A shot or two from a hold out pistol will fix the mentality on that... and of course the lack of any meaningful armor without encumbrance penalties.

Yeah I've never seen an optimizer dump Body, as having at least 3-4 makes a massive difference (it's just got diminishing returns as you get higher). Far more likely as a dump stat is Strength, Charisma, Logic, or Intuition, depending on what the character wants to do.

I have.
He was of the not entirely wrong opinion, that not being hit was better than soaking damage.
An adept with combat sense and sidestep and whatever else helped getting combat pool and dodging up sky high . .
He was icnredibly hard to hit, but when he WAS hit, he sure felt it. happened only twice in the time i knew that one. .

*edited* I'm pissed and grumpy, but that was out of line. Sorry.

Bull

OK, those examples were _slightly_ hyperbolic, but I am sure everybody got what I mean.

Then again, with Softweave FFBA and some cyber for better damage soaking the BOD 1 sam might actually work...probably would not be cheaper than just putting a few BP in Body, but on the first glance it sounds totally doable.

Min has always meant minimize downsides. If you're not doing that and instead dumpstatting everything else to raise one thing to the max that is far from min-maxing. One-trick pony and glass cannon are two variations where the min part of optimization are ignored.

--



Bad water?

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In SR4, the majority of damage reduction was done via armor, augmentation, or avoiding the attack. Body provided a not significant portion of the damage reduction. The body stat was one of the worst in SR4. There is also no compelling reason to have an even value for your body attribute.

Priority is better than karma and vastly better than build points. It provides scaled limits for different aspects of a character, yet also enforces minimums. You don't need freedom in a character creation system for a game, you need reasonable upper and lower limitations. And you need it to not take 17 hours of fiddling.

There are 120 ways to prioritize a character. Each one of those priority sets contains at least thousands (this is actually an interesting math problem that I don't care to solve) of possible ways to arrange the points. Complaining about a lack of freedom here is like having a giant field to play in and then complaining when someone builds a fence around the edge of it to keep kids from jumping in the creek. The field's still enormous and it's more than you know what to do with, but all you can see is the fence.

It's OK Bull *hugs*
I've gotten like that sometimes too.

Ah, we can take it.
If somebody can't take it, he has no right to dish out.
We know you are grumpy.
You often are.
It's a bit hard to tell if you are pissed via Webbernets tough.
Well, untill you fly off the handle like that, then it becomes pretty clear.

It doesn't take 17 hours to make a character using BP. I can make effective and potent characters in about 3-4 hours and most of that time is spent looking through equipment to find the name and cost of that thing I know exists but I don't memorize.

There are certaily not going to be 120 ways to prioritize a character. There's at least 6 ways to issue priorities where the results are exactly identical to another method of priority. Further, there are combinations that are likely going to be measurably weaker and not worth considering due to metatype/awakened combinations. Finally, various archetypes are going to end up looking stupidly identical thanks to the priority system. A troll street sammy? Almost certainly is goin to be A on metatype, E on awakened, B on resources, C on attributes, and D on skills. Those D skills are all going to be in the same ones with very little variance between characters. If skills are far more valuable then attributes then flip attributes and skills. You're not going to see resources with a D and C are going to be exceedingly rare given the traditional costs of augmentation. If there is a variance on these narrow limits, then they're probably not well meeting their archetype which is a huge mark against priority simply based on how deadly SR5 has been reported to be. Finally, the variance within the priorities due to skill and stat arrangement is going to be extremely narrow in scope. There will be certain attributes that will be needed. There will be certain skills that will be needed. Those are truths that cannot be avoided and those truths will significantly eat away at whatever potential variance might be left.

The fact that the BP system that SR4 implemented was bad has no bearing on the merits of point-buy based systems nor does it magically makes the flaws of the priority or other rigid character creation system disappear. The simple fact is that point buy based systems are much more adept at permitting a player to actualize the character he or she imagines by removing floors and ceilings. Systems like priority introduce entirely arbitrary floors and ceilings which only serve a purpose to be in the player's way. The only players that I can imagine that would actually like priorities are those who hate people who are adept at optimization, and thus seek to penalize them, or have such narrow vision that priority suits it.

1st) Statistically speaking, Wikipedia is found to be just as reliable (or close enough as makes no difference) as Encyclopedia Britannica. So, unless you have something more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica to back you up, let me know. Using a wiki source is no worse than using any other site on the internet, with the exception of peer-reviewed journals.

