I think most of us have long gotten over the fact that SR isn't fully realistic when it comes to guns.

The accuracy stat exists to offer one more thing to factor into the decision making process for the player when picking their firearm of choice. It's an abstraction, designed to represent general weapon quality, reliability, and ease of use, but it also serves a mechanical purpose.

If you have to choose between two similar guns and accuracy isn't a factor, you're probably going to pick either the cheaper gun, or the gun which holds more ammo, or the gun with better recoil compensation. It's typically not too tough a choice though, and in SR4 we ended up with a lot of weapons available that were just kind of redundant because there were other, objectively better choices. It made the other choices nonsensical - why would you take the gun with less ammo, or the gun with less armor penetration, or the gun that costs twice as much with the same stats?

Adding in accuracy allows for the system to be slightly more robust and offer more interesting choices and tradeoffs - do you go for the heavy hitting pistol with the low accuracy, or the slightly less powerful one with pinpoint precision? It's one more factor on the sliding scale of benefits and tradeoffs, and it makes choosing your gear carefully just that much more interesting.

...that and it's a pretty natural extension of Limits in general.

~Umi

Erm... First, the "farther than" limitation has NOTHING TO DO with Accuracy - distance may actually make Accuracy less of a factor, because range reduces your dice pool, and not your accuracy. Hitting a stationary or unaware target requires only 1 hit; that means that, hitting the limit without a smartlink or laser sight, we're looking at ~13P for a heavy pistol. On average, that'll oneshot any printed mundane critter.

So, not seeing the validity to this specific complaint.

Well, maybe not ANY printed mundane critter. They've printed things like Moose and Blue Whales, ya know.

Dogs and cats and whatnot? Sure.

~Umi

Printed in SR5, specifically. That includes sharks, and great cats - aka, lions and tigers.

adding in a smartgun or laser sight increases your accuracy, so whatever it is