I think we've arrived at preference...

let me reiterate:
I think ItNW should be normal, armour should be optional
Draco says ItNW contains armour
Yerameyahu thinks armour should be standard, ItNW should be optional.

Well... considering that this is largely idle speculation, anyway, and that the likelihood of these rules ever seeing use is miniscule, we can just safely agree to disagree on the finer points. We can count on it that IF they are used by a future development team then they will find ways of botching them, so that we can yet again hope for perfect rules by 6th edition .

(No offense meant to the writers... or at least, apologies if you're not responsible.)

Anyway. Tell me about your position again. When you say 'ITNW normal', what flavor of ITNW do you mean? I've seen: a) auto-hits+armor, b) auto-hits only, c) as SR4, d) immune to AP, etc. It really changes everything.

Personally, I think the basic principle is that spirits *don't* wear armor, and *should* have something as normal. So either that's a decent amount or armor, or a smaller amount of Hardening; which option isn't as important as giving them something-but-not-everything.

I don't personally like the 'dual-mode' ITNW that you mention as Draco's. I think it's complex, and therefore yucky.

I said no such thing. I said "autohits"

I meant this, which I understand to basically mean: ItNW (=hardened armour = force) is counted once as auto-hits, and a second time for regular armour, which amounts to my idea of including my optional Armour power for all spirits.

I would have liked to separate auto-hits (=hardenend armour) from regular armour, so you could have one or the other, or both, without the two necessarily interacting.

I do agree the AP interaction is unsatisfying, if only from its complexity. So should we say that AP doesn't interact with Hardenend Armour at all? That will cause problems if you give vehicles hardened armour, too, which might have the body and capacity to get quite a bit of it.

If there's no "-half" AP anywhere, you can specify which armor is "outside" and apply AP to it first, then work your way in. But that doesn't work so nicely if there's "-half" AP too.

I think ideally nothing has both Hardened and non-Hardened armor, so that you can skip a step in processing damage, and avoid these nettling questions altogether.



You could also go the whole way, and abolish the concept of Hardened entirely, and make all armor auto-hits. There's still a to-hit and defense roll both modifying damage, so it's not like there won't be enough randomness in damage-dealing. But it reduces rules/dice rolling overhead in combat, which is desirable, and it greatly simplifies armor-stacking rules. If something is supposed to be Hardened, just give it more armor rating.

Yeah, that's the opposite of "all or nothing" that Hardened Armor currently tends towards. Personally, I don't have any trouble with it.

If and only if you give vehicles hardened armor, and I advise that they DO NOT get it by default as it only makes things worse.



Drake mage who casts the Armor spell.

Done.

Which means we have to determine an interaction for what happens when a creature has both.



I am also not a fan of this, as it makes Hardened Armor a "force based effect" rather than "magic based effect" or even an "independently rated effect."

I really think it's best not to have 'Hardened armor' (armor which affects damage resistance, phys/stun, and AP) at all. Have 'armor', and have Hardening (free auto-hits/automatic pre-DV reduction); and be sparing about it. AP only affects armor, and you could certainly have things like the DUP for specifically negating Hardening (Hardening Piercing?). I guess this makes Hardening like DR 3/- or whatever, which I think is fine.

It also depends on which thing we're talking about. There are sprits, other critters (inc. drakes), vehicles, and barriers (and even mil-spec armor, in SR3), and none of them need to use the same Hardened Armor thing. Vehicle armor and barriers make sense to have small arms *ping!* off without damaging them, but heavy attacks *wreck* them. I don't think spirits should work the same way. For drakes and things, it depends; there's a certain lore of dragons that jives with the 'ping' aspect, but it should be weak for drakes.

I don't understand your last comment, Draco18s. Force = Magic, so who cares?

After reading the above arguments, I'm leaning towards:

Hardened Armor-Automatic successes on a damage resistance test equal to the amount of hardened armor. Hardened Armor may not be reduced by AP, but stacks with normal armor when determining if an attack deals physical or stun damage, and for encumbrance if it's made available for standard armors. (So your Drake with 4 hardened armor and 10 regular armor has 14 armor for purposes of physical or stun)

ITNW-Grants Hardened Armor based on magic. Critters without magic get 4 hardened armor. This is an optional power for all spirits

Spirits-Get Regular Armor based on force. Depending on the spirit type this can go from Force -3 (squishy spirits) to Force +3 (tanky spirits)

Smart Armor-Acts as hardened Armor for Vehicles. May be bought along with regular armor, but cannot be bought as high.


What I disagree with:
-Making all armor auto successes. It gets rid of the lucky "I got shot in the face and manned it!" which is something I always liked.

