i would assume that things like this are what the range penalties are supposed to represent.

Is that what you were doing? That was hard to see from your statements. Because you were the first person to talk about specific distances:

I know that you're all big on the whole "exageration for effect" thing, but this is pushing things a bit far. You were the one who started going off about"a thousand yards" and all that crap. Not Brahm, not me, that was you.

So if you want to stop talking about specific distances and move instead to discussions of what you perceive as the "extreme range problem", we can certainly do that. The entire question of what happened a kilometer out was entirely based on your statements, so kindly stop getting offended when people continue to talk about them.

---

The basic resolution to your entire claim is that you actually don't even get to make a firearms check at all unless you have some way of knowing where your target is. The fact that there are penalties for not being able to see your target do not give you the ability to make an attack if you don't know where the target is.

If the target is unaware of the attacker, the target is not allowed a defense roll. But if the shooter is unaware of the target, they don't get to make an attack roll. Period. This has been fucking well explained to you over and over again for months now, and if you don't get it, it's because you're choosing not to. Honestly, I've completely lost patience.

We've tried using big words, we've tried using small words. You keep moving the hypotheticals and it never works. For the love of goodness, just shut up. We know you don't like SR4, we get that. But you going off on these large tirades about the interactions of charts you haven't read with rules you don't understand is just sad.

-Frank

You skipped the important part. The line you quoted was just explaining the misunderstanding.

A huge amount compared to SR3? I think we are getting back to your experience, or lack of that. But you don't like the extra flexibility, you want to feel the comfort of having more stuff codified.

I don't like the extent that SR3 did that to and in the manner that it did it in. Because you end up outside the codified areas anyway, and quickly, and even inside the codified areas SR3 wasn't so hot. So my thinking is you might as well have a better system for handling it to start with.

EDIT Of course it won't take that long to sort a lot of the SR4 vague spots out. Some contentions will remain. Which is good otherwise what would there to be to debate about on DSF?

I do miss a few things that were cut from SR3 to SR4, and I find the SR4 core book overly vague in some places that SR3 wasn't. Maybe those things will make it into the new supplemental books, maybe they won't. But I'll take that trade off straight up now to not have to try hobble together the different pieces of SR3, and to have the huge load lifted from the GM and players with vehicles and for having a Deckers back in the team. Talk about stuff that detracted from character side.

Missed this before, but the same basically applies. You can assume this all you like, however it would again be a very poor GM call since vision magnification does not remove those factors and their presense varies from situation to situation.

How many times have people on this forum directed noobies to fix the problem with their players hitting too easily by starting to asign visibility penalties?

Once again look in mirror and you will find the root of the problem with the senario staring straight out at you.

and i recognized this, and just listed several examples of situations where you'd know where your target is but wouldn't be able to actually see him. hell, i'll throw out another right now: your target just shot at you, and then ducked completely out of sight behind something.

in other words, it is again up to the GM to fix the difficulty of a particular task based on his own assessment of what the difficulty should be. most of the time people on this forum directed noobies to use vision penalties, they didn't tell those noobies to make up vision modifiers. they told them to use the ones that were listed.

all i can say is "i disagree". the only time i've found myself completely outside the ruleset is when i try to do things with decking and rigging that god did not intend (which is fairly often, i'll admit). SR4 has, hands-down, a superior decking/rigging system. other than that, though, i've never run into a problem with combat or magic where there wasn't some sort of rule to cover what i was attempting. where the rules were problematic, i found it pretty easy to patch them with houserules. if you find it easier to adjust SR4 thresholds on the fly (effectively making up malleable houserules as you go), bully for you. i find it easier to fix any problem i encounter once, rather than re-fixing it every time i run into it.

the mirror thing is just trite. i've already stated several times in several threads that my play/GM style is not for everyone, and that other people with a particular style would probably find SR4 enjoyable.

The problem is?

I guess the first problem is your use of the word Success. You are assuming one hit is a Success? That isn't how SR4 works. If you are doing something that is unopposed and you only need 1 hit, then you don't even need to roll if you don't want to and your GM is cool with letting you use the conversion of 4 dice to 1 hit.

