It's really a very important question. The game where character can take automatic gunfire and move on, is very different from the one where they can't. Current SR is a bit on the fence about it, but seems to be leaning towards "that's deadly". Obviously not everyone like that.

Do we need to build a consensus on that, or is it feasible to make the game flexible, to accommodate both styles?

About the only way would be optional rules. Like have the rules defaulting to one or the other, then an optional rule to raise or lower lethality to the other end. Like default is full auto as is and called shots for +3/5 DV instead of 2/3, with the optional rule going to what I proposed. Or vice verca. Personally I'd put the lower lethality as the default with higher lethality as the optional rule, so the game defaults to something a little less deadly with a little more room for characters to take risks and do cool things without dying. But of course, I'm biased.

Wasn't automatic fire always deadly? I remember writing page-long house-rules for SR3 about automatic fire, and now I also remember discussions on the same topic for SR4.

I think at the time I argued for a +1 die per round fired (after the first) approach, with no inherent bonus to damage. The problem there is that firing with recoil is completely pointless, then - you fire more rounds, and the dice are again subtracted due to recoil, because the recoil system sucks in SR4.

I don't view that as a problem. It means you fire as many as you can safely handle. Currently, it's an uncommon case that you fire extra bullets beyond your RC, just to lower their Dodge/increase damage. It does happen, but only because your DP is (artificially) bigger than theirs. In my house rule, there is a minor +DV, just to keep that rare-ish option available. If we deflated the DPs a bit, it'd happen even less.

If we're to simulate reality at all (and Shadowrun tends to try), then automatic fire can be very deadly. But it can also be grossly inaccurate due to muzzle lift.

Today, the military is looking into two round burst to replace three round, because the third round usually misses. Partly because of muzzle lift, partly because shots one and two move the target.

Also, for the most part, no two rounds hit the same spot, so they don't help each other directly with armor penetration. But, to simulate this properly would required a system that determines how many rounds hit a target, and then dealing damage for each one. A logistical nightmare.

So, the system we have in SR4 is pretty tame in comparison, and a lot easier to manage.

Muzzle lift has been ruining my ability to play modern shooters recently. :<
(Also my reflexes and accuracy weren't that hot to begin with: this is why I love shotfuns)

Shotfuns, now with New and Improved NERPS Rounds.

Do they come in Stick and Shock mode?

Of Course they do... NERPS has Everything you could possibly Imagine, and then some.
NERPS goes that extra mile so you don't have to.

If yours don't, you need a bigger dice pool

"I'm going to pull a robin-hood. But instead of splitting an arrow, I'm going to split my bullet. While it's inside you. While you're moving. Yes, I can do that. You wish you were as awesome as I am"








But anyway, I'm going off on ANOTHER tangent. Someone earlier mentioned that contacts should have a capability rating that you have to pay for. So a contact can be completely useless himself but know a lot of people, or really competent and know nobody. I like this idea. I also happen to think it's stupid that a generic face who has never done anything illegal in his life has a much better chance of finding a rare gun or cyber than a guy who works with these things for a living.

I also happen to think high loyalty contacts are on the cheap side, it's too cheap to get someone from "I know who he is and we have a working business arrangement" to "Best buddies for life". Unlike skills, I don't think this needs to be a larger number to represent a more granular loyalty, but rather than loyalty should cost more to get. Also it might be easy to pick up some guy on the street and have him decide you're his best friend ever and he'll do anything for you, but if you get a high class fixer, he knows a hundred guys just like you, he most likely doesn't have any particular loyalty to you over them, and it takes more to work him to that point where he does.


So here's what I'm thinking:
1) All contacts now have a professional rating. The professional rating determines the quality of their core skills. This would work pretty much along the same lines as the professional rating for NPC challenges in terms of what a higher professional rating gets. A professional rating 1 hacker has a pretty crappy commlink, is an amateur, and generally not very good at his job. A professional rating 6 has his relevant skills at expert level or above, with all appropriate gear and situational mods he can stack in his favor. Around professional rating 2, if the character does this for a living they have access to a shop, and at 4 or 5, they have access to a facility. (or equivalent for their field)

2) When searching for specific gear, a character can substitute a relevant skill for an etiquette check to find it. You might use an armorer check instead of etiquette to find that assault rifle upgrade, for example. Additionally, any relevant knowledge skills may be used as a supplementary skill. Contacts should be expected to have a relevant knowledge skill for most things they work with regularly. NPCs can add their connection rating as a bonus to this as normal.

