I personally would rule that kick attacks and nerve strike don't work together.

Its pretty easy to drop people in one combat round with melee. Without finishing strike. Nerve strike is too expensive for a fancy gimmick that wears off in 1 minute. Sure, its easier for say, stopping someone if you're planning on questioning them. But other than that, it definately isn't better than say, 4 levels of critical strike if you're looking to just drop people.

Always someone with the "why pick X, it isn't as good as Y."

You forget that once they're paralyzed, if you need to knock them out, now they can't defend, so take your time. One minute of defenselessness is death.

Yes, but typically, you won't get 4-6+ net hits on your opposition. Of if you are, you can knock them out with a regular punch anyway, especially if you put that 1 power point towards critical strike.

Also, you have 2 regular str 3 guys. They each throw the same dice around and such, except one takes nerve strike, and the other takes 4 levels of critical strike. Say 16dice or so based on your example.

Thats an average of 4 hits. Against a typical goon (rea 3, unarmed/dodge 3) they'll get 2 net hits.

It takes nerve strike man 2 attacks to paralyze one goon, with the goon taking a rea/agi penalty of 2.

It takes critical strike guy 2 hits to paralyze one goon also. Except the goon is taking a -2 penalty to everything after he is hit.

Now, this is going off your dicepool of 5 agi, 7 unarmed +2 specialization +2 for kick reach. Critical strike guy can up his str to 5 and now he knocks people out in 1 shot.

Nerve strike man needs to somehow squeeze an extra 3 dice out of this martial arts attack in order to do the same to these average mooks. Put them against someone not a mook? And they're going to be taking a lot longer to drop the guy.

Against say, a credible opponent. (Rea 5/Unarmed 5) 3 hits they'll each average 1 net hit. Nerve strike guy takes 5 attacks to disable the opponent.

Critical strike guy takes the same 2 hits to drop the guy.


Nerve strike just isn't useful unless you're using it on people who don't matter and could be walked all over anyway.

What I think people are forgetting is that Fourth Edition is geared towards whatever dicepools the developers want it to be geared. While a canon typical human professional in the field has only 6 dice pool in whatever he does before equipment, please note that he can only buy 1 single hit or achieve 2 hits on average. However a survey of the canon contacts in SR4 and RC tells us that many of the people the runners come into contact with are anything but typical human professionals. They are more likely to be Improved(if human) Experts in their field of choice if not better.

Problem is that no matter what the devs have to say on the matter, the rule system of Fourth Edition breaks the rules of the claimed genre, venturing into bad anime terrority.

What rules of what claimed genre? Genre has no rules. It is simply a limitation of the human perception.

Street Level Cyberpunk.

And of course genre has rules, I think everyone would cry foul if Indiania Jones pulled out a lightsaber and started cutting a swath through a hoard of Nazi engineered Monkey Men that bled acid.

Shadowrun is not Street Level Cyberpunk. At least unless the developers make it so.

Of course genre does not have rules, it is the games that have rules. No one would cry foul if Indiania Jones pulled out a lightsaber and started cutting a swath through a hoard of Nazi engineered Monkey Men that bled acid, if the RAW allowed it to be so.

Bad anime territory? Are you one of those people that believes that competent characters are exclusive to anime?

I would never call Shadowrun "street level cyberpunk". It is a game where people can call up spirits, blast people with lightning, hack into augmented reality and bend it to their will, and perform superhuman feats because they have physically or magically augmented their bodies to the point where a mundane pedestrian is just a sad bag of wobbling meat to them.

Sure, you have all the "grit" and the quasi-dystopian atmosphere, but it is just there to add flavor to a game more inspired by action movies, where hard-edged anti-heroes stick it to "the man".


It's still not quite anime level, though. And forget mecha or Dragonball Z. Simply look at something like Noir, where you have mundane, unaugmented humans doing things that would be impossible for a multi-initiate adept with delta-grade bioware.

It's worth noting that anime can encompass a whole slew of power levels.

Those who play the game at this level are restricting characters to the rating levels of goons. Those Halloweener gangers that are fodder listed in the back of the core book? Yeah, they're street level. Runners "live on the edge," but they are by no means "street" level. They might have their street lifestyles, but they are the good and the awesome, the anti heroes who are noteworthy. Just like with those action movies and animes that inspire this kind of quasi-epic storytelling, the characters are at a level more than the average human and their actions are something to write home about.

Of course, as a disclaimer one doesn't have to play the game at this level. If one wants a street level game where you start at 300 or 200 BP, then those gangers seem pretty rough and rightly so. I've played games like this. My players got bored because of the lack of interesting experience. Street occurrences happen at street level, and since they are the norm, We find that they're kind of average and boring. That's why we now play at 400 BP like the designers set in the parameters.

