Hey whaddaya know it's Sunday. I'll grab a 6 pack, you grab a few signs. I'll meet you there.




And etiquette skill includes knowing "Hey if I want to be taken seriously here, I need to knock that guy talking trash to me flat on his ass", as much as it does sweet talking people.

I think people seem to think I want everyone to be a sweet talking fool based on the reactions, but between the different skills you can get and the specializations, I don't think that a few free social skills is going to ruin anyone's character concept. And in the very rare case it does (see: Tarzan, Mr Autistic), they can take negative qualities to make things worse for themselves. Just replace the current -1 to social tests with "you don't get free social skills" or "reduce your charisma back down"

And we're back to disagreeing. *grins*

At it's most basic level, I suppose I simply don't see a reason why we should give out free social skills, and I do see a reason why we shouldn't give out free social skills.

• The problems you describe where every single player dumpstats CHA and neglects social skills simply doesn't happen in our group. Occasionally we'll have a player design a character who is truly atrocious in those areas, and having to either 1) faceroll through the scene, or 2) circumvent social situations (when the other players are unavailable to cover for them) is enjoyable, memorable, and part of the game. And yes, players have occasionally lost karma, nuyen, and (once) essence because of that. They learned from it.
• In terms of why we shouldn't do that, it comes down to the fact that it feels like railroading character creation. Attributes are ubiquitous, but skills tell a story, and we don't like the game system telling our story for us. That's our job.
• And last but not least, I just don't buy this "social skills are special because everyone probably has them" argument. Everyone probably also has some physical skills. So what?

My earlier suggestion was that if you want to tie skills to character creation in a more controlled way, that you could do something along the lines of handing out x*Attribute in BP that can ONLY be spent on skills linked to that attribute (or used to defray the costs of skills linked to that attribute). (Essentially this is just taking the 3rd edition-style limits and turning them into drivers). Now I'm not really convinced thats a great way to go, but at least that way you have a systemic approach to chargen. Giving out this but not that seems more like a patch to deal with a particular set of players.

I think we both understand each other...we're just in the position of making up houserules that go in different directions on this one.

I would actually be pretty okay with this. You'd have to more tightly control how much karma/bp is available and how much of it can be applied to attributes, but that does give people a pretty diverse array of default skills without railroading into any specific skills. It basically accomplishes what I wanted, without having that railroaded feeling.

The one problem I see (which is also a problem with my previous suggestion, don't get me wrong) is that attributes are much more important at character generation than after. But then again, if you have a cap on attribute spending (like there is now), then that doesn't really matter since most people are going to go to cap or close to it anyway.

That seems a little complex, though. Buying attributes gives you skill points for that attribute? It's an odd double dip situation. Honestly, I still kinda think this is a table/GM issue. :/ It's hard to say. There are already limits on attribute and nuyen spending, and there are skill maxes, too. So it's not a foreign concept. :/

True. But if you did this in combination with the optional rule of baselining attributes at the racial average and keep the ratio's (of how much you can spend on attributes...which is SR4A is just 50% of total BP for standard chargen) constant, you're dealing with a range of ~50 BP, instead of 200 BP.

If you don't go that route, then you are absolutely correct that you have to account for more significantly different approaches to chargen, and how to balance them against each other.

I would also agree with you (twice in one day?!) that almost all the characters I've seen designed by my players were at or close to the cap on attribute spending. From what I've seen outside my own table, that's nearly universal. I'm sure someone out there is rocking a crazy build that involves a street sam who only spent 30 BP on attributes, but it's not common as far as I know (anecdotal though it may be).

Ad hoccing some character gen rules just to get a feel for this:


While working on this, I've been tempted to treat a racial bonus as an augment for everything except determining augmented max. ie having a racial bonus doesn't boost your cost to raise the attribute, doesn't grant bonus skills, but you still get it to raise your augmented max when applicable. So a dwarf with his +2 strength has a 5 starting strength, but to increase that from 5 to 6 costs him as much as a human raising from 3 to 4, so only 20 karma. He also only gets free skills equal to the actual base strength, not also from the racial mod. This simply makes it so much easier to balance metahumans at character generation.


w/standard SR except for chargen changes:



It is worth noting there's not really much in the way of choice for body or willpower based skills, which could weaken those attributes, which brings me back to wanting to make those derived.


Same as above, with derived Will/Body



So this actually comes out almost exactly the same as the above. Which makes sense since the first scenario accounted for about 30 points worth of skills that would work for Body/Will which don't actually have that many skills. The extra 5% discount pretty much nullified that 30 and left us back at ground 0. So yeah, I'm sticking with 150 points worth of attributes, and 500-550 karma as the magic number using this system.

