Hate to break it to you, but your corner of the world is not necessarily representative for the rest of the planet...


Those are standard perception modifiers which apply to every test. Radar however gets anything which degrades Signal ratings on top of that, while E-Sensing is totally immune to such shenanigans.

Hate to break it to you, but the default setting of the game, Seattle, is part of "my" corner of the world.


Quote where it explicitly says E-sensing is "totally immune" to jamming. Chapter and verse: I want page numbers and book name.

EDIT: Oh, and by the way, it's not just Technomancers that can get that ability. Changelings can, too - with the "Electrosense" Metagenic quality (10BP / 20 Karma).

...only 60 years in the future, after a couple of world-shaking calamities. Given that the UCAS have even abandoned the prehistoric measurement system of the current USA, they might just have gotten around to learning the art of brick-laying.


Another hint: Discussing based on a certain premise and the suddenly going "well, now prove to me that this premise is valid" when the discussion does not go in your favor looks rather like a red herring.

But anyway, the range of E-Sensing is based on the TM's Resonance and not Signal, jamming and Wifi-negation techniques do not affect Resonance, ergo E-Sensing does not care about jamming. And in case you want to try an even cheaper trick and claim that the books do not explicitly state "E-Sensing is unaffected by jammers": Prove that radar is unaffected by Counterspelling.

The more I think about it, the more I don't like this "Limit" idea that's being added. Roll poorly? Edge. Roll well? Edge. Now I'm being punished for rolling well, as well as punished for rolling poorly. Edge Edge Edge. It's becoming the must-have-at-all-costs stat, beyond what it already is.

Plus I just kind of don't like the limit on hits mechanic, it seems to get in the way of the sheer excitement of rolling 7 hits on 8 dice. "Oh sorry, your gun's only got an Accuracy of 4". Well frack.

Tell me again why Technos should be allowed to have perfect vision?

You're right, only sixty years. Whereas we've been building "stick-frame" houses here for over two centuries.

The "new" stuff now, is aluminum framing, covered in drywall. The drywall itself is evolving too; in SR terms, I can see it being a plastic panel, or a biofiber mat perhaps. But the technology behind buildings is going to move forward here, not backward - which is just what going to "22cm brick" would be. Even especially-thick concrete is becoming more and more a "crude thing of the past" (outside certain military applications), and that's today ... without the advances in materials science we know to be part of Shadowrun's setting.


It may have looked like a red herring, but it's not. I honestly wanted to know if there was an actual, RAW statement that it was immune to "jamming" (which needn't be the "Jamming" rules for Signal-based sensors, by the way).

Patently, there isn't.

So it's not that E-Sensing is unstoppable, it's that a bog-standard Jammer unit probably won't do much to it ... and/or, the rules don't cover how to degrade that sensory capability.

But I say again: E-sensing should be at least as susceptible to disruption, interruption, overwhelming, etc, as any other sense. Fog limits vision distances - even though eyesight doesn't have a "Signal rating" for the fog to "jam". There is, despite your protests to the contrary, absolutely no reason there can't be a parallel effect for E-sensing. Indeed, I would generally posit that most urban environments are so littered with things for E-sensing to pick up, that a Technomancer trying to pick out smaller, more subtle things - like, the bioelectric field of a person - would definitely qualify for some sort of "distracted" penalty, just like (for example) trying to eavesdrop in a busy nightclub.

Woul that I coudl be more specific, but alas, those books remain on the old computer's HDD, and will for a few days more.

[.... stupid double-post ...]

This sort of makes sense, I would probably think about using it as a house rule...but now you've gone and house-ruled things. When people say E-sensing isn't affected by jamming, they're talking about the rules. By the rules, jamming affects Signal, which E-sensing doesn't use. There are no visibility or other modifiers table that includes E-Sensing. The rules for E-sensing never mention modifiers.

You're talking about altering the rules. Which is ok, necessary even sometimes, but it's not the rules, the rules that other people are actually talking about..

Ergo, E-Sensing is stupid and incomplete and rife with problems.

Or... That is simply your opinion.
Personally, I think E-Sensing is not something I would choose as my first few Echoes as a Technomancer, but I would never say it was broken, incomplete and/or rife with problems.

