ROTFLMAO

Correlation, r=0.78.

cockroach god

But Frank, it is fairly easy in Rifts to look through the classes and work out approximately how powerful each one is

Then decide where you want your game to be, set minimum and maximum power levels for characters and make your players choose within that range.

In SR4 the imbalances are more subtle and thus harder to work out.

Sorry, not lying, just pointing out something I see

Let me explain caretully.

Rifts is less balanced than SR4 when run by a computer

BUT it requires less effort and attention to rebalance.

Or want to see.

Subtle? You mean largely so small that they don't really matter under most conditions, and sometimes which way they go is not only debatable but also dependant more on players and GM than on the system itself? So balance problems would indeed be easier to see with RIFTS since not seeing them would be like not noticing a 5 ton elephant sitting across your kitchen table.

I've been playing a mundane with no cyberware or bioware, and I am unaware of any compensation the GM has made to account for this. The character gets along fine, and is a real contributor the team. He would be somewhat out of place in a powergamer campaign, and he doesn't stand out head and shoulders in the team. Also magic still trumps all, like SR3 and pretty any RPG out there so all mundanes going agaisnt an awakened foe is an uphill battle. That seems to be standard RPG balance issues.

Really, outside of the partially GM fiat powered Clean Steve, how many mundanes did you come across in SR3 that weren't mook fodder or string pullers that cowered behind their hirelings in a way that didn't make a lot of sense? SR3 is the superhero version of SR to SR4. So representing the iconic metahuman of the SR world as infailable and unbeatable face to face on paper stats alone is going to be a bit tougher, and without a bit of experience with the system and interest in doing so you wouldn't see the way.


Maybe that is partially why I am comfortable SR4. My preference wasn't playing SR out at that high end of the power spectrum, with a PC going face to face on even footing against iconics. I also don't buy into infailable NPCs, only NPCs with really good public relations teams. So Brainscan might be a bit tougher to translate into SR4 with it's fan wank atmosphere intact, because without being quite advanced even SR3 PCs tended to get chewed up without the GM coddling and pulling punches.

I also am comfortable with the SR4 style of centering tactics, which are still very much there, more around things my character is doing rather than centered around managing a number of constantly changing dice pools. Although I did miss the Combat Pool initially when thinking about playing, once I started actually gaming I didn't at all. I have found the Edge to provide some interesting leverage that requires similar decision making. Plus it works across the board, not just limited to combat.

Fun? Yes!

No, I mean subtle as in not immediately apparent, but becoming more of a problem over time.

Just a few examples
Hackadepts
Social Adepts
the disparate nature of karma cost versus point cost for technomancers
the cheapnes of combat deckers versus technomancers.
the sheer power of spirits.
the removal of will combat versus spirits
the incongruity of tech and magic how tech cannot detect magic but magic can detect tech

Now people complain about riifts but the coomplaints come in two basic groups
1: the MDC/SDC dichotomy
2:the sheer range of differing power levels in classes

now to balance those, you merely pick a power level for your campaign... and the MDC/SDC issue, if it is a problem, change the ratio.

r=0.78

r=0.67

r=0.99

r=0.83

r=0.93

r=0.69

r=1.0, I'm really puzzled as what you see different than SR3?

EDIT Ok, one difference. How Object Resistance and spell Force work in SR4 forces the mage to use higher Force spells, so the imbalance has been lessened.


There is one big balance issue potential in SR4, and it isn't particularly sutble at all. The 1.3 errata helps immensely there with fixing the typo in the spirit stats, there have also been plenty of suggestions on the SR4 board on how to effectively handle any remanants, and it boils down to the old RPG bane. It certainly is front and center in SR3. Magic trumps, so you better have one or more awakeneds on your team if you are meeting a magic using foe.

