Just curious, why 20 minutes?

*shrug* Because he said he could do it in 15. I decided to give him some leeway.

I would've give him 30, if I was that big of a dick...

Pools are the one thing I am missing from the old editions.

Bye
Thanee

I can agree there. But they were often a headache to teach new players. They were always a huge stumbling block doing demos.

well you can easily make a char in 15min, if you leave buying stuff out of the time limit.

And seeing that I now can get even more money, buying stuff with Priority is not getting any faster!

YMMV, but I found that calculating pools was the hard part. If you did the math for them, using the pools was fairly easy.

Add 3 numbers, divide by 2, round up??? How on earth can that be difficult?

The problems I had with SR3 dice pool was to keep track of them as a GM, especially when there were multiple opponents with big pool size difference.

Apparently difficult.

I too agree that the pools were excellent, and teaching it to new players was simple. Set aside the character's dice pool in a seperate colour. When they take dice from the pool, they remove them from play. And when it refreshed, you would add to that pool again. It was freakin' easy to teach.

How about this: Human A, Magic B. You have 9 special attribute points but only 7 usable. What happens to the left over two points?

My suggestion would be to not choose it in that order if you don't want it to go to waste.

But they may have rules for unused points in that situation, know one really knows.

Get Exceptional Attribute and/or Lucky to increase your limits, or choose differently. Nothing stops you from choosing poorly, except common sense.

Even worse will be Human A, Adept B. You will have 9 special attributes, but can only use 5 of those.

By Default (in SR4A), there is no cap on DP's (it is an optional rule, afdter all), therefore you may increase your DP's to your heart's content. Nothing stops you from doing so. Since that was deemed unacceptable for the new addition, they had to come up with different mechanics to sell it. I think they chose poorly. *shrug*

Ummmmm... Sometimes (Often?) the difference between Force 6 and Force 7 is that the Drain goes from Stun to Physical. For me, Taking Physical Damage for casting a Spell is downright stupid unless you have absolutely no other choice. And sometimes that extra point of Force Matters. *shrug*

First, I'm just gonna point out that's what already happens in the system as it currently stands. Under my suggestion for a more logical progression, Human A would have 12 points. Which is more than you're ever going to be able to actually spend since apparently minimum magic is 2. I'm guessing they capped at 9 because 9 lets you raise edge from 2 to 7 and magic from 2 to 6, with nothing left over. Which is fine, but they make it cost too much to get there. If you only want someone to get stats they can actually use, don't let a human pick priority A. (ie cap it at priority B with 8 points). Alternatively, as others pointed out, picking race (human) and magic both that high are a bad idea, people simply won't do it because it wastes points.

Alternative solution: Let any special attribute points be rolled over to regular attributes if the specials are capped. So a Human A and Adept B gets maxed edge, and then the 7 leftoverpoints gets added to your regular attributes (which at this point are likely C or D, so you could use those anyway)

I have done it (Often - when I get an idea, I put it together just to see how weell it works out)) in less than 30 Minutes, and if it is a quick pickup game, in less than 10. Of course, in quick character Gen, I generally have less than 4 BP in gear, to make things easy (Gun(s), Armor, some ammo, and maybe a few other things, DONE...). Often these are for those One-Shots that have occurred over the years. Regardless of the Character Generation System, I often take much longer if the character is meant to span multiple campaigns.

And of course, there are always the Archetypes, which I have played on more than one occasion.

Testing that now.

Who said anything about taking damage

Most starting characters have a drain pool of like 9-10 dice. Maybe as high as 12-14 on the outside. It takes a few initiations under your belt before you can reliably take no damage from drain. Especially from spells with higher drain codes. That's going to go double with SR5 making drain based off force rather than half force.

The Magician I play currently still takes Drain, even if it is nickles and dimes (anything with Drain DV 2 or less I am okay on, Most of his spells are Drain of +1 to +3 adjustment), and he generally only casts at Force 3-4 (Generally all he really needs, with Force 5/6 being his Crossover from Stun to Physical). Put him in a Background Count and he reliably takes drain. Lagos Sucks.

Burnt out mage, two essence worth of cyber.

What does that have to do with the left over points? You maximum magic would be reduced...

