I like it.

I whole-heartedly agree. Etiquette should be broken up again like it was in earlier editions. I forced it into SR3, but not in SR4.

This is somthing i really don't get when people complain about variable TN's. .
You roll dice to randomize, so why is randomizing even probability bad then?

So when I say it's too early to be "quite sure" of something, your defense is to call me wrong, but then admit that much of your argument is just conjecture. I'm not even sure what to say to that. It's like you're agreeing with me, while angrily shaking your head. "Yeah, we haven't seen what gear does yet, so I'm just guessing, but I'm sure it's going to add a bunch of dice to your pool, all the time!"

But -- okay! I was basically trying to calm things down by reminding you that not every piece of gear is going to work like it did in SR4 (which is certainly what you seem to be assuming, since you insist that the core problem of not controlling pool bloat is still here). Since you'd rather argue with me than admit that we don't know how gear works yet in SR5, I'll just leave you to be frustrated and stuff, I guess, and sorry for reminding you that the entire "what gear does" part of the equation still hasn't been released.

Since I'm not particularly welcome in the thread, I'll just go back to lurking, I guess.

Obviously some of those don't apply to some areas (ie. a shield bonus and a dodge bonus will never stack, simply due to effecting different things).

But a good portion of that list does stack against a single number and I've heard of builds that get as many single bonuses to a single stat as possible.

Oh, and one more that wasn't listed.

Defending (from defending weapons). A defending weapon allows the wielder to transfer some or all of the sword’s enhancement bonus to his AC as a bonus that stacks with all others.

And it does impose actual book keeping. For D&D games I no longer use paper sheets. I have custom excel sheets set up that instead of going "oh, I have a +3 to this" and just add a "+3" to the formula, I reference another cell as to indicate where that +3 came from ("oh, cell CA43, ah that's from my shield.")

I don't like it.

There's a story floating about how the government was once trying to reorganize tax brackets. They had some beancounters figure things out, and they came up with an interesting scaling idea, where each bracket of your income was taxed at a different rate. You paid 5% tax on the first $30,000 (or whatever, I'm just making up numbers) you earned in a year, and then 10% of the next $30,000, et cetera, up until you hit 100% on anything you earned past $600,000 per year. Then someone stopped and said, "Guys - if we do this, people are just going to stop working once they hit $600,000 a year", and the whole plan fell apart.

Same sort of thing with dice pool caps. If your pool is capped at 20 dice, you have absolutely no incentive to ever go above that. People will just pick out a single favorite weapon with a high accuracy and build entirely around the dice pool cap. They'll do just enough to "cap out" one dice pool, then start investing in the next one.

~Umi

Did I ninja you or pre-emptively overtly support your post?

--



Of course, but that's not a problem with the system of bonuses. There was at least a method of controlling the problem even if further developers of product decided to add new bonus types to get around it. SR4 included no such mechanism and as far as I can tell, SR5 contains no mechanism either and in fact causes bloat along two metrics rather than one and SR5 is just as vulnerable to the bloat as SR4.

A story eh? Well, that proves me wrong.

This one's been mentioned in the past, but here's another round of it for those late to the show.

One of the things that SR5 was doing (And, keep in mind, I'm not the SR5 rules crew, I just got to watch and make suggestions/find errors) was trying to be more fun. Another bit was 'No Retcons'. This is pretty darn important. If magic suddenly allows time travel, or if Ares had never been a corporation, people would go ape, and rightly so. Changing the bonuses Trolls got *was* discussed, but it'd be a retcon in a way that would need laying out for people. If you lowered their stats, you'd probably need to lower Orcs as well to keep the races different. Then you'd need to say why Orks *and* Trolls were shrinking.

That way doesn't end well.

So, keep the bonuses as-is, figure out how to work them into the system.

L:et's take an arbitrary point cost of 100. Let's say that Body costs 5 points per point. If being a Troll gave you +4 Body, and cost 10 points, you'd get more from the investment than you put in. If it cost 30, you'd be getting less so more benefits (Like a higher Str) would be needed to compensate. Since a penalty to something you rarely use is les disadvantageous than a bonus to something you use a lot, a straight balance (_1 to four stats for +4 to one stat) isn't actually equal, especially if those penalties come with a caveat, such as "-1 to this stat, to a minimum of 1" ... which means that if you had a 1 to start with, there was no penalty at all. Whee!