The point of this is so your typical high professional rating low connection mechanic can actually get vehicles, parts, or upgrades for you, rather than needing to go through a face or fixer for everything. You probably won't have a contact for everything, so a fixer still has a place, but for those contacts you do have, now they can get you stuff without having unrealistic social pools.

3) Contacts cost a base of Connection+Professional+Loyalty Rating. However, for every 4 points of Connection+Professional Rating, loyalty's cost doubles.. So a 2/2/2 contact would only cost 6 points. But a 4/4/4 contact would cost 8+(2*4)=15 points. A 6/6/6 contact would cost 8+(2*2*6)=32 points.

Yes, that's really expensive. But consider a Professional/Connection 6/6 contact is basically the equivalent of a CEO, having one of them on speed dial and a lifelong friend SHOULD be expensive. As it is now, most GMs just say "No you can't have that as a contact, change it to something else". This increases the cost of a high loyalty contact enough that it may be plausible to allow. Though it may still be too cheap for that and some redefinition may just be the better answer. I'm just throwing shit at the wall.

Couldn't the Professional rating replace the Connection rating? Who cares how connected your talismonger is, so long as he can find you the right stuff?

Whereas, with a fixer, his profession is connections, so his Professional rating would represent his connections and relationship with them.

Lastly, it kind of makes sense to cap connections to professional rating 3 at character creation. Make the players earn their high level connections through play, or have them work to help their connections become better at they do.

Yeah, I can see how there's no useful distinction between Professional and Connection. Loyalty and Professional Rating are probably good. The crazy power issues could be addressed by the 'karmagen-everywhere' proposal, which basically just says that all costs should be increasing curves. The only real problem is that the CEO/Friend for Life only costs slightly more than 6 'nobodies/will spit on you'. The Groups are the same issue.

The groups are an awkward patch, really.

A better costing structure for contacts would be nice, yeah. For one, making it affordable to make a face who knows 30 people, but on the other hand not so cheap that you can have five AAA CEOs as best friends.

How bout making the price Loyalty*Rating? Having the CEO's commcode is one thing, getting him to call you back is another one.

Isn't that still too expensive for a lot of low-grade contacts?

Would it be possible to treat contacts as equipment, with a monetary value?

Isn't it really pointless to discuss all the problems of SR4 in one thread?
It would be better if someone organize something more well-arranged like a wiki.

Yes and no, Merlin. If you read through, we've mentioned that. This thread is sort of brainstorming. It serves a few purposes: it gets people interested together, lets us consider the big picture instead of little individual fixes, and it lets us plan for the detail work later.

I dunno, Traul. Something should certainly multiply, but I think we should model our ideas on karmagen. The more we can (safely) reuse existing mechanics, the better (just as a general principle). So something like (Rating+Loyalty)*X? I feel like the Contact rules (group and individual) should resemble the Advanced Lifestyle rules… after we fix *those*, of course.

What about calculating it like everything else with karma?

1/1 is 2
1/2 is +2 (total 4)
2/2 is +2 (total 6)
3/3 is +6 (12)
4/4 is +8 (20)
5/5 is +10 (30)
6/6 is +12 (42)

So you can have 7 2/2 contacts for the same price as one 6/6

And where, exactly, do these numbers originate from? They do not look like any Karma Expenditure that I have ever seen.

L(1+2+3+4+5+6) + C(1+2+3+4+5+6) and suchlike.

A 3/2 contact would be L(1+2+3) + C(1+2) = 6 + 3 = 9

A 5/5 contact would be L(1+2+3+4+5) + C(1+2+3+4+5) = 15 + 15 = 30

It's kinda like you chopped skills' [new rating] * 2 in a Loyalty and Connection slice. Compare to raising skills from 0; 4+4+6 = 14 karma for a R3 skill (the first point of a skill is extra expensive).

It also handily produces a model for guesstimating the value of increasing a contact's ratings in karma terms, if that interests you, if you want to balance adventure awards or something.

Gawd, I love the way you talk, TJ. It should be (New Rating * X), more or less, with a base (1/1 costs maybe 2, like Karma said). The example numbers look slightly off, but that's not really important. The real question is just what X should be. I'm happy to start with Base 2, X=2, or make it identical to an Active Skill (Base 4, X=2). X could even be 1, depending on how powerful we think contacts are.

1/1 = 2. 1 loyalty + 1 connectiveness = 2.