I suppose you could always use dice pools in SR5. It would be pretty easy. All you need to do is come up with an equation (possibly something similar to the limit equations?) to determine your dice pools. Then, any actions have a base rating (Skill Rating for example) of dice that you would roll, and you could add dice from your pool, but you could not exceed either the skill rating or the associated attribute rating. This, of course, would require some tweaking; but that would be the gist of it.

I'm still trying to figure that one out, too.

I doubt they'd be much more of a headache than teaching Limits. I can certainly anticipate players calling out that they got 5, 6, or 7 hits and having to remind them, over and over and over, to compare it to their relevant Limit. Players have a hard enough time remembering small occasional bonuses in other games (like a spell granting a +1 to hit or however in D&D) no matter how many times you remind them in the same session, so the extra step of comparing against their various limits or accuracy every single time (especially if people are mixing 3 or 4 kinds of different-limited activities in a short period) sounds like it's going to often provoke that extra "okay please verify" from the GM. The GM can't remember everyone's Limits, and there's no physical pile-o-dice like Combat Pool to help organize them in some tactile way.

Which gets into the problem of "oh crap I looked at Social instead of Mental, that was actually 4 hits instead of 6 does it still work" or "whoops, I got that number from the wrong gun, that 3 hit shotgun blast was actually an 8 can you please redo the damage against the target" and so on.

Pretty sure it would be a small matter of just having the Limits noted at the top of a PC's character sheet, bold, and underlined.

And for GM's to just have the character's Limits be apart of their notes. Not that bad, all considering.

I forgot perception on my last characer so yeah mistakes are made occasionally, but since I didn't design the character around that skill I just made it a character trait in play and had a lot of fun with it. I think it really depends on how far you plan on fiddling with the gear part of a character. Me I have a gun or 2 both stock models, the armor I want to wear, a disposable comlink or 3, a fake id or 2, and whatever cyber/bio I think fits the character with a couple pieces to round him out. Sure I could spend 2 hours taking pieces off, adding other pieces to get the perfect cyber to bio ratio etc. but I don't need to do that to have fun with my character.

That's that Threat Pools were for. You simply added X number of dice to every roll.

They didn't have threat pools in SR3. That was a SR2 mechanic. Mind you, I carried it over anyway. It made things easier.

I suppose it also depends on how often you make characters. I like my campaigns to last a good while, so my players don't make too many characters very often.

As a GM, tracking 30 extra limits (limits, gun limits, etc) on top of the ones for the NPCs just sounds delightful.

Oi, I'm a GM too!

Well, not really: after awhile, the players should eventually memorize their Limits, and for grunts in combat, pretty sure all of them would more or less have the same Limits.

Plus, I always found Initiative and Health to be the most annoying to track...

I am making a character sheet, and am considering putting the Limit next to each skill DP.

I'm not sure which skills use Social. I suspect the Influence group, but what else?



-k

One of the many says SR2 was better

But as a mechanic for NPCs it was way the heck better than tracking individual pools, which frankly, was a horrible decision.

Your opinion may vary of course

Initiative is easy if you draw a little chart or use a gaming aid (I use a magnetic dry-erase sheet designed for Pathfinder, you can move things and take easy notes). Health is more difficult to track in SR4 than SR3, since it's not very predictable whether something is going to do Stun or Physical damage, and tracks vary in length for each individual.

I do hope they address the Stun/Physical issue in SR5. In SR4 it's much easier, cheaper, and quicker to plan on doing consistent Stun damage (shock bullets, stun spells, etc) rather than mucking about with lethal weaponry, due to the way armor works. I'd rather see it go back to weaponry favoring lethal damage and having stun be inconsistent.

Eh we do long campaigns usually. Thing is since it is a long campaign I feel like I have plenty of time to fill in the holes that I missed while not fiddling with my character for hours.

While I also prefer dice pools as a mechanic.

My biggest issue with it all is attributes were far too important to most dice pools in SR4, far out of proportion to skills. With the limit change it doesn't matter that skills have ranks up to 12 now... those extra ranks are irrelevant unless you have the high attributes first! They both provide dice AND set the limits so it makes the skill changes pointless.

