If you're buying up your power points, you cannot be a top notch mage. The karma spent is needed in order to be a top notch mage.

Of course they can, the issue is they give up virtually nothing to do so. The pure mage is at best when min maxing to the nines a marginally better mage while the mystic adept can gain a wide range of versatility. A mystic adept face will be a significantly better face than the shaman face and yet the shaman face is not really better at being a better shaman. That does not really seem fair to the shaman to me. Most generalist concepts give up a lot compared to the specialist why is the mystic adept some special snowflake than gets to be a generalist while still being the specialists equal or near equal in their specialty. I'm willing to give the hot fix a go to see if it balances things though I honestly don't like how it looks, it seems a odd way to advance the various magic attributes.

They give up plenty - unless they're specifically combining the mage and adept stuff towards one goal, in which case they damn well should be better at it than the mage or adept, they're intrinsically worse at both.

That's why I posted this now, and this list will be available at Gen Con for everyone who comes in. We're doing our best to make players aware in advance.

Also guys? We've had the argument elsewhere about Adepts vs Mages vs Sammies vs the World. Please keep the arguments contained there, and keep this thread specifically about the Errata stuff.

No. I prefer stories with conflicts that are entirely one sided in the "good" guys' favor, although it need not appear to be so.

Compared to what? Utterly unoptimized characters? Book archetypes?



Astral Projection is really valuable if you know how to use it, and you seem to drastically undervalue its benefit. With the increase in range before a service counts as remote, the projecting mage can keep out of harms way while still contributing to a run, whereas the Mystic Adept puts his ass on the line. Give both characters some Karma, and the standard mage will really shine, especially if some of the better initiate abilities from SR4 make it into SR5.

Btw, it's spelled "Mystic Adept".

Wait, are you saying that this season's numbering system is going to include letters? So it's entirely probable we're going to have a SRM 5A-03 "Title A", SRM 5B-03 "Title B", and SRM 5C-03 "Title C"?

Eric

Yup. That's what I was seeing when I was looking at Gen Con events.

And I see the first one as boring, with a Capital B. If you cannot fail, there is no accomplishment. The 2nd Story arc is so much more fulfilling. *shrug*

Which is Boring. You cannot fail, because the conflict is an illusion.

"Top Notch Mage" as a concept is very subjective. I would consider my Mysad split 3/2 to be a Top Notch Mage, as well as a Top Notch Adept. It is about the concept, not the mechanics.

I completely disagree with this sentiment. Again, it is not about numbers, but about concept. *shrug*

And a Mystic Adept cannot use a Spirit Why, Exactly? He has no need of being on the front lines (whether or not he can astrally project) just as a Magician has no need of being on the front lines.

It's kinda easier to do if you float around astrally with the team, and then direct it.

Not really... *shrug*

I'll rephrase. If top-notch mage is defined as the best mage you can create out of chargen (or at least being in the area thereof), a MystAd buying power points cannot be that. That is the definition of the term that I am using, and the one I assume Shinobi to be using. A top-notch mage, then, would have a Power Focus, a Mentor Spirit, a Sustaining Focus and/or Focused Concentration, they may have Quick Healer to assist with healing Drain, and some variants might make use of Exception Attribute to hit 7 magic as well.

Saying its about concept is valid from a certain perspective, but it's not at all a useful definition in this context - where "top-notch mage" is being used to argue about a balance issue, and thus we need a definition strictly relating towards mechanics.

Hmmmmm..... I guess I can see that. Thanks for your clarification.

Equally boring is if you cannot win...



Just wanted to add there are plenty of things that could make the first story interesting. Perhaps the guy hes going against is even more talented, his shoelace gets untied while running etc etc. I hear from dumpshock and the official boards soo many times that OMG this guy had 50 dice it was so broken. Frankly i dont see this as a problem, the problem is when you have a player with 50 dice at a table where everyone has else has 10. Some form of balance is good between player characters while maintaining niche protection. As a GM I can dial up or down the difficulty so thats a non-issue. Its just a matter of are you running against the Crimson Crush or running against Ares.

All conflicts in RPGs are illusion, they are never real. Also due to very nature of dice, certainly you can fail, just that it is unlikely. There can be failure, but it is supposed to happen only in minority. You should not fail is quite different from you cannot fail.

And thus the sweet spot is where you can win, but it's sure as hell not going to be easy.

Who said anything about not being able to win? I just do not think is should be a foregone conclusion. You need the ability to lose for your victories to mean anything at all.

Why should your failures be minimal or happen in the minority? Again, if there is no struggle, there is no victory. If you choose poorly, you should suffer the consequences for that choice, not get an adjusted success out it. Yes, dice can swing the outcome. And I never advocated that you should never win. But your initial story element is boring, because as it is written, there is no failure at all. It was all about winning, winning, winning. The second is more poignant, because it has failure and, after a long, hard struggle, triumph at the end. A triumph that is not guaranteed.