1/2 is 2 karma (new rating) more than 1/1, likewise 2/1 would be 2 more karma than 1/1, total 4.

raising a 2 to 3 costs 3, so a 1/3 costs 7....

raising a 1 to 2 costs 2, so a 2/3 costs 9....

It's exactly like raising any other attribute or skill with karma, except I used "new rating x1" instead of x2 or x5.

I thought that was fairly obvious.

Basically treating a contact's Loyalty and Connection like they were to Knowledge Skills stapled to each other. They can have different ratings and be raised separately, as long as they're both > 1.


It's an interesting way to encourage low-level contacts.

How useful are contacts? I think there's a divide between "the dude that gets your gear", who is useful in a very generic way, and "an employee at Corp X, who can give inside information about Corp X", which is a far more specific kind of contact.

This difference isn't very well-modeled by the current Connection trait, because Connection doesn't measure competence within the contact's niche/specialty.

Hmm, Ascalaphus. I was sort of thinking about it was a single rating (Rating+Loyalty), instead of two separate-but-parallel ones. I'd have to run the numbers, but my gut was that the pooled version provides better cost balance. Either way, the increasing-cost mechanic should both encourage small contacts and discourage super ones.

As for the specificity, I agree. However, I think that's kinda up to the GM to deal with. Like Know skills, they can be arbitrarily general or specific; the GM interprets that. It does present an issue with fixers, perhaps. Hmm. Anyway, I'm working from the assumption of 'Professional Rating replaces Connection'.

I don't know if it's too far along to suggest this, but the following core mechanics have served us very well in our games:

1. Attributes and Dice Pools - a character's dice pool for any task is always equal to their Attribute value. Except for Skill rolls, the TN for any roll is always 6, and the player may roll an additional die for each '6' rolled. The single exception to this rule is Edge - a character that spends Edge may add their Edge to their Attribute value when determining their dice pool for that roll. Attribute values and ranges are unchanged from SR4 - a normal human's Attributes range from 1 to 6.

2. Skills - Skills now range from 0 to 4, as follows:

0 - Untrained
1 - Novice
2 - Professional
3 - Expert
4 - World-Class

When converting from older editions, divide the character's Skill level by 2 and round up to determine their Skill in this system.
A character's TN for any Skill roll is always equal to (6 - Skill rank), and the player may roll an additional die for each '6' rolled. This creates a system where Attribute determines the raw capacity for success, and Skill determines how reliably that capacity can be applied to a given task.

3. Threshold - The difficulty of a task is now measured solely by its Threshold - the number of hits required to achieve a success. A Threshold of 1 is considered a reasonably easy task; a Threshold of 3 is a moderately challenging task, and a Threshold of 5 is an extraordinarily difficult task. Unless otherwise specified, always assume a Threshold of 1 for any task, before applying penalties.

4. Bonuses and penalties - for the most part, bonuses and penalties to a roll will apply to the roll's Threshold. Certain abilities will apply a situational bonus or penalty directly to the Attribute being rolled - for example, 'ware or injury - but this is the exception rather than the rule. If a rule says to apply a bonus or a penalty to a roll, apply it to the Threshold; if a rule says to apply a bonus or a penalty to the Attribute when making a roll, apply it to the calculated dice pool.

I'd be surprised if it all works without many other conversions, especially #4. It's probably a viable mechanic, sort of the inverse of SilCORE (where DP = skill, and attribs are the bonus). I guess it depends if we're talking 5e, or 4.75e.

I think that's a good way to go too.

So it is NOT like raising any other Attribute or Skill... Gotcha.
Just wanted to make sure...

Except exactly the same. Knowledge skills use (New Rating * 1). Come on, guys.

Except that it is not a Knowledge Skill, it is a two rating conglomeration of craziness.

I see no issues with the system as it stands. You get what you want at chargen, and then EARN the rest in play, with absolutely no expenditure of Karma needed... And the GM has final say on what you can actually have. You know, like a GM is supposed to do... *shrug*

Facrissake. You don't see problems with *anything*, because the GM can always do *everything*. This is a thread about every little issue that real players find, TJ.

Sounds like Blue Planet, except using d6s instead of d10s



Given that I was talking about Karma Gen....

I am a Real Player Yerameyahu, just not a Player who tries to find every single loophole that exists so that I can exploit it to the detriment of the game. Try it sometime.