Or if you really don't want to cause any harm what-so-ever. Some people don't take to kindly to being knocked out cold. But in the same regard, that can also be said about people who don't like the loss of their motor skills.

You don't need to argue the awesomeness of critical strike. I know it's awesome. I use it extensively. I don't think I ever have martial arts adept without critical strike and combat sense. You need tons of dice to evade and dodge as you close the distance gap, and combat sense helps. You need tons of DV to drop an opponent quick, and crit strike does that as well. I was messing around with nerve strike and I was seeking answers and opinions, not a "you're doing it wrong... FAIL GET" character critique.

Genre does not have rules, it has conventions. And even then, sometimes the best settings come when those conventions are tossed topsy-turvy.

Star Wars is a mix of sci-fi space opera with liberal amounts of pulp cliffhangers and a touch of wuxia and samurai movies thrown in for good measure. Stargate SG:1 ended as exploratory fiction mixed up with Star Trek. Heck, Shadowrun itself is a major genre mash-up; high and low fantasy with Noir sensibilities and an overlay of cyberpunk. (Cyberpunk has never been that deeply imbedded in Shadowrun.)

Opinion: Its completely worthless, as the same can be accomplished via other adept powers. Which are also useful against difficult opponents, unlike nerve strike.

You're missing a step. With normal unarmed attacks, the opponent gets to soak the damage after you have gotten those aforementioned net hits. If you get 4-6 net hits against a troll with a Body of 10, wearing riot control armor and a full set of PPP including helmet, with ceramic bone lacing, then that character will roll 30 dice to soak it, reducing the damage by 10 on average. With nerve strike, though, that same troll gets instantly incapacitated.

I don't have a problem with there being a special attack that circumvents a tank's normal defenses, a la the stun touch spell, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around armor doing nothing against something called "nerve strike" (maybe it wouldn't be as jarring if it was called "bodily disruption" and described the effect as needle-thin charges of magical energy stabbing into the target and ignoring armor). Especially when armor did make nerve strike more difficult in SR3.

Toturi I disagree, unless my aging memory is failing me I clearly remember reading that one of goals for Fourth Edition is that it is aimed towards street level power scales. Also needless to say I also disagree with your second point as you are the only person I know who follwos RAW so zealously.

Janice, nope, I like Runners to be competant and strong individuals, but there is a huge difference between having a team made up by compentant and strong individuals and one that is made up of world class individuals who make the laws of physics their bitch on a casual basis. (And no, I'm not getting sidetracked about the nature of magic.)

TKDNinjaInBlack, streetlevel play is fully possible at 400BP, and can involve more than getting your butts kicks by gangers, if your players were bored I suggest being more imaginative.

While that may have been a stated goal, in practice they failed miserably. It's remarkably easy to create characters that should be running around in tights and capes; in fact, the system encourages it even as the fluff says otherwise. While you can force the game into street level play, it's not meant for it, and a lot of problems will arise. I mean, you can play high fantasy with SR4, it just doesn't work very well.

Despite the claims, Shadowrun is not meant to be street level, and it's never really been cyberpunk.

You can't really make a character with a "street level" power level at 400 BP unless you are either very new to the rules, or intentionally gimping your character. A "street level" atmosphere, however, is more than possible at 400 BP.

I just don't see the point of complaining about super-powerful characters in a game of cybernetically and magically augmented superbeings who do ultra-dangerous work for a living. The NPCs like the Tir Ghosts? They're the grunts. The opposition. One of them could give a shadowrunner not optimized for combat fits, and several of them could make most tweaked combat builds sweat a bit. But they aren't some kind of benchmark for player characters.

If player characters were as good as the grunts, they would not survive, because they are usually outnumbered and outgunned by the grunts, and have a gauntlet of combat and other activities to get through in order to complete their mission. They need to be significantly better than the grunts, just to have a chance. And the character creation rules reflect this. That said, 400 BP characters still have plenty of weak areas, vulnerabilities, and so on. They are more than human, because they are supposed to be, but they hardly break the laws of physics, unless you drastically overestimate what high dice pools can do (a common problem with, for example, social skills).

True, but I see the problem being in a flawed char-gen system as opposed to the ruleset at large Cain. As long as you play at lower dicepools the system works quite well, it isn't until you get to bad anime levels that the Fixed TN starts producing outrageous results.

Professional Dicepools of 6-8 before equipment actually works people.

I would pay money to see that. >.>



To be fair, Anime characters seem to have a higher chance of being incompetent than characters in western fiction.

