Wow. It has not just always been in the fluff, it's one of the foundations of the cyberpunk genre. Cyberpsychosis and all the good stuff coming with it.

You must never have used any quality, then? Because what those do is exactly that.

I'm not offended that you're using the wrong word, I'm just trying to explain to you (again and again) that you're using the wrong word. Talking about it like it's a die pool penalty (which people have done, grousing like it's just a flat modifier to your pool) is plainly incorrect. You should stop doing it, if you want to continue being responded to in something approaching a constructive and helpful manner.

Sadly I cannot, I have no PDF's of the Previous Editions, and my Hard copies were all stolen about the time 4th Edition came out.
Though Someone has already posted the relevant pieces pertaining to healing and 'ware. Apparently you missed the part about Medicine and the penalties that 'ware imposes. *shrug*
First Aid, of course, is still not impacted, to my knowledge, in any previous editions.

I hate to be pedantic, Critias, but if I'm reading him right, you're wrong.

He's not calling it a dice pool penalty, at all.

He's saying that it is a penalty against the maximum number of hits a character can achieve. Which is precisely what it is.

only if that mage on the opposing team was careless.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

It worked extremely well, actually. And made for an excellent game.

so it should be more accurately called a "hit limitation"

or follow any rules at all, for that matter. Dang pesky rules, telling me what I can and can't do. I HATE EM"!!!

To be fair, the opposite end is D&D's alignment system. I wouldn't want such a straight jacket for a character either. I *think* he meant more something like that, at least that's how I took it. could be wrong, though.

Did you ever see the old Rolemaster alignment system? It took the D&D alignment system and injected it with every steroid known to man. I know it sounds bad, but it allowed someone to customize their alignments more.

The why of the social penalty is described can set up a one true way to play a street sam depending on how severe the fluff is on the issue. a mild or broad enough description leaves it wide open, but a narrow soulless monster description is a unnecessary control on how you play. Somehow I suspect they did not go that far.

And, ultimately, if someone doesn't like this rule, and their GM doesn't like it either, ditch it.

Tried playing a game of MERP back in my school days. We spent two entire days going through chargen, then my character killed himself by putting an arrow trhough his foot in the first five minutes of the game. It was horrible, but I didn't even get to notice the alignment system. Or rather, I just don't remember.

Rolemaster seemed to be optimised for clunkyness and suffocating the player, though. All these random tables ... but hey, that was nearly 20 years ago. Maybe I'm just massively misremembering. Also, true D100. The worst dice system there is.

Isn't this about SR? or...? Maybe i just miss something important?

Actually, SR4 has multiple ways of enforcing penalties: dice pool penalties and threshold modifiers. Double-dipping penalties already exist in the system. I'm not keen on the idea of adding a third-- limits-- into this mix, although like you said I'm going to wait and see how it works in play.

Threshold modifiers? where?

Off the top of my head, I can think of the advanced rules for software programming in Unwired regarding Programming Suites VS Nexus Programming:



Other than that, I've only noticed DP modifiers...

Neither one of those are threshold modifiers. One is a dice pool bonus, the other reduces the interval which is not the same thing.

Vehicle tests as well. I use them as dice mods though, because frankly, some make it damn near impossible to pull off anything cool without a 20+ dice pool.

I've always liked the idea of ditching the DP mods and using only threshold mods.

Is there a link to the 1st preview? I haven't seen it, yet.

...

-_-

Thank you brain for playing tricks on me again...

http://www.battlecorps.com/catalog/product...roducts_id=3144
or
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/1140...on-Preview-%231

Certainly some people would like the mechanic, but it could rather predictably lead to some pretty Not Fun consequences - for example, unless the team stops while healing occurs, you're basically stuck unable to do much of anything for an extended period of time; the loss of agency inherent to that doesn't make for a particularly positive experience for most people.

Given that magic can fairly easily poof someone back 4-5 boxes of health I have no problem if first aid kits filled with sci-fi super healing nerps used by a trained player can do the same or more. The groups we play with have gone kind of gung ho with this including adept combat medics. 7 dice best in worls skill+3dice imrpoved ability+2 dice specialized in combat wounds, 9 logic+6 dice first aid kit=27 dice to heal you now. We carry the pattented defribunow because later is too long to wait. Technomancers with a spite to boost things up for a party in first aid, and hey if you want to go for the magic breaking fun of a possesion mage a force 9 task spirit who knows first aid is pretty bad ass have it possess a humanoid drone and it can be a somewhat litteral heal bot.

