What do you suggest this would prove?

Er ... I count 120 BP to get to average everything for a human. Could you post your math? I may have it wrong.

EDIT: Right, eight. Me posting too fast. That's still 160, though, not 180. I'm not counting special attributes, since those aren't included under the cap, and I think it would be disingenuous to talk about the 200 BP thing and include stuff that doesn't count toward the 200 BP thing.

I count 160.

8 stats * 20 BP.

Unless you count Edge or Magic (that takes us to 180, both to 200).

How about: 8 Attributes at 1 all bumped to 3 costs 20 BP X 8 = 160 BP? Leaving 40 BP to play with.

The special Attributes are not counted in the 200 BP limit.

20x8 Natural attributes costs 160 Build Points, and that gets flat 3's. Actually, I come to 170-since they start with a 2 Edge, to get to a 3. Unless you consider 'average' to be 3+ the modifier, in which case a Human average edge is 4, so that's 200 BP counted in.

But 160 for the 8 that are the 'core' 8. It's still not a whole lot more to play with after that(especially since you need the other BP for Edge, Magic or Resonance, which while isn't toward the cap, sucks a large amount of BPs.)

Here's one for you folks:

Cain has played for 20 odd years and has gained a great deal of experience. In your estimation, how much of that experience has gone into improving his Gaming Skill, and how much into increasing his INT Attribute?

I bet most answers match what the SR4A rules suggest would happen.

I've seen a mage take a deadly physical wound from drain, in SR4 to boot.

Wow. It's 2005 all over again.

Especially as those "most" and "some" are a vocal minority. As it seems most of the players are fond of the changes.

No one does quad bypass by themselves. They have a team of additional surgeons helping out. If the rules were going to be realistic, then it should lean towards one person not being able to complete a quad bypass by themselves.

Most sheep are happy right up until the slaughter.

The rest are just happy to finally get some silence.

Oh, there will be silence after the slicin' an' dicin' is over.

I've gone over my issues with this change in a few other places, and I'm sure you've seen plenty arguments, but I'm actually more curious as to what the perceived problem was with direct combat spells. This turns a drain efficient spell into a not so drain efficient spell. Was the low drain of the spell seen as a problem, and if so, why the complicated change and not a simple increase in drain?



Some games favor attributes and some favor skills. Games that favor attributes tend to be of a more "superhero" style and I like that shadowrun leaned towards skills. I was actually very upset at the SR4 change to make attributes more important in rolls and much more efficient to raise than skills. Needless to say, I am in favor of making attributes cost more. There's more to say on the attribute "weight" decision in SR4, but they wouldn't be useful here.

Well, in a game, I don't necessarily want 100% realistic rules. I'd just make a RL game where most people die in one shot, with no magic, no metas, etc.


But even in the case of, say, 3 surgeons working on the quad bypass...4 Logic, 3 Medicine score. The other two only get to help the lead one, by the rules. They add their successes to his die pool. So say, average of 2 hits each, Lead Guy gets an extra 4 dice.

4 Logic, 3 Medicine, 4 extra helping dice, and 6 Medkit dice. Now its a bit better-77..but STILL not enough to ''buy'' to the Threshold of 6, and getting 6-7 hits on even 17 dice is not an easy thing. Again, it's not like a threshold of 4 is making it a cakewalk and it can still fail, but with the 6? It forces people to overpump their die pools anyway, lest they want to fail too often. If you take the average 3 dice=1 success, someone needs 18 dice, usually seen as 'a lot', to have a chance of hitting that. This is beyond even the Best Person in the World. a 7 Logic(freaking beyond genius), 7 skill(Steven Hawking), WITH a Specialization(+2 in whatever), has 16 dice, and still, on average, will not make this roll. Tossing a Cerebral Booster 3 on them would FINALLY get them to the point where they can make it roughly 50/50. (Or insert any stat/skill combo into this.)

People keep discussing ''keeping attributes/die pools to more reasonable levels'', and then they throw this stuff there that even brain-boosted(or whatnot), already World Class people pumped to the gills can only do if they get lucky...it just seems contrary to me.

As I mentioned before, on my personal characters, I prefer nice raw potential(solid Attributes), and a more middle skill-spread(which to me feels better than having a ton of 6's and a 7, which is world-class stuff.) Most of my characters WILL have one nice high skill, but the rest in the 3ish range, with 2s/4s sprinkled about as the concept fits.

I love the irony. Even more for the fact that it's unintentional.

I didn't want to say it.

At least, I got proof. Just look at the current poll about the changes. currently (atm of this post) there are 10-14 votes to leave the changes as they are compared to 4-6 votes to revert it back to SR4. lets have a look at the outcome of this poll.

Awesome proof.

