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HentaiZonga
So, I've been playing around with making a modified version of Shadowrun. I've started with 4E's ruleset, and made the following significant changes:

1) Attributes maintain the exact same ratings that they have in 4E:

1-2 - weak
3-4 - human average
5-6 - human maximum
7+ - exceptional or metahuman

Your base dice pool for any action is always equal to your augmented Attribute rating. The only things that modify your dice pool are wound penalties and multiple action penalties.

2) Skills now go from 0 to 4:

0 - untrained (TN 6)
1 - novice (TN 5)
2 - professional (TN 4)
3 - expert (TN 3)
4 - world-class (TN 2)

Your target number (TN) for any action is always equal to 6 - your skill/specialty rating.

Thus, if you have an attribute of 4 and a skill level of 3, you roll 4 dice; each die that rolls 3 or higher is a 'hit'.

3) All tasks have a "Threshold". If you get no hits, you fail. If you get at least one hit, but don't make the threshold, you get a "minimal success". For attacks, this might be a grazing hit; for extended actions, this means you can keep going; for other actions, you don't succeed, but nothing bad happens either (or you can succeed with a glitch). If you get more hits than the threshold, you get a full success (full damage with a weapon, or completely succeed at your goal, or whatever). Additional hits augment your success.

Task modifiers modify the threshold for a task, but even if the threshold is reduced below 0, you still have to net at least one hit to succeed.

4) All 'natural' dice rolls use the "Rule of 6". Skillsofts, agents, and such don't use the Rule of 6, but all beings with Karma pools use the rule of 6 for all dice rolls involving their own Attributes and Skills.

5) "Initiative Passes" are replaced with an 'Action Point' system. All characters have an "attribute"-like score called 'Reflex'. Unaugmented characters have a Reflex of 1; things like Wired Reflexes, Synaptic Accelerators, etc. increase your Reflex. Characters who can enter VR or the Astral have multiple Reflex scores (one for each).

All characters have an "Action Pool" that holds a maximum of five action points (AP). When a character first joins a fight, they roll Reaction vs. a 5 (or vs. a 6 if they have Combat Paralysis); each hit grants them 1 AP. Complex actions cost 4 AP, simple actions cost 2 AP, free actions cost 1 AP. A character can 'rush' an action by halving their dice pool, rounded down (turning a complex action into a simple action, or a simple action into a free action).

Each 'beat' of combat lasts one second. During that second, the character with the most AP decides what to do and spends that many AP to do it. Then the next character, etc. Characters who don't have enough AP get to wait. At the end of the beat, each character gains a number of AP equal to their Reflex.

Tanegar
Why? What is your goal here?
HentaiZonga
1. Differentiating "talent" from "skill" in a mechanically relevant way - and in the process, simulating the idea that raw talent gives you the ability to achieve higher things, but skill lets you do so consistently.

2. Reducing the sheer number of dice that are rolled.

3. Fixing some of the timing wonkiness with Initiative Passes.

4. I like tinkering with things.
Tanegar
OK. I think you've done a pretty good job with 1 and 2. I haven't really encountered a lot of wonkiness with the IP system, but that's probably a subjective thing. Let us know how playtesting goes.
UmaroVI
By "things like Wired Reflexes, Synaptic Accelerators, etc. increase your Reflex" do you mean "things that used to give you +IP give you that much +Reflex?"

Can you take more than one action per beat? For example, if you have 4 AP, can you take two separate simple actions?

Do opposed rolls still work the same? EG, shooting people: do you roll Pistols vs a fixed Threshold? Or does one person roll Pistols and the other person roll Reaction?

My immediate observation is that your system devalues Intuition, which no longer affects your ability to act first. This is probably bad.

What happens on rolls that are not Skill+Stat? Example: damage resistance, drain resistance, resisting Direct combat spells when not protected by counterspelling.

So things that used to modify your dice pool and aren't wounds or multiple action penalties now affect Threshold. By how much? If something used to give +2 dice pool, is that -2 Threshold? -1 Threshold? How does this work?