I would say that it was sufficiently incomplete that it needed a few tweaks.

Like, say, a list of "typical modifiers and thresholds" for associated Perception checks. Maybe even specifically make them Perception+Resonance, if the rules don't specify otherwise already.

...

Which is to say: I think it needs more polish and refinement.

Yeah, the E-sensing table could be more specific and whatnot, but I like the general concept and most of what they actually have rules for it. Alot of the techno stuff seems not very well thought out or complete. The Trodes Echo...wtf...

*edit*


Both of those are already rules for E-sensing in Unwired.

I rather like it as a way to cut out a lot of the min-maxxing bullshit that leads to characters with preposterous dice pools that massively overshadow their attributes.

I agree that dice pools can get really high with too many bonuses that overshadow attributes or skills. But I think there's better ways to do this using this new "Limit" system. Limits don't actually fix the problem of preposterous dice pools, but are a kludge system to try to hold all the water in the poorly constructed dam that should be built correctly in the first place.

All limits do is penalize you for rolling well. You have to goldilocks-roll in SR5 now: don't roll too well or too poorly, but roll just right.

I think you're selling the character design implications short, although I agree that I don't like seeming to penalize a player for rolling well. The thing I -like- is that this is a disincentive to focusing on making huge dicepools as opposed to increasing a character's basic statistics. If rolling 16 dice on a test isn't going to be advantageous, then the emphasis goes to spending that karma in other ways.

This may not be the best way of doing it, but the only other effective one I can think of offhand would be hard dicepool caps.

"It's less good than some other powers" isn't really saying much.

Follow-up: I assume that this is the full defense pool for ranged attacks, because otherwise firefights just reverted to line tactics...

Nope. All defense now uses Reaction + Intuition. Full defense adds something else, I can't recall what though since none of our players used it, only the mooks we were fighting, and the Catalyst rep sped through that part pretty quickly.

In that case, I declare the combat system officially fucked. Consider this little table:


If the defender has REA + INT 11, 53% of the time the attack fails irrespectively of what the attacker rolled, since his Accuracy limit makes it impossible to roll more hits than the defender. The attacker may opt to spend edge, sure, at which point the defender simply does the same or goes on full defense.
If those numbers stand, everybody needs to bring a sniper rifle into close-quarters shootouts -- whereas snipers do not really need sniper rifles, because an unaware defender does not roll defense and therefore any weapon with Accuracy 1 is sufficient to hit.

Playtesting MY ASS

Never said it was less good, just that My Technomancers tend to have other priorities is all...
If I actually had a concept where E-Sensing was important, I would likely take it.

You are assuming a lot, but I'm under NDA.

I think that this is really making some assumptions. please correct if I am wrong.

That makes a good question for the ones who played the play-test.

Did the limit apply before or after the opposed roll subtracted hits? also, was defense an opposed roll? I am assuming yes, but thought I would ask.

Also how did armor come into play? Basically was it I roll to hit and you oppose with Reaction+Intuition, then net hits add to a DV, then you roll bod Plus armor to resist that, or something else?

Thanks,
Red

If the writers had wanted E-Sensing to be vulnerable to jamming, they would have based its range on Signal (which TMs have already) and/or mentioned it explicitly (like with the radar sensors).

It was a limited short demo of a book that's not out yet, in a convention setting. I think it's not going too far out on a limb here, to say the guy giving the demo wasn't using 'all' of the rules, but just a bit of it to run the demo. When the guy is saying things like "For the purpose of this playtest all firearm accuracy is 4" Indicates that it's not always 4 and the rules are being simplified for quick demo play.

Gotta wait for the book to come out to flip out guys.

Well, I am assuming that CGL would not intentionally mar the first public appearance of a new product by using numbers which have previously been tested and found ridiculous...

... because of course, every singly jot, dot, and iota of the Sacred and Holy Rulebooks was perfectly written, and mistakes have never been made in any of the Annointed Texts.

...

And Bogota is a Port city.

...

/facepalm

It's been playtested, trust me. I'm not sure why they went with acc 4 for their demos, but...oh well. I'm just a freelancer. There are things I could say about Edge and a few other things from the sounds of how the playtest went, but, well, NDAs. I'll just say that I guess you can't really show off every part of a system in a half hour, and leave it at that.