No no, see. Anyone who takes the "Barrens" background would also get a rank of a melee combat skill, too (or possibly firearms, depending on what people decide the barrens would be like). So an orc in the barrens picks up 2 ranks of unarmed, the elf picks up 1. Doesn't mean the orc is a better fighter, just that his background (as well as the fact that he's an orc*) contributed more.

*I mean this in the same way that the Big Guys in high school play sports more than the little guys: they're good at it because they're big and thus played more, whereas someone like me played chess. The orc--because he's an orc--is going to get in more bar fights than the elf.

I'm going to push back on this some more.

I agree with you that the Ork is big and strong...that's what the racial bonuses to Body and Strength are all about. I disagree that because he's an Ork, he know's Kung Fu. If an Ork and a Human both have the same Kung Fu, then all else being relatively equal, my money is on the Ork because he's bigger and stronger. But big + strong =! kung fu.

For the Troll, in addition to being big and strong, he also has dermal deposits and arms the size of me. But again, even big + strong + armor + reach =! kung fu. It just means that he is going to curbstomp someone of the same skill who is also smaller, weaker, less armored, and has less reach.

In other words, there is a difference between being good at something and having an advantage at something. When the Ork kid goblinized, he didn't wake up and say "Holy crap I have tusks...and I'm a Krav Maga master!" The fact that he started winning fights instead of losing them was simply a byproduct of being an Ork.

Keep in mind, also, that I'm using examples.

You're right of course, that orcs still goblinize, so yes. Their racial skills should probably be the same as humans.

The whole point I'm trying to make, however, is to put a two-tiered combination together: an elf and an orc both from the barrens aren't going to have the same "base" skillset just because they're both from the barrens.

If you do it right offering packages like: Race (allready in SR), Culture/Background(Barans, village in the jungle, AAA) and Profession can be great.
Those can make it very fast and easy (if you do not offer billions of them) to create a character.

Simply put:
You choose Race, Background and profession.
So Lets say you take an Ork growing up in the barrens and becoming an Street samurai.
Now you get unarmed etc. and some streetknoledge skills for barrens, a weapon skill of your choice +X and the skillgroup firearms or melee +Y the other +z etc.
So you end up with the skeleton of a Sam.
Now you get, lets say 400 Karma to flesh out your charcter and increase the attributes.

No racial skills. Races are generally not segregated, there is no reason for someone to learn special skills just because of his race. Now if your troll has been raised in a swamp troll village, that's different, but it's because of his upbringing, not his race.

Sorry, I did not want to suggest that. Thats why I wrote that the races are already in SR.

Thats why I wanted Background/culture to refect that.
So if you got a Troll beeing raised in swamp troll village and he is the hunter of his tribe you end up with the attributes of a troll.
A lot of wilderness skills (knowledge and active) and of course some weapon skill (bow, spear etc.)
Maybe in the backgrounds are even some kind of merits.

With the Karma you got you for example flesh out that he is also good in tirbal medicine or even found an practiced with a laserweapon he found in some strange bird, which fell out of the sky...

Phew, LOTs of posts since I chimed in last time...

Now, without wanting to quote too many things:

Skill packages:
While there is a justification, they are also a limitation, and NOT everyone from the Barrens learns the same things. There are 101 ways to survive the Barrens, at least one of which is sucking cocks for money, and please tell me what (book-) skill that relates to?

What I would do is rather, keep the free active skill system, but declare a set of DEFAULT skills, which are ALWAYS on the char-sheet at a rating of 0, because quite obviously everyone has come into contact with them, unless they take a neg quality.
The should be along the lines of Perception, Etiquette, Computer, Running, perhaps even Dodge. The quirk being that you don't need to default on them at -1 to DP, and you don't need to pay the +2karma for the first point. (Only 2 karma).

Secondly, for knowledge skills, give packages based on education, but there doesn't even need to be a discount in karma cost, because discounts are unfair. You just get to pick a package for basic education (cheap), High School, college, University, with certain choices to make there. You can also continue buying individual skills as you would normally. The idea of packages is only for easier picking.



Attributes:
I disagree with the paying more for less mechanic that some people suggest when buying back the racial averages, so I would rather not have to get them. Rather, just get rid of that damn BP-buy already, and you'll see that with Karma the attributes will be fine. Getting 1s and 2s just doesn't make too much sense, except for Str .

I disagree with the idea of giving people karma for skills based on attribute. For instance, someone with huge Cha might be content with never developing his social skills (much), because everyone likes him, anyway. So why would he have to spend a lot of karma on Cha linked skills?

I also somehow don't like the SR4 attribute numbers that show up. In SR3, I hardly ever had attributes below 3, and mostly above 4. Now, the low BP-buy/expensive karma costs force you to hyper-specialise. I don't like this, I would prefer to see SR3s attribute numbers again. So I tend to favour going back to 3xnew score for attribute cost. But that's just me.

