to make it fair, the same as the success rate of tech trying to beat magic of course.

While it does seem stacked against casters there are two things i take comfort in which what i think the creators were looking for:1. since objects roll dice, they can not only score low, but can critically glitch. 2. they wanted to get players to spend edge more often. a human caster will have at least 2 edge in the begining of their career, and more later on (im starting with 5edge and 6magic) so if i need to get the hit on a machine i can either go with edge to explode my sixes or reroll everything that failed. Machines and objects cant.

Wait wait wait.....

Are people taking OR to be a threshold? If so perhaps I see the issue here.

If not then me suggesting that a mage with 23 dice is not what's required to fool a drone with invisibility, it's what's required to basically auto-succeed.

If you are rolling 15 dice against 15 dice (which you can quite easily straight out of the box, even without 6 in spellcasting and magic) then you have 50% chance to succeed.

So let's take the invisibility example:



If the 2nd drone had spotted Mohawk and engaged him then the mage would be up against only one drone rather than 2.

Why is this not worthwhile?

Yes, Which is Poor Game Design... *shrug*

I Disagree... The Character I am playing currently has been a very successful "Average" Spellcaster for years now. He just knows where his strengths and weaknesses lay.

Indeed... My current character rarely casts against Drones or Vehicles unless I have absolutely no choice (which is rare, as he has other skills that could apply, and he has other teammates as well).
He is comfortable with OR3 and lower, to be sure, and sometimes he absolutely needs an OR5 Effect. That is what his Edge is for.
I do not expect the character to triumph over Technology all the time, but I do expect to make a good go at it.

He is still up against both drones, since the other one can now use assisted gunnery to shoot the invisible mage. Besides, any Decent Drone will ignore Invisibility anyways. That is what Radar is for.

Not that I get everything right either. But at least I know when there's a problem.
For example, I had a random point selection algorithm (no actual random input, just heavy math) that I only recently made an easy way to display the distribution of.

http://s12.postimg.org/n9m5k7nlp/before.png

Whoops. All my tests up until that point had been involving positive values and the math did not appear to indicate a bias towards positive values (as either things were multiplied together or divided against, and a negative result was still useful) but none the less, there was a problem.

One Math.abs() call later

http://s29.postimg.org/90uyv1lw7/after.png

Could you define "average" in this context?

He did in a previous post, for mages at least a 12 dice pool. I tend to agree, I see focuses and other power boosts for mages as rarer than augmentation so their pools usually are a bit lower though they can do more with them,

I'd say that's higher than the Average Mage - way I figure it, Magic isn't normally distributed; rather, Magic 1 is more common than Magic 2, which is more common than Magic 3, and so on. The average runner mage, on the other hand, would trend towards the higher end. That might be a low-end of average runner mage, though.

The average runner WILL be more capable than the average person; the average person attempting to be a runner will rapidly become the average corpse.

It's actually worth pointing out that threshold 5 in SR4 (Difficulty: Extreme) and threshold 6 in SR5 (Difficulty: Very Hard) are more or less the same; on average, you need 6 hits to defeat the OR of a highly processed object in SR5 and 5 to do so in SR4. In other words, the difficulty as the system sees it is unchanged.

And TJ: Career dice pools in SR5 are an entirely different animal than in SR4, due to the difference in skill caps. That skill of 5 in SR4 is equivalent to a skill of 8 in SR5; accordingly, his dice pool of of 12-13 for his specialty goes to 15-16.

I though it was pointed out that OR in SR5 is not a threshold test, but an opposed test?
Or did I miss something?

I think RHat was just referring to the general descriptions of various thresholds, on p45 and p62 for SR5 and SR4A respectively.

400 Karma post Creation - So please take that into account.

Mystic Adept - Split 3 Sorcery, 2 Adept. Spellcasting Skill 5 (Specialty Manipulation), Summoning Skill 3 (Specialty Man), Stats at 3 and 4, and Edge 3.
12 Dice for Manipulation Spells, 8 Dice for all other Spells. 8 Dice for Spirits of Man, 6 for all others.
More Spells than he can shake a stick at (Versatility rather than Power).
Some Sustaining Foci of various Types (Force 4).
Ritual Spellcasting Focus Rank 2 (Manipulation/Illusion Dual Focus).
Grade 4 Initiate (Flexible Signature, Masking, Extended Masking, Centering).