All over the place. Granted, it's mostly that the threshold is variable: a GM just sets the threshold wherever they see fit. The general point is, there's two ways of setting difficulty in SR4.5: dice pool modifiers and setting the threshold. That means there's already two axis of difficulty in the game. Setting a third-- limits-- seems excessive to me.

It's an old gimmick of the cyberpunk genre, yes, but it was never nicely implemented. If implemented at all.

To me, it's just ... old.

A factor that negatively affects the number of successes achievable is justifyably called a penalty. It is not a dice pool penalty, but a penalty nonetheless.

The alignment system never was a straight jacket, just a gaming aid. "You can't do this because it's against our alignment" bullshit is not in the rules, "this action changes your alignment" is.

It was implemented in the Essence mechanic, and the in-character effect left for the players to roleplay. The dehumanizing effect of cyber is mentioned numerous times throughout the books, including, say, the perfect Hatchetman's account.

Every D&D group I've played with more or less ignores alignment entirely unless you do something like go torturing people or burning down orphanages for no reason, and even then it's not a case of "You're not allowed to do that", it's as you say "Chance are you're going to be considered evil now", and even that only matters if you run into something that can cast a spell (usually Clerics and Outsiders) that targets a specific alignment (ie Blasphemy, Holy Word, Protection from Good/Evil, whatever).

Yes, precisely. Otherwise, an alignment is not doing anything other than offering some vague guidelines as to how a character should be roleplayed.

I personally don't like when players jump all over the place in how their characters act. I'm not a big fan of the alignment system, but I do like the idea of players stipulating certain character traits that their character will abide by. Otherwise, it's not really roleplaying, it's just adventuring. IMHO, at least.

By that reasoning, Cyberpunk is old.

I think that is my biggest beef with SR4 and surely SR5, as well. It doesn't feel like cyberpunk anymore. It feels more like a bunch of kids walking around the mall with cellphones and guns.

Well, CGL doesn't have the license for Post-Cyberpunk Transmetropolitan so... Old Skool Cyberpunk it is!

I don't like how characters with very high attributes but low skill levels can have so many dice. If limits will be based on attributes, I think that goes the wrong way by making attributes even more essential and powerful.

I've thought of a few ways to make tests a little more based on the actual skill, but most of them would be overly complicated.

This is from my earlier post. Have a look. If there is anything you like, feel free to use it.

1) My players and I have tried to use a rule that limits the number of hits a skill test can achieve (Max Hits = Skill Rank +1), and from experience, it just didn't work for us. The main reason is everyone kept forgetting about the limit, including myself as the GM. If you and your players are confident you would remember, then my point is moot, but I thought I would share that. Personally I don't like this one, as I am a firm believer in the GM moto: "nothing is impossible, just highly improbable" and I think a player should always have a chance, no matter how small, to succeed. This is also why I like the optional rule of 6 for all rolls and not just rolls with Edge.

2) A different way I came up with to incorporate skills as a limit, but never had a chance to actually try, was to dictate that no skill test may have anymore attribute dice added to the dice pool than the skill rating. (Example: a character with Pistols of 3 and Agility 5 would only have a dice pool of 6 because his Pistols skills of 3 would only allow 3 of the 5 Agility Dice to be added to the test). Defaulting would allow only 1 die. --- This concept has its merits, but also its flaws. Some will notice that it is similar to early SR where the use of combat pool was limited to skill rating.

3) An idea I've recently had is to go back to something similar to the rule of 1s from SR1, SR2, & SR3. If a player rolls a number of 1s greater than his skill rating then he glitches (rather than half the dice as per SR4A & SR5). This puts extreme importance on the skill and prevents low skill players from adding too many dice to their pool from other sources out of fear of glitching. A GM would probably want to allow a player to control the number of Attribute Dice he adds to the pool so as not to be rolling a massive amount of dice to a default skill test.

4) an alternate version of #3 could have a number of 1s equal to the skill just being an automatic failure.

