Ooooh I remember the TMNT rpg by palladium.
I loved it but lost my copy unfortunately.

LOL I played a dragon straight out of character gen that was doing 6d6MD with most of his attacks. Surprisingly, I was the most powerful of the group... even moreso than the SON OF FRIGGIN' TYR godling character. I hate palladium.

Downside of being a dragon:
Your age is measured in days to weeks (of course, your max age is hundreds of years!)

Wait, that's not a detriment!

Oh, and you understand all magic, can use technomagic, and if you take an OCC, you get to actually have a decent range of skills. For irony, I made the dragon a Knight. And took the spell that let me understand all languages as one of my primary spells. Yay for being able to use anything ever.

Doesn't quite compare to a time traveling augmented velociraptor in coolness though.

Or dying by being hit by two skyscrapers (there was a black hole between them, character was crushed as both buildings moved towards it).

Jim was in some of the best games.

Just for curiosity sake... How is the Elf worse off than a human... they get 3 points of stats for their 30 BP cost as well as a Sense Enhancement... the only drawback is the loss of a single point of Edge... Seems pretty balanced to me...

Oh.... And Opinion is not Fact...

A jury of twelve would find them mentally competent.


Yes they bloody well are. Making one race strictly better than another is an unjustifiable decision if a system is intended to be balanced.

Complete and total balance is an illusion...

Well in a game system I look for fun. Its weird I know trying to have fun playing games but some of us go for it. But hey I totally respect those of you over in Soviet Russia where the games run you, I dig that in a game where fun isn't the objective you want things balanced .

As I sit here eating my peanut butter, mayonnaise, mustard, bologna and cheese sandwich I wonder if a sensible person can accept that people have differing tastes and might enjoy different things. I think the answer is clearly no, since the games run you the only tastes you are allowed to have are the ones the game give you.

The elf comes out 10 points behind the human purely on points, 5 points behind if you count their natural low-light vision as a 5-point advantage. However, this is a good illustration of the flaw of looking only at points - the elf can effectively spend 30 more points on Attributes, and has a higher soft-max on Agility, which is probably the most overall valuable Attribute of the game, and Charisma, a desirable stat for both shamans and faces. Of course, they come out as a bargain if you include the equivalent of 2 exceptional Attributes over the human (Agility and Edge balancing each other out, more or less), except that exceptional Attribute is hideously overpriced, and breaks down when you try to apply it more than once to approximate a metahuman's advantages.

The point is, they are technically a bit behind on points, but are optimal for certain roles.

Assuming that that makes the two races "balanced" against each other, then compare orks and oni in the same light.

That role being virtually every active task in the game. Its a small role but someone has to fill it.

When did I ever claim orks and oni were balanced against each other? Should they be? It comes down to variety vs. making every single option equally "good". Is every assault rifle as good as the Ares Alpha? Granted, I do wish they were more like elves vs. humans, or elves vs. dryads - in other words, one option not as optimal, but having some advantage that might inspire you to choose it.

Personally, I think the developers are virulently racist against blue-skinned people. I mean, Nartaki got screwed too.

Can you imagine what a turd of a game you'd have if everyone was a Nartaki? It wouldn't be Shadowrun, it would mult MultiarmedfreakRun. No thanks! I'm ok with them existing, but I really really really don't want them to be a no-brainer choice!

Of course it is. But Jesus, oni vs. ork ain't exactly rocket science.

Yeah but 5 points aint a lot either. I'd have non problem with them being mechanically balanced, but I just don't see 5 points as an issue.

That's a quality, a 2/3 contact, a rank of a skill plus extra, or 25,000 nuyen.

I never said that you claimed them to be balanced, I said that they need to be viewed in the same light as elf vs. human.

As for "equally good," no. But if Oni are going to cost more, there must be a niche that they fill. "Being/looking different" is not a niche.

Qualification: "Being/looking different" is a niche. One that should give you points.

Not disagreeing with that. Even something like the bonus to intimidation that I suggested would give them some niche to fill. It's just that a metatype being overcosted by 5 points, while not meaningless, really isn't that significant to me - there are a lot of bigger balance issues in the game.

Compared to others, yes, the Oni vs. Ork vs. Ogre is fairly minor. However, it is the most blatantly obvious of the balance issues in the game, which is why I use it as an example whenever discussing the absurd pricing of various RAW racial options.


Oh, and while 5BP may only be 0.25% of a standard characters starting value, it is still rather significant, considering just how often I overspent when I used the BP system (& still tend to overspend, with my Karma system).

Exactly... Not all that bad of an option...

Damn, you beat me to the snarky comment.

That's Me... Snarky AND Fast...

What would you rather have, a quality or nothing? A 2/3 contact or nothing? 25,000 nuyen or nothing?

It's not as bad as Alpha Omega. The different races don't cost BP, but some are clearly better than others. One of them is so inferior to it's genetic parent (half-demon and a half-angel had sex to create the annunaki) that it's equivalent to a rule that says, "During character creation you may chose to throw away 100BP for no gain. You may not gain these BP back at any point in the future."

(AO has a 500 BP chargen system and your expected character growth is about 100 to 150 BP per session--I'm not shitting you, it has power levels that greedily suck that BP up)

AO also has no skill for repairing items, despite a Repair Kit giving +3 to the check and a TN of [damage sustained]*[repair multiplier]. For Heavy Armor this means that 30 damage (of 100) has a TN of 90!

It should be noted that at chargen a character who is specialized gets about a 20-25 on their best skill on average.

