OH GOD OH GOD HE'S DOING IT! HE'S TRYING TO EXPLAIN IT ALL AWAY WITH REALITY!

Seriously, it's monowire not barbed wire, let it go man.

Still I'm of the camp that monowire has to actually uh... be doing something to harm you. Touching it probably earns you a cut (ie. no real damage), being thrown into it earns you it's full damage rating. Getting garroted with it does all that and a bag of net hits.

I will admit that doing as much damage as a sniper rifle seems a little odd but I'm also thinking about it in terms of impairment rather than actual damage. Falling into a nest of monowire (if we assume it's super sharp but not "Instantly cleaves bone sharp" which, if it's based on the Gibson monowire it IS that sharp) is going to mean you're walking out of there with a lot less of your fleshy bits. Nasty avulsions aren't usually life threatening but you're definitely not going to be doing much more than screaming and babbling afterwards (unless you have a pain editor and simply not notice). It might be more reasonable to assume that monowire does Stun rather than Physical if that makes you feel better.

I don't know, I've always imagined monowire as razors in string form. It might not kill you but it will certainly make you wish you were dead. Properly applied (garrote or otherwise) will sever something important and you'll die.

Yeah, Monowire in SR is nothing to sneeze at. It's rather bad against hard things(or was, anyway, like vehicles...in SR3 barrier ratings were doubles, I think it's the same), but against soft targets and soft armor it's devastating. The whip alone has an 8P damage code regardless of the strength of the wielder. I can imagine if a souped-up runner who can probably run with a LOT of force hitting this stuff...yeah, they might be taking him home in two pieces afterward.

But the barbed wire? Yeah, I think SR barbed wire is...knives on wire. Real stuff isn't *that* bad. Concerntina(sp?) wire, though, is pretty nasty stuff. I was cut by that before. Ouch.

First off, I think hobgoblin's point about livestock-proof versus human-proof barbed wire is valid, and hasn't been addressed.

Second, did you know the guy who invented barbed wire was a Unitarian?

Third, a barbed-wire fence does as much damage as a knife or a light pistol with little or no net hits. The guy with the knife or gun can be a lot more deadly than the barbed wire could ever hope to be.


So ... you got a one or two hits on your Damage Resistance Test when you hit the barbed wire and a couple three more on your Healing Test that night. That seems to jive with the rules.

Still waiting the original poster to give an example what's so woo-hooo wrong in SR4...

Not to put this thread back on track.....

I was in a Changeling game with eight players and three were GMs (I was one of them). Consensus was a bear. The game dissolved due to one of the GMs refused to let a NPC do something because it was his NPC (another GM was running at the time). That killed the game for me. One GM basically disallowed another GM to tell the story their way due to the first GM's pride. And in my opinion, it was a matter of pride. When there are "too many cooks in the kitchen", peoples toes get stepped on; and that hurts the pride.

RPG's are designed as a single GM with a core of playing characters. The concept of multiple GMs is not a new one, but is still off the beaten path set by the (spirit of the) rules. This is where I see the largest hurdle with your group, OP. This and the desire to have a less fluid, more regulated rule set. The more you deviate from any rule set, the more GM discretion is needed. And in your group, is sounded like GM discretion must also have GM consensus. In the multi-GM game I played, if I wanted to try something new I had to run it by the GMs before I ran the game. In a group of eight, this was not so bad; but in your game this appears to be a majority of the group (who won't be surprised by your clever ploy). So having rules you can point out in a recognized, official rule book is a boon. If the GM had cleared his use of the "other GM's" NPC, we may have gotten to the Climax of the story(or not, depending on consensus).

IMO, SR4 is not a detail-system oriented game. It relies heavily on GM discretion. All RPGs exist on scale of rule complexity. To much regulation and it's just a glorified board game *cough*D20*cough*. Not enough rules, and you might as well not buy the books (or you might as well LARP. Scary). SR4 appears to be trying to find that balance of system and story....and the rules are a bit vague. With extreme patience and comments (both good and bad) from Dumpshock; I am learning the rules.

Now in criticism, the holes in the rules are not being filled by my imagination (like I think it was designed), but rules from other games I plyed in the past. Example: No where in SR4(BBB) does it say you need a control-rig to "jump into" a drone; yet because it didn't say you didn't need one, and because previous editions of SR said you did, I thought a character needed one to "jump into" a drone. I saw in a thread, here on the old DS, that said you didn't need one, and checking all rules I could find, I saw he was right.

Arguments abound here, as do they in a multi-Gm game table. But people here aren't at the same table, where you group is, OP. Pre-game rule consensus in needed, and egos must be watched carefully; that the story is more important that the characters. If this is unacceptable, a new arrangement may be needed.

I apologize for my lack of brevity. This looked like a popular threat so someof my statement may be outdated already. Thank you.

Floyd

One of my players tends towards the rules lawyer side of things, which can get frustrating as the rules set is not entirely watertight. But frankly, what is? I usually just wing it, and I'm not above letting my npcs take a few extra hits if they are going down too easy, just to make the players sweat a bit.

One example that one player brought up was to somehow modify a vehicle to have the opposite of the Pimped ride mod, so as to make it harder to recognise and more bland. His real aim is to get a restricted police vehicle and not get instant heat just by virtue of being in an illegal vehicle. No specific rules for that that I can find, but I'll hash something together.

I have had problems with "optomised" pcs. Trying to balance the adventure when you have one guy who rolls 20+ dice to shoot things, and everyone else has between 8 and 16 combat dice depending on specialty is a little annoying. It gets even more annoying when player in question decides that the best way to solve every problem is to start shooting things up, which makes it a pretty much one man show, since noone else has an opportunity to avoid combat and be sneaky or hacky or talky.

