This is in reference to several comments scattered about the Doctor thread:

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...=27564&st=0

I feel it deserves its own thread because I see a massive calibration problem in the attitudes of many players. I see a definite trend toward level "6" in skills as much as possible. Perhaps it comes from people simply expecting hack-n-slash games.

Level "3" is "Professional". That means the character can make a living at it. He or she is competent...journeyman level, so to speak. Call it a level of performance after internship to two years. A doctor who never sees anything too complex may stay at a "3" for his or her entire career.

The problem comes in with PLAYERS of the game (players include GMs). Suddenly, everything has to be maxed out. I love to look at character sheets and find 22-30 year old characters of average intelligence with Nobel Prize level performance in various skills that take decades to achieve.

When people start speaking of having level "6" just to become a doctor tells me there's a problem in the game. Additionally, when people say they blow almost every roll with a maxed out PC...then there's definitely a problem with the game. A proactive GM would solve the problem by changing the difficulty level, incorporating lab tests and gear to add dice to the roll and allow collaboration with other doctors to increase the odds of success.

Not that any of this matters. It's fighting the wanker gamer culture.

The game expands to fill the needs of the players in it.

And wants.

And whims.

And whimsies.

My infiltrator/hacker character that I'm currently playing has skills around level 3. The only skill he has really high is Perception (5).
On the other hand, I spent almost the 200 points cap for attributes.
It is a 30-year old elf with Agility 6 (, Reaction 5, Intuition 5 and Logic 5 (7, cerebral booster, I love you )
He has a lot of potential and already has some experience (he is a Yakuza assassin on the run from them)

On the other hand, my munchkin friend is playing a Mage with Magic 6, all the most relevant skills for casting and counterspelling 6 (with specializations) and a lot of Foci (who the GM will start to roll for addiction). (and this character is supposed to be a early 20's years old human).

The thing is that the Players are special, at least they are at my Table. They are not just some people off the street doing a day job, they are highly trained professionals who are in the Shadows because they are either very good at something, or quite good at everything else. However agree, I do not like the general move towards having everything as high as possible, and personally I found the whole “Doctorate because of the Skill Table Examples� skewed. The example given for PhD level was a Knowledge skill, and my table has always been very lax about Knowledge skills (They do not count towards the whole only allowed one level six skill at CC thing). And I also believe that getting that high a Knowledge skill, compared to an active skill, would be so much easier that the Table might in fact be about correct.

And I think your comment about the “wanker gamer� thing is poorly chosen. Perhaps some degree of Geek Supremacy, my gaming style is better than your gaming style? If people choose to play high power games more power to them. It doesn't really influence me, none of my group reads Dumpshock and I actively suppress my Min-Max side (apart from when I am just playing with numbers)

I had gone through a couple iterations of creating my character where I initially had a lot of 3s, 4s, and 5s. I realized I didn't like that and spread it out a lot more and now have skills between 1 and 5, with the majority clustering around 2-3.

I've never understood why people think having characters with maxed out attribute scores is okay, but maxed out skill scores somehow makes you an insane munchkin who is horribly broken in all ways imaginable.

It's also pretty crazy to accept the skill rank charts as having any real meaning whatsoever when it comes to player characters. Shadowruns, as previously mentioned, are special. They're supposed to be exceptionally trained or talented in their particular fields and more than competent in a few other basic areas (such as stealth and the ability to use a firearm). If you're running the shadows as an ordinary schmuck with a skill set and attribute array similar to the average person, what's the point in anyone hiring you over anyone else? The shadows are all about specialization.

That said, trying to rationalize that you're a good gamer by saying you have all these skills in the 1-2 range, but then bragging about how you maxed out your attributes to unbelievable levels (most people are in the 3 range there, too) is pretty darn silly and more than a little hypocritical. Especially when you consider how cheesy it is rules-wise considering one attribute applies to multiple skills and tests while one skill only applies to a limited number of situations.

Hack n slash isn't really the appropriate term here, i think.
HnS sounds too much like simplistic, kick-in-the-door style gaming without much tactical, let alone strategical consideration.
Not the kind of game i'd love to play in anymore, i prefer gaming styles with a strong emphasis on creative problem solving, social interaction, a lot of planning and downtime...and dice pools you'd most likely consider obscenely inflated.
Not because i go for 6's in as many skills as possible, but because i love to pile on as many bonus dice as possible.
Much cheaper and more efficient than jacking up the basic dice pool.
I want my characters to be able to do something, to have a tangible effect on the gameworld, so that i have more ways to actively participate in the creation of a story.

And that's a lot easier when your PC actually has a chance to succeed at tasks that go beyond what Joe Average could do.
Because seriously, shadowrunners regularly participate in tasks that would make Joe Average shit his pants in sheer terror.



Yes, of course.
But how often does that doctor have to treat a heavily cybered teammate with multiple gunshot wounds while he's dodging bullets in an open sewer and the group's mage has to battle a hostile spirit just two meters away from the emergency operation?

Seriously, take a look at the table for First Aid modifiers, it takes more than 12 dice (medkit included) to reliably treat your team's tank or spellslinger under field conditions.



Yes, the problem's called "people who don't read up on minmaxing and therefore depend on a skill rating of 6 to have a double-digit dicepool"



Yeah, that's what a doctor in a hospital would most likely do.
According to Augmentation, hospitals regularly include gear counting as a rating 10 medkit, so a doctor with Skill 3 and Logic 4 should very well be able to work with that under sterile conditions, especially if aided by qualified coworkers.
In most cases however, it is rather unlikely that the medic of a shadowrunner team is hauling a full-fledged operation theatre complete with medical staff with him in his backpack...
So it may be advisable to choose that your PC packs a higher dicepool before adding in external gear, teamwork tests and so on.