But that's not even standard according to the BBB. Most of the archetypes have much larger dice pools. For example, IIRC the street sam has 15 dice in automatics. Heck, an elf can break combat dicepools of 8 without soft-maxing a single skill or stat, before equipment. And even karmagen encourages much larger dice pools than that.

The "ruleset at large" encourages large dice pools. It rewards overkill, in the form of critical successes. The very levels it sets in the archetypes are near the breaking point of the rules. There are a few arbitrary and annoying limits tossed in, in an attempt to rein things in, but they're easy to get around and result in overfocused characters.

I agree that limiting dice pools is key, but I don't pretend that the rules support that choice. I ask people to not create pornomancers, I don't come up with arbitrary and unfair rule interpretations to prevent them. Really, to restrict the power levels to what you state would take either a direct appeal to your players, or a serious rewrite of the entire ruleset so that power level would be appropriate.

One more thing: overpowered characters is not just a subset of bad anime. Superman was tossing around asteroids long before Goku learned to throw a ki-blast. You don't like the idea of shadowrunners being able to tangle with superheroes, that's great! But don't blame anime for creating superheroes.

I'm pretty sure he's discussing the "Dragonball Z Effect" in the original comment. You know the one, where the GM has to come up with some enemy that possesses, in the words of the Genie from Aladdin "Phenomenal Cosmic Power!" to really challenge the PCs, lety alone the one uber-badass who's specialized out the ass.

And no, Tir Ghosts are not grunts. Grunts are the chipped beef who surround the big boss of Chinatown. Grunts are the trog gangers chasing you blindly down that alleyway into your claymore funhouse. Grunts are the typical CorpSec goons telling you to move your illegally parked vehicle or they will start shelling in ten seconds.

Tir Ghosts, however, in the words of the Devgrp are "the masters of covert operations and have broken into some of the most secure areas on the planet undetected." In other words, these are the boys who have snuck into the Renraku CEOs office via their most secure corporate facility, raped his personal direct-connection commstation to grab the goodies on their latest newtek from their super-secure R&D servers, and left a lovely floral arrangement and "Thank you" card on his desk to be found when he steps into his office the next morning when they're halfway over the Pacific on the ride home. Oh yeah, and they do all of this with a pre-equipment dice pool of 10-12. In other words, these are the big dogs that every 'runner aspires to be.

*chuckles* Aye, so would I Platinum Dragon, but I would be extremely pissed if I entered the cinaplex thinking I was going to be treated to a real Indy Jones movie, and may the firy pits of the Nine Hells protect the poor slot would later rule that such a movie was "canon" in Indy's universe.

True Cain, but I have learned the hard way not to point to the pre-gens in my arguments since they are basically piles of shit twice warmed over, the nicer of my two theories is that whoever built the pre-gens didn't have a complete verson of Fourth Edition's rules yet, my other theory is that large qualities of crack was smoked while they were being built.

However, I think you may be misunderstanding what I'm trying to say when I talk about Fourth Edition ruleset being geared towards lower dicepools, all I am trying to say is that at lower dicepools you don't get the crazy "brokeness" that you do with high dicepools, not that lwoer dicepools are "rewarded" in some way ... well other than having a ruleset that isn't broken that is.

As for your point about superheroes, agreed, but as I think I have said either here or in another thread I use the term bad anime simply because the style of the examples that appears on Dumpshock belong in the catagory of anime.

In pure combat, they aren't quite at the level of a player character focused on that (as their description notes). Their dice pools for combat are above average, but not the greatest by far. A dice pool of 12, before modifiers, for stealth, on the other hand, is a very good dice pool. They have a base Agility of 6, an Intuition of 6, and the stealth skill group at 6, so they are at 12 before modifiers for every stealth skill.

That said, the version of Tir Ghosts presented in the book are grunts. They are what you nab when you need some quick stats for the strike team that drops from the rooftops onto the team's van, leading to a fight. If I put together a team of Tir Ghosts, they would have more than the bare-bones 'ware they do (come on, no muscle toner? Seriously?), and have better equipment (such as armor that doesn't give them penalties, probably chameleon suits, with FFBA half suits underneath). Hell, I might even give the Tir Lieutenant some actual hacking skills.

Their biggest advantage over a team of runners is that a team of runners need to fight, sneak, and gather information, and tend to be specialists in certain roles. The badass sammie will be picking up the slack for the hacker and the face. On a team of Tir ghosts, though, every one of them can sneak and fight, making them a very tough challenge for most runners.

You're nicer than I am on the ruleset. My nice concept was that they were just trying to hide how overpowered the game really is. My not-so-nice theory might get me banned from Dumpshock.