I'll trade to have those issues any day in place of the problems with SR3 decking, riggers, and vehicles. It is an even better deal because I get an improvement with cyberware costs thrown in for free.

alternatively, SR4 is an unrealistically normalized version of SR. i think someone who has spent a significant portion of their life doing badass things ought to be pretty badass. and if they have augmentations on top of that? they should be really badass. look at the Blackwater guys, six months or a year back--something like eight of them, holding out against around a hundred of the opposition? give those guys smartlinks and cybernetic vision mag, and i bet there wouldn't be any survivors.

It is just a matter of order, and where in time you are taking the snapshot. Think of the mundane without the cyberware but with lots of skills plus traditional general mental and physical training. More training than their Build Point equal that instead took the surgery path to badass. Now take the guy with just traditional training and give him another 40 Build Points in cyberware and bioware and he will definately kick bigger hoop. Just a single extra IP makes a big difference in an extended heavy combat situation.

So some day, if he survives long enough, I expect Slim will spend some of his accumulated wealth on Synaptic Boosters, maybe some Tailored Pheromones. If he doesn't gamble all his money away first.


SR4 has openned up a portion of the life cycle of a Shadowrunner that was far less viable to play before. What did that Shadowrunner do before he had several 100,000 of gear implanted or realized that he could tap into the flow of mana?

In SR3 he was ghoul bait, by starting PC standards. Even for lower powered campaigns how often did you see a full essense mundane?

But in SR4 someone with a fairly solid training background can now work as a freshman, and even sophmore runner to earn that money for his first chrome or vat job. He might still be squating in a cardboard box eating artificial seaweed flavour Chunky Soy to save up the cash faster. But he is eating and clawing his way up to godhood.

Then put our money where your mouth is, show me how the things I mentioned either
A: are Imediately apparent to any GM, or
B: will not cause campaign problems

Why would I retype things that are there for the reading on the SR4 board? Especially when you don't even take the time to address the one item I did add extra text for because I don't remember reading anything like it on the SR4 board, and is something that stikes me as unlikely to come up on the SR4 board because it is so nonsensical. Which is an impresive height in nonsense.

I like everything Wizkids did up to SR4. Yea, I had some technical quibles, but I had the same with FASA's work. They could be resolved. SR4 goes way beyond that. The difference between shamans and hermetics has all but disappered (My next spellslinger will be called Herman the Shametic). Spriits have been genericized. The worst problem is they eliminated all signs of Olde (Pre Matrix 2.0) Tech. I'm not strong enough to suspend that much disbelief. I worked though it and figured out that a pre 2 security system would shread any group of shadowrunners, because it's lack of wireless links would make it invunerible to hacking. All means to do a physical hack (you know, deck it) are gone. So to keep from killing the players, all security systems include points for unauthorized access. Stupid squared.

WizKids did exactly one thing, which was well before SR4, and that was to license Shadowrun to FanPro.

Well, ok, they also did Duels. And most unjustly killed it off, too

~J

on second thoughts I might run a SR4 game, the players by invitation wil be all the PRO SR4 players ont heboards, and I will use a wired security system at some point one that does need pre Matrix 2.0 decks to access.

Enforce OR how? Rewriting how the spells work? Sure, someone could do a rewrite, but why bother now when it has now been done for you. While I've never seen house rules where someone rewrote, for example, the SR3 Improved Invisibility to account for Object Resistance. The way many of the SR3 spells are structured would make this extremely clunky.

I thought FrankTrollman was being too cruel about intentionally lieing. But this is becoming much harder to explain my way.

Actually I was referring to rhe OR minimum force rule and the combat spells OR TN issue

That smells like an r=1.0 too.

Hardwired systems requiring you to hook up to a hard jackpoint are still fully handled within SR4 the rules. VR is still VR, with it's metaphor overlays and personas. Just the terminology and numbers have changed. Wireless transmission is just another transmission option and in most devices is something that a can be disabled and replaced or supplemented with a skinlink or old-school optical link.

Not that a 20 year old or arcane system couldn't present inherent problems to someone trying to work on it with tools ment for a new system. Going back in fluff SR Matrix history you find reference to that sort of thing happening. Or just ask the average newly graduated computer technician to fix an IBM System/360 and listen to them say something like "Fix an XBox 360? Nah, we just send those out for replacement. I can do that. Do you keep it in one of these funky metal shelving cabinets?"