On the other hand this does bring up a point: If we go with TN4 rather than TN5, armor values may need to be tweaked, because we basically just raised the survivability across the board. Personally I don't mind this side effect, as I do prefer more durable characters, but once you get past the 10-12 range and you have people averaging 10-15 soak rolls, it gets silly. Making military armor JUST hardened armor, but a lower value (ie instead of 16 regular armor, you get 7 hardened), it's still far better than any other armor out there, but makes it a bit more reasonable. (So your typical heavily armored guy has 7 hardened armor from suit, 2 armor from helmet, 2/4 armor from securetech, and 4/1 armor from undersuit, so 8/5 armor that gets rolled and can be bypassed with AP, and 7 hardened armor. Compared to now the same character would have 24/19 armor)

-Getting rid of hardened armor altogether. There's always been some distinction between regular and hardened armor, as far as I'm aware, and think that distinction warrants keeping. It's the difference between what your average vehicle has and what a tank uses. The difference between a normal spirit and a tanky spirit.

I can certainly agree with this and pen it down for the playtesting team.

That seems reasonable, even though I would separate auto-successes and the total armour rating entirely. Well... preference.


This I don't get. What's with the magic rating? What was wrong with Force? All spririt attributes depend on Force, anyway, why make this distinction? I still think spirits should have this by default, because it's a very traditional SR thing. At least bound spirits should get this automatically, because they are expensive to get.


That's super squishy compared to now. A squishy force 3 spirit will get 0 armour. I would still say 2xForce, but ITNW replaces half of that when you get it.

This is ok, however you call it. Current smart armour is... really stupid, and overly complicated.

Yes.

Without looking at the details too much, remember that a TN4 also produces a lot more successes on all tests, which is why damage could also go up. But this is numbers tuning, which should come at the end of the process:
- Weapon damage numbers
- armour value numbers
- desirable skill and attribute ratings
- etc.

Naw, with the new method I think it's a good idea to have it. It's just important to really keep a unified mechanic.

I really think it's cleaner and easier to balance if Hardening is not 'armor' at all, just auto-hits/straight DV reduction. It requires you to keep them separate for AP, for modified DV check, and also damage resistance (unless you're getting auto-hits *and* rolling those dice, which I think is also a mistake). I think both ways function, but it just seems simpler for everything.

I agree with Brainpiercing: *regular* spirit armor should be a largish number (between 3 and 18). This is supposed to be comparable to vehicle/SR armor. That's why I suggested an 'X+Force' method, that would ensure armor to the weak spirits, while not giving the strong ones 2*Force.

Not all Critters have Force, I assume, while Magic==Force. Why is this an issue? However, why would any Critter without a Magic rating get ITNW in the first place? That caveat seems pointless.

Mil-spec armor shouldn't have crazy Hardening, but a little bit would be okay and flavorful. Enough to block holdouts/MPs (DV 4) or maybe even regular pistols (DV 5), fired with moderate skill? I dunno, we'd have to play with the numbers.

The thing is that Hardening (auto-hits) is damage reduction against everything (even strong hits like a rocket). It's not like the current 'pistols go ping' situation. This is intentional for some people, I gather, but it means we have to consider the impact differently. Very *small* values of Hardening really add up over time in terms of your Condition Monitor, because it's like having Trauma Damper + Platelets.

I don't particularly see what spirit/critter Hardening and vehicle Hardening (and mil-spec, and barriers) need to be the same mechanic. I think they have different needs, as I said earlier. Vehicles and barriers *should* have 'pistols go ping', with weak *base DV* attacks having zero effect. Spirits, on the other hand, just need to be take a beating, which is auto-hits.

The reason I was in favor of hardened armor counting as armor for determining stun/physical and encumbrance is really for consistency sake. Imagine if we do make Military Armor hardened armor, now you wear it and it blocks more damage than anything else... but the damage you take is almost always physical, and you have no encumbrance from it at all. Seems kinda awkward to me.

That could be remedied by simply not allowing hardening on armor characters can actually wear, reserving it for powers and machines, but even then spirits/critters with hardening would be facing physical rather than stun much more frequently, and vehicles with smart armor would take actual damage more often.


As for making regular spirit armor much higher, one thing to remember is Drone armor can't go above 12 for a large drone (capped at bodyx3 iirc). If you make smart armor an option for the drone and ITNW an option for the spirit, they're pretty close to equal with my proposal.

I could see maybe regular armor being force+0-6, as the base, rather than having any subtractions, but if base armor can get that high, I'd argue for a lower hardening. Or maybe hardening only applies to the bonus. So if you get a Earth Spirit with hardening, you have 6 hardened armor, regardless of force. If you get a wind spirit, hardening isn't even an option. This could pretty much solve the upper end of the scaling issue, but can lead to some pretty relatively scary low force spirits.



Do Drakes always have magic? For some reason I thought they could be mundane, but I could be wrong.

All drakes have 1 magic (unless they don't take mage/adept and get implants and get permastuck as [form] or if they encounter BGC).

No drakes have force.