But, yes. FWIW, it's been playtested plenty.

You're also assuming that this is the only conceivable way that this can work.
Assumptions don't generally work so well. I'll hold off my judgment until the final product is out.

Except not all guns will have an Accuracy of 4. Some might have an Accuracy of 8, and then you can use all of your hits. That high accuracy gun is probably going to be a top of the line precision weapon, though, so you need to be willing to shell out the nuyen and make the contacts necessary to even find one. Or maybe you're okay compromising on an accuracy 6 weapon, giving you almost all of your hits on an awesome roll but being more affordable and available than milspec.

The idea of weapon accuracy is that hardware limits your skill. The best gunslinger in the world can't make very good use of a Barrens Special, even assuming it doesn't just blow their hand off with a misfire. On the flipside, there's no point in outfitting a bunch of gangers with high quality precision weapons, because they can barely hit the broad side of a barn. Different guns for different skill levels and different uses. If you look at the 4E weapon listings, particularly those in the Gun Haven books, they have the Shadowtalk snippets with people arguing the various merits of the different weapons. For example, the Onotari Arms Violator has the following exchange.

> Onotari’s latest line of heavy pistols has a rather small magazine compared to the competition. If you don’t know how to maximize the use of every bullet, you had better pick something else.
> Riser

> If you’re good enough to afford this kind of hardware, you’re good enough to not need extra bullets.
> Kane

Clearly this is supposed to be a more expensive option intended for higher skilled shooters. But if you look at the actual listing, though, the Violator doesn't compare at all to the classic Ares Predator IV - it's flatly inferior.

The Violator has the exact same damage, armor penetration, firing mode, and recoil stats, but with only 2/3 the ammo and at 40% greater cost. The only benefit from a Violator is a built-in Basic Advanced Safety system, but assuming you really want that feature and can spare a mod slot, you could just get that added to a Predator IV for less than the additional cost of the Violator. And you'd STILL have 50% more ammo to boot!

But if 4E had an accuracy mechanic? If the Violator was more accurate than the Predator IV and better rewarded more skilled shooters? Then it'd easily become a reasonable alternative for a skilled marksman. Your average punk on the street with no real skill to speak of still gets more bang for his buck from the Predator IV, but for someone who can make proper use of the Violator, it actually would be the more attractive choice.

~Umi

I assume they didn't let you take the character sheets back home or photograph them?

The matrix rules are straight up incomplete in a couple of places. So, "if the writers wanted that it would explicitly be there" is a pretty ridiculous argument. We have no idea, for example, how the writers intended for Machine Sprites to operate drones.

The character sheets were literally the sample characters from Shadowrun 4th edition, same stats and everything, just with the limits handwritten on the sheet. It was more of a demo of the combat mechanics than a full-fledged game.

I just want to get clear confirmation here: Are you saying melee defense no longer included melee skill?

Thank God this Initiative system is returning. It was far superior.



This one could be good, but it could also cause some problems with the limits on hits.



Well, I see one thing that will be getting house ruled out of any game I run, most likely back to the way it currently works where it resets every time you get an action.

I'd rather withhold judgement on the recoil system until I see it in detail and in action. "As long as you're holding down the trigger" suggests Full Auto firing as opposed to Semi-Auto (where the gun fires as fast as you can pull the trigger), and I can imagine ways in which that could be changed that make sense.

You ever see those sort of macho youtube videos where soldiers or gun enthusiasts are messing around with their machine guns, firing from the hip or one handed? Notice how they typically fire in short bursts, and when they don't they're basically just laying down the equivalent of suppression fire, or braced so hard into a single position that they couldn't possibly aim at a non-stationary target? If you're sitting there doing Full Burst after Full Burst, the gun is constantly firing at max speed, realistically there's not much time to compensate for the recoiling effect properly unless the weapon is mounted or similar. On more lightweight weapons the gun can easily start to climb rapidly.

