Oh boy, you are making it harder than it needs to be.

We have been talking about a quicker combat in SR5 than in SR4, right? In SR4 you could fire twice per phase, the target could dodge twice. According to your fire-mode, you could either raise your damage to insane levels or reduce his dodge dice. So most of the time, the fight was over after one or two good-rolled-phases.

NOW, we have higher base damage but no additional damage through auto-fire. We have more base-armor, but compared to armor stacking in SR4, we are at about the same level. What we can still do, is reducing dodge-dice, but dodge-dice-pool is higher than in SR4. So we have less attacks and more dodging. Where exactly you see a speed-up, goes completely out of my understanding. And if it wouldn´t be a sufficient effective explanation, we have another problem: you can only ATTACK with one phase, but you still have another simple action. In SR4 you used it for shooting, now you do stuff like perception etc. Yes, all these things are actions for that dice need to be rolled. So it takes up time, too. And now please explain to me, where exactly we saved time?

Funny is, that you even agreed, that combat isn´t quicker, but you reach your action phase faster. If the simple phase is not used, you might be right. ^^



That might be, because the WHOLE MAGIC is less effective. ^^ But "shoot yourself" is more effective than a direct spell or an indirect one he can dodge (while you die of your own drain).


Whooey...they increased the damage. Did you recognize that they did it with all weapons? I see no improvement here. Hold outs are not made to kill people lie a heavy pistol.



Of course it is. Even with build points you have to think about what you do with your char. The calulation might be more simple, but it is not quicker.



In 4 recoil also mattered. You are comparing apples and oranges, as long as we only have one book SR5 compared to a dozen books SR4.

Oh, you were serious about that....ok.


It is not half as bas as SR5.

Like TJ pointed out, you didn´t understand the meaning of my post.

You still have to read a table and the table is not blessed with a good overview.
I don´t see a proper change. Our sam got shot on the weekend in SR5 because of exactly your mentioned SR4-problem.^^

So you define quicker and faster as 2 different terms? Okzz.......



Plenty of spells work in pretty much exactly the same way as 4th Ed so you're wrong straight off the bat, and even if you were to say 1/2 of them have been nerfed you can't really say that half of them have been nerfed by the same amount. In fact I think most people haven't actually read how Mob Mind and Mob Control work this edition. a) 2 stat dice pool to resist now instead of 1 b) The victim(s) can attempt to resist every turn, instead of every force turns. So in almost every case you will have all the guys rolling to break the spell before you get to command them to do anything.

You could then interpret (thanks to the fairly loose rule set of Shadowrun) that the group is resisting the spell as a whole, not as individuals and that as the spell ends when net hits are reduced to zero, the group need probably only achieve the lowest net hits rolled against any of the targets. Sure you can mitigate this by casting the spell at high force but........ year the drain is F+1 and fireball is F-1.....and can't be dodged.............





So the relative damage matters, not just the raw damage? So if hold-outs did 100P it would still be no better that 4th Ed because heavy pistols do 102P? Ok.........



Say wha............?



Hmmmm, maybe faster then?




It reset every IP, whereas now it doesn't. I'm not sure how you think this is apples and oranges.



Well, given that in 4th Ed I could get a penile implant and know the cost both in NY and Essence, then I didn't think that knowing how many seats a car has was a big ask. Even if you didn't need to know I'd like to know how this is not an improvement? Surely at worst you can ignore it and still shove 6 Trolls into your Nissan Jackrabbit?



God bless rose tinted glasses.



I understood it fine. You said that the limit doesn't matter because the amount of hits you roll does not reach the limit. This sounded like assumed averages to me.

On the other point about good luck being punished, why stop there? Why do I get punished for bad luck? Why can't I succeed when rolling 0 successes? Damn this game is punishing!!



You clearly don't understand the concept of step mechanics.

'Machiavelli' says - I don´t see a proper change. Our sam got shot on the weekend in SR5 because of exactly your mentioned SR4-problem.^^

It's right there on p161 and 162. You can use all your movement in any particular pass. You just get modifiers once you exceed certain distances for the rest of your Combat Turn.

This...

At first I hated the idea of limits. Then I found them to be a sort of thing you could mostly ignore. Then I discovered that players simply have a hard time remembering to apply them.

For that reason I'm ditching them in my re-write of the SR5 ruleset and replacing all the gear limit bonuses such that the standard benefit is the combination of offline/online (where it makes sense) tossing the limits, and the "wireless bonus" is an additional +Device Rating dice pool bonus for actions taken with that particular gear. And by "actions" I mean like shooting someone with a smartgun, not something reactive/defensive like dodging. For the most part for basic gear and cyber, this is an extra +2, but for alpha/beta/delta cyber you'd see +3/+4/+5.

Aeeehm...actually no. I used them synonymously to each other. Is this wrong? I am not a native speaker, sorry. But i thought at least my intention was clear.