Of course, you are free to run a low-level game where average people succeed at average tasks.
Nothing wrong with that.
Nor would it be wrong to run a gritty, gutter-level game in the Barrens, where average people most often desperately fail at above-average tasks.
High PC lethality is a long-standing, respectable gaming tradition and i applaud everyone who makes the bold move away from the present-day level-appropriate, wish-fulfillment, safeguard-included gamer culture for pampered geeks living out their superhero fantasies.

But there's other alternatives around as well, and some include taking over the metroplex with dicepools in the low- to mid 20s.

The answer is that it's relative, so everybody loses 2 internets for trying to give an absolute answer.

It depends ENTIRELY on the power level set by the GM. Does the GM routinely put rating 3 maglock in your way or rating 6 ones? Your dice pool size should reflect the strength of obstacles put in your way. Period.

Yeah, I really just can't make myself care about what anyone else might do in their game with respect to skill or attribute scores.

But I will say that if I'm gonna spend my time playing Shadowrun, I want my character (and teammates) to be a bunch of stone-cold badasses who do amazing things. Playing low-powered characters who spend their days knocking over the local stuffer shack just isn't appealing to me. But if you like playing low-powered characters, more power to you. Good roleplaying isn't what you play, it's how you play it.

Nothing says "troll" like starting off your thread by calling a bunch of
people wankers.

Awesome.

At least he didn't break out the "rollplayer". I hate it when people use that one too, and pretty much stop reading as soon as someone says it. As long as no one's cheating to get skill ratings of 6 at chargen, then what's the problem? If you don't like the rules, then houserule it for your game or play a different system.

Agreed. We have a PBS here -- Problem Behind Screen.

I think a good part of it is meta-game thinking (or lack thereof). RPG Gamers just tend towards wanting to max out their character. I don't think there's anything really "wrong" with that, it's just something that people tend to do. When walking something through creating an SR character and they get to a skill they really want their character to be good at they'll ask, "What's the max?" It often doesn't matter if you say "6, but that should be rare" they just hear "6" because "that's the max." Since there are no game-rules consequences for taking a skill at 6, beyond the fact that you can only get 1 of them at chargen, the real "gamey" gamers will see anyone with a skill less than 6 as "not awesome."

The real unfortunate thing with SR4 (and I saw it in my first reading of the rules) is a problem I call "compression of scale." Basically, with only 7 levels skill (and all of those being attainable at chargen) there isn't enough "room" for the GM to tell some of the stories they may want to tell. The limited number of levels makes it difficult to really put into game mechanics how much better Super Guy A should be in relation to the Average Guy B. Worse yet, because 7 is achievable at chargen, it massively cheapens what that level of skill is supposed to represent. Like it or not, gamers react strongly (often mostly strongly) to the mechanics of a PC or NPC rather than their "fluff" description. If the players meet some hardened spec ops veteran, that they probably should greatly respect (if not revere) and find out that he has an Automatics skill of 5 they will react differently. Most "muncher" players will become almost dismissive of the character ("pffft... I could build a character better than him"). FastJack is supposed to be the "best decker (hacker) in the world." So what's his Hacking skill? By the chart it should be 7. But I can make a starting character with the same skill level, so that (IMO) cheapens the achievement. I realize this is a design decision that the SR4 team made, and it does give a great deal of freedom to the players to make pretty much any character with any background they want, but I think the drawbacks outweigh the advantages.

In games where the crunch forces your character to start "weak" you are often limited in how you can create your character background. You are pretty much "forced" to create a character that is just "starting out." Some may find this limiting. SR gives a player the freedom to create, say, someone who was part of the original Echo Mirage team and has just come out of "exile" now on some secret personal mission. This person should quite likely have best-in-the-world level Hacking abilities. The system allows this, and that's a good thing. However, the baggage that comes with this freedom is part of the "gamey" mentality of players.

Part of the mentality of many RPG Gamers (isn't that what this thread is about?) is that things that can be achieved at chargen are "basic" or "introductory." In part, this is probably due to years of prior RPG's and video games where players were forced to start out basic and earn more power and skill through in-game achievements. The other part of this thinking is (IMO) due to the fact that what your character gets at chargen is not earned. Aren't some of the most memorable pieces of equipment you have ones that come with the story of how you got them? It's not just the widget you bought with your chargen budget, it's the widget that you snagged from that the BBEG's hoard while your buddies distracted him and then had to fight to escape with through a hoard of minions sent to get it back! When I play RPG's, it is primarily about telling a story, so that's what I revel in: playing a session that creates those long-lasting memories. But when New Guy joins your group, and he crunches his chargen points so that he also has a widget just like yours, but no in-game story, don't you feel a little let-down?

The first RPG I ever played was the old D6 Star Wars game by West End Games. The system bears a lot of similarity to SR. In that system, starting character's skills were capped, but they could be improved forever. This gave the GM an incredible amount of "scale" to tell cool stories. Starting characters felt competent, but with lots of room for improvement. The system scaled from starting characters to awesome galaxy-rulers incredibly well. This was shown by West End Games fearlessly publishing in-game stats for pretty much every major character in the universe: Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia, Boba Fett, Darth Vader, The Emperor, they were all there and (for the most part) they were awesome. There was a sense of awe when you looked at Boba Fett's blaster skill of 12D, or The Emperor's Alter (Force) Skill of 18D.

There are a lot of great things about the SR system, and the world is incredibly engaging. However, I would really like to see the "scale" of the game changed to give GM's the freedom to tell those great stories, and inspire awe in their players, without having to resort to "too cool for stats" tricks.

Just one thing I'd like to point out.

If I make a 400BP character - that is to say, a standard one - I'm GOING to have skills at 5. Or attributes at 5. Or be rich as hell. Or be a magician with a ton of spells. Or something that is otherwise 'unbelievable.'

