Try using Karma Gen instead of BP. Skills come fairly cheap with that system.

Most combat tests are opposed rolls. Which is something quite different.


"Most" of them might have been. I really don't know what the mixture over the years might be. But I do know for a fact that not all them where. All you did was try to create an edge condition and then put on your rules lawyer hat and and twisted the text of the rules beyond.

Any game "breaks" if you pull on the asshat and maliciously rules lawyer away at it [and the GM is snowed by this]. Yes, even SR3. There have been thousands and thousands of Dumpshock threads written as a testimonial to that.

Of course the really ironic thing is that when a reasonable reading of the rules is applied and the odds are worked out for SR3 and SR4 the difference was something like +/-10% difference (that being above or below, since there are different variables in play in SR4) in the chance for your cherry picked scenario.



Of course there is nothing in it for you. A little hit-and-run smear is pretty much all you've got. Your selective memory is what serves you needs best, right? Have fun and take care!

You do realise that where talking about superhuman shooters here with smartlink.

Seeing the target firs is perception roll, that has nothing to do with how good a shooter you are.
After all you can't shoot anythink you don't know is there.

I'm trying to figure out if this is ruined FOREVER or just They Changed it and now it Sucks.

Actually, more than anything it sounds like a quote from this all-to appropriate article:

Surely you don't imply?

haha, i'm such an addict. there is nothing else to do this week, though. we just finished a big contract, all the shows i watch are on season break, i've beaten all my games, and there aren't any good copies of any good movies available to download that i haven't already watched. i suppose i could go outside, but i'm concerned about the bears. so i'll sit here and argue with people whose immediate response to encountering an opinion different from theirs is to go for the insult.


this situation doesn't require an opposed test. for one, i don't believe that surprised opponents--and coming under accurate fire from someone a klick away, at night, is pretty surprising--get dodge tests; for another, this result is just as silly if you're shooting at an inanimate object. the usual response to this point is that the GM should raise the threshold to hit stationary targets. i don't find it realistic to make stationary targets harder to hit.


it's a simple combination of modifiers--one that has, in fact, come up fairly frequently in games i've played. hardly an edge case.


if my selective memory serves me, i started quite a few of those threads. as one of the more loudmouthed proponents of SR4, back before i got ahold of a playtest copy, i'm well aware of SR3's many shortcomings. and to SR4's credit, it does address many of them. but in my opinion, what it sacrifices is not worth it.


as i recall, the SR4 shooter had something like 2 dice. an SR3 shooter would have however many dice you wanted to give him--14 seems like a reasonable number. he'd be facing a TN of 17. if you like those odds, well, your bookies must be either very rich or very angry with you.


yes, and as far as i remember, that's an attribute+skill roll, just like the shooting test, which means that it's just as easy to pass.


no, "where" not. we're talking about a shooter with high attribute and high skill, with no cyberware and no magic and no scope. he can make the shot i describe fairly reliably, if my selective memory serves me correctly.

I don't doubt that you recall it a certain way. That's really my point, isn't it? Just as I expect you'd do with any detailed discussion in this thread. You'd got a good head start already. Running through the same busted logic by rote, retracing your same fundamental mistakes and misunderstandings, plugging your ears, gaining nothing, and accomplishing nothing.

Go be bored somewhere else.

Oh man, I've seen several of those on DS. We have some Purists and Elitists but not a whole lot. We've certainly had our share of Toxic Critics ("first of all, I hate SR4..."), but I've seen boatloads of Toxic Genius' and at least one prominent Toxic Visionary. Wow... it's scary how right TV Tropes is...

No he definedly can not, If we stay below superhuman max dice at scenario is 2 without smartlink.
Agility 6 + Long arms 6 + spec in sniper rifles 2 - 12 for full darknes and extreme range = 2 dice, not very reliable.

yes, it's quite apparent that you lack the facility to debate the facts rather than attacking the poster. this is your vendetta, not mine.


he'll succeed something like 2/3 of the time, i believe. that's pretty reliable, given the conditions. it's especially bad because he's not even aiming--this is a snap shot. if he actually took a few actions to aim, he could be all but guaranteed a hit.

