+Skill dicepools + or - modifiers), and that both were influenced by oWoD which in turn was inspired by the original Shadowrun mechanics (which oWoD creators worked on). In fact, I find SR4bears more similarities to the original Trinity Universe games by WW (before they were D20ified), which didn't fare very well commercially in either incarnation (though I'm a big fan), but it's so much more granular and provides so many more structural alternatives in play (catering to SRs fanbase) that it's hard to compare beyond the core mechanic.

As for the rest of it. I've only one thing to say. Despite Cain's continuing claims regarding Shadowrun 4's lack of popularity the truth is that with the latest print run shipped to the stores, the Shadowrun 4 core rulebook has almost outsold SR3's entire 10-year run and will certainly have done so when it completes 3 years (and this when RPG sales are down across the board). And that is not factoring in pdf sales. The advanced rulebooks are moving well with Augmentation doing particularly well and location books are moving briskly. Demand has never been higher since FASA's heyday. More new players have picked up the game, and (quite telling) even more veterans who'd given up have returned to playing Shadowrun since SR4 than would have been possible with SR3. There are more SR gaming groups around that there have been in a long time and, more importantly, to us, they're having enjoying the game.

Is the SR4 system perfect? Hell, no. No system is.

Is it fatally flawed? No. And we're working on the kinks.

Is SR4 a simple system? No. We never claimed it was. We said it would be simpler and more streamlined than SR3. It is - rule by rule SR4 has less rules, there's a unified core mechanic, the rules themselves are simpler and more intuitive/easier to pick up, and the game flows better and caters to all character types more evenly.

Was SR4 intended to cater to the narrativist or the simulationist crowds? Neither. We don't really care for the distinctions so we'll leave it up to the pundits. Our ideal system has the built in flex to be played as loosely or as granular as each group wants (something that was impossible with SR3).

Will it be getting a significant overhaul anytime soon? Nope, we're happy with things as they stand and are looking forward to the next 10 years of Shadowrun gaming with SR4.

Unlike the Savage Worlds and Dumpshock forums however, RPG.net is not associated with any one single game system.

Yeah, manufacturers websites are much easier to get to grips with as they offer a dedicated look. Interestingly, dumpshock bucks the usual more guests than logged in members thing (which I agree is the trend) - currently it has 16 logged in members to 5 guests, which savage worlds official boards (including deadlands reloaded) running at 1 registered user to 36 guests.

Again, dumpshock has over 20 times the number of total posts too, but that is probably just longevity, but the abnormally high number of registered users to guests indicates that we have a more 'hard core' crowd around here.

Amazon is a really weirdly unreliable indicator of a game's popularity. But Deadlands (Savage World Edition) is ranked 86,160th in books, while SR4 is ranked 81,987th. This despite having been published a year earlier. Amazon also has 28 customer reviews for Shadowrun and only 4 for Deadlands. Both have consistently high reviews from their reviewers (unsurprising in an established niche game). Most tellingly of all, the most reviewed review of Deadlands was only rated as helpful five times. Meanwhile, there's a review on SR4 that was rated 38 times. More people rated the most critical review of SR4 as unhelpful than all reviews and ratings of reviews for Deadlands combined.

Does that tell us which game has more players? No it does not. But it does tell us that more people are buying Shadowrun 4 from Amazon three years after it was published than are buying Deadlands two years after it was published. It tells us that more Amazon subscribers are Shadowrun fans to the point that they would write a positive review on Amazon than are Deadlands fans who would write a positive review. The correlation isn't necessarily there, but it's quite indicative. Shadowrun is a niche game. Deadlands is a niche game. But Shadowrun is pretty obviously a much bigger and more prominent niche than Deadlands is, regardless of what your personal playgroup experience happens to be.

-Frank

Important note -- CGL doesn't distribute to Amazon. If folks are buying it there, they're buying it from Amazon Marketplace vendors.

I believe that This is the podcast in question. Basically, he said that the mechanic was proposed by Steve Kenson, full in the knowledge that it was similar to the nWoD/Exalted mechanic. You can listen for yourself.



Oh? Then post actual sales numbers for comparison. Steve Jackson games does.

Anyway, according to the post-release numbers from C&RG, then-Fanpro scored an impressive 3.66% market share; but this was similar to what it had earned prior to SR4's release. As far as I can tell, all game lines are selling more books than ever before, so what's happening isn't unique to Shadowrun.

As far as Deadlands goes, I should point out that it's essentially a splatbook for Savage Worlds. It's basically just a setting. Pirates of the Spanish Main (79,432) and Solomon Kane (64,717) are complete rulebooks, so those are a better comparison. Also, the Savage Worlds Explorer Edition is selling like hotcakes. It's ranked 35,870 on Amazon, and it's a complete full-color rulebook that sells for US $10. Beating SR4 in price by a wide margin, and delivering just as much content.


Some more so than others.


I am not allowed to comment on SR3-4 comparisons. So, let's just say you're wrong, and leave it at that.


