Wow-10 pages-I think I last posted 5 ago.....I'm going to avoid comparing 4.0, 4.5, 3.0, 2.0, and 1.0, and Chain Mail.

Any RPG can be used or abused by the players and or GM. It can happen in D&D, Rifts, SR,. Paranoia (well GM abuse is there at least), Twilight 2000, WOD, MERP, Call of Cthulu and any other RPG out there. To prevent abuses like the pornomancer, it is up to the players and GM to put limits on themselves and play the game they want to play. That being said, what is good about the game for one group, does not make it so for others. Some find the SR3 rules better as they like the TN# success mechanics, others like 4th ed because it is more streamlined/restricted in defining difficulty.

W00t! Page 11!

Larme, when one tactic consistently auto-wins fights, to the point where the rest of combat is mopping up, you have a problem. And when your only counter is a contrived situation such as high background counts at Stuffer Shacks, you're railroading.

You're trying to straw-man me into saying that any tactic that ever auto-wins is broken. That;s not the case. A new tactic, or one that has believable rules-based counters, is not broken. For example Flechette ammo used to be the Win, until they adjusted it's AP.

Matsci: On a quick search, I found 26 threads, none of which were started by me. I don't have the time to go searching through them, so you can repeat the search yourself.

Sure rules can be house ruled. I am in fact doing that by converting SR to the much better D&D4 ruleset. Another person at my table is doing the same but using nWoD as the ruleset. We'll sit down as a group, try both and see which we prefer. We've all agreed (and another group she was running also agreed) that SR4 is just not for us. The rules are too broken to bother with. We do however love the fluff but the rules don't let us play that fluff the way we want. So we don't play.

I most certainly do not play street level. We have had a few games dissolve because the group decided that their characters would rather "retire" to milk runs that they can face roll instead of going for the big stuff. I've also run games where we all agreed to have some sort of "big" anti-establishment background hook for each character to encourage that high-level, larger-than-life end game. I also understand that any RPG is unbalanced and that all RPGs require the group to set its own version of reality. However, I am finding that the handwaves and the "huh?" moments are getting bigger with SR4.

Magical Security: what's the point? Unless you are directly guarding something that is itself magical what is the point of magical security in SR? None of it is anywhere near good enough to stop a determined Shadowrunner, and an "on-call" astral mage is more than enough to deal with minor threats. And don't give me "Background count" as an answer to making things difficult. Ares is as big into Fung Shui as Wuxing (or whatever) is into Apple Pie and the 4th of July.

So there's a perfect example of the way reasonableness applies in my games. Why would Ares ever mess around with Background Count? Sure if you are hitting their Bug research facility they might. But that arms warehouse you are knocking over? Nah. Would you even bother paying handfuls of money to Ward said warehouse? Probably not. How does keeping astral mages out of the warehouse help your company? They aren't going to steal the stuff astrally.

Or maybe answer me how any of you guys justify runners getting cyber and being able to go anywhere in Downtown Seattle without getting caught?

I've done a pretty good job of explaining my views and how my table operates. Show me how yours does the same? Maybe you've thought of something I haven't.

I wasn't trying to straw man you, I was trying to take your arguments to their logical conclusion. I'm glad to know I was wrong though -- that's not what you meant, even if it might have sounded like that to me.

What we have now is nothing other than a factual disagreement -- does manaball auto-win like you claim? In your experience it does, in mine, it doesn't. That's not really a dispute we can resolve, because each of our experiences are anecdotal. No two games of Shadowrun are run exactly alike, and there's no "right" way to play. I've tried to suggest ways to alter your game to deal with the problem, but you've shot all of them down as railroading. To you, every solution that isn't a house rule nerf is a railroad. If that's how you want to define it, then fine. Just recognize that you're not rationally evaluating my arguments, you are instead defining and re-defining one pejorative term, "railroading," to defeat every argument I make. I submit that you're still using an overbroad meaning of the term which is actively preventing your own enjoyment of the game more than it is defeating my arguments. All you have to do to make my ideas work is to ignore the term railroading and open your mind to different ways of playing. But you clearly can't, which is why you can't concede any part of my argument to be true.

Anyway, again, there's no right way to play Shadowrun. The only way to play wrong is to play in a way you don't enjoy. I'd suggest that this is exactly what you're doing if one tactic always wins. You're not playing The Wrong Way, but you ARE playing in a way that's detrimental to your own enjoyment. And you're preventing yourself from fixing it by pejoratively labeling all remedies as railroading. You've dug your own grave here, and now you're lying in it. Your solution, to rewrite the rules, is just digging the same grave deeper, because there's no assurance that you'll come out any better than you started. Every tweak ripples across the system, requiring interminable re-tweaking until you no longer recognize the game.

I'm reminded of the guy who wrecked the entire game just because of Stick-n-Shock. He nerfed stick-n-shock because it killed spirits too easily. Of course, this made spirits too good against mundanes, so he had to nerf them. Of course, the nerfed spirits were too easy to kill with guns, so he had to nerf firearms in general. This meant that spellcasting was way more powerful than firearms, so that had to be nerfed too. In other words, he ruined the game because of one ammo type. You can't just nerfbat individual things because it throws the entire game balance into disarray. It might look unbalanced right now, but you don't have the expansive consciousness necessary to comprehend the entire system all at once and determine the focal points where a tweak would improve balance. For all you know, a tweak unbalances the system more than it helps, it nerfs one thing, but then the PCs just find the next most broken thing because the incentives shift, and so on. I'm not saying that house rules are wrong, but I am saying that they don't fix anything. They just change it. You might prefer a changed game, but that's no basis to say it's a better game, or a fixed game.