That raises the question: Do the Rules allow TAKE AIM Action, if you are in complete Darkness at a -6 and more or less effectively BLIND?

Sure it's going to appear apparent to you...when you do a memory dump of when I (or anyone else) does go through the trouble of laying it out in detail, with rules references.

They have help.

He is also the best human sniper ever. Also i would never allow some to take aim under those conditions.
And ofcoure i still don't understand how this scenario would ever even come up, as that guy should actully first somehow see his target so he can try to shoot it.

Even more than you think.
Uncle Ancient more or less said he had been writing on the shadowrun page on tropes *g*

*Tosses in a penny*

I just miss the combat and spell pools (and the rest of those lovely piles of dice), I've heard the complaint they were too complex, but I liked having a turn based "I'm awesome and trying hard" renewing stat. It added a nice tactical and cinematic feel to the game and it makes me slightly sad they are gone. The changes to the rest of the system are largly cosmetic. I too miss the atomically super impossible target numbers, but its just a matter of which end of the game you want math heavy. I've played with enough different RPG contest resolution mechanics that I don't care about them much anymore, so long as they kinda work in most situations common to the game.

*Tosses in second penny*

*Goes for a beer*

Only really bad part was how frigging high those target numbers got with hacking, rigging and medicine rules.
everything else was pretty mediocre in TN's . . and could be brought down to low with some work usually.

yes, exactly. as anyone who has any shooting experience can tell you, the best human sniper ever couldn't make this shot in a million years.


that's fine, but it's not in the rules.


as i already stated:


it's been laid out many times: 6 attribute, 6 skill, -6 for full darkness, -3 for extreme range. that's actually 3 dice left over, and i didn't even count specialization--enough to reliably get one hit. not every time, certainly, but far too frequently to appease my taste for realism.

It's -6 for extreme range in SR4A.

'k. we're back to 2 dice (counting specialization) then, and roughly 2/3 chance of getting a hit.

Hm, and what is it with this shot: Medium skilled (human) individual, Handgun, near running foe, in the darkness:

SR3: Skill 3 + 3 dice combat pool. difficulty: 4+6 +2 (running defender) So he has 6 dice to hit a 12. Fairly possible, but unlikely. Maybe around 10%? But he can do it, because he knows the dude is there, and he is good.

SR4: Skill 3 + 3 Agi -6 vision = 0 his action is denied... Yeah he CAN do a long-shot, but then the outcome is not based on how good he is, how fast and agil he is.. but only on his luck.. Even if the outcome is the same, the source is different. (And the SR3 char can "use" his luck too, but that is different)

That is one point which feels different now, i guess. Ah, but before people rip me apart: like i said, i haven't really played that much SR4 now, can be i made a mistake.

But why i am really here: Calm down people i have never mindlessly attacked the System. In my first post i have stated manymany concerns, yes, but i also asked just for opinions on differencies, and experiences from people who have/had the same concerns. I already said that i will try the game and also i was sure that i like it either way. And a few posts down i already said, that since most people seemed pretty content, that the rules maybe "meld together" in play and are not as ... strange as on paper. That was my main topic for discussion, not a rally cry for SR3 is the better ruleset and we have to kill SR4 with fire...

Ah well... also IF you change the initiative rules to: All first, faster guys get their more turns later... yes the unenhanced character shout "Yay..." but don't the people who bought a Wired reflexes, or MBW or with Ki-enhanced reflexed feel betrayed? After all... well, realism is on their side there (in-game realism i mean). But well, let's see how this pans out for me.

See ya, and chill.

5/9, actually. And while that 14 starting dice represents the maximum possible unaugmented human, I question how many - even among the best snipers in the world - would actually have that level of competence. After all, Elite Military are suggested as being Firearms 5, which leads me to suspect that the average dicepool among such people would be 11 or 12 rather than 14.