From there, you also had a concept issue. Trolls were intended to be big strong dudes that could take a thumpin'. Obviously, you wanted to encourage big strong dudes, but one chargen method had stat adjustments made before stat costs, so, a Troll would find himself paying obscene levels of points for only +1 or +2 strength and could ever get full-on big-n-beefy. Adding the stat mods afterwards resulted in Trolls that were too cheap. When a formula was finally figured out that was properly costed, Trolls wound up being so expensive that they essentially became an archetype in and of themselves.

Trolls were a bugbear all through the character generation work, believe me.

At one point, it became clear that the ideal Troll build as "Woody Allen", a Troll who enjoyed the baseline Body and Strength of being a Troll, never sank any points into either stat, and instead boosted up his mental attributes. These guys were cheaper than a human with the same statline, *and* flew in the face of "Big strong dude" that Trolls should (usually!) project. Fine for an RP hook, but when it was mechanically superior in all ways, well, that was a problem.

And we'll probably have another go'round if a full-blown Karmagen system gets assembled for those who want more options than the Priority system. (Those of you who want to take a crack at balancing Trolls, I suggest starting a new thread on it. Who knows? Jason might pop in, lay out some numbers, and see what you can do. I can't, NDA and all that, but I know we have a bajillion guys who love looking under the hood and tinkering, so, it's possible you can unlock a good balance.)

(Next post is new stuff, by the by, not quoting stuff form page, like, 2!)

No, it just cleanly and simply illustrates a concept I use immediately after in my post?

~Umi

Relax, I'm just teasing.

Dangit, I forgot my smiley at the end when I formatted.

~Umi

I dunno, it just seems odd to me taking so many rank 1 skills at chara gen, when you could be putting putting your skill points to some of the more useful stuff.

Then again, I'm not going to argue too much on having the character sheet match the backstory, since I myself beat that notion into my players all the time. So I'd leave it at that.

(oh the silliness of someone bringing to me a character whose initial background was as a nurse...and then trying to justify to me why they have Heavy Weapons 3)



Well, glad we're of the same mind of this.



"Wait and see" again, huh? Very well then...



Guess it does help a little bit that while DVs and armor are getting buffed, health isn't.

It's one way of really drive home to players: "Yeah, getting an armor vest is a REALLY really good idea, you should do it!"



...yeah, not really thrilled if there's that big of a disconnect between the writer and the artist. Especially it it's to write around the art. I personally think that the working the other way around produces better results, but that's just me. And as Critias mentioned before, CGL aren't making comic books.

...

Although, now I'm just amused that CGL apparently follows the Marvel Way of producing art w/ accompanied text.

Phew.

Okay, lastly, on chargen, since there's some stuff talked about before that hasn't come up, so I can talk a little here.

The big one:

How long does making a character take?

Well, I did between a third and half of the pregens (So, anything you see wrong, chuck eggs at me as I'm likely the guilty party), so I'm probably the closet thing to an expert at this point in time, but that'll quickly be eclipsed.

Keeping in mind that I did this via PDFs and printouts, flipping through pages and sometimes having to tug the rules people for updated rules on X, Y, or Z, it came out to just about 90 minutes each. Everything was done longhand, then typed into Word files, which took another 30 minutes or so (I didn't have a format, so it was all blank page and go).

As time went on, and documents gelled better, that time dropped to about an hour, most of which (as always) is spent shopping. Because buying stuff is COOL but also because I went over the lists several times to make sure I didn't forget anything. Having, say, a decker who didn't have a deck, or a driver who didn't have a vehcile? That looks kinda BAD, right? Ditto a samurai with no sword or a gunbunny without ammo. My perosnal mantra was "Commlink, SIN, lifestyle, stuff", to make sure nothing got missed. If we get a new PACKS system, it'll make life much, much easier, and I actually put together several packages of my own to make life easier. If I get permission from above, I hope to toss those up on the web when SR5 launches, to make everyone breathe a little easier. Lord knows it made my life better.

What archetypes are there?

NDA, sorry. I can only talk about what's been announced officially. Feel free to make your best guesses below!

Is (blank) gun/augmentation/car in there?

Again, NDA, but the guys who put all the gear together did excellent work.