Blasphemy!

I have not actually played D&D 4th, but I have looked over the core rules, & have extensive experience with other D20 systems. As such, I feel justified in saying that the D20 system (regardless of edition) is crap. Seriously, one of (if not the) worst game systems out there. It does work - kind of - but has so many flaws they cannot be fixed without creating an entirely new system. That & the class/level base...


I have a good amount of experience with nWoD, and that system is vastly inferior to SR4. The basic setup of the game's mechanics is nearly identical to SR4, but the implementation is bullshit. Combined with the fact that White Wolf has absolutely no concept of mechanical balance whatsoever, it is not worth playing (one of my side projects - currently on hold - is adjusting the SR4 system for the WoD setting).


Yes, SR4 has a number of problems. However, the significant majority of those are purely numerical - this quality costs to much, that power gives to little benefit (or to much), etc. These are easily adjusted; I have even posted a House Errata here specifically dealing with these issues in the core book. The few remaining problems are (with the exception of Chase Combat) also easily fixed.

D&D 4 isn't even a tabletop game, it's pen and paper video game. No options, no customization, no fun for a Shadowrun fan. If you think D&D 4 is a good system, that's fine, but the two games aren't comparable as better or worse. They're apples and oranges. One is a game with truly unlimited customization, no classes, no limits, no nothing, and of course nothing to stop you from rules-lawyering a powerful badass into existence. The other is a game with truly 0 customization. There are rigid classes, and the choice of one class or another matters little as far as how powerful you are. Even the choices of different abilities lead to almost no difference between characters -- a rogue is a rogue, no matter what combos he learns. Not so with any Shadowrun archetype. You can prefer one or the other, but that's a preference only, and has nothing to do with goodness or badness of systems. Each has its pros and cons -- Shadowrun customizable and thus easier to make odd and colorful characters, D&D rigid and thus harder to make weak or broken characters, but also harder to make them interesting.



Sure, astral security on call makes a lot of sense. And if an enemy shows up, they send a spirit who is ordered to protect the guards and defeat the runners -- that means counterspelling dice plus a magical threat, almost on demand. It's fair, and it's an effective counter to mages. The only way that it wouldn't work is if every security guard stands in a cluster and gets manaballed at once -- I don't think that's part of any established security procedures handbook, however.



Lots of facilities hold secret things. Warehouses aren't the only target that mages go after, are they? If they are, then your assertion that your games aren't street level is laughable. Runners attack all kinds of facilities, many of which want to keep prying eyes out, and many of which might indeed contain magical secrets as well as mundane.



Uh... rhetorical question? How about fake licenses? Regardless, I don't think there are cyberscanners on the street, there are just too many people. In a AAA zone you have to operate in Active mode for scanning, but unless you go inside a building somwhere you're not going to get your torso x-rayed.



Mine mostly operates in the Redmond Barrens. When we leave for a job, we sortie by car, traveling to our destination in relative anonymity. We stay out of AAA sec zones unless we've got a clear exit strategy and a LOT of time to prepare.

Although Magic as a whole in the world is rare, I have always viewed that Magic is still present (if not standard) in any situation where there is something work protecting. For a corp facility, for example, its all about cost benefit: is potential loss if this facility is attacked greater than the cost of implementing the magical security measure? The fluff states that there are fairly large companies that specialize in contract Magical security of various levels. This includes simply creating Wards (around key areas), Binding Spirits to patrol, having Magicians on-call, and having Magicians on-site. Magic is best countered with Magic, even if all the company can afford is to pay a Mage to show up and cast Mana Static and then leave. You have hours of anti-magic protection for a particularly sensitive area right there. Also remember the street proverb "Geek the Magic first". All you need is for your gun guy to survive that first spell, and then all Smartlinks are on the guy who cast the spell. Yes, casting powerful spells is that obvious.


Why not? What's the value of goods going through the warehouse, or stored there at any one point in time? No an astral form isn't going to steal anything, but a theft attempt will almost invariably include Magical support and a Ward does hinder that, even if just a little.


Fake SINs and Licenses are pretty cheap and readily available to Shadowrunners. Otherwise, you just stay out of the secure areas. Not all parts of Downtown Seattle have A or better coverage, several neighbourhoods have B or C ratings (Greenwood, Northgate, Riverton, Bitter Lake, Central Downtown (some sections), Capitol Hill, Columbia (some), Interbay (some), Laurel Hurst, Ravenna, Sea-Tac (the area just outside is a B, Tukwila... is that enough neighbourhoods to run in?). Yes, you can't get a permit for an "F" item, but that's one of the counters for those items, you can't just walk around with one stuffed under your coat. Additionally, having a Hacker in the group for defensive purposes was a purposeful design decision in the game, I'm fairly certain. It was part of the move to re-integrate the Hacker with the rest of the team.


I thought I had in my previous post. Is there something else specific you want me to elaborate on?

