While it still does reward some system mastery, I wouldn't say it does it to a high degree. You have to really make an effort to make a character who is actually bad at his job, as opposed so being only slightly less awesome than one made by a more experienced player. A character made by a novice can end up 1 or 2 points of attack / damage bonus behind one that was made by a more experienced player, but that's hardly crippling. It's definitely not the same gap that existed between, say, an average fighter and an expertly built wizard or cleric in D&D 3.

Lol. I forgot about that one. Near the end of a product line and we were getting swamped by stuff at that point. Pulled it out again after you mentioned it and that is okay. Could have been better if it didn't include all those contacts. That's an example of the stuff that should be in the actual game book instead of a product 6 or 7 years into the product line. That one was overshadowed by he fact that SR4 had just been announced and would be released within a year. So they finally threw the GM a bone in a 1 print run splat book at the end of an edition. Woohoo.

Oh and btw we had 30 pages of GM tips and 32 pages of contacts in that book. Priorities anyone? The random run generator was pretty frackking hilarious however.

So heres the deal on the skills meaning more in older editions. For an average test in old SR your TN was 4 (I'm not talking about whatever crazy thing your GM did, it should have been 4 for short range in a clear afternoon, I state this because I've seen GMs cheat and raise TNs over the years because of that I need to "win" mentality I talk of over in the metagaming thread).Your tn is now 5, obviously generating less successes than 4. So all things being average on attributes the SR4 guy gets to add 3 dice and the previous guy has 4 combat pool, say he uses 2 for attack 2 for defense.
at a skill of one they both should get one success and a skill of two they both should get two successes but at a skill of 4 the older edition guy starts to pull ahead and by a skill of 8 (specialization for the SR4 dude) the older edition guy has 5 successes to the sr4 guys 3 (almost 4), but the older edition guy can keep raising his skill. And thats why skills don't matter as much in the new edition.

and Dwight I think your comment about Cain and the door was crude and rude. Not that no one else has ever said anything rude on dumpshock but I think you could have stated your dislike in a less offensive manner

I think that's what a lot of us liked about the older versions of D&D. Hearing someone compare the damage outputs of clerics versus fighters as if they should be even is astounding. I mean, these days, I hate level based and class based games almost as much as I hate D20. But the older D&D games were at least role-playing games.

D&D4 seems like just a complex board game where the pieces just don't automatically come in the box with the rules.

One thing that is awesome about D&D4e -- it makes it really easy to identify the people who don't understand the issues and ignore them.

I think the gap is just as large, but the starting place for bad is not as far down.(but I think starting really bad was mostly hyberbole, yes someone might take a fighter with just skill focus feats with a dagger for a weapon and loin cloth for armor but it is kind of unlikely) I've seen plenty of 1,000 damage in a round builds in 4e due to system mastery when I'm happy if I crack 100, now those char op monsters wont be seen in any game I play in, but they exist.(one player will try to execute the super combo and be slapped down)

In SR4 you can make a really crappy character, like owned by mook security guard #5 on average, I think the previous editions with the priority systems somewhat blunted this since you met certain minimums, still you could make the suck character and I am sure I have. Heck given how cheap stats were to raise in 2e I think I've built multiple 1 body characters knowing I'd raise it after a run or two so I just had to survive. Hey priority D attributes aint easy. A magic, B resources(35 spell points and a shit ton of guns and contacts), C skills, D attributes, E race. While the character "works" he also fails hard if anything makes contact with him. Once he gets some karma he is fine, still overall a broken character. That wont happen in D&D4e, you always start with decent HP, unless you intentionally fail you will hit 50+% of the time for decent damage, and you will have a decent AC. The basics are covered.

heh, ignore the issues, or ignore the people?

There's system mastery, and there's obsessive optimization . I'm not talking about the latter, here. The problem with D&D 3 (I don't have as much experience with 3.5, but it doesn't seem that different), was that its lists of "stuff" (skill, classes, feats, etc.) were deliberately seeded with bad choices, disguised to sound reasonable to a beginner. They saw that as a way to "encourage system mastery", which of course is foolish. Not even a first time player would think Dagger-Loincloth-Skill Focus guy was any good as a fighter, but they could easily think sinking points into Toughness or the Use Rope skill were reasonable choices.



Precisely. You benefit from extensive experience with the rules, but that's not required for you to play the game.