You're rehashing what has already been said. Can you just accept that some people care less about 5 points than looking cool? Can you just accept that it's not retarded for some people to approve of how rareness is factored into BP costs for metavariants? Do you really have to beat the dead horse like your life depended on it? (If your answer is no, no, yes, then I feel sorry for you.)

Yes, no, I do until you admit that it's a game balance issue.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
- George Orwell

Well their not nearly as absurd as the ones you provided, especially for Elfs/Trolls and their metavariants.

No Comment needed.

You should not beat a dead horse just because you think one person still doesn't agree with you. Regardless, I can admit it's a game balance issue, but it's also so small as to be utterly inconsequential to my enjoyment of the game and therefore not worth house ruling. The points cost is based on fluff, and since I care about fluff, it's just fine with me.

You have admitted that you do not ask for balance in a system. This is all I ask.

No, I admitted that I don't care about very small imbalances, especially when justified by fluff. You know that I didn't admit that game balance doesn't matter at all to me, you know that you blew my words out of proportion to make that statement. And pretending to believe what you know to be false? That's hypocrisy. Anyway, why do you "ask" me to admit things? You care that much about what I think? Or do you simply need to feel like you "won?"

I am pretty sure that this topic has been hijacked, beat, tortured, and left for dead...

Oh Well, it was fun while it lasted...

Balance is balance. You have admitted that, to a point, you don't care about it.

Besides, this isn't a minor point; this is glaring.

Because I need to know that you're rational.

Why? You obviously discuss just for the sake of discussing. Is that rational?

Lars

Not sure if this has been picked up but oni do actually have 1 advantage under KarmaGen:

Slightly more points to put into stats at no cost other than weird skin

Thats why I made Mine with Karmagen

Hough!
Medicineman

Er, we have a problem with something and have to discuss this with people who don't care about it and now you say we discuss this issue just for the sake of discussing?

Why don't you care that it's incorrectly based on fluff, then?

The fluff states that most ethnic Japanese Orcs are Oni, and yet, Oni are priced higher than Orcs (despite having a penalty and no benefits in comparison to Orcs) purely based on them being "rare".

Oni aren't rare. They're actually, doing a bit of napkin math, probably the most common Orc metavariant.

Why, then, do we pay a point premium for their nonexistent rarity?

Um... magic?

-paws

And,if the additional 5 Points are for rarity of the Oni,
If I want to play a Japanese Ork (no Oni) which is much rarer than an Oni,why don't they charge 5 Poinzts for that ?

I don't like the "rarity-control by Point-cost" No Sir,not at all.Thats why I'm building every Variant with the Karma-system

HouHouka
Medicineman

Orks are a minority of the Japanese population, and Japan, being a fairly small place, has a small minority of the world's population. Right now, Japan has 127 million, compared to the world's 6 billion. That's 2% of the world population. Assuming that populations stay roughly proportional, Oni are a minority of a 2% minority population. To say that they're not rare is, frankly, kind of crazy. They're not rare like pixies or anything, but they're not an everyday sight outside of Japan.

And like I said for the last jillion pages, there's no objective standard to say what the right points cost for rarity is. What do you want, an aglorithm that returns a point cost based on actual population statistics? If we had a mathematical function that proved that Oni cost 3.129384 points for how rare they are, would that be the point cost you want to use? Give me a break. Oni cost 5 points more because all metavariants cost at least 5 points extra, regardless of their abilities. That's the rule, and it represents how every metavariant is rarer than their parent race. If you don't like it, you can complain, but it doesn't make you right. Please see previous pages for an explanation of how you're not god, and you don't have any better of an objective standard to judge BP costs than the devs, since the correct values are always subjective. I've said my piece on the matter, and you can argue with me, but I won't be responding to such arguments because I have said enough on the subject, pages and pages worth. So you can argue with yourself in public if you feel like you can add something that hasn't already been said.

That's incorrect.


Ogres cost the same as Orks, and get a free 5 BP advantage.

They are rarer than Orks, and yet they cost the same price.

Menehune, same cost as Dwarves - free Underwater vision.

Hobgoblins & Giants, same costs as their parent metatypes.


Which brings us back to the original question, why do Oni cost 5 BP more than standard Orks, 5 BP more than Hobgoblins or Ogres (both ork subtypes that cost the same as their parent type) and have a disadvantage with no compensation?

I disagree with the notion of controlling rarity through cost, I'd rather control rarity through making them more rare (a fluff effect for a fluff cause). Still, it's a design decision and I understand the reason it was implemented that way, even if I would have done it differently.
If it would have been implemented consistently, though (as in, every metavariant costs 5 BP more than its advantages would suggest), there'd be at least a lot less discussion about it.
Still, this thread feels like the rerun of a rerun of a flik that wasn't all that interesting in the first place...

The baiting and sniping in this thread needs to stop. Thanks.

Need to add the "Coolness" value into the cost calculation. Based on the results, Oni are empirically about 10 BP worth of "Cool" better then orks.

Every individuals measure of "Cool" is different, but the overall effect is expected that less people will pay that extra cost to be an Oni, and thus you have less Oni in the player population.

I've tried to stay out've this, but no, I can't resist.

1: Yes, the cost of Oni is a shaft.

2: Somebody that cares should FIX IT.

3: BP costs aren't the best form of enforcing in-game rarity - they only enforce rarity within PC groups, and PCs are exceptional by definition.

If the Sixth World's demographics are based on what players are likely to play, there are a lot more trolls than the fluff suggests.

Are Oni somehow intrinsically cooler than Ogres, Menehune, Giants, Hobgoblins and Gnomes?

What was done points wise to have less of them in the player population?