Hence "based on force" effects should be "based on magic" effects.

QED

The extra cavat "no magic -> 4 hardened armor" is a just-in-case cover-all-bases cavat. It does not mean that a drake who has his magic reduced to 0 gets 4 HA back (0 magic is not the same as no magic). Although in the drake description I might include a cavat for drakes with low magic ratings (such as BGC induced) stipulating that if their innate armor falls below same value (say 4) then it loses its hardened aspect first (so 4 HA, 3 HA + 1 NA, 2 HA + 2 NA, 1 HA + 3 NA, 0 HA + 4 NA) representing an innate, but non-magical armor value.

Or something.

That's kind of the point: *everything* Awakened by definition has Magic of at least 1. Spirits are the only thing that has Force, and it always equals Magic. Drakes, pixies, etc. are paracritters (=Awakened=Magic).

See, Seerow, I wouldn't suggest anything having Hardening alone. Mil-spec would still have normal armor, plus like 2-3 points of Hardening (==2-3 automatic DV reduction). Even 1 Hardening would be a *nice* use for light mil-spec. Ditto for spirits: I suggested that all spirits get a natural Armor, and Hardening be an optional add-on. Ditto vehicles: they still have armor (and are still immune to stun), but Smart Armor would let them stay in the fight longer against things like rockets (which otherwise tend to simply beat their armor and BOOM).

Yes, moderate normal armor and *small* amounts of non-armor Hardening is my suggestion, as you say.

So just remove Force since it's a useless term, and use Magic everywhere?

No. We still need force values for spells, and also for spirits (summoning).

We need to stop using force for the primary stat for critter powers, though, simply because not all critters have force. In fact, none do, except spirits.

But if we change over to magic rating then all critters can have the power and use it in the expected way.

I should also note that Hardened Armor shouldn't be an explicitly magic based effect. Neither should "immunity."

They'll have ratings, and for things like spirits it'll be "this power at Magic rating."

Only if we need Hardened Armor (which I again suggest be called simply 'Hardening', or something else without 'armor') to be one unified thing. I'm fine with there being Smart Armor, ITNW, and Hardening (milspec). They just happen to be similar. It's ITNW that is explicitly magic.

If we can combine them without sacrificing any function, that's also fine. I think making Hardening non-armor actually helps with that, because you don't have to worry about stacking and balance issues; you know that it's pure DV reduction wherever it goes.

Side note: I assume it goes without saying, but we're going to change it so nothing is called 'Immunity' when it's actually just 'Resistance', right?

Oh please yes!

Can we add a new power called Immunity that is actually immunity?

It would be nice if water spirits were actually immune to water and fire spirits to fire.

As long as the immunity is only to specific things that aren't really particularly common, as opposed to the previously suggested immune to everything except this relatively uncommon thing, I don't mind it.

Ideally it would be open ended, but the by-RAW stuff would be "this is a spirit of fire, as such it's fucking immune to fire."
Things everyone can agree makes sense and doesn't need weird wonky workaround rules for things like "immune to lead" (what's that do, make you immune to being shot, or immune to lead poisoning?) or "immune to non-magic weapons" in a game where magic weapons do not exist (excepting weapon foci, which cannot be bound by mundanes (excepting unique enchantment rules (except that...))).

On another note:

Drakes, armor, and hardening

Drakes should get armor equal to their magic value which explicitly either does or does not stack with the adept power and the mage spell (personally I'd say "doesn't stack," but it can go through playtesting both ways) and has Hardening of 4.

So your basic drake mage or whatever, just toolin' around in drake form has (effectively) 10 armor against attacks (for determining stun/physical). 4 are auto-hits and 6 are dice.

This isn't terribly overpowered for the price paid (this is why I say it shouldn't stack with the spell or adept power). Nor is to god awful weaksauce either (current rules). Reasonably "bullet proof" when in dracoform and doesn't lend the player the sense of "if I transform, I'll be weak" as in metahuman form their looking at standard armor of around 10/8 to 12/10 with no hardening.

1. Get Rob Boyle back

2. Address the issue that magic has been around for decades now.
...2a) Several middle lifestyle and all High Lifestyle will have found treatment to prevent astral projecting voyeurism.
...2b) Carpet and other flooring materials will become fashionable to limit invisible mage intrusion
...2c) Even the lowliest security companies will come up with protocols to limit change person switch-a-roo of personal.

3. If you get a defense roll vs. melee b/c (and I quote) "you aren't just standing their letting someone hit you", then allow the same courtesy to people getting shot at that aren't just "standing" there.

4. The double defense vs. melee sucks mechanically.

5. Balance spirits-- maybe solved by point #1.

6. Make physAds no longer effected by background count again!

7. Readdress social mechanics

8. Have contacts "Connection" level actually make a difference. Lowering the threshold would be a start.

@SaintHax: some of your points were discussed above already. But you make some interesting ones;


I think this is part of a wider need for a "corporate security handbook" explaining how corporations can protect themselves against the more common runner tactics, including magic. But it's not really a rules thing, more something to put in a (GM) supplement.