I think sometimes people who are bitching about the game being unbelievable because OMG PLAYERS IS MINMAXIN' forget that Shadowrunners, if created by the book, will end up that way by dint of the rules.

Another important thing to consider here is that Skill level alone doesn't say much about how good someone really is at what he does.
Climbing 7 doesn't mean you're the best climber in the world.
It just means that you have learned as much about climbing as is possible for an unaugmented human.
In fact, your intuitive grasp of climbing techniques, related muscle memory and so on are so incredibly profound that most people (read : the 99.99% of people who don't have Aptitude : Climbing and Climbing : 7) will never be able to reach this level of understanding.

However, what you have learned about climbing is only half of what makes up your Dicepool (and even that holds true only if we don't consider augmentations, be they magical or technological; more on this below).
The other half are your basic physical abilities- in this case, your Strenght score.
No use if you have a lifetime of climbing experience if you've become a couch potatoe since your last trip to the Himalaya, right?

Then there's Edge.
When you want to achieve truly heroic feats -climbing the Mt. Everest, winning a Nobel Prize in medicine, setting up a world record in running, recording a piece of music people will still listen to in 100 years-, you need Edge.
Not just mere talent and experience, but true dedication, the will to push your own limits or sometimes just sheer luck.

But wait, we are still talking about unaugmented humans here.
We shouldn't, as this is Shadowrun.

Unaugmented, mundane humans are evolution's last year model.
Outdated, obsolete, fallen behind the SOTA.

You can blow 147 BP into being a human with a DP of 14 (Exceptional Attribute at 7, Aptitude, Skill lvl 7)- or you get yourself a bunch of cyberware for 50BP and receive DPs of 10-20 or more in, say, about 8+ skills.

Just take a look at all the stuff available for Social, Physical or Technical skills.
In fact, combat is about the only thing in SR where it gets really hard to push your Dicepool above 20.
Magic and hacking receive some restrictions, too.
But when we look at the inflation of bonus dice for skills considered less crucial for your average group of roleplayers, all bets are off.

What does it take for Joe Average with LOG3 and no Biotech skill group to achieve the same average performance as someone who would nowadays be qualified to make medical history?
Cerebral Booster 3, PusHeD, Encephalon1, Neocortical Neural Stimulus Nanites and some skillwires.
And with that 'ware, he would just need a new skillsoft to do the same with all Acedemic Knowledge Skills and all Technical Skills as well.

Let's face it, what we consider outstanding today is about to become average in the Sixth World (if you have the , of course).
SR's system isn't scaled to adequately reflect the level of proficiency of present-day, real life people, no matter how exceptional they are- and it shouldn't attempt to do so.
Because they could barely compete in the 2070s.
Welcome to the transhumanist age.

My Current Character, with just over 200 Karma, has most skills at 3 or less (the majority at a 2 or 1, though I do have a very large amount of skills), with only Electronic Warfare (Rank 5) and Perception (Rank 5) higher (And no skills in the 6 range)... it has worked out great for me... and as a result, I am still on the quest to raise the rest of my skills to Professional Level, at which point I will pursue Veteran Status (I Should be able to play for a very long time at this rate and not become too overwhelmingly powerful in the process)...

This lack of maxed out skills, however, has NOT lead to a disappointingly low success rate either, as the GM views the world as a cohesive whole where skills of 3 are Actauly PROFESSIONAL grade... I am loving it...

EDIT: And Yes, I would say it is a matter of scale... Though as a player or GM I have no real problem with it the way it is...

Unless your attributes are also 3 or lower and you have equally low-rated equipment, your point is kind of moot. If I only point to a fraction of a dice pool, I can pretend I'm just an average Joe Blow, too.

For reference... My average Dice Pools are 10 (or so, with one or two at 12+, and some are as low as 7)... but the point remains... even with augmented attributes (Reaction of 9 and Agility of 6) these are not stats that are outrageous (all of the rest are 4's, with the exception of a 3 Charisma)... so as you can see, not an uber maximized character... the game is written with the premise (as supported by all of the archtypes and NPC's) that the player characters will have dice pools from 10-15 (and maybe the odd 17, Street Sam I am looking at you)... if playing within that premise, these dice pools are exceptional and will lead to success more often than not... once you make the assumption that dicepools need to be higher than that, well then that is where your power creep begins....

I don't want to get into another argument about dice pools and the requirements that they be high, as this generally devolves into a verbal slugfest... lets just say in my experience (I have been playing Shadowrun since inception) that I am comfortable with playing/running a game in this zone, as it melds well to the fluff...

Keep the Faith...

Bullshit. The archetypes and NPCs are archetypes and NPCs, period. There is no "premise" whatsoever as to how high dice pools "should" be. It may be an open build system, but there are many hard limits in the game (only one 6 or two 5's for starting skills, only half of Build Points can be spent on Attributes, characters can only have so much in resources or Availability). There are even more soft limits in the game (maxing an Attribute costs an extra 15 Build Points, starting with a skill of 7 costs 18 points, including the quality, to go from 6 to 7, the same as the cost of a skill of 4 with a specialization). And you don't need to be a master of esoteric rules trivia to get a high dice pool, either. It's easy and logical to do, without going over the soft limits of the system, much less the hard ones.

I could care less how high dice pools "should" be, but while they may not be required to be high, high dice pools are neither "outrageous", nor do they violate any supposed "premise" of the game.

Personally I would love to play a gritty game where you start with only 300 BP and you are new to shadowrunning (400 BP means they aren't new, btw). I love low level games because it means you are starting at the beginning of the story (well, the beginning of the shadowrun story). As many people mentioned, the roleplaying and building the character through the story is exciting and fun. Being a veteran through experience is a lot more fun than building a kick-butt character from the start. Then you have a real story to tell... now just to find a game group that lasts longer than a few runs...