I would say the sweet spot is that you can win or lose, and it will still not be easy. You cannot grow if you never lose, after all.

One of my favorite shadowrun moments was a victory but a costly one, which made every run for months to come difficult. It was one of the universal brotherhood adventures we were in a tunnel system and came upon the queen and were quite frankly getting spanked. My character was a street sam/demo expert. He fell back grabbed 2 killos of c12 slapped in some detonators and wrapped a belt of explosive LMG ammo around it. He then leaped off the ledge on top of the queen shoving the bomb down her throat. Good news he succeeded, bad news she bit his arm off. The GM ruled it worked like some chunky salsa goodness and killed the queen who exploded in a cinematic shower of gore. It was awesome. You know what was more awesome, running the next year with only one arm as I saved up the money to get a sweet cyber limb. Especially as I had lost my main arm and was shooting lefty for that year. Killing the queen was cool, running the shadows one armed for a year was epic. I'm also in the make it hard and maybe fail camp.

Indeed... that is what I am talking about.

My Cyberlogician was cram packed full of ware; very high end ware (2 pieces of Delta I managed to get, with everything else being Beta). In the midst of the campaign, he was captured by Mitsuhama and was tried and convicted for Industrial Espionage. They pulled out almost all of my cyber (they left the spinal stuff in place and a few non-essentials, but all the rest were yanked). Even with the ware gone, I was able to get the transfer to the orbital prison switched with another criminal nobody staying dirtside. After several months in prison, I managed to arrange an escape (with some help from a Corporate Contact or two, who arranged for me to get some cosmetic surgery to change my identity and looks). Spent the better part of the next year working on recovering my ware setup while running as a new guy with my old team. I managed to pull it off, until in a moment of crisis, I let my cover slip when I took control of the airplane the team had (was mine originally, and I had all the original, hidden, codes to it still) to allow us to make it to the epic ending of the campaign arc. Was a TON of fun, even though I had a setback that put me back to almost no ware, and no equipment. But in the end, he was a better character for it.

Yes, but would it have been even MORE fun if you did not have that setback? In the end, would he been an even better character for having succeeded and not been captured? I suspect that what you really enjoyed was the successes you had after the setback and would not have much fun if he kept on failing. Therefore the main question to me would be more along the lines of which would be more enjoyable? a) Succeed (+1), succeed (+1), succeed (+1), for a final score of +3. or b) Fail (-1), fail (-1), succeed (+1) for a final score of (-2). In both cases, you still succeed on the final try.

Not really, no, because I would never have had to improvise and stretch the character's limits. He would have been much more powerful, to be sure, if he always succeeded, but that gets boring really quick. As to the changes that would have wrought in campaign: there would have been no repurchase of ware, so nuyen could have been spent in other places, Karma would have been spent differently, he would have had fewer additional contacts, the campaign would have played out differently, and we may never have actually succeeded at the final mission, because a lot of things would have played out differently - unless you assume that we succeeded there as well. Looks like we have very fundamental differences in how we approach things.

I'm with TJ on this. Constant success is the worst kind of game.

My case in point is actually a character that is not mine.

As the result of time travel one of the PCs has crossed his own timeline and ended up with some of his future-self's posessions. One of which is a book titled "1001 More Uses for Milk" (written by his future self).

As a result of this book the PC has become a Lactomancer ("all life comes from milk").

A few other various things, PC/player saying that he'll "never be that guy" (i.e. denying that he will become who his future self is).

The irony is that through his own actions, of his own free will, he is unwittingly becoming his future self.

His future self is the Big Bad Evil Guy of the campaign.

The GM has not intentionally planned things this way. As far as I can tell, it was just some hints (there is someone causing trouble), a couple of dropped objects (previously owned by the guy causing trouble), followed by actual player actions (player deciding to start practicing Lactomancy). The rest is pure speculation on my part, but I've expressed my point of view with the GM, who is very good at improvising multiple plots (and teasing his players*).


No matter how you cut that, the PC's path isn't one success after another. If he does become the big bad, the PC is destined to fail at some point (especially if he confronts himself: one of the two of them will lose)

*A different player was teased for the longest time that his character "was a plant." It has since become factually true and accepted as such. Effectively the PC at one time was a magical quarterstaff, which became intelligent, which then became shapeshifted all prior to the start of the game (and the PC is currently pregnant).

Constant success is boring, but constant failure and feeling like you can 'never win' is discouraging and can be unfun as well. There needs to be a balance(for me personally, some people love it one way or the other.)

Success is meaningless unless earned, which implies the possibility of failure.

More powerful? Possibly.

That's not the same as "better".

Roleplaying can mean getting just as much out of your failures as your successes. It's not about "winning", after all. It's about character development, and not the stat-boosting kind.

