QUOTE (Cain @ May 10 2014, 10:40 AM)
I used a simple example because I didn't want to do a lot of math. We can get into more complicated examples, but not at 3AM after I've spend all day in the Multimedia labs.
Actually, it doesn't. What it does is bring a new level of system mastery into play: it's no longer about massively overinflating dice pools, it's about inflating your Limit as well. This means we'll start seeing even more min/maxing, as there's two things that need to be maxed, forcing more mins.
What's more, Limits only work if they hit the sweet spot. If limits are too low, players will be constantly aggravated as their great rolls are taken away from them. If they're too high, they don't come into play, and so they end up not being a limiting factor (pun not intended). In between those two is a place where Limits can be an effective game balancer without annoying players. However, I don't think SR5 has found it yet. They might find it by the time 5.5 comes out, but I'm not going to bet money on it.
I've done the maths for opposed chances of success for a number of things. I used it to show the effectiveness of various attacks and show how an accurate attack performs compared to an inaccurate one at various defence pools versus various targets.
Some of it can be found here in my grenade post:
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...c=39934&hl=But, I've cut out the actual reference to the graph
I have here a graph of hit chance with an Accuracy 4 weapon and a grenade at various dice pools. The Acc4 gun is targeting various defence pools with 6 being weak, 9 average-ish and 12 a strong pool (+ a 15 as bonus for a decent defence, still far behind what a mysad can do but who cares). I also added a supergun (accuracy 7) versus defence 9 (average target). No matter where you look, the grenade wins all the time (and this is ONLY counting direct hits, ignoring all partial hits with 1-6 meters blasts that deal at worst 12P for a frag)
http://reptid.se/datas/users/1-grenadesautohit.png This was mostly meant to show how broken grenades are, but the graphs with guns are still interesting.
Now, to your main argument, that limits add just another thing to inflate and min-max. Sadly, you are correct. There is too much liberty with limit breaking tricks to make inflated dice pools get the nice neat diminishing returns they need. But that is sadly the case with a lot of numbers in Shadowrun 5, even worse than 4. The fragments of a system is there, but some people on the team must have been incompetent at maths/statistics or just didn't actually test their stuff enough to realize their errors.
I'm not just thinking about the broken aoe attacks rules that obviously doesn't work at all but also things like Quickening costing 1 karma, Reagents doing nothing useful, Alchemy/Enchanting having innate limits to their use that requires quite good understanding of the rules for players to pick the preparations that actually work. And then you see Cyberdeck costs, the missing damage gap between assault rifles and huge big heavy machine guns....
They did get rid of a lot of extended test nonsense so once again, you see that some people on the team is thinking in terms of playability and quality of life for players and GMs. Too bad that kind of thought and vision didn't go all the way through. Not to mention the terrible text quality in many chapters (Like the one describing dumpshock.. it made my brain hurt!).
Thanks for reminding me, I'll add "at no point can the limit be increased by more than +2 cap" just like attributes have +4 limit for my games to try and get the limits back in play.