Still, it wouldn't stop me from making a character that is maxed on something at the beginning of the game. That just means that the rest of your abilities suck and your character history needs to explain your reasoning for such an unbalanced sheet. It also adds a bit of depth to the game. Instead of some elite guy who's only worry is not getting blown up, you also have bills to pay (crap! How long has it been since I got that notice?).

Of course, eventually you become super-runner then retire before you are forced into retirement, but the stories you would have... Then you could do some second-gen thing where you start a new character and use the first as a contact or something, your PC you watched grow from gutter trash to elite warrior is now an NPC of great respect and who your next character idolizes. This is getting me excited... I want to play... now I know why people write books. It's because they didn't have a RP group to materialize their fantastic visions. Oops, I'm rambling now.

I read some where that today's US army soldiers are about as fit as they have ever been.

That the average infantry man is as fit as a WWII ranger.

Makes you wonder what they will be like in 50 years.



I do think a PC should have a least one or two high skills and stats to define the character. I'm talking level 5 here.

And natural talent/gifted is a valid reason.


Also SR has some nice built in limitations on maxing skills and stats.

Getting at 6 in either one is rather expensive.

I totally see your point, but i find it a lot easier to build street-level characters for gritty games with 400BP.
It's all about how you spent these points.
With 400BP, you always have to compromise somewhere when you want to built a "real" shadowrunner.
In fact, i have to minmax if i want to generate ninjas, specops guys, magicians with a doctorate in thaumaturgy and the like and don't want them to turn out as overspecialized, incomplete caricatures.
But if you spend 400BP to make a well-rounded, believable gang member, wizzer, corp brat or script kiddie, it may work out nicely if you go for a broad range of low-level skills and buy more stuff that's there just for flavour.

400BP has enough range to work both for low and average level games, as it's not about the sheer number of BPs, but about what you spend them on.

300 BP, IMHO, is for squatters, wageslaves and the like.
E.g., you couldn't spend more than 150 BP on Attributes under that premise.
Which would mean that Attribute scores of 3 in everything (in other words : an average human) wouldn't be possible with 300BP and even coming close to it would require maxing out the Attribute hardcap.



Most likely about the same as today.
But then, i don't expect the advent of magic and SR-style cybernetics in the next 50 years.

The problem I ran into was partially one of my own making. I decided I wanted to make a spec ops that had been crapped on by his government. I had three basic issues.

The first was that I couldn't fit a believable attribute mix into the attributes to adequately portray the character. So I made a judgmental call to have the period of time between his expulsion from the service and the current year be large enough that conceivably his physical stats could have degraded slightly.

The second issue was a conflict of two things. The first I think was that I worked from overall character concept to character build, while most of the other players decided on specifically what they wanted to do and built concept around that. This was slightly exacerbated by the GM wanting our characters to fill a number of "roles". I have 3-4 skills that I would considered extraneous to the concept that I took to satisfy the wider utility, as well as had to drop skill levels to be able to do so. I'm wondering if going with karma build may not have been better, and am actually considering recreating from a karma build just to see the results.

The third issue was that I made the willful choice to use bioware over cyberware. I figured that the lower maintenance/profile of bioware over cyberware would be more ideal to spec ops, especially those in recon that typically operate in two-man teams.

However, I really don't know if I could have min-maxed my character much beyond swapping bio for cyber.

An average challenge is Tn 4. With only 3 dice, you're going to fail about 12.5% of the time. I'm not sure about where you work, but where I work, if I failed at more than 10 tasks I had to do for my job, I'd hardly be a professional, I'd be fired.

You're talking about SR3, aren't you? The skill scales are too different in SR3 and SR4 to compare.

That's pretty short-sighted. Peak human performance has increased at more or less the same rate since about the 17th century, following trends of medical science and food production. What makes you think we've run out of ideas?


Tests are Attribute+Skill, not just Skill, so you've actually got 6 dice. Throw in a specialization if you care about your job, a die or two from gear, maybe a little Teamwork, and your odds of success start to skyrocket. When all else fails, you've still got a point or two of Edge.

Yeah, I went through and calculated my character's karma cost at 561, and that's with using 410BP. I think most of us are new to Shadowrun, and the GM wanted us to all be highly versatile. I agree that karma-build allows for more versatile characters, however I'm thinking that the best method to create a character is to use BP to create your character within its specialization (ie don't take extraneous skills unrelated to concept). Then convert it to karma and use the remaining karma to flesh our versatility and character background.

Most, if not all, the players in our group are new, including the GM. I think we may not have adequately considered karma-build to create the versatile characters the GM wanted, so what I'm suggesting to the GM is that we convert our characters into their karma build equivalent, take the remaining karma-pool, split it in half. The GM gets to use one half to improve the characters to shore up the weaknesses he perceives in the whole group, and we get what the GM doesn't use plus the other half. So I would have 189 karma left, GM would get 94 or 95 to shore up my character to fit within his group concept, I get 94/95 plus what the GM doesn't use to shore up my character to fill some of the concept/background stuff that I feel is missing.

Overall
1. Construct character via BP to fit within specialization + some.
2. Convert character to karma equivalent.
3. Split remaining karma pool.
4. GM spends his half shoring up the PCs.
5. Player gets unspent GM karma + his half to shore up his PC.

You KEEP saying that Glyph, and I will keep arguing the point...
You can play any way you want (That is the beauty of Role-playing games), but the indicators are that the system is not set up for characters with 20+ Dice, as the power creep begins to get absolutely crazy...

Keep the Faith

Don't get me wrong here StealthSigma... I have no problems with the concept or execution of your character... could it be a little better, of course, they all could be a little better... but if you stayed relatively true to your concept and the GM's guidelines for the campaiogn, you are doing great in my opinion...