Overall, it was both a hoot and a holler, I dare say, and I hope to do it again sometime. Archetypes in the core book are, perhaps more than anything else, the guidepost of "This is how you should play" and, as such, are important to get right. Yes, the experts in the house will be making these guys a hundred time sbetter down the line, butout of the gate, each and every one of 'em's playable. Good at what they do, even! There're little RP hooks snuck into each one as well, such as ouor guitar-playing ganger, here, and his drekky used cyberarm. I hope you'll enjoy reading them half as much as I enjoyed making them.

I'll be heaidng to my nephew's third birthday party in about an hour, but when I'm back, I'll answer any questions that I can. Until then, feel free to suggest what archetypes you'd like to see. Always room for more previews.

Here's a more elegant solution:

Ditch Attr+Skill. Create Physical, Social, Mental, and Magic/Hacking/Resonance pools sort of like Limits. Try to push these into the 4 to 8 range for most characters.

When rolling a test, only roll Skill dice. As dice pool modifiers, add any gear bonuses. Then add relevant pool dice up to a maximum of the Skill rating (the exact amount chosen by the player). That is, a person with Physical Pool 7, Pistols 5, and a smartlinked (+2) pistol rolls 7 dice plus up to 5 pool dice.

When someone gets shot at, they roll Reaction plus Physical pool dice (limited by their Dodge skill).

Pools refresh every full turn.

On a full-turn action, like with an extended or social test, the pool pretty much gets used every turn to double the skill dice (so a person with Negotiation 6 and a Social Pool of 5 would be consistently rolling 11 dice per action). Social pool probably needs a rule that allows you to spend pool dice to negatively influence your target (forcing them to roll fewer dice, or somesuch).

And so on. Dice pools are virtually cut in half (from SR4) initially but can be brought back up to decent levels using the pools, but you tend to run out of those quickly and have to rely on pure skill and gear in higher IPs. Combat actions tend to drain the pools quickly, so combat beyond the first couple initiative passes slows down (fewer dice being thrown per action) unless the combatants are very advanced.

Skills are now cleverly a limiting factor while simultaneously adding dice. Attributes are important to get your pool dice but require competency in skills to get the full use out of them. Gear lets you get flat additions to your rolling, but doesn't let you draw more benefit from pools (making gear dice prized differently than skill or attribute dice). Guns could even get an accuracy stat and provide a little -1 or +1 or however, balanced out by improved or mitigated features (single shot light pistol might get +2 accuracy or more for its relative weakness and slow rate of fire).

See, that's the sort of system that makes me happy. Limits make me sad.

Well, art takes way longer to do and costs more... you give them priority. I can pretty well assure you that creating that ganger took longer than writing about him and going on a shopping trip did. To my knowledge, him not having the gun (and cocktail) shown is the only hiccup out of the rest. Shotguns went to shotgunners, katanas to katana-wielders, and so on. Heck, upthread someone grumped about shotgunners never having special ammo. One of the ones I put together has at least three different rounds. Editing might change things up a tad (I know at least one ammo changed in a different archetype), but they generally let fly.

Getting to contribute at all was a HUGE honor, and I thank everyone for the opportunity. Their rules made it fun!

I don't mind limits, but the system you propose sounds awesome. It's something to think about.

Soft-capped? Something like, the negative modifiers to dice pool come from your total pool, but you still can't roll over your cap pool? So the extra 5 dice past 20 help with negating modifiers, but not much else?

yeah, I'd be cool with that. You still get some utility from your super dice pool, but it's heavily reduced.

I was thinking more like sliding caps, perhaps based on your attributes as Limits are. Kind of like the soft-capping on armor without encumbrance in SR4.

There are a lot of ways to soft-cap things, though, and each has certain merits of its own.

~Umi

Which is exactly what they hoped to achieve with limits. People diversifying. And if the caps are variable, rather than fixed across the board, you have an incentive to keep investing through diverse means. You invest in one set of things to raise caps and another to raise dice pools and hopefully each of those have diminishing returns so that you can maximize them but it's kind of pointless to.

To use your tax example. If you are taxed at 100% for $600,000 of income, but you are taxed at only 50% for investment gains, you'll diversify to include some gains in how you earn money (in fact you'll probably diversify to earn $300,000 income and $300,000+ gains, just like the tax system works now anyway) and companies will diversify to reward you with other things than additional income. More vacations, better benefits, stock options, etc.

So exactly what I proposed earlier, that Black Swan said "I like it" and you responded "I don't like it" and went into your tax analogy? Did I miss something?