First, let me say many people are WAY too harsh on D&D4. It is actually quite an interesting system and more customizeable than D&D3 ever was. They evened out the power levels on all classes so that lvl 18 Wizard = lvl 18 Fighter. Unlike previously where Fighter was pointless after level 10. Also each class within a Role (Striker, Defender, Leader, Controller) is VERY different from each other. Depending on how you build your class it could be VERY different from the same class. I'd recommend heading over to the Wizards boards and reading some of the "Edition Wars" threads with an open mind to what the 4ed players are saying.

Back to SR.

Wards: What do they actually do for you? Stop Clairvoyance? Not anymore. Prevent astral projecting? Check. Slow down a Spirit's Search power? Check. Prevent non-ritual spells from being cast outside to inside? Check. Do they actually stop an intrusion by a runner team? No. They stop astral/dual natured only. Here's another CBA function for you: a warded facility is now marked as being important enough to need a ward. Does advertising something is there justify the defenses the ward provides?

Mana-Static: Now no one can use magic. So again, what is the point of magic?

Geek the Mage: This tends to be very meta-gamey at most tables I've seen. What identifies someone as a mage in SR? How would you ever tell that the guard holding an assault rifle, wearing corp sec armor, and taking cover is casting at you (baring obvious magical source-to-target effects)? Most runner mages look like mages because we as players think it looks cool. What if the runner mage was decked out in combat armor and used aura masking to make it look like he had excessive cyberware? Also, Manaball doesn't create any physical effect so no training of smartlinks on him!

Okay, yes, there are more facilities than Warehouses. Duh. I was using an example. Just because I used that as an example doesn't mean that's all we do. Usually we hit a warehouse and a chip shop before any run to make sure we have all the gear we need for the real run.

Also who says that the theft attempt is going to include magical support? Only 1% of the world has ANY magic and most of that 1% are lay magicians and astral perceivers. Again, the presence of magic in the security set-up actually GUARANTEES that the thieves will bring a mage if they are so determined. So now you are spending money on mages to enable magical thieves.

Honestly your best deterrent against mages is opting out of magic. On call mage pops in and drops Mana Static or else 1 mook spends his first action lobbing a FAB grenade at the runners. (Yes these are both magical effects but the idea is to remove magic from the equation)

Granted. Not all areas are A rated. You will need to go into A rated neighborhoods, especially if you want to get to the "top tier" of running. As Frank was so fond of pointing out with the Agent Smith problem, make enough rolls and eventually your defenses fail. Every shop checks your SIN and every Star drone checks your SIN/Permits. Sooner or later your dice will fail you and you will be discovered. You will get your cyber checked all the time. It is very cheap to do and only requires you to be within 15 m. It is in the Star's best interests to do so since prevention is more important for the bottom line than catching someone after a crime.

Point granted about hackers.

Agreed a Ward is about as a good a defense as a locked door, but it is a relatively cheap way to include some form of magical protection. Dual-natured guard critters are also a good, inexpensive way to provide magical and mundane protection.


If some corp or facility doesn't have enough resources for "active" magical defenses, they can even the playing field by essentially negating Magic. It's a form of Magical defense.


Nothing, until they cast their first spell as I stated.

So, for Force 6+ anyone who happens to be in the area will automatically notice who cast the spell.


As has been pointed out before, the best (most effective) counter to magic is magic. I firmly believe this is by design. Facing Magic with no Magical support is a virtual "no win" scenario. The threat that intruders may bring Magical support necessitates Magic in order to counter it. Isn't this that "Nash equilibrium" stuff that people keep talking about?


Conceding a point? Is Cain reading this?!

That just means your players don't know about the tactic, yet. And it might not just be manaball; it could be stunball, or any direct combat spell. Basically, do they know they can combine Aid Sorcery with Edge for a big nasty boom?Or they may be saving it for an ace in the hole. I'd question rather or not your players have been fully educated in what they can do with their mage.

Again, there are 26 threads that I found that discuss how overpowered direct combat spells are. It's not just me, and it's not just a few anecdotes.

Also, you don't need to have something in your game to know it's broken. Pornomancers are hideously broken, enough so that many won't even let one into their games. We can safely say that they've never had to deal with one, but they know it's broken.

There are two kinds of evidence: scientific and anecdotal. You can acquire enough anecdotal evidence to jump to a conclusion, but it can never prove anything. This factual controversy is indeed unresolvable, unless you can suggest a methodology to run a controlled experiment, yielding quantitative data on which we can run statistical analysis. I say it's not auto-win, you say it is. You can argue about why you're right until you're blue in the face, but it will never constitute proof.

As for the pornomancer, I've already discussed this with you in the thread. Not all situations can be won using social skills, therefore the pornomancer is not invincible. By a reasonable definition, only the invincible tactics which have no effective counters are broken, and since pornomancers are quite vulnerable as character builds, they're anything but.

Another straw man. I never claimed the pornomancers were invulnerable, although a well-built one is certainly no more vulnerable than a comparable archetype. What I said was, you don't need to let a pornomancer into your game to know that it's broken. Similarly, just because you haven't had a problem with manaballs, chase combat, or any of the dozen or so commonly house-ruled aspects of SR4, doesn't mean they're not broken. We can demonstrate the brokenness of the pronomancer statistically; we can show the problems with Chase Combat, and so on and so forth.

On a quick search, I came up with over 500 threads on house rules. Come on, you can't say that people aren't having problems at all, if there's so many requests for house rules. Weight of evidence is also considered proof in scientific circles.