Perhaps more importantly, however, the blind-fire rules require you to be able to guess or estimate the target's position with a reasonable degree of accuracy. While that requirement isn't detailed any further, it does put the GM declaring shots such as the one you described completely impossible firmly within the scope of RAW.

Though, as others have said, this is an edge case. Preventing those from having the potential to cause issues within the rules tends to require a great deal of extra effort and word-count going into situations that will rarely, if ever, come up. And most of these problems are easily solved by applications of GM-fiat. "No, even if you still have dice left over, 12 points of dice penalties means that action automatically fails."

Not a chance I'm reading all of the posts i this thread. But Summerstorm, I agree. Go get yourself some ebay action going, beat up your new friends, and then play real Shadowrun, the cyberpunk one.

No offense anyone! ^-^

Your calculations are wrong.

P( X > 0) = 1 - P( X = 0)
P( X = 0) = 2/3 * 2/3 = 4/9
1 - 4/9 = 5/9 = 0.555...

It's still significantly larger than you might want, but the fact is that even if you've got a single dice you're looking at a 1-in-3 chance of getting a hit.

there are a number of possibilities that would reasonably allow a shooter in such a position to estimate the target's position. for instance, if the target pops off a shot, you can sight in on his muzzle flash. regardless, though, the perception question is irrelevant to the question of being able to hit such a target at such a range in such conditions.


again, this isn't an edge case at all. as a player of many stealthy characters, i have used the difficulty of such shots in SR3 to my advantage many times. if you want, you can halve the range and use an assault rifle instead--it's still an incredibly hard shot, and the RAW does not reflect that.

and it's more than this particular scenario. i like this scenario because it clearly delineates why i don't like SR4's dice mechanic: standard modifiers increase difficultly linearly in relation to ability, and the total number of possible outcomes is far too small for my tastes.

It isn't exactly the same. It never was going to be precisely the same. Otherwise why bring out a new edition, right? You will see differences in specific instances. There are also slight tweaks in the overall picture. As Blade mentions your PCs will take damage more often, although typically a few less boxes when damage does occur. But in the long run, in play, it all averages out to about the same thing, those small tweaks aside.

For your example there is the fairly low chance of doing damage in SR3 (typically you have to stage up damage to end up hurting someone with a handgun, good luck staging up that shot). In SR4 over time, because Edge gets you into a reasonable shot range but it's a limited resource, the average will be very similar.

Just don't fall into the trap mfb has. Make sure to think in terms of opposing rolls. Think setting Thresholds for rolls that aren't opposing rolls (shooting a 1" square plate is not the same as shooting the broad side of a barn), rather than thinking one success is a successful roll (that's a big habit to break from SR3). Otherwise you'll just end up a bitter old man spending years grumbling on the internet about something you don't actually understand. Doing it a few times is OK and it is no bad thing looking back at the sessions you played and saying "I had some good times playing that". I generally look back fondly on Combat Pool, at least focusing on the good parts of it. Likewise I liked the colour of the old Shaman domains.

But in both cases I appreciate the new rules, too. The handiness and robustness of the dice mechanics, the extendibility of the rules to new types of spirits, and so on. ((though I've since moved on to something that IMO does both Shaman domains and dice mechanics even better than SR3 and SR4 does, respectively))

Over the long term the only person that I know in the flesh that wanted to return to SR3 I don't game with at all anymore in RPGs. He liked the exploits, he knew the places to pervert the rules to create bizarrely surreal effects, creating huge reward or just screwing with other players for no risk to his PC. Or at least he knew where to rules lawyer like crazy to try get them. He did this in SR4 too, it's just that he saw SR3 as a more fertile ground. But when he suggested SR3 to the rest of the group everyone to a person told him he was crazy.

P.S. His attitude in general is why I refuse to play RPGs with him. It wasn't that he didn't want to play SR4. He would, he'd just rather play SR3.

That change didn't happen in SR4 - it happened in SR3. Before SR3 was when the sammies could get umpteen actions before anyone else.