I would have much rather seen a limit based on skill. For example, (3x skill + link attribute)/3. Skill would matter a lot more to the relevant test, while attributes continue to add a lot of dice to many different skills. Every skill die could potentially contribute a success while only 1 in 3 attribute dice could.


I disagree with all those talking about taking away successes, especially Cain. It's no different than many of the other tests in the game where you only need X... over X doesn't matter. Force limits are NOT a bad thing in the system. a massive list of spells to learn at only force 1 like existed in old editions was not a good thing.

I completely agree that making attributes even more insanely important is a little silly.

Limits based on skill would be a wreck (moreso than limits based on attributes), as that would mean a gazillion Limits that constantly changed.

Limits based on weapon 'accuracy' are also, frankly, weird, because hits (presumably still) feed directly into damage. This negates the possibility of the lucky shot through the eye with the cheap holdout pistol just because the accuracy sucks. And I know you can spend Edge to lift the cap, but it's rather mean (read: counterintuitive) to require spending some extra resource just for the privilege of being allowed to be as good at something as you actually are.

It really leads to edge cases where the system will break the boundaries of believable, since there would be situations where a weapon would be literally incapable of killing someone without the expenditure of Edge. You put the gun to the Johnson's temple and pull the trigger, but the gun only does 6 damage and has an Accuracy of 2, capping at 8 damage. Now you're rolling 20 dice at someone who can't dodge, so you could expect to take his head off, but the system says no, that's not what happens. He takes 8 damage and cries some. The GM in that situation can certainly say that the target just dies, but what if the target is a hard-headed Troll who has at least an in-character believable chance of soaking part of the hit and not dying? You would actually need to use Edge for this?

Comparatively, SR3 would just give you an insanely easy target number and you'd probably stage the damage up 4 or 5 steps past Deadly. Even SR4 would let you keep your 10 hits and believably turn his face into goo. These are systems that could at least work with edge cases. Limits sound very focused toward resolving the middle ground, the 'near average' circumstances, without paying any mind to what happens if the conditions are a little weird.

It's very different. First of all, in SR4.5 is the critical success rule, where the player gets to add in Extra Cool for additional successes.

Additionally, most tests in SR4.5 have additional benefits for overkill. Degree of success matters in the game. For example, on an attack roll, extra successes translate to extra damage.

But most importantly... have you, or a player at your table, ever made an incredible roll? And seen everyone else cheer, high-five, applaud, or otherwise celebrate their success? I'm sure you have; but even if you haven't, I'm sure you can imagine it. Now, imagine what happens after that tremendous roll, having to tell the player (or having the GM tell you) that you don't actually get to use your fantastic roll. You get capped, so you only get a fraction of what you rolled-- maybe even failing. How would that feel?

I think we should have a look on Character advancement cost in the final game. As for the previews "Karma" is now either an altogether different "currency" or the relations in cost have changed. If raising an attribute ranges within "old" cost like new attribute rating x5 or more while skills and qualities get cheaper to improve I do not see as much of a problem with making them even more important.

What I expect is to see more rounded out attributes and less samurais with charisma 1 running arround, as they would be "face-bait" (with low essence also figuring into the social limits as some theories go) if limits apply to the defensive party in a contested roll in the same way.



I have had that experience, and sometimes it was the mage character throwing an awesome spell success with 9 hits on his force 5 barrier spell, effectively "loosing" 4 hits (until another mage comes along, trying to dispell his barrier). Or rolling similarly well on a resist 3S drain, with more than 3 successes having just no effect other than just sitting arround unused/ unneeded.

What I want to point out is, that we still don't know when limits are going to be figured into the success (and how expensive it is to change them in relation to doing other stuff).

Example: My Samurai shoots some corporate sec guard with his beloved Uzi(w/Laser sight) Acc5(6) [I am guessing here] rolling 15 dice and comming up with an incredible 8 Hits. The sec guard now rolling defense with rea + int (QSR, iirc) comming up with the ammount of 3 Hits. Are the hits of my character now capped at 6 and afterwards the 3 hits on his defense roll are subtracted leaving my samurai with 3 net hits, or (as I suspect) are they subtracted beforehand and the net successes are capped, which would leave my samurai with 5 net hits on the damage.
Has anybody some insight on this that can be shared at this point without violating NDAs?