Which was done by trying to simultaneously imitate some of what the narrativist crowd already does, and a lot of what the simulationist crowd already does. I give you guys props for trying, but you can't tack a few narrativist details onto a hard-core simulationist system, and expect that you'll end up with the middle road. You end up swinging from one extreme to another.

You may be satisfied with what Shadowrun has become. But fans like mfb and myself are ensnared by the vision of what Shadowrun could be. There's a lot of things in SR4 that were done right, but a hell of a lot more that can be improved substantially. We *can* have the perfect game, and Shadowrun could be it. SR4 is just a lot of mixed messages, mostly in the wrong direction.

Why? You can't just say "You're wrong!" and expect everyone to believe you or even listen without the slightest justification.

And I'm a little confused about this restriction on you that you're not *allowed* to make SR3-4 comparisons. That makes it sound like someone's basically slapped you with a censor. For good or bad, that's wrong, and you *should* be able to voice your opinions, whether or not people agree with them.

That said, Cain, we all realize you hate SR4. We get it. You *could* stop trying to tear it down at every turn. Not trying to censor you, just saying you don't need to repeat the same info nearly every time you post on the SR4 system, that's all.

Your supplied link doesn't seem to actually include the interview, merely a statement that they have the interview. maybe you have to be a logged-in member? Regardless, even assuming that it says what you say it says, that's anachronistic. New World of Darkness hit the shelves in August of 2004. SR4 hit the shelves a year later. But it took longer than a year to write. so it actually can't have been lifted wholesale from nWoD, because nWoD didn't exist when they were writing the thing.

-frank

essentially, every time an SR3 vs. SR4 thread starts in any way, shape, or form, it devolves into a flamewar. as such, the mods/admins/whoever have decreed that it's no longer allowed to get into those discussions.

[edit] just realised i went and compared SR3 to SR4 there =S

so yeah, short version: i tend to disagree with what Cain said. but i'm not particularly interested in discussing it with him anyways, so whatever [/edit]

Prerelease info on nWoD was available long before release, just like we all knew what the SR4 mechanic was going to be before release. Besides which, IIRC Exalted was out and in full swing long before that, and it's essentially the same mechanic. Precursor games, which had a very similar mechanic, include Aberrant and Trinity; IIRC, Aberrant came out in 1997. So much for originality.


I don't hate SR4. I strongly dislike the implementation of SR4. See my post above.

Is there seriously an issue with SR3/4 comparisons? That is bullshit. I see no reason why Cain cant have and voice his completely wrong opinion, and so far I have seen no really flames. Once people start insulting other peoples family, etc. then there may be an issue. Having a strong opinion should not be punished. Shiting on other peoples threads is an issue, but that is exactly why we have this thread.

Now to join in:
Cain, why is SR4 being outsold by Exalted and D&D such an issue? Do you seriously wish us to believe that a systems characteristics are completely represented by the number of copies sold? Aren't you forgetting that it may not be the system, but the concept that attracts people?

Shadowrun is a much more mature RPG than most. Exalted grabs the anime crowd, D&D the nerds, and WoD the emos. I seriously do not want SR to be an RPG that attracts those kinds of people. I never expect SR to the #1 RPG. The changes needed for it to be that would so bastardize it that I would no longer want to play it. I think the fact that it is completely outselling SR3 is the most telling statistic. There is no point comparing it to other RPGs, because it is usually not the system that determines interest in the game. The system just keeps people playing it long after the newness has worn off.

it's calmed down quite a bit. for a while there, certain individuals--i won't name any names, but it was mfb--would use pretty much any excuse to discuss why SR4 sucked in comparison to SR3.

That's in rebuttal to Synner. He claims that the whole point of SR4 was to make it more popular. In that regard, it can be seen to have comparably failed: SR4 has no more market share than before.


That was inflammatory. There are many people who play both Shadowrun and nWoD, D&D, and so on and so forth. Are you calling Frank Trollman emo? I wouldn't go that far in insulting him, why are you? And the market share argument shows that the proportional sales aren't that great. Besides which, there are many people who think SR4 is for people who like shooting and looting and power gaming. You want to toss insults, be prepared for them to be tossed in your face.

Basically, by not comparing it to other RPG's, the game stagnates and take totally wrong directions. Here on Dumpshock, you can be sure that everyone is a Shadowrun fan; but if you built a game to cater strictly to the Dumpshock crowd, it'd die a horrid painful death. Shadowrun is not the perfect game, but it could be it. If it evolves in the right direction, that is.

i was trying to think of a nice way of telling nathanross exactly where to stick it, with regards to that particular paragraph, but Cain seems to have done it for me.

For the first time, I'm in complete agreement with Cain on something. Those broad, grossly innacurate generalizations about the types of players attracted to the varied games was not only complete crap, but was rather insulting. I play oWoD, SR, D&D, Star Wars and when I'm feeling giddy, Paranoia XP. Does that make me emo, a nerd or whatever? No. It means I enjoy getting away from reality. Anyone who thinks WoD is strictly for emos is completely out of touch with reality. DnD isn't only for nerds. SR isn't only for powergaming psychopaths.