Actually, people with multiple initiative passes are better off than they were in SR3. First, they don't have to ration out a Combat Pool that only refreshes with each new round (rather than each new action). They have their full dice pool for each action. Second, they have the option of full defense as an interrupt action, meaning that they can go, then roll a lot of dice to block or dodge the slowpoke's attack, and then, if they have three or four IPs to start with, still get one or two more attacks. By the way, this means that initiative passes actually matter for melee combat now. So you may not be able to go 5 times before anyone else even moves, like you could in the older editions, but initiative boosters are still a huge advantage, to the point that I consider them essential to nearly any combat-focused character.

this is awesome. i post for the first time in, what, a year? two? and almost immediately, i get blasted by some guy i don't even know, who's apparently been holding some kind of grudge over a debate about game editions--and the word he chooses to use to describe me is "bitter".

stay classy, DS.

It is totally relevant though since if you can't perceive them, you can't make the shot at all. And as for the perception test also being a skil+attribute test, while that is true, perception tests do have thresholds. And the threshold to see someone one kilometer out in total darkness is infinity. If you spot the location due to a muzzle flash or something, then sure make your shot. A 1 or 2 in 3 chance for the best shooter in the world hitting a target that was briefly illuminated a kilometer out doesn't seem that bad to me. Maybe a bit unrealistic, but I don't play for realism I play to have fun. Documentaries may be realistic but they are not nearly as fun as an action movie to me. Guess which one of those movie types most RPGS try to emulate is.

While the die system is not perfect, the cases where its worse than the previous editions rarely comes up for us.

It is relevant. You only get that shot if you manage to convince your GM that you should have a non neglectible chance of success. The point of SR4 is that rules need not bother with extremely easy or hard actions, as GM call can deal with it faster.

Maybe SR3 rules handle very difficult actions better, but who cares (rhetorical question here: I know you do )? It is still better to avoid throwing dice at all in such a case. SR3 bugs come with medium-hard TN, and that is much more of a problem since the GM cannot rule out the result without frustrating the players.



Not benefiting from any full darkness vision enhancement is already an edge case

Highest target number for a shot we ever made in SR3 was 22 or so. That was an over the top sniper shot from a helicopter passing a stadion through a "just in time" hole in the roof. (Or something like that). We were using the SR1 karma rules, and I think the shooter spent a dozen or two dozen on rerolls.

Oh man, do I know someone who fits that description. You might know who I am talking about.

So what you are saying is you felt that an important part of your contribution to DS, important enough to get it in soon, something that is high priority after a couple years of your absence, is your signature finger-in-the-ears-la-la-la moan about dice? I guess you felt DS was really missing your special brand of classy. Hehe.

that's perfectly okay. if it doesn't bother you, great--enjoy SR4. i'm not being sarcastic, i mean it. whatever your group finds to be the most enjoyable is what your group should stick to. i, and many of the people i play with, prefer a ruleset that better reflects reality as we perceive it. we don't feel that SR4's dice mechanic can effectively carry that level of realism.


there are almost no situations in my games where i'll agree that it's better to avoid throwing dice. and yes, SR3's dice mechanic does have a bug at the 6x/6x+1 divide, but that bug can easily be fixed in a number of ways. the simplest fix is to just add 5 instead of 6 when you roll a 6. there are others that make the progression sequence even smoother.

What SR3 does is have, at least with some die rolling modes it uses, is this very long tail of extremely highly improbable rolls. SR4 somewhat truncates the tail and creates the very similar percentages, over the long run, via a more brief and simplified mechanic. That has really no impact on how closely the system mirrors reality.

If you are concerned with overall accuracy against reality, or subjective "realism" for a broader swatch of the players for that matter, what you really want to do is go further down the path SR4 went on. You abstract more and simplify the process, then generalize the framework even more and give handles for the people at the table to manually guide/tune the model. It is little coincidence IMO that the SR4 Matrix is overall a slightly better reflection of computer technology, even when comparing to the state-of-the-art when they were published, than prior. Or I should say a slightly less painfully bizarre parody of computer technology, since between the two it's like winning a beauty contest at fugly.com.