I'd like to synchronize melee and ranged a bit more. The main disadvantage of melee should be that you have to get close to the guy with the gun. Also facing better defense and slower attack rate is a bit too much. Melee damage isn't really higher than ranged damage either, and there's only a small penalty to continue using a gun while engaged by a melee opponent. That should change.




This is indeed an important one. I'm not entirely sure how to go about it though.

Step 1: Remove Glamor.
Step 2: Remove Empathy Software (or at least, reduce its viability within a conversation)
Step 3: Reduce other bonuses from other cyber/bio
Step 4: Increase the amount of dice the defender gets to significantly even the odds between the secretary and the face who oozes sexually enticing pheromones (seriously, tailored pheromones are too powerful).

The thing I don't like about social rolls is this: it's usually just a "one roll kill".

If you fight someone in combat, there are a lot of steps to go through - initiative, to-hit, defense, damage. And you'll rarely kill an entire enemy team with one lucky roll in combat.

But with social rolls, entire confrontations turn into a single dice roll. Boom. Over.




Think about movies with cool social scenes. A high-stakes negotiation. Goes back and forth, threats are made, people pull aces from their sleeves, dramatic reveals, deals offered.

Single dice roll? Disappointing.




I see the use of high-speed social rules for unimportant encounters, but I'd like mechanics for epic social "word-combats" too. And (notice the resemblance to the problems with hacking) preferably in such a way that the rest of the team gets to be part of it too, not just the hyperspecialized Face.

That's the GM's job, though. They can simply ask for multiple rolls as the encounter progresses. Having seen 'social combat' systems, I wouldn't care to have that.

Hrm, I partially agree here, partially don't.


On the one hand, I agree we don't need a huge social combat type subsystem. On the other hand, I do like the idea of everyone contributing something, as opposed to "everyone shut up and let the face talk".


One thing I think would make a huge difference is just have everyone have some social skills by default. Not really high, but enough they have a moderate dicepool to contribute. I mentioned earlier in the thread having people start with 3 in all stats (capable of being bought lower with negative qualities), and having some social skills for free (also being capable of bought lower with negative qualities), which would make a huge difference, because now the guy with almost no investment can at least throw 6-8 dice in.

Then, it's just a matter of staggering thresholds so there's something useful you can do at both low and high dicepools. The high dicepool face might shoot for a really outrageous con, with a threshold of 8-10 successes, while the normal guys might only be shooting for a threshold 2 test, but their role in this would be basically teamworking, except lowering the threshold for the con instead of giving your guy more dice. Or another low threshold test normal people could do is distract someone else while your face does his job with the main target. Things like that. Basically, leaving social tests resolved pretty quickly, but everyone has something they can do, and it's generally beneficial for more people to be helping.

We've actually used a modified version of this before, and been fairly pleased with the results. Instead of 3 in all stats though, we opted for racial averages, which we took to be the average of the starting attribute and the racial max (round down), listed on page 81 of SR4A. So for humans, yes, you get 3's across the board, but for a troll it would be different (7 STR, 2 CHA, etc). Then we just said that to raise your attributes cost the typical 10 BP per point, but to lower them only netted you 5 BP per point. This let players still reduce attributes in exchange for BP, but it just moved the baselines from Tabula Rasa to Joe Everyman. It also had the unintended-but-lovely side effect of encouraging players to think through the implications of their attributes a bit more.

And yes, we reduced the total BP that players could spend as well as the additional BP they could spend on attributes by the appropriate ratios. (And if you dig into our math, this actually resulted in a net gain of 20 BP for non-Trolls, and a net gain of 10 BP for our horned brethren). The non-linear costs for the final attribute point and the rule that only one attribute can be at racial max during character creation are still in effect.

We stopped short of doing the same for skills because we felt that was impinging too much on character design (if social skills, then why not physical skills, etc), and we already have other minor subsidies for other aspects of character creation via some other house rules. Your mileage may vary on that.

Yeah, I can agree with doing averages, and actually was thinking that though I didn't say it. And yes, I would cut down available BP after doing so, and available BP for attributes dramatically. Probably drop BP down to 350 (you actually saved 80 bp, so this is a net gain for most characters, but represents points being spent where you wouldn't necessarily want them), and max invested into attributes knocked all the way down to 50 or 75. (It costs 35 points to go from 3 to 6, or 20 from 3 to 5. So at 50, you can get as much as 1 6 and 1 5, or 2 5's and a 4, or 5 4's. 75 is a bit more flexible, giving you just a little more than necessary for 2 6's)