Mind control is a pain in the arse spell, and coming pretty close is imp. invisibility. Those two spells seem to be the goto solution to everything that my mage player comes up with.

Overall though, my group are imaginative, reasonable and I only have to argue over rules minutiae with one of them, and even he accepts that I am the GM. Not sure what would happen if we were to trade places though...

The matrix and magic. Happy now? Geez take a look on dumpshock if you want to look at how much debate/argument/confusion there is over the rules. If I didn't use the search function I would have way more questions then I normally would. I didn't say SR4 was terrible, I said it was a pain in the ass the longer we played it as it became harder to handle. I really think the world/setting almost makes up for its shortcomings... almost.

Lets take magic for instance magic creates a power scale that just dwarfs everything else once characters start reaching a higher magic 7-8. It means that in order to put the team in check a GM has to start sending out spirits higher then force 6, since the more powerful the party gets the more dangerous our runs become. It then means that the spirits they start sending at the party have more dice then the mage at pretty much anything, which means then that you have to rely on your spirits counterspelling because it is better then your skill is, and if you don't use it the spirit will munch on you. If your not a mage you are totally boned especially if you are unable to enlist a spirit or mages help. A spirit uses oh say... influence on you and rolls 12-16 dice and you resist with.... willpower of 2-7 (and only 7 if you are a maxed out dwarf.) The spirit pretty much always wins over the non spellcasters as there is no real counter for it. It then means that if the GM doesn't want to fiat all of the non spell casters it becomes obvious that he is pulling punches that never had to be pulled before in our games. There are many spells although they seem nice can be abused, are overpowered, need a better description. Mind control spells, mana static, turn to goo, mass animate, and even some of the spirit powers are pretty off the hook especially those few mentioned in Street Magic (spirits of man are not too shabby either.) The higher powered the game gets the more balancing issues come into play is just one issue our group is experiencing. Raising that point of magic just gives a mage +1 dice at everything a mage does and raises all of their spells by one level in the S to P ratio. There is nothing that even adepts or mundanes get that comes nearly as close to something that good.



Maybe our group is different. We are all mature individuals who have a lot of fun at our table. Our egos do not get in the way of what we want our game to do, so maybe we are a fluke when it comes to this. Needless to say there is a lot of communication that happens at our table off the table to facilitate the fact that no one steps on each others toes, and there has not been a single problem on the story telling aspect. However when you take the same stance on the rules in SR4 it is a pain in the butt. You don't want to go on Dumpshock and check a 6 page thread that was already made where both sides bring up valid points yet no real consensus is reached. You want as a player and GM to spend a short amount of time trying to figure it out and then move on. SR4 is a rule set filled with the power of handwavium, however what we have found is that when you turn to the rules that there is not enough of a solid foundation to consistently make a judgement call on any given situation in SR. My person opinion is that SR4 could be a bit more solid on the rules to avoid headaches while still allowing a GM to be flexible.

Tactics. Sure, he has 20+ dice. Thats great. Is his gun smartlinked? Did he turn off the wireless? No? Hack the corperate decker get into it. Smoke, strobes, etc. have the guards using chemicals instead, stuff that stacks up the dice penalties. Lethal? No. and it gives you the ability to capture your characters and that sort of thing too if you want to go that route. SR4 isn't made for "balanced between all players". He has 20+ dice, hes their goto for shooting things. The face with his 20+ for talking is the goto for talking. And don't allow shooting to be the answer to everything.

I think this post truly describes you frustration well. It is also the frustration I have experienced, but not with just SR4. As any game increases in level, to challenge the characters; the game seems to get more deadly. The margin for error becomes less, and mistakes and accident have stronger consequences. Games are easier to run when the punishment is lighter. When characters become experts at what they do, they become deadly; and the deadly are called to fight the characters. But IMO, all games have this problem.

If I were to offer a solution(if you need one), make the consequences less about life and death, and more about threats against what they love. The story can return to the concerns of low level characters, but of NPCs not PCs. NPCs the PC love.

As for magic support: that what contacts are for.

Please respond to so I may know if I am understanding the issue.

Spirits aren't always the answer. Just having a more powerful mage in th e enemy force is plenty to keep the teams mage in check. Spirits using influence can be overpowering, but not many spirits have that power... 3 in fact. And only spirits of man have it as a base power. Guidance and Task have to select it as an optional one.
Spirits are strong, yes. But you can shoot them, and they will die. Especially if you're a good shot. (And if the mage has 7-8 magic, I'd expect the sam to be in the 25+ range for shooting). If thats what they're throwing, then agaisnt a force 9 spirit. Throw a wide burst at it (since narrow ones don't help for the armor) for a -9 to its dodge. Sam can expect to have full recoil comp, and get 8 hits. Since he needs to break the 18 on the spirits armor to do damage, if he loads apds (-4) that drops it to 14. And means he only needs a 7DV weapon to hurt the thing. Or an assault rifle (-1 ap) and 6P, which convieniently enough, most of them have.



Yeah, and the first time even, is 13 + 21 karma = 34 karma to do it.

For that kind of karma, the streetsam can take a skill from 0 to 5 with a specialization. Thats 7 more dice for something he couldn't do before.

Not to mention raising any skill group at least once. Even from 5 to 6.

MasterofM: I feel your pain. I'm still sticking with the recommendation to take a peek at SR3. It's still Shadowrun, even moreso than SR4. There are other systems that can handle what you want as well-- Savage Worlds and Gurps comes to mind, if you have the appropriate supplements-- but SR3 needs no conversion.


Are you doing the same thing to other players? No? Then you're not playing fair. If you've reduced his dice pool, you've reduced everyone else's, perhaps to the point where the non-shooters have a zero dice pool. Now, they can't participate in the combat at all.