Matrix tasks:

It seems to me that the best way to run them would be consistently: Attribute+Skill+Outside help (=Programmes). Just tweak the numbers to the desired values.

Easy: Negotiation...

Actually with Karmagen it makes more sense to sit at a low attribute, because it costs more to raise your attributes (unless you're going with the x3 cost you mentioned at the end of your post). I agree with getting rid of BPgen on principle, because having a different system for generation and progression tends to reward min maxing at chargen rather than making a character.

But really, I don't see the problem with starting with a few 3s and a few 2s and buy up from there. Even from the start you have some choice of which attributes you want to dump a little lower, and if you really really need a attribute 1 or more attribute 2s for your character concept, you can take negative qualities to reduce them.

One other benefit to having the higher base attributes is that it becomes MUCH easier to modify character gen for a lower power level. Right now with the current system, if you decide you want to play a low powered 200 bp campaign, you only get 100 bp on attributes, which is barely enough to raise all attributes to 2. On the other hand, with this system, your basic attributes are already there, so you can drop a huge chunk of karma out and still have pretty functional characters that are lower power, without any other real change needed. That extra flexibility alone makes it worth it imo.



Instead of thinking of it as developing the skills, look at it as having that attribute allowed them to have some affinity for skills of that type, and they learned a bit almost passively. For example that guy with 4 charisma but isn't a face doesn't focus a lot of his social skills, but he's got a rating 2 etiquette, a rating 2 con, and rating 1 intimidate, which just represents basic stuff he's picked up without any real effort.

The amount of skills you can get from the karma levels I was experimenting with (5xattribute) are actually really low, and people will still spend a lot of karma besides on improving skills further and getting new skills they couldn't manage with that. The main thing it does is provide a bit of diversity among skill selections by default. It also helps smooth out the learning curve for making characters, as new players will have a few skills of any given type.





On the topic of the x3 cost, it is worth noting that attributes are already pretty damn important, the cost isn't really deterring anyone from raising the attributes when they have a lot of karma (karmagen), they just don't get raised much in game because raising them in game is a much longer term investment than other things. I think most of us enjoy while playing being able to see an improvement regularly. I wouldn't mind the cost going down to x3, if attributes were made less viable. In SR3, attributes were only used for determining skill softcaps for example. While I wouldn't go all the way back to that, I have in the past pushed for attribute applying a softcap and applying only half its value to dicepool. That way attribute still has some contribution, and also governs skills to some degree, so it's still valuable, but not the primary driving factor of everything it is now. This would also devalue attribute augments some, assuming you made the softcap based on the unaugmented attribute.

I really like the idea of getting free skill points from each attribute that must be spent on skills linked to that attribute. It well represents the idea that having a talent for something encourages someone to develop skills in it. It also encourages well-rounded characters. Plus, I think it'll play well with each form of character gen, even priority based.

On the other hand, I'm not so confident in starting characters at the average. It can work, and work well, at creating broad characters, but I think it's more worthwhile, at this point, to try and make sure that no attributes are effective dump stats. Savage Worlds does this by making each attribute essential to survival in one way or another. Some thought along those lines would be rewarding.

Can someone explain to me why starting at average stats is a bad thing? In a large number of game systems, starting at average, or just slightly below average, is pretty much the expected norm, and players tend towards the above average. Starting at average works better in making people not feel like they're being penalized for making a well rounded character (and yes blah blah that's a player issue blah blah. Whatever. The game system should NOT encourage players starting with 1s in several ability scores, and expect players to not do so for flavor). Starting at average makes it easier to adjust the system to different power levels without suddenly making all the characters gimps. It makes it easier to design NPCs.

The only downside I've heard from anyone is that it takes away from player customization. Yet these same people insist that the majority of players should be buying up to at least average attributes -anyway-, and only allowing dump stats if it's something the character would have. How is that different then just starting at average and having a negative quality to dumpstat an attribute when it fits the character?

It has always worked well for L5R: start with all attributes at 2, get a Crippled flaw to downgrade a trait to 1. Raising a trait costs 10 points and Crippled only brings 5. Since the L5R scale is close to SR (attributes are supposed to go from 1 to 5), the same rule can be taken as is. It also creates some room for real racial penalties.

I propose starting stats at average, and using NQs to lower them below avergage. But those NQs do count towards the maximum number of BP/Karma that can be gained from NQs.

Why not have it count against NQ cap? It seems pretty arbitrary, and having a gimped charisma seems to me like just as valid of a negative quality as "take -1 to all social tests"

DO count

Don't you use your logic and reading comprehension on me! It CLEARLY says don't.




And now I'm going to go offline for a few hours before I make another mistake like that and make a fool of myself.

