And I would disagree with that point of view. *shrug*

So? Last time I checked nobody challenged that it happened, only why it happened...

PS: And given the TOS of this forum, climate data is something I won't touch with a ten-foot pole here

A hardcap of what, 64 extra dice per run?

The problem with Edge is that it gets exponentially more powerful, unlike every other attribute that increases linearly. The mechanics of Edge lend it not toward scrappy luck or perseverance against odds (low dice / high difficulty), but rather on rolls that already have a lot of dice behind them to take advantage of the exploding sixes. Or apparently to raise hit caps, I guess so you can blast the troll with 11 successes rather than 5.

It's not luck, it's just a weird metagame resource.

Do you count the resource utility of each attribute? Have 10 passes with a Pistol (5 Turns, 2 IP each, 2 shots per IP - total of 20 rolls), and that Agility of 5 is worth 100 dice of utility. Add in standard defensive rolls along with it (Reaction of 5 = 9 dice of defensive rolls per Turn against ranged attacks = additional 45 dice utility over that same 5 Turns of Combat) and you have so totally blown the utility of Edge so out of the water that it is laughable. Normal attributes are not restricted to how many times they may be used in a Session.

All those who don't currently like Edge, what say you to the idea proposed where Edge is not purchasable, but increases as the character's earned karma increases?

Which takes us back to the bad days of previous editions. No thanks.
Of course, this was not really directed at me, as I like the cuirrent Edge mechanic. *shrug*

A hardcap of 8 for lucky humans. Which can translate into 64 extra dice per run. Or per session, even, depending on the system used for refreshment.
Since you've already only considered one possible edge use, why don't you go ahead and compare that number to what is possible in SR3 with a karmapool of ... let's say 20.


Which, in part, represents luck.
Note how it's not called Luck, but Edge

Yes.




How you get it is less of a concern than how it's used.

Comparing a potential starting character to one at the ~200 Karma level (or ~400 for metas) from a previous edition?



Better mechanic: spend a point of Edge, counts hits on 4+ (with exploding 6's). No extra dice. That's an edge. An extra handful of dice on top of a big stack of dice for eleventy billion counted hits available for nearly every significant roll in a run is a win button.

Sure. Why not? That starting character cannot _ever_ get more than his 8 edge. That's what I originally said even. The open-endedness (nicity? whatever ^^) of the karma pool system in comparison to the edge. Please read the original point before arguing against it.
Reiterated here for your perusal:

You're welcome.


Different mechanic. Can't say if better. Needs playtesting

Well it seemed that part of the concern with Edge was how a starting character could have 8x8 extra dice, just from the word go. Accumulating Edge based on earned karma would delay that 8x8 scenario until some (large?) amount of karma in the future. Then it's easier to imagine a well-seasoned runner having this kind of tool in their arsenal.

With the karma system I proposed you would permanently spend edge and accumulate it as you gained karma.
So someone that accumulated edge over a long time would be able to pull off what did Sean Connery in the second highlander movie "All your energy focused into one point in time"

Also, christ on a bike people are passionate about dice luck.
Wholeheartedly support the idea of good or bad dice and lucky rollers, even if it's just human nature assigning intent.

All I have to add on the subject of dice luck is a 24-year unbroken string of critical fumbles. Every time I GM Shadowrun, *since the game came out*, I've critically fumbled at least once per game, and usually more. My record is all ones on 13 dice. And yes, I have witnesses. I don't know how the odds work for this sort of thing, but it does happen.

As for Edge, front-loading it is a more serious problem than gaining it eventually. A high Edge character may not gain any more luck as he gains karma, but it's not as bad if everyone is gaining it as well. In SR2-3, it wasn't that one character was hard to challenge as karma pools grew, it was that everyone became harder to challenge as karma pools grew. That meant things were balanced, between players at least, it's just that things became more powerful in ways not all GM's wanted.

Cost wise, having a high Edge doesn't prevent characters from having high dice pools elsewhere. You can have an Edge 6 pornomancer, for example. You might not be able to get the 50+ dice, but you can settle for 40, which is more than enough. The trick to a high Edge character is that you have comparable dice pools in most areas, with Edge on top of that. Unless you show off, you don't need to use Edge any more than any other character would. So, limiting Edge refreshes doesn't hurt them, it actually helps them more.

