Last night I ran a live session for the North New Jersey, Shadowrun gaming contingent. At the moment we use SR 4.0 (BBB) Rules. We are running a 400BP campaign. It is a 400 BP campaign with all of the rule books, Street Magic, Arsenal, Augmentation, Runner’s Companion, and Unwired open for creation (with a few exceptions). I enjoy allowing the runners to use all of the goodies and options that are available to them through the other books. As a GM it expands my imagination when they perform actions or feats using new technology.

So, for the past three sessions the group has been tearing through the opposition. Their dice pools are relatively high for certain feats. The rules in BBB were written before the arrival of the supplemental books. The BBB was also written by Fanpro, while the other books were written by CGL.

Here is the question for GM’s and PC’s with good insight. Do the rule changes in Shadowrun 4th, 20th Anniversary edition (SR 4.5) improve the overall gameplay for Shadowrun 4th edition over the original core rule book (BBB, 4.0) which was published in 2005? Does it make the game more realistic? Does it make the game more difficult for PC’s and NPC’s to pull of rolls (even at a minimal amount)?

I know that there were a few basic change to the overall structure of the rules, making it more difficulty to pull off certain feats for the PCs. Such as an increased modifier from firing from cover, an increased amount of successes for ‘exceptional’ rolls, higher drain for magic, how having cover adds to the reaction roll for the character being attacked..etc.

It has been a few months since the release of SR 20th (4.5) and I was wondering what everyone’s experiences have been with the new edition in their live games. I remember reading from one of Adam’s post that SR 4.5 was specifically written to compensate with the enhancements, powers, qualities, gear, etc that was provided for PC’s in the supplement books. Personally, I have always seen SR 4.5 as Catalyst Game Lab’s take or version on Shadowrun 4th edition (Since they inherited the original rules from Fanpro).

Edited: We are currently using SR BBB because we have some new players into the group and many of my players have not had an opportunity to read SR 20th in it's entirity. Eventually I am hoping to move the game into SR 20th. But before hand I would like to know if and how this will effect the change for the group. Thanks.

I've been happy with it (except for the ridiculous price they put on Active Skill softs. 10K per Rating?).

The increased drain for using extra success in spell casting didn't make much sense to me, but they made that an optional rule (my main issue is it encouraged Overcasting.)

The increase in Stat cost are good. Stats were too cheap.

The increase in Range penalties is also good.

And the increase in the Object Resistance test for high tech items was needed.

And any thing to make the characters and NPCs more survivable is also good.


So well worth it.

The single difference between Shadowrun 4 v1.5 & Shadowrun 4 Anniversary other than simple layout changes & short stories is precisely the single difference between Shadowrun 4 v1.5 & Shadowrun 4 v1.3.

That is Errata.

You imply they are two separate games. They are not. The Anniversary printing simply has a better layout, & includes the most recent errata.


This is not Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 vs 3.5 - it is 5th printing vs 6th printing.

While I agree with you mostly Muspellsheimr, the 20A version did more more changes and more dramatic changes than any of the previous printings did. However, I don't really consider 20A as an "optional" change, it is simply the way things are now.

In general, the increased penalties were a good change as they were a natural rebalanced of the dice-pool creep introduced in the supplemental core books. The biggest one that my group noticed was the increased penalty for firing from behind cover. For whatever reason that extra die penalty really made an impact on them.

To start, you are not doing it justice by calling it v4.5, this is nothing like what WotC did when they made D&D v.3.5. SR4A is more like a large collection of errata than anything else. There are a few changes to the rules(tweaks to extended tests, range and cover tables, object resistance ect, all small things), and few things that where released in other books(the chemisty, arcana, and enchanting skill, a metamagic technique or two). Other than that the main difference is that the SR4A book is presented with more pictures and better examples/clarifications(the wireless world chapter in particular has been re-written for clarity. Most of the problems people where complaining about early on where either fixed(like the object resistance table) or made into optional rules(the increased drain for spells mechanic). The biggest change is the change to attribute costs, which is met with an increased to advised karma/session.

