The artist. Not necessarily the mage. You can hire someone for that part.

~J

E.O.T.L.F - if I may ask something. This is going to sound insulting - please don't take it that way, becaue I don't mean it in that light. But I honestly have difficulty reading your posts because they only have punctuation at the end of the paragraph. Using some punctuation will improve your argument. Thank you and I apologize if that sounds insulting - I truly don't mean it to be.

As to the chargen issues: If you have a character with 6 in Sorcery, Conjuring, and whatever else you want, plus all the spells you want, plus all the attributes you want... Why are you playing the character anymore? I work and sweat for the karma to buy all those things when I play a character. When I have everything that I could want with the character, I start to look towards retirement. If there's great roleplay still going on with the character, okay, he can stay around, but in terms of advancement... I'd rather make a new character who has faults and difficulties and has to scramble to improve himself and his lot in life. Granted, for magic-types there's always initiation and always another magical bad-ass who's badder than you are, but ubermagical threat of the week gets a little tiring after a while, don't you think?

For that matter how often do you think you will find an artist among the Yakuza ranks? Especially being the rigious training required to do art in Japan.
All professional artists(no longer true for cartoonists and a few other professions) are trained classicly, meaning more than a year just for the first stroke type of the brush... I really don't see any Yakua having set aside chunks of their lives to learn to draw..

Ok the artistry skill was complementary to tattooing. I did concede and say that for what you (and yes someone else) were doing tattooing skill would be enough. Yes I do relize that there are few who know how in the yakuza but if you don't know how to do it yourself then your gonna have to find someone to do it that won't be easy. Also you spend the karma to bond the tattoo that is gonna take awhile to earn. At the same time I earn the same karma I use it to increase my physicals through running weight lifting ect.ect.. You get a tattoo or 3 now we meet in the shadows for some reason spirit vs. spirit while that is going on I get lucky and disspell your tattoos. Oops your powered down till you can rebond by which time in useing my karma to improve I far surpass you when we meet again. Tattoo magic is neat but it can be disspelled major drawback but hey you want it go for it as I said I'll take the training method.

Yum is right, completely.

Now take this. Not only does he have all thost things Tattooed, but he also is a very large Troll, meaning he can still fit some on himself. Barrier, Bullet Barrier, and Mana Barrier seem to come to mind. What now? You sit there and stare at him as you can't figure out why the frag you can't touch him physically or magically.

Unless he has Masking and a hell of a lot of Initiate Grades, he's going to have a heck of a time getting past even minor wards without tripping the alarms. Such characters are more of a liability on anything beyond a smash-and-grab run than an asset.

Tell Sphynx that

~J

So? We're going on the "what-ifs," not the actual things that could happen.

I mean, hell, E.O.T.L.F. said he just dispelled three tattoes, which probably have a dispelling force of 12.

No offence but I think Yum just does not like what I put up here because of where I placed all metas. I say that Yum because it seems you are the biggest oppisition to having all the meta races equal the way they were ten game years ago. As I said before I can't see ten years giving Dwarfs & Orks a large enough lead so as to reduce their availabilty. But that is the case as per the concepts of third edition so what by 2070 you can be priority E for Dwarf, Ork & human? From there in 2080 it's priority E for all races? Seems to me that this is off I mean every ten years (that seems to be the scale) metas increase in dominance. So if we keep to that progression then by what 2090? 2100? humans become priority A because they are so rare? Also why Dwarfs & Orks? Elves & Dwarfs were here first then came the Orks & Trolls plus Orks & Trolls live shorter life spans (humans are not far behind). If anything would happen the world be over run by Elves & Dwarfs not Dwarfs & Orks (the Orks having the shortest life span of all races).

So Yum any thoughts? Also Yum you maybe right as to powering up the Attributes, Skills & Resources and I may make further changes that is why I posted on here. It is looking as though most people who have chimed in have said that the only real problems are that humans get screwed so lets work to gether to fix that. Now I DO NOT belive that if we as gamers come up with something that is better balanced for all races and all character types that Fanpro nor Wizkids will listen but could it hurt to try?

I mean think about it even Adam has said on these boards that it has been what 5 years sence the last overhaul and that that it is considered a long time in this industry. You have to figure that one or more of the powers that be have had the thought to move on to 4th edition (which sucks as far as I am concerned but will happen sooner or later). So why not try and come up with something they might look at?

Actually, eventually, the UGE and Goblinizing just evens out, so, after a time, you can be any race without picking a Priority. This takes a while, however.

With the way I'm remembering; Orks (Or is it Trolls? Correct me) breed in litters. With their short lifespan, the litters die off faster than a Human being born. This makes even more equality between races, because, eventually, it's evened out. In fact, Trolls, as per the spot in SR3, are the rarest of the Metas.

