Stale? No way! We're barely to page 13 of the hundredth thread about this. Let the hits keep on a-rollin'!

Well since I want to keep the stale air not a flowing, if you bump into a high teens perception character with any frequency, then yes it is railroading.

Only if it is constant... my point was that there are counters for almost everything in Shadowrun... if you constrain yourself to never using counters because you believe that it is unfair, then how do your games ever progress beyond the "I Win" button that every one talks about...

At that point, if I am the baddest thing on the street (we all now that we can create characters more proficient than the templates or NPC's in any of the books, if we desired to do so) than what is the fun of playing... If you are not challenged, why play at all...

Well the point of the i win button complaints isn't that they always work, but that they work to frequently without railroading.

I win problems are when without railroading you have this.

Piece of cake, Piece of cake, Piece of cake, Piece of cake, Piece of cake, Piece of cake, tough fight, Piece of cake, Piece of cake, Piece of cake.

A good balance looks more like this,
Challenging but fair, Challenging but fair, Challenging but fair, piece of cake, Challenging but fair, Challenging but fair, really touch fight, Challenging but fair, Challenging but fair.

The difficulty mods and rare builds should be used to make something easy or hard from a fair fight if somewhat tilted towards the PCs not to bring it down from I win to reasonable.

With this I can agree, but it is funny... I am assuming that I am playing a fairly similar game to you (assumption, I know, and we use no real houserules, just the rules in the book, some of which our group interprets different thatn some on this forum)... and I have yet to see any "I Win" buttons in our campaigns... yes, Magic is powerful, but so are a lot of the other character builds in the game... this is not a One Solution Wins All environment... If the environment is equivalent to the above: Piece of cake, Piece of cake, Piece of cake, Piece of cake, Piece of cake, Piece of cake, tough fight, Piece of cake, Piece of cake, Piece of cake scenario, I would say that the GM is falling down at the job of providing adequate opposition to the table at large... We have had fairly large groups (upwards of 8 people on occassion), though our core group is 5 players, and we win some and we lose some, and they are rarely "Cakewalks" in any sense of the word... we have all types of characters, from combat mages, to Technomancers, to Street Sams and Hackers, and yet we are constantly challenged using nothing but the Rules in the book...

You may not agree with me, but i fail to see the incessant "I Win" button that a vocal few seems to think exists... Maybe it is just me, but *shrug*

My 2

From what I've seen I think magic has a quicker tipping point at which it becomes an I win. Some of my intiial builds of characters(and how I'd be still making my character if we weren't testing some things) did not break the game. But without much in the way of twinkage I can make a mage that becomes an I win much quicker an easier than I can with other builds.

I've also seen how play style effects things. In our first group after my phys ad died I played a mage, we had another mage in the group as well. Our stats and dice pools were very similar, I think he rolled 3 extra drain dice than me otherwise the same. Because I was much more willing to eat max force spell drain and high force spirit drain I was the bigger I win button than he was by a large margin. He adapted style a bit so the disparity wasn't there much at all except with spirits, since he was cursed with disgustingly high resistance rolls he played that with a lighter touch than me.

If in your game people rarely overcast, and don't summon high force spirits you wont see the iwin effect.

Not unless you do. You stopped arguing with me, and started repeating your conclusions as if you'd already proved them. Your tactic is to claim that every single possible solution within the system is railroading, and thus invalid. And then repeat this claim over and over, mischaracterizing my arguments with straw men when needed. If someone challenges your definition of railroading, all you do is repeat it, as if that settled the matter. That's not an argument, that's just contradiction. If you'd like to engage in a serious thrust and parry, I'll be happy to. What this requires is concession, it requires you to concede valid points that your opponent makes, and alter your position to refute them. You can't simply repeat your conclusion over and over. All I've gotten from you these many pages is the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting. So I'm ready to argue if you are, but you haven't shown yourself to be.

On the contrary,when I played a mage, I often overcast spells for greater effect, it was just not the instant :I WIn" that others talk about... Our GM is somewhat savvy and always managed to challenge me, regardless of whether I overcast or not... Did I overpower opposition on occassion? YES... Was it constant? Rarely...

I admit that Magic can Overwhelm a campaign, but then, so can High Damage Weapons, or the Uber Hacker, or whatever... it takes a savvy GM to keep things under control when the characters start to flex their abilities... That is what he GM is there for, to create interesting and enjoyable scenarios for those of us who play in their games... I would be highly disappointed in my GM if I was allowed to win with little to no opposition all the time.. sometimes we have outstanding plans, and the opposition just can't cut it... It happens, but this is not a common occurrence in our game... generally the opposition is scaled to the run... when we go into a HIGH Security Megacorp facility to extract a VP, I do not expec the bargain basement guards to be the opposition... Nor do I expect that it will be just something that we casually accomplish...