I don't see it. You complain about a POTENTIAL 64 additional Dice for a Human, and completely ignore that that is not likely how that 8 edge is actually used in play. In addition, you apparently have no issues with the Attribute 9 Charactrer who gets those dice in everything that attribute pertains to. There is a Disconnect.

Case in Point. An Edge 2 Troll I played had a 19 DP soak roll. Scored a single success. Used Edge to Reroll all failures. Net 18 Dice gain for a single point of Edge. Same character, still faring quite badly, needed to Burn Edge to survive an Encounter. Net Dice Gain? Absolutely nothing.

There are other uses of Edge than Adding the Edge score to the DP for exploding 6's.
Just becasue something can be abused does not mean it will be abused.

We aren't exactly talking about Karma Pool, though. It's got its own problems that aren't necessary to hash out.



I have kicked around an idea for tying it to karma gain, involving doubling the amount of Karma needed for the next step (have metas start at 1 and humans at 2) and then acquire a point at 10, 20, 40, 80, 160, 320, 640 etc. That makes it a quick race up to the 4-5 mark, and then a long haul to get to the 6-7 mark.

I would want to change the base Edge mechanic, still, though.



1 in 13,060,694,016 -- or about 1000 times less likely than dying from a lightning strike. Don't golf in the rain.

Uhm. Right. You answer to a point I made about not liking the karma pool in comparison to the edge attribute and then claim that we're not talking about karma pool?
Whatever floats your boat.
You still fail to make a compelling argument why you think that Edge is poorly implemented and works awfully. Look to Cain on how to do it

I never addressed your comments about Karma Pool until for some reason you wanted me to compare high Edge versus high Karma Pool. Your snarky 'learn to read' bullshit is unwarranted and unappreciated.

I don't like to use the phrase 'misanthropic shut-ins' all that often (that's a lie, it sort of rolls off the tongue), so can we drag ourselves out of the mud, people?

No, but only because Edge doesn't need to be changed, it needs to be removed from the game in its entirety.



Try rolling all 1s on a 24 dice soak pool in consecutive sessions.

Karma pool in earlier editions... hated it. Sorry... just a mess... especially the 'group karma pool'.

TJ: strongly disagree... when things are written in an easily abusable manner... they get abused. That's why I objected to things like people abusing 'mist form' to teleport equipment as a fluff plot device, it's the camel's nose under the tent. I see it all the time in all sorts of games... creative players find creative and disruptive uses for all kinds of things. Also, why I state when it comes to crunch those are the things playtesting should find and point out to be fixed.

But in this case the edge 8 human paid out the nose for this... 20BP quality... an extra 15BP more on top of 60BP spent raising edge. So 95 out of 400BP went into edge alone.... that's not abuse in it's own right to get a lot of dice out of it... especially when you can only spend that 8 times before you're out and not all of them will be for adding 8 dice.



Though I just had a realization of why All4Big would advocate he needs 1000 karma to make a 'balanced' character. Bad luck quality and 1 edge... means he has no 'catchall' dice pool to use when he needs to pull a rabbit out of his hat and turn a mediocre dice pool into a good one.

Also he doesn't realize something important... the players between them normally have many times the amount of edge available to the GM. If the GM does spend edge countering player uses... he runs out before the players do. All it does is drag out the scene a little longer... rather than a quickie... *bang* ouch bullet to the eyeball... he's dead... big bad is down in the first round from the first punch... what a wimp, not memorable at all..



Edge and refresh... if SR5 makes edge more important through exceeding the limits... then I'd say it should most likely refresh faster a point or so at a time. Maybe even weight it so people low on edge regain it faster... But in any case, the 'critical' success rules are so badly flawed that I'd never use them to refresh edge.. it simply rewards powergamers for powergaming! (the bigger the dice pool the more likely the critical success becomes... the faster edge refreshes for the non-powergamed pools). Put simply... i expect the pistol adept to pull 4 nets every time he pulls the trigger... I don't think he should get a point of edge back on top of the rewards he's already pocketing for his stellar firearms skills as opposed to the guy who made a better well-rounded character but is only rolling 12 dice instead of 18+.

It doesn't make it wrong at all. Your guy, created like, 5-6 characters with a random attributes rolls? That's like 36 rolls. The chances it happens is certainly way superior than winning in Euro-million.


The law of great number says:

"In probability theory, the law of large numbers (LLN) is a theorem that describes the result of performing the same experiment a large number of times. According to the law, the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value, and will tend to become closer as more trials are performed."