The reason I say giving some starting skills free is there are some skillsets that everyone is simply expected to have. If you lack any social skills at all, you basically end up a social retard, rolling 2 or 3 dice on social tests, meaning as often as not you're critically glitching. Literally every time you open your mouth you're as likely to mess up a situation as help it. A little etiquette at least is something I would consider a basic necessity, much like you gain knowledge skills for free, because without doing so the majority of characters would enter creation with no knowledge skills at all. I'd say charismax2 in social skill ranks, with free skill capped at stat, and 1 point will buy a specialization. (So your starting guy with 3 charisma can have 3 etiquette and 3 con, or 3 etiquette plus spec, and 2 intimidation. Or any other number of combinations. You have 6 or 7 social skills, so even getting some for free, you still have plenty of variability in characters, you just end up with a much lower ratio of autistics who can't string 2 sentences together. And for people who intentionally want to play that archtype, they can take negative qualities to make it happen.)

I'm also tempted to say at this point of technological pervasiveness, basic matrix skills (computer use and browse basically) should have at least rating 1 or 2 for most characters as well (or even as high as 3 in an uncapped system), and would also go a long way towards opening up the matrix to nonhackers. But that's a much more debatable point than social skills.

I think the idea is that the stupid players are supposed to buy basic social and matrix skills. And contacts, etc.

You want to be careful how far you push that though. It's one thing to incentivize an aspect of character creation, it's something else entirely to mandate it.

I'll stay away from precise numbers because we use a lot of house rules, and so the numbers that work at our table wouldn't make sense in vanilla SR4A. But the principles would still hold.

What we elected to do was simply encourage a particular outcome. We wanted characters with attributes closer to the racial average at the point of character creation. However, there is absolutely nothing actively preventing a character from creating an anti-social murder machine by using CHA as a dumpstat. They simply come out a handful of BP behind compared to where they would have been under typical chargen rules. The type of player who values those BP more than their vision for their character won't make that trade, and that works just fine for our table.

When you start mandating that characters have a particular skill, then you have gone beyond encouragement into determinism, especially when that skill is not necessarily viable for all character archtypes. A character can't ever get away from their attributes; they're not optional. You can't chose to begin play without Intuition. Skills on the other hand, are more than just mechanical. They represent a part of the character's history. When you start requiring characters to have a particular skill, or set of skills, you are requiring them to have that history as well. Even if you allow them to opt-out later with the equivalent of a negative quality, I'm assuming they won't get the full BP value back (after all, if they did, there's no point to having the rule in the first place).

Our group was uncomfortable with that, especially since they felt that while such rules might favor the average wage-slave, the average wage-slave was not the average shadowrunner. Remember, chargen needs to be able to work just as well for Cereal Killer from Hackers as it does for Tarzan, and being a physical adept raised by magical wolves could totally happen in this universe. And when someone in our group wanted to make the love child of Rob Boyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs, we didn't want to dissuade that. *grins*

If you're going to go that route, what you might want to do is actually rethink the way that skills are purchased entirely. Why not give players a certain number of BP towards skills based on the appropriate linked attribute? So characters with high CHA get more free CHA-linked skills than characters with low CHA. And if someone creates Tarzan, they can always use their free points towards Intimidation instead of Etiquette (Whatever). Again, you'd want to reduce the overall BP accordingly, but if you're already using the baseline of racial averages for attributes, you can approximate that to a much better degree than if you were letting people buy them up from scratch.

I see your point about the skills, I really do. I just don't think the implementation can be that simple and still be elegant enough for the variety of characters that exist in Shadowrun.

Now if you wanted to take a page from any number of other game systems and say 5th Edition should include Backgrounds as part of chargen... :grins:

Here's what I'd do for skills.

I'd borrow the system from HARP (High Adventure Role Playing).* Each race gets a set of skills for free (reasonable number of skills, 1 to 3 ranks, D&D equivalent; mostly 1s) and then had a profession (so fighter, cleric, etc.) which granted a few (1 rank, mostly) and then a background (rural, farmer, citydweller, etc) that granted about as many skills as race, although nothing ever overlapped perfectly (it was impossible to get above a 4, and even a 4 would have been tricky, and would have likely been in something like a Profession (Blacksmith) skill or the like).

It represented the kinds of thing you'd know simply from having grown up.

So for instance, Orcs and Trolls might get a rank of Intimidation free, maybe a rank of Unarmed Combat. Elves might get a rank of Negotiation.
Then you factor in background (slums, barrens, center city, corp archology) get a knowledge skill (navigation, etc.) or two, maybe another active skill at 1.

Then instead of saying "everyone has social skills at 3 to start" you instead have all the trolls get the same base skillset (but low-ranked) and have people pick a background, which'll give them a skill or two they want, but also a bunch of side skills they'd not bother spending points on, but will take them for free.

Everyone comes out a little different, but fairly rounded out. It's all free (reduce starting BP a notch; 10 or 20 points, tops, for 20 to 30 BP worth of skills) and everyone comes out happy.