It's very unlikely that you get a Complex action on the first beat. This leads to some balance problems - in particular, melee (which is already an iffy thing in SR) gets way, way worse - even if you start out at melee range, it's very, very unlikely for a melee character to land the first hit, because they need a Reaction of 12 to pull that off on average. 2 hits for a simple action ranged attack is much more likely. This also hurts spellcasters some, but I think that's less of an issue because spellcasting is already really awesome. Full Burst go from a sometimes tactic to a stupid tactic but that's not a huge balance problem because you can just use two simple-action bursts instead.

Very odd things happen when people join combats midway. If you jump into a fight, you get Reaction/3 AP on average. But everyone else will have their Reflex. So depending on how augmented people are, jumping into a fight midway either makes you act last or act first a lot of the time. It's also weird that if you jump out and yell NOW WE KUNG FU FIGHT, everyone rolls reaction/3. But if you start a fight with your buddy, stall a lot (thus building up a pile of AP), and then jump out and yell NOW WE KUNG FU FIGHT at a passerby midway through your first fight, you have a huge AP pile built up, and can act first and keep taking Complex Actions. Or, for example, suppose you have a fight between one lone person, and one pair of people. (A vs. B&C). A and B keep shooting each other, C delays actions and hides. Then D shows up. Since C's been delaying and built up a massive AP pile, he can easily unload on D before D can do anything - even if D has way higher reaction, and would go first if all four of them started the fight at the same time. It's kinda strange.

Do you plan to change the pricing of stats and skills relative to one another?

HentaiZonga
QUOTE (UmaroVI @ Apr 9 2012, 05:04 PM) *
By "things like Wired Reflexes, Synaptic Accelerators, etc. increase your Reflex" do you mean "things that used to give you +IP give you that much +Reflex?"

Can you take more than one action per beat? For example, if you have 4 AP, can you take two separate simple actions?


Yes, absolutely. They'll be simultaneous, of course.

QUOTE
Do opposed rolls still work the same? EG, shooting people: do you roll Pistols vs a fixed Threshold? Or does one person roll Pistols and the other person roll Reaction?


You'd roll Dexterity/Pistols vs. a threshold equal to the other person's Reaction/Dodge hits.

QUOTE
My immediate observation is that your system devalues Intuition, which no longer affects your ability to act first. This is probably bad.


Agreed - perhaps Initiative should be the higher of Intuition or Reaction? I hesitate to add them together, but that *would* solve the melee problems listed below.

QUOTE
What happens on rolls that are not Skill+Stat? Example: damage resistance, drain resistance, resisting Direct combat spells when not protected by counterspelling.


In general, if there's no appropriate "skill", the TN should probably be 5. Alternatively, resistance could be managed something like it was in SR3 - for example, spells could have a resistance TN based on Force, like so:

Force 1 to half Magic Rating: TN 2
half Magic +1 to Magic Rating: TN 3
Magic +1 to Magic x 1.5: TN 4
Magic x 1.5 +1 to Magic x2: TN 5

QUOTE
So things that used to modify your dice pool and aren't wounds or multiple action penalties now affect Threshold. By how much? If something used to give +2 dice pool, is that -2 Threshold? -1 Threshold? How does this work?


In general, I'm thinking +2 dice pool is equivalent to -1 Threshold.

It's very unlikely that you get a Complex action on the first beat. This leads to some balance problems - in particular, melee (which is already an iffy thing in SR) gets way, way worse - even if you start out at melee range, it's very, very unlikely for a melee character to land the first hit, because they need a Reaction of 12 to pull that off on average. 2 hits for a simple action ranged attack is much more likely. This also hurts spellcasters some, but I think that's less of an issue because spellcasting is already really awesome. Full Burst go from a sometimes tactic to a stupid tactic but that's not a huge balance problem because you can just use two simple-action bursts instead.