Someone's sarcasm meter must have broke.

Oh, I got it.

Just to put this out there, I would personally prefer getting rid of Karmagen, and just going with BP for both chargen and advancement. My reasoning is simply that you wind up using smaller numbers, which makes the math easier overall. And before someone launches into a tirade on how the math isn't that hard, please know I agree...to a point. But wherever possible we should strive for simplicity, especially if we want to rope in new players for a new edition. Back when I started Shadowrun it was still using the A/B/C/D/E system of chargen. That's probably too coarse for what we want, but my opinion is that when you start telling someone that they have hundreds and hundreds of points to spend, their eyes glaze over. The classic case of this is Eclipse Phase; I saw their chargen rules, shook my head, and thought, "I love you Rob Boyle, but this time you have gone too far."

My preference aside, is there agreement that regardless of what we land on we should have a unified system for both chargen and advancement?



With the massive caveat that this is a house rule, our group does this by making both Body and Willpower derived attributes. Body being the average of AGI/REA/STR and Willpower being the average of CHA/INT/LOG. This has the side effect of flattening out the damage resistance curve a bit (on average, orks and trolls wind up rolling 1-3 less dice), but we balance that out in other ways (such as armor encumbrance being linked to STR). We still have the qualities and augmentations that add directly to damage resistance tests...oddly enough, this change helps justify the fact that the costs for those were previously higher than for other attribute bonuses.

I think I saw this proposed briefly way back in the thread as well.

Really? I LOVE the fact that you get 1000 Points to generate your character with in Eclipse Phase. It goes right quick too. Unfortunately.

That seems to be the general theme. Alternate methods (such as priority gen, which you mentioned) can be given in some splat book, but the core preferred method should be the same.


Actually mentioning priority gen reminds me of something I wanted to bring up: In the old days, if Money was priority one, you could get 1,000,000 nuyen starting cash. Nowadays, the cap is 250 no matter how much you're willing to invest in it (okay take that back, there is a quality that can raise that as high as 300k, but it's pretty inefficient).

Just a thought, but what if non-awakened characters didn't have a cap on how much karma/BP they can invest into money? This would allow raising the prices on certain things, and at least put the mundane on better footing when starting out, if not fixing the room to grow problem (which would ideally be addressed via skills being uncapped, since non-awakened have so many other karma sinks, nonawakened characters will have generally higher attribute and skill levels).


For example: If we condense programs greatly for hackers, making buying a new program much like buying a gun, your main cost as a hacker should come from a badass commlink. A rating 6 commlink should take about the same investment as getting 6 Resonance. However, 6 resonance is 105 karma. That is 262,500 nuyen worth of karma, or higher than the cap. That investment actually isn't so terrible if you don't have a money cap, but if your money is capped even if the cap is raised slightly to accomodate, it's eating too big a chunk

Then you have complex forms for technos that do special things or provide bonuses to certain things, rather than just being required to function, and on the hacker end you have program options and commlink upgrades that provide similar options (ideally they would have some options shared and others unique to them, so there's an advantage to either).





Yeah I suggested it some time ago, and mentioned it again just a few posts up when doing numbers for the suggested free skills from attributes system. Personally I like it a lot, but I'd still leave armor encumbrance based on body, or reworked to something different entirely. To help races that have Body bonuses, just add up their other modifiers, to see what effect it has on Body/Will, and apply another modifer directly to body/will to get it to where it's supposed to be at the average level.

ie you have Troll, which is +4 Bod, -1 Agi, +4 str, -2 Cha, -1 Int, -1 Log. So he should normally have a +4 Body, +0 Will. With the stat averaging, he ends up with +1 Body, -1 Will. So you keep Body/Will racial mods... but now the Troll's Body Mod is +3 (giving him a total +4), and his Will Mod is +1 (bringing him back up to +0). If you think Trolls are too durable, then that's something to reconsider and you might reduce that body mod (say to only a +1, so his net body is only +2).




edit: I forgot to respond to the main point of the post!



Generally, Karma is considered better because it incorporates scaling costs, so it has a sort of soft cap built in. The difference in BP or karmagen is generally do you want people encouraged to generalize a bit, or do you want to encourage specialization. Because BP gen is pretty heavily leaning towards specialization. While I do think specialization is a good thing, a couple of low rating skills should cost more than a legendary skill, and a legendary skill should make a huge impact on how good you actually are.

I can see the appeal of wanting lower amounts of points, and I can definitely see the appeal of being able to increase stuff more often (relatively slow or arbitrary progression is one problem I have with SR), but I really do think Karma is the better way to go from a game design perspective.

You actually have two separate issues at play there: 1) the resource cap, and 2) the balance between mundanes and awakened.