You are nitpicking and i really don´t think that you don´t understand what i mean. Maybe it is because of my inferiour language abilities, but for you i will make it more clear:
Magic at all is nerfed. May it be, because they changed the spell description, the way the magic-category in question is working, or just because of the fact, that your target resists with more dice. About the example i pointed out, i wanted to say, that your potentially damage is higher, if you control a victim and force him to shoot himself, than shooting him directly with the same amount of net successes (and you will potentially cause less damage to yourself through drain).


Do you really point out, how magic works? Sweet. I play the game since 20 years and i think i read the magic passage quite detailed. So I think, the rules are pretty clear. To your example: I also prefer a good fireball, but don´t you think that fireballing around could be a problem, especially if you think about close-combat, combat in a confined space or if innocent bystanders are present? There are only a few situations, where you can use area-spells without causing more trouble than benefit.

I will try to answer the other questions asap.

Hmmm, apologies then. They are mostly interchangable. Obviously if english is a 2nd language then the confusion with that is understandable.

I didn't pick it though so your grasp of it is better than a lot of native speakers.

@Machiavelli

And now please tell me HOW this could be a bad thing. This was the MAJOR complain in SR4. It coined the phrase "magic-run", because everyone who was not playing a mage, did not get the game, so to speak.

@Smash
And just to point out an other obvious thing in general: I would not be sure about the no dodge to the fireball, since it still has a modifier to dodge and nowhere in the rules says you can't dodge it.

While I can't provide a quote I'm pretty sure this has been attributed to a copy/paste issue.

The semi-official stance mentioned in another thread sometime back, was that the -2 dodge mod was a copy /paste from previous edition and not in play for SR5, so technically there is no dodge for fireball and similar aoe effects like grenades.

However, at several cons the playing GMs used the -2 dodge during play citing a high number of TPK resulting from primarily grenades and some AOE spells.

@Smash
I know, but frankly I do not give much about such statements if they can't be backed up by the book (and here they can't).
No matter who writes it, it is a personal opinion and the value depends on what aspects of the rules this person was working on.
So I am just waiting on the next print, keeping in mind the point Sendaz mentioned...

I pretty much had to remove grenades form my GM arsenal since a half trained inbred humanis member can pretty much insta gib anyone.

especially indoors, chunky salsa indeed.

Yes they can - the text makes it clear that grenades operate as a Simple Test, not an Opposed Test; the text also makes it clear that area spells function as grenades do.

This is not the point of my discussion with Smash. We were just arguing IF magic was nerfed. IF it needs to be nerfed, this is a completely different discussion. I, IMHO, disagree.

I think it did need it, but in a very specific, targetted manner, not the way it was done.

On the assumption that the changes did nerf magic (mages and spellcasting specifically), it did so in a way that was so broad as to swing the pendulum the other way:
* point-for-point drain went up (that is, raising the force of any given spell from X to X+2 is now 2 DV of drain vs. 1 DV)
* point-for-point resistance went up (two attributes vs. one)
* point-for-point effects went down (now just net hits vs. of Force plus net hits).

I also agree, that magic needed a nerf. But it was not magic at all, that was overpowered, only the rules for overcastting and the corresponding relatively low drain ruined the game balance. There were some good proposals to fix that problem (e.g. only 1,5 times force and higher drain for the overcastting per force-point), but instead of fixing the broken problem, they fixed a lot of stuff that worked quite fine. But like I said, this was not the topic we discussed here. We just argued about IF magic was nerfed, and it definitely was.

Magic is just different now, some stuff got nerfed(direct spells, spirits(new hardened armor rules means they can actually be hurt)), while some things got buffed(indirect spells being the most talk about, but mind control spells got huge buffs(if you read the spells, they care about net hits, not force. Get some reagents or just spend a point of edge, then laugh as your force 1 mind control does horrible things, seeing as the only way to stop it, is to notice the spell and then resist it)). Also, reckless spell casting really needs to be clarified with how it works in regards to the one attack per turn thing, because it seems strange I can cast two spells in a round, but they can't both be flamethrower, gotta be flamethrower and ice sheet. Least you can give orders to spirits and cast spells though.

Overall though, I agree it is a net nerf, just not that big.

Oh it gets better, as you can not cast that second spell of Ice Sheet directly under someone as that would be considered an attack, since a roll is involved.

The base guideline was 1 attack per IP, so it moved us more to a classic miniature style of Move and Action, but the Run & Gun does have the optional rule lifting this so if you want to use both simple actions as attacks.


Yes, because while you have given the spirit an order, it is still doing that action itself.

Fun no?

...no, I refuse to believe that. That...that is just so silly.

Better believe it. ^^

Attacks are defined as anything directly effecting the target. An Ice Sheet under the target's feet directly effects him. Ergo...

(Direct from Bull, if you're wondering)

In general, definitely. But as pointed out some spells got buffed as a side effect of other rules, and they were definitely not spells that NEEDED it.
(If anything, they were spells that needed nerfs!)



It is, and them's the rules.