And I do understand what you mean about lower dicepools. My point is that the whole ruleset is broken, running into issues at very low dicepools (Longshot tests) and very high ones (pornomancers). At the very high end, it's impossible to challenge those characters without resorting to serious cheese. NPC "prime runners" need to be built to the same rules as PC's, which is not only time-consuming, it means the game turns into an arms race to see who can create the most powerful character.

At the very low end (and at some moderate levels, as well), you have the ability to pile on the modifiers for greater effect, while not changing your odds of success at all. For example, if you're facing a longshot test, you may as well go for Full Auto or a Called Shot; your dice pool will not change. This can also apply at the high end: in the Sky High Armor thread; someone bragged that he could put something like 95 points of armor on a person. You can make a simple called shot to bypass the armor, and call for a longshot. An Edge 6 character will always have 6 dice to make the shot with. Gods forbid you should have an Edge of 8!

The point here is that the ruleset has some fundamental assumptions that are very bad. The game is *playable*, but it's not anything *special*, at least from a mechanical point of view. They didn't know, or didn't care, that the game could and would break right out of chargen. I know how you hate gonzo anime games, but Exalted deals with this problem by simply reveling in the high power levels. The SR4 rules tries to pretend they're not there. In that regard, Exalted is more successful than Shadowrun.

One more point: while Shadowrun is many things, it is not cyberpunk, nor has it ever been cyberpunk. Precicely what Shadowrun is hard to define. It's not fantasy, it's not elves with guns, it's not urban fantasy; it's something unique all to itself. Sure, there's some cyberpunk tropes; but that doesn't make it any more cyberpunk than RIFTS.

Most of the Dumpshock games are at least 400 BP, with characters that tend toward the tweaked end, and I haven't seen the GMs struggling to challenge the players. High dice pools are broken when the GM makes challenges too straightforward and/or doesn't apply any negative modifiers to anything. Shadowrun is a very potentially lethal game, so I don't see characters dominating simply by having high dice pools. Longshot tests are broken only if you use Cain's specific interpretations of them, which not everyone agrees with.

I think the whole "street level" thing gets people hung up. My impression is that they meant "shadowrunners doing their thing" rather than the world-shaking events that were becoming a bit overdone towards the end of SR3. Actually, the char-gen rules recommend 300 points, rather than the standard 400, for people interested in a low-level street campaign.

Going to the topic of Tir Ghosts...if I recall, the Tir Paladins were a bit more of the really badass, if they come after you you're in big trouble, types. Geared more toward front-line combat, if I recall. But my memory might be fuzzy here. I do recall some high-end Tir combatants that can kick the asses of a good shadowrunner.

And I agree...I do see folks getting hung-up on the street level game. I mean, we play a slightly more ''pro'' game I guess you can say, but we(we take turns GMing) haven't had a problem challenging the table.

The pointers about the balance of SR4...well, I can see a few. The thing is, some say that the game was made to be played at DPs between 6-10 or so. But...I dunno, I'm just not seeing that. It seems the mooks are balanced around that...but...ok, to use the example of the Pistoleer; a 5(7) agility, a 5(+2) Pistols, and a Smartlink, is not twinky, IMO, in any stretch of the word. But that's 16 dice right there. I do enjoy SR4 a lot, but it almost seems like the game was balanced assuming players would take no more than a 4 in something and not get any attribute-increasing cyberware or magic. In a game that emphasizes either having cyber or magic over being a mundane.

Even with a 4(+2), and a 4(6), and a smartlink(or 2 reach weapon), that's 14 dice. I know using the Sample Characters are a bad idea, but there's big differences there-the Street Sam has a smartlinked firearm pool of 15 dice for his Automatics, and 14 dice for his Pistols, and throws 12 dice with a katana(after reach.) Now, this is lower than average than your typical 400 BP runner that I've seen come out(and I mean right off the bat, it didn't take months of research to figure how to get a die pool to 16.)

At the same time, I can understand going the ''high road'' for the mooks-then the PCs would have to go bigger. But...the PCs will usually go bigger anyway. I know we like a more pro game(again, our high pools run 16-20 or so, mid 8-12, low 4-6. IMO, this isn't some kind of monster-game, but we like to play folks with a bit of experience under our belts.) Then again-you could easily have a ganger that's just damn good with a combat axe. I mean, he could be good enough to get out of the gang with it, but he likes it.

There is nothing, IMO, wrong with wanting to play a 300, 400, or 500 point game, depending what you and your table like. And there indeed are more things you can do with the mooks in the book than inflate their power levels. They have numbers, they have terrain advantages, they can call for backup(which might be better armed), there are tools in the book which can help them, etc. Trust me; i've used 8 die mooks against our usual parties to rather good effect before. They didn't kill the PCs, but I wasn't trying to(they were doing the hold-off until help gets here kind of thing). They still challenged the PCs, though. It just depends how you use them.