2nd) Can you back up your statement? Until you spoke up, I have never had anyone disagree with me on what a min-maxer is and I've been around for those 20+ years and have been hearing the term consistently used in the fashion that I referred to; and so, I have to go by the majority until you or someone else can prove me wrong.

Augmentation provides relatively little armor unless you actually used the broken cyberlimb armor rules (in which case, yes, you COULD get away with 1 body... but if you're using a full set of cyberlimbs already, that sets your body to 3 already, and a little bit of money can set that to racial max via optimized cyberlimbs. So 1 body + lots of cyberarmor doesn't happen). The vast majority of Damage Reduction came through worn Armor, which could be worn as a function of body unless you wanted to cripple yourself with encumbrance penalties. Soak dice in SR4 was basically Body*3+2, for any character that optimized his armor. You might get as many as 4 extra points from other sources, but 2 points of body is going to do you a lot more good than most augmentations would. This remains true until you hit the point where you just can't find extra sources of stackable armor (this happens around 6-8 body)

Avoiding the attack on the other hand is much more valuable than damage reduction. I agree with that fully. You'll notice I didn't list Reaction as a potential dumpstat either.

Related aside...

In game design there is a known phenomenon where too much choice in character build actually can often result in lower diversity in build styles. This is more visible in online games like MMOs but is applicable to most games with a decent player base.

This is because as a group, players tend to optimise. Given free rein, they figure out the best combos. This tends to result in characters, instead of the wildly varying designs you might expect, you'd see the same few builds over and over and over.

I was involved with beta testing an MMO a few year back. When they first started, they had a completely freeform character build system. Take any combo of powers and abilities that you want. Sounds great, yes? Two weeks after they opened up wider testing, the devs began to notice 80-90% of the characters were minor variations of the same few builds.

So they scrapped the whole build system. Re-wrote it from the ground up to force choices so you could not just cherry pick the best abilities. Overall, it was a lot more constrained than the freeform system. But you know what? It resulted in a wildly varying build selection from the players, nearly every power and ability being represented in a given group of characters.

Great for the players, sure. Great for the overall health of the game? Sometimes not.

Have we seriously gotten to the point where folks have to bicker about what things as fluid as slang terms mean?

Dwarves are now +2 star and bod?

I'm not sure where or with who you play, but around these here parts (where I live . . . . not dumpshock), min/maxing refers to maximizing your greatest assets and minimizing the assets you don't want to use, we do also refer to them as one trick poneys. Perhaps the change in definition hasn't reached us here on the planet that is farthest from the bright centre of the universe.

I'm still waiting for CanRay to pipe in about how Min-Maxing is some obscure Canadian ritual involving beer, geese, and a very tall, Nordic looking woman.

And a sheep.

And Canray wouldn't be wrong.

No, we don't do sheep.

Given that the Oxford English Dictionary defined terms on a crowd sourced basis...

It actually involves finding a Beaver that has killed a Bear, and fighting it with only your hands in a mating ritual that predates the Inuit. Beer has been included when it was introduced into North America, admittedly, as almost everything Canadian involves beer.Read Sim Dreams and Nightmares to get at what he's referring to.

I'm not sure that's 100% accurate. What you're describing is a function of system mastery which leads to the ability to quickly parse and discard inferior options for the goal that is being strived towards. All that changing up the creation system did was likely force choices which didn't matter to the goal (and thus had an equal zero value) or the method obfuscated the crap out of what a given option did. Any computer based RPG will reach a point that at any given point in time there is exactly one build that is superior to all others. WoW has been plagued by this forever and it's not just limited to builds but also in the optimization of action orders. However, those are terrible comparisons when placed against a TTRPG. In one you have an unthinking and predictable foe which means that the best build and best action order is a state which exists and can be known and most importantly repeated. In the other your "foe" is capable of independent thought and ingenuity which makes the best state indeterminant. Finally, computer games are very poor choice of comparison against a TTRPG because computer games would actually compile while TTRPG ruleset would make a compiler vomit errors.... and sheep.

That's for sure. . . . I am a heck of an outcast.

No beer. No curling. No hockey. No skiing. No Tim Hortons.

And then there's the occasional variant involving curling rocks.