I honestly don't get the "attributes are too powerful/important" line of reasoning - they may be undercosted, but that is a different matter entirely. I recognize, of course, that this is a change from prior editions, of course, but what I don't get is why people seem to think that a (clearly intentional) increase in the value of attributes is automatically bad. Note, for example, that Priority A Skills about three times, give or take, the points of Attributes you get. This does suggest that the real (rather than potential) value of Attributes should be about 3 times that of Skills - though as it is not a zero-sum case, that is not actually a precise form of measurement; further, there is the curvature of value to consider.

I know it would violate my NDA if I answered your question

I thought so, but knowing somebody knows means there is a clarification about that instance somewhere, which is comforting.

I haven't had a chance to number-crunch the priority table, but the general gist is that an attribute factors into many skills, so improving the attribute is more cost-effective than raising all the associated skills. We know it's still attribute + Skill, so I'm not violating my NDA by saying that much. We also know that attributes are used to calculate Limits, so they're even more valuable than skills.

The bottom line is that attributes are (supposedly) seriously undercosted, to use your term. Undercosted to the point where raising skills is a bad idea, raising attributes is much more cost efficient.

Again, I haven't run the numbers for myself, so take this with a grain of salt. But as long as the base SR4.5 system is being used, attributes are far more valuable than skills. Adding even more benefit to attributes is taking things in the wrong direction.

You forgot attribute only tests like judge intentions or composure. Something for which there is no skill analogue. Yet another strike against skills.

So if they think 3 skills is worth 1 attribute... yes badly undercost.

I think at last count there was something like ~9x the number of skills in game compared to 8 link attributes. A skill group with a mere fraction of the skills linked to that attribute costs the same as the attribute itself.

Reframe this another way... why is there a limit of half BP to spend on attributes in SR4... (further broken by metas giving even more points for attributes above this limit). Yet there is no limit on points spent on skill. If the costs were in line there would be no need for a BP limit on attributes.


And Cain... yes... we completely ignore the 'awesome success' rule because whoever wrote it was on crack. With the size of dice pools in the game... 4+ net successes is a ludicrously easy bar to reach, especially on an unopposed success test. Especially for an optomized character. When they do it nearly every roll... it's hard to care. For a spellcaster... they chose their force specifically to restrict the level of effect and control drain. So yes extra successes are moot.

The entire point of the line of argument around basing it more on skill isn't to create complexity and things for the GM to track... you rely on your players to police themselves. At a limit of 1 per skill and 1/3 or 1/4 more per attribute. Awesome agility builds can still function... but they'll run into the cap nearly half the time. Reflecting raw ability but lack of training to use it. It's also easy to figure on the fly. Average human 3 attr, 3 skill... limit 4. But if no skill... now only limit 1. Or even 1 rank.. limit 2.

It's the old alternative rule published to limit successes to 2x skill with a tweak.

The progression is logical, it's just not necessarily linear.

When you're pushing an exponential scale (like Karma progression) into a linear scale (like Attribute and Skill Points), you've got to do a fair amount of approximation. The basis for that approximation can come pretty much anywhere along the original scale, but you've got to pick somewhere. We looked at a few tables created with different approximations, and the one presented is the one most of us liked. It is, to be fair, only one of a number of approximations that are all valid in their own rights for their own reasons, but this one was the one that we thought was the best fit for SR5.

I don't see your problem here. Edge is meant to simulate those lucky breaks. If anything, this is just removing the absurd ability to stack enough dice that the one in a million lucky shot is a certainty.

I have an intense desire to quote a piece of Guards! Guards! where the City Watch had to deal with a dragon and made some comment than a "million to one odds pans out nine times out of ten" and then proceeded to gimp their sniper's ability so it was as close to a million-to-one odds as they could before he fired his crossbow.

He ended up standing on one leg, one arm tied behind his back, blind folded and shooting behind himself while he jumped off a roof into a water trough.

Good news: he hit.

Bad news: the arrow bounced off the dragon's scales.

Well, since it is a million to one chance and since PnPs are usually narratives and you usually only have one chance anyway so it will succeed. Then there's the whole probability pileup where you end up approaching 1 for such a low probability event occurring multiple times once it's happened once. Of course, telling the odds usually has a nasty was of increasing the probability to 1.