Don't worry about it...

Keep the Faith

Sure,

the scale is small, but i think it works. If you have 6 dice, you can accomplish moderately difficult tasks. And the situational modifiers make a big difference too. You might be a doctor, but have you stitched someone up before the security forces bust down the door and shoot you in the face? also, If your character has a 7 in medicine and 1st aid, then you built the Doogie houser of 2070, because thats the guy you wanted to play. The same holds true for Magic. Its supposed to be kind of rare, but there isn't a shadowrun team out there that doesn't have at least a phys ad. why? Because these are the people that are interesting to play. Do I have my own golf video game? no, because people don't want to play "joe shmoe's golf" the want to play "Tiger Woods". As far as the "Darth Vader" of epic Bad guys, Its tricky in shadowrun. anyone can be shot to death on the street. so Your Baddie has to be too smart , too prepared, and too hard to find. The real powerful guys are behind 300 less powerful guys. everyone enjoys killing the high pain tolerance chromed out Troll or the uber powerfull mage, but its the guy that hired them that matters

Oh noes!! Power creep in a game of cyborgs, magical kung-fu fighters, fireball-chucking wizards, ultra-hackers, and people commanding robot armies? What were they thinking?

Looking at the mediocre archetypes and bare-bones sample NPCs does not give any kind of baseline for PCs. Other than that, a slavish adherence to the fluff of the woefully truncated skill levels, and some anecdotal evidence easily countered with other anecdotal evidence, is not convincing in the face of how the mechanics of the actual game are set up.

Or do you think SR4 was designed by retarded monkeys? Because honestly, if they made an high-powered, action-oriented game, and set up a kajillion hard and soft limits to character generation, but still made it possible to make game-breaking, power-creeping characters by making normal, logical choices in character creation, but expect you to somehow intuit some unwritten power level, then SR4 topples F.A.T.A.L. to be the worst game to ever exist.

In some games, there is no limit to how high you can go. All things become relative; Skill 20 means nothing if the average skill is 20, but when the average skill is 5 it becomes godlike. Shadowrun tried that for a couple of editions. Go back in the old books and you'll see 6's, 8's...skills of 12 and 15 and higher were not unknown. By setting a ceiling on skills, game designers basically force players to spend their resources on other things. Instead of raising their skills directly they have to raise them indirectly - implants, mentor spirits or other qualities, foci, attributes, gear, related skills, etc.

I'm sure I had a point where I was going with all this, but I'll be damned. If I can think of it. Well, that too.

Even more than indirectly raising skills themselves, shadowrunners become tougher by developing the complementary aspects of their specialty. Sure, you have 20 dice in pistols, but can you use a rifle if it is longer-ranged combat? Do you have a high Reaction and lots of IPs? Can you dodge and soak the bullets from the other guys? Can you spot an ambush before you get surprised? Can you sneak up on the other guys? Can you fix your own gun if it gets broken? Do you know someone who can get you APDS rounds? Can you hide your gun if they do a pat-down at the door?

The 800-point character thread was pretty instructive to me, in a way. It demonstrated that while you can make a tough 400 or 500 point character, they are still a long way from being as tough as they can be.

OK. I read all the posts in their entirety, and I think it' time I stuck my proboscis into this one.
There are some good arguments here, as well as some bad ones. But the first thing I’d like to do is just look at the new SR4A thresholds and consider what they imply.

The highest TN listed anywhere in the actual SR4A book that I have found is 5. If we look at what you get at that TN 5, factor in that the previous TN is a 3 (not a 4), and the degree of improvement implicit in the differences in description between the TN 3 and TN 5 results, I think we should all be able to agree that TN 5 really is “Ok, that’s the highest meaningful level of success ��" everything above that is sauce.� If we can agree on that, some interesting things can be inferred.

First: Succeeding in a TN 5 test should be an astounding result to mortals, even in the hyper-enhanced 6th World.

Second: The minimum Dice Pool to be able to reliably pull off that TN 5 test by the odds most of the time is 15. To be able to BUY that test right off as routine, you’d need a Dice Pool of 20… to achieve the nigh-impossible with such regularity that you disdain the possible chances of failure.

Third: if we accept the first two premises, which can fairly reasonably stand on their own, we can see that the SYSTEM itself is truly designed to handle Dice Pools only up to about 20 dice; Beyond that and you’re starting to break the system. Every system has a point where the numbers start to do things that break the rules. Furthermore, see the following except:

SR4A, P.61: Dice Pool Modifiers

Optionally, gamemasters may choose to cap dice pools (including modifiers) at 20 dice, or at twice the sum of the character’s natural Attribute + Skill ratings, whichever is higher.

I think the Devs are making their opinion pretty clear in black and white for us.

So, let’s examine that 20 Die Pool, shall we? Let’s call it 10 dice worth of skill for an Adept with an Aptitude for the skill at hand and maxed skill ranks.

Furthermore, let’s give them 10 dice in the controlling stat, assuming it’s exceptional. How many individuals like that should exist in the 6th World? To have both qualities, in a stat and skill that compliment each other, and then furthermore develop the skill’s potential to that extent? Not many. Then we have a new assumption: that the net modifiers cancel out to 0 or better in the Adept’s favor. Then, and only then, can the absolutely fantastically capable and powerful Adept buy off that test as a matter of course.

Instead, let us look at the average human professional, qualified to do their job on a daily basis. They have a DP of 6. That means they can expect an average of two Hits on any given test, excluding modifiers. Let’s look what that buys her:

SR4A, P.62: Success Test Difficulties Table

Easy 1
Average 2
Hard 3
Extreme 5+

That means that, on average, the average human can achieve an average result the vast majority of the time! Seems they got something right.