The modified curve is kind of curious. I am not clear on why did you chose to have the Threshold increase at every 5th point? That doesn't really match up at all to any situation I am aware of. Threshold and penalties move fairly independantly.

GM can turn the realism dial to where they want it. You haven't been paying attention in SR3, visibility penalties are judgement calls there too. You haven't been using haze for very long shots or heatwaves on pavement or the desert on sunny days?

EDIT
In combat, maybe I have just played with more over the top people, or maybe they try more over the top things, because maybe every other session there would either be digging into the books to try find something to shoehorn the action into the rules. Or to avoid killing the excitement the GM would just pull out something right there. Because frankly we tossed a lot of SR3 rules as dead weight anyway.

It is outside combat that more wierdness comes up, and I don't mean vehicles or decking. Decking we sometimes didn't roll dice for, and we definately didn't have decker players. Rigging sometimes. Security devices often. A number of the technical skills for items or actions that didn't match to the lists well. But it was the actions that fell into the "other" catagory where things would get wierd and often. Things where just the name of the skill was questionable.

On the rare occation that it would come up, I'm fine with it as long as the shooter knows the body shaped area where the target is. You however were bursting an blood vessle making a mountain out of a mole hill, mostly because you were framing the senario in a misleading way. But I am saying that like the Groucho Marx joke, if you don't like that stop doing it.

Then write down a note if you can't remember it. You certainly weren't looking to fix the problem here. It looks a lot more like you are looking to drag up some sort of excuse to hate SR4, lame as it is. Drag it up over and over and over.

But now it is you that are bitching about your own GM style. *chuckle*

*shrug* it never came up. i can't recall the last time i played or ran a combat at long enough distances for it to come into play.

no. what i'm bitching about is a game that doesn't support a wider variety of GM styles. with SR3, you could scale the detail however you like, and the rules would generally support you--some GMs track every modifier in the book, others ignore most of them, and the system generally works just fine either way. with SR4, the GM has to run the game a certain way, and fudge things all over the place, or the game doesn't work quite right.

i spent enough time trying to fix this trainwreck when i was playtesting it. damn if i'll spend any more on it.

where, exactly, was i misleading? you're sitting here talking about windshear on long-range shots while you ignore the fact that those shots are being made within a three-second window from the time the shooter spots the target, but i'm leaving things out?

people tend to do that with valid arguments. the blindfire + extreme range argument hasn't been answered to my satisfaction, so i'll continue to use it.

So how often would this sniper rifle, or even the assault rifle senario have come up? Likely not in your living memory I guess. *shakes head*

It works fine. But here your are bitching about the game having more flexibility to support multiple tastes. You know, more styles.

So you decided to break with the whole valid argument trend? I think FrankTrollman is right. You just don't get it because you DO NOT want to get it. You want to be bitter, and savor the biterness by hating SR4. But misery loves that company so you spouting off about the hate trying spread it around. Even if you have to do it in a misleading way.

Misleading in that you try to act like problems with how blindfire is handled is something unique to SR4. Which it is not. Pretending that it is a senario that is somehow significant. Which in your gaming experience it is not. And by cooking up an absurd senario, describing the situation that your ruling implies poorly, and then acting all indignant when the result seems odd based on your poor description.


Credit Where Credit Is Due

At least you were open about knowing squat about SR4. If only you allowed that to more temper your views and opinions and posts.


Epilogue

Well Critias, looks I am now fully on your side that the thread is at at end. But at least we got to the answer of your question.

No problem, as long as their idea fun doesn't match up with Ted Kaczynski. Illogical luddite rants punctuated by the occational fireball.

The problem is that in SR4, the probabilities are such that the band of "sometimes works" between "always works" and "never works" is very small. The "always works" band is also quite large. From the curve I show, the pool goes from 70% chance to never in just three points of penalty.

For all of its problems, SR3 case at least had a large area of "maybe" in the middle of it.

Yes, actually. In the case of the long range blind sniper, one success is all that's needed.

It's an attempt to use a simple mechanic to moderate the behavior of the probability curve away from "always"/"never".