The problem there being: Dissociation / Cyberpsychosis due to ware is a common theme within the genre, but not necessarily a defining one. And it has been rightfully remarked that SR - even during it's original "cyberpunkish" days of 1st and 2nd Ed. - didn't emphasize it that much and also made it at least in part a matter of external perception rather than just an instrinsic effect of cyberimplantation.

It seems more likely that limits will be based on equipment, as has been indicated in the blog posts with- limits on hits due to the accuracy of your gun.

I imagine-

Limits on hacking based on the ability of your cyber deck.
Limits for climbing, stealth, driving, etc. based on the gear you're using. Better gear has higher limits with mods likely available to increase it.

Social limits probably fixed at some base number (3 or 4?) for mundanes and then cyberware or magic that lets you increase your limit rather than just adding tons more dice. (so pornomancer goes out the window)

I would expect there's probably some base-line limit for things that don't necessarily involve any gear (running, knowledge skills, um not much else).

And since skills go to 11 now, attributes will be the smaller portion of the dice pool and a skilled character will not be completely trumped by the street sam with 14 agi defaulting on everything.

I actually dislike limits on hits altogether. I'm a big fan of players at least having a chance of succeeding, even if the odds are astronomical.

Hit limits are not to prevent success in cases of astronomical odds, they prevent overwhelming success when success is almost assured. That is, preventing Robin Hood Shots with crappy gear.

(I.e. hit limits are "no you cannot hit that side of the barn, no way no how," they are "you're hitting a man-sized target at 30 meters, but with your gun you're not going to put one bullet through the other's hole.")

@Black Swan
The first two are (almost) precisely what I had in mind. I hadn't thought of modifying the glitch rule, but I'm not sure about the idea of more dice making glitches more likely. The weird situations are characters who have stellar natural talent but are relatively unskilled, and characters with very low attributes being masters of their craft. So here's my nightmare:

1) A character may not add more attribute dice to a test than their skill dice.
Example: Attribute 9 + Skill 4 = 8 dice (4 + 4)

That would massively reduce the incentive to get very high attributes, except when certain skills also get very high. (11?)

2) A character may not add more than (attribute * 2) skill dice to a test.
Example: Attribute 2 + Skill 6 = 6 dice (2 + (2 * 2))

If skills now go to 11 (Spinal Tap reference), then the max dice pools before modifiers would be:
Attribute => pool
1 => 3
2 => 6
3 => 9
4 => 12
5 => 15
6 => 17
7 => 18
8 => 19
9 => 20

An altogether different nightmare I had was:

X = skill level
The first X successes are as normal. Successes higher than X each cost two success dice.
Example: Skill 4, success dice = 7, successes = 5 (first 4 generate 4 successes, next three only generate 1 more)

All of this in my opinion is tedious and barely playable.

@thorya

That's right. The inherent limits are what I was thinking about.

Based solely on SR4 (since we don't know enough about SR5 yet), I can imagine a completely different idea that would revamp skill rules. My though is just using skills and skills alone (similar to old SR).

To do this, you could increase the maximum skill rating to 12 and have the associated attribute simply be a divisor of the karma cost. I haven't put much thought into it, but I've always preferred the idea that attributes make skills cheaper to learn rather than improve the actual skill.

So, not all over the place at all, then.

Yes there are two axes of difficulty. Modifiers modify dice, and threshold difficulty is a preset number. However, I think that the threshold difficulty should be solely based on the actual difficulty of the task itself, without considering abnormal circumstances. Then you bring in the abnormal circumstances as dice modifiers.

Myself, I'm happy with just having a base threshold difficulty and then having threshold modifiers based on the abnormal circumstances.

We have always played with "down time" between runs, which is used for things like healing, training, and getting new gear. So, not much was missed out on. None of us wanted D&D with guns, where characters were fully healed within a day or two. We wanted reasons for players to be afraid of getting hurt, beyond the fear of death.

So the implication is that a character that does not rely upon gear is now an impossibility?
And skills go to 12 now, not 11.