Routine (missing from the table because it’s assumed): Don’t even roll! Examples include driving in average rush-hour conditions, walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time, stepping over a 0.5 meter high fence, or running on flat level ground in decent shoes.

Easy is just that: make sure you achieve a minimum level of success. Even defaulting, an average stat character has a 2/3 chance of succeeding.

Average is average; this is where you would expect somebody to require the requisite experience and ability of a professional at work to achieve success ordinarily. Examples might include talking on the comlink to your brother-in-law’s friend in East Africa while driving a cab aggressively in heavy rush hour traffic while it’s raining and managing to not hit the child who just chased their ball out into traffic, Interpreting test results with observational data to correctly determine a common illness that is afflicting a patient, and successfully vaulting a 1 meter tall hurdle at a full run.

Hard is where even an experienced veteran with above-average statistics needs something to break their way to pull off an activity on average; You need a 9 Dice Pool to expect to get 3 Hits, and 4 Skill + 4 Stat is only 8. You’re still looking for a net +1 DP modifier somewhere. Even your Elite characters with the maximum unmodified Stat can only buy success casually if the net DP modifiers are even or in their favor.

Extreme suddenly looks a lot more impressive, neh?

So, I have touched on how stats and skills at their representative levels reflect on expected success rates against subjective thresholds. Everybody still with me, as this has turned into one of my characteristic and infamous rants?

Now, why do we have problems with number creep? Because we’re gamers, even the hard-core “role-players� on some level know it’s a game and that games have rules, so more dice is better. I never met a positive modifier I didn’t like. But that’s us looking at it as a game, not as imaginary avatars in a fantasy setting. If we were to look at it from a WOLD perspective and KEEP our frame of reference in that space, like I demonstrated above, we could keep in line with the system’s base assumptions and expectations instead of breaking things.

To help with that, I like both the caps quoted above, as well as the other one limiting the maximum number of hits to 2x Skill. That means without spending Edge, a defaulting character can’t achieve even an average target number. Why? Because that’s what we’d expect from a professional individual, not a schmuck who’s guessing! But even the barest of actual training allows a “beginner� (RTG 1) to routinely pull off average tests with enough modifiers in their favor. A “novice� (RTG 2) can do hard things, and a “professional� (RTG 3) can achieve extreme results, when things go their way. Is that unrealistic? Not in the least. Does it bring the focus squarely back onto skills? You bet. Does it Nerf^TM characters back to levels the system was inherently designed to handle? It just might at that.

That is why, whenever I create a character (or examine a character sheet) I am asking myself “what is the thematically appropriate skill level for this character in that Skill?� I did that with Kerenshara when I built her, and had to do a lot of trimming. But guess what? I did NOT assign even one skill (naturally) at RTG 5 (Expert) or above! If I had the points I might have put a 5 into Perception given her specific upbringing and background.

It’s also useful for RP purposes to keep those skill guidelines in mind, because I guarantee that although the characters don’t know what their DP count is, or what their Skill RTG is at, they know their approximate level of capability, and in the real world, I “role play� to my own perceived level of capability every day.

Finally, let’s look at the closest thing we have in real life to Prime Shadowrunners as most of us conceive of them:

U.S. Navy Seal team member

Statistics:

BOD: 5 (Even the scrawny guys are in extreme peak physical condition.)

AGI: 5 (If they didn’t have it before, their AGIlity will be superior before they’re done.)

STR: 4 (Swimming, Running and Jumping are all STRength, plus carrying.)

REA: 5 (Their training is intense in all kinds of REAction based Skills.)

CHA: 3 (Guys who can’t get along in a group won’t make it onto a Team.)

INT: 4 (By the time they’re out, their ability to intuitively process data is well above average.)

LOG: 3 (Contrary to some popular belief, these guys are actually smart.)

WIL: 4 (If their WILlpower wasn’t at LEAST above average, they’d have washed out of B.U.D.S.)

Core Skills:

Firearms: 5 (Expert) - specialists will have even better.

Athletics: 5 (Expert) - all that Swimming, Jumping, Running, Climbing and Tumbling?

Close Combat: 4+ (Veteran) - these guys are lethal up close, though they prefer firearms.

Throwing Weapons: 3+ (Professional) - Grenades, knives, incendiaries, you name it.

Diving: 4+ (Veteran) - even Nuggets on the Teams are veteran divers.

Parachuting: 4+ (Veteran) - HALO jump at night? Par for the course.

Infiltration: 4+ (Veteran) - If you’re not quiet, you’re worthless.

Perception: 4+ (Veteran) - What you can’t see, kills you.

Leadership (Tactics): 2+ (Novice) - Even the nuggets know the basics.

Demolition: 2+ (Novice) - Even the nuggets know the basics.

First-Aid (Trauma): 2 - Everybody’s cross-trained in basic trauma first-aid.

Can you build that with a starting 400 BP? Not a chance. Should that character intimidate the drek out of any shadowrunner less than full Prime status (read: not a recurring name in the Fluff)? If they’re smart, yes. Do they have a pile of 6’s in anything? No. And the numbers above don’t even include 6^th World augmentations! These guys are picked from amongst the best of the best of the best. They are trained at a crushing pace over the course of years and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars. No Shadowrunner can match that out of the gate.

The thing about those two nerfs you mentioned is that, even for extreme cases (dice pools of 20+), neither is likely to come up too much. So they're really "fixing" an almost non-existent problem.

But also keep in mind that social skills, magical skills, and combat skills are not threshold-based, but are opposed tests with lots of potential negative modifiers. For threshold-based tests, generally things like technical skills and the like, it is much, much rarer to have one of those super-high dice pools, and you generally don't need one, either. Someone tossing 12 dice for pistols is decent, but could be a lot better. A hacker tossing 12 dice for hacking is pretty damn good.