A "tight" system like SR4 requires regulation. It's crunchy, some would even say tactical, and it's got a lot of options in normal combat. There's a million different things that could affect the outcome of a combat. If a GM is playing fast and loose with this sort of game, he is seriously inviting trouble and hard feelings from his players. If a GM makes a ruling that kills a PC, and they later discover he was wrong, you're in for some trouble.

A "loose" system, like Wushu or Everway, requires a vast amount of GM discretion and GM trust. Strict regulation in these type of games is death to the system.

To heavily combine these two needs is a bad idea. You're trying to mix the worst parts of two different play styles. While you can have narrative abilities in a crunch-based game, it needs to be carefully handled. Regulation basically assumes that the players cannot be trusted, while in order for narraivism to work, you have to give the players control. It becomes player discretion, instead of the GM's.

Everything in SR is situational. Also where there are mages there are spirits is the way we have ruled it.

It's never going to be just a mage. Lets say you try to hijack something that a AAA corp has a very very vested interest in. You go up against 2 force 8 possession based spirits. One takes over the vehicle you are in, while the other fears the mage so he basically ditches the vehicle he is currently protecting. Now the pilot of the vehicle is w/o magical assistance in a vehicle now inhabited by a spirit. How do you then not destroy the vehicle you are currently piloting but take out the spirit? Oh wait.... you can't. By RAW even if you have a crazy amount of demolitions (which you would need against a spirit possessing a vehicle) the spirit and the vehicle are now one and the same so the only way you can knock out the spirit is by blowing up the vehicle. It was the right move for the GM to make, but it means that it is impossible for the adept to knock out the spirit (since the adept was not using a weapon focus against the spirit) and if the mage tries to banish the spirit and fails he will be in for a load of damage especially if the spirit was bound (against a force 8 spirit.)

Yes you can totally handle some spirits, but a pack of them are tough and a mundane/adept only gets 1 crack at taking out every single spirit before it's game over. You fail and the spirit can do any number of things to punk you hardcore if you are now sans magical support.

I'm not seeing a problem with the rules here. What I'm seeing is a problem with the way the situation was approached.

Why isn't the adept packing a weapon focus? Is he using Killing Hands? Why isn't the mage packing appropriate spirit focii? Were they aware that this situation could come about? Did they do legwork to case the place before they tried breaking and entering? Of course mundanes are going to have an issue with magic, as it's something they can't normally deal with without their magical support hanging about and doing their job properly.

What I'm seeing here is a defense of being situationally deficient and blaming the subsequent fail on the rules. The rules work just fine; a banishing test for the mage (which yes, should be appropriately risky; they are Force 8 spirits after all), an athletics check for the poor sap of a driver stuck in the vehicle, and an exotic weapons roll to blow the bottom out of the van if the mage doesn't work.

Heresy: It's times like this I appreciate encounter building in That Other Game (:P)

ETA: Extra stuff.

Hi, I'm a duplicate post.

Agent Smith: Me too!

Ok. 2 Force 8 possession spirits? That means 2 mages, or one mage who has bound one in advance.

To take over the vehicle, he has to make a forcex2 (16) test with a threshold of the OR of the vehicle. Which is 4+. I'd probably say regular vehicle 4, security 5, and military 6+. So, if the runners are using it its probably a 5. Which the spirit might get, some of the time. Also, just because the spirit has possessed the vehicle, doesn't mean you can't still drive it. Though, I'd probably do an opposed strength check against the driver (if actually driving it) or a test against the vehicles body (which is vehicle strength) if using VR. Why? The spirit tries to turn the steering wheel right, but the player is pulling on it left. Whoever wins gets to decide which way the vehicle goes.

As far as fear, mages tend to have good willpower, and decent charisma, which coincedentally is the test to return against being feared. Chances are, he'd be able to come back at the spirit within a turn or three.

How do you not destroy the vehicle while still killing the spirit? Stun damage. Attacks of will. Neither will harm the vehicle. Both will get rid of the spirit. Adepts can use killing hands to punch it, and he can still do stun too, while damaging the spirit and not hurting the vehicle. The adept still doesn't need to use a weapon focus, as he and everyone else can just punch for stun damage, and still eventually hope to get through to the spirit.

And, if the mage in question has a magic of 8, stunbolts galore should take care of them pretty well. He can even astrally project and nail them from there.

Level 7+ is Initiation Level magic. A GM is allowed to hold a mage PC at level 6 until the PC finds a Magical Group to Initiate with. That's also a good way to stall for time as the rest of the PCs catch up in terms of skills and combat abilities. Hold off on throwing high-level baddies at the PCs until the rest of the team is ready.

The way the situation went down we couldn't have found out the magical backup would have been that fast. The adept wasn't a combat adept he was a demo expert among an expert pilot and ect. Mage looses to fear and dives off the vehicle is what the counter to being feared? You are supposed to run away not be able to fight back with everything you have. Where do you come up with stunning a force 8 spirit inside a vehicle and think you can ever throw enough dice at that situation for it to work? Hardened armor is a bitch, and knocking out a spirit that has the body of a vehicle + 8 and it gets all of its armor you have next to no chance to 1 shot KO it. On the astral this is different, but that is not what happened. The spirit casts a "something" at force 8 and the adept freakin' eats it. No what the adept did was blow up half the vehicle and threaten to blow everything else to high heaven if the spirit tried anything funny. The adept upped the risk and after the spirit left the vehicle he got the hell out of dodge, because if you are smart a possession spirit is an adepts/mundanes worst nightmare. The mage was out for a turn and had jumped off of a movemented vehicle. In a single turn that spirit could have just chosen to unload 2 of whatever they wanted to and that would have been the end for the adept.