Correct. It's a collaborative experience. That means all parties must be contributing. Fortunately, Shadowrun doesn't have the same degree of problem that D&D has with magic, but it's still exists. I want to explain the D&D problem just so that you understand what I'm talking about and because having a comparison to illustrate against is useful. D&D has multiple types of problems that need to be solved. If you take a plain old fighter, he's really only good when it comes to bashing in the heads of things and not much else. A rogue is better because he has skills which let him sneak around, get from point A to point B, and also has skills to get into other places. The rogue and fighter can get along together pretty well and can coexist. The rogue can't really deal with combat without a flank buddy and the fighter gains a huge benefit from having the mobile and sneaky rogue. The problem is the wizard. The wizard has spells. The wizard can know all spells. Any situation that the fighter or rogue can solve, the wizard can solve it with a spell. You need to get into this room? I'll teleport. You need to get up this cliff? I'll cast fly or spider climb. I need to end this encounter? I cast sleep or prismatic spray. The fighter and rogue are practically useless. For all intents and purposes they're basically the wizard's companions to haul stuff around or do things if the wizard can't be in multiple places at once (which I think there's a spell for that). It's to the point where D&D has a tier system that categorizes classes so as to provide a guideline to understand where on the power/utility curve a class lies so that players can all around a 1-2 tier range so that everyone is roughly similar. However the tier system is based around the assumption of equal levels of optimization. So even a non-powergamer playing a wizard is still going to have more tools and more potency than the non-powergamer fighter.

Shadowrun has the same problem but not to the same degree that D&D does because the awakened don't necessarily have tools that are useful for all situations. Awakened just aren't going to be as good of hackers as the hacker or technomancer. Awakened do have spells that make the mundane sneaker pointless. They have astral projection. They have spells which make basically any street samurai pointless by ending combat before it starts or totally avoiding it which is preferable just on the merit of wounds alone.

Nor can we going on about specific builds for the sammy which have a great effect in one tool area than the mage. The mage will still probably do it more efficiently while not needing to give up more tools. The sammy will probably be giving up more options to obtain that level of competence. Specific build, to use D&D tier lingo, may push a class up or down a tier. The only thing we have to look at is the average and the average in Shadowrun consistently puts the sammy well below the mage in terms of tricks and tools. The sammy may be able to perform better in combat than the mage, but the mage probably has tools that make combat unncessary. To put it another way, the Sammy's toolbox is usually "Beat it until it's dead." or "Shoot it until it's dead." and both of those tools are only useful in a situations where making things dead is a viable solution.

Nor can we go into world/story specific situations which make a mage less effective, such as background count areas especially if they're known. There's no reason for a team with a mage to take a job the know is in an area with a background count or would even suspect it exists. Full stop.

You can go on about a collaborative experience, but the simple fact is that the system requires a gentlemen's agreement that the game doesn't devolve into "Why do we need a sammy?" That's a defect in the system. The defect can also be illustrated by the slogan "Geek the mage first."

But Shadowrun also has this problem even within an archetype. It's a fundamental flaw regarding a point buy style system in Shadowrun. It has a pretty high optimization ceiling and floor. The last time I played we did no-magic combat heavy game. So all of our characters were essentially street sammy's with some other areas of expertise mixed in so we had to be strong in our areas while also being broad in efficacy. One of the three players was rather dejected about his character because he felt that he was significantly weaker in combat than the other two characters and had very little to contribute. So the other player and myself started looking over his character. We found a stupid number of ways to keep his power the same and free up karma. I think we ended up securing about 70 karma on an 800 karma build when it was all done and said without making his character weaker.

And I personally am quite disgusted by Gilded Age morality being made a universal constant in this game. Alignment, at least in the D&D I played (which, granted, was 2 and 3) was, essentially, forcing a stereotype on all PCs of a certain profession. It seems to have mellowed a bit since, but back then, you either were a Good Christian, or you weren't a paladin. And so on.

Nothing against giving a character traits that in parts shape their actions; in fact, a character without those stops being a character and becomes an MMO avatar. But tying this to professions, classes, or races, is a big, big no-go for me. That Shadowrun never did this is a big, big plus for the game. YMMV.

It's mellowed. I think it's more like "within one step of diety" now. Which makes so much more sense.
(Paladins are a tricky bunch, because classically--by which we mean the definition of the word--is so stuck on the "good" end of the spectrum, and attempts to make "evil paladins" have ended poorly)