Just a few thoughts after having sat down and created five characters, no actual play time involved.

First off, the font choice (starts at page 14) for the flavor prose is pretty poor. When I kick up the PDF to 150% it goes from being a pain in the ass to merely being annoying. The book, with my reading glasses on (20/10 corrected vision) is simply a pain in the ass.

The art, I will refrain from bitching about the art as I am well aware that my tastes really go back to the 1st and 2nd edition styles.

The tech, while I think AR is bloody brilliant I think that they missed the boat in lots of other areas but again I have to cut them some slack. Technology moves in strange and mysterious paths, from carbon nanotubes breakthroughs to the train wreck of synthetic spider silk. With that said, there are some areas that I disagree with the path choosen.

Electric vehicles I think are going to be the prevalent method of transportation and that the underpowered stats that they have been given doesn't reflect even current technology. Electric motors have more torque than either gas or diesel engines, especially at the bottom end. Four electric motors (each one operating a single wheel) controlled via computer is going to give the driver a handling that is going to surpass a single engine. You are redistributing the weight to the four contact points with the road, more torque, and precision control of that power at each wheel. Top end speed, I see no reason why electric cars won't be able to be competitive with gas engines. Range, that is one area that at present is the short coming of electrics. Some smart engineer is going to figure out how to combine metalic plastic batteries and carbon nanotubes (room temperature super conducter) to create a battery that is light weight and able to deal with the discharge and recharge issues.

IEC Fusion (Interial Electrostatic Confinement) or Bussard's Plasma Wiffleball...or Plasma Fusion is going to be the future of electrical generation. The fuel is boron-11 (plentiful and cheap) and the radiation stops when the reactor is turned off (none of that pesky radiation crapola to deal with). If they were to fast track this project (although currently powerful groups are quietly opposing it...guess who) they could probably have the first comercial plant operating in five years. The displacement of natural gas, coal fired, and nuclear plants would follow as they simply can't compete with a clean fusion reactor that has footprint of three school buses.

I could go on and on about the tech but I need to get some sleep, so I will return later with part deus of my thoughts on 4th edition.

I didn't say you made that argument. I was using the reasonable definition of broken -- Something is broken if it cannot reasonably be countered. I was using that definition because it's actually possible to apply it with some degree of objectively. Your definition shifts to encompass whatever you feel like it should encompass. You have yet to articulate the standard after you said that my own interpretation of your definition was a straw man. I don't want to attack a straw man, but you've left me with a nothing man. If you have some kind of workable definition that's as plausible as mine, I'd be glad to hear it.

As far as science goes, your data is still scientifically invalid. You have no control. You're saying that "over 500" is a significant number, without actually running any stats to find that out. I mean, you haven't even compared that to how many posts don't use the term, FFS. That's like telling me that 50 North Yukastanis think I'm cool. Without knowing how many people are in North Yukistan, I don't know whether that makes me a national hero or a nobody. Over 500 might mean a lot, or it might mean nothing. You're making a supposition based on common sense, but that's not proof. Even if everyone agreed, that would not be proof -- the fact that everyone thought Galileo was wrong didn't have any bearing on whether he was, to use an uncontroversial example. What you can prove is that a lot of people agree, but that proves nothing except their opinions -- commonality of belief doesn't prove something to be right. If it did, what a world this would be.

This is an argument without a conclusion. First of all, all Shadowrun experience is anecdotal. There is no such thing as a control group when it comes to people playing Shadowrun. It has too many variables, it defies quantfication. You can never show that something is definitively broken, because no two groups are alike, and no two groups have exactly the same anecdotal evidence to work with. That doesn't mean you can't agree with each other based on common experiences, but it does mean that you're simply making judgments about how you prefer the game, not deducing facts and how and why the game is Balanced or Unbalanced. Again, you don't even have a definition of balanced, so how would you know? You're just going by whether it feels right or not. And in the end, that's what everyone does, no matter what mask of objectivity they try to wear. An RPG is evaluated subjectively based on anecdotal experience. Just because it works one way in some cases, or even many cases, means nothing for another case. The fact is, 5000 people could agree with you, and 200 disagree, but both sides could be equally correct because they simply do not share the same data sets because they are not playing the game in the same way. The only way to get scientific proof is to run a controlled experiment and then reproduce it, which you simply can't do with Shadowrun. You can poll people and survey posts and what have you, but all that gives you are inferences, not proven facts. You cannot win this argument. Struggle as you might, it is unwinnable. You can make up your mind, you can argue forever, but you cannot present me with actual proof that you're right. As long as my preferences differ from yours, we will disagree, and neither of us will be right or wrong. Because judgments about game balance are ultimately nothing more than statements of "I like it," or "I don't like it." It's hard for me to understand how anyone could reject this, the idea that you can't have a final proof of a subjective judgment, but here you are, rejecting it. Or at least I think you are. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised again.

Playstyles vary too much. Apparently there are even people who consider D&D 4E as a better game than Shadowrun 4E.

So when every warehouse at the docks is warded, how excatly you know which one of them holds something important just now.



What kind of "lets stand here in the middle of the yard so that nice runner mage can stunball as all" guard are there in your world.
I can maybe understand if theyr all insede the spell radius, but thats only enough for indirect combat spell so a fireball would hurt like hell. But the mage needs a LOS for all the targets with that direct combat spell and that just isn't/shouldn't be possible in a fight.