It is not blaming the rules, but pointing out that there is a power gap that the rules have created.

Not that I am taking any side in this issue, I just have a tangent:
Do the people in your game know who you are in terms of the SR community?
I have a friend who wrote many of the rules for factions in a swords and swashbuckling game. Not the fiction, so he isn't as famous in game circles, but he wrote the mechanics. (With far too little credit love in the front of the books )

Fans of the game praise everything he does as fantastic beyond belief. To be honest, his fame provides a certain aura that enhances the experience. At least for the fanboys of the game. Those of us who have known him since uni just sit and enjoy a Saturday game.

I would love to swoon under the same impression in one of your games. However, I think its something to consider. When anyone who holds any status inside a development community says something, it does not represent "Joe Gamer". This is not a question of sincerity or fact, but of relevance and classification.

Attacks of will ignore the ItNW of the spirit. SM, 94. Have the face do it. Faces have high willpower, and high charisma. They work great for it.

Also, This is a case where I'd allow a called shot to bypass the vehicle armor. Why? The spirit is the entire vehicle. If I shoot the padding of the chairs, I hit the spirit. Is there armor there? No. Thus, not get the vehicle armor.

I'd also say that if they're inside the vehicle, the spirit can't make a reaction test to avoid getting hit. Since they're essentially inside of it. Stun damage works fine, because vehicles don't take stun, but spirits do.



As far as your team dies scenario yes, they would. Why? Because they only brought 1 mage and 1 adept to a fight with a mage and 2 force 8 spirits. At a minimum the teams mage should be able to call in some bound spirits he has tucked away for such situations to beat the snot out of the possession spirits. And only having one mage and one adept is a major hinderance to a SR team.

In other words, if the GM wanted the team to live, he threw too much at them. If the team wanted to live, they should've planned ahead better, and brought better magic backup.

I'm going to quote this just so that I can maintain my own coherency...


So - did the team know that there was magical defense that tough in the area?


So...what did he put his adept powers towards? He was a hyper-good tech guy? No offense meant here, just...that's a highly specialized person to be taking on a run.


As Tarantula said, Will and Charisma are generally two of the stats you use to resist fear, and mages usually have high one or the other. He screwed up the test; did he glitch / critical glitch?


So why didn't they run? Would they have been able to move their target? Sometimes its not about defeating your opponent, but stalling them long enough to get the heck out of Dodge.


So target it on the astral. Astral ignores things like armor and hardening and, that's a mages area of expertise.


Why not?


Wait, what happened? The adept blew a chunk of the vehicle out and told the spirit he'd do the rest if it did anything else? So the spirit jumped out and the adept turned tail?


Who's smart? Sounds like personally screwing the adept to me. And why is a spirit their worst nightmare?


Again, confused.

1. The mage was out for a turn because of the fear power, got that.
2. He further should have done a body test to check for situational damage from falling off of a car (stun damage at most, IMO), but otherwise, just fine.
3. Adept could have been stuck in a dead book by....something the spirit could have done if it'd felt nasty.

Again, I'm not seeing where the problem lies here in the rules. Everything here is completely covered by the RAW, no special house rules needed.


Because the team went up against a challenge it wasn't prepared to deal with? Uh...yeah.

From what I understand, you have two magically "adept" runners in your team - your mage, who sounds like atypical combat mage, and an adept with a tech focus. Why wasn't the mage packing spirit focii? Had he done astral observation? Had he assesensed the spirits if he'd caught sight of them? Was the adept your wheelman? If not, what was he doing there? Simply to blow stuff up? That's kind of a waste.

It just looks like you guys took on an opponent that you weren't ready for and properly got your butts handed to you because of it. That's all that this sounds like to me...

Counter to being feared in the fear power description. "The terror lasts for 1 Combat Turn per net scored by the critter. Even after that point, the target must succeed in a Willpower + Charisma (critter’s net hits) Test to return or face the critter again."

So, he gets scared for a while, then makes a test to come back. Or he could just send his own spirit/s after it.

Spirit rolled 9 hits. Mage got 7 with edge. The spirit was rolling more dice then the mage initially anyways. Fear of 16 dice against a mage with even 12 dice is at a disadvantage. The adept was a gunner not a physad.

The magical threat on sight was dealt with swiftly. The fast response was something we couldn't predict. This all took place on an ocean, and the spirit possessed a rather large boat (1 of 3 we were trying to steal.) Even having the boat go at force 12 movement and conceal astral movement is just that much faster.

The mage jumped off the boat and was left in the dust. The adept didn't take a point in astral sight so couldn't engage the spirit in astral combat. The problem is possession spirits can just possess people from the astral so an adept or mundane who can't see on the astral just gets possessed. It's a problem in a game when both sides can do this. It is a problem that magic in this setting have very little defense considering how even optomized characters can shrug off bullets no problem and even basically "eat" grenades. With magic there is no real defense in this game, and it is a power gap. The problem is a power gap in the game. Everything about SR is about glass cannons, but Mages are the biggest glassiest cannons out there. They get awesome stuff, and there is very little to counter against what they can throw. They get spirits, wards, spells that can just win at almost anything. So yeah I got beef with the magic system. Our mages have done the same thing theirs do and to me it's annoying since it makes most other characters sit on the sidelines and watch the carnage.

First, if its a large boat, I'd be very inclined to give it an OR of 7, 8, or even 9. The bigger and more complex, the higher that number goes. And the less likely it'd be for the spirit to be able to possess it.

Why did the mage jump off the boat? Because the one possessing the boat feared him? If thats the case, he got at minimum 1 action after it posessed the boat, before it could fear him. Thats when he should've been throwing down his overcast stunbolt. Of course, thats all moot if the spirit couldn't even possess the boat in the first place.