In fact, CGL released a doc with all the changes in the book, and it's only 3 pages long:

http://shadowrun4.com/resources/sr4a/sr4a_changes.pdf

You don't need the SR4A book to play, just that doc above, the SR4A book is great however, and worth reading through(the index in particular is quite good).

Which was basically just an Errata as well. There were no real rule changes. They adjusted the layout, changed a handful of feats, and that was about it. 3.0 stuff was basically 99% compatible with 3.5 stuff. Oh, and I think the price of skill based magic items went up some.

As for the difference between 4A and 4, the only big ones I've heard are skillsofts rocketed up in price, Recoil is much more limited, hard tests start at 1 higher threshold, extreme range mod is 1 higher, changed how extended tests work a bit, and that is basically it besides all the layout changes. None of that seems like it greatly affects gameplay (Except making burst fire with shotguns alot harder.)

Yes, approximately 20 pages of errata to the core books with extensive changes to numerous areas of the system. It was "just" errata. The core book changes where never published by Wizards even, except as generalities.


My House Errata document is borderline to a complete revision of several aspects of Shadowrun 4 - so much so that in some areas I call it a complete re-write. It is nothing compared to the changes D&D went in 3.0 to 3.5.

Further, to use that as a comparison to the Anniversary printing of Shadowrun 4 is a gross mistake, as none of the rules changes are even remotely similar in extensiveness.

And the fact that given enough time, ANY extended test could be accomplished as long as you didn't glitch. Now, the longer it takes, it is easier to glitch.

I generally like the changes. The one change that I highly recommend against is the increased drain for combat spells. I understand that it's an optional rule, but the rule neither addresses the problems with mages nor makes much sense mechanics-wise.

First-off, if a caster wants to do more damage, they're always better-off boosting their drain dice and over-casting than boosting their casting dice. See:

• +3 casting dice allow you to get an extra hit, which gives a possible +1 damage, but might not as you're limited to hits equal to the spell's force
• +3 drain dice allow you to on-average soak +1 drain, which lets you cast the spell 2 force higher for +2 damage. You're also less likely to hit the force cap.

Secondly, no other rules in the game work like this. For any other damaging attack, extra hits equal extra damage with no drawbacks. The equivalent is saying that the sam uses more bullets when he shoots with a gun. In no other part of the game do you ever have to worry about rolling too well, if you roll well you do what you want to do with a flourish and everyone claps, now for some odd reason a mage has to not cast too well or he'll fry his brain. I have nothing against mages being able to fry their brains, but there's already another, more effective, way for them to do that.

Lastly, staging-up damage on combat spells is not the problem with mages. Yes, a mage can easily use a combat spell to hurt someone, the mage rolls 2 pools and the mundane rolls one, but the mage could just as easily use a gun whilst invisible. If anything, the problems with mages arise from the fact that it generally takes a mage to defeat a mage. Without spell defense, or a way to reliably hurt a spirit, a mundane is vulnerable to any number of attacks a mage can level at them. Examples:

• Mind control takes someone out of the fight, then turn them against their buddies. This is a much nastier attack, which becomes much more viable if combat spells are thus-nerfed.
• Attack from invisibility means no dodge, so again we have 2 pools versus one.
• If you over-cast a stun-bolt, you can probably cast it at force 10 and thus KO anyone with willpower <= 4. The drain is F/2-2, so 3 drain for force 10, which is generally soakable even for a starting character. An elven shaman could even buy the 3 hits using 12 dice.
• A force 5 spirit isn't too hard for a mage to summon, yet the spirit has 10 points of hardened armor and rolls 10+ dice for most tasks.
• Mundanes can only really dream of having as much power as a mage with 5 bound spirits, which the optional rule does nothing to counter

As one of the players, looking over what happened last night, I don't think switching to 4A would have changed the outcome, or the ease with which we dispatched our opposition. They were outgunned in almost every case, and almost definitely statistically outclassed. Even with me deliberately removing myself from the scene (since I'd been in the spotlight for a decent chunk of a night), they failed to actually wound anyone. I was thinking it about this very thing on the drive home last night and I'm pretty sure that swapping to the 4A erratta would have tipped things even further in our favor.