No. I'm saying Limits barely have anything to do with solving the dice inflation issues. It will solve some very specific subset of it: large dice pools winning opposed tests even when the opposing side "makes a good roll", and large attacking dice pools dealing very large amount of damages.

The actual fix is reducing the number of gear positive modifiers available. Limits rather is a fix to the fix, by giving gear another modifier to grant.

My actual opinion was that most of dice pool inflation was actually caused by a limited number of items: muscle replacement/toner, cyberlimb Agility enhancement, adepts' improved physical attribute, improved ability+kinesics, empathy software, vision enhancement+attention co-processor... which I think could have been each fixed separately (among other things, the 4th edition should never had carried over the 1st edition legacy of muscle replacement rating going up to 4 while including Agility in attack dice pools).

That's actually exactly how it works in France, except it stops going up at some point instead of reaching 100%. The current rates are 0% up to 5963€, 5.5% up to 11,896€, 14% up to 26420€, 30% p to 70,830€, 41% up to 150,000€, and top at 45% above that threshold (they recently added another tax on top of tht that kicks in at 250,000€).

Which reminds me of another story on how, when the politicians comes up with an idea the French revenue service don't like, they make sure to implement it in way that will quickly backfire and kill the idea. Making the rate goes up to 100% typically is the kind of things they could have come up with.

I don't really see anything in your proposal about "soft-caps" or "sliding caps". I see hard flat caps, with a few modifiers. Did I miss something?

~Umi

Since when is 15 Dice stupidly large?
And you should not HAVE to spend Edge to use all your Hits. *Shakes Head*

So, in other words. . . . basically SR1 to SR3 dice pools.

P.S. Don't get me wrong, I really liked the old dice pool concepts.

Except that you would be wrong here. I am not a Munchkin who is complaining that my favorite exploits have been nerfed. My average DP's are from 8-14, with 14-17 being HIGH end after several hundred Karma. However, I have had many instances where I roll my moderate DP's (15 Dice was my last example) where I got an inordinate amount of hits (seemed to happen a lot with that character when I was attempting to take someone non-lethally). Being told that you cannot use those hits is a let down (even if they were counter to my intended goals).

Maybe a bit late to this, but: Patrick, I thoroughly enjoyed the intro fic. The little details just made me happy: Hauser fiddling with AR, the ingredients in the omelet, and how age is hitting the ork hard at the end. Well done.



We now return you to your regularly scheduled rules arguments.

Yeah, I was about to say:

If you want it be more like SR1-3...just play SR1-3 instead!

Thanks, Zephyr. Glad you enjoyed it.

It's funny, this is how I felt about SR4, until I actually started playing it.

Keeping in mind I started when SR was young. (It didn't have an edition number back then).

yeah you did. Guess I wasn't clear. Oh well. I meant for it to be "sliding caps" derived from attributes or equipment, like they are doing with limits currently. But also with the option of modifying the caps as well with magic/ware in addition to attributes giving a base. Thought that was clear.

I never viewed logic as a super stat. If you just ocunt number of skills yeah its impressive. But basically its the decking skill, almost everything else is in the its a cool hobby skill to round out your character but not great. Being able to fix my car is not going to ocme up often as a game changing event. Sure it can. but you will be lucky if it is once per capaign. In my mind charisma and intuition are more powerful as both are used on a regular basis by all character types.

Yes and no. In my first foray into 4e, I set up an over-the-top game. I wanted to see how far things would go, and I got what I asked for. Problem was, I rapidly lost the ability to challenge the players, because I couldn't top their dice pools. I admit, I did it to myself, but I did have a problem with huge dice pools.



You're ignoring the argument that limits won't work, they only address the symptom and don't fix the problem. You also assume that limits are more mechanically effective than caps, which has yet to be proved. But let's look at your three points.

Limits will just add bookkeeping: True, but more importantly, they add unnecessary and unhelpful bookkeeping. It won't limit high end imbalance, it'll just shift min/maxing tactics to another area.

Relatively small dice pools can get big numbers of successes: The issue here is that Edge is overpowered enough as is. Adding more just makes high Edge characters even more broken than before.

Limits get in the way of min/maxing: False. Sr4.5 was just easy to min/max, because all you had to worry about was pool size. Now we're looking at more complicated interactions. This means that it's going to be easier to accidentally gimp a character, and differences in system mastery will create even bigger discrepancies in character power levels.