The samples you describe are small. So it's very possible.



Wanna mix the idea of beeing lucky and probabilities? Easy: Let's say that beeing lucky=roll well a certain number of important dices. That roll has a probability associated. So it may happen. So it's possible (in probability) that a lucker exists.


Likeliness of it decreases over time the more you roll as this probability follow a gaussian curve. (as it's finite, it's not really a gaussian curve but maths addicts well get the idea).

And here's proof you didn't read. Because I specifically said "dozens", not "5-6".


Possible and Likely are two entirely different things. The chance that one particular player, consistently across dozens of characters, would always be significantly better than everyone else at the table, is so vanishingly small as to be, for all practical intents and purposes, functionally zero.

That was a LONG string of games. And is the foundation for my absolute loathing of any randomness during character creation, and strong preference for point-buy systems.

For a single roll. Having it occur once in 24 years on the other hand..

Dozens of reliable trials, where you just rolled randomly "for" him when he wasn't around and you weren't even playing. Those definitely were not subjective and all of these cases that you remember supporting your opinion are good reliable data. Luck must be an animate force acting in our world.

But, I've got good news for you. I just rolled 4 sets of stats for him and his string of luck is broken. Lady luck has turned her back upon him and your troubles are ended.

12, 15, 14, 16, 5, 15
14, 8, 16, 15, 11, 13
16, 12, 7, 9, 10, 13
15, 16, 13, 10, 17, 12

Let me know if you need help breaking any other strings of unlikely rolls.

I'm not really keen on Karma Pool either, even though I prefer SR3 to anything else. I like the idea of characters having an 'oh-shit' pool of dice (or 'dramatically appropraite' pool) but I find the implementation of these things to be a little weak, because they've never really hit the sweet spot of coming through in a pinch but not overwhelming the game.

Karma Pool was rooted in the idea that the grizzled veteran would be generally more apt to do amazing things or survive against all odds. For awhile, early in a character's lifespan, it works okay, but pretty soon I think it shows up too fast and sticks around too long. There are 'burn a point' rules, but in my experience they're rarely used. Sort of like the D&D group that hoards their expendable items, you know, just in case, players are generally loathe to permanently expend stuff on their character sheet just for a quick benefit. So instead of self-regulating, Karma Pool just tends to accumulate until characters have 10 or 15 points and can do anything they want all the time.

So the solution there was obviously to make it a stat you have to pay to improve and add limits, but then the changes in the dice system made it so that snagging a die out of the pool for a roll wasn't a big help. So you snag all the dice out of the pool, lots of times. Or buy initiative passes (again, changes to the dice system made this the only way for a non-wired person to get a second pass, even though it was fairly common in SR3). Rerolling your gobs of dice (again changes in the dice system made this one mean you reroll 25 dice instead of 5) is hilariously useful sometimes.

So you get a weird combination of too awesome, or lackluster. No sweet spot.

Noone, because he'll never use these. I haven't had contact with that group for 10+ years.

Meanwhile - yu just go ahead and keep telling yourself whatever comfortabe lies you need to, to discount that maybe, there's something to "luck" that simply hasn't been quantified yet. *shrug*

That is over the moon, sir.

Is it, really.

I get told that I've deceived myself, or that I am willfully rejecting any "evidence" (which is really just assertions "it doesn't work that way"), or that I am misremembering or misrepresenting things .... and it's okay, because ... why, again?

Yet when I turn that exact same attitude back 180 degrees around, it's suddenly "over the moon" because .... why, again?

Because most posters on both forums incessantly feel the need to denigrate anyone who says anything that doesn't fit in their little Red Sky World View in their little box in an attempt to discredit any and all who disagree with them.

That's just amazing. Talk about a victim complex. It makes you feel good about being wrong, right? That's an honest question, because people whose minds are warped fascinate me.


You THINK it happens to you all the time because of the way the brain stores memories. So yes, it is over the moon if you claim otherwise because that's not the way the world works.

Talk about red sky worlds, really.

Because that is how all claims of supernatural powers have ended so far once put through controlled, randomized, blinded tests? Oh right, I forgot that is just due to narrow-mindedness and the scientific establishment trying to hide the truth

Yes. Also, I don't really see how two peoples' persecution complex is relevant to the topic.

You say "persecution complex" right after a post blatantly attacking all who disagree?

One line off topic and non contributory replies in any thread are considered flaming and trolling.

Except for this one of course.