*HARP has a different problem that's visible almost strait from chargen. Imagine that every session every character received not some standard karmic award determined by the GM, but received their Edge value in Karma,** and at chargen could only spend a certain amount of points on skills also based on Edge...

secondary footnotes and rant

That sounds like a good idea, Draco18s, but how many different backgrounds are there in Shadowrun? The metatypes are pretty limited, even when you expand it to include sapient critters, drakes, and infected.

Not to close the previous random topic, but at some point we should resolve Clustering. Apart from some of the cheese tactics, there are also things that just don't make sense (RAW, you can cluster drones in different cities, and they become 'one node'). Also, of course, slaving, programming, etc. Ugh.

Giving characters free ranks in skills because everybody should be able to do that is bad game design and you should feel bad about even considering it . Just let characters who aren't partuculary skilled in social stuff roll their stat or something.

Really I was thinking more along the lines of most runners DO start as joe average wage slave. If they want something else, there are negative qualities available to nullify those free benefits. So yes, you get 3 in all stats and some social skills free. If you want to play tarzan, you take a negative quality either reducing those free social skills (with the remainder put in intimidate), or eliminating them entirely. If you want to play someone who's autistic to the point he can't communicate clearly, you can do that and also take another negative quality that reduces your charisma. As long as these are relatively cheap qualities (like 5 bp each) so they aren't always the best option for the character, but rather a viable way to build a character with a different background, then it should be fine.



Draco: That could work, but doing it that way seems like adding an extra way to min-max. My reasoning for wanting to see some skills granted free is because they're skills that typically, unless the person is focusing 100% on that, they ignore it entirely. At least in my experience. I mean sure, I've had a gun bunny with influence group 1... then I realized that I still only get to roll 3 dice after spending 10 bp on the skillgroup and 10bp on a second point in charisma, and I'm left wondering why I wasted that BP at all. On the other hand, if skills are granted free at a relatively low level, but can be gotten rid of with negative qualities, it becomes a matter of choice. There are other negative qualities you can take, and the negative qualities don't get you back as much as the skills and attributes are worth, so if you want to play a character like that you can. But if you don't, you're not being encouraged to by the system.

But with a background system, you're first likely going to have some backgrounds mysteriously become prominent among most gamers because they're perceived as advantageous. Second, those most popular backgrounds likely are going to be the ones that don't include things like social and matrix skills for non faces/hackers. Suddenly everyone will be tarzan raised by wolves for the bonus unarmed combat skill and intimidation or whatever, and that's just silly.



On your footnotes, I am wholly in favor of a more definitive karma rewards system, but I'm not sure that's the way to handle it. How do you handle augmented attributes? Is karma really going to be capped at 3 per session, with the vast majority of people getting only 1 or 2? (Seriously 6s across the board is crazy expensive and hard to get). I'd personally rather have the system better balanced to the point where professional rating means something (right now a starting runner team can take professional rating 5 enemies more or less straight on without a huge amount of trouble), and make karma rewards based on the professional rating of the mission. (Note that's not necessarily beating enemies. If you go into a facility guarded by a bunch of professional rating 6 guys/systems, get what you want, and get out completely undetected, that is every bit worth the same reward as going in and destroying them all.). Ideally the balance would be a starting runner can handle PR3 missions, with 4 being pretty hard, and you want to get some real karma and money on your belt before trying to go beyond that.






Rules for defaulting are clear. If you default it's stat -1. Right now that means a character by default doesn't even roll dice. He has to invest a fair chunk of BP to be able to roll a very small number of dice, to the point where he's better off not rolling despite his investment. Excuse me for thinking an average character without negative qualities shouldn't be literally critically glitching and making the situation worse every other time he opens his mouth.

I still don't know. Did you 'waste' those BP, or did you build your character? The goal isn't efficiency, it's fun and representative. Functionally, there shouldn't be a difference between expecting people to buy the right stats/skills, and just giving them away 'free'. Except more complexity for many characters.

That's an issue with the defaulting rules, and the game's trouble with low DP levels. Not all interactions require rolls, though. That character (a freaking 1 Cha, 0 Skill) is fine for everyday stuff, but simply too crappy to attempt advanced things (like lying, flattery, etc.). This is appropriate, because he's not normal. He's way subnormal. (And god forbid he 'invest' in something he expects to be capable at.)

Functionally there shouldn't be a difference. Realistically, there will be. If you give people X BP on the assumption they're going to be buying these things, then they don't so they can get an advantage in their specialization since buying those things was worthless to them, now they've gone and exceeded your expected power level making the game much harder to balance. It's simply easier and more balanced to say "You start with this, and you can get rid of it if you really want to, but doing so isn't particularly efficient"

Think of it this way: Would you support a game that started with all characters as quadraplegics, but you could opt to buy the use of each limb for character generation resources? Most people would be expected to do so, but you'd have mages or hackers who say "Fuck it I don't need those limbs, I can operate fine without them", gunners who say "I only really need one arm, I can live without the second", and some people who just say "You know what forget paying for these weak metahuman limbs I'm getting cyberlimbs". Then occasionally you get a person who decides they do have adequate use for all limbs, and buys them all.