Like I said your problem lies in requiring only a single hit for someone throwing 14 dice. It is like asking an ice skating champion to glide in a circle balancing on one foot. Insanely below their ability. Until you ask them to do it while carrying a live brown bear on their back in the dark while drunk.

You are looking in the wrong place for the maybe. Using only a single curve. The single cure where you are varying the number of hits required is a start. But what you need to do is have 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 curves, one for each number of hits. The area covered by those is where your maybe shows up.

EDIT The data for that is here. http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=9995 Scroll down to the Shadowrun 4E Odds Tables link. I haven't checked the numbers myself, but nobody has said anything about them since they were posted.

The maybe comes across those curves, not just follows a single one of them. More hits mean more successful; or you should set up as many tests that way as you can because that is where SR4 works well.

I think that is why Opposed Tests work even better than Threshold tests, because it naturally uses more of that maybe area no matter where you are on the curve.

it came up just now, actually, in a game i'm in. my character, armed with a shotgun (remember, we're talking 'bout extreme range in general, not the extreme range for any particular weapon? i hope this doesn't throw you!) burst into a warehouse with four bad guys playing cards around a heavy desk. i didn't achieve surprise, and the four guys acted before me. one of them suppressed the area i was in while the other three kicked the desk over and crouched behind it. presto.

no, it really doesn't work fine for my style of gameplay, nor the style most of the 30+ people i game with use.

this, right here, is what i'm talking about. there are very few places in the rules where a threshold is listed for a success test. certain spells, hacking into a host--i probably missed a few, but by and large, the only source of thresholds on success tests is the GM. that's not supporting a variety of play styles, that's pretty much forcing the GM to fudge things. i don't like fudging; i trust my players, and i'd rather let them handle the bulk of the work of performing in-game actions. making me stop and adjudicate the threshold for every single success test (even if i don't add any threshold, i still have to stop and consider whether or not i should) is extra work that distracts me from other GM tasks. the only time you have to do anything like that in SR3 is when there's no set TN for a given task. in SR4, you have to do it whether there are listed modifiers for the task or not.

the extreme range + blindfire scenario is an example that points out something i see as being a general flaw in SR4--namely, that difficult things in SR4 are not difficult. the modifiers only prevent low- and mid-range characters from achieving insane, impossible feats; characters with high-end attributes and skills in their area of expertise are able to do things which no human can possibly do with any reliability, and are able to do those things every other time they make the attempt.

conclusion: two of my big problems with SR4 are the fact that the GM has to do too much work to keep the system reigned in, and the fact that if he doesn't reign it in, the system allows unauged humans to regularly perform feats that unauged shouldn't be able to perform regularly.

That might actually mean something if you weren't trying so damn hard to make it not work and bothered to read the rules.

Creating an absurd extreme senario and then trying to say "Why that just happened", only it didn't because it wasn't out at the extreme end. In no small part because they were aware of the shooter. Now please pack up your sad little song and dance routine and head out. Bye bye.

it's not just one scenario, it's every scenario with around a -9 dice pool penalty.

Answered. Several times. Opposed Test. Don't just cook the dice numbers to give the result you want. There isn't a huge difference between SR3 and SR4 result.

But you don't want the answer. Did you actually try to work out the senario you described? Of course not, because it would require reading the rules.

So please, do some reading yourself. Bye. Bye.

For crying out loud. If it isn't an Opposed Test the GM selects the Threshold, from a list or based on a general list. Of course that is uncommon when you have an opponent. It certainly is in combat attacks.

Sorry, it is hard to be more specific than -----------> Bye. Bye.

The scenario, as it's laid out, is not an opposed test. I'm not arguing that the system doesn't work with opposed tests (I have a feeling that it does work well for those). However, it's those unopposed tests which break the system as written.

The problem is that huge penalties mean nothing if you only need one success. The GM can step in and add to the task threshold, but that requires fiat, which is something above and beyond the rules themselves.

While the 1 hit curve does look horrible, the 2 hit curve looks much better. The thing is, there are simply not any rules there to move the threshold up. You can say that the GM should pick the threshold all you want, but that goes back to the "what am I paying for" discussion.

with "or based on a general list" being far and away the more common situation--the standard, actually. which is problematic, because the general list is really vague (being, y'know, general); the GM ends up setting the level of difficulty for the test independently from the listed dice pool modifiers. this means that GMs who prefer to let the game run itself as much as possible are largely unable to do so.

you keep using that word. i do not think it means what you think it means.

