I'd be curious to see what ya got as far as revisions so far. I think 4th Ed has taken us in the right direction and with some TLC in the right places 5th Ed could be a welcome change. If its a cut paste job for the material you run out if time to fix or a backslide into previous editions I don't see it being a viable replacement for my gaming table though.

All4... where I think they got things wrong with SR4 is the attributes... they're too important and contribute too much to the dice pools. Same goes for equipment. So you run into the trap of almost always raise the attributes before the skills... But under SR3 rolling only the skill made a lot more sense because of the variable TN system. Dice pools never added so much to single checks as attributes do now.

I think they would have done better to keep the skills going from 1-12 like the old days. Stuck with the old attributes but only added half their rating to the pools. The thing about 3rd was the dice pools were added here and there but they didn't dominate the skills, you always rolled the skill then added a few dice here and there as you saw fit. Now you can get away with an Agility 12 elf.. and damn the skills.

I've toyed with playtesting locally 1-12 skills... then capping dice at no more than twice the skill rating... (excess dice go towards offsetting dicepool penalties...).

The last part is the situational mods don't work well... -4 out of 10 swings the odds a lot... -4 out of 20 doesn't. But it does beat the old variable TN's by a LONG shot... Short of doing penalties as a percentile... (remove 20% of the dice from the pool... very quickly works to 2 out of 10 or 4 out of 20)... don't see a good way of handling that.

That's the thing, attributes adding to the dice pool makes them MEAN SOMETHING rather than just being the worthless point sinks they were before. Granted, skills should not have been stuck with an arbitrary cap either. Adding full attribute along with unlimited skill growth would have the the absolute perfect way to go.

Ân eGhost lacks no longer has a magic rating hence loses all magical ability which happens to include the ablity to sustain it's former powers. I don't think there's much wiggle room there.

@Shadow Prophet
For me personally the question is in which direction it will go. I won't be wasting time and energy in a project which will end bringing all the flaws of the 3. Edition in the 4. Edition.
Short: Thinking about a new System, yes.
Frankenrules: Thanks, but no thanks.

Technically, sum up Impact+Ballistic. Every two points of armor over your quickness value, you lose 1 combat die. I'm rather sure your troll is at 0-1 Combat die left.

Now as a GM, I don't like every NPC use APDS bullets (makes the game too deadly at my taste). But, if one would do such a min maxing, he'll taste some. They halve armor.

And now, I guess that even some Heavy pistol could represent a threat, even to your troll. Ok, no death at 1 shot, but it could turn up the tides.



(and I'm not talking about idtiotic -I try to kill my PC-kind of behavior like 1 sniper, 14S Sniper Riffle, APDS ammo, 1 shot, 1 dead tank-troll)



And about the damage overflow, there's an optionnal rule for deadlier-overdamage which says that you fill additionnal boxes if the damages are staged over Deadly.

Yes, I know how that works. And no, the character has a Combat Pool of 7. Again, he is not encumbered



Never happened in game for well over 180 Karma. Even with APDS, he still had 5-6 points of Armor. So that is still soaking at 4. *Shrug*
This is not a testosterone comparison. I provided the information to show that it is easy to not care about most man-portable weapons if the build is right.

That particular Troll was a monster in melee combat, which was what he was built for, as such, he had to be able to survive the ranged weapon fire options. He routinely bounced automatic weapons fire, from both SMG's and Assault Weapons, and took the occasional damage from sniper fire. He was insanely durable. When he ported to 4th Edition, he was much less surviveable, as would be expected (I mourn the changes to Melee Combat). Soak 2's became Soak 5's, and so he fared a bit less in that conversion against weapons fire (Seeing as how I did not upgrade his Armor to insane levels, as was the [stupid] option, but continued to use the same armor as previous editions. Just becasue you can does not mean you should. Even still he was soaking with 22 Dice). *shrug*

@sk8bcn
Unless you are getting A LOT of success on the attack, that won't be the case....
Again: Unless you use a really heavy weapon or full auto... Forget it.

The damage you can deal in SR 3 was restricted to 10P!
That means if he just manage 2 hits on his soaking roll, he would still be alive.

So unless you push the power up to 11-12, at least. And for getting from 8M to 11D means just about 10 hits!
(And you will need still at least 2 shots to bring him down!

What the dickens are you basing that on Irion?
POWER NEVER went up in SR3 for Guns. Only for Close Combat with Extra Net Hits after you had achieved Deadly Damage . . and that only counts for net hits after the defender has had his rolls.

How did you manage to not get him encumbred?

If you had 12 Ballistic, you probably had 6 impact, which makes 18 total. At Quickness 6, that's still 6 dices lost.



Anyway, I find your impact stacking still pretty insane for SR3.