Myself, I have had massive bad luck for some of my characters. The character might not like it, but me, as a player, I don't see a drawback. I see an opportunity. My characters would probably HATE me if they knew I was responsible for much of their pain.



-k

This

I played under some GMs over the years where on the lower end X was not useful in his/her game (but we don't know that ahead of time, like negotiation will not be used etc) to an extreme case where you cant win, no matter what you do or what you say, you loose GM wins. I rarely run into the extreme case these days but it was more common in the 80s and 90s.

Could you have chosen to improvise and stretch the character's limits? Could the GM have pose you winnable challenges to stretch the character limits?

As I see it, the GM would have had to lowball your challenges after you had your setback compared to challenges before your setback, because if you had your wares and other equipment, you would probably have a higher probability of success. Were the challenges that your character faced after capture fundamentally easier, even if they might have been relatively as difficult or more difficult given that your character was stripped of his gear?

Success is always earned, you can't have success unless you earn it, even if you earned it easily. When you roll the dice, there is always the possibility of failure, even if the risk of failure is very small.

I've seen instances of this-I've sent groups on runs that I thought they'd sweat like hell at but damn, did they bring the rolls home.

Then I sent them on what were meant to be kitty-cat milk runs and watched them fail roll after roll spectacularly. You never know what happens with those devious dice...

A mysad can have most of those too(power focus and mentor being most important), especially as he can get his iniative boost from powers and thus doesn't need a sustaining focus for that.

See, that is where you are wrong... And you might want to get your eyesight fixed. The Challenges in the campaign only got harder, not easier (and my Dice Pools did not really take a hit from the incarceration (except for the loss of the smartlink, which I eventually recovered anyways)). And I had to scrape and scratch to get back to where I was before I was incarcerated (it was not handed to me on a platter; it took me over a Hundred Karma and about 9 months of effort (play time) to recover to anywhere close to where I started. Some things were easily replaced, like my Comlink and Senseware; while other things, like the Delta-Grade stuff, were Much harder to recover from. But that is okay, because again, I was not trying to "Win" against my GM. I was developing a character and a story. It was never about competition between GM and Player. It was about making an interesting story with an amazing climax to that particular storyline.



If you earn it easily or with no effort, I would say that you did not earn it. Does the Olympic Sprinter EARN the win over the High School Sprinter with no experience? No, of course not. Saying he does in Disingenuous, at best, and an outright lie at worst.

If a MystAd buys 6 power points, he cannot afford both the power focus and mentor spirit, much less the rest of it.

Why couldn't he? Even with the Increased Cost of MysAd Power Points to 5/Point, that is still only 30 Karma, and you can have up to 50. Plenty of points remaining. *shrug*

Force 3 Power Focus: 18 Karma
Mentor Spirit: 5 Karma

That's 53 Karma with 6 Power Points. The max you can have for chargen is 50.

While true if the difference is that small IMO the difference is far too small. If you have to hit every extra dice mile post in order for the mage to be a better mage than the mystic adept there is a problem as I see it.

Those are the two most obvious possible things - and I'm particularly comparing reasonably optimized characters, because they're a good benchmark for balance. You've previously stated that you feel that "you should have to completely fail to build a mage to be worse than a Mystic Adept", which doesn't remotely sound like a balanced system.

So take a Force 2 Power Focus instead. 1 Dice is so insignificant as to be laughable, at that level.

At which point you're simply deciding which ways you will be "less than". Remember, the Mage gets 30 more Karma to spend on mage stuff.

I don't see how its unbalanced to say that a specialist should have to build o fail in order for a generalist to beat them at their specialty. If one person builds a combat decker and the other a pure decker the pure decker should be significantly better at hacking than the combat decker and unless the decker built his character poorly that statement should stand. That is a balanced concept, making it so the decker has to optimize in his specialty so a guy with 2 different focuses doesn't beat him at his specialty is what doesn't sound remotely balanced.

Well, for one thing, there's nothing stopping a Mage from building as a generalist or a MystAd from building as a specialist - they're not as well suited to it, but nothing prevents it. What you're suggesting is that the generalist Mage has to be worse than the specialist MystAd, which means that the MystAd has to be at a disadvantage that is much too large to be balanced. A specialist Mage should be better than a specialist MystAd, but that's already true.

Guys. Build discussions and arguments should go in a seperate thread. I'm at gen Con, so don't make me go get out my red Mod text. i'd be very irritated to have to do that. plus at least two of the Mod/Admins are actually onsite here, and are easily plied with alcohol. And I'm not above abusing my power to keep my thread clear of these petty arguments.

Gah, sorry forgot which thread I was in. I tried to not go into this in this thread anymore as other threads are more suited towards it. I'd blame the rum, but it will always be blameless in my heart.

I was dulling the ache in my arthitic knees last night with Cap & Coke, so I can empathize there.

Does that actually work, Bull? Would love something to dull the pain of the two titanium rods in my spine. Sadly, nothing really works for that, that I have found.