Like I said, Edge is overpowered as is. High Edge characters are nearly unstoppable, when done right: they don't go through Edge any faster than other comparable characters, and can show off more often. What this means is that characters can still get away with oversized dice pools, because they can rely on spending Edge to blow away the limit whenever they want.



In SR4.5 (I don't know how it'll be under 5e) there's not really any reason to stop bloating your dice pool. You can stay competent in many areas and have a min/maxed pool from hell. There's plenty of characters on Dumpshock that prove this: you can be both well-rounded and hyper-specialized. The only way to rein it in is to cap the dice pool somehow.

But no: limits don't soft cap the dice pool. They don't stop dice pool bloat in any way, form or fashion. What they do is to try and restrict the utility of a huge dice pool, and try to discourage people from working for them. Unfortunately, there's still ways to min/max limits. So, what we're going to end up with is people hyper-specializing in two areas-- dice pool and limits-- and sacrificing character breadth to attain this.


Bingo! That's exactly what they do, and that's why hard caps are so successful: they encourage well-rounded characters. Since there's no incentive to oversize a dice pool, people won't try to make oversized dice pools! It solves the actual problem, rather than imposing new restrictions and complicating the system. It also helps set a consistent power level for the players to aim for.

SR4.5 has a serious problem with wildly inconsistent character power levels. I haven't experimented with Sr5 yet, so I don't know what it's going to be like. However, without some sort of cap or guideline, there's going to be huge gaps in character competence. Hard caps fix this problem neatly, and solve many others besides. Limits appear to just add more problems than they solve.

It depends greatly on the mechanical details of hard caps. Can dice pool modifiers increase the dice pool above the cap? Do hard caps limit the sum of all the dice that can be rolled before modifiers? Do hard caps limit the sum of all the dice after modifiers? Or do hard caps only limit the sum of all the positive dice including modifiers? As I see it only by limiting the sum of all positive dice including modifiers would people not make oversized dice pool.

I am not hostile to the concept of gear-imposed limits. I remember reading a story in the Gunsmith Cats manga where the main character, Rally, is facing off against someone, and only had a pistol that she had grabbed from some other punk she had put down. When she gets a look at it, she realizes she is in trouble, because it is a lousy Saturday Night Special, useless at anything beyond a fairly close range. This is someone who habitually disarms people by shooting off their thumbs, but all of that awesome skill is limited by this crappy gun.

Attribute-imposed limits, I am more ambivalent about, mainly because one of the flaws of the system already is that Attributes are so much more important than skills. I would like to see concepts such as "weak, but very skilled" be more viable, not less. But I will reserve judgement until I see what dice pool sizes are like. Skills go higher for experienced characters, but on the other hand, a lot of gear-related bonuses might change to limit bonuses, instead.

Personally, I don't think high dice pools are this unstoppable thing that can't be fixed. If you really want to limit dice pools, stop continually adding more and more modifiers to the things that already have a lot of modifiers, such as social skills, athletics, and armor. And have clearer rules that allow less stacking modifiers for similar things. I think a new edition presents a great opportunity to take a nerf bat to unbalancing things - compare the SR3 mnemonic enhancer or enhanced articulation to the SR4 version. Just don't go too far the other way. The snippet on mage spells was worrisome. If a mage casting manabolt is resisting 5 Drain to do 3 or 4 points of damage, you may have gone too far, especially since the lethality of everything else has been raised.

By Missions standards, everything counts against the cap except edge. Which is bad, because Edge is already overpowered, but it technically doesn't count as a dice pool modifier.

Pretty much. Dice pools were an excellent way to limit the amount of dice being thrown by making roughly half the dice you can roll a managed resource that wouldn't fully last through a combat turn. I really feel like the baby went out with the bathwater when they decided to just make the dice the dice. It seriously affected characters with multiple IPs, so now if you roll 15 dice you roll those 15 dice every time, instead of rolling 15 dice once, 12 dice the next, 6 the next, and then 5 the rest of the time. Characters had a taper-off in power over the turn, which subverted the need to limit them otherwise. SR4 took away the taper, so now in SR5 they feel the need to drop a big hammer down on character effectiveness -- but it's a big line in the sand, rather than a graded decline.

Then...what's your problem?

It doesn't look hard to get a Limit of 5. If you typically don't top 17 dice, I don't see the problem.

Are you going to hit your limit from time to time? Yes, absolutely. Should that ruin your fun? No, not at all. Is your emotional response to a perceived lack of power more important than overall game balance? I don't believe so, but to be fair, that's just me.