Because an Attribute of 6 is worthless in SR and you can start with an 8 at least in it.
And stacking impact armor is close to impossible in SR3.
Best way was to use some worn Armor and then have a Mage cast an Armor-Spell on you when needed.
Nothing better than +6/6 Armor for no encumbrance whatsoever. And you end up with 10/12 impact/ballistic easy.
Which makes resisting even bigger weapons easy enough as a troll.

You misinterpreted the rules, actually:

Character A, shoots, TN 3, nets 7 succès (no cover TN4, standart street lights +1, Smartlink -2).

Character B soaks. 9M, 2/1 armor, TN 6, nets 2 successes.

It's not 7 successes=+3 level stoped to D, then 2 soak successes so Serious, but:
7-2 successes= +5 success = +2 damage levels, so deadly.


And damage overflow was: +1 box/2 successes, optional rule.

So Sniper shoots, roll 12 dices TN 3, 8 successes.

Def unware of sniper, doesn't have combat pool, rolls no success.

Effect +8 success, =>Serious staged to Deadly + 3 boxes.


Still not overly deadly but the game is already diffcult enough.

It's an answer to me?

A troll can't start with 8 quickness. Didn't your GM houseruled it by making it dependent to Body instead of Quickness (by raw)?

A Troll has a natural Maximum in Quickness of 5.
Meaning he can get 5+(5/2=2.5 rounded up to 3)=8 Quickness. Meaning you need the Suprathoid Gland and 2 levels of Muscle Stuff or 3 Levels of Muscle Stuff.
With exceptional Attribute he gets back up to 9.

Bingo... And with an Adept, he also has access to Improved Attribute.
So, for this one, it was Improved attribute + 2 levels of Muscle Stuff.
And Mystic Armor (iirc) boosts to avoid that pesky encumbrance.

Tell me it's not min-maxing

it ain't minmaxing.
minmaxing is when you lower something to gain more of something else.
this is basic optimization tech. and the only reason why i forgot about the adept stuff is because i am really bad at magic <.<

Maybe if you stopped shoving your body full of ware you wouldn't be!

Just FYI you could have clarified that like eight posts ago, rather than just saying "nope, didn't impact him."

Another thing : Make Melee more fun. Fuck reality. Reality blows. If I want to jump off a 2 story building and Big Elbow some mook, I should be rewarded for it. Furthermore, Guns have gotten a power creep, Hand to Hand has gotten major power creep, but Melee weapons havent. How the hell is a punch doing more damage then a BATTLE AXE?

SHOULDN'T HAPPEN!

Ideally, I'd like to see something like 'Melee snap'. They tell cops that if a bad guy has a weapon out, and is within 12 feet of you, and you've got your pistol holstered, you're getting stabbed. Make that reality in the game. Ignore initiative scores, if there's a guy close enough with a fucking axe out, he's getting to choppy chop you before you shoot him with your concealed holster SMG bullshit.

CHOPPY CHOP!

What part of "He is not encumbered" was unclear?

Actually me not.

Playing Feng Shui, yes. Or Wushu maybe. Or HeroQuest. Or Marvel RPG...


I like SR to have kind of a "realistic, not too much" feeling. Style of feeling: the last Bourne film, not too much more.

Well, how you managed not to be encumbred ofc.

Ummmm... It isn't. Took him a long time to get there, and he was still not optimized. *shrug*

Does it really matter? How I got there is pretty irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Cyberpunk is always an option?

Uh what?

I must have been unclear.

taking hollywood films: Bourne approach of action (ok on what a supertrained guy could do) vs The Transporter (totally unrealistic).

Both can have their adepts. For Sr I prefer a more realistic approach.


That means: ok, you're wired, augmented and stuff. Then you perform way better. But not up to a Feng Shui style which is inspired by chinese action films.


I had not that much comparisons left over into the cyberpunk-genre.

Because people kept asking. Rather than say "he was not encumbered" you say "he had an augmented quickness of 8."

No, I get what you're saying. It's just that in a world with shapeshifting jaguars, magicians throwing up fire walls and plant spirits, vampires, zombies, and pixies, A guy launching himself from 25 feet to better hit someone is probably the least crazy thing on the list.

Ugh melee... always hated it. If you bring a knife to a gunfight you deserve what you get... even if it is a really really big knife.


It's one thing when you pack a pistol and a sword... quite another when you expect your melee skills to automatically make ranged weapons ineffective in close combat. Especially in a game where most combat is of a room to room close combat nature where bringing melee to bear isn't all that hard if you're willing to leave cover and accept the consequences of becoming bullet magnet.

The problem isn't Gun > Knife, it's Fists > Knife.

Disagree. Very strongly. All of that involves magic and lots of it. Magical fists have raw damage but not precision... magical weapons have damage depending on size and concealability but have a lot of precision due to their reach and +focus dice. By Magic 6... the fists only have about a small damage advantage over a force 6+ weapon focus. Without that single minded focus and investment though weapons are pretty superior.