Oh, so you didn't realize how and how much SR4 supports OR, and also that you no longer have to compare the dice in each roll to each targets TN?

So we are just back to r=1.00. Good to hear, I guess?

It certainly appears that it would be an enlighting experience for you rules wise. As always hopefully the team does their leg work so they know to either break into a museum to find the equipment needed to make the interface, steal it from their parent's attic, or pay a systems integrator to custom build the software glue. Hope the Johnson is paying an anthropology bonus.

That's not particularly true. When you added +6 to the TN, every die had 1/6 of the chance to succeed that it used to. That does not mean that it affected everyone equally.

A player with a small pool (2 dice say) going against a TN of 5 would succeed 55.6% of the time. A player with a large pool (8 dice) going against the same TN succeeeded 96.1% of the time. Jack that TN up to 11 and the small pool succeeds only 10.8% of the time and the large pool succeeds 36.7% of the time - a shift of 5.14 times for the small pool and a shift of only 2.61 times for the large pool.

The difference wasn't uniform. It wasn't anything like. It wasn't even close. The probabilities were simply so complicated that people like you couldn't rationally evaluate them. SR4 probabilities are relatively transparent. People can look right at them and see where the weirdnesses and breakpoints are. It's not that they didn't exist before, they totally did. It's just that it was so hard to wrap one's mind around the chances involved that it was needlessly confusing.

---

And yeah, Brahm's got KOA and Starfurie dead in the water on the wired infrastructure thing. Commlinks can run fibreoptic cable directly to datajacks and devices. If for some reason you really want to hack something with a wire, you can. And there are a number of reasons you might want to - closed circuits, broadband absorbant paint, etc. etc.

The SR4 matrix rules present a wide variety of potential security setups, many of which call for the hacker being on-site and active in a way that rarely happened in previous editions.

-Frank

the comment I made was a system that did not upgrade to matrix 2.0
Now if you read the fluff again you will realize that one of the major changes was that you did not need as much backbone gear in 2.0 as in 1.X... the support for your customized Novatech Navi OS will not be there.

In short NO backwards compatibility

Um... no. The Navi runs on your commlink in the way that whatever your SR3 operating system ran on your cyberdeck.

The backwards compatability is there from the commlink to the pre-crash infrastructure if you really want. The datajacks are all the same, and the interface is there. You don't need as much backbone gear because of miniaturization, not because Matrix 2.0 somehow subsidizes your HaXXoring. In fact, if you play with the the old SotA rules, that pre-matrix 2.0 OS is probably like Rating 1 in Firewall and System. A modern commlink can probably just take it over on autopilot.

So really, we are back to the fact that you don't know what you are talking about. Your big ace in the hole against SR4 doesn't even make any sense in the context of SR4's actual tech specs. I strongly suggest that you quit this before you fall more behind. Your basic ignorance on this subject has already been well documented.

-Frank

In some ways 1 is the new 6. Just having a skill means something now, where as in SR3 if you had 1 in a Skill you were literally playing Russian Roulette because 1 in 6 times you'd roll a 1 and shoot yourself.

Still having 3 or 4 is definately good, and 5 and 6 backed by a solid Attribute is great. So you do tend to see Skills spread across a range more. There is still a cost incentive to buy skills up high because they cost more in karma. Same with Attributes. But because the last point of an Attribute costs a huge amount, learning a new Skill to 1 and advancing from 1 to 2 is the same karma cost, and the ability to buy Skills above 4 is sharply limited the cost savings you can get are a much smaller percentage overall than in SR3.

Another part of why the mundane Orc starting PC that nick012000 described didn't occur. Unless the books were cooked by the GM to throw around a lot of cash or the GM brought in a mysterious benifactor that strentched believibility it took a very long time to buy SR3 implants, and without Initiative implants or magic you were so hosed in combat because there was little you could do to protect yourself even to turtle since the maximum possible roll could easily be smaller than the minimum roll of a moderately cybered character.