If the spirit is purely astral, then it can't affect anyone, and no on will care. If it is possessing something, the adept doesn't need astral combat to be able to hit the spirit with killing hands (bypassing ItNW). Or to do attacks of will (also bypassing ItNW).

Magic can and does require magic to counter. Its up to the players to either a) make sure they have the appropriate magic on their side to keep themselves safe, or b) talk to the GM(s) and ensure that any magic defenses will be scaled to their magical abilities.

The way I see the examples given, it sounds like the team got their asses handed to them back in pieces thanks to either poor legwork, incredibly bad luck or a GM who tossed in bit too much for the team to handle. Raising the difficulty of the runs of course comes from the fact that you are hired to do more difficult jobs (and paid accordingly) but if the gig was the typical run but the opposition was something else, there has to be a reason why it happened, other than "my group has too high DP".

On the matter of the car mod, if you buy a military/police vehicle and want to make it look "common", you gotta replace the hull of the car or something alike. Want unsuspicious car? Don't buy a exotic car but the most common Toyota in the markets and modify it otherwise to fit your needs. Not buy that Lamborghini Diablo and change it look like your typical sedan. I think there are more than just the cars in the book for sale anyway so you can buy a good car that's not designed only to police for example.

None of these examples sound to me like it's the problem in the rules but in the fact that the players want a written rule about everything and won't trust GM's judgment on things that aren't straight from the book. I would recommend playing chess or some other game where you can only do what the rules allow if something not straight from the rules cause problems. Yes, the game gets more edgy when the power rises, but isn't that the same in just about all games? That great dragon you meet on 20th lvl might kill you just as fast as that little kobold on lvl1, eh? SR4 isn't a perfect game, but as is, it's pretty damn good in my books. I've never played SR1-3 so I won't comment which is best or worse, but maybe for some of the "SR3 is 100x better than SR4", the issue is the not wanting to change things or even give the new system a chance. Guess as I did never read any of the old books, I don't notice the fluff messups that folks seem to find on SR4 vs. SR3

I'm quite curious as to just what 'status' you think I hold. I am neither a developer nor a writer. I am just a dude who posts on an internet forum (a lot ).

Sorry to digress here, but this issue is one of my personal pet peeves: What kind of wacky mindset leads to thinking the only way to handle a mage is to throw more magical threats that nobody else can handle into the fray? If this were a home repair RPG, would you handle the spotlight hogging plumber by flooding the basement? Throw more drone riggers at them! Drones have natural object resistance and are outright immune to many of the spells mages use. Plus, you can't even own a sustaining Focus higher than Force 3 at chargen, which means Physical Illusions and the like will have to be sustained manually in order to beat drones and security camera OR, forcing negative dicepool modifiers. There are ways for mages to cope, to be sure, but the bottom line is that the Samurai, Rigger or Hacker will likely be better equipped to quickly handle the situation than the Mage.

Fortune,
Your posts are well thought out, frequent and on point. Not to mention that you have been around for several worlds (releases of shadowrun). Anyone who has read Dumpshock for some time, knows of you. A Dumpshock elder of sorts.
I played a miniature game called ClanWar for years and the fine Kuni Tetsu was held in high respect. Never was he a developer or writer* but he did contribute to the community. Founding some aspects of said community. When the game was abandoned, he became the defacto choice for rules resolution.

Community is very important to gaming. It should never be underestimated. I would go so far as to say that the international community for Shadowrun has a large influence on the game.

BlueMax
Who works hard to keep SR going in his meat and bones community.

Considering that neither of those is actually going to kill anyone at full health (well, I suppose monowire could kill a neoteny with a body of 1) and that you can very seriously injure yourself on barbed wire and that surviving getting shot isn't unheard of, it seems about right to me. Also, at this point, it's pretty common knowledge that monowire is retarded.

Who? Me? When?

Seriously though, thanks.

To answer your previous question, none of the players in any of my offline games post on Dumpshock (that I know of). Therefore any 'status' accrued through this community would not really be relevant.

I really don't think the rules are the problem in the original poster's case, but the (collective) GMs' implementation of those rules.

hear hear!

Yes, but they don't show someone pressing that same knife blade flat directly into the palm of their hand without getting cut. Makes for bad press and the like, y'know.

The problem there is that with 20+ dice, it can be the answer for everything. Person threatening your face with immediate death? They talk their way out of it with 6-7 hits on average. Johnson jerking the party around? The Sammy hoses them down with their SMG and 6-7 hits on average. Oh? The hosed down people friends got froggy and sends someone after the party? Well, those 6-7 hits before Edge being spent works just as well on those chumps as well.

How big a body count you need before you have to whip out the ol' "Inane NPC of Doom and Gloom" to take care of the problem here?

And the RAW is that smartlinks and cyberware aren't open to hacking unless they're in diagnostic mode so you can't just send someone to screw with this stuff anymore.

I also come from a background of playing 3.5, and SR combat so far has made D&D combat look positively streamlined. A fairly simple combat between our team (of 6) and ~6 mooks took the better part of two hours to run, with people in the team with only 1 IP having to wait about 20 mins between turns.

Yes, with experience it would run faster, but even then, there's just a lot more rolling going on than in D&D. The fact that attack rolls are opposed alone bogs the system down some. Shooting someone in D&D is: attack roll -> check AC -> damage roll -> apply damage. Shooting someone in SR is: we both roll, tally hits -> split difference, add remaining hits to damage code -> roll soak, subtract hits from damage -> apply damage -> modify initiative to reflect wound penalties.