SR4 didn't break far enough from SR to avoid some the bizarre results you'll get in spots when you try hold a simulation too detail to literally of what it is being modeled. It's just the nature of simulations.

P.S. The SR4 system as written also does something else that creates/exasperates the problem at the particular edge condition mfb is trying to exploit [in more than a little part through dubious rules interpretations] and focus on. SR4 readily mixes die pool reduction/addition and Threshold modification for both penalties and bonuses. I couldn't say for sure why this was choosen, maybe the authors didn't realize the hiccups it would create. Maybe they didn't care. It does take some discipline to keep penalties to the Threshold and bonus to the die pool. Maybe the judgement was made that, given how big they were making the die pool, and because of the TN5 means you'd have to size bonuses to be bigger than Threshold increases, that the drawback to mixing in pool reductions was worth keeping the pool size lower. The issue is more problematic when dealing with rolls versus a [low] static Threshold, so maybe the feeling was that that is rare enough in SR4 to live with it? It might even be the "right" decision assuming you stick with these others (keeping TN5 vs say TN4 is important to keep the splashy, slightly superhuman feel of SR).

But I do know that when a die pool mechanic sticks tightly to a penalty being an increased successful die requirement and a bonus is an addition to the die pool, this sort of hiccup goes away. With some appropriate tweaks you can bring back some of the long, thin tail, too.

... yet there it is in SR3 where they can pull it off in something well short of a million years. More that even odds of say a character with 8 dice of doing so by the end of a 10 rnd magazine, assuming your TN 17. Before tapping any pools. Oh my.


EDIT: Clarification.

The sweet spot for SR4's test mechanic is in higher DPs where you can vary thresholds to give good control over how probably a success with reasonable accuracy. In SR3 a -1 penalty cycles from having no effect (6 to 7 : 1/6 to 1/6), being worth a little bit (7 to 8 : 6/36 to 5/36 i.e. 5/6ing your chance), to being worth quite a bit (11 to 12 : 2/36 to 1/36 i.e. halving your chance).

More SR4 mods ought to be turned into hit absorbers/thresholds, or else added to the opposed side. A 15 dice pool against a similarly sized pool gets pretty decent marginal resolution for determining the probability of success. Smaller pools less so.

possibly, but that makes for a really steep difficulty curve. stack a few thresholds one way or the other, and you quickly run into automatic success (negative thresholds) or automatic failures (thresholds so high it's not even worth rolling the dice). and with a fixed TN, i'm pretty sure thresholds translate pretty smooth into dice penalties--about -3 dice per point of threshold.

Exactly. Just as SR3 loses granularity in the discrete steps when bumping against the bottom of the TN, SR4 does so when bumping against the bottom of the die pool size. SR4 actually has a fatter sweet spot to hit, especially with opposed rolls. But the way the modifiers were generally chosen for some Skills you fall out of that window in certain types of situations where it isn't particularly necessary.

EDIT: You don't even need to get up to the 15 die range for opposed rolls. It's pretty smooth sailing just getting close to the 8 die range.

Edge makes automatic failures a non-issue. You were in over your head, you had to get lucky. EDIT: Not that it is particularly common for competent abilities when you have pools sized for TN5 (average 1 success per 3 die).

Automatic success means "this is so simple for my character why am I wasting my time rolling this?" Not rolling at all is just good RPG craft, which is why that rule is there to start with I assume. Because people forget that and/or the authors decided to hang a firm number on where the line is.

Okay, seriously. What's your problem, dude? Why the need to toss in the wahmbulance picture in what would have been an otherwise reasonable post (along with the need for the insults and jabs in other posts that might have, without them, been logical and rational)?

You seem to have an awful large chip on your shoulder for someone that wasn't even a member until several years after the massive Edition Wars. You're spewing bile specifically towards another poster, where he's at least spewing bile instead towards an inanimate object; a game he doesn't like as much as you do. And, what's more, you've chosen to specifically target one such poster (rather than the OP, for instance, who's made comments at least as dismissive of SR4 as anything mfb has said).