For example, the guys that Bishop shot through the wrecked cars that didn't get defense rolls would have gotten no benefit from being obscured, so that rather than shooting at a -6, he'd have had no penalty and they'd have been dead rather than bleeding out. The poor sod who caught the pair of rifle bullets to the ankle would have similarly been in even worse shape. Rather than my losing 1 die from shooting from cover and 6 from his almost full cover, I'd have lost 2 dice for shooting from cover (rather than 7) and he'd have gained four, further widening the disparity between my offensive pool and his defensive one.

Instituting the optional rule about net succcesses adding to drain would have just encouraged Eduardo to overcast his manabolts, ending his combat even faster and probably seeing him taking even less drain. I think I was the only one who took a shot long enough to have a range penalty and even that wasn't out at the band where the penalties changed. The dice pool caps would have also not have been an issue because I was erroneously applying the SR4A dice pool caps to all my social skills all night and effectively cheating myself out of some dice on almost every interaction. SR4A would also see the cost of Cecil's Improved Reflexes drop, which means more Combat Sense or more Improved Ability dice.

The attribute increasing cost going up would start to make a diffference down the line as we're just getting enough karma to start raising stats, Going to the SR4A Activesoft costs would mean that Bishop tracks down pirated ones rather than me paying for them legitimately. I'm avoided the pirated software rules because the place they lead to is only madness.

What happened was more of a function of us having a team where even the hacker and the face are brutal killers of men than of the nature of the rules. Im sure in the face of better equipped, more skilled opposition, things won't go so smoothly.

Dont forget that they altered a lot of the spells to bring down the power level of the game... Specifically durations of effect in a lot of the spells...

Keep the Faith

Don't forget the changes to the karma costs for attributes. This, plus the changes to the costs of certain pieces of gear, is what makes it 4.5 for me, since any character that's seen play might need to be rewritten from the ground up.

From what I understand, apart from the errata, the rules for Matrix were better written and presented in SR4A, with the intent of meshing with more of the advance stuff in Unwired.

Also, what exactly does "BBB" stand for? This is a new term to me.

So they revised it...but it still doesn't make any sense. Falling isn't the easiest thing to abstract simply - you have to take in mass versus cross-section, the amount of air being displaced at varying atmospheric pressures, and so on - but this doesn't even come close to modeling reality. A terminal velocity of 66 meters per second isn't completely absurd - well, okay, it's pretty fast - but in order to fall 50 meters in the first turn, something's got to be wrong with gravity. After 3 seconds in freefall, assuming average weight and cross-section, and that the faller isn't trying to fall quickly, the velocity is going to be something more like...well, what am I saying? Just feed your relevant figures into one of my more favoritest wolfram-alpha pages, and see how bj0rked SR's falling rules are.

Big Black Book. Another term for the core rulebook.

Is that a generic RPG term (e.g. "splatbook") or a SR-specific term?

"BBB" usually makes me think "Better Business Bureau."

As far as I know, its origin is with SR. As I recall, it originally only applied to the hardcover main books, but has come to mean any main book, particularly now that the main book is always hardcover.

Huh. I never thought of any of the SR core books as being "black" per se, except for maybe 2nd or 3rd edition (heck 1st edition was a dark blue, even), but there was so much else going on with those covers that to simply call them "black" feels like a disservice.

I guess to me, "Big Black Book" connotes an all black, faux-leather-bound hardback volume, with maybe a silver- or gold-embossed logo on the top or the spine.

It can also mean "Big Blue Book", as every SR core book has been black or blue and fairly large to my knowledge. Regardless, it is the fan term for the shadowrun core rulebook.

I was far from impressed by SR4A's drastic, and unnecessary, changes. Overall, it seemed like they hosed up the existing system to "fix" non-existent problems, or even exacerbate them.