The only wierdness is the ranged fist power... which turns it into a very short ranged weapon. Which gets back to the whole... don't bring a knife to a gunfight bit in the first place.

Look up titanium bonelacing, hardliner gloves, and the Martial Arts rules for me.

Compare the result to a combat axe.

Yep.

No point in getting into that, Falconer goes by the fallacious logic that hardliners don't just add damage to the normal punch and make it physical.

Meh, even so.

No, you're the one with fallacious logic All4Big... where in the rules does it state that hardliners are not a weapon in their own right. Don't call out other people if you can't cite a hard rules authority rather than your fluffy sense of anything goes and rules don't matter... even when the rules clearly disagree with your stated position. The rules state that they use the unarmed 'skill' to attack with... not that they augment your already impressive unarmed attack.

You're right you can't cite it. It does not exist. It does not once say that hardliners at +1 to the users unarmed damage, it says they're a weapon and do their damage code the same as a combat axe. If you choose to make hardliner weapon focus... you don't get weapon focus and all your other stuff, you get weapon focus hardliners the same as if you made a weapon focus axe. No more, no less. That's the balance inherent in the rules. You simply refuse to accept the rules because they don't comport with your powergaming.

Then when your powergaming breaks one aspect by allowing two things to combine which shouldn't... you then complain that the game is 'broken' and unarmed is overpowered. Because you insist on pushing a questionable reading of things with zero support in the rules then not liking the outcome.

You're no different than the teenager who murders his parents then cries for leniency because he's now an orphan.

It's called using common sense. It's a frakking hardened glove, and an unarmed strike is a weapon, so by extension common sense dictates that. Just because you want to rules lawyer your way into screwing people out of what they should get, doesn't make you right.

Exactly... you can't cite the rules. So you call things broken specifically because you refuse to follow the rules... there can be no argument with someone who refuses to accept even the rules by which the game is governed as a baseline. Why bother even writing them... if they'll just be ignored.


It's no different than the other board thread... the rules devote a FULL page to a single quality and go to all sorts of ends to make this clear it's entirely 100% GM discretion how/when/why... and should even be kept from the player that it's happening. So this means to you, this should all be discussed with the GM in full and should only happen in accordance to the players wishes with his full foreknowledge.

And what unequivocable proof can you provide for your BS claim that the gloves don't work like that, especially since the unarmed attack "weapon" wouldn't get any of those bonuses either by your logic?

Common sense and rules never go hand in hand.
Had a guy in my old group that tried to argue real world logic for everything, even when the rules explicitly stated that it worked differently. The only thing he ever achieved with this was wasting hours of everyones time on several occasions.

That's the point, it's a grey area in this case. The fallacy comes from saying that wearing that pair of gloves means you can't use bonuses to Unarmed. It doesn't say that anywhere. Doesn't say the other way either, but allowing the gloves to function completely as a potential weapon focus for Unarmed Combat is beneficial to the players and their enjoyment. This is the most important thing. The other way is going out of one's way to try and hamstring the PCs. This is bad.

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Oh, and one other thing, I don't believe there is a such thing as "broken" or "overpowered" in rules, only misused, and I see no misuse in letting Unarmed Combat have access to something to have a weapon focus (like other melee has).

Except then the orphan cries because it's broken and all the other melee weapons are subpar. Because he insists on combining two things which weren't designed to be combined.

The rules also state that if I pickup a dwarf and use it as a club I use unarmed combat. I guess that also means that i should get all my unarmed augmentations like bone lacing and the like!


If you check back on the threads, there is a 100% canon way to get a weapon focus involved in unarmed. But it involves cyber and essence loss. And a huge risk to the user (since he becomes vulnerable to astral attacks when he activates the weapon focus). (construct the bone lacing cyberware as a weapon focus, then install it into you). So it's not exactly a panacea though it is scarily effective.

Is using the utterly ridiculous the only REAL defense you have for the ruling? Must be, since I haven't seen any argument in favor of it that's worth more than what I leave in the toilet.

Agreed. Internet time is short so I ranted.

I fully understand the importance of the line developer. I simply want a small group of critics to review brief trial rules system to see if it is even vaguely worth effort required to pitch the idea. Also, if critics approve, the forum might garner attention. As this is not my domain, I do not know another way of doing so. At worst, I create some rules a few people will adopt in their games. Different views are extremely useful in the creation process so would you like to take a look and add your opinions?

I agree and have taken that into account in the rules.

@All4BigGuns
Sorry, but his ruling is not more silly than those promoted by others.

And this burns down to a point I bring up quite often: A good rulesystem makes up definition of what is stacking with what and to which extend BEFORE making up the gear.