@ Tarantula:
Right. Thinking about highly armored targets, like Glyph shows above, is where nerve strike shines and your argument falls on it's face. They are both used for different things in different situations, so saying that it is a worthless skill when you forget a step and ignore its true call to greatness is uncalled for. Maybe in your games characters don't wear 6+ points of impact armor, but from what I've seen, it's more than common, and that's just on the NPC side, let alone some of the crazy armor ratings players accumulate. So yeah, tossing that in with high body ratings at 6 or higher (which characters need not to be encumbered), and now statistically those +4 DV from that point in Critical Strike were completely soaked in the damage resistance roll.

As said, both have their place in combat, and while under some situations it's far easier to just knock someone out cold with good ol'fashioned DV, some situations require the finesse of Nerve Strike.

@ Glyph:
See, you and I agree on the fact that as we read the rule on nerve strike it seems that more armor would hinder efforts to hit those nerve centers. That's why we have to assume that the current nerve strike skill is really reliant on those transfers of ki/chi/mana energy that are associated with eastern (especially Chinese) martial arts and bypass armor much like a spell does. Unless a dev speaks up and gives insight, that's how we have to justify it if we are seeking to make sense of it. Otherwise that armor we think would hinder breaks the RAW.



I did try to make street level interesting for the group. Added all kinds of fun things. They weren't having any of it. The wanted Shadowruns, you know, as the name of the game suggests..



That's also what I think they were going for. At the end of SR3 there were a ton of events that if you characters participated in, by most parts of it, they became canon. As these big events were happening, the players were on the front line. Take a look at the drastic change of perspective for Emergence. World shaking events are happening, but the runners are involved at the street level, where the action is personal and still dealing with people instead of the big movers and shakers behind the scenes. The runners aren't given the option of getting the MCT experimentation video out to the public, they aren't taking out Tlaloc station. They are hunting down technos and saving them or turning them in. From what the devs say about Ghost Cartels, it'll span everything from street level up to the source, but will still have things down and dirty on the personal level.

Another thing about ''street level'', but I always thought that you could have ''street-level'' but still have compitent, even very, very skilled, people. I always thought it was the ''attitude''. I suppose you could look at street level as ''you have a holdout, a knife, a bad drug habit, a leather jacket, and that's it. No DPs over 8, after smartlink and reach'', or you could look at it as a skilled guy with good ware, ex corporate black ops, now dealing with an even seedier underbelly of what he even used to deal with before; also now working with the very people he used to be hired to 'remove from the equation because they pissed someone off.' He doesn't have his steady fat paycheck, or his free ware, or his perks, he now is basically, for whatever reason, running against the same people he used to work for. Some of them include his old friends. IMO, that's still plenty gritty. Even ''Street Power Level'' is hard to describe, when it's flat-out easy for even gangers to get cheap muscle replacement, low-grade wires, spurs, smartlinks, and even stuff like SMGs. As for ''Gang Campaigns''...well, the Ancients and the Merlins are gangs. They are proof that just because you make your way on the street, doesn't mean you have to be low-power level.

Again, nothing wrong, either way, with liking a low-power game, but I never liked to assume ''low power'' automatically means ''more street and more gritty.'' You could, technically, play a 300 BP game made of ex-corporate folks-the computer dude, the guard at the door, the driver of a guy's limo, etc, and it might have nothing to do with the streets.

My main issue with the insane (IMO) dice pools is how resistances fall flat on their face every time. Take a pornomancer-type character with gobs of adept mind-humping goodness. They can roll up on someone, tell them "Eat this pill" and they're completely hosed because the (current PC in my party) pornomancer gets five free hits and the poor slob with a pretty damn good stat (5) in Willpower gets five dice to resist. Ack?

Skilled characters isn't the issue, either. A character is well skilled by the ruleset at a 4 stat and a 4 skill. Add the occasional kit for a +2 and you typically get your three hits for a challenging task. This is hacking a commlink with a decent firewall in less than one turn. This is breaking that typical safe open in five minutes. This is making that shot despite tons of incoming and popping up from around a corner. There is nothing wrong at all with this 3 hits average by the way that the ruleset is written.

However, for some people that's not enough. They see that 6 firewall as the hurdle they need to punkslap immediately. They want to rape EVERYTHING in the book, EVERY DAMN TIME. We'll forget that the firewall in question is an extended test. We'll forget that they can blow Edge in an attempt to get that extra few hits if they're in a hurry. No, they want it all and they want it now, Now, NOW!