Your Mileage May, of course, Vary...

I agree with Shinobi. Combat in Shadowrun shouldn't devolve into a series of "Piece of cake" scenes.

But to blame the GM absolves the rules of their contribution. Sure, the GM is responsible for setting challenges, but he must do so fairly. To use an example from above, high-force Concealment is practically a game-breaker all by itself. The only solution without changing the rules is to make every NPC have double-digit Perception scores. And that is railroading.

Despite TJ's attempt at a straw man, the fact remains that broken rules can and do cause problems that good GMing alone can't fix. Sometimes, a house rule or two is needed.

Now, I'm not meaning to slam on SR4.5. I'm trying to put things in perspective, where people see that the game is not perfect, and isn't any better than, say, D&D 4E. On my scale, I'd put the rules as better than Rifts, worse than Savage Worlds, and roughly equal to Hero and GURPS. YMMV on this scale, of course.


Talk about a straw man! My point has always been that the counters *you* listed don't work unless you're doing them almost all the time... and if you're doing them that often, you're railroading. It's not that every possible counter is a railroad, it's that what you propose is railroading, if it's done enough to sufficiently restrict the tactic.

Why do you play out "piece of cake" battles anyway? If the opposition is two idiots with a baseball bat I just say "you overpower them, and move on".

[offtopic]


I heavily suggest changing board preferences ... to me it's currently page 7
[/offtopic]

Page 7, no way we just started page 4.
/offtopic

Exactly. It's that vapid, intellectually banktrupt "all or nothing" argument that I believe is a non-argument. You simply assert it, without support, and move on. If anyone argues against it, you simply assert it again, as if it were a given. Not an argument, just contradiction. My position has consistently been that the GM only needs to counter the players some of the time to keep the game interesting, and your response has consistently been "nuh uh, you have to counter every single time or nothing is made any better." Again without support, just flat contradiction.



Of course, here you pretty much abandon your original position and take a balanced view of things, finally. Nobody is arguing that the game is perfect. What I'm arguing, and what you have yet to even address, is the fact that house rules are often not a fix at all. House rules are a downward spiral of constant rebalancing, every time you nerf something, it alters the game's balance of power, and it alters the incentives that PCs have. Nerf magic, and they just move to the next auto-win tactic. Nerf that, and they move on to the next. You can't preempt every rules exploit the players will try to use. One nerf often requires another nerf, and another, and another. Pretty soon you may be altering entire game mechanics, rewriting costs in chargen... who knows? This is because there is no objective standard of game balance. You can never say for sure when the game is balanced as a whole, therefore you have no way of knowing when you're "done" making house rules, which means you inevitably end up with a whole mess of them. And there's no guarantee that the game you create to replace Shadowrun will be any better. Unless you're a perfect human being, it will probably have as many or more flaws than the original, being as how you're not even a full time game designer.

So again. You tell us that using the system is not a fix. I tell you that house rules are probably not a fix either. Just like you can't counter every tactic within the system every single time, you can't create perfect house rules that don't have any flaws or loopholes. Your fix is a different way of tackling the problem, but it's not like the game is unplayable without house rules. You need house rules if they will increase your enjoyment of the game. But if they won't, you have no need for house rules whatsoever.

Straw Man again. My position is that if you're countering it sufficiently for it to not be a problem, you're probably railroading.


And now you see the problem! SR4 has many problems that can only be fixed via house rules. A GM is aided by the rules, he shouldn't have to fight them.

Additionally, you've committed the Slippery Slope Fallacy.


Unplayable, possibly not. But certainly not as enjoyable as it should be. There's over 500 threads asking about house rules that I found on a quick search; there's probably more if I cared to do the digging. That indicates a strong need for house ruling, and that it's not all the fault of bad GM's.

The question here is, what do you do with a bad rule, that good GMing can't fix? If manaball is an "I win" button 90% of the time, you'd need to contrive situations something like 85% of the time in order to balance it. That's a lot! Your contention is that one has to contrive less-- but how much less?


When ten guards in mil-spec is a "Piece of cake" battle, is when you have problems.

This thread has become circular. Your internet philosopy sidetracks annoy us. There is nothing that contributes to anything but ego stoking and following the same sad arguments. Larme, stop letting Cain bait you into this stuff, you already noted how he's going to argue 1/2 way through the thread. Cain, stop derailing everything with your desire to be proven right over your damn arguments. You are contributing nothing to Dumpshock this way.

This thread is closed, and may be deleted, Mods are discussing it at this point. Let this serve as a warning to everyone to stop derailing things, and stop opening up the same argument in every thread you visit. Warnings may be applied from the content of this thread.

The Mod Staff