You can easily adjust the cap up or down depending on what kind of games you want to run. The second part is the trick, and a big part of that is determining what a unit of BP is "worth" when it comes to converting it to Nuyen. For our games we've left the cap at 50, but usually give anywhere from 7k to 10k nuyen per BP (instead of 5k). We can explore that topic more later, but for now I'll just say that I DON'T think the idea of having one set of resource rules for mundanes and another for awakened is good. We want simpler right? You can ensure that awakened don't spend as much on resources simply by raising the cost of being awakened.


You're actually describing exactly what our group didn't want. *grins*

One issue is that despite their protests to the contrary, Body and Strength are basically the same attribute. Even if the fluff says that high body doesn't necessarily equate to being big and strong, it lies. You can run a correlation on the core five races and you'll get a result of 0.92.

We wanted to get away from that entirely, because quite frankly we were offended by the implicit idea that being able to bench press a truck also made you immune to high-velocity ammunition. We also wanted a single mechanic by which characters with high AGI, REA, or both would also be able to "mitigate" damage in the appropriate abstract way (we also simplified combat rolls)...since after all this game has to account for both Mongo the Uber-Troll and Ishii the Smoke Ninja.

Willpower is a different matter; it doesn't correlate with the other three, but it also does very little on it's own, and we felt that the same abstraction worked here (when you "resist" something...how do you do it? Intuitive rejection of the concept? Logical analysis? Force of personality?). We felt it was all three, and so...presto...derived attribute.

Anyhow, that might be irrelevant to the larger discussion, but hopefully it gives you some insight into what we did. It also shows you what happens when your group is made up of a bunch of professional game designers and a lawyer. *grins*


So does BP. It just does so at specific milestones (racial maximums, the magical number 6, etc.) rather than between each and every integer. Granted that's a different way to do it, but it's still a scaling cost.

Alright, I probably won't be back for a while...I'll hopefully check back tonight though.

True, it's two separate issues, but they have some degree of correlation. I can see your argument for not wanting an extra modifier, and I guess that Technomancer spending 105 karma on resonance is 105 karma he doesn't have to invest into other gear.



I actually was in favor of combining body and strength, until it was pointed out Will was just as useless. Making both derived stats works better.

But a body of 8 doesn't make you immune to high velocity ammunition. Really, it still leaves you taking a serious beating from a holdout pistol. What a body of 8 does is let you wear more armor which can make you more resistant.

With the system you described, where you don't give any bonus to Body, but make Armor Encumbrance based off str, the only real difference is your troll has only 4 body, but still can wear 14 points of armor (21 if military grade). Add on the form fitting suits for an extra 2-3, and you have a troll with between 16 and 24 armor. Body contributes an extra 4 dice to the soak pool. Your troll is still rolling up to 28 dice. Without your change, he's rolling up to 31. You nerfed a little less than 10% of the soak pool. Hardly a huge deal. The invincible troll is still largely there.

If you want to avoid that, you will need to divorce the armor from attributes (or at least str/bod) entirely. You will also need to severely cut down on stacking stuff that does not contribute to encumbrance (for example the bonus troll armor, cyberlimb armor, dermal plating/sheathing, bone lacing, basically all of these things will provide extra armor and not count towards encumbrance, allowing a character to far exceed expected armor levels.

I did mention the possibility of reducing Troll body to only a +2 rather than a +4 if you really wanted to go that route, but I'd rather leave the troll with a high body, and find a different way to restrict armor. Maybe even make it work like recoil comp. With RC you only get 1 recoil comp per 3 points above 6 you have, why not have Encumbrance have a restriction of 8 base, and Body increases it by +1 for every 3 above 3 you have. (So a 4 bod character gets 9 encumbrance, a 7 bod character has 10 encumbrance, and a 10 bod character has 11, etc). All the mods mentioned above (except maybe racial mods) count as half armor for encumbrance purposes like form fitting suit. Though those mods should have their essence costs cut drastically to compensate for this reduced utility. Military Armor no longer has extra encumbrance, but has a few points of hardening that don't count towards encumbrance at all (as described earlier in the thread) making it still top of the line.




Well if you're supportive of that, earlier in the thread I was heavily in favor of a system where skill cost was on a milestone style progression. Like skills are uncapped, but every 3 skill ranks, the cost increases again. This in conjunction with a softcap derived from unaugmented attribute (either attribute+50% or attributex2, depending on how high you want skills to get. Attributex2 is probably more fair for low-mid attribute characters) that increases costs linearly once you exceed that softcap, so you have basically:

1-3 skill: Novice
4-6 skill: Professional
6-9 skill: Expert
10-12 skill: Superhuman
13+ skill: Legendary

It's a different and pretty clearly worse way to do scaling costs, is the thing. Still, the main issue that that chargen and advancement probably need to be the same system: either BP-BP (EP does this), or Karma-Karma. That's the separate issue of 'chargen exploits'. You see this issue in Exalted, etc. as well: it's just better to hugely minmax, then fix later.