The limit to social dice pools, when what they really needed to do was to delineate, more clearly, what social skills can and cannot do. The problem wasn't high dice pools, but GMs who would let PCs use social skills as the equivalent of mind control, rather than subtle social manipulations.

Spellcasting rules that made overcasting a more viable option - and it was overcasting, not normal casting, that was tilting the power of spellcasters. Not to mention that the proposed fix (relegated to an optional rule, now) was cumbersomely complicated, and punished players for successes.

Changes to Attribute increasing costs and upgrading electronics which were not worth the disruption of existing games - that sort of thing should be put in a new edition.

Nothing to really discourage powergaming - hell, some adept powers got cheaper (one of the few things they did right, and relatively easy to change in an existing campaign, since adepts are able to "save" power points to spend later). The reply by one of the players suggests that SR4A might have made the PCs more lethal.

Changes in 4.5 require reading and changing stuff and don't actually make anything better.

That's because rolling 40 dice at a social test is basically mind control. The hell, there are demagogues and socialietes today (ie: without all the possibilities of the 2070s) that can get people to do what they want, up to and including killing themselves. Being able to talk someone into throwing away his job and live savings isn't unrealistic. Not in the least. That stuff actually happens. Making it too damn easy to reach that level is the problem. Which is precisely the problem SR4A tried to fix (there's still too much stacking stuff, but it's alot better now).

Who says so ? Roleplaypolice ?
Nobody is forced to Rewrite his Character !
When I talk to the People at Cons or in Forums those that use the new Rules don't change their Chars.That means If they get 4A Karma, they use 4A Rules (for Attributes and so on) from that Point on and thats all.
I'm playing SR4A in two different Groups and both Groups decided to use the new Rules (Karma & Cost) but not to retcon any Character !
and,by-the-way,I think the changes between D&D3 and 3.5 are much more drastic (Spells especially) than between SR4 and 4A

with a less drastic Dance
Medicineman

I think the original BBB (Big Blue Book) is the HERO SYSTEM, though.

Bye
Thanee

Of course everyone is forced to rewrite his char if he wants to use of *official* rules. The official rules say "new attribut x5" If you raised your attributes with x3, its (now) just a houserule, which is fine depending on your group but its still an houserule/decision.

And yes, while I can understat the reasoning behind this decision it should have been done 2005, not 2009.

SYL

Agreed.
Even if with all the tech/magic that can do things that nobody today can match, it'd still be nice to have some ideas on what can or can't be done by a "pornomancer".

We have rules that let us know that a troll with augmented strength can lift a car. That's just applying basic weight lifting rules. But social situations are much more complex and it's difficult to tell what someone who has a very precise control over body language can and cannot do, and how much time he'll need.

Hello Apple
No,I don't consider it a Houserule. When It was RAW to use Attribut x3 I used this Rule.Now that it is Attribute x5 ,I use the same RAW .
I was RAW then,I'm RAW now.
And Yes It would've been better 2005 also considering the 750-Karma-rules

with a Raw Dance
Medicineman

You know, the big changes that I noticed from 3.0 to 3.5 was mostly the huge adjustment to the Ranger class. Other than that it was pretty much a collection of what could be called errata to bring the system into a more balanced state.

However, I will agree that a lot of the added SR4A rules seem extraneous or unnecessary. Some I definitely like the old rule better. Extended tests penalty makes no sense. It shouldn't apply to -all- extended tests. It should just apply to making an extended test while under stress. If you have all the time and the world and no stress on accomplishing the task, then there shouldn't low risk of failure. My GM ran some numbers on making climbing extended tests. I can't remember what his numbers were, but you would get to a point, fairly quickly (AKA not a lot of meters), where your character could no longer safely climb. You could be using a line and climbing gear and gecko tape gloves and have someone on the ground holding the line to prevent you from falling and you will still be unable to make any further progress. I think this change was dumb, personally, and instead would have felt that extending the test interval would have been a more appropriate answer.

--



Not even close. As the poster you responded to pointed out. People have chosen to use it and ignore what conning truly is, which is subtle social manipulations. You cannot con someone into doing something they would never do. Because of that it cannot be mind control. Conning is just to make people do things they wouldn't normally do because you're presenting them an option that looks like its in their best interest.