Karma Gen is absolutely no different. You pay points for your contacts at start, and then earn them in play.
4 Points for a 1/1 Contact, and 24 Points for a 6/6. No Different.
Imagine that; You can get Six 1/1 Contacts for the Price of a Single 6/6 Contact. Just like in BP Gen. Amazing Indeed.

TJ, that is crap and you know it. I'm not talking about exploiting anything. We're talking about game design. First you pretend that you can't understand Draco18s's example numbers, and then you default to your standard 'everything's fine at my table, the GM can fix everything'. We don't need this pettiness here, if you don't feel like contributing.

The problem is that a 6/6 contact is worth something like a hundred thousand 1/1s. The proposal is specifically to make contacts have an increasing cost, like the *rest* of Karmagen. The current Karmagen is, if anything, worse for contacts than BP. It is now duly noted that you do not agree.

We all get that you're smugly happy with your table, but the more and more you describe your table, the happier I am that I'm not sitting at it. There's stuff about it I like, but it's clear that you're gaming your system just as much as everyone else is gaming theirs.

What people are trying to do is to find the weak points and imbalances inherent in the system, and tweak them so that the math makes a little more sense from a balance standpoint (to reduce the gaming of the system). It appears many people are happy with quadratic costs for progression instead of linear costs. If someone could find the right balance for attributes, skills, and enhancements on a quadratic scale, I'd even buy into a lack of capping dice pools. It also helps to use the same scale for pre-gen as post gen as it allows people to add characters into a campaign at any time with minimal difference between a 300 point + 100 point character and a 400 point character. (Technically, the 300 point character is probably going to do better on cash and contacts.)

If you are happy with the game as it is and want to play it as-is from now on, then thread probably isn't a good thread for you because you're opposed to the purpose of the thread.

@Tymeus: A game system shouldn't be built on the premise that all the players will be saints. Trying to make it entirely munchkin-proof hasn't ever worked out well that I know of, but somewhere in the middle is a robust yet flexible enough game system, and that's what we're trying to discover.

The current issue is that while costing the same in SR4*, 6 1/1 contacts aren't comparable in utility to a single 6/6 contact. Which is bad, because ideally stats have a constant cost-utility ratio across the game system.

So the idea is to make low contacts cheaper, and high contact dearer. Just like (in karmagen) high stats are increasingly more expensive.

I can get behind the straight up multiplying solution. A 1/1 contact costs 1 karma, a 6/6 costs 36. Still not quite ideal, but better.


I will say, my reasoning for wanting to separate Professional Rating and Connection is that sometimes those can be drastically different. I personally think there is a large difference between a Professional 6 Connection 1 Mechanic, and a Professional 6 Connection 6 R&D Head in Ares Corp. There are people that are really good at their jobs without knowing a lot of people, people who are pretty bad at anything except talking to others, and people who are really good at their job and know everybody who's anybody in the industry.

I'm still wondering if Connection even has a purpose, though. I kinda see your point, but it almost seems not worth the effort.

If you're going to separate Connection and Professional rating though, straight multiplication becomes unfortunate.

Consider: a lonely yet brilliant scientist buddy (L5, P5, C1) would be 25 points of something, while if that scientist knows just a few people (L5, P5, C2), he suddenly costs 50 karma.

"stapled together Knowledges" though don't have this problem quite so much;

L5, P5, C1 = (2+2+3+4+5) + (2+2+3+4+5) + (2) = 34
vs.
L5, P5, C1 = (2+2+3+4+5) + (2+2+3+4+5) + (2+2) = 36

Note that I've priced the first point in any of the traits 2 karma, because skills and knowledges also make the first point cost the same as the second point.

However, even so they end up costing a lot. But that's the price for not actually being on your own, the way a 'runner is supposed to be (according to some noir cliches).

It really depends on how detailed you want to make contacts.



Like if you want to make a handful of generic contacts at each professional rating, and give a set karma value each connection rating should give (thus opening up the option for players or GMs to stat up custom contacts if they prefer), you can pretty much eskew it: A high professional rating fixer will simply be someone with a decent charisma/ettiquete, and the vast majority of his karma spent on a shitton of contacts (most at low loyalty) so he can find basically anything or anyone. Then really special people like corporate CEOs or major NPCs are just contacts you need to earn in game, no amount of karma can earn them for you without GM discretion.



Alternatively, if you don't want to go so far as statting up every contact for every character, then some separation and generalization needs to be made. Professional Rating would determine general skill levels, while connection determines the ability to actually find something (as it is now).