I'd rather ask: If something is not warded, why is it important enough to hire a runner group with a mage in it? If something is valuable enough to hire a mage to go after it's valuable enough to hire magical assets as protection. And if a shadowrunning mage works for so little money to make warding not worth it why would other mages be more expensive? It doesn't really add up.

Larme, polls are a well-respected , long0standing, highly-proven method of scientific analysis. They're a way of turning anecdotal evidence into hard fact. Now, you're attacking the meta-argument instead of debating the facts at hand: a significant portion of Dumpshockers have issues with the SR4 ruleset.

If you want statistical significance, though, then just take a look at the members list. There's approximately 10,000 members, although most of them have only a few posts. Eliminating the ones who have zero posts gives us a much smaller number. But even if we ignore that, 500 is a significant percentage of 10,000.


A twenty-meter diameter is much bigger than most Americans realize. And the best place for guards to stand is withing sight of each other, so they can see if someone goes down. Finally, if you've got tn guards and you can only manaball eight, that's still an instant Win.

No. With AR, biomonitors and tacnets there is no need to bunch up. And guards who do not take cover are not really worth much to oppose either. Again - if the guards are that easy to manaball then the objective they guard is likely not worth the cost of hiring a team with a mage to steal it.

The relevance of the poll is only statisticly relevant given the pool that it is taken from, assuming that Dumpshock is representative of everyone who plays SR is dangerous.

I would also point out that context is very important as well, something that numbers don't provide.

Take for instance that 3rd edition sold in the neighborhood of 300,000 copies, 4th edition has sold (at last I heard publicly) 100,000 copies. Now, I could state that 200,000 people stopped playing SR when 4th edition came out. I could propose that WoW has decimated table top RPG's. There are any number of things that I could say, but the raw numbers don't put the situation into context.

What I do find interesting is that four years after the fact, a thread like this pops up on a forum that has such strong ties to Catalyst. It begs the question...why?

Why post something that is going to draw so much fire? Tilting at windmills...or is there some hope that some measure of change is going to be achieved?

If you are shooting for the second...I think that you are going to be vastly disappointed.

Well, Bob, I think that the OP (being a newly registered, new to SR4 poster) simply wanted to rant about the changes between 3 and 4 that he doesn't not like. The reason this thread came up on a forum like this is because the OP was upset about the changes from previos editions, which are, in his opinion, bad chang3es changing the feel and style of the game. In short, I agree with him on almost (i only re-skimmed the post just now, so i don't want to say all, just in case) all points. It's entirely possible that, being new to Dumpshock, he did not quite understand the inevitable shit storm that would follow. Plenty of other people have (myself included I believe...) posted similar rants, back when 4th edition was coming out.

As for the rest of us (yes I'm including myself here)? Well, we're all (ok, not all, but the loudest of us anyway) argumentative bastards, who (nearly) always refuse to concede a point, no matter how sound, logical, or correct.

I'm pretty sure no one really thinks any of this will change anything official. It started as one person's rant, and grew into... people repeating the same things over and over again two hundred times. But well, this was basically expected by everyone after reading the OP, wasn't it?

Now thats just stupid and what has them seeing each other have to do with the mage actually having a LOS at them, manaball does absolutdly nothing to some one who's in cover.

What's not to like about D&D4?

1) All the classes are on the same power scale meaning that they are all playable at all levels of experience. No one shines.
2) Classes are balanced so that by missing one you are not gimping your group's ability
3) Ritual casting available to all means you aren't dependant on priests for raise dead or cure disease anymore
4) Strong emphasis on teamwork as opposed to solo play
5) Clearly defined roles means that you have a good idea of how you are supposed to contribute to the team
6) Flexibility in class features and powers allows you to customize your role to your playstyle

Contrast that with SR4:

1) Mages far overpower most builds. With 2 mages you can replace everyone in the group. You could probably do it with 1.
2) Basic assumption is that team cannot work without a mage of some sort (not in my opinion but in many)
3) Doesn't really compare.
4) Game is built with it in mind but not main emphasis. The only archetype with decent buffs is the Mage. Hacker/technomancer can help but those rules aren't defined well.
5) Roles can be difficult for new players. Decently well defined but VERY customizable. Can lead to lots of sub-optimization through generalization.
6) Very customizable characters.

Honestly it is point #1 that really takes the cake for me. All the other points stack up pretty well. I do like the hard-coded game benefit of team work. But that isn't a deal breaker for me in SR.

The first time a ran a game for one group they had to kill a corporate executive who was guarded by a corporate spec ops bodyguard. They waited until he was on route and forced his car to the side of the road. The mage manaballed all of them to death as they exited the vehicle to take up combat positions. The expression on the face of the street sam (who spent WAY more time making their character) was truly heartbreaking. That group never wanted to play SR again.

As for Manaball not affecting everyone all the time. I would like to point out that usually people will poke their head out of cover so that they can fight back (this is what happened above). If everyone has to cower behind cover for fear of mages delaying action with Manaball hasn't the mage just neutralized the entire opposition? Or at least forced them to fight at only a fraction of their force? (as squad 1 pops up followed by squad 2 once it's safe)

Also, them staying out of line of sight destroys the Geek the Mage theory Malachi proposed since 1st group pops up and gets destroyed by Force 10-12 Manaball. They can't relay the position of the mage since dead people don't get to perceive or speak. Second group knows that there is a mage but not who it is since first dead group didn't get a chance to speak. I don't know how the sparkly light show that they decided to add in 4.5 interacts with technology but since Manaball is a mana spell I imagine that cameras probably DON'T see it.