And it sucks for the GM because that 6 is all we got. We start showing numbers higher and we become the big, bad bully GM who's cheating to keep the players from doing their thing.

Hey now, what about me?


And targets with 30 dice to soak, are about as common as running into an elf/pixie/other with double digit agi and reaction. Chances are, you won't even hit these guys, and if you do, the 1 or 2 net hits you get will take a long time to freeze them up.

A fair number of people have implemented house rules to deal with longshot tests; but by canon, it works the way I describe. As for huge dice pools breaking the game, just try playing a pornomancer in a game, and see what happens! You're the one who built it in the first place, but you once told me you never actually played one, so you've never seen how bad it really can be. Worse is the Commanding Voice Leadermancer, who can talk everyone into surrendering. He just dominates the social aspect, the combat aspect, and if he's got the right skills, he can participate in the stealth and technical aspect. Doesn't leave much for the other players to do.

And the problem with simply lowering the BP or Karma cap is that you're still running around with high-powered weaponry and skills of 5-6. You need to alter a lot of things to truly lower the power level. In fact, my experience with reducing the BP level leads to even more two-dimensional characters, as people focus even more tightly on maximizing their skills within the limits provided.

How can you reduce the power level in your game? I only know what's worked for me: Ask your players to voluntarily lower their dice pools to the level of the campaign. It's been highly effective in my games, so long as I make sure the challenge level is appropriate for those dice pools. Think of it like CR in d20: you set the opposition dice pools in relation to the PC's own.

So you're telling me there's a chance...

And that, in a nutshell, is how social skills can be broken if you treat them like mind control, and how high dice pools in general can be broken if you allow auto-hits (I have already pointed out that the rule in question is not intended for such situations) and ignore potential negative modifiers (and for social skills, the listed modifiers are only a few examples). The pornomancer/leadermancer/intimidator is bad news, but if social skills are used in that fashion, they will be broken even for a normal face.


As far as Cain's suggestion of CR, I would do that to some extent (challenges would tend to be geared toward the group's power level), but I feel that there should be some static qualities, too. A mall security guard shouldn't get magically tougher as the group does - rather, the group should move on to tougher targets.

Even within normal uses of social skills, things get out of hand quickly when you're tossing 30+ dice. And that's leaving out the Leadermancer + Commanding Voice option, which *is* effectively mind control.

You're right as far as it goes on mall security-- kobolds are kobolds, after all. What I mean to say is that challenges should be scaled based on the team's dice pools. Mall security is supposed to be a non-challenge, so you scale it down. But equal opposition needs to be equal to the party; and not in BP or karma, but in dice pool size. This is what sets your CR for the adventure.

What's considered too high a dice pool here anyway? Most of the dicepools I see in my games are around the 12-14 range for primary skills and around 10 for secondary skills.

Doesn't Equal opposition simply mean that that one NPC is able to take on one PC and a team of PCs should be able to overcome him? If an Equal NPC created to match a PC's speciality and yet still cannot match it in terms of dice pool, then something is very wrong. The Grunts (and arguably even the Contacts) in SR4 are already your static opposition.

The complainers think that the normal dice pools that you can get at character generation are broken. I'm not talking about rulebending tactics like trying to argue that a machine sprite in your smartlink gives you six more dice, or trying to argue that the shapechange spell should let you change into another metahuman - no cheesy stuff. I'm talking simple, obvious decisions.

Examples:

1) Street samurai with Agility: 5, muscle toner: 2, primary ranged skill: 6, specialization: 2, and smartlink: 2 for 17 dice.

2) Mage with Magic: 5, spellcasting: 6, combat spell specialization: 2, mentor spirit bonus: 2, and power focus: 2 for 17 dice.

3) Face with Charisma: 5, influence group: 4 and intimidation: 4; adept with hardmaxed magic, 1 point lost due to bioware - kinesics: 5, tailored pheromones: 3, vocal range enhancer: (1), minor cosmetic biomods: (2), and first impression quality: (2) for 17 dice and an additional potential 5 dice from conditional modifiers. (this reflects my own bias against empathy software - a microsensor with a skinlink, camera and rating: 6 empathy software adds 6 more dice).

These aren't munchkinized abominations that twist and bend the system (in fact, they aren't even maxed out) - they are characters built with the obvious skills, qualities, and gear/mods for their specialties. No aptitudes, no exceptional Attributes, and only the face's Magic was even hard-maxed. The characters with these skill sets don't have to be one-trick ponies or crippled in other areas - they will all have plenty of build points left to be functional runners.