The most awesome, cause it IS reflecting the vocals of the community on the DSF about their feelings towards the changes.

well, it seems to float around 2 of 3 more liking the new changes, but the fact there IS still around 1 out of 3 liking the old ones should not be disregarded(at this point.) It means that 1/3 of the people find these new changes NOT to their liking, and 1 of 3 is not like, say, 1 of 20, in which case it's definitely a specific taste coming in at that point. I mean, opinions are opinions, but I feel there are enough that are unhappy for them to maybe look at things.

First, the poll is currently at 30 votes - that is not enough to make an accurate judgment either way.

Second, as ElFenrir pointed out, 30%+ is not a "vocal minority", but a significant percentage. Yes, a minority, but not anywhere near a small one.

I wonder how many people like for example the drain change because they now can cockslap their groups mage, because he is less awesome now. Basically voting for the change out of spite, not because they think it was neccessary.

Internet polls (especially fan-initiated ones) are completely, 150% useless from a statistics point of view. They're self-selecting (meaning that you do NOT get a representative sample), they questions and available answers are generally biased in some form (meaning the results are skewed), and the number of responses is generally infinitesimal (much too small to be draw any kind of conclusions from).

Either way, the poll will be representive for the opinion of those DSers who involve themselves with the question of SR4A introducing well recepted changes or not over the course of the next days thus proofing either essay.

besides that any statistic can be read in multiple ways. I'd say: "only a vocal minority is concerned about the changes thus the changes are welcome for the most of the voters". But you could also say "because of the amount of users being concerned of the changes they are not THAT well recepted as needed to call it being welcomed overall thus implying we should rework them."
And there is always the issue how representative a poll can be based on who opened it, who designed it and who is more eager to participate in it.

Sometimes I have to wonder why people even bother to explain stuff to you.

[edit]crap, I think that is my second strike today. Mods, don't hurt me, I will self-ban myself fo a day, or something.

Dude, it's as if you sensed the gold writing coming.

Perhaps its so much fun to try? Besides that it's rather easy to steal a strike if you just lurk around and post some useless comments.

As amusing as these anecdotal little posts are, let's try to keep the tangent discussion to a minimum. This thread has been pretty good over all. Let's keep it that way.

Not true. A properly designed poll has no bias and includes a truly representative sample. For example, exit polls for Election Day. There's no bias, the sample size is generally quite large, and while it is somewhat self-selecting, there isn't a bias inherent in the choice to answer the poll or not (whereas there IS such a bias inherent in choosing whether or not to answer "Are you happy with the changes in SR4A?").

Does this make my argument any less true? The issue exists, being solved by the parameters you apply

Then a community of under several throusand members, by that rationale, is unpollable? What would be a representative sample of the Dumpshock community (which has maybe a hundred active members at this time)?

The smaller the population, the larger the proprotion of respondents needs to be. As a very extreme sample, imagine that you're polling a population of 3 people on whether they prefer skim milk, 1% milk, 2% milk, or whole milk. Could you really learn anything significant about the group by only polling one of them? Again, that's a very extreme example, but a population of a hundred isn't much easier to poll than a population of 3. I've been told that it's not really worthwhile to poll anything under a population of 10,000 or so, and you need at least several hundred responses to draw a conclusion.

Now, that's not to say that you can't use a poll from Dumpshock; assuming it's set up correctly and administered correctly, it could be used as part of an aggregate poll across several internet sites, for example. Don't ask me how I'd set up or administer such a poll, though; there are people who are paid to do that kind of thing, and I'm not one of them. It's really not as easy as it sounds to set up a completely unbiased poll, and I'm not even sure where to start. I also know very little about administering polls. I just know a bit about the statistics behind them from work-related market research, although I'm close to exhausting what I know in that regard.

Just curious, but what would be so not-biased about a poll that read:

''Do you prefer the old mechanics, the new mechanics, or a third mechanic of a houseruled nature the most''?

though the part about it not being easy might come into play here, and perhaps some sort of expert could tell us how this isn't as unbiased as it sounds.

Not an expert, but close enough as a similar concept is used for database design, which I am familiar with.

Your particular example does not allow the option of disagreeing with all three. The best way to do it (assuming the voters can give input) is to give Option 1, Option 2, Popular Alternative (optional), Popular Alternative (optional), Other (includes disagreement with all presented options), and Do Not Care (for those with no opinion on this poll, but must answer to complete other aspects of the poll).

The poll I setup includes all these options, excepting the "Other" for advertisements, which I feel was not necessary because that is essentially a yes-no question, & all grounds are covered (Leave as-is, change position, remove, or do not care), although the change-position option is somewhat limited, being more precise.

Like I said, I'm not an expert at designing polls. Still, I can pick out a couple possibilities.