Sure, it's just my anecdotal experience, but seems like broken rules didn't work for that particular group. Wouldn't have happened in D&D4 since no one class totally overpowers another (unless they were all Minions in which case the Controller shines). In D&D4 each role has its shining moments but no one class shines ALL the time.

Apparently you haven't taken any statistics classes. Polls are a valid means to collect scientific data, but only if they are VALID polls. A flawed poll can have skewed results, can measure the wrong thing... any number of things. And no, you can't just compare two numbers and say that one is a significant percentage of another. You have to do math and evaluate the statistical significance. It's not a value judgment you can make in your head, not if you want scientific validity anyway.

Again, even a poll wouldn't resolve this dispute. The best we could determine from a poll would be what people thought. We could find out whether a statistically significant percentage of the population thinks that certain things are broken. But that doesn't measure if they're broken, it measures what people thing. People can be wrong. I'm not saying they are or not. I'm saying it defies proof, because it is nothing more than a subjective judgment of how much you like thing. "I like it" or "I don't like it" depend only on someone's feelings about the facts. The facts are what they are, but the conclusions, as in broken or not, are not facts. They are decisions on whether you like the facts or not. So again, you should give up, this is a question without a final answer and a debate without a possible winner.



Really? All that technology and their best tactic is to use their eyeballs? You can claim that your GMs aren't uncreative all you want, but it's shining through... You pretty much claim that one tactic always wins, and then you go ahead and reveal that your NPCs always do the same thing. Can I get a "no, duh?"


@Cheops: Let's not turn this into a discussion of D&D 4. You can't compare the games, they're apples and oranges. D&D 4 is a highly structured game with almost no customization. SR4 is an unstructured game with total customization. They are just too different to call one good and the other bad -- they're different animals. Both are enjoyable for their own reasons. Some people like one and not the other. Just leave at that for the love of gawd.

So I'm not allowed to argue back at a comment specifically targeted at me? I'd also point out that this is a thread saying that SR4 sucks and I am comparing it against another system that in my opinion doesn't suck. So far no one has given any reasons why SR4 is better than D&D4 other than "D&D has no customization" which I am refuting.

I'll also note that you, sir, chose, out of my entire post to only pick at the D&D4 aspects of it. You have nothing to say about my anecdotal SR experience? What about the stuff I said about Manaball and LOS?

I agree with this statement, but would like to point out that it cuts both ways. We're talking about a 33 foot radius of death. I've been to many office buildings which have hallways between 8 and 15 feet wide with doorways on either side every 10 feet, and right-angle turns in the hallway every 40 feet or so. Stairwells are between 15 and 30 feet square. In that type of environment, it is very realistic that your enemy might pop out of a doorway or come around a blind turn closer than 33 feet away. Hitting that target with your manaball (or any of the other AOE spells) exposes you (and any of your teammates who are between you and the target) to the same damage from being in the area of effect. I'd say that it would be unusual to be in an office complex and be able to see a whole group of crouching opponents that are more than 33 feet away.

[edit]It's true that manaball/stunball can sometimes be an 'I win' button - but not all the time. If you have an unobstructed view of all the bad guys, and they're within the required radius (usually easy for high-force spells) and there's no background count or counterspelling, then you can wipe out all the opposition with minimal drain damage. With a high enough force you can usually overcome counterspelling and a modest BC and still wipe out the opposition, with higher but still survivable drain. However, if you can only see two or three of the ten guards at any one time because they're hiding behind partitions, that drain will start adding up. If you target guards that are closer to you than the radius of your spell, you're teammates will be pissed when they start taking damage from friendly fire. If the guards have any sense they're hiding behind that haven lilly pot, turning off the lights, popping thermal smoke and dropping nausea/nerostun grenades, all of which will make the mage's job harder. It's not railroading or nerfing for a GM to have the security guards be knowledgable of magical threats and to use intelligent tactics for the scenario they're facing.

Except that you can withhold casting dice to reduce the radius.

A Spec Ops bodyguard without any magical backup? What's next? "The samurai can kill people who do not wear armor, stand in the open and don't have any enhancements, that's overpowered" ? I am not arguing that magic is very powerful, and may even be a bit too powerful, but the argumetns for that shouldn't be based upon a mage wasting stupid opponents. Also, ask yourself what would have happened if the Samurai had fired like two neurostun contact grenades at the targets once they had left their car. Or the rigger would have opened up with the LMG drone.

And not going into D&D 4E, its many faults have been amply demonstrated on other forums. Check The Gaming Den if you want to know more.

It's not new to the Anniversary edition rulebook. The exact same text appears at the top right of page 168 in the first printing of the rulebook. To clarify, it's not the spell itself that is seen, but the Magician actually casting the spell. Cameras can most certainly see people. Remember, even if Magicians are not terribly common, any security professional knows the parameters and counters of magic. Your corp exec should be in a limo with one-way or tinted windows, and when the vehicle gets forced over the team should either stay put and call for reinforcements or use Smoke or some other vision inhibitor to cover their escape. High-ranking corp execs will also very likely have a Magician assigned to their security detail or at least one ready and on call that can come and Astrally scout the area, identify an Awakened attacker, notify him and his team of their location, then summon a Spirit to either attack the Awakened attacker or provide Counterspelling to cover the security team. Letting a Magician always Manaball everything is a GM Free Pass. The same argument(s) get made for the Control Thoughts/Actions spells and the counters are the same.