The important thing to remember about characters is that they will seek to become better with time. Will they know their dice pool? No, but any Runner worth his dark sunglasses has shot enough bullets to know a smartlink makes his life easier, and spending time at the range is necessary for existence. When you make Prime Runners to use against the PC's I'd bet my Power Focus you look at their DP's. In the real world, people who aren't good enough at their profession or avocation get better or quit. In SR, runners get better by any method they can, or they die.

I think the argument that somehow players should avoid going above a certain level is fatuous, at best. The truth is in SR anybody else can be just as good as you are. In fact, the classic setting puts the characters against the corps. The corps always have more resources than the runners. If a group of players churns out specialized 25 DP badasses then the GM needs to stop whining and run a game where they are challenged. If the group wants to hard cap DP's at a certain level for their game, great.

Attempting to interpret the intent of the game designers as to power level from a combination of suggested house rules, fluff, and various off-hand comments in blog posts is like reading your tea leaves to find out if you have cancer.

Kerenshara! A cogent, well-argued, impassioned statement. How refreshing. Thanks!

Really? OK, I guess you haven't played with my group then. When the GM announced they were going with those caps, the players excep me (who fundamentally designes assuming those caps to begin with) wound up going back for a complete re-do of their sheets. Nothing was in stone, but we were hashing out team roles and backgrounds and so forth. Trust me, the number of times Kerenshara's had to leave Hits in the tray, it's an issue.


THIS is a better argument, but if both opponents were built with the caps in mind and the general design of the system and game universe in mind, the same things still come to pass: highly skilled characters will routinely surpass and/or defeat lesser skilled opponents. I don't care HOW talented you are in terms of LOGic, you're not going to beat Garry Kasparov head-to-head.
If you cap hits at 2x Skill, and max DP modifiers at 2x [Skill+Stat], you eliminate a surprisingly large number of the "odd" conditions and bring things back to more centered results. The dice are the engine of randomness. With them eliminated, modifiers can only affect the outcome so much.

Kerenshara: I have a gut reaction against looking at something a person has created and inferring that person's opinion from it. THAT SAID, I agree with pbangarth that your statement was cogent and well-argued, and I agreed with all of its assertions.

My only interjection is that this skill-centric thinking is probably great for game-balance and fluffy reasons (as many have argued), but I feel it'll result in a great preponderance of adepts. Resonance, spellcasting and conjuration all fail to give any boost to skills, and bioware has only the limited +1 from Reflex Recorders to offer. If hits are going to be capped by skill (or skillx2), why give adepts the highest ceilings?

I just wish the +3 skills love was shared. I don't see why we couldn't have an Increase Skill spell, or Reflex Recorders grade 3.

Of course they do, and I wasn't attempting to argue otherwise. What I was saying is that by using the 20 DP cap, you keep things from spiraling endlessly out of control. There is going to be a fundamental point where it's going to come down to luck; Take the sniper (modern day, not 6^th World) who has the best possible rifle, Legendary skill, hand-eye coordination to boggle computerized controls, and aims to the end of time, but in the end, at 2500 meters, it's going to come down to a fair sized measure of luck. Did there happen to be a stray puff of wind? Did the shifting balance of the rifle dislodge something a millionth of a centimeter and deviate the aim point ever so slightly? did the target decide to turn to talk to their friend at the last moment once the bullet was on the way? Adding more dice isn't going to change that, and 20 is plenty to account for whatever else you have come up.


I never said they should avoid going above a certain level. What I said (or implied) was that there is no subjective NEED to push a character that far. The rules have hard caps in them, aside from the "optional" limits. As long as the character isn't "breaking" the rules, I have no problem with the actual taking of stats and/or skills to those heights. I am concerned when doing so is merely an attempt to further push the limits of the system, not to do with any particular character motivation or need. Getting to Longarms RTG 6 takes a lot of time, dedication, practice and rounds downrange. Are you the team's dedicated sniper? Is that your focus? Than why shouldn't you be satisfied with being "Expert" with the weapon? It's one more die, and even with the caps, you're already within the "max 20" cap leaving a Stat and Skill both at 5. Now, please bear in mind, when I talk about Stats (in any discussion like this) I am referring to the ones that are completely natural. Augmentations, be they magical or technilogical, are, to my opinion, simply more modifiers. And as I pointed out in the long post above: with the Hits <= Skill x2, you still can get "Extreme" results (5+ Hits) with RTG 3 Skill. Add a Stat augmented to a 7, and you can hit the 20 DP cap with no problems.

I'd like to turn your proposition on its head. Instead of a GM who stops whining about characters with too many dice, why don't we have a group of players who push their GM to come up with more creative challenges that require the PLAYERS to think and respond, rather than just throwing double-handfulls of dice? If the GM sets a tone where the 20 DP cap is not only a limit, but also an unusual limit reached by the top professionals in their fields, then they won't be as incentivised to buil such extensive Dice Pools in the first place, and we won't have the vicious spiral to begin with.

Your argument here unfortunately boils down to "I can make a badhoop mother-slotter, so the GM just needs to deal with me!". Omae, I don't mean to sound confrontational, but doesn't that sounds just a tad immature to you? If you don't think so, take another look at your assertions. If neither you nor your GM set out to break the system, doesn't the whole argument just go away? We're here to play a game together, not to beat each other.

Oh, and as a side note: GM's are SUPPOSED to lose. What makes their job fun and challenging, is keeping the margin of failure to as thin a line as they can. If the players lose, that's it. Roll up new toons, folks. But if the players blow the GM out of the water, it lacks the satisfaction of pulling off a brilliant last-minute victory from the jaws of defeat with a brilliant use of a point of EDGe and a load of creativity and chutzpah. The secret is, nobody is as satisfied with that ending as the GM themselves.