Damnit. I agreed with Cain. Now its' gonna snow in New Mexico again. heheheh

While it was insulting, at least on the MU* (specifically MUSH) side of things, this part is veeeery true:





Come on. Everyone was thinking it.



Also: There are a lot of cyberpunk genre fans outside of DS that think SR is really really really really crap. Mostly for it's theme and multi-race aspects, but yeah.

No. We weren't. Like I said, Frank Trollman plays nWoD. And while I could fairly call him any number of choice names, emo isn't one of them.


Which is rather the point. Shadowrun mostly appeals to Shadowrun fans, while games like World of Darkness and D&D have a broad appeal to many gamers.

This is what we call satire.

Did you also really need to quote /quote right below my post?

Congratulations on your post becoming a petty slap fight Cain! After 12 pages though, what would we expect?

For sanity's sake, I'd like to see people stop responding to this thread unless they have something substantive to say. Arguing about who said what and what they meant is like... yeah. Aren't most of us too old for this?

Just a friendly suggestion

How dare you suggest maturity here you little so-and-so!!

I have something to add, though I've been away for a couple of days.

This thread was begun because Cain made a boast about how broken the SR4 rules were in a particular way (scope for character advancement). I'll repost it here:



It's a statement that is very critical of the SR4 system and it is merely the latest in a long series of such criticisms.

Now Cain has posted a build that he has admitted doesn't meet that boast. He also posted someone else's build which he admits does not meet that boast. He has stated that he requires a couple of days to create a build that does meet such a boast. Over the past two weeks we have seen endless efforts on Cain's part to divert this thread into other arguments, to rephrase his boast and to delay posting of such a build.

I would now like to see Cain say that he was wrong. He made a criticism of the system which he couldn't support, has dragged us through twelve pages of argument on the subject and still not withdrawn his statement. The fact that he pleads it takes a couple of days to build a character is not, as he casts it, an indictment of the SR4 character creation process as it takes most of us a couple of hours at most to create a fully fleshed out character. Much less for a quick, non-optimised build. Which says to me that if he's so unfamiliar with the chargen process as to require a couple of days for this, then he's in no position to be making judgements on the chargen rules in the first place.

Cain - you made a very strong criticism of people's work in producing the SR4 rules. You are clearly, obviously and pitifully unable to substantiate that criticism and I would like to see you show some decency and admit that you were wrong.

As to the frequent instances of you saying or strongly implying that SR4 rules are inferior to SR3 immediately followed by stating that you're banned from comparing the rules, that is both disingenuous in pretending that you aren't comparing the rules in the first place and it is also a clear attempt to try and pass off a criticism that cannot be challenged - a sort of appeal to secret knowledge or a demand that we simply trust your judgement. Given your unending diatribes against the SR4 rules, we can hardly extend that trust to you.

You continue to play underhand tricks, such as slipping in references to how you can one-shot a citymaster with a knife when we had an entire thread (linked to by myself earlier) in which the example was thoroughly taken apart and you are fully aware that the example didn't stand up to an actual reading of the rules.

Thread after thread has gone down in flames because of you Cain, and your relentless posting of factually incorrect statements that you refuse to substantiate, only rephrasing them or changing the subject again and again and again with only one thing consistent - an attempt to show that the SR4 rules are "horribly, badly broken."

We all play Shadowun, Cain. We all know how the rules play out. Your weird efforts to convince us that the reality is different to what we actually see only result in irritation, anger and wasted time as we try to deal with the strange figure amongst us with his hands over his ears, his eyes screwed shut, shouting "broken, broken, broken" at every opportunity.

I don't understand your agenda, Cain. Time and again, your arguments have been shown to be factually incorrect. Time and again, you've found that everyone else is unconvinced by them. Still, we have this erupt in thread after thread fuelled only by your unending criticisms and people's unwillingness to let them stand unchallenged for the sake of those not familiar with them that might swallow them whole. But ultimately one of those two forces has to give. And if you don't stop this endless, unsupportable criticisms on your part, then the only that will remain is for people to quite simply stop arguing and just ignore your posts. Perhaps that is your goal - that you should be able to post your criticisms unchallenged - a victory by sheer fanaticism. But if so, it wont meet your presumed aim of persuading newcomers of made up flaws in the SR4 system. It will just end up with dismissive "ignore the troll" comments and a link back to these threads if you're lucky.

So please, just admit that you can't make good on your boast and stop this for once and for all, before everyone gets sick and tired not just of these arguments, but of you.

Thank you,

-Khadim.

Problem is, I think that Cain doesn't think he's wrong.

According to him, a character with one maxed-out skill is at the top of his area (and even if he could spend karma and/or nuyen to improve, this would be meaningless) and a character with maxed-out edge (and the maxed-out attribute linked to his skill, which needs to be the inexistent Quickness attribute) is well-rounded and doesn't need to get better at anything but his maxed-out skill.

Emo or otherwise, quit with the name calling.