EDIT: Ok I got beaten to the punch, but Apathy and Fuchs are basically agreeing with me. It's not railroading to have opponents use intelligent tactics.

Dumpshock is representative of the hard-core Shadowrun fan. At any event, there;s still an awful lot of threads on house rules. Compare that to the Pinnacle forums, which does not have anything of the sort.


Depends on the circumstances. AR glasses are easily fooled by Illusion spells. An easy way to render a tacnet useless.

And it takes less creativity to railroad than it does to set appropriate challenges.

As far as D&D4 goes, it's a game with a lot to recommend it. It certainly doesn't suffer from the "mages are overpowered" bit, although I haven't played it enough to determine if it has other serious problems. It's a valid comparison. Also, I'll point out that Cheops is also chiming in with the "Magic is oerpowered" complaint, proving that it's not just me.

So let me get this straight? You guys are perfectly fine if mundane runners ambush people and blow their heads off. But them getting jumped by a mage and Manaballed to death they are stupid to not have anticipated and prepared for it to the max.

Yes, they could have just as easily blown up the entire car with a grenade. Forgive the team for wanting to actually be able to engage in a firefight with their kick-ass sammies they just made. But oh wait! Magic is so the broke that we don't actually get to do that!

I'll also point out that a starting mage will have about 10-14 dice to throw at Manaball compared to 11 dice to resist for Tir Ghosts (from the rulebook and definitely not starting characters) with full 6 counterspelling. Those are pretty good odds. Also note that Smoke does shit fuck all against Direct Combat spells unless you reduce the Mage to a Longshot test for Perception. Or do you force your PCs to make Perception tests all the time to see their opponents? Or do you selectively apply that to mages casting Direct Combat spells?

And yes the light show is new. In my hard copy of SR4 it has the exact same rules but doesn't mention the light show. It says you notice stuff like their intense concentration and body gestures or shamanic mask if they were dumb enough to pick that. Rules are 100% the same. Fluff text is now changed.

*adds fuel to the fire*

So... what you're saying is that manaball is not overpowered, just that the other players didn't want the mage to do that because they wanted to do it the hard way?

*stabs himself in the face for posting in this thread again*

P.S. Can I Dikote my manaball to give it +1DV?

*dies*

Untrue. In SR4, you apply any cover and visibility modifiers against direct damage combat spells. So if I'm behind decent cover (-2) and you're trying to thermally see though smoke (-2), you're down 4 dice on the attack roll. I don't know if that's changed for 4A, but that's definitely how it works in the regular 4th book.

And thats a good think as now its actually explained why more powerful magic iseasier to spot, instead of that sentence just ending after saying that.

So... if say the mage had wanted to have some kick-ass mage duel, using mana bolts, and the samurai got first and nuked all with a rocket launcher, you'd have been mad at SR4 for having overpowered mundanes? That's what it sounds to me, using your own "logic".

If an important corp exec was not wearing armor, had no bodyguards, and was riding in a convertible with the top down: that's a GM free ride. If the corp exec is in an armored limo with cybered up bodyguards, then he's clearly expecting an attack and has the physical angle covered. Important people in the SR world know about magic and know how dangerous it is. If they spent the resources to protect themselves from physical attacks, then they should spend the resources to protect against Magical attacks as well. Shadowrun has always had three worlds: mundane, magical, matrix. Important people know an attack can come from any angle and will prepare themselves appropriately.

Magic is powerful, yes, but it has counters as Larme talks about. The GM should know the counters because in a realistic world the people that are the target of potential magical attacks would know them as well.

Except those counters are inadequate. Mages will be throwing more dice in sorcery than the opposition will have in defense, counterspelling or no counterspelling. Besides which, the only answer to magic is more magic. The physical can be deatl with via the matrix or by magic, the matrix can be dealt with physically or through social engineering (where a Control Thoughts spell comes in handy). Only magic has to be countered by magic.

Once again, you're pointing to others' opinions to prove that your opinion is the only right one. That's logically invalid. All you're proving is that your opinion is shared by others, not that the dissenting opinions are false.

And yeah, I get it. All solutions that aren't a house rule are arbitrarily labeled as railroading and thus removed from consideration. I guess you're out of real arguments. I'll check back in if you come up with something to say that isn't devoid of intellectual rigor. Peace out.

Shadowrun is tipped in the balance of the attacker for everything except Melee Combat. Visibility impairment, cover, and some of the manatech stuff introduced in Arsenal can all be used by mundanes. However, I do agree that the best counter for Magic is Magic. This is a design decision/concept that has been in place since the beginning of Shadowrun (or at least since I have been playing), with 4th edition actually tipping things more in favor of the defender (counterspelling is now more easily and effectively applied).

An opinion is difficult to prove false. However, vast numbers of opinions can show degrees of validity of opinion. Basically, you're saying that I'm wrong, and anyone who agrees with me is an "uncreative GM". I can disprove that easily enough. I have shown, repeatedly, that lots of people have issues with instant-win tactics in SR4. (Note: This isn't to say they didn't exist in SR3!) Trying to blow it all off as opinion is a logical fsllacy.