QUOTE
Very odd things happen when people join combats midway. If you jump into a fight, you get Reaction/3 AP on average. But everyone else will have their Reflex. So depending on how augmented people are, jumping into a fight midway either makes you act last or act first a lot of the time. It's also weird that if you jump out and yell NOW WE KUNG FU FIGHT, everyone rolls reaction/3. But if you start a fight with your buddy, stall a lot (thus building up a pile of AP), and then jump out and yell NOW WE KUNG FU FIGHT at a passerby midway through your first fight, you have a huge AP pile built up, and can act first and keep taking Complex Actions. Or, for example, suppose you have a fight between one lone person, and one pair of people. (A vs. B&C). A and B keep shooting each other, C delays actions and hides. Then D shows up. Since C's been delaying and built up a massive AP pile, he can easily unload on D before D can do anything - even if D has way higher reaction, and would go first if all four of them started the fight at the same time. It's kinda strange.


It's called an "ambush". If D was aware that a fight was happening, then D already rolled Reaction. (Yet another case for why adding Intuition is clearly necessary).
Yerameyahu
Ew, variable TN. smile.gif
Neraph
QUOTE (Yerameyahu @ Apr 9 2012, 09:57 PM) *
Ew, variable TN. smile.gif

My sentiments exactly. Maybe the OP should meditate upon the reason the game designers left TN in 3rd Ed...
Chainsaw Samurai
QUOTE (Neraph @ Apr 9 2012, 09:51 PM) *
My sentiments exactly. Maybe the OP should meditate upon the reason the game designers left TN in 3rd Ed...


And not just Shadowrun, virtually every game system which had similar dice rolling procedures and target numbers.

Tabletop roleplaying already provides a very uneven playing experience across it's fanbase. This is because rules are largely up to interpretation and not hard coded like a videogame or monitored by an unbiased authority observing the two "teams" like in sports. Making target numbers variable makes the rules become a bit more arbitrary depending on who is running the game ("Dave is a pushover for his Vampire game, getting successes is easy" vs "Mike's Shadowrun game is brutal, you need to min-max up 16 dice just to start the damned car!"). Uneven playing experiences like this galvanize a gaming community rather than bring it together, the more uniform and understandable the rules are the easier time everyone will have talking about it in the community or in online forums.

Of course that is worst case scenario. Best case scenario you have variable target numbers which are in all cases specifically defined in the core book. This leads to consistent gameplay, but results in early edition D&D styled gameplay which required shifting through rulebooks for 5 minutes to do anything, disrupting the flow of game.
Chainsaw Samurai
As far as the initiative pass system goes, I really don't understand why people are so upset about how things work. It is easy to understand and doesn't even require much note taking to make it flow well.

Dave 2 3
Mike 2 3
*Gang Leader 2
Tina 2
*Gang MembersA 2
*Gang MembersB
Fat Tony

Real simple, works even better on graph paper cause you can make the numbers line up. The initiative scores don't even matter, just the order. Starting at the top it's Dave and then Mike. The Asterisk denotes it is my turn (the GM) and the Gang Leader is next, then Tina, then I go again for the gang members. Finally fat Tony. Go back to the top and then start again on the 2's. Down the list, everyone with a 2 goes again, then the 3's. Reroll again and repeat for the next round. Too easy.

It is simple to understand, easy to keep track of, fairly streamlined, and easy to insert third parties in to. The only complaint anyone could have is that this edition robs people with exceptional reaction scores from going more than once in a round. I would sooner focus on a way to fix that specifically than trying to muck up a perfectly understandable system.
Midas
Seems fairly elegant to me, although Umarov did bring up some valid concerns. A few observations:

* Skills would have to cost much more than they do in 4A, and I am not sure how much I like the TN going down so steeply. I would be inclined to have 4 more skill ranks and have TN go down by Skill/2 (round down) ... with skill 7/8 only being possible through Aptitude.
Yerameyahu and Neraph do have a point, though ... I remember the bad old days of SR1 where sammies with smartguns delivered TN2 carnage.

* The initiative and action dynamic seems a tad complicated and book-keeping would be a pain ("Now it's the 3rd second of combat ... wait a minute, how many AP do I have again?"). I would definitely have the Initiative (Reflex) stat as average of Reaction and Intuition (round down).

If you give it a playtest, let us know how it goes ...
UmaroVI
Guys, it's not a variable TN system like in 3rd. The TN is set by your skill. The threshold is what varies.