I don't think any of those builds are "too much", but if they are, then char-gen is seriously flawed. Because it depends on players somehow intuiting that somewhere below an easily-reached level of effectiveness is a "balanced" character. It's like when AD&D first edition introduced double specialization - every fighter took it. They didn't put it in there, then say "Well, this is too unbalanced at first level, but I'm sure that fighters will start out with no specializations at all, to be well-rounded, maybe pick up a specialization at third level, and then get that double specialization at 7th level or so. But we don't need to say so. The players can just look at how the city guardsman encounters are built, to see what level we were going for."

That's how I feel, exactly. They put in cyberware, bioware, and other toys, and explain them in full. It's very easy to get things like a 5; which isn't even broken. But somehow it seems, maybe just in some folks's opinions, the game is balanced for PCs to have nothing more than a 4 in their main attribute, and nothing more than a 3 in a main skill, MAYBE with a specialization. Maybe even without cyberware or magic, even though the game heavily, as we were saying, goes toward the augmented route. Oh, ok, let's throw some muscle replacement 1 in there. The DP, with a Smartlink, is STILL 12. Which is higher than the 6-8 people are suggesting. I mean, in the AD&D example, (yeah, I know some folks don't like using it but bear with me), just because your team got good rolls on their stats, doesn't mean that suddenly, tne kobolds and goblins had 10 HP each rather than 2-3 HP each. It's like punishing people who want to play, well, a 26 or so year old who had worked for a corp/been in the military by the time he was 18 til 24, and had 2 years of other experience after that(of insert any archetype here.) He very well might have some very nicely ranked skills, some good ware, and some nice attributes.

I mean, talking to the players, yes. If you want a more fresh-faced, just rolled off of the chopping block game that takes place in the Ork Underground or in Low-Wage Corpland with 17 year old gangers or the security guy and the computer dude behind the desk with the secratary face, then tell the players that's the game you're shooting for(or better yet, have everyone decide on a power level. Believe it or not, even as a GM, i believe in working together as a group to decide. If you're thinking ''ganger'' but they are having visions of pro...maybe some kind of compromise should be made. Then again, this is coming from someone whose group likes the 750 karmagen system(which doesn't inflate die pools up, really, but you do get more skills.) I'm not saying I don't like lower-end, I played a campaign(all-magic, surprisingly-me a bouncer adept, my friend a ganger combat mage, my other friend a snooty summoner), where our die pools were around 12-14 at the higher end(more around 10-12, the 14s was for reach, smartlinks, etc) and 4-6 at the lower end and had plenty of fun.

SR4, 149, "The gamemaster decides if such a vulnerable spot is accessible." No, it doesn't. I think its safe to assume that if someone is enclosed in a vehicle, you can't bypass the vehicle armor. If someone is enclosed in a rigger cocoon you can't call shot to bypass the cocoon. Any sane GM would back that up, and he has the backup from the rules to do so.



Command voice eh?

SM, 176, "If the adept succeeds in the test, the target uses his next action to either carry out the command or stands confused (gamemaster’s choice, but the more net hits achieved the more likely he will obey the adept’s command). Such commands carry no weight beyond the immediate impetus, and the affected characters will quickly reassert their wits, returning to their original course of action. "

I think most GMs would agree that a command like "shoot yourself in the head" would never work on someone unless they critically glitched their resistance test. In fact, I'd say people would never carry out a command directly lethal to them (including dropping their guns in front of armed opponents) without a critical glitch on resistance. Since its up to the GM, the GM is allowing you to abuse the power, its not the power itself.

Exactly. You can have fun at this level just like my group is. My issue is with the people here that say, "A Sammy has to have at least 15 dice with his Misc Tools o' Death™ or they're a chump! And they might still be a chump with only that many!" or some other such nonsense. My question at that point is "So why is your Sammy running around in the shadows when he should be making the mega-bucks as the spokesperson/top shooter for the Ares shooting team? His dice pool screams "I win the IPSC Championships! Whee!" to me..." Hell, Ghosts only roll out with an average of 13 including smartlink and they're Tir's fucking Delta Force.

Hey, lets get back to talking about martial arts.

How many users have ever practiced any?

I have, for 9 years. Kenpo, with elements of silat, and jiu jitsu with it. As well as 3 years of muy thai kickboxing.

I've done a mish-mash of martial arts for 17 years now. Kempo Karate/Kajukenbo (pretty damn close to each other, really) and Small Circle Jujitsu (for when I'm feeling nice...ish) are the longest studied, with bits of Muay Thai (best knees in the biz), Kajukenbo: Wun Hop Kun Do (nice Philipino stuff and Chinese-style strikes), Arnis (loves me some knives and sticks), Pentjak Silat (centerline is your god), Goju-Ryu Karate (one hit, one kill), Brazilian Jujitsu (attain your base, remove their base, finish them off), Jeet Kune Do concepts (attack on the half-beat), Tae Kwon Do (best kicking footwork EVAR), and Savate (great low kicks) stuffed into the box as well.