I can't help but get the feeling you're just someone's alt account with a bone to pick. If that's the case, you might want to tone it down because I doubt I'm the only person getting that vibe from you. If that's not the case, you might want to tone it down anyways because you're acting like a total fucking douchebag.

And this is why the mods usuually put the kibash on cross edition comparisons. They have a nasty tendency to turn into flame wars.

For me, SR3 is like a really comfortable pair of old shoes. It fits me.

Is SR4 bad?
Not at all, there are things that I like about it. I think AR is a beautiful concept and executed very well.

Is it wrong to like SR4 more than SR3?
It is personal preference and I can't imagine telling somebody that them liking blue as opposed to red is incorrect. Nor do I have a problem with people saying that SR4 is better than SR3 because of X, Y, and Z. Again, it is personal preference even if it seems that they are stating a truth as a fact. (Truth is what a philosophy professor teaches...facts are what hard science prof's teach.)

I just can't see getting my feathers ruffled over one game versus another.

Critias, keeping it classy...like a total fucking douchebag.

I don't think it's about his anti SR4:ness, it's about the specific example he's using.

at this point, me either. though, to be honest, i don't play SR nearly as much as i used to. back when i did, i admit to being pretty angry at many of the changes, because they took something i really enjoyed in a direction i didn't want to go. to an extent, i suppose i'm still holding a bit of grudge: i have yet to purchase any 4th edition book, choosing instead to borrow others' copies when i need to. which is rarely enough; like i said, i don't play SR nearly as much as i used to.


it's quite clear that it's not about the example, nor the fact that i still prefer SR3 to SR4. it's about me, and his apparent need to insult me. *shrug*

I'd have described you as bitter years ago!
And I think it's closer to one year, not two.

Wouldn't you also apply an additional -6 penalty for Target Hidden (Blind Fire). Which would also make the test firearms skill + intuition. That would make the shot impossable.

I don't think so, thats what the -6 for full darkness is there for.
Actually i forgot aptitude, so that would be 3 dice left.

I think his point was to show simply that he doesn't like the linear difficulty scale in SR4, not to argue the specifics of one example. His point is valid -- even if you're reduced down to 3 dice, you will on average succeed at your task. Of course, there's also a really high risk of glitch.

I would argue, however, that the difficulty scaling is not all that different. Because you always get your full dice, full pool, and karma pool in SR3, difficulty scaling can also be rendered fairly meaningless. Let's say you take a shot at long range in the dark, for a TN12. Then you roll your 8 dice, plus 8 combat pool, getting you on average 2-3 6's, for about a 50% chance to roll another 6 on one of those dice. And let's not forget that SR3 karma is infinite -- Edge might be super cool, but SR3's karma pool lets you reroll over and over and over and over... So for an experienced character anyway, there's almost no TN that will never be hit. In fact, it's easier to make things impossible in SR4 than SR3 -- if something is TN 25, someone with a large dice pool and large karma pool can still do it. In SR4, you go down to 0 dice, then you're done. There's Edge of course, but that's one roll, no exploding 6's, no second chances, with a hard cap of 8 for (for Lucky humans). Karma pool by contrast has no hard cap, so while you won't be able to do the impossible out of chargen, you will some day.

The point is, it's not really a matter of mathematical superiority. The systems provide different means to the same end, which is adjusting the difficulty of tasks. There is no reason why variable TNs or fixed TNs are inherently better, there are only reasons to prefer one or the other. IMO, the primary reason to prefer variable TNs is that you're an old fart who can't let go of the past (mfb as much as admits to this ), because they both seem fine to me. What really makes SR4 the better game is the streamlining and powering down of starting builds. Again, I'm aware that certain builds are pretty insane, but you're still forced to do more with less absolute resources -- I've made characters with no flaws in SR3, it's just not possible to do so in SR4, even the most badass character has some glaring weakness.