You con a guard to get by because it looks like stopping you would bring some wrath down on his head.
You conning a single person into killing himself is not even plausible how is killing himself in his best interest? In fact it's more plausible to con a GROUP of people into killing themselves via a cult-like approach that would take -months- to enact.

Glyph is 100% right on social skills. GMs would allow their players to do unreasonable things with simple speech tests.

Yes, that usually takes months to do nowadays. But it actually works and actually happens. With guys trying to do that who're rolling like 14 dice.
People can't benchpress half a ton nowadays, but for trolls stuffed with cyberware and having triple the maximum strength of human from today, that's totally possible.
People can't reliably hit a target a kilometer away in a thunderstorm, but a guy stuffed with ware,a smartlink, reflex recorder and absurd agility, that's totally possible.
But being able to simply reduce the time needed to convince people to kill themselves, because they'll get to bang 72 virgins in heaven, even though you're about three times as good at convincing people than the highest conceivable demagogue today is somehow unrealistic?

Really, slapping "realism" concerns on a single minigame in a world full of larger-than-life action thanks to positively superhuman potential is kinda short-sighted.

Anyone who doesn't think a skilled manipulator stands a chance at convincing someone to do something they otherwise wouldn't do under any circumstances - murder, suicide, standing aside while criminal acts are done - hasn't spent much time with skilled manipulators. Shadowrun then adds to real life's possibilities with a host of superhuman abilities and technology which can significantly increase the chances of producing such effects.

I understand it's more difficult to imagine superhuman charisma than it is, say, superhuman strength; everyone seems to be able to grasp "lifting a car," but it seems for some reason much more difficult to accept the same level of ability on a social level. You can take my word for it, or you can experience it for yourself, but I know quite well of what I speak.

I thought BBB limited you to a max of four rolls on extended tests, or maybe that was just an optional rule or I'm just remembering things incorrectly.

Not true. Steve "Bishop" McQueen even stated that anyone playing an SR Missions character could simply use the new costs on a "go forward" basis. That's the only sane way to do it.

It was... Fourth Edition to Be exact

If it matters (and it probably does not to a whole lot of people)... the retcon of characters to teh Anniversary edition for Karma COsts to Attributes go something like this...

"Hey guy's we are moving tot the Anniversary edition of Shadowrun"
"Awwwww, now I am gonna haw to readjust my character... this blows..."
"Never fear, any stat upgrades that you paid for will be retconned with the exact amount of Karma needed to keep the character in line, no need to even place those values on your character sheet..."
"Well, hey, that's cool... thanks GM"
"Hey no Problems... Lets Play "

See... It is not that difficult at all... Easy Peasy

Keep the Faith

Hey StealthSigma... You do realize that the rule for decrementing extended tests is just an optional rule, for use when it might heighten the tension, right?

Keep the Faith

Probably a house rule... effectively, in the Anniversary Edition Optional Rule for Extended Rolls, you roll your dice pool with a decrementing die per roll (gives you roughly your pool in size to succeed)... this rule is good for when you want to inject some tension into the situation...

For those times when you do not care how long it takes to complete a task... such as rebuilding the engine of that classic car, or programming that rating 10 System for your Ultraviolet Node, or climbing that mountain during a recreational day of mountain climbing... you use your full dice pool... it does not really matter, and will generally have little to no immediate impact upon the game environment... hell, many individuals just use the "Buy Successes" rule for such situations and the task will get done when it gets done... simple, easy and moves the story along without having to roll out all of your attempts...

Hey... Keep the Faith

Amen

Those seem to be the two most common arguments for ludicrous social skills, and are often used in tandem. People can do X today, and people should be able to do even more when there are so many magical and technological ways to boost social skills in the game. I have some problems with this argument, though.