As for the *other* issue of scaling costs, it just seems like a continuous system is inherently better: smooth curve, encourages breadth, doesn't get you 'soft-max' in everything, etc. I didn't really realize this was under discussion, what are the cons? I'm aware of a minor issue with racial attrib mod/Karma cost interaction, but that's a small, fixable issue.

--
So, how do we feel about a *lightweight* 3-part (race attribs, background skills, profession skills) module system *in theory*, leaving the specifics aside for a moment? On the order of EP, which is extremely light.

--
To 'fix' defaulting, should there be three categories of skills ('simple', normal, and 'complex')? Simple has -0, normal is -1 (still pretty minor for all but the smallest DPs/large penalties), and 'cannot be used untrained'? Would this even matter? I feel like someone with a DP of 3 is already getting penaltied to 0 in most cases. Does extending the normal skill scale to 12 already deal with this, because it inflates the low end?

Assuming this is directed at what I was going on about (if not, correct me and clarify ), the benefit of having a non-smooth curve in skill cost means that you can have infinite scaling, while maintaining tighter control over costs. You choose where it should be feasible for a skill to get to, and adjust the rule to make it work to get to that point. For example, earlier in the thread, when I was first arguing for it, I crunched the numbers to produce a system where it takes the same investment to get a rating 9 skill with the system as it takes to get a rating 5 or 6 (I forget which I went for) currently, and the same investment to get a rating 12, as it takes to get a rating 7 (when including the cost of the positive quality). This could relatively easily be shifted upwards or downwards.

With the smooth contiguous curve, you either need to hardcap early, or make the curve high enough that even mid level skills are damn expensive. 12 karma for a single extra die is damn expensive. Even if you removed the skill caps entirely with the current system, nobody would actually go much higher than 6, because paying another 30 karma for 2 more dice just feels like a bad investment. On the other hand, if you drop it to straight up linear, it ends up feeling too cheap at low levels. If you use BP where every rating costs the same, everyone just keeps pumping into that skill because each point is worth the same as the last.

The point in the more complex cost is to try to keep some control over skill levels and costs for those levels. The system I proposed may have issues of its own, but it is far easier to fine tune to address issues, in my opinion.






I'm still personally not too fond of background skills. I think the skill points from attributes would be a better, more flexible, and less space intensive (no need to write up 50 different backgrounds for every option we can think of) way, to accomplish basically the same thing (encourage some diversity in skill types at character generation.

Profession skills on the other hand... it depends. If we formalize all of the knowledge skills, so that each has a specific use, and you can't just make one up, then see above. The current system works, and allows for enough customization. On the other hand, if knowledge skills are left as they are, packages of background skills that you can buy that give you a few ranks in generally useful knowledge skills, while allowing them to choose to buy skills they make up that may end up being useless, is great. (Random example of a frivolous skill, no real bearing on the discussion: I have a dwarf who has spent the points to invest in 4 ranks of Dwarven Math. This skill involves getting drunk enough that math makes sense to him)

I think karma works better at innately balancing things, but it's slightly harder to use than BP. Specifically, if you're building a new character, buying stuff from zero to X with karma involves a sum of the costs of raising to 1, 2 ... X, which may put off people who don't enjoy math. It can be solved by putting a "X -> Y" cost table in the CharGen chapter, but it's not pretty.

That said, a neatly balanced system is also important, so I say too bad about prettiness.

---

Something different: The Other Game, I hear, uses a "slot" system for magic items. One slot for Necklaces, two slots for Rings, etc.

Would that be an interesting way to handle augmentations? Specifically, to handle which augmentations can stack and which ones can't, such as cyberlimbs with bone lacing (huh?) or dermal sheathing (dubious).

Don't kill me if you hate it; I'm just wondering if this could be a useful tool.

Personally, I don't think that the slot system 'works'. At least it doesn't it hasn't in any game I played. It just leads to a christmas tree effect where you get an item for every slot and it's more or less the same as if you had just gotten those effects and not dealt with items at all.

I -like- the essence system, because bigger things cost more essence, so you can differentiate a bit. If anything, I'd want to build further upon that.

At most, as far as a slot system goes, I would go for having various body parts listed, and have cyber/bio list what body parts it affects (so a cyberspur? Arm. Cerebral Booster? Head. Wired reflexes? All but head. etc), then have any cyberlimbs have to pay capacity to take advantage of that cyber. In exchange, you get a discount on cyber that's in an area that has a cyberlimb.