His spellcasting is what I would consider "Average" for the world, rather than "Typical" for a Shadowrunner
Skills are in the 1-4 Range for almost all skills (with Spellcasting at 5, and Counterspelling at 6, after about 100 Karma or so - Both of which started at 4 IIRC)
Knowledge Skills in support of the Occult Investigator archetype (Professional/Veteran grade in specialties), with a Specialty in Ancient and Middle Ages Cultures.
His overall Power has not really increased that much (Magically, just a few dice over several years), though he has gotten broader in both spell selection and skill composition.

Yes he made choices based upon his concept, to be sure (though I would argue that they were never a suboptimal choice, though others would definitely argue)

VERY UNLIKE our Combat Mage who is a Grade 6, Magic 7 Spellcaster of Doom who is really only competent in combat. But BOY can he throw a magical beat down. He is the Typical Shadowrunning Combat Mage, to be sure. I like to think that the Character I play is more attuned to the Average power level of the world, instead of the niche of the Shadows.

Assuming that I would feel the need to go to an 8, which is highly doubtful. *shrug*

I'm basically using average results for the OR pool to figure out what a statistically equivalent threshold might be - basically ceiling(Dice Pool/3+1).



I'm not talking about your choices. I'm talking about the representation of the same level of ability - what was a rating 5 skill in SR4 is considered the same level of ability as a rating 8 skill in SR5, because the scale has changed.

As an aside, though, TJ, I disagree with your assertion that the rules should be built for the average person in the world - rather, they should be built for the average member of the population from which the PCs are drawn; optionally, the rules can also cover for the average member of the total population as they vary from the average member of the PC population, but mage that is average in the total population should have a pretty hard time with a task which has a difficulty described as "Extreme", as OR5 was in SR4.

When you design that way, though, you get stupidity like the average person not being capable of his day to day job. Which is stupid.

AS for Extreme, Yes, I have a hard time with OR 5 thresholds with my Character. I just do not complain about it.

To be fair, the "average person" is a statistical construct, not someone who actually has a day job in the first place - the average worker in a given job probably has high skills/attributes in that area than the average person does. And the average person is going to have trouble with hard tasks - threshold 4 should give them trouble.

I agree that they would balk at HARD tasks or greater... I disagree that they would have high skills.

In SR4A, those people would tend to have Primary Skills in the 3-4 Range (Professional to Veteran) and Stats in the 3 Range (Average). Probably have a specialty too.
In SR5, the Stats are the same, and the skill sets at an average 4 (Average professional). Therefore, the DP's are very similar between the editions.



The only change is that they altered the upper scale (which I argue was NOT needed) to accommodate those who wanted more Dakka. There was absolutely no need to expand beyond the 9 delineated Skill ranks of SR4A. And in fact, the average person STILL does not go beyond Rank 4 Skills per the Descriptions of Skills, and it would be a very rare bird who exceeded 8. All it did was cater to those who wanted more DP. *shrug*

Didn't say high, said higher. And it's not confined to skills - the corps are going to want to slot people into jobs that suit their aptitudes. Someone with, say, Skill and Attribute 4 has a pretty easy time with tasks of average difficulty, and is reasonably capable of accomplishing harder tasks inside their specialty.

And there's a lot of valid design reasons I could see for the wider skill range - and in all reality, for most things dice pools wind up being about the same as before because the dice pool bloat isn't there and isn't meant to be returning (that being a big part of the purpose of limits).

I'm Sorry... But it appears that we have a disconnect. My 340 Karma Hacker in SR4A has less Dice (in his hacking skills - 15 Dice with No Limit) than the Starting Hacker I put together for SR5 (19 Dice with Mental Limit of 10) with the same criteria.

Now, Granted, the SR4A Character has almost 90 Skills after 340+Karma, while the Starting Character is exactly that (only 33 Skills), though he is BETTER than the Cyberlogician in his specialty. That is a huge disconnect, at least for me.

I see MORE Dice Bloat in SR5 than in SR4A. At least for the Archetypes and Character Concepts I prefer. Limits do NOTHING to stop Dice Bloat, and in fact encourage it to hit those High Limits that can be accrued. Limits do not do what they are supposed to do, and I think they are a poor design choice, anyways. (shrug*

No worries, though.

I don't think it had anything to do with more dakka. I see the two primary goals, benefits is that people too easily started at the top of their carreer leading to stagnation and a 1-6 range does not lead to enough differentiation. The difference between professional and near top of the charts was less than 1 success, that really does not feel accurate. Its not about more successes in itself, it is more about mr average feeling actually worse than the best in the world.