But now you have a much higher percentage of people going around with limbs that don't work than really makes sense. Game mechanics wise it works, but it's silly. And that's basically the situation we have now with attributes and day to day skills. The way the system is encourages min maxing to a higher degree by starting you with nothing. If you start with the average and can modify up or down from there, you are more likely to get the expected results, while still allowing for the corner cases.



edit: I have a question-Are you offended by getting free knowledge skills from logic and intuition? Because I'm not really advocating "You must start with this skill at this rank". I'm saying "You get a few points from charisma you can put into whatever social skill you want". If that cha x 2 number sounded high, remember I'm in favor of an uncapped skill system, where actually focused people would be looking at skill ranks up around 9-12, so your average person starting with a couple rating 3 skills is actually pretty minor. If sticking with the current capped at 6 skill system, I'd say make it just charisma in skill ranks rather than cha x 2.

But really, social skills are diverse enough, given chax2 with a cap at charisma, you still have a lot of choice. There is: Con, Etiquette, Instruction, Intimidation, Leadership, Negotiation-6 different social skills you can invest in. That's a pretty large number of different combinations possible, especially with specializations thrown in. It's not like all characters are going to be cardboard cutouts of each other where they all have etiquette 3, negotiation 3, or something like that.

That's one way to implement a background system, but it's hardly the only way.

Sure, you can go the route where you simply pick a background and it gives you a small pile of bonuses that retroactively make that background plausible. That works, and it has simplicity on it's side. The problems are that 1) as you mentioned, people tend to gravitate towards the ones that provide combat bonuses, and 2) assuming background are of equal value, you're not really doing anything except giving players free points or ramming choices down their throats (depending on whether they ultimately add or subtract from total BP).

Another possibility would be to make backgrounds have prerequisites. So you must create your character in a certain way to qualify for the background. Rather than the background giving you the skills needed to justify it, you have to create a character that already has those skills, and the background gives you a small bonus. You can flesh this out somewhat by having conditional prereqs on both sides...some require that you have x, and some require that you don't have y.

As far as some of the issues raised by people with low attributes and/or skills goes, remember that characters in those situation aren't non-functional, they're simply not skilled compared to others. In another thread someone seriously raised the issue that a troll with a logic of 1 couldn't use his commlink to find a Stuffer Shack or call his buddy. My personal take on that from the way the rules are written is that it's nonsense. And so I lean more towards trollock's POV on this matter; skills are where characters really depart from one another. If you want to encourage or incetivize certain skills (probably by using the linked attribute...basically a more aggressive version of 3rd Edition), that can work, but just giving them to people carte blanche generally isn't a good option. If they want to genuinely be bad at something, then the natural consequences is that they will often fail, and fail badly, when they try to do that something in a stressful or competitive situation.

You mentioned that you imagine that most runners "most runners DO start as joe average wage slave." I understand that, and in the novels and fiction there's certainly examples of that. But we also have shadowrunners who start life as go-gangers, NAN mountain men, and the shapeshifting child of an uber-panther, (and those are just the novels I can see from here) just to name a few. None of those have identical social or technical backgrounds.

Even go-gangers have some social skills. The go ganger might take impaired attribute (charisma), and have 2 charisma. He now has 4 ranks in social skills, so has 2 points in intimidation, and 1 point in etiquette with a specialization (gang). This character is clearly below average in regards to his social capability, but he at least has SOME, and that makes the difference.



He may not have trouble calling his buddy (I figure that's pretty fair), but the logic 1 troll with no data search will have trouble finding the local stuffer shack on the matrix. Because yes, searching for a store is a data search, albeit an easy one. So it's an extended test threshold 1, say you're nice and make any roll a minimum 1 die, this troll has a 66% chance of getting where he wants to go, and a 33% chance of getting sent to a surfer shack across town, and wondering why he sees all this surfing gear in new york instead of food.

I do see where you're coming from, Seerow, and I do agree: the 'blank slate' build paradigm requires better players and better GMs. There is indeed a continuum between starting from scratch, and starting with pre-built character templates. Most games fall somewhere near 'scratch', though. People enjoy having control, and—let's face it—we've all built ten times as many characters as we've actually had the luck yo *play*. So it's nice to have some replay value in the chargen.