...

Hello?!

Was typing my response while you posted...

I'll agree with that. I never got a good grasp of the old Karma for luck thing. I always just house ruled that burning a point of karma gave you a re-roll. Not something you did often with your combat pool, hacking pool, or magic pool. Dodge pool, and damage soak were the exceptions.

I loved Karma pool. I miss it. I had more than one character who stayed alive solely because of their belief that God made Karma pool just for them.

Edge can do the same thing, sorta, but it's still not the same. Ah, well, c'est la guerre.

[.... just saw the moderator post ...]

If Edge cost about half what it does--due to the inherent finite capacity--it would be fine*, but since it is unlikely to be done because people will just bitch and moan if it were to happen, it would be better to just remove it entirely.

*Despite what some would claim the more permanent attributes are fine where they are--or possibly a bit too expensive when it comes down to actual speed of advancement--so increasing their costs would just cause a major issue where a character can't advance at a decent rate.

/signed

I think escape death is too cheap, too.

That's just it... Edge was put in to replace all the pools... and it works fine for those purposes.

I've had many characters who've done just fine surviving with edge... and I've never run into a case where I've needed to burn it. I've had cases where I've gone from 5 to none and come very close to needing to burn edge... and rarely use it on offense unless it's make or break. (a 'defensive' first strike if you will).


As far as All4Big's comments... strongly disagree. Edge is a unique attribute with unique uses. And even comes into play with edge only tests regularly in a few of my games when the GM is just testing 'luck'... just to see if someone gets lucky or not.

Given the choice of 30 karma to raise natural agility to 6 and edge to 6... I'd go with edge!

Sorry, but it's just that useful... also with all the ways to spend edge.. not all of them result in dice. Many of them can't be mimiced in any other ways. For those who don't avail themselves of it, very little can be done.



There's very few things in the setting which get better with a return to a dice pool system. About the only thing I can think off the top of my head would be TacNets... if those were a dice pool which only refreshed every so often they'd be a lot more reasonable than they are now.

Try having it happen every single game session for 24 years.

Back on topic, I certainly don't want it to be easier to critically fumble in Sr5. I fumble enough as is, thank you very much. Even though my players enjoy it a lot, it's less fun for me.

In my my experience, having a very low Edge rate only serves to punish the low Edge characters. High Edge characters simply don't need to refresh as often. It's a fallacy to assume that because they have a high Edge, they need to use it more often.

One could do a fairly regular partial refresh of just a single point at a time. Then low edge characters are only punished if they're saving up their points so that the refresh is wasted.

Try having it happen as repeatable as claimed under scientific supervision and you would be filthy rich

Going by that logic, a character with a Body of 1 is punished because he can't soak damage coming in. If you aren't going to raise an attribute, you're going to suffer for having it so low. Though, having Edge recover one point per scene isn't such a bad idea.

It's how it's handled usually where I play SR4.

Strongly disagree... the glitch mechanic needs a changeup...

Half the dice pool as 1's just doesn't come up enough once the pool goes over say 10 (very common).

Also there's the wierdness that is odd numbers... rolling odd numbers of dice is significantly less likely to glitch than even.


I still stand by my position... I'd love to see glitches changed to rolling more 1's than successes. (since each die is twice as likely to roll a success as a glitch... it's pretty agnostic to the size of the dice pool... unlike currently in which they pretty much disappear after a point). Glitches being the minor/funny monkey wrenches which get thrown into the best laid plans now and then... crit glitches being the really nasty ones.

That would change the game to Slapstickrun. The Glitch mechanic is devastating enogh as is; it doesn't need to be made even worse.

Only if you don't do the math.

All it does is clean up the low end dice pools vs the very high end dice pools. Unless you're using very specialized stuff with defined glitch outcomes (like high risk Ex ammo), then most glitches are pretty minor... needing to take a simple/comlex action to clear a jam... or your summoned spirit is wish wording you while doing a groucho marx impression... etc.. And generally I've found glitches to be funny and humorous or simply minor setbacks which add a little bit of difficulty now and then. Not 'slapstickrun'.


It only turns slapstick if they're coming up all the time... and when you got a 1 in 3 chance of a success and a 1 in 6 of a '1' on each die... it's very unlikely that you'll roll equal number of 1's and 5/6's to produce a glitch result... The probability curve of it happening stays nice and flat though instead of disappearing into near nothingness as you go past 10 dice though.