... Hackers were one of the worst cases for dice bloat in SR4. The upper limit (without Aptitude) on a mundane hacker was something like Skill 6, Program 10, Specialization +2, Neocorts +3, PuSHeD +1, Optimization +1, VR +2, Encephalon +2, Overdrive +1, and Trance +2 for 32 dice. In SR5, you're looking at Skill 12, Logic 6(9), VR +2 and Specialization +2 for 25 dice. SR5's hackers do actually wind up with lower pools overall; the fact that your character even after 340 Karma is way under where he could be doesn't change that. Where was 15 dice coming from, anyways? You can hit that with just rating 6 programs and Cerebral Boosters 3; if that's all you were using I'm really not sure where you were putting all your advancement...

Limits do stop Dice Bloat because things that were dice bloat can now have a limit implication INSTEAD. That's what they're supposed to do; I'm not sure what you thought they were supposed to do, but that's the stated goal from the dev blogs.

Optional Rule, so Programs did not figure into it. Stat + Skill (Limit Programs). AS for Why I did not have 32 Dice for my Hacker... Because 32 Dice is NOT NEEDED. There is NO DP that needs to be higher than 20 Dice, Period. Any thing above that is wasted effort and resource in SR4A. Why should I add more than twice the amount of effort and resources when what I have is good enough?

And the stated goal of the Devs does not work (hell, even the Devs have stated that Limits almost never come into play, and if that is the case, then they failed in their design goals). The fact that you cannot get most of the "Dice Bloat" in SR5 is because the tech (that you compared against) has not been published yet and is one of the reasons your above comparison does not work. When that tech becomes available, you will see Hackers with MUCH higher DP's. The fact that it can climb above 20 is just ignorant, in my opinion. There was absolutely no need to add skill creep in SR5. That leads to nothing more than DP bloat (remember, the stated goal was to eliminate that). *shrug*

But we are back to my Opinion and World Building Consequences, so... My Philosophy is probably not going to line up with your philosophies in that regard. No worries.

Correct. I think with the publishing of SR5, two completely different worlds have collided, worlds that "came along" more or less without bigger problems in SR4A. And of course, we can break down every discussion to the phrase "ok, i think we disagree", but if this is the final consensus, why do we discuss at all? I am a powergamer par excellence and even i think, that SR5 exaggerates the character-development a lot. What I really like on SR5, is that you cannot start with an already "finished" character. In SR4 the skill limit of 6 (or 7 with the aptitute quality) was reachable from the level of character-creation, and now you really can (theoretically) sift chaff from the wheat and create a quite unique character. The problem is: You still have to set your focus on one particular skill you want to excel in, simply because of the limited availability of karma. So what will happen? You only raise the skill, you draw most effect off. So the mage is forced to raise spellcasting, the sam is forced to raise his chosen weapon skill, the brawl-adept his close combat-skill, etc. So where is the great diversity? I don´t see it. To be honest, i see quite the opposite happening. Why? Because obviously an average character (and with average, i am talking about skills at rating 6), you are obviously not good enough to survive in the shadows. The problem is, with skills at about 8 or 9 you already reached your realisitcal limit (please don´t forget you also need karma for other stuff) and even then, you have a hard time to deal e.g. with a drone as a mage? C´mon, this is stupid. The whole point of the size of your dice-pool, is to enhance your CHANCES to succeed in a test. If your pool i high enough, some tests SHOULD be easy for you. But if you need to powergame and highly focus on ONE skill, and if you have to put ALL your efforts into this ONE SKILL to beat an REGULAR opponent in your game (drones ARE common), the balance and diversity that surely was intended, is gone. If a starting character stands statistically NO CHANCE against such an enemy, it means the same as if this opponent was not INTENDED to be beaten by your character "class". I, personally - love Shadowrun, because it has no "classes". So every char. should have at least a chance to succeed. This is not rock-paper-scissors. This is not Dungeons & Dragons.

The problem is not the opponent or the "class", the problem is that you're using the wrong tool. Why are you trying to beat the OR of a drone in the first place? If the mage has to be the one who has to defeat/bypass a drone (not ideal in the first place, but it can happen), then use the right tool for the job - a Lightning Bolt, a Physical Barrier, Levitate or create a whole in a wall to go around the drone - there's all manner of both straightforward and creative ways to use spells to solve such problems. If your only tool is a hammer, then don't be surprised if you have a hard time unscrewing nuts from bolts.

I have to disagree here. Technological items are by design difficult for magic to deal with; that comes with the territory. Be glad that the mage has a chance to do something, your hacker buddy is staring at that hostile spirit and drekking himself because he can't do anything to it using his primary skill set. But like you said, Shadowrun doesn't have classes, so if your main shtick isn't working, pick up the inevitable firearm that everyone is carrying and start shooting the damn thing. Based on pilot ratings and autosofts, unless the drone you're facing is being jumped by a rigger, it's going to have a max of around 9 dice to dodge and its armor and body suck.