Well their stated goal for LBB WAS to be half contacts half GM Guide. But if you're still looking for GM tips aside from the blurbs you get in the main books, they had a chapter in both versions of the Shadowrun Companion that also had tips and ideas for running a game, and then there's Sprawl Sites which is essentially a 1st Edition GM guide, down to the originator of the Run Generator (though to be technically SS is a little wonky since it came at the same time as DMZ, though DMZ has some GM stuff in it too you can peruse.)

Hey, what do you know, Kruger and I agree on something^^

I won't argue that D&D 4 is a nice game to introduce people to tabletop, but I find it as textured and complex as a bowl of oatmeal.

You need to buy better oatmeal. Sorry complaining about oatmeal is like using vanilla to call something bland.

... you start out misidentifying what in SR4 corresponds to "Skill" from SR1-3.

Only if you assume the same pool size, which is a flawed assumption. And that's just a couple of the assumptions that you make in your post that are, to put it un-rudely, dubious.

Thank you for reassuring me that I made, and continue to make a good choice in not reading that thread. I'm guessing that "I need to challenge these characters, that's my job" looks a lot like "I need to 'win'" to you? :/ Please feel free to respond in the other thread!

P.S.

1) I prefer "colourful"!
2) My primary objective was accuracy.
3) No Cheops, I wasn't refering to you. Pardon the obscurity in my post. I generally agree with you that help and some guide posts are good things. It is just that some people won't grok it even if you hand it to them labeled and wrapped in a bow. *shrug* At that point you have to put in drastically high, confining barriers to try keep them from hurting themselves (and the people they play with) with diminishing returns and mounting drawbacks [of stifling breadth of play].
4) Moving on....

I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say here... I'm not actually complaining about oatmeal, you know. Now, if you were trying to say that my choice of simile was uninspired, I prefer accuracy to "creativity" in discussions, especially in a thread where people will take any excuse to derail the topic

Actually the English language is pretty clear on the word skill... SR4 is attribute+SKILL= dice pool, previously it was SKILL+diepool, I don't see why you have a hard time understanding what I mean by skill. I'm talking about, you know, that characteristic on the sheet that edition is calling a skill. That the characteristic labeled as a skill is numerically less important in 4e than it was previously.



If you bothered to read the whole post rather than responding, you would have noticed I went into when the pool is the same size, how the person got to that size pool and how the relationship is hard to match when you cap skills in 4e thus not allowing me to compare when both characters have a skill of 25. The example had the person in previous editions start out with one less die, but it becomes clear that by the time both people have a skill of 4 the previous edition character has a better chance of success.



No thats not my opinion at all. Challenges are fine, "win" attitude is when you know your PC has 12 dice and that the target number should be 4 for this situation but you want to screw him/her so you make up modifiers with no real reason behind them. Things like after you roll initiative and got a 27 the bad guy goes first even though the GM rolled 1d6. He then rolls some dice and hits you with a deadly, you roll it down to a light where in you still take a deadly from his dragon fists(I was a PC in this game I couldnt believe it either) and then he goes again attacking the rigger (who was two blocks away) blowing up his van killing him instantly no roll. Finally someone gets an action and shoots this guy who fails miserably but somehow takes a light only because of his dermal armor which on him counts as auto success. He also doesnt take wound penalties because hes a dragon man (who looks entirely human)... Yeah it was a TPK and I dont think any of us went back to that GM again. It stems from the old style GM vs Players style game which is stupid as the GM controls the world all he has to do is drop cows to win.

Well you implied oatmeal has lesser complexity and texture, unless you were trying to describe 4e D&D in a positive fashion about how it is rich in complexity and texture.

So I go back to, buy better oatmeal. If you find oatmeal to be weak in complexity and texture you need better oatmeal.

Well played, Shinobi, well played...

You need to review all relevant parts of the language; Labels. The label "Skill" in the SR4 does NOT mean the same thing as the label "Skill" in SR1-3, and trying to treat either as "skill" is perilous, at best (and typically, as in this case, incorrect). Here, you even describe that difference....



Yet you doggedly pretend they actually are the same thing. What you are really complaining about is label redefinition while ignoring the substance of the matter, the rose by another name.

Oh I read the rest of your post. The whole thing twice and parts of it more than that. I just stopped listing your dubious assumptions in at the second one.

