So I was looking over Runner's Companion and checking out the meta variants when I noticed something weird about the Night Ones. They cost 35 BP and you get the following bonus. Keen Ears ( +5 BP) and Low-light Vision (free cuz you're an elf) but you end up with Allergy (Sun Light, Mild, -10BP), Unusual Hair (-5 BP), Nocturnal (-10 BP).

So if you add that up you get 25 points of negative qualities for 5 points of positive ones and your race costs 5 points more than a standard elf. Is there some attribute adjustment missing somewhere or what?

Seems to me they get shafted when compared to the other variants. Compare this with the Wakyambi for example, who also cost 35 BP and get Celerity and Elongated Limbs (+5BP each) and Low-light vision (free again cuz you're an elf) with no negative qualities. Was this corrected somewhere? There is no errata for RC and my version (hardcover) is a first printing.

They factored fluff(how seldom a given meta type is) into the cost.

Shadowrun Metavariant Rarity Tax, move along.

that was a bad Idea from CGL !
Arbitrary racial Cost.....

with an unpleased Dance
Medicineman

It's hardly something new. Metavariants have always had a rather arbitrary cost increase, and the traditional response has been that it's meant to reflect their comparative rarity.

Oni in Japan are not rare !
still they cost more
and thats just one example why it was a Bad Idea from You guys.
the other bad Idea from the RC is to give each and every Surgeling or metavariant the distinctive Style for free.With most Races and obvious surge I can understand that very clearly but not when the Surge Qualities are not visible at all !
Next bad Idea was that its possible to use Surge instead of Metavariants because its cheaper to create them that way.
I have one Nartaki Elf and a surged Elf with all Dryad Merits & Flaws both are 5 pts cheaper and got Astral perception for free
And Yes, its not new and Yes every GM and every Gaming Group should have & use its common sense to change these Rules.
But If You (as CGL not You Critias ) would've declared these Rules as optional Firsthand it would've been much better for everyone

with no rare Dance
Medicineman

To clarify: I'm not saying it's a good idea, I'm saying it's not just a CGL thing. It goes back to previous editions, and has always been that way. I don't particularly care for it, and I wish CGL had changed it when it was their turn to write metavariant rules -- but the "rarity = points increase" idea wasn't something new, is all.

3rd. ed didn't have quite the same disparity in cost/benefit to play meta variants. A Night One in that edition got +2 quickness and +2 charisma and if you were using the build system from Shadowrun Companion it only cost an extra 5 points to play a variant. Sure you had allergy to sunlight but that was it.

Now you pay a rarity tax? Lame. May as well make them all NPC races then, especially since you could build Surged versions cheaper. I mean it's one thing to make it a little more expensive to make sure they stay rare but that is just stupid.

What's the down side of playing a Wakyambi? Oh yeah you are as tall as troll. Wow that will take some real role playing to deal with. Cuz trolls are just soooo rare. The downside of playing a Night One? You get stupider in sunlight, it also distracts you and you are easily recognized plus you are covered in gaudy fur. But hey you got them keen ears. That'll help offset all the pain and suffering.

The build point values have no bearing on the rarity of the variants. It's one thing to ask them to pay the extra and take the negatives if you get something from it. In this case though, you are just a fuzzy elf who is generally worse off than any other elf. Or ork or troll or dwarf.

I thought the Wakyambi were supposed to be pretty rare, but with this set up they may as well be as common as a regular elf. The 5 BP cost is certainly worth the bonuses. Another one is the Fomori. Arcane Arrester and Metagenic Improvement (Body) along with the other troll benefits all for just 5 more BP than a regular troll. Why play a troll when you can play one of these?

Well I was hoping there was something I had missed, an errata or something that would make this make sense. So I suppose I may as well just do away with them as PC races. It's obvious which ones will be chosen as the variants, at least in my experience, are most often chosen by the power gamers. Easier to ban them to NPC status than make one more point of contention with the PGs.

Aye... i have nothing against "Paying for style".

But in history the "Night Ones" were SUPERELVES. More Charisma AND more Quickness if i remember correctly. Problem is, that now the attributes are wort very much more in this edition... so now you can't have them going overboard.

Bu i still don't like that the Fomori doesn't get their charisma back (Trolls with 6 Charaisma are awesome). Where does the body+1 come from? weird.