It's not about trust. I trust my GM to make a call if he has to. It's about not having to make the call in the first place. SR4's rule-layout is a bitch to work with. Having come from D&D 3.5 - a ruleset with a similar level of complexity - I'm kind of dissapointed with the presentation. I read the D&D3 PHB once, from start to finish, and I had a working grasp of the rules and knew exactly where to look to clear up confusion about a rule I didn't recall by rote. The only times I had to look up rules were for little-used combat maneuvers (bull-rush, disarm) and for individual spell descriptions.

In stark contrast, if I want to look up rules for pinning someone down with unarmed combat in SR4, I know which chapter too look in, but that's about where it ends without having to look in the index and hope they called it 'grapple' and not 'grab,' 'pin,' 'pugilism' or something equally obscure. There are a lot of things I like about SR, but I honestly think it would be a much easier system to get a handle on if they'd made an attempt to have their rules layed out in an intuitive manner, rather than haphazardly inserting rules and fluff willy-nilly the way White Wolf does (love their systems / settings, hate their books).

And let's not even get started on the matrix rules - that chapter is a cross-referencing clusterfuck.



Not true. You just have to be flexible with your story; it's a form of collaborative fiction. If you approach it from the point of view of telling a story set in stone you're right, it will all end in tears (either of anguish or boredom), but that doesn't mean it can't be done.



Having to deliberately curtail a character's advancement in its primary discipline until the other characters have 'caught up' is a major failing of the rules, in my book. Certainly initiations should be notable undertakings by the character, and not just something to do in a week's downtime between runs, but by the same token, the player should not find themselves at a complete loose end for attempting to undertake one. If they wish to go out and find a magical college to initiate under (or just want to start a pet project by which they can introspectively refine their own knowledge of magic, as might be the case with some eastern traditions) then that option should be within the character's reach, unless they specifically took hindrances that would say otherwise.

If I was playing an awakened and I decided to look around at different magical colleges to enroll in, I'd be miffed if I was told I wasn't going to be able to find one untill Joe the street-sam has accrued 50+ karma.

Edit: Also, monofilament wire is silly.

The great thing about SR is that everything has multiple counters. Being the hammer-man who sees every problem as a nail is a great way to die fast. You have to employ smart tactics, always, that applies to both sides. If the GM has to pull out a super NPC to create a challange then he's doing something wrong.

I'm a fellow player at the same table as MasterofM, and was playing the shaman in question.

I think that there are some gaps in the rules as written. For example, the Influence power doesn't list modifiers for the difference between resisting "shoot yourself in the head" vs. resisting "leave me alone" vs. resisting "buy the extra-large side order of fries". It's also less than clear on whether the subject understands that they've been Influenced.

I trust a good GM to be clear about the times when they're imposing an absolute fiat. If the GM wants an NPC to hit on a certain shot, the GM should just say "He hits", and not pretend to be using a die roll.

In this specific case, the PCs bit off more than they could chew. Given the precedents of that campaign, it was reasonable to expect that when Horizon sends a convoy of boats across the Pacific with a value over 3 million nuyen (not counting the secret advanced gear that was hidden in the boats), Horizon will protect that convoy with both a swarm of drones and a stronger-than-PCs mage with a posse of high-Force bound spirits. If the GM had said "One F8 spirit possesses each PC (rolling 16 dice against Willpower), and has you wait passively for Horizon HTRT to arrive, your character will escape only if you burn Edge", I would have called that... fair. The GM instead had one of the spirits take over the boat, and use Fear and Influence to make the shadowrunners go away.

Yes, of course the secmage has a bound spirit or three. It costs ¥4K in binding materials, and that's a quite reasonable price to pay in order to prevent the theft of ¥3M worth of boats. My CHA 7 Elf Shaman PC often has a full posse of seven bound spirits.

My PC told the other PCs, unambiguously, that attacking the convoy was a bad idea, then went along it. He probably should have said "I'm not interested in joining this run"; that might have meant me sitting out the session.

Meanwhile, a teammate who also stole a boat and fled in a different direction, got to escape easily, since the security mage sent both of her bound spirits after the boat stolen by the shaman and the super-skilled adept. So the team as a whole still did quite well!

You're assuming that the player isn't using smart tactics as well. Super characters with smart players using good tactics will beat anything fair a GM can throw at them. The bad part is that this encourages a "Player vs GM" attitude, and you're caught in an arms race to get that next advantage. The GM doesn't have to be doing something wrong in SR4, it could just be that the players are doing everything right.

Here's a short list of issues and types of issues we've had difficulty with:
SINs: SIN-checking results in getting caught quickly, scrapping ID's
Hacking, abandonment of Stat+Skill+Equipmod makes script-kiddies the equal of skilled hackers. As mentioned above, it is a clusterfuck of cross reference. Matrix Rules: Let's not even go there. Too many threads already.
Jamming: Most effective modern militaries use frequency hopping and spread spectrum. It's highly resistant to narrow-band jamming and broad-band jamming is both ridiculously energy intensive and a fast boat to cancerville, particularly if it's a device you carry in your shorts. Check frequency hopping on wikipedia. A player at our table for a while did comms in Iraq and laughed in bewilderment at much of the e-warfare in SR4.
Sensor upgrading: ermm, yeah. This has been discussed before. Rip out the sensors that can't go above three and you suddenly have a Sensor Rating of 6, even though you have fewer sensors than you started with. That makes sense. Or not.
Vehicle Rules (especially crash damage, ie. Ramming)
Movement Power: conservation of momentum and handling + handwavium = no problem! Add in economics and society shifts tremendously.
Spirits of >F6: Physical attacks rapidly become meaningless without magic to boost them. Spirit Skills rapidly outstrip metahuman skills. Half the time we ask our spirits to Assense and share over the mental link, rather than do it ourselves.