Even if you get all 17 hits on an epic roll with a limit of 5, should you feel bad? No, you can always use Edge. Is it more effective than Edge currently is? Probably, depending on how much you are allowed to exceed your limit.

Compare previously, where you could either add your Edge dice, or Reroll Misses. With an Edge of 6, you could add 6 dice as well get exploding sixes, but you still have to actually roll them. Sure, you could get those same 17 hits, or more, but you also could get 0 hits too, wasting the Edge usage. Since we're talking about emotional responses to the perception of being robbed of power, I think that's a very important thing to bring up. No one goes around complaining about that current aspect of the Edge system, even though it is an overwhelmingly more painful outcome that simply exceeding your limit. (Maybe because it lies in the hands of the dice and "chance", instead of the rule system?) And it seems likely that new system does away with that concern entirely.

Now, instead of rolling beforehand for a chance at a good number of hits, you already have the hits and simply spend Edge to make them count. Moreover, you're essentially using Edge to buy Hits instead of Dice, and a single Hit is demonstrably more valuable than 3 dice.

~Umi

Again, the arguement isn't "we shouldn't have ways of curbing the effects of high dice pools."

The arguement is "Limits are a bad way to accomplish this."


-k

That's precisely what I do. I play SR3. I don't like SR4 for various mechanical and style reasons. I know parts of SR3 are a mess, and I'd really love for them to put forward a game that evokes the same style and feel of SR3 while shoring up some of the more mechanically difficult or obtuse ways of going about things, but the route taken through SR4 to SR5 seems to be a mechanically complex system that doesn't provide a lot of depth. SR3's complexity provides depth.

SR4 generally strikes me in the same way as D&D4 -- it's a game system that's designed to be superficially simple, but is actually a mechanical quagmire, all based on the idea that roleplayers and tabletop gamers have either become more impatient or, frankly, stupider since the 80s and 90s.

I'm squinting at this one. Limits aren't a good way to curtail power. They're a hamfisted, inelegant way to mitigate the fact that the rest of the game is designed around giving you a shit-ton of dice to roll. A strictly better solution would be a way for the system to not give you as many dice to roll, without some referee stepping in to throw a flag and call foul on your rampant success.

In effect, it's as if they've made the soccer goal twice as wide but prohibited scoring more than once in 15 minutes.




Precisely.

A strictly better solution swould be a way such as... what, exactly?

We've had proponents of dice pool caps, which are equally inelegant and problematic depending on form, and which take even greater amounts of power away from high dice pool players. We've had proponents of reducing the amount of situational modifiers, which the developers have stated they've actually done.

And now you're saying that the best solution would be to "simply" change the amount of dice rolled overall - a monumental undertaking which would require an entire rework of the dice system, and a task which goes directly against one of the developers' stated mission objectives. In the blog, they said something to the effect that they like the buckets of dice - that it is a distinctly "Shadowrun" aspect of the game system. I have to agree.

If you want less dice, I can only suggest you try playing a different system in the Shadowrun setting, because I think "buckets of dice" is a staple of Shadowrun that would take a lot of work to change or excise. I agree, Limits aren't perfect, but there's only so much that can be accomplished with the resources available.

~Umi

I've posted one already.



Bullshit. SR4 was a monumental undertaking requiring an entire rework of the dice system. And it produced a poor dice system that appears to be getting patched over in SR5 rather than fixed. The best solution would be to fix the inherent problems rather than tacking on rules to try to offset them.



SR didn't become a dice-lobbing party until the most recent editions, so I don't think you can call it a "staple" of anything any more than you can call powers-on-cards a "staple" of D&D.

If this is really what the developers want, I'll just vocalize my issues with what they're doing and passively hope they eventually lose the license and pass it along to someone who'll do a better job. It's pretty simple.

But then if it gets to the point where SR5 turns into SR3, then what would even be the point when you're better off just playing SR3? Because then it reaches the point where it's not longer SR5, and it's just SR3.5.

And then it makes you start to wonder why the hell they're calling it SR5 when it's clearly just SR3.5.

(nvm that last I checked, a big problem that happened with the D&D Next playtest was that the game is essentially turning into AD&D 2nd edition, and does not have its own identity as D&D 5th)

And if you're THAT discontent with SR4 and SR5...just stick with playing SR3!

No one's going to care if you do!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And regarding D&D 4th VS SR4...

