I have visions of the Gun Adept with threads woven to the smartlink in his gun.

And my personal favorite.. the Cyber Adept. Who becomes one with the machines.

Equinox






-k

I loved Immortal (From Precedence Games)... What a wonderful game, and full of SO much potential. I Did a lot of Playtesting for them back in the Mid-1990's...

I would think that Threading could happen now(as in 2072 now), as the technique wouldn't be mana-level dependent. It's just a technique that isn't widely known in the 6th world. I don't think it would take too much work to convert some of the Threading uses in Earthdawn to Shadowrun and make it a Metamagic ability.

They were very good about using metaphysics that were fundamentally the same to create two different systems of magic.

I really think that the Earthdawn Magic system was the Shadowrun 1.0 Magic system taken to a fairly logical evolution.

They took the Shadowrun System and adapted/grew it into the Earthdawn system based on how they thought magic would evolve.
They added some cool stuff, like threadweaving, and Matrixes. They made everyone adepts or Mystic Adepts.

I'm running a solo Logos game where the main player is a Proto-beastmaster being taught the actualy Discipline by a Re-awakened Beast Spirit who remembers it from back in the day.

I just wanted to say that I always enjoy these threads. I never played earthdawn and know very little about it. I've read up some, but not a lot.



This blew my mind. I love it.

Surely dragons & IEs aren't doing mundane spellcasting? Maybe thats why they dont answer a lot of questions about the nature of magic. The most educated and proficient mage in the world is like a mundane to them. "I am as far above you as you are above everyone else." really seems to apply here. SWEET!

I think what he meant by mundane was basic or natural. In Earthdawn you have Raw Magic which exposes you to the condition of Astral Space around you. If it is corrupt you generally take damage and have a chance of gaining a Horror Mark. This is why spellcasters in Earthdawn as a rule cast through a matrix which essentially does what the Filtering Advanced Metamagic does. They have access to both from the start.

My impression is that the entirety of 'near' Astral in Earthdawn is polluted by the equivalent of a Background Count of about 3-4, with the added negative of the Horror-Marking thing. Background Counts in Shadowrun only indirectly make Drain worse by reducing Magic. I guess you could introduce Spell Matrices in Shadowrun as a means to bypass Background Counts. A magician taking the time to thread a matrix could cast in areas of Background Count without reducing their Magic. For games set in zones with significant Background Counts like Chicago or Lagos, this would be very helpful. Again, many Earthdawn magic concepts could make their way into SR without too much trouble. Whether it's worth it, or unbalancing, is another discussion entirely.

I thought he meant skill vs talent. Spellcasting was available as a mundane skill or as a magical talent.

Background count also adds +1 DV per rating doesn't it?

There were different classes of pollution in ED just as with SR. There was "Safe", Open, Tainted, and Corrupt. All of them caused Raw Magic damage equal to Spell Circle + modifier (0 for safe). So a bigger spell in a safe environment is as bad as a low circle spell in a more polluted area. This mimics variable force very well except of course that spells always have to be cast at their circle. On top of that you have warping and horror marks. Warping can do stuff like destroy your spellbook (if grimoire casting) or wipe your matrixes. Horror marks are the real danger and is the reason most people avoid raw magic.

There were several ways to cast as well. Spellcasting is available as a skill meaning that non-adepts could learn it if they wanted (thread weaving and spell matrix are not). You could cast spells as Raw (and take damage), Grimoire (and take warping), and Matrix (and be safe but restricted to how many spells you can cast). In my current campaign one of my players hit on something which was kind of annoying which is using Grimoire casting as means of using D&D style Spell Scrolls. He brought the Warrior back from the dead by doing this (which was pretty cool).

I ment skill vs talent yes.

Adepts had Spellcasting talent.

Other people could potentially buy the Spellcasting Skill (which would be very much like the Sorcery skill in SR)

That is what I meant as well. Spellcasting was available as a mundane skill, while threadweaving and matrices were not. So people could cast raw magic,(not in a matrix) though I guess they would be limited to simple spells without threads.(not sure on that) I never really looked into it much since well every PC was an adept and could use talents and multiclassing wasn't that hard, at least not as hard as it implied it would be. And quite frankly when making a NPC I don't really care much about sticking to closely to the rules, I go for quick and easy stat blocks.