For one thing, it flies in the face of the few quantifiable examples of using social skills. The Johnson won't ever budge past a certain price, but you can talk a total stranger into killing himself, or changing his sexual orientation? I don't buy it. Real-life manipulators spend lots of time and effort (and in the case of suicide bombers and cultists, brainwashing techniques) to get those results, and even then they usually have to get the hell out of Dodge to escape the angry marks once they figure out they have been swindled. And for every ultra-charismatic public figure you point out to me, I could probably find someone with mental stats of 1 or so, who hates them and will never change his mind.

The Shadowrun social rules were designed for quick, quantifiable things like getting past a guard. Used more long-term, or against PCs, it breaks down. For one thing, why would a shadowrunner be so gullible regarding someone who he knows is a con man? And why should the face be able to do it again and again, without it ever becoming more difficult?

I guess Shadowrun faces are like Harry the Hat.

Yup. And in the meanwhile, you need to adjust their Reputation and Public Awareness. So, the high-attribute character also gets a boost to those, while other characters get left behind.

Sorry, but a rewrite is the only sane and completely fair way of doing things. Every other conversion method hurts somebody.

Or you could just leave the past the way it was, and simply change the Attribute costs and Karma awards going forward after a "cut-over" point?

I don't particularly buy that the Johnson can't possibly be convinced to spend more than some specific price, unless he's simply incapable of doing so by virtue of not having the necessary funding.


If you translate this real-world example into the rules - always difficult - then there would need to be some mitigating factor - whether that's terrible rolling on the con's part, or some Quality of the mark, or whatever - if someone with a relevant mental statistic of 1 will under no circumstances alter their behavior.


You'd be amazed.


The short answer is that he shouldn't. It really should get more difficult each time, much as, say, Mind Probe does. The rules do not reflect this, because as you say they're really only written for simple encounters.

One solution which suggests itself would be differentiating between immediate social actions and extended social actions. I agree that it's fairly absurd, even given superhuman charisma, that someone can walk up to an otherwise healthy individual and, within 3 seconds, convince them to shoot themselves in the head. That's unreasonable. [Of course, such an action should carry with it a huge Threshold, which, if it's not in the rules, should be.] But given time and understanding of the mark, it's not nearly so ridiculous as it might sound. Most people have some sort of trigger - usually many - to produce a given response. Not every response can be produced, but this can certainly be reflected with Qualities, high Thresholds, die pool reduction, and the same sort of things that apply to any test in Shadowrun. To torture the metaphor, the troll can't lift an airliner even with a strength of 12, but given time and, most importantly, leverage, he can move the world.

Personally, I would rather keep social skills as a mechanism to resolve a few easily quantifiable situations (fitting in at a street gang party, bluffing past a guard, etc.). The rules are too simplistic to do more without falling apart. Some of the basic assumptions don't even work. In real life, people who lack social skills are not always pushovers for people with high social skills. People who are weak-willed can also be incredibly opinionated. And people can be pushovers in some areas, and absolutely unbending in other areas.

I honestly wouldn't be too interested in a more complicated system, either. It would just get in the way of roleplaying. I would rather have the NPCs react to the PCs based in large part on their stats (a shy player with a character with high Charisma and social skills will find people being friendly and paying attention to the character more, while a talkative player with a low Charisma character will have to hustle a lot more to get what the first character can get by saying hello). Break out the dice to resolve straightforward uses of social skills.

Letting the players do too much with social skills might be "realistic", but it breaks the sense of realism for other players, who are told that their characters suddenly act in an irrational and out-of-character manner. They will probably think, why bother with my backstory, if my character's deepest convictions and most defining traits can be changed at the whim of the allmighty dice? In a roleplaying game, verisimilitude trumps realism.

The book isn't GREEN.

This just gives some people a advantage and other people a disadvantage based on how they'd built their character to date and how optimal that is vis a vis the advancement rules, and how long your game is going to run.

This just gives some people a advantage and other people a disadvantage based on how they'd built their character to date and how optimal that is vis a vis the advancement rules, and how long your game is going to run.

Edit: It's totally okay if you just want to do that, but whatever.