For me, what makes cyberpunk and near future stories exciting is not just the cool gadgets and shiny tech, but rather the well-thought out ways that the tech affects society and interactions. It shouldn't just be Today-With-Shiny-Things-Taped-On. Look at the way text messaging, cell phones and the intertubez have reshaped the social fabric of our culture. Throw in Movement, Wards, etc and security changes drastically, trade changes completely. All too often, though, we find ourselves fighting the crunch to support the fluff or reality. Gun rates of fire are ridiculously low, healing is ridiculously fast, etc.

I love Shadowrun, and have since i first played in the mid-90's. The only version i haven't played was 2nd and i played 2-year stints of extended story arcs in 1st, 3rd and now 4th. I love some of the changes, but look forward to 4.5 or 5th already.

A lot of the issue is also granularity/resolution. If it's a slider bar, picture GURPS at one end of that and Wu Shu/Feng Shui (the games) at the other. SR4 tries to be somewhere in the middle, which is the most difficult (and desireable) place to be, but doesn't feel well-playtested.

BTW, if your response is just to say, "it's not the rules, it's you. love it or leave it" or similar variants, maybe save the electrons and jump to another thread, instead. Our conflict is that we love the story setting and wish the ruleset lived up to it. I guess that's better than loving the ruleset and wishing we had a good story, but, dammit, i want both! Greedy bastard!

I think you are playing the wrong game if you want this. Frank Trollman showed some what a society should be able to do and look like based on logical extrapolations of the rules and the society resulting looks nothing like the fluff.

It's more than a little annoying, isn't it?

Aaaaah, now we are back at the topic.^^

I have read all your statements and after 13 years of running I have to say that I understand the rule-lawyer as well as the handwaving-rulebraking-GM. But IMHO the really big problem with SR4 is, that the developers AGAIN forgot about the developments they made within the 3 previous versions. I mean after THAT time, even if you establish a new rule-basis, you should know about the weaknesses and where you should add further informations so that nobody has to ask for it. But where are all the already solved problems gone?

The SR4 corebook doesn´t even have a summary/index. Some tables with prices etc. are in the section but not in the gear table at the end, finding specific rules is a pain in the ass because some details are covered in endless text-parts and sometimes not even in the part they should be. It wouldn´t be frustrating if it was V.01 but hey....we are in V4, and after all this time, all the topics in several internet forums and i-don´t-know-how-many erratas, especially such things as the runners companion (e.g. Arcane Arrester) are embarrasing.

A lot of those approaches are meaningless for several reasons:
First we have rules covering the use of skills, gears and powers for day to day use by small teams. The rules aren't here to simulate large scale operations. You can compare that to physics. You have laws and equations that can apply for any scale and any situation (in some cases we haven't found them but we still assume there are) but if you want to apply them for a specific scale and situation, you go with a simplified version. The rules are the simplified version adapted to the use in game, not the industrial use.

Second, people in the world don't have rulebooks, and aren't rational entities. For example someone recently stated in a topic that no mage would do enchanting since they can probably earn more as mages-for-hire. It makes sense from a purely gamist approach, but mages in the SR4 world aren't crunching gamists. A mage might prefer enchanting to spell slinging, he might have failed the sorcery class or maybe he chose enchanting because it was the easiest and left more time to party.

This thread has covered the spread from broken rules to not enough realism with a dash of can't tell the story I want. The rule-set is vague, I admit that; but I believe that was intentional. Its designed to accept actions not outlined in the rules without designers having to regulate every last action of a character in the game. You may call this lazy on the part of the designers, but SUPER-regulation is neither time efficient or cost efficient when trying to get a book to press. Game Masters have needed to make rule calls since the dawn of the hobby. I believe that this system (SR4) expects that to happen, so it wrote its rule books accordingly. I know there is errata, I downloaded it, printed it out, and tell all my players to look it up when things get confusing. If that doesn't help, I know I will have to judge exactly what the grammar, used by the creators of the book, is trying to convey (as GM and sometimes as player). In SR4, with RAW, I accept this reality. I think GURPS (Generally Unplayable Role-Playing System ) or HERO system (Champions "of the Universe") would make a good conversion game, as their rule-sets come first in design leaving flavor and story up to teach individual GM. This requires an amazing amount to set-up, but once in place; the world created will tell the story you want with a solid and well defined rule-set.


Realism doesn't sell.
This forum is rife with "rules vs. realism" arguments, trying to hash out just exactly what is going on at a given moment. And the conversation is usually just over a given moment like it is here. Something happened in a game someone doesn't like, and they post their frustrations on this forum. That is what the forum is for, community support. I support everyone's right to bitch about something that happened to them in any edition of Shadowrun (no "falling" rules in SR1). But I also support everyone-else's right to comment on the original bitch. But that's not my point.

No dice system ever created, in the process of being created, or ever will be created will ever map the course of reality. It can't be done, and I don't think is what is being asked for in this, or any, thread. What is being asked for is a dice system that explains exactly how I (and by I, I mean all of you) view the universes I live in. Unless I write the dice system this will never happen. I applaud F.Trollman for his dedication in creating dice systems to help better understand the world of Shadowrun. I would never use them because they don't represent my view, but he has the discipline to do the work when there is something he doesn't like about the game. My approach is to accept what the book says and fudge it when I need to bang it into my story. But stories aren't real. Even the ones I tell about something that happened to me personally are sprinkled with edits and wild abandon, and still I can't see all ends.