Sorry about the misinterpretation of your comment. Anyway it was probably because something did not seem right. While 1st Edition Earthdawn did not go into detail about Spellcasting as a skill, 99.9% of spells require a thread to be woven for casting regardless of method of casting. It was always my thought that it was a screw up. The current 3rd edition no longer allows it.

I think of Skill Spellcasting as basically being the same as Shadowrun Spellcasting.

I liked that it was there, but incredibly dangerous and difficult and only the truly insane would do it.

How is the 3rd edition by the way?

I am thinking of getting it, but it is a bit pricey for something I doubt I will get to play.

As for me I had no problem with it. There were plenty of magical items average people could use so it already differed from SR in that regard, I just thought of this as the same thing dealing with the elevated levels of magic. My attitude was everyone had access to some levels of magic, like mages of the SR level of magic. They could cast simple spells, they could use magic items etc. Adepts were mages+ who could use magic at a higher level of natural talent.

The 3rd edition is simply awesome. It really fixed a lot of things which had been broken, Disciplines have more flexibility since you get multiple talent choices, a lot of optional rules to customize your game, and clarification on items which were questionable. All this and it is easy to convert old stuff to it, plus it is in print with new stuff rolling out. Kathay comes out for Christmas and I know it will be mine, oh yes it will.

Everyone could use magic items but only adepts could use thread items which essentially equate to Foci in SR. The act of Spellcasting assumes a relationship with magic, with astral space that mundanes simply lack, and since they lack having it as a skill never really made sense, of course YMMV.

Well... normal people can use magical items in SR too. Anchoring Foci for example, (and that one unique sword from the Digital Grimoire implies many more artifacts).

Hell... maybe a lot of runner already USE naming on some level (without knowing):

I mean: a Runner named Quicksilver is KNOWN for being the fastest draw in the 'plex, right? So is he the fastest because of his name? Or because many people KNOW him to be the fastest? *g*

Just like dudes like "Icebreaker", "Casanova", "Bulletstorm" etc. Streetnames for the WIN.

YMMV. I thought it was mostly two steps forward, one step back. For example, they made a number of moves to make Disciplines less constraining and then made Circle advancement more constrained.

I don't like the fact that they got rid of the different sized Karma dice. Windlings /suck/ in 3rd edition. The Windling Warrior which was one of my favorite/favorite combos is now useless.

I'm not fond of what they did to Acrobatic Dance. And the new 'flexible' disciplines.. I'm not sure how I feel about it.

Still, it's Earthdawn.. so it's made of awesome, fluff wise.

used to be:
Troll/Obsidimen d4
Ork/Elf/Dwarf/T'skrang d6
Human d8
Windling d10

Now they all have a d6 karma, and a different 'karma modifier' but lets face it.. how much karma you could get back per ritual was never eally that limiting. The dice was the big thing. The main reason to play a human was the d8 karma and the versatility talent.

I think the difference is in SR there can be ongoing magic effects via anchoring. In earthdawn anyone could use magic items at there basic level. So in SR mundanes can't actually use items, they can be used upon them. In earthdawn they can use items. That hints to me that at the higher magical levels maybe everyone is a bit magical, like maybe 1 magic knacks effectively. Though it seems like in later editions they have gone away from it.

Aw well it looks like I may drop $60 or so and pick up the main book at my game store.

I never felt windlings needed the d10 unless they were playing counter classes like the warrior. If they played to their strengths they were fairly absurd. But IMO natural flight is always 30 different kinds of bad ass and in fantasy settings even more so. But I hate all dainty, elfy races.

I hate the gargantuan main book, its large eough to be difficult to use, I'd rather it was still in its original smaller component books, or split into one book strictly for characters and another for the GM. They'd probably even make more money if it was split into 2 or more more manageable books (I'd buy them, I won't buy the a book thats too big to use/read though).

I still like 3rd edition though, the open talent system makes disciplines not quite as harsh. Windlings and humans definatley took the nerf stick in that they didn't gain anything but ther karma dice shrunk and human wasn't only way to pick those must have talents anymore.

Wait is more included than the previous main book? Is it effectively main book and the higher circle companion book or something. That makes the $60 seem less painful.

I think the Adepts Way and the Companion are both crammed in there, not sure what else, its big. They actually do have a seperate GM book, but its the same way, several books crammed together to make one rediculously too big to use book.