To the other thread, please. One thread derail at a time limit, and oatmeal has the floor....

Your like talking to a wall, seriously, we arnt comparing dice pools we are talking about how SKILLS are less important in the new edition. But you keep insisting we arnt. So if I want to have a conversation about cars do you start talking about motorcycles? cus you know they have wheels to.

If you want to get into the label redefinition, yes dice pools became attributes but skills are still skills. Now Mr. Trollman has argued for that the skill aptitude chart should be changed to encompass attribute but to date it doesnt.

[edit] and I'm not complaining about label redefinition, I'm not even complaining about anything (other than your rude comment), I'm simply stating that raising your skill by 1 in the older edition increased your chances of success by 17% more than the strait 33% increase that 4e gives with that same skill increase.

If you keep restating the obvious while ignoring the obvious [and the English language you purport to hold so high], of course you are going to feel frustrated. But please stop putting that on me.

EDIT:

In a single instance fabricated by you [with a number of flawed assumption] which you acknowledge might not actually reflect how the game was/is played. That's pretty damn weak.

Insulting 10%
Says Nothing 110%

Oh look I did it to

Go with what you know! Constast your insinuation that I don't be knowing that English thing much and me linking to that English thing, with explornationifications.


EDIT: In other news, good-bye, trying to discuss this with you is quite obviously a dead-end.

+1 Karma


[edit] no insult, seriously. I laughed so hard when I read that. I think we will just have to agree to disagree on what constitutes a skill

Incidentally;

"Now Mr. Trollman has argued for that the skill aptitude chart should be changed to encompass attribute but to date it doesnt."

He argues that because it would accurately represent the reality of the what the mechanics are saying. To help people [such as yourself] better understand what the labels [now] mean. So yes, you are stuck on labels while ignoring the reality of the mechanics that define the physics of the game world. You just don't notice that you are arguing about label redefinition.

So without trying to start a fight, I would disagree with him because SR always had dice pools based on attribute. There was even a social dice pool option in 2e. If you assume 1/2 your die pool was going for "offense" and half was going for "defense" you now have a close proximity to what the attribute dice do. Though we didn't have dice pools for every situation like we have attributes for all but one (that I know of ie hacking) now. Or you could look at the way WOD does it were attributes are natural talent, skills are semi learned, and specializations or merits (depending on which WOD) are expert training. Skills are still IMHO skills...

[Edit] To expand on it consider the following, both editions handling two artists, one has natural ability with little training, the other has training but did not have natural ability.

SR2: No Training - QUI(5)+INT(5)/2 = Dice Pool = 5 (natural ability) + Skill Art 2 = Total Dice 7; No Training - QUI(2)+INT(2)/2 = Dice Pool = 2 (natural ability) + Skill Art 5 = Total Dice 7
SR4: No Training - AGI 5 (natural ability) + Skill Art 2 = Total Dice 7; No Training - AGI 2 (natural ability) + Skill Art 5 = Total Dice 7

The results are the same but how the pool is built matters because it is representative of different types of people. I'm the guy with almost no natural ability but some training, someone with great natural ability and no training will match my dice pool but we are two different people.

As a small note in SR2 you could only double your skill with a pool IIRC. So mr 5 pool+2 skill could only roll 4 dice.

Hmmm.

I if understand this correctly, you are claiming that;

Reading the SR3 rules, and finding out that dice pools are Skill + N Pool = total dice for resolving things
and then looking at SR4 rules and seeing that dice pools and seeing Skill + attribute = Total dice for resolving things
is less clear then then looking at some numbers on the character sheet and without labels figure out which ones match your personal concept of skills you think your character has and off you go and grab some dice and roll them?

I seam to remember that to, but I couldn't find it in the book when I looked.

It's under the individual descriptions of the pools themselves in the Combat section.

That means that you cannot use any pool if you are skill webbing something. Neat huh.

It's an interesting interpretation. Was it ever Errata'd like that? Because, for example, the Hacking and Control pools only said that the maximum number of Pool dice was equal to the base number of dice being used for the test. Skill webbing only changed the Target numbers, not the dice. And you were still using the original skill (say, Firearms to default to Gunnery. You weren't actually using the Gunnery skill. Just hoping your knowledge of Firearms was sufficient to improvise/translate.