So I can easily imagine a number of ways the system might carry over recoil "as long as you're holding down the trigger". The simplest way I can think of would be that any uncompensated recoil in a Full Burst carries over and adds to the next one if you don't let go of the trigger between actions phases. So you're firing 10 rounds, suffering 9 recoil, and compensating 5 of it, the next action phase you'd suffer 14 recoil and compensate another 5 out of that, et cetera. But there could be numerous ways to alter recoiling that make it more desireable to fire in short bursts rather than in constant FA.

~Umi

In other words, your premise for this discussion just turned from "what is RAW" to "well, maybe the authors meant something different when they wrote 'Resonance'". Maybe they did, but discussing hypothetical intentions is just as pointless as discussing possible future building standards. The only thing we can discuss are the written facts, namely that E-Sensing works on Resonance and that less than 99.9999% of the population live in drywall buildings.

Waht do you mean by "this"? That combat remains on opposed test where the attacker rolled Attribute + Skill? In that case, I'd say Shinxy would have noticed an told us if it were any different


Like I said, I assumed CGL would not ignore testing results in the most important part of a product introduction and therefore these mechanics must be untested. If they were tested and the feedback ignored, well, it does not exactly make things seem better

Heck, even without any dice rolling or math it should be obvious that increasing the defender's DP combined with limiting the attacker's hits leads to this.

Calm down, dude.

Yeah, you know what? Think whatever you like. I'm tired of arguing with you.

That was calm. Dripping with sarcasm, yes. But calm nonetheless.

Accuracy could limit the net hits.

And it probably would have been reported if everyone matrix dodged every 2nd bullet, so it is entirely probable that you're missing some detail of which we all aren't aware.
There could be tons of negative modifiers for evasion, there could be another system in place that governs how limits work, there could be lots of positive modifiers for shooting.

That's what I mean by 'this' and it's why I won't speculate about it until I have the full information necessary to deconstruct or applaud such a system.

I also got to play the demo at PAX. Only thing I really have to add is something the guy running it mentioned. He said that while at character creation the limit for skills is still 6, the maximum has been increased to 12. Basically so that as a new character you wouldn't be the best in the world at whatever.

He also mentioned that they hoped to be able to release it at one of two different cons this summer. I think the two he mentioned were Gen Con and Origins, but don't quote me on that. I played first thing Friday, so PAX overload has made a lot of things fuzzy in my head.

I also picked up a physical copy of Storm Front at their booth, now I just need to find some time to read it...

First move the goalposts, then try "well, there are no hard answers, maybe...", and finally escape via the "nanana, you are stupid" route...boooring


@bannockburn:

Remember the demo was done with the sample characters from the BBB, where even the sam has less than 10 Initiative. At those numbers the difference is small enough that it would probably not get noticed in short demo.
Since I already have Matlab open:
If you have 9 dice and the attacker 15, the chance to get hit is 0.70 (no limit) vs 0.55 (Accuracy 4)
If however the defender has 12 dice and the attacker rolls 20, the chance drops from 0.79 to 0.38


You are of course right that we do not know everything. But if the big reveal of the brand new system uses numbers which turn out to be crap at first glance, it does not exactly increase my expectations for what will follow. And the idea of having to juggle a handful of modifiers on every dodge test is not exactly exiting, either

I know that the numbers don't make sense the way you crunch them. Presented as is, they are very very stupid and the system would indeed be Matrix as you say.

However, your fallacy is that it's only a glance. It is nothing more than a glance and it cannot begin to give you a complete picture, so perhaps you set your expectations based on incomplete data, which in turn makes the number crunching worthless, except as an exercise in a vacuum.

It's not that I criticize your results, I just don't understand why you would speculate that wildly and then say "Well, I'm not excited." That's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think of myself as an outspoken critic if I don't like something, but here is just not enough data to proclaim "I like" or "I dislike".

Not that anyone ever addressed my question:

Why should a technomancer be allowed perfect vision?

Cheap Lasik Surgery with no Essence Cost?

And here is where a big problem lies. People claiming that a character sheet not 100% "optimized" through extensive number crunching of probabilities and 'karma efficiency' is automatically a "crap character".

Aaaaand you completely missed his point.

This is actually part of why I like the idea of attribute-based caps on successes. It severely limits the amount of cheese weasel that can be applied to create dice pools.