For example: You have a titanium bone lacing already installed, which covers all body parts, but decide you want a new cyberarm. You get this new cyberarm, but your cyberarm has to be customized to include the bone lacing, costing you 2 capacity. If you don't do this, you lose the benefit of your bone lacing (or average its benefits across the parts of the body that do have it, the way attributes currently work with cyberlimbs). However, since one of the 6 areas that bone lacing affects is now a cyberlimb, you get a 16% discount on the essence cost of your bone lacing. If you have a full set of cyberlimbs, that bone lacing is essence free.

That could probably be abstracted and simplified, but if you want to track body slots, that would be the way I'd do it.



But I'd also like to see essence expanded upon. It really is a very nice universal resource, that both mundanes and magical people rely on. Like what if there was a way to increase your essence? What if magic just had its cap reduced by essence loss rather than losing magic, so a hybrid was more playable? What if mages had to dedicate essence towards learning specific spells like adepts do with powers? What if essence was used for bonding foci, rather than karma, and it was opened up to mundanes as well, so you could play a non cybered mundane with magic gear? Streamlining and expanding the role of essence could open up a lot of possibilities, and potentially makes things easier to balance.

For the cost scaling, I can see how a piece-wise curve gives you more control, but it is indeed more complex. I'm also not sure that simple scaling can't do it just as well; it's just a question of choosing the right function. The point is that no one is defending the *current* BPgen, right? Where each level costs 10, until the 25, and that's *it*.

Seerow, I'm still on the fence about skills based on attributes directly. It seems like a bad idea to double dip like that. They've already got increased DPs, so we're giving them 'free' points to make them bigger?

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I'd prefer not to use slots, myself.

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I'm fine with proper implant-interaction, yes. As for fundamentally changing the magic/mundane system… oy. Probably 'necessary', but such a pain.

I think Jester was saying he likes current BP-gen, but I'd wait for him to clarify.




Well I'm also personally pushing in favor of attributes only apply half their value, while skill values go much higher, so you can still get high end dicepools from 15-20 dice, but only like 3-5 of those dice come from attribute, with the majority coming from skill, and another 3-5 from other modifiers. In this scenario, giving a few free skill points along with attributes helps justify the high attribute cost. Attributes raised via karma remain viable for determining the softcap for skills, and for providing a (smaller) dice pool modifier. Sort of a hybrid of 3e and 4e attribute benefits.

I'd also lean towards augmented max being the unaugmented attribute x 1.5 (rather than the racial maximum x 1.5), which also encourages raising attributes, but that's a different only tangentally related argument.



Aw c'mon, stuff like that is half the fun!

Yeah, I'm interested in Attributes contributing something less (like straight 50%, perhaps), and that does address the issue a bit.

I think Body is FAR from useless. Survival is a primary necessity of the game! The stat that makes you survive, even if it does little else, is one of the MOST valuable. People who dump it literally deserve to die! As such, SR4 does a better job than even SR3, because now every point of Bod gives you a total of over 3 dice of damage resistance.

Willpower is less clear cut, but there are ways to make it more useful. (And I would rather favour putting Log and Int back together like in SR3.)

One thing is evident: There should be a Steel test like in Burning Wheel. If you had to roll WP+X before each combat... but wait, that's what you do, except it contains Int. So let's put WP into initiative, because cold-bloodedly acting fast is much more important than instinctively doing so. And there could be more WP only or WP+X rolls whenever you do something strenuous or push the envelope in other ways.

The other thing is spell resistance, and here SR3 used to be stronger, because a lot of mind-control spells got 1/2 WP as a threshold, in addition to needing WP as the TN. That's also easy to reproduce: Add 1/2 WP as threshold for mind-control, in addition to the resistance roll.

Body isn't going to be removed. It'll simply be turned into a derived attribute, equal to the average of Strength, Reaction, and Agility. Survival will still be an important part of the game, but an otherwise useless attribute will be redefined to streamline characters. Willpower will likewise be the average of Intuition, Charisma, and Logic. I think that Willpower shouldn't be part of Initiative, because being able to react quickly to something doesn't imply that you'll choose the best course of action. You might be the first person to act in combat and decide that the best course of action to run away and hide. Willpower can guide your actions in combat, but it shouldn't affect when your actions take place.

It gives 3 dice of damage resistance thanks to armor. I was arguing the point that body alone makes you immune to damage, which it does not. It gives you only a single die. Yes, when you consider encumbrance as well, and maximizing armor, it makes a huge difference. My characters tend to have no less than 4 body just so I can wear more armor. However he was talking about moving encumbrance to strength and lowering body, which doesn't address the problem at all, because the largest chunk of that damage resistance is still there.




So you would have perception based off of logic? That seems kind of weird.



So now initiative has 2 mental attributes and 1 physical attributes, so mages and hackers are always faster than your super geared up cyber ninjas? Nothanks.