And I should note that I actually started with Shadowrun playing SR4 (I currently have no intention of touching any of the older editions, nor do I care enough to play them) after coming off of D&D 4th.

My diagnosis: SR4 is WAAAY more complicated then D&D 4th.

D&D, despite for all intents and purposes being a lot different from SR in terms of mechanics, is a lot more easier to play. It's more pick-up and go then SR4, and it's relatively easier to explain to new players the core basics, nvm that there isn't a whole lot there (which some would argue is the biggest fault of D&D 4th, but let's not get into that).

SR4 on the other hand has a lot of sub-systems in its gameplay, almost too much in comparison. I've even joked with my players how the Magic rules and Matrix rules alone are enough to run their own game without ever getting into the other rules. The numerous tables of modifiers, the special rules for shotguns, the intricacies of mundane healing VS magical healing, all of the extra stuff that gear can do for you...it was a lot to keep track of. Way to much for my liking.

(nvm my players can't be bothered to read the whole rulebook themselves, and are relying on "It's the GM's job to explain EVERYTHING!!!!" but I digress.)

Point being: D&D 4th a mechanical quagmire as much as SR4?

Funniest thing I've heard all week.

So by that token SR5 is just SR4.5? It's pretty much borrowing the standard SR4 mechanic with some alterations.



Did I say they were equivalent, or did I compare the trends of the two games? Pretty sure you read some things that weren't written.

Obviously not since Limits are something wholly unique to SR5



Then what the hell did you mean by this:


You're phrasing it as if the issues in D&D 4th and in SR4 are similar, if not outright identical.

Which I say is not true at all in the slightest.

You're being ridiculous, and your hostility is downright weird.



Similar in that they're both harboring terrible mechanical complexity and bad game design under the banner of simplicity, yes. Identical, no.

That's why I said "generally" and "strikes me in the same way" instead of "are just like each other in all respects."

...how did you pick up "hostile" from that?



...so they DO have similar problems?

Which is what I was trying to understand if that's what you meant.

Well, seeing as how dice pool caps have been effective for so many people, I'd say they're proven to be an elegant and clever solution. It doesn't take power away from anyone.

You haven't said why limits are better than caps. I've repeatedly shown actual play trials, which have worked smoothly. Limits are untested, so how can you be so sure they'll be superior?

With all due respect, that's a load of bunk.

Shadowrun has never historically been a buckets-of-dice game. You used to only get your skill in dice, with a bit of allocatable pool thrown in for good measure. That meant a really good character was rolling a maximum of twelve dice at start. The buckets of dice syndrome didn't start until SR4, when they copied the NWOD without thinking things through all the way. It is distinctly *not* a staple of Shadowrun, it's an accident caused by a flawed system.

I've been playing Shadowrun ever since it came out. In all that time, I never rolled more than 20 dice for any task, and that was on a heavily maxed out roll. Then SR4/4.5 comes along, and suddenly 20 dice is standard-- in some cases, low, even. No offense, but your experience with Shadowrun must be severely limited if you weren't aware of that fact.

How should we fix it? There's a lot of ways you can go. You can take the Exalted route and say "Screw it!"-- just go for gonzo, over the top action with fistfuls of dice. To pull that off, you just need to quit pretending that smaller dice pools are normal. Make everything bigger than life.

Another way is to fix the rules themselves, namely the stacking issues. Dial back the modifiers, so it's not as easy to build huge dice pools. Or you could go back to variable TN's, so that "MOAR DICE" does not equal "Automatic win". Fixing Edge would help a lot as well.

If you want to stick with 4.5's model, try using dice pool caps, which have worked for hundreds of players through hundreds of Missions events. I know you have an issue with them, but you've yet to articulate exactly what that is.

To be fair, Limits are one solution, but they're a tricky one. If Limits are constantly coming into play, players are losing successes on a regular basis. That's no fun. If they're not coming into play often enough, they're not actually limiting anything, which means huge dice pools still rule the day. There is a middle ground, but finding it isn't going to be easy, and is probably going to end up as a matter of personal preference. Bottom line here is that we can't know if it works until we try it-- and you haven't tried it yet.

You're focused on Limits as the One True Solution. Quite frankly, that's very narrow thinking. There are many solutions, all of which may be better, and many of which have been tested with years of actual play. Limits are brand new, and quite honestly we don't know how they're going to work. Why do you think Limits, an untested mechanic, is superior to all the other solutions that are actually tried and true?