With that in mind: I have had extreme trouble with the lexicon to the game, and I'm not talking of the fictional aspects. I am computer stupid. I'm the guy most IT guys complain about when they go home and kill that kobold in effigy. The "dash " of "realism" applied in SR4 (mainly Matrix chapter) had me going to reference material to find out what the hell certain words meant. I know what a Node is. I thought I knew what a Node was. It's different in SR1 (where I'm coming from) than it is in SR4. The difference is subtle, but it is there. But the post which speaks of sensors (stromcrow's), talks of the lack of reality in that aspect of the game. So at times the game is too real, and not real enough. Sorry, my rant, but it leads me to my next point.

Equality is an Illusion.
This is a personal statement and in no way represents the views of Dumpshock, it's members or guests, or of anyone that I know of. But I still believe it. There is no such thing as equality. The only true equality is that none of us are equal. The only peice of reality that RPGs get right is that their is always somebody better. The concept I supporting here is: I believe in the SUPER-NPC. Deus ex Mechana (or a facsimile there of). One day, in the not to distant future. In some RPG I will be playing. AN NPC that is much better than me at everything will descend from the heavens and step on my balls. I accept this. It has been a literary device since the dawn of story-telling. I stepped on the heads of plenty of low powered NPC. Payback is coming. It's coming for me, and its coming for you.

Shadowrun is for thelling Shadowrun stories.
The last complaint I believe this thread suggests is that their stories can't be told due to the rules. This is not so much a question of mechanics as it is a question of Mythos. All game systems have actions that can't take place in "real" life. I cannot fly. I cannot give birth to elves. I cannot find spirits (but somebody else could). These action must be regulated into the actions that are "realistic" and can be carried out in a physical world. I can jump a ravine. I can drive a car. I can shoot a gun (but I won't). But the dice system regulated to these physical actions have physical observations and scientific formula to back them up. There is a basis of comparison to how these things are accomplished and what effects they have. A dice system can be applied to them using these observations (but so rarely are).

But imaginary action must be quantified as well. So the people at Shadowrun (I think it's Catalyst this week) have to determine just how powerful the fictional aspects of the game must be. I believe this was the problem the original poster had. That there was no defense for the imaginary. I'll go one better. I believe the game master had designed the run so the characters would fail. I've been in games where this is the case. Was the GM my enemy? No. Was the story he was telling about my success? No. The point he was trying to make was that in this story I was in, I was the NPC. I was the "innocent observer" because the playing field was set to a higher bar. There was information I needed to know in his game, but that information had a price: my failure. But failure is a part of life, and I accepted it. Hell, I relished it. Here was an NPC I could learn from. My character went right into fan boy mode, and almost got arrested watching the NPC in action, instead of getting while the getting was good. SO there is no defense for a GM destined to see you fail, just as there is no defense for failure in the real world. Damn realism, creeping into my games again.


The arguments here are not over rules, as I see it, but over concepts and play style. ANd these vary as the stars. I'm not telling you not to argue, I cannot turn that tide (although I have a dicepool to do so). All I'm asking is to remember that arguing these point will not bring you satisfaction. They will bring more opposing view points. But through that lens, you own argument may strengthen, and through that you will gain enlightenment (sorry, went zen for a moment)

Apologies for the length of this post, but I wanted to address everyone's point of view. I most likely have failed to do so, but I hope you still take away something from this.

Thank You
Floyd

Indeed.

Impressively readable for a long post

Very much. Bravo, you've said many things I think I had in my head but couldn't figure out how to put into words.

Whoa....this was really long. But did we have a problem with realism? ^^ Of course SR is not about covering the reality, but it shows at least a possible world so the rules shouldn´t conquer the things even WE know as (theoretically) granted. And hey...if SR rules would be without mistakes, there would be NO SINGLE SR-forum. Then if we are honest, this is 90% of the purpose these forums are made for.

I laughed as you said the lack-of-definition in the rules was intentional. This would be the same as if I would shit my pants and would tell everybody it is art. Espeially at RC it left an impression to my whole group like the old Compendium did...not finished, just thrown on the market to make money. The longer I think of it, the more it remembers me of the German Computer Game "Gothik". This game is the home of all the bugs that infect other games and for me, most of the SR books are also some kind of "bugged".

Don´t misunderstand me, I love the game, but this doesn´t say anything about the quality of the rule-books.

It was a tangent, but some posts (the one concerning monowire) had addressed it. Although, since i interpreted the OP as: "there is no defense against the imaginary", I felt an aside on realism to be appropriate.

And don't misunderstand me, I love your poopy-pants; and would support your decision to sell them to the Guggenheim.

Cain, I agree with most everything else you've said on this topic, but here I have to disagree strongly. If the GM really is fair, then they will survive anything the GM throws at them. if they get stupid, even for a short time, the survival clause may not apply. But beat it? Nope. There are too many things stacked against the Runner. If they can simply rock roll every time if they avoid stupid mistakes, then you loose WAY TOO MUCH of the flavor of the setting. Sometimes the smart Runner runs away and hides in the Shadows, simply because sometimes the hornet nest is just too big.


Isshia

Right, but never forget that GM´s are also just humans, and humans sometimes get pissed off and i never heard that humans are fair at all.^^ So never forget to bring extra chips and coke for the GM, you never know how he´s feeling today.

But to get seriuos again. We are talking about SR4. The rules have changed a bit and nowadays it is enough to roll bad dice to get your character out of the living world. The times that target numbers of 2 are possible are over and even with 20 dice you can easily make critical boobs (i swear, this word is a translation of the german wird "Patzer", www.dict.cc says that). The last time that I thought "oh, only 2 successes with an assault rifle, I don´t take a action-phase to dodge" was the day my troll-tank died. and he had way more than 20 dice. So not only stupid GM´s or even more stupid Players are against you, also the dice are evil in SR4.^^

That's why Edge is more available to starting characters than Karma pool was in SR3.