I'm okay with nudging the pointer higher on that continuum, though. Start everyone at *2* in everything, instead. Require minimum fractions of starting BP (karma/whatever) to be spent on social, for example, in the same way that there are already caps on Nuyen, caps on Attribute spending, etc. If you look at Eclipse Phase, just for comparison, you nominally start with a whopping 1000 CP! Except you have maybe 300 CP to actually play with, because the rest must be spent on stats, skills, etc. My point is that allocation blocks are a pretty familiar mechanic, so it'd be okay to do that.

Knowledge skills are a little different, because they're worthless.

That troll's MSP would run the search for him, or his local agent, fetch module, etc. Unless he's trying to find it quickly under stress, it's a non-roll. Otherwise, *yes*, a moron with zero skill can't use the computer good.

It'd be hard. While I haven't delved into this in great detail, we're talking 2 skill ranks, tops, for any skill, most of which won't be directly useful.
Mostly knowledge skills with a handful of scattered active skills, almost none of them combat related (the example of orcs and trolls getting Unarmed being a notable exception, due to the fact that orcs and trolls are physical beings and will likely resort to physical violence growing up).

A couple would likely fall as specializations (0 ranks, but free specialization if that skill is raised above 0 either due to background skill sets or from direct BP/karma expenditure).

Background module systems can be fun, or crazy, or both (see the newest Battletech RPG stuff, right?). Eclipse Phase uses a light double-module system (you must choose exactly 1 'background' and 1 'faction), which grants (mostly) a couple minor skill bonuses. Other games use nationalities and things: Oblivion, I think?; Alternity; various oWoD, though those were often more like classes.

Right. It's a skill package. You get a bunch of secondary "this makes you a real person" skill bonuses.
Occasionally they work in your favor by boosting those skills you wanted anyway, making them a little cheaper, but hey, that's fine too.

Oh, I forgot to mention before: that Logic 1 Troll with 0 Data Search? He defaults to Browse-1, so he could easily have DP 5. I dunno how I forgot. I know that's not your point, but it's a particularly bad example.

I was actually assuming using logic instead of program since basically everyone agrees that programs as they are in SR4 are retarded, and attribute+skill is the standard for basically every other test in the game.

Oh. You were assuming an Optional Rule. That is good to know ahead of time!

I certainly don't agree, and I seriously doubt it's 'basically everyone'.

You and I disagree on a lot, but I would stand next to you holding a sign to that effect and help you picket CGL any day of the week.

And twice on Sundays.


Aaaaaaaand that's racist. *winks*

Seriously though, "resorting to physical violence growing up" is going to be a byproduct of environment. An elf in that environment would be just as scrappy.

There are environments where beating people up essentially is the etiquette piece that Seerow is so concerned about. And there are environments where beating people up is looked aghast upon because it is wrong.

Go back and read the first few pages of the thread when everyone was bitching about matrix rules.


Long complaints short:
1) Having one subsystem work completely differently from everything else in the game arbitrarily is absolutely retarded.
2) Having to have an expensive program just to enable every option is similarly absolutely retarded.
3) Making it so only a single person is capable of contributing to matrix tasks because nobody else has a free 150k to blow on all the programs is again, absolutely retarded.



That's without even going into specific idiosyncrasies with the rules, and just pointing out how the fundamentals of them are completely different from everything else in the game and how that hurts the game as a whole. Making dicepools based off attributes (mainly logic), rather than programs, is a good starting point. After that there's about a million ways you can change how hacking and cybercombat is handled to fix the other 2, but there really is no excuse for having no attribute play into any computer test as long as the other skills still do. Singling out a subsystem to be handled completely differently like that is one of the things that confuses players and makes them avoid that section of the rules entirely.

It would be like if in D&D Wizards no longer added their int modifier to spell DCs and had to buy an item to increase their DCs instead. And needed to buy a separate item for every spell they know to get the bonus. And if they lack the item they can't cast the spell at all. Some people might go ahead and deal with it, but most people wouldn't, and it would hurt the system as a whole.

I'm seeing 'retarded' a lot, when I think you mean 'a minor point I happen by chance to disagree with'. I'm very familiar with the Logic-Matrix arguments. They're not 'retarded', and while I still haven't seen a good version discussed, I'm sure such a thing could exist. While the current Matrix rules have many issues, the single small issue of stat/program isn't the problem; it's a mere neutral context.

On the contrary, making it so only a single person is capable of contributing to matrix tasks because nobody else has a free (bunch of karma) to blow on all the (Logic and skills) is again, absolutely (a minor point I happen by chance to disagree with). I prefer the 'equality' of the SR4A RAW in this aspect.

I certainly understand the desire to unify core mechanics, but SR4 has at least 4-6 already, so directly subbing Program for Attribute is an extremely simple and easy one.

I try to be very polite and open-minded, but the comparison to D&D and *magic* is just totally irrelevant. If anything fits that analogy, it's technomancers.

Regardless, I'm sorry I wasn't aware of your assumption when I countered one specific class of defaulting example. It is, as I said, not relevant to the point you were making; I just thought it was interesting.