Also, a lot of people are moaning about a 15 dice resistance pool. That's basically the reistance pool that a decker is going to face going up against a Rating 6 Host with Firewall prioritized. They have the same skill/specialization limits and may pick up an extra die or two on their attribute through a very expensive piece of bioware. They MAY have two bonus die for Codeslinger for a specific Matrix Action, but generally speaking the pools are pretty close to one another. A Rating 6 host isn't even the level of Host that a local corp would have, so we're talking fairly low end and with their primary schtick.

That was an odd double-post.

Oh c´mon. Do you really want to tell me, that the mage has to deal with it, that every 500 Nuyen drone has a build in magical resistance and your only chance is to frag it, because your detection spells, illusion spells and most of you manipulation spells don´t work?

A quick hack could be to call a device's OR something like Device Rating x3. That gives really advanced devices stupidly high OR, while putting most common devices in the 6-12 range.

Yes. Just like, as Jack VII pointed out, a Decker's only chance against Spirit or is to frag it, because none of his uber Matrix skills work against it. That's one of the main reasons Shadowrunners work in teams, so they can cover each others' weaknesses.

Not a Hack... That is exactly what it is NOW in SR5.

In which case these spells should simply not exist.

Technically, they don't. I don't think Wreck is in SR5, and Detect Object has a host of possible low-OR applications.

Uh, what? No it isn't. A commlink is going to have an OR of 9 (probably) whether it's Device Rating is calculated based on the individual commlink's DR (1-7) or the general DR of commlinks (DR2).

Ahhh I see what you are saying. DR (whatever it may be) not Base OR (1-5). In your example though, the Comlink is OR 3 in SR4a, and so therefore it is now OR (9 Dice) in SR5. However, Microchips are Microchips regardless of their DR in SR5, which is why the Comlink still acts with a Base OR3 (SR4A), or the equivalent 9 Dice (SR5). Doing it your way would entail stupid levels of bookkeeping for the variable DR's that are possible for each and every piece of equipment that is carried.

DR==DeviceRating i guess

Yes, DR = Device Rating.

I'm pretty sure Epicedion was referring to the item's DR in SR5 for his calculation.

I don't really have "My Way," I'm fine with the ORs listed on p.295. I think if one were to use Epicedion's suggestion, you would use the general Device Rating chart on p. 421 to avoid the paperwork nightmare.

The deckers chance against every kind of damage, is to stay in the matrix. Accessing from a safe place.

Fair Enough...

You think limits failed in their goal because you think the goal was something other than what it is. The whole point was that all that tech, much like many other things moved to (see: Kinesics) could be made to give Limit Bonuses INSTEAD of pool bonuses, thus creating a situation where your dice are pretty much purely from stat+skill; pool size was not in and of itself part of the idea. The concern was Dice Bloat as defined by taking a wide array of bonuses and stacking it on top of what you already have such that the pool winds up being about what your character has, rather than about the character.

And whether or not you think those dice were needed isn't at all relevant - and just because that thinking works in your game doesn't mean that's the case for everyone; the system can't be designed based on just your table.

That's... Not especially practical.

And yet, DP's are bigger, so no, I do not see DP's limiting as compared to SR4A. Therefore, the design goal failed. *shrug*
My Viewpoint and all that, of course.

Smaller dice pools wasn't the goal. And in most cases, the upper bound ISN'T bigger.

The Upper bound does not have to be bigger, since it was already ludicrous to begin with.
Starting DP's on the other hand ARE bigger.

... The "upper bound" is "how many dice you can get"; if dice pool sizes are ludicrous than the upper bound must be higher.

And for reference, there is more need in SR5 for larger dice pools - double attribute defenses, higher thresholds, and so on changes things. But to say a dice pool larger than 20 couldn't be needed in SR4 is ludicrous - not needed at your table, sure, but not needed ever? You can't possibly back that claim up.

It is what deckers should do. It was, what deckers did in version 1-3, until some moron came with the idea that everything needs to be wireless but for some stupid reasons deckers need to leave their homes now. Isn´t it great that sometimes technology evolves in the opposite direction?

Wireless actually made that EASIER at first, because isolated systems weren't as much of a problem. But with Noise nowadays and a number of other issues (and isolated systems again), it's not practical.

And you shouldn't expect the evolution of technology to be FRIENDLY to runners. And there's a lot of game-reasons why that shouldn't be what deckers do - seriously, you wouldn't use the rest of SR1-3 decking for a model of how it should be (see: the mini-session problem), would you?