QUOTE
In general, if there's no appropriate "skill", the TN should probably be 5. Alternatively, resistance could be managed something like it was in SR3 - for example, spells could have a resistance TN based on Force, like so:

Force 1 to half Magic Rating: TN 2
half Magic +1 to Magic Rating: TN 3
Magic +1 to Magic x 1.5: TN 4
Magic x 1.5 +1 to Magic x2: TN 5

I'm not sure this makes much sense, and it encourages really weird things. Like, a Magic 1 magician's force 2 spell is really hard to resist, but a magic 6 magician's force 2 spell is a joke to resist. I'd probably just go with "5," and figure out how you do want Counterspelling to work.

QUOTE
It's called an "ambush". If D was aware that a fight was happening, then D already rolled Reaction. (Yet another case for why adding Intuition is clearly necessary).

I would probably indeed add Intuition to the initial roll. It's very hard to get 6 or more AP still, but 4 is reasonable.

That's not what I mean about the problem with this system and people joining late. Consider two scenarios:

A and B are duking it out in a room. B keeps holding back AP by delaying (so he has, say, 100 AP built up); maybe he has higher Reflex than A and is holding back. Whatever. C is wearing headphones (so didn't hear) and opens the door to the fight (he wasn't aware until he opened the door, but as soon as he does he sees the fight). No matter how rad C is, B goes first automatically and can shoot B in the face like 20 times before he can react. Huh?

Now compare the same situation, but D shows up right as the fight is starting (and B hasn't had a chance to stockpile AP). Now, suddenly, D has a reasonable chance of going first.

You can't really fix this problem by capping stored AP, either, you just limit it. You can cover the problem up a bit by banning people from ending beats with more than X much AP, but the fundamental problem here is that the first turn of a fight is a special snowflake and it just doesn't work properly with anything else.

I think the only way this is going to be fixable is to group beats into something else (call it songs), and at the end of a song, you lose all remaining AP and reroll for your starting AP. Probably 5 beats to a song (so mundanes are guaranteed a Complex). You still have slightly awkward things if people join halfway through a song, but not much worse than joining halfway through a combat turn; you can probably patch it by saying that if you join after the first Beat, you roll base AP and also add Reflex once, and most of the time you can fudge it by only letting people join in at the start of a new song.
Tanegar
QUOTE (UmaroVI @ Apr 10 2012, 05:51 AM) *
I think the only way this is going to be fixable is to group beats into something else (call it songs), and at the end of a song, you lose all remaining AP and reroll for your starting AP. Probably 5 beats to a song (so mundanes are guaranteed a Complex). You still have slightly awkward things if people join halfway through a song, but not much worse than joining halfway through a combat turn; you can probably patch it by saying that if you join after the first Beat, you roll base AP and also add Reflex once, and most of the time you can fudge it by only letting people join in at the start of a new song.

...Aaaaand now I have a mental image of a team of runners and a team of corpsec troops resolving conflict via a dance-off. You just got served, samurai!
thorya
QUOTE (Tanegar @ Apr 10 2012, 10:21 AM) *
...Aaaaand now I have a mental image of a team of runners and a team of corpsec troops resolving conflict via a dance-off. You just got served, samurai!


If someone made westside story the rpg, I would probably at least give it a try.


I'm not sure I like your implementation of the action point system and I like action point systems. I think it just will amplify any wonkiness you feel the current IP system has. It seems to me it would be easier to use a more standard action point system. Just give everyone some set amount of action points. If you want a complex actions to be 4 action points, make it 4 each round. Then if you feel the extra IP doubling actions is too much, make each extra one give an extra 2 action points. If action points aren't used at the end of the turn, then they're lost. No worrying about accumulating, etc. If you want to give people to a chance to use left over action points, let them start an action that uses more points. i.e. if they have 3 points left over, they can start a complex action, but they have to declare what it is and in the next turn if they want to finish it they can spend the 1 action point or they lose the invested action points. Alternately, let people spend left over action points to go first in a round. You can also, as an option apply action point penalties for things like paralysis or injuries, but that's up to you. It's way more intuitive for me than this accumulating action point system and requires less rolling.

Good luck with this, let us know if you give it a try.
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