Sure it is. The target is aware of the shooter. They get a roll, and can even choose Full Defense if they want to turtle. I don't have much trouble with them rolling Reaction, but if you don't like it have the target use Intuition in place of Reaction just like the rules proscribe that the shooter is using in place of Agility.

There are tables for Thresholds. Including a general table. The general table only goes to 4, but at least one other tables off the top of my head goes beyond that. I recommend that you not be afraid to set 5 or 6 for the Threshold. Another great thing is to not have a binary yes or no success at all, but every hit gets you a little more. Like with Assensing. There was also an example of a great use of that in tha character thread I've linked to too many times. There are also Threshold modifiers in the rules.

The "what am I paying for" is silly. You are paying for the setting, the mechanics, the guidelines, and the specifics that are there. Same as always. You thought that as a GM you didn't need to make judgement calls to try fit things into catagories? I find at least that entire chapters of rules in the book are not being ignored as unplayable, like happened so often with SR3.

Sure I do. But you just won't go away. *sigh*

Ooh. That was a burn. He burned you.

The TinkerGnome and I we are. FrankTrollman has already covered what you are doing. Bye. Bye.

I am sorry. I didn't realize that there is a senority rule here. Does mfb outrank FrankTrollman too? Yes, I guess he does. Ok I guess he gets to stay and play dumb. *sigh*

EDIT

I didn't call him that. But I'll change the simile if that is a problem.

I guess I'm getting fustrated like FrankTrollman did when he told him to go away. I guess I should have realized that when he didn't listen to Frank, and from his doggedness of dragging up the same thing over and over after it was addressed, that that wasn't going to work.

FrankTrollman just went away instead, but I just would like to talk with TinkerGnome because I get the sense that he wants to learn more. He doesn't need to like what he finds out.

Whereas mfb doesn't seem to want to learn. Someone so dead set against SR4, and doesn't read the rules, posting in the SR4 forum. With the outgoing on, and the incoming off. Repeating the same distortions.

I was talking about what I've seen, not here. I guess you won't leave, and you obviously aren't interested in discusion but instead beating your same old dead broken down horse. Bye.

First of all - mfb playtested SR4. He's read the rules.

Second, I have yet to see you post any answers to the problems posed here that actually referenced rule-based solutions of any sort - your answer to everything is "it's not a problem, just ignore the broken rules because they don't come up very often, and leave everything else to GM discretion".

This coming from a guy who's effectively been going "La-la-la-la-not-listening-la-la-la" for the last several posts...

Unfortunately no, he hasn't. He read an unfinished version several months ago, and it shows. I don't know where in the playtest he quit, or how much it changed from what he read. But keeping SR3 straight from SR4 would be difficult if you didn't have the books to work as a reference from.

Odd things can happen when you set up odd senarios. But even when he came up with the senario the results were similar to SR3, and when the senario was fully described for the rulings that mfb had made it wasn't really out of wack at all.

So the rules didn't break, they worked. Or at least as worked similarly to SR3. Could you find individual situations where one worked a lot better than the other? Sure. This is where how often something comes up is relavent.

GM discretion is a cornerstone of any pen and paper game. That is why you can do things, and fix things that computer programs don't. It is like saying discretion shouldn't be part of the legal system, and they have a lot more text bulk to work with.

EDIT

To a guy that has been doing it for several months? Maybe, although I have been trying to answer questions too. Like I said I was getting fustrated covering the same ground over and over with him that I and others have.

Impossible? Unless you have burnt all your Edge or you don't have the Skill and the GM doesn't allow a Default, impossible doesn't even exist. Highly unlikely does exist though of course.

The rough equivalent of two SR3 dice is about 4 dice. Most people would be unconscious before they ran out of dice, unless they had taken heavy damage on both tracks.

In that senario if the dumpshock had been a little harder, and nobody that was conscious had the Skill would they still have been able to pull it off? That is the bad thing about designing situations where there is only one possible solution. Although sometimes it happens, you have to be careful about artificially creating them to try drive the story to read like you want it to.