If You're interested ...
I started two Polls in the two German SR Forums wether or not the Players retcon their Characters
until now 78% of one Forum (20 Votes)
and 77.78 % (23 Votes) in the other
Do not Retcon their Characters, they proceed with the new SR4A Rules but do not change and/or recalculate their chars
So ,according to Caine,all of them are insane and unfair
only 1 Vote (5%) respectevely 2 Votes (11.11 %) Retcon their Chars

with an insane Dance
medicineman

Yes, that's a problem. I fully agree with you there. But the problem is with the unmovable Johnsons. the problem is with the authors writing rules and thinking of reasonable possibilities and then not taking into account those possibilities. That's a big problem of SR-fluff, incidentally. None of the matrix fluff would be realistic or even possible if it were to be gauged by the matrix rules (which is the main reason those are unusable). Lots of fluff elements simply forget the existence of magic and thus describe a situation that will plausibly never actually occur in the sixth world. And that's bad. Yes, making social skill unable to actually achieve anything would solve that as well, but it would neuter the Face at the same time. A StreetSam may go all action movie superstar and easily waste more than a dozen opponents in a single combat turn and your Face, having spend just as much karma and NuYen in social skills may not convince people of ridiculous stuff? Why would he pay for high social skills then? You'd basically solve a problem by introducing another.


This is true and I agree this is a really weak spot of the social rules. Social skills shouldn't be as important as counterspelling (but they work exactly the same way now). You should be allowed to either roll the skill as now or do a regular mental resolve roll (ie: WIL + CHA).


True, but that's only a problem if the manipulator didn't know about the specific strong opinion beforehand, otherwise he can just mold it to his needs. You can seriously use a person's hate for X as a base to convince him to do something that helps X. You'd just have to use a different (but not more difficult) hook (ie: convince him that whatever you want actually hurts X).


This is an age-old RPG-problem, but it's only tangentially related to social skills (and not at all to verisimilitude). You have the same problem with mental manipulation magic, chemical brainwashing, hell even tied up characters. People don't like being unable to play their characters (add "the way they want", or don't, depending on the exact circumstances). And with good reason, because as long as they don't play their characters, why are they even there, specifically?
Which is why you should never run an adventure featuring a brilliant manipulator just getting the chars to do stuff the players don't want to do.
Just as you should never run an adventure where one or more players can't actually participate. Incidentally, an adventure where all the fortes and specialities of a certain character are meaningless may very well fulfill that criteria as well, even without explicitly taking him out of the picture.
But not because those adventures are "unrealistic" or "break verisimilitude", but because they suck for the players. Now, there may be players who could actually enjoy a session like that, and if you know yours do, you can get away with it, but in general, that's a recipe for disaster.

None of that matter for NPCs, though. They don't need plot armor. Killing the social minigame is way to broad a reaction to protect your PCs. Let the Face convince the main guard that he's actually Damien Knight and just lost his commlink. Let him convince a researcher to give him his access ID and passcode, because he's part of internal security and needs to check up on something. Let him shine.
The guys beside him have just won a firefight with a dozen SecGuards, hacked the securest nodes and gotten the hottest paydata and magicked up half a dozen brutal combatants, made the whole group invisible and solved lots of plots on their own. The Face should be allowed to shine to the same degree.

No... you just don't bother with it at all... from the point of the conversion you use the new rules... why are you so hung up on retconning the number to make it "Legal," it is a legal character... without such nonsense...

Keep the Faith

And how is this any different than not changing over to the new rules?

Keep the Faith

Yeah, that actually makes me think: me, too. I would rather let the rules apply only to simpler, short-term situations, and resolve the rest with roleplaying, because as you say, the rules are - and they have little choice but to be, unless we want a 400-page book of social rules - too simple to do more.


Yeah, that's roleplaying for you: in the same way that someone can have strong legs but weak arms, and still just have a Strength of 4, the social system cannot be applied simplistically to complex situations: the remainder must be made up by the GM and the players.


In my view, if you're not getting both - in other words, if your realism doesn't seem realistic, despite being realistic - then something's gone wrong. Realism and verisimilitude are not mutually exclusive.