True, and that's why magic is considered to be an "I Win" button. It's not the only one, though. Magic is still very potent, even with easier counterspelling. The problem is that counterspelling isn't effective against high-force spells. The max you can have is 6 dice in counterspelling. The average starting runner will have at most a softmaxed stat of 5,but more likely a 3, giving him 9 dice. I've seen starting mages throwing 14 dice, before you add in foci and the like. The caster wins. And that's assuming a maxed-out Counterspelling skill; in all likelihood, it'll be much lower, probably a 3 or 4. So, we have 6 dice vs 14.

Thing is, killing the first batch of guards, or even the second or third, doesn't necessarily end the run. If they're on a difficult run against a high security opponent, the initial guards are just there to act as canaries in the coal mine. Their DocWagon bracelets all go off, and the security rigger in the building immediately locks all the doors in the area, cuts off the lights, releases the neurostun, and notifies the FRT. When they get there, they'll be charging in behind thermal smoke, hiding behind riot sheilds (or tower sheilds if necessary) for cover modifiers, supported by spell defense and by drones. They'll pop in from multiple directions at once so you can't target them all at the same time, and catch you at chokepoints so you can't use area effect spells without also hitting your own people. Your 14 dice for casting loses several to reduce AOE, a couple for smoke, a couple for partial cover, a couple for spell defense, one or two for distractions, and pretty soon it's an even playing field. You'll be able to reduce the area of effect, but you that costs you dice. Once that hits the fan, the hacker and the street sam will have a chance to shine and you'll be struggling to keep up.

I have tried to stay middle of the road and not be nay-sayer but there are outside events that are still coloring my perception of the game, things that I should disassociate from the game. Anyway, the discussion at least seems to be more civil now and that is a good thing.



Saying it doesn't make it so...of course...me denying it...well you get my point.

If you look at 100,000 consumers of SR 4th and then think about 500 dissenters/rebels/etc., that is not a statistically significant number. If anything...I would say that I would have to doff my hat to Rob for a successful transition.

Actually, the maxed out counterspelling can be quite higher: 6 skill, 2 for specializing in combat spells, then add in initiation for the Shielding metamagic. So we're at 9 dice for a first level initiate, to increase to up to 14 when/if they hit initiate level 6.

Oh, and drones are a great way to neutralize a mage. Every facility is likely going to have at least turrets; many are going to have a somewhat competant spider, and the armored limousine is likely to have a turret as well. OR 5 is a beast to meet.

~erm~ you cannot start to add things on the one side without doing the same on the other side. If you start to "max out" counterspelling beyond the initial possibilities of character generation you have to do the same on the opposite side. Otehrwise your argument isn't worth anything.

Start to specialized on combat spells on the attacker's side as well. Max out his skill as well and make use of foci as Cain said ... the and only then the comparison will work out correctly

No no, you forget. That's railroading, because any time the NPCs play to win it's railroading. The only thing that isn't railroading is when they stand in a big scrum and all die at the same time.

And one high-force Concealment service negates all that. All you know is the guards went down, you don't know how or why, unless you Longshot a perception test. You need more and more magic to counter more magic; there's no mundane solution. And with magic supposedly being rare, it seems very contrived for everyone and their brother to have magical security.

Larme, do you intend to debate seriously or not? Railroading is when everybody has 14 dice of counterspelling, which is what you need to have an even chance and therefore what you recommended.

That has less to do with Manaball being broken and the Concealment power being the most broken thing in existence.

Cain,

Thank you for briefly looking at my suggestion. I feel, however, that you may have glanced too quickly. Nowhere did I suggest adding Thresholds to the Opposed Test mechanic. The Opposed Test remains and Opposed Test with dice added to the second side instead of taken away from the first.

You may have been talking about the second sentence in which the GM rolls dice and adds the hits to the Threshold (one option for Edged rolls against a Threshold). I don't feel this mucks with fundamental assumptions about the whole combat system, but if you do that's fine. For your convenience I added a mechanic introduced in SR4A (SR4.5, SR4:20, whatever). I believe the system they introduced specifically mentions Counterspelling dice being divided by 3 (round up) and added to the Object Resistance Threshold. This would be the second option for Edged rolls against a Threshold. You seem to have inadvertently missed this sentence in your quote. No biggie.

I am still interested in your opinion of my house rule, but I wanted to be certain you were discounting it accurately. If you don't like it you don't need a reason. If you have a reason, feel free to share it. I was trying to arrive at a simple mechanic that makes things unlikely but possible in high difficulty situations. I think that's what a Long-shot should be.

PS SR4:20 is my favorite humorously insulting abbreviation. It's both less and more of an in-joke than WWLOMPCAT. (Did I get that right?)

I expect them to take cover, but to stop the manaball they would need full cover, and no I do not expect that. They should be shooting back at some point and then they break cover, they can return to full cover but I do not think in the same pass. So yeah a manaball should clear most the targets if they decide to well shoot at the runners at some point. Look out though the mage will be at -4 dice(+4 dice to defender in 4a) While I doubt it, that + counterspelling may be enough.

You know, If a starting PC can get a perception roll in the high teens, concealment is really not that much of an obstacle...
Oh, wait... that is probably railroading though... never mind...


I mean really, this argument is getting pretty stale...