My "A Box" strikes are knees (20-pound hammer!), roundhouse elbows (10-pound hammer!), front kicks (quick and safe), hooking punches (out from the side so they're hard to see), and the good ol' go-to chin jab (so they know I'm serious when I say to "Stay Back!"). Admittedly, I really love low round kicks too but the "A Box" is only supposed to have five attacks in it so it's pseudo-B thing I do all the time anyway strike...thing...I guess....or something.

Anywho, I've worked personal protection, assisted in the instruction of police tactical training (got a real nice way to get people out of a car if you're curious), and have worked as a bouncer in a few clubs with minimal hassles because I can talk people down pretty well but it's been a while since I've done "The Look" so I probably suck now.

And I'm back with Kempo/Kajukenbo for a while now and loving it.

Not even in the same leauge kid.

I used to practice Tae Kwon do, a long time ago.

One difference I have seen in the rules for unarmed is that they really favor the skilled users. A sammie with 16 dice in firearms against 6 mooks with 7 dice in firearms still needs to use cover and tactics, and is likely to come out of the confrontation wounded. A sammie with 16 dice in unarmed against 6 mooks with 7 dice in unarmed will be likely to completely wipe the floor with the goons, although the goons might have a chance if they are trained enough to use wolf pack tactics.


A sammie doesn't have to have 15 dice, but he doesn't have to try awfully hard to get those 15 dice, either. Tir ghosts are covert ops guys who are decent at shooting - they are renowned for stealth (which they are extremely good at). Their dice pools are good enough to wipe out a team that they have the drop on, and give them a lot of trouble even in a stand up fight (the sammie may have 15 dice, but the hacker, face, etc. probably don't - while all of the Tir ghosts are slinging those 13 dice). A sammie rolling 15 dice is good, but not the greatest. And raw skill in one ability does not guarantee employment using that skill. There are great marksmen in the real world who pretty much just plink tin cans in their back yard.

My point is, you need to be upfront about what your level IS, because the 10-14 range a lot of people seem to like is NOT explicitly (or even implicitly) spelled out in the books. You can get 15+ dice without trying to munch out.

The problem here is the SR4 books define "equal" purely in terms of BP. If he's got more BP, he's more serious opposition, even if he's just a corp researcher. That is a flawed viewpoint. Opposition needs to be scaled in terms of pertinent dice pool sizes.


That's exactly the point. Starting around a dicepool of 15, you hit the point where you can start expecting successes on Threshold 1 tasks. In my most recent game, I have a player with such a huge conjuring pool, he doesn't even have to roll most of the time. And that's almost within my dice pool limits! While I like the action that a dicepool of 16-20 can support, it also completely wrecks parts of the game.


I'm not talking about called shots (although a GM that allows someone to get away with 140 points of armor should have their sanity questioned, and probably allow the shot) but about longshot tests. That example is useful because it offers a quick -140 to your dice pool. The fact is, no matter how far into the negatives your dice pool goes, you still have the same chance of success. It can be -2 or -200; your odds do not budge.


You don't even need to be that lethal. "Surrender" is good enough, and since you're going to be scoring a critical success over their roll, they'll probably do it. See, the effectiveness of the roll by RAW is not dependant on how badly they rolled, it depends on how well you roll, and your total net successes. Since we're discussing somewhere around 51 dice for the PC, and since most NPCs don't even have the Leadership skill, you can *buy* a critical success no matter what they roll. Telling them to "surrender" isn't even abusing the power, it's abusing the character-- which is perfectly legal and by-the-book.

Not as many as psychophipps. Wing Chun, Jun Fan/original Jeet Kune Do, Shotokan karate, Judo, Tai Chi, and several different self-defense courses. My ex-wife also studied kickboxing, Wun Hop Kuen Do (with a few lessons under Mark Dacascos!) and Brazilian Jiu-jutsu, and shared some of it with me.


This is exactly why I have suggested dice pool maximums in my games. I tell my players how big I expect their dice pools to be, and they usually listen to me. What that does mean, however, is that I have to throw the BBB challenge levels out the window, and build the opposition from scratch.

General concensus around here seems to be somwhere in the 16-20 range (inclusive).

The corp researcher with more BPs is more serious opposition. Flawed or not, it remains generally true. An Equal NPC has a finite amount of BPs/karma, he can be built to pose a credible challenge to 1 PC but he can be overcome by a team because he is unlikely to have as much dice in those other PCs' dice pools.