Sorry, but i see no rarity cost in other metatypes. Fomori trolls are quite rare, have only bonuses in comparison to the common variant and they cost basically the same. Since Runners Companion came out, we have no other troll form than fomoris left. They cannot put costs on variants that penalize their use while really broken ones are untouched. That is just stupid.

Which was as much of a "rarity tax" as I liked, and which I partially liked because it was a flat rate amount, across all metavariants.

Yes if you wan't to use part of your limited 35BP quality cap for getting those thinks.
I have never understood this whining about the RC meta-variant costs when the prices for the base meta-types are already completely arbitrary.

If I remember correctly, aren't Orks the best value for money race there is? Closely followed by a metavariant of the orks that slips my mind right now? In terms of stats-to-points?

Yes it is plain bullshit to factor rarity into the calculation.
But considering all the other bullshit in RPG rules bound to happen, it ain't that bad.

Yes, it was because of this that I've made another calculation for the metaraces costs and ended up with this:

Human 0
Ork 30
Dwarf 30
Elf 30
Troll 50

Then, for the metavariants, I treated as if they were SURGEd specimens, because, COME ON, it's ridiculuous that a Fomori is cheaper than a common Troll and still ends up with Arcane Arrester.

Yes, although dwarf may be a better choice for some roles (mages, for example) and are a comparably good deal. Of course, there's also concepts that would profit the most from being elfs or trolls (excuse me, fomori), but in general, orks rule.
Ogres and satyrs are even better (slightly), oni and hobgoblins are slightly worse.

Regarding the night ones : brokenly bad, i guess we can all agree on this.
This would easily be fixed by giving them Metagenic Improvement (Agility). Suddenly, their point cost fits and it's even in line with SR3's rendition of them.

One thing people keep missing about fomori is that they don't get dermal armor, unlike baseline trolls. Not that it matters, an increased Body stat is better than that anyway. It also tends to look less repulsive. So you get a mage-killing supertroll and he's cuddly as well. Also less freakishly large, while we're at it, so you don't run your head into doorframes quite as often.
There's really no reason to play normal trolls (or even giants, cyclops, or minotaurs) anymore unless you are completely fixated on their style.

Orks and trolls tend to be top of the line for what they get for the cost, and thier metavariants tend to be incredibly cheap for the extra bonuses they get. Elves and humans on the other hand tend to be too expensive, and thier metavariants are generally way overcosted. Keeping this in mind the extremes are at the metavariants, a Satyr or Fomori is a cheap souped up orc or troll which was already a cheap race to begin with while a nartaki or night one is an overcosted version of a race that already costs too much.

The OP hit this one right on the head though, night ones are probably the worst choice in the book, you pay 5 points to pick up 30 points of negative qualities (he didn't count distinctive style) and in return only get a 5 point positive quality. If you made the same character as a base elf and then used qualites, particulalry surge, to turn the elf into a night one you would end up around 30 or so points ahead of actually playing a night one.

The only advantage I can think of for the overcosted variants is that you have a limit on how many positive qualities you can take, and racial qualities don't count against that limit, but still who would pay 30 points just to squeeze in keen hearing?

An excellent suggestion, the alternative would be to reduce their cost, but we don't want them to actually be cheaper than normal elves do we?

That's what I did actually, they cost 10 points only.

I think you'll find, on close inspection, that plain humans have a cost:benefit ratio of 1:infinity.

@longbowrocks

Why would benefit be infinity?

Unless Humans were negative cost. ;p
(Lolololol, being human is a negative quality)

Also, your ratio is off. It's (correctly) 0:0. Humans cost 0 BP, so the cost is 0. Humans have no benefits, so the benefit is 0.

So in essence, you divided by 0 and took two different results: x/x = 1 on the left, and n/0 = DIV 0 = Infinity on the right.

Benefit is 1 luck. 0:1 == 1:infinity.

or rather 1/0 == infinity == infinity/1.

It's undefined. You're thinking about limits.

@longbowrocks

Well, actually not.

Anyway this value would be something to consider if you could pick beeing human twice or three times. But you cant.

0/0 is also infinity

So 0:1 and 1:infinity are not the same.

(You are right, however, I forgot about the Edge Bonus. I'm at work and jumping between tasks)

Purely situational.
In this case, you're gaining a benefit for no cost. Essentially, you have an infinite gain per cost since for any portion of your 0 price tag, you still get a benfit of 1. This is in contrast to pure mathematics in which division by zero frequently eliminates any useful properties of your expression, or computerized mathemics in which there is no way to represent all real numbers due to restrictions on hardware capacity.