I don't mind making Willpower part of more spell resistance tests. Specifically against mana spells. Either that or have lost essence apply a threshold modifier. Or both. Direct/Mana spells in general are too hard to resist right now. But that can be put into effect even with Willpower as a derived attribute. The main reason to make Will and Body derived isn't because they're useless, or not worth investing in, but rather because they have no linked skills (okay they each have a single skill that is fairly niche in use), and attributes' main focus should be in affecting skills.

… Except for the cyber initiative enhancement, you meant? And we're assuming the ninjas are stupid/etc.? I'm just pointing out; on the whole, I think the derived-B/W idea has promise, and I'm not really interested in adding Will to Initiative.

Ninjas may not be stupid, but they generally won't have as high mental attributes as a mage who relies on mental attributes for their primary schtick.

Also, is there anything cyber that is straight up initiative enhancement? I may be forgetting something obvious, but I thought most of the initiative mods came in the form of +reaction.

Which would increase the roll, or more likely, be altered in this new mechanic. I'm just saying, I don't think there's any danger to the wired-sam archetype. Personally, I liked the old +Xd6 system, though. Anyone else?

I didn't see any suggestion for changing the actual initiative mechanic, just to add Willpower to the initiative roll. So you'd have Reaction+Intuition+Willpower. At least that's what I think was said. Personally I think it's fine just leaving it as 2 attributes.

That's the idea.

Call it "Mental" or whatever. SR3 simply called it Intelligence. That was fine by me.


No, I was going to replace Int (or any other mental stat) with Willpower. This is good, because now sams will gain magic resistance because they want to be faster.


Ok, seriously, Willpower may not have linked skills, but it doesn't NEED them at all. It's an attribute for putting pure flavour into the game.

There are soldiers on these boards, right? Couldn't anyone confirm that Willpower is EVERYTHING in combat? It's the difference between doing the job and running away while peeing your pants. Not having it would be pure madness.

I think you're missing the big point: Willpower would still exist. It really would. Willpower wouldn't be removed from the game. However, it would no longer be an attribute, because an attribute in general only matters in so far as how it affects skills. Things that don't affect skills? They don't need to be attributes. Attributes are crazy expensive because of the huge effect they have on all aspects of the character. Willpower doesn't have that. It is almost entirely a reactive force, rather than a proactive one. Just like Body is.

You want to introduce more things that incur a willpower check to avoid running away, or avoid doing the wrong thing? Fine, I can get behind that. In fact, there's already a mechanic for that. It's called Composure, it is measured by Will+Cha, and comes into effect when you are faced with a situation you are not hardened to.

You want to make Willpower more important in spell resistance, increasing the threshold and whatnot? I already agreed with you there.


The only thing I am disagreeing with is that Willpower needs to be something you pay out the ass to increase. Instead, as you become more mentally apt, you gain a higher willpower. You can also have qualities that increase/decrease willpower and body, so you can get above and below average if you so desire. Between that and racial bonuses, there's plenty of diversity in possibility there. It would still be used for everything it is used for now. The only difference is now it is not explicitly an attribute.

Not running away in combat is a Composure test, not an Initiative test. And Willpower is the linked skill for Survival and Astral Combat.
Edit: And Body is the linked skill for Parachuting and Diving.

You should be paying out of your ass in game if you don't buy it.

And I just feel making it derived will kill the flavour of playing a hard-ass. You can't play a hard-ass if everyone who is smart and charismatic is also one. Basically ALL my runners get good WP. Max it, if I have the points (on a generous karma allowance). I feel that attributes should be important on their own, and I'd rather lose a different one if you want only three mental stats.

Well, maybe that's just me.

Theoretically, you'd get something like Iron Will or Sangfroid as a Positive Quality, and then you'd bump up the *skills* that resist relevant things (Intimidation, Leadership, etc.). Yes, I see how you're losing a little granularity there; the simplicity gains might be worth it for the general population, though. We could even add a skill for Badassitude that's used in what *used* to be Attribute-Only Willpower tests? Some races, implants, etc. directly raise Will, and we could keep that as a straight bonus.

It's true that there's a nice symmetry to the Body/Willpower as defense-only/no-skills concept, and therefore derived instead, etc.

And if you could get +1/+2 willpower at 15/30 BP (or 30/60 karma, or whatever), wouldn't that give you the effect of being the guy with badass WP? I mean in the segment you quoted, I mentioned you could have a quality that boosts Willpower, so if that's the character type you want, you can go for it.

And as Yerameyahu points out, you can spend further karma investing in things that make you more resistant to other things. (Want to always maintain composure? You can have an above average Charisma as well. Want to avoid being intimidated? Grab some intimidation skill. Etc)