So mundanes bought implants at creation time, usually lots and lots, because of the powerful economic incentive to so and the huge punishment for not doing so.


SR4 has its shortcomings. Some people will prefer SR3 over SR4. Some people like garlic flavoured ice cream. That will just happen because desires vary. But when someone asks about the differences to try choose without learning both it is very unfair to the person asking and others reading for KOA to post extremely inaccurate, uninformed information.

The rules for using security items as jackpoints are gone (there are rules for manipulating them, but jacking in though them is beyond that). The only jackpoints are the intentional ones. The only jackpoints they need are in the security office, behind all that security. No one has enough edge to successfully defeat every security device seperately to get to the office.

Even worse would be if they add a bogus wireless system. Any activity on it would automaticlly signal a security breach. Then you just send out the guards and sucker the runners into a free fire zone with good crossfire coverage.

Want to hear something funny? If SR4 stripped off the magic and technomancers and was called something else, I'ld love the system, but SR it ain't.

From the way it's looking, I'm going to own two hardcover SR books. SR1, the first I bought and SR4, the last I'll ever buy.

The way defaulting works in SR4 makes this not as big a deal, though. Having a skill at 1 is a gain of two dice on the test, whereas in SR3, having to default could make many things flat out impossible. Just another thing that makes attributes worth more in SR4.

Logic dictates that you should be able to jack into the system through any security device. I mean, they have to be connected to the system, afterall. I know they're not designed to allow one interface... but isn't that what hacking is all about?

A lot of the way security systems worked in SR3 was, quite simply, stupid.

There are still rules for openning up items and tinkering with the bits inside. They didn't spell out all the hot tap details to anywhere near the level that Rigger 3 did because this is still just the core rules. Also commlinks still have jackpoints and such.

As for the rest of your stuff, as a GM I could:
1) Has the target run a completely alien computing system that does not use the terminal protocols that have been in place for decades. Not even use optial chips, or hololisp.
2) Drop an orbital on the runner team.
3) Have rocks fall, everyone dies.

That isn't anything new. Congratualtions, you have just rediscovered a way to be a ratbastard GM that is SR version independant.


Post Script

FrankTrollman's advice for KOA Kremlin is also highly applicable to you.

the measure by which most combat-type runners can make utterly impossible shots at insane ranges without even taking the time to aim, honestly. oh, but wait, that problem doesn't come up in SR4--the GM just decides it's impossible, and assigns a threshold of 6. woo, system is fixed again! SR3 isn't 'realistic' by a long shot, but it tends to make things hard things very hard to do, whereas even the hardest task in SR4 can be accomplished half the time or more by skilled, able individuals, unless the GM intervenes. (the ire in the above paragraph is not directed at you, incidentally.)

not really true. i mean sure, that extra 3 dice is nice, but if you've already got 12 dice, or even 13? 3 more isn't that big a deal. yeah, you need it to exceed your limits, but the amount by which your limits are exceedable in SR4 is extremely limited.

you're misreading me somewhat, here. i agree that at chargen, a cybered character will have to make some tradeoffs that a mundane doesn't need to. but my main point is that even after chargen, after both characters have spent money and karma advancing, the mundane and the cybered char in SR4 are neck-and-neck. moreover, they're pretty much neck-and-neck with starting characters. i don't like that lack of variability in ability.

I haven't tested this in practice yet, and I'm sure you have. Doesn't the diminishing returns aspect of reaction as a defense mean that someone with extra actions will have a significant advantage over someone without?

In SR4, it seems like PCs have a harder time killing things while at the same time being harder to kill. To my mind, that sounds like it's going to be easier for me to run games since I've always had trouble challenging a team of experienced runners without killing them all.

Frank: read system failure page 118

You will note the complete change of design philosopy, and how the new philosophy allows for devices with far less raw processing power to access the system than the cyberdecks of old used.

So no, if you use that data the cyberdecks would not be rating 1 devices

but I guess you either didn't read system failure, or just ignored it