QUOTE (Cain @ Jun 13 2009, 02:41 AM)

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.
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.
QUOTE (Cain @ Jun 13 2009, 02:41 AM)

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.
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.