With those notes, it must mean that Priority E should be Ork, C should be Troll, and everything else should be D, right?

Right?

Yeah... sometimes costs are chosen to keep things rare. Other times, they're chosen for game balance. There's a difference.
As for 4th ed, it has been clearly stated that there are no plans for it. This was several months ago, but I somehow doubt that they've found the need since then. At the very least, they're going to get all the reprints out the door before they work on another edition.

~J

Actually, it was the spell point thing that got my panties in a wad originally. it just showed such an unbalanced look at the game world that it tainted the entire rest of your system. So I brought that up, and with every post since then, you have grown further and further from what I feel the ideal character mindset should be. You're idea of how you create charcters is not how I want to see other people creating characters. therefore any character creations system that comes out with that mindset is probably going to be going in a wrong direction. And you still are making mistakes and not understanding basic concepts, for instance just because metas are evening out compared to humans does not mean that humans will increase in priority, and it definitely is not a linear increase (every 10 years it goes down). Also, you're assuming that the old rules actually were true at a time and that they have become this, when a rules system comes out, the other one must be treated as if it never existed; it's not like all of a sudden in 2060, all battles suddenly became different, just becayse SR3 changed the initiative system.

and most of the people who have chimed in have actually said "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." The priority system really is hard to revamp and do correctly, because it is so rigid. Personally, I might be for a revamp of some aspects of the chargen system, altering point costs for certain things, and doing other things like changing the price of spell points. maybe making a special rule that conjuring adepts (if not other awakened as well) can use their spell points to initiate because that's the only way they can be better at conjuring at chargen than a full mage.
Perhaps people do need to look at metas and alter their costs, but there's 3 things to keep in mind:
1: cost should reflect benefit. that is, if you make it free to play a troll, then many people will just because they can get the stat buffs at no cost. you need to have any bonuses cost something
2: cost should create the proportions in reality, so if something's rarer in the "reality" of the game world, it should be rare among people making characters too.
3: Cost should not penalize people wanting to do something for roleplaying reasons. Lets say I want to make a samurai, and I want him to be a dwarf, I shouldn't have to pay through the nose to get a dwarf, just because they're rare.

And now you're hitting on why people don't use the priority system by itself. Sum to 10, Points, or BeCKS are much more common. The best fix for the priority system is not to use it.

Right. Sum-to-Ten works just fine while keeping the flavor and style of the Priority system. In fact, it's derived from the very original design of the Shadowrun game if memory serves (I never actually owned the 1st Edition book).

A little late to be posting this, but I don't like your priority system. It could be useful for a mage friendly highpower game, but overall it's a coked out, cranked up, maged to the max descent into point-whoring and powergaming.

Granted, I don't mind the [magical] killing machine every now and again, but those ventures are rare.

3rd edition got it down pat, and BeCKs, Point-build, and Sum-to-ten are all wonderful editions. Your priority system may work well in your campaign, but as a generality it seems overpowered and more than a little biased.

Keep at it, it's taken me several years to get the rules to how I like them, and I'm still overhauling. Good luck.

Are you sure about that Fortune? I'm almost positive the original was Sum-to-Ten (though it was still just called "Priority").

That's right! The SR1 Priorities were numerical, which may be what contributes to the confusion.

Must be.

Ok more changes mainly back to norm. but I left the money. reallinged the magic but gave an increase to fully active so that if the player wishes to max out his character at 50 spell points it is doable. Also reduced the cost of spell points to further help in being able to achive max.

Thoughts? Comments?

Not that I'm saying I agree with your choices, but if you're rearranging it so that it's a bit more generous to the PCs, why don't you shift the races down one notch, I.E. Huiman to Priority 'E' and Metahuman to 'D'?

That's the original problem. A mundane newbie wouldn't understand why, after taking Resources A, Attributes B, and Skills C, he wouldn't take Race D and be an Ork or Dwarf? After all, they get more attributes, overall, than the Human at Race E.

So, virtually, there is no difference, except that people have to actually give something up to be a meta, which, IMO, is how it should be.

My campaign started at first edition and has just been adapted to each edition as it came out.

We've always used sum-to-10, because I misunderstood the wording in first edition, and thought that that was the way you were suppost to do it.

So personally I think sum-to-10 came about because people like me misunderstood the first edition system, I didn't even know we were playing "wrong" until second edition came out.

I still prefer sum-to-10 over priority, because of the meta-human thing.

Both orks and dwarfs have numerical disadvantages. Dwarves need refitted gear, run slower, and are short, which makes simple stuff hard.

Orks have poor charisma, intelligence, and lifespan compared to a human.

Sometimes people prefer humans over a meta anyway. I play humans even when I could play ork or dwarf "for free" just for the character.

Finally this is a stunning example of why Sum to ten is superior.

And then there's the whole karma pool thing, again.

~J