I guess it ultimately depends whether you are going for fluff and story telling vs. number crunching. Don't get me wrong, you can tell a story with just the number crunching; but I find the lack of realism that comes hand in hand with constant number crunching tends to drag the story telling down. IMO, anyway.

Maybe, but we are not talking about something new here. SR has been around for 20 years, BP generation for around 10 or 15 years (I think it started with 100 points in the SR2 compendium?), so it seems that the player base is quite ok with having these possibilities without being overburden oder cherry picking.

SYL

Oh, sure, if you want to cheat and beat the beaver to death using a rock that has a handle...

Over here in Ontario we wrap the beaver around the rock into a curl shape . . . . and then beat it with a curling 9 iron.

Out here we have hockey sticks for that.

we would too, but we have the Maple Leafs . . . thus, our hockey players play more golf than hockey . .. . lol

And you're using a golf club for a weapon instead of water balloons filled with the tears of Leafs fans why? Serious waste of potential there.

Back to topic, I would really like to see the rest of character development. I promised myself that I wouldn't get my hopes up, but now that I see the return of SR3 elements, I'm afraid I must break that promise. . . .

I have to shy away from Character Development questions after what happened LAST time.

What happened last time?

He opened with a joke and it didn't go over well.

No offense, but the freelancers and devs on this forum should probably not post in this kind of thread anyway. Your jokes sound funny to you (in-jokes always do) but to the rest of us it reads like you're lording secrets over us that we just aren't cool enough to know. Let us speculate and lose our minds, and then in a few weeks when the full rules are out you can tell us how wrong/dumb we are.

did i miss that?
or is my memory really that bad?

The joke wasn't in any way "inside", in that case.

Pardon my semantics - the point is that us normal people don't have the same info and should not be egged along by people who do.

Yup!

No one ever has the same info.

Eh. I appreciate the comments that they can make - it some insight into what's going on that we wouldn't get otherwise.

Not that it matters, since SR5 is looking to be released anytime soon.

Technically, they could have released the PDF already, seeing how it went to the printers . . last week?
But according to . . i think Hermit, the Quick Start Rules are planned for release on June 15th in english.

I understand and appreciate your point of view, but in this instance it's coming entirely out of left field and I feel it has nothing at all to do with the incident in hand. CanRay made a joke -- not a great joke, but by no means any sort of "inside" joke -- when starting a thread about the development of an NPC, and then, in his absence, that thread turned pretty ugly and evolved into a discussion of some heavy real-life topics like sexism and misogyny and stuff. I'm sorry that you feel him mentioning that post is something like lording secrets over you that you're not cool enough to know, or whatever, but in this case I think that's something more to do with you than with Ray or his intent.

And, speaking for myself, the reason I take part in these threads is to answer what questions I can (without violating my NDA), to offer what clarification I can (likewise), and to -- as a for instance -- be able to say things like I did earlier, where I was able to point out that the +50% equipment prices for trolls were incorrect, and that they're only suffering a lifestyle increase (which is information I shared to keep people, hopefully, from losing their shit over essentially a typo, from spreading the word that trolls were going to be totally unplayable in SR5, and to keep rumors from spreading like wildfire). I'm sorry if you think that's somehow disruptive or counts as me lording secrets, but -- again -- it certainly wasn't my intent.



The copy of a file that goes to the printers is very much not the same pdf that gets sold as a pdf product. There's all manner of formatting and stuff that still has to happen.

Is not?
I thought the layout had to be done to be sent to the printers?

The printers pdf wouldn't need things like the bookmarks that make it into the pdf version that is sold.

i'd think that would be done first thing and then it would be sent off to the printers . .

See, the thing is: I'm willing to put up with "baseless" (and in some cases even "stupid") assumptions by "commoners" like myself (or making such assumptions myself), but it certainly disturbs me when people who are (to an extend) "in the know" (and thus are not just "commoners", despite their claims of being "normal posters") start getting defensive when people speculate on limited information or resort to - what they deem - funny jokes ... and then go into hiding behind their NDA (again).

I don't want them to leave and I even enjoy additional information once the product in question is availible to the masses, but I'd certainly like to see them being professional about it (regardless of how minor their indvidual professional involvement is) and really keeping it to themselves while being under NDA.

In other words: I'd happily wait for that info in form of the final product if that spared me comments that are either totally unfunny or outright annoying to me.

As always: YMMV