Sure, but that only applies to the contacts that are for finding things in the first place. Like you said, there are 'doer' contacts and 'network' contacts. Like I said before, I think the GM can just apply the knowledge skill method: the player says what the person is and their (Pro/Loyal) numbers, and the GM decides what that Pro number actually means.

Yeah, Ascalaphus, you clearly wouldn't use that method on a 3-part system. But I don't think multiplying was the idea in the first place. It's (New Rating * X). So yes, promoting an already great contact is expensive. The other proposed method there (*not* pooling the stats) actually deals with that problem; you can raise a low aspect without paying the surcharge. Again, we'd have to run the numbers, but I guessed that the pooling surcharge would actually be a feature. For a Connection 6 contact, raising Loyalty from 2 to 3 *should* cost more.

--
So there are a few possibilities here. Let's jump back to the start, then: everyone agrees contacts should have Loyalty, right? Then, should they also have a Professional Rating (whether their profession is 'mechanic' or 'gossip')? Should they have that *and* Connection? Do contacts need/use PC stats? Personally, I've never given a contact stats, nor made them roll normal tests.

--
Side issues: would anyone want an Advanced Lifestyle-type system for Contacts/Group Contacts (after all, it kind of half exists already)? Should Mentor/Ally/Enemy/Vendetta still be Quals, or could they just be handled by Contacts (perhaps with negative Loyalty, heh)?

I'm fine with professional including connection. I'm also fine with (professional + connection) * loyalty although that sounds really expensive if contacts are on a scale of 1-6. A scale of 1-4 seems more fitting for that price level.


I'm torn between liking it and the difficulty of having another system to balance. I'd make it optional, much like the current lifestyles, in order to keep chargen simple.

I definitely agree that Loyalty must stay.

I also think that Professional and Connection should be merged. It's more elegant, and basically describes how good the character is a whatever they're supposed to be. This does mean that some extra language will be required for each contact to describe what his or her Professional rating actually represents. I see that as a good thing, as it might illuminate differing character types.

I do wonder, is a 1 though 6 scale right for Loyalty, though? In what cases is Loyalty a loyalty test made?

I think that for a lot of cases, Professional Rating for a Contact makes more sense than Connection rating, and that the Connection rating isn't really all that interesting. Sure, a Fixer's Connection is interesting, but an R&D guy or a doctor is mostly important because he's able to do stuff himself.

So my vote goes to replacing Connection with Professional Rating.

---

The group contacts system definitely needs a rework; the possibility to have ties with an entire group is definitely a nice-to-have, but can be difficult to work out well in the rules.

Maybe it's an idea to put a restriction on the height of L/P ratings at CharGen, similar to the Availability 12 limit for gear and the 2*5 or 1*6 limit for skills?

---

That brings me to a related item. It might be nice to include upfront a section about packages of related caps and restrictions that a GM can use to set the power level for a campaign. Stuff like how the amount of starting karma, dice pool caps, maximum Magic and Availability all fit together. What to adjust if you want more or less MagicRun, more Barrens or more Prime Runner etc.

Because it's something that comes up a lot, and it could be useful to have a unified piece of GM advice about it, along with ready-to-use implementations.

Okay. So if we assume for the moment that we're replacing Connection with Professional, with Loyalty, that's once again 2 bits. So, there are the two (immediate) options for pricing that: pooled, or non-pooled. (Multiplication/Product isn't consistent with Karmagen, but we can compare for the hell of it.)

Pooled would account for the synergy of Professional/Loyalty, so that it does cost more to go from 1/6 to 2/6 than from 1/2 to 2/2. My opinion is that this is appropriate.

Non-pooled would allow such minor upgrades without charging pretty large upgrade fees, and instead focuses on just limiting the individual aspects.

The Base cost (of a 1/1), the *N multiplier, etc. can be tweaked, so what really matters at first is the desired behavior.

And how is that any different than what I said?
What I was doing was altering the bloody costs!

But you see... I disagree with that statement as well (and I am not trying to be an ass about it). That 6/6 Contact may be more useful in the short term, but you will likely hardly ever have any contact with him. I would rather have a a dozen smaller contacts than a single "Powerful" one. They are going to be much more useful in the long run, because they will be a hundred thousand times (to use your own numbers) more accessible.

Contacts DO have an increasing cost in Karma Gen, Just like they do in BP Gen. You are being disengenuous.

The whole point of him being Loyalty 6 is that yes, you are constantly in contact with him. If you have almost no contact with a 6/6 contact, you're doing something horribly wrong.