This highlights another point that's been rattling around in my head. Shadowrun is a weird game in that the rules for magic tend to be as orderly as applying for a small business loan, and the computer rules are this mystical realm where it's anything you can imagine.

Long periods of time to do things don't seem to make much sense in the system though. What's the point? If the end result is unbalancing to the game, it's going to be unbalancing whether it takes two months or two minutes to do it. If it's not, why make the construction time be something that's a huge obstacle in all but a small portion of games?

bwahahaha! You're so totally right




Reminds me a bit about Ars Magica (the real calendar game). Perhaps these time intervals make more sense if you could conveniently all scale them to the style of campaign you run. If there's lots of downtime between sessions, 3 months isn't such a problem. If the campaign is a rollercoaster that fits about two weeks of IC time in two playing years...

My group has a strict playing schedule (2nd and 4th sunday of every month), and the IC date is adjusted to match the RL date +62 years at the beginning of every new mission. Hence we get plenty of downtime, and I don't think this'll be such a problem.

You're still looking at only inventing roughly 1 new spell every time you initiate and gain a point of magic (unless its a detection or health spell, which has a lower interval (1 month) and lower threshold (8 ), making them roughly four to six times easier to make than any other spell type).

I really wish there was an quicker "one use" type spell design system where you could do something really specific if you had an hour or three.

Then magic turns into something useful in real, day to day life, rather than spending a year researching how to wash dishes without having to get your hands dirty.

(Not that using magic to solve day to day problems is always a good thing, mind, but its a little more realistic than SETTING PEOPLE ON FIRE WITH MY MIND, you know, on weekends when I'm not stuck at a deskjob, as I'm sure that's not the first thing that comes to mind when realizing you can, well, set people on fire with your mind, as you'd get arrested pretty damn quick, but not having to ever clean house again is the Bachelor's Dream).

Game as you like to game, but I doubt you're going to be awarding bonus karma for expert "taking worthless qualities to circumvent the build point limit."

Have no doubt, there will be karma awarded for expert "taking worthless qualities to circumvent the build point limit" if it aids in any of the categories of Awarding Karma, even Good Roleplaying (some people may even say especially Good Roleplaying).

Incompetence is not really a "worthless flaw", even when it is taken for something the character is unlikely to attempt to ever do. For one thing, it gives a point of Notoriety to the character. For another thing, the character is treated as unaware in that skill. In other words, the character not only can't use the skill, but is totally clueless in regards to anything to do with that skill. "What is that strange object you are pointing at me?"

But character approval by the GM is the final step of the character creation process, and the GM can always veto negative qualities that are problematic. So if the GM feels that incompetence in pilot aerospace is not going to really come up in his game of gangers from the Barrens, he can disallow it.

Personally I'm not very fond of the incompetence quality because it seems very unrealistic. I mean skills like uneducated make sense, because the person can still learn them with increased difficulty, but the idea that it is impossible for someone to learn to do something at all just seems odd. Difficult, certainly, but unable just seems like such a stretch.

While I do wonder about the realism, this sort of incompetence is a common fictional trope. I really enjoyed the Modesty Blaise books. One character was incompetent with a pistol, the other incompetent with a rifle, if I remember correctly.

Yours,
Joel

Yeah, but this level of incompetence is basically that you are incapable of pulling the trigger on those weapons. Just doesn't seem to make sense to me.

That depends on how you want to describe not being able to default on the skill.

True. I kind of interpret it to mean you can't do any action that would require a roll, or any action that would require the skill but be too easy for a roll generally.

I guess the other option would be an automatic critical failure if you attempt it.

You don't get a roll to see if you hit anything, but there's no rule saying you can't fruitlessly expend ammo.

The weird part is without a roll of some sort, the Incompetent person can't glitch.

The book describes a firearms example of the Unaware skill rating as "Never seen a gun before." So such a character would be able to pull the trigger on a gun, but might possibly be curiously looking down the gun barrel while he does it. Or he might be able to pull the trigger, but have no clue why it doesn't want to move, because he doesn't notice that the safety is still on. Or he might accidentally eject the clip first. It would be like handing a pistol to a chimp.

I have been in two games in the Welcome to the Shadows subforum with incompetent characters. One, where we played characters operating in the Ork Underground, had an awakened character realistically playing someone with an incompetence in pistols. And I played a character named Null in an anti-awakened game with incompetence in leadership, and that flaw was a very significant part of his personality. When it makes sense for the character, it can be a really good flaw to roleplay.

The problem that I have with some incompetencies is that they are harder to justify when a character is incompetent in one thing, and has points in skills that are similar to it. In other words, it is easy to imagine someone like that mage who doesn't comprehend pistols, but it is harder to explain for the street samurai who has incompetence in pistols, but a rating of 6 in automatics. And in this case, it's not really a question of game balance, but a problem with picturing how that peculiar mix of skill and ignorance could happen.

I tried to find out what happens when someone who doesn't have the skill but can't default tries to make a test. The best I have found is "In this case, the character simply fails."

Incidentally, it is amusing to note that despite being unable to be incompetent in a Knowledge skill, the table on p119 SR4 has Knowledge skill examples for Unaware.

Awesome! After all these years I found someone else who read Modesty Blaise.

I read them in book form, although apparently the original comics were extremely enjoyable as well.
I enjoyed them enough to re-read more than a few times.

Yours,
Joel

I can justify that one. I had a troll in SR3 who was incompetent in pistols, but it'd work in SR4 as well. Our justification was, his hands were too big to hold a pistol, even troll-adjusted ones. By the time they built up the handle and trigger to a size where he could use it, it was the size of an automatic.

I agree with you that Incompetence can be a fun flaw to play out, even if it's in something the character is never likely to do. Pilot Aerospace? "How in hell did you crash a simulator!?" Even just as a background story, it can be fun.

If your GM lets you explain away the fact that your Troll char can't comprehend how a revolver might possibly work because it's smaller than a machine pistol, then godspeed.

Not me, man.
That's all I can offer on this subject, I guess.

I mean, just because the Flaw you chose is undeniably a disadvantage, that doesn't change the fact that it's essentially nonsensical.

I figure at that point its not so much a mental thing, but a physical thing. A man with no arms could be incompetent at firing guns, but have extreme detailed knowledge about how they work.

Quadriplegia, Incompetent in all physical skills and Infirm, here I come!
.........the GM inside me can't figure out whether to laugh evilly (npc min-max'ing) or cry (my players will attempt something like this >.<)

Make it an NPC dragon and see what you can get him to do.

You do know that negative quality points are capped at 35, right?

Doesn't mean he can't have more, they just don't grant points.

Now, I wonder if, with all those negative qualities, his notoriety would go through the roof.....

Not to mention his public awareness. At 10+, you get trid shows made about you and stuff. So someone would be doing the equivalent of Nana's Everyday Life about this infirm, incompetent quadriplegic.