EDIT A example of a really bad chokepoint requirement that I have seen was a puzzle type module run at a convention. It did not have prebuilt characters, and at one point you need one of the characters to know a specific language to get past. Fortunately someone in my thrown together group had that language, but not all tables had that good fortune. Talk about a horrible way to fail.

ofcourse it is, beleive it's been going "left around the world" for quite some time now...

Circles are still somewhere.

~J

Taking this back to the sniper example, how is the target aware of the shooter? The shooter is 1km away and in some way completely hidden from the target. The bullet will arrive before the sound of the shot... so there is simply no way the target is aware of the shooter.

As for breaking into something as a poorly skilled character with good tools, I don't see why it should be impossible in SR4. Such a thing should be an extended test, and thus doable (though just as easily glitchable) by anyone with a die. It may just take a long time. Extended tests seem to be a little more spelled out and used in SR4 than they were in SR3, which is a good thing.

Anyway, this argument is definitely getting cyclical. What are some of the other issues of SR4 that we can discuss? I believe the meaningful discussion of this one is pretty much over.

No.

Here's the run-down:

mfb has fixated on th fact that if you are a badass in SR4, and you are in a bad situation, you are still able to perform easy tasks. He calls this "unrealistic" because he extrapolates this to mean that people who are badass can routinely perform impossible tasks, which is not what the rules say at all.

Then people started throwing feces at each other.

Now, people are covered in feces.

----

That's pretty much been the last several pages of the thread, I'm not sure why it's still going on. mfb is never going to accept that SR4 makes a distinction between performing easy tasks in difficult situations and performing difficult tasks because SR3 didn't and he refuses to evaluate SR4 rules in the context of an SR4 game. That's really what this whole argument is about, it's what it's going to continue being about. I predict that it's going to keep going for several pages.

The whole "shooting at extreme range with full concealment" is continuously being held up by every side because it represents the entire argument. mfb has defined it as a threshold 1 task - which in SR4 would represent shooting a target who does not or cannot move in response to being shot at and whose position is known with a fair degree of accuracy. But he leaves off those assumptions and keeps acting like this is some sort of zen shootery where you are firing into the universe and homing your bullets at te target.

It has long since passed beyond the stage of coherent debate. Everyone at this time has heard everythign they are going to hear. If the argument is continuing, it is because there are things being said by one side or another that cannot be heard by the opposing sides because predispositions are too strongly held.

-Frank

That isn't an Opposed Test. Well it sort of is. But it is more a philosophical question. Can you have an Opposed Test if there is no opposition? By unaware I mean unaware that anyone is aiming at you, you aren't expecting to be shot at.

Still when you get out to the ends of those curves you posted the area of variability gets smaller and smaller. Like any system if you get outside the sweet spot it doesn't work as well. The best you can hope for is that those cases overlap little with high frequency occurances.

If you have good tools and any sort of Skill+Attribute then you likely have dice or are flat on your back. What Lindt descibed sounded like an Extended Test. One thing about those. If you run out of dice and need to make a Long Shot, which is using Edge only, they can get really hairy if you only have one or two points of Edge left because you have to get as many hits in those one or two rolls as you are allowed to get in multiple rolls. Come on sixes!

I think Lindt's question was a good one. Having something improbable but not impossible can be a very exciting part of the game. Sitting there rerolling 6's over and over at a key point tends to be memorable.

that's because it is some kind of zen shootery. for chrissake, do you not understand how hard it is to put a bullet into a non-moving target at max range, when you can't see it? sure, it's possible--even likely, if you have time to aim. in SR4, you don't need to aim to make these impossible shots, and that is what i keep railing against. you hear me say "sniper rifle", and you apparently forget the fact that the person with this rifle is performing snapshots, assuming instead that the shooter is taking time to aim because that's what snipers do. the target pops up, the shooter brings his gun up, bang--all within three seconds. whether or not the target dodges is completely irrelevant to whether or not the shooter puts the bullet where he wants it to be. yes, in combat, a sniper with 3 dice shooting at an aware target probably isn't going to do any damage to the target--but killing people with those three dice was never my contention. being able to make the shot at all was.