I might be confusing the 3E books with the Red Brick edition books, I don't know if theres much of a difference size and content wise though. Red Brick printed thier own version of the game, which had no official designation of what edition it was, using a combination of 1E and 2E rules, this is when they started compiling old books together to creater the monster sized ones. Then they introduced new 'optional or playtest' rules which were added to thier 1E/2E hybrid to create the new 3E.

No, it's very simple—the issue is that it's just a little less simple than the designers thought. In every case you roll dice such that your expected result is approximately your step number. Improve your step number, your expected result goes up. Great, right?

Unfortunately, no one told the designers about variance. As a result, you can get nonintuitive effects like reducing your chance of success at a given test if you improve your step number by one—the simplest example is the same one Savage Worlds is plagued by due to exploding dice with a k=k+1 bug and multiple die sizes.

To illustrate: at Step 3 you roll 1d4; at Step 4, 1d6. All dice are exploding. At Step 3 your odds of rolling a 6 or better are (1/4)*(2/4)=3/16. By contrast, your odds on a 1d6 are 1/6, or 3/18—by going up a step, you lose out on this particular TN due to the different shapes of the probability curves around the respective areas.

Admittedly, the fact that the dice are summed after exploding does make exact by-hand probability estimation more complicated, but it's very amenable to automation.

~J

You are thinking of the ED Classic line. The 3rd edition books are definitely not HUGE.

And both ED Classic and ED 3rd Edition are released and developed by RedBrick.

The 2 Windlings in our party would completely disagree with you on that point I would think...



I think the 3rd Edition is MUCH better than previous editions... It runs smoothly, and Disciplines are A lot More customizable than they ever were before...

As for Acrobatic Dance, I think it is quite useful myself...

And as for the Karma Dice... Have not really seen a big difference in the play style... those with lots of Karma use it, and those with less, save it for the important rolls...

Anyways...

You are indeed confusing them with the Red Brick Editions...
There are 4 Main Books for 3rd Edition... 2 for Players and 2 for GM's...

My group and I are sticking with EDC as our flavor of ED. Navigation was easily solved through sticky tabs on each chapter. For us it stayed close enough to ED1 while solving some of the problems. ED3 didn't do enough to clean up some of the issues with spells so the only thing I've borrowed from it was the modified chart on Journey to Life so our Wizard can't bring Elianar Messias and King Tav Korelsed back from the dead.

As to the math, the developers released their graphs and a probability by step vs. TN chart at the site at Redbrick. So you can see exactly what your chances are. ED3 eliminated the d4 and d20 from the system for the reasons that Kage pointed out. My table likes that wonkiness (but we also liked the SR3 TN 7 problem so YMMV).

Just getting rid of those two dice doesn't help—the problem exists anywhere you have exploding dice with an n=n+1 problem and two dice of sides k and k+2 at TN k+2, so you've still got it with the d6/d8, d8/d10, and d10/d12 pairs (there may be another issue with variance on the d20 that was fixed, but since there's no d18 it doesn't have the same issue).

~J

Then what were they trying to help by getting rid of the d4 and d20? I could spend the time to put together the relevant PDFs (not the file type) but it seems like you might have already done. So what did the removal of those two die-types do?



Edit: I very nearly bought all four of the new 3rd edition corebooks last Friday but restrained myself at the Checkout. For now, they languish in my Wish List.

I have no idea—all I know is that the dk/dk+2 with k=k+1 at TN k+2 issue (there really has to be a shorter way to describe that problem) is almost completely unaffected by the change, so either they didn't know what they were doing or they were trying to fix something different. I have no insight into which of these are true or what the "something different" might be.

~J

The d4 is so small that the problem mentioned above happens all the time. The problem with the d20 is that, unlike d6 -> d8 > d10 -> d12 -> 2d6, there's no easy way to slide the d20 in.

Not to mention that the variance between d12 d20 and 2d6 ment that almost always you would rather have 2d6 or 2d8 than a d20

Unless of course you tended to roll well, and then the yatzhee factor in the d20 was huge.

I am noticing the issue in a deadlands game I am playing in. My mad scientist recently got his mad science up to 5d12 but I usually get around a 10 result.(then after drawing cards ends up being like a nothing result.) I really don't know the rules of it but I notice I do about as well with my fighting of 4d6 since at least one d6 explodes almost every time. Though last game I got 18+ a lot on my mad science, not sure why.