Is it any less pointless than proving that you can build a character and engineer a situation to break the rules system? That's what I have seen over and over again in these threads: ways to break the system. Can we do it? Absolutely. Can we prove it afterwards? Without a doubt. Do we deprive ourselves of some of the flavor and sense of the immersion in the word we play in as a consequence? Unfortunately, yes. If you and I as players make a point to keep ourselves "reasaonable" and not push the outer edges of the rules, the GM won't feel compelled to follow suit to "keep up", and there is still plenty of room to frow and develop as a character.

And Samurai with Reflex Recorders plus all their other goodies. And Mages who creatively use their spells to thwart the űber Adepts. And Deckers who skillfully screw the űber Adept or the Gonzo Sammie or the technically less-than-able Magician.

Keep in mind, that those skill bumps are limited to 1/2 of native skill. How many Adepts are going (if you go with my take on things) to take multiple RTG 6 skills just so they can spend .75 MP on each of them? You only need a total of 10 points in Stat + Skill to get to the 20 DP max, and Skill RTG 3 to hit the 5+ TN threshold. Why bother going to such lengths unless it's the character's focus and they don't want to have to rely on modifiers?

Yes, an Adept can go to the highest heights. But then again, that's no different than now, is it? They ALWAYS can get higher skills than anybody else. The most proficient non-TM Deckers are Adepts, neh? That means they always had the higher maximum DP. By your own argument, the 20 DP cap actually reigns them back in just a tad, don't you think?

And one thing nobody mentioned that can be a huge drain on those modifiers: Wound Penalties, especially for your physically tougher or much more WILlpower gifted characters at the bottoms of their tracks.

I do not see capping successes at 2x skill in the SR4A changes document. May I know where is that mentioned in the rules?

Dear heavens! You mean I got the drop on rules just ONCE on this bleeding forum?

Toturi, I cited the page reference in my PDF copy of SR4A, which I presume to be version 2 because the thresholds are 1,2,3,5 instead of the original 1,2,4,6. If you have the PDF, it's in the section where it talks about game concepts up front. It's an optional rule, exactly like I cited, but it appears in main text, rather than a side bar. It's not in the "changes" doccument to my knowledge.

Oh, poo. I misread that the first time through. The cap on hits is another "sidebar" optional rule from the existing BBB.

In the old main book, it is on pg. 69, TWEAKING THE RULES, under the subheading: Grittier Gameplay. It is one of the optional rules.

I know it is an optional rule in SR4, but the previous posts gave me the impression that it was a non-optional rule in SR4A.

My first impression on the capping of the dice pools is "What were they thinking?" Remember the discussions we had on the Pornomancer pwning the Don and his mom or the Neenja infiltrating clad in day glo orange screaming his head off? Yes? Good, those are choke full of negative modifiers. You want the player to load up deliberately load up on negative modifiers because it isn't really going to matter to him since you are capping his dice pools anyway?

Even on a top notch street sam (with 20+ dice pool) will be Calling his Shots, simply because any extra dice he had would be wasted. Apart from the Porno, the other guy with a ton of dice - Mr Perceptive won't really be bothered by this optional rule. Why? Simple, Perception has whole loads of negative mods normally! Not really paying attention? -2. Concealment? -(Force). What about camouflage/invisibility/rutherium suit? More negative modifiers. The real reason why Mr Perceptive needs so much more dice is to overcome the negative mods, not to have a really high dice pool -because his direct opposite would also be limited to 20 or so (Stealth) dice anyway. But Mr Stealth, sneaky git that he is, is throwing those 10+ negative dice pool mods at you. Besides, Mr Pornomancer can be easily limited with "No hablo ingeles!"

Kerenshara, what exactly do you think is "breaking the game"? I was reacting to people who seemed to think that a skill of 6 at char-gen was a sign of hideous munchkinism. My PCs tend toward the high teens in their primary dice pools, with low 20's occasionally popping up for an optimal combo (like an adept with muscle toner: 4 and a weapon focus). I was serious when I said that the Attribute + skill x 2 limit wouldn't affect most of them, and neither would the hits cap (maybe I just don't roll as well ).

Other than social skills (where the modifiers tend to be very conditional past a certain point), my experience with 25-dice characters has been that they are more suited for a "how many dice can you get?" thread than an actual character for play. Not out of any need to place restrictions on myself, but because they get to the point of diminishing returns. Things like hard-maxed Attributes, the Aptitude quality, and such wind up costing an exorbitant amount for a minuscule increase.


One thing I have frequently posited is that the GM needs to make the power level of his campaign, and the house rules and expected dice caps, known to the players. Especially if they like a lower dice pool cap than what players can get by making a character within the rules. A lot of confrontations and accusations of munchkinism could be averted by some communication beforehand, rather than the GM assuming that the players should know where an invisible line is.

Another way is for the GM to give the players what they want. You know the old saying be careful of what you wish for. This is one of them. For me, if my players come to me with a 5s and 6s with dice pool of 20+, that's fine. They want to walk all over everything except the hardest opponents I can field. That's alright with me. If my players do not want a challenge, then it behooves to me, as their GM, not to do that!

Thank You Ancient History, That about covers it for me...

And Glyph... It is Your Game... Play how you like, But I am going to use the Fluff and Rules as they are, somewhat significantly out of the Stratosphere...... It is very obvious the intent of the designers... skills from 0-7 with the average being in the 3-4 range... You may not agree with that, but you cannot argue that point...

Keep the Faith

Bravo Kerenshara, Bravo...
*Bows*

What the hell "average" are you talking about? Shadowrunners, in case you might have missed it, are not average. Let me clue you in. You haven't stumbled onto the one true way the game was "intended" to be played.


Words to live by.