First, "house rule" has a slight negative bias all of its own.
Second, from what little I remember of the discussion, the order that choices are presented can introduce a bias. I don't know if that's the case here, if it's a very specific case, or what.
Third, that question is quite "all or nothing". There's no middle ground where you can answer "Well, I like that direct combat spells cost more drain now, but I don't think it was the right way to solve the problem", for example, unless that's precisely what the house rules do (and then see #1).

#3 is one reason you see a lot of polls with "strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree" as the answers, with several questions that approach a larger meta-question from several angles.

Yes, please don't take my posts here as any kind of condemnation of your poll. I just wanted to point out that the debate on polls and counter-polls and vocal minorities and so on isn't really useful from a market research standpoint. Like it or not, Dumpshock (or any other internet forum devoted to a game, such as Paizo Publishing's D&D boards) isn't a good place to conduct market research. At least, not without other polls in other places to compare and contrast with.

A poll on the dumpshock fourms would be far far far from scientific and accurate. 1st a certain type of gamer posts on forums. Different form the typical gamer. I would also say it appears that most of them are probably GM's or have Gmed on several occasions, when most players have never GMed before. Second, a specific group of people tend to respond to polls online. So you'll probably end up with two extremes, those who love the item in question and those who hate it. So a poll on dumpshock is only valid to find out what the posters on Dumpshock think. This will offer no real grasp as to what the players outside of Dumpshock think.

You then have the phrasing of the question and the answers to take into consideration. Sometimes a person can be torn between two answers, or not agree with any of the answers totally.

Take a look at the current poll that is up.

Why Do You Play Shadowrun ?, Why this RPG and not another ?? Options Track this topic
Why Shadowrun and Not another RPG.

What is the problem here? It assumes you play Shadowrun and Not another RPG. Personally I've played Shadowrun one night, D&D the next day, and Vampire: The Masqurade after the D&D Game. So why do I play Shadowrun and not another RPG? Simple answer is that I don't. But that isn't an option in the poll.

My personal opinion on SR4A, despite the fact that I haven't bought the PDF yet (I don't have the money) is that if they were to publish a new book with just new art, fiction, and a few updated character archetypes more outrage would be had than this, and for better reason. I agree with the attribute cost change - I feel that skills should be more important than attributes in any situation.

I'm glad that they're not invalidating previous SR4 book purchases, though. That'd kill my budget.

Kudos to the CLG team!

If a GM thinks magicians need, uh, cock-slapping, then by implication they think that the change is "necessary." It does seem that some of the changes were made to reign in power-gamers but so long as the changes were made in such a manner that it doesn't interfere with the non-power gamers then that's a positive for many people (excepting those that like power-gaming). For the most part I think that was done, but not with the Direct Combat spells. I think if I have some time this afternoon, I'll actually do some analysis of the change and that might help resolve some of the arguments (yeah, right).

K.

how about making it a teamwork extended test? and just set the threshold silly high...

oh, never mind, i see someone else have already gone into detail on that option...

the potential problem there is that one person may dislike one change, another may dislike a different one, but only a small portion may dislike the change as a whole (and have a gut reaction against any change)...

I would hold that the OR changes fall into the same category as DC Spells. The change doesn't effect Power Gamers 20+ Dice Pools it effects ordinary first time players using an Archetype to sneak past a sensor grid.

It has always been my opinion that if you want to nerf the Power-Gamers then you should employ a Power-Gamer to design the nerf.

I know exactly how to cheese a character and exactly how to put a stop to it.

No healing Drain with First Aid. That would fix it.

now that would be a break with the past...

Teaching the new player his character cannot do everything, but he needs a good hacker. WOW. A mage who is not a runner team by himself any more! How plain unholy.


Then please, design a fix that nerfs the stunbolt assaulting mage, and the overpoweredness of Karmagen versus BP-gen with Awakened and Emerged, without any unwanted side effects.

Well, not to be snarky, but my fix for that is "I don't care how legal that character was built, or advanced, I am not running a game for that". Aka "I don't care what the rules say goes, I decide what power level we're playing at" aka "It doesn't matter how you build your character, all I care about is that it fits into the team, both with regards to power-level and background".

Any character that cannot survive without support won't show up at the meet - it's as simple as that.

There's quite a difference between "I can't survive without support" and "I can't do a run by myself without support".

It's not. Mages got nerfed on influencing technology. a domain of Hackers and Technomancers. there was much flaming and calculating to compare the latters and Technomancers were considered too uber. that got adressed. You feel your builds being to weak? Increase Karma or BP in your group. You think your characters advance too slow? Increase the karma you get each session. The changes made rebalanced the triangle of builds (mundane - awakened - emergent) for the better.

Yes, sure, but he was talking about an alternative to the way CGL addressed these by changing the rules. I completyl agree with you on handling this in groups, but I guess the regulations for Missions make more RAW solutions necessary.

Also, I'd just like to see him do it.