that's an interesting distinction to make. i'm not sure it's all that necessary, though. i'm evaluating both games in the context of whether or not the results the game mechanics come up with are comparable to the results one gets in real life. in SR3, difficult tasks (or easy tasks in truly difficult situations, either one) are difficult no matter how skilled you are--a high-skill character has a better chance than a low-skill character, but neither has a significant chance of achieving the near-impossible. in SR4, the near-impossible is easily within the grasp of unaugmented human starting-level characters. this is true whether you're talking about making a difficult shot, an easy shot in difficult situations, hacking a difficult node, hacking an easy node in difficult situations, casting a difficult spell, casting an easy spell in difficult situations...

You missed the part about what happened to SoCal?

Outside that I think that is a very accurate observation about overall tone. It doesn't read like the people that brought you Drop Bears. It is the core rules book, so the atmosphere text can get squeezed out a bit more. Or maybe the less cheesy, more serious tone will continue.

I don't think the change to the fixed TN by itself is all that either, although I definately like it better after using it for a bit. It was what they used it for that I like, have all the parts of the game fit each other.

Safe to speculate a marketer had a lot of say in whether they spent the money to make it. But I think you mean that you think it was done cynically to try to get you to spend money you didn't need to?

I doubt that selling to current SR3 customers was their big target. Otherwise they could just chug along with three or four supplement books a year that are cheaper to make and just low risk milk the license. Coming out with a new version is usually about getting new customers. If they are going to be successful it does not matter if the person that makes the decision is a marketer or a gamer or both. They will have had to listen to a lot of gamers, and that group will have made the decision.

They have mananged to create a lot of talk. More talk about Shadowrun on the internet in general gaming circles than in years. Maybe since ever since the internet wasn't nearly the same size when version 3 came out. Is that translating to sales? I don't know how big their first printing was, but the books selling now are second printing and the third printing is on order. Shadowrun 3 went through 14 or 15 printings in total, so that seems about right.

Of the 5 people I play with 4 have never played before, and the 5th had not played since SR1. I joined them after they started playing Shadowrun, so they found it by themselves. Some of these people are gamer's gamers too, having played all sorts of systems. They seem to be having fun and enjoying it.

EDIT Their lack of SR experience is part of the reason my mundane character took Thurmatology. On Saturday night I found myself explaining to the mage, and all the other team members, why some of the people in the bar they were in looked a lot different when she popped out for a quick astral jaunt. "Wolves and big cats? Leave. Leave now. Leave. Right. Now. No, no reason to panic. Just leave and don't start any fights on the way out. I'll call you back in a few minutes when you are in the car." There were eight shifters and 2 team members. Even with the toned down Regeneration power that is not good odds. I have no idea what the GM was going to cook up for stats because he does know the old butt kicking shapeshifters.

I've said it since the beginning, and I'll continue to believe it - it is a total money grab. They counted on gettting as many of the old players as possible, and get new on top of that. They gambled that they would gain more than they loose - a lot more in fact. Becuase there is really no reason to go through all this if they only gain one or two new players for every one they loose - it's just not worth it.

And we may not know for a couple years if their gamble paid off - we'll know by the quantity and quality of supplements they publish. If they continue with the pace they have had for the last couple years, then we know that their gambit did not pay off. If we see an increase in supplements, and an increase in their frequency, well then things are looking good. (For those of you that continue to buy the new product.)


I monitered the changes as they announced them. i discussed them at great detail with fellow gamers. I've monitered the discussion in the SR4 board since it came out. I picked up the book (not bought - looked at) .

I particulary don't like the fixed target number/threshold mechanic...

It looks like a decent game - but it is not Shadowrun. I'ts lost the flavor and feel - to me anyway.

I have yet to see anything impressive about the new game. I've bought Sr Sice the beginning, but they will not be getting any money from me again.

So was printing SR3. And every book in SR3. And SR2. And SR1. It's a business, y'know?

I understand that your base accusation is that they went with what they thought people would buy as opposed to what was, well, good, but as it stands your statement is almost tautological.

~J