No, it's undefined.

That's why division by zero is frequently illegal in realms where your answer is significant. Since infinity is a concept, you wind up with things like a "bigger infinity" when you divide 4 by 0 instead of 1 by 0. This is where limits become useful.

Ahem.

Division, which is what you're doing, is only defined for a/b, where b is nonzero. You don't end up with anything infinity. You end up with "undefined."

Limits are a different beast altogether, good for determining convergence or divergence. Beyond that they're more complicated.

There are different infinities you know.

How many Integers are there?

"Infinity" good, good.

How many Real Numbers are there?

"Infinity" good, good.

Except that there are infinitely more Real Numbers than Integers, as between any and every two Integers there exists an infinite number of Reals.

Isn't math awesome?

May we get our heads around, that this sort of calculation is useless anyway?
It would be lesser if you add 2 bonus points of edge and increase the costs by 30BP.
But everyone would argee that what you end up is better than a normal human?

No, that's where $Deity is making black holes.

As for the Original Post question: Yes, the additional cost is how easy you are to pick out of a crowd.

On the bright side, an unstated cost is that you are slightly fluffy and fun to cuddle. Always handy when trying to get a date!

Actually, that's Distinctive Style that's free and a negative quality.

Specially if they are into the furry fetish.

PS: Draco, Aleph numbers are the most funny and insidious thing you learn in Discrete Mathematics.

I actually didn't learn about them in Discrete Math. I picked them up somewhere else....

How did my post turn into a discussion on math?

Anyway, I didn't include Distinctive Style in my original post because all the race options in Runner's Companion get it. It's why I didn't see the need for CG to include low-light or thermographic vision in every one of the variant descriptions. Yet they did. So including that, yeah, Night Ones hold the crown for the least benefit for the most cost. I actually preferred 3rd ed. solution for playing a variant where every NPC started at Hostile and you had to work your way up through social interaction. More accurately shows the racism than distinctive style does.

I've thought of redoing all the variants to make them balanced but then I realized none of the players in my game are playing them. The worst power gamer offenders are gone and unless another rears its head, I won't have to deal with issue again.

Thanks for the feedback and clarification. Except the math. The math didn't help. Don't do that.

I didn't know about Aleph numbers, but I did point out in the post you quoted that there are indeed different values of infinity.

*edit* ah, sorry about derailing the thread Mantis.

Welcome to Dumpshock!

I feel they're fairly balanced, anyone can turn it into a numbers game, however. Now, the Non-Metahuman Sentients... They're a little skewed.

Double my usual bribe to ever allow a Pixie Mage again. Triple for a Pixie Adept!

Did she have a strength of 1 and 6 ranks of Killing Blow/Critical Strike?

No. He was a Mystical Adept, actually, and had Improved Reflexes 2 and something else (Mystic Armor, I think.).

Three IPs to throw fireballs every round.

You have to remember to divide by fnord.





-k

It's an "I want to play a drow." tax.

There are colours other than black...

As CanRay said, welcome to Dumpshock, if a thread isn't derailed at least once, then it wasn't a good thread to begin with
Now, I do agree on the cost of Non-Meta sentients. The only shapeshifter that I think it's cost was ok was the Wolf Shapeshifter, with all the others shifters needing to increase the cost by 20-30 points to balance...
Now, if Way of the Adept had been released last year...
My Jaguar shifter would be even more awesome with 22 dice of ranged dodge in full defense.

I hate Discrete Math.

The cost of playing a metavariant or SURGE character is GM dependent. If the GM doesn't care about metatypes or metavarients, then nothing is stopping you from powergaming with them. If all the NPCs are racist and don't think that Fomori are Troll enough, then Fomori have a greater cost than just the BP cost.

But what would he have if he were driving a Jaguar?

A British accent and higher insurance rate...

Shadowrunners can get vehicle insurance? News to me.

Of course, with my luck and vehicles, and what's happened to my group and their vehicles...

"I tell my bike to drive Home." "OK. ... Where did you set Home as on your bike." "I didn't, if someone were to hack the bike they'd find my... Crap." "OK, it goes to the default Home of the factory where it was built." "That's not so bad." *Rolls Dice, Critical Glitch, Shows Group The Roll* "In Japan." "DAMNIT!"

EDIT: Also, "OK, you come from South America, where the frag did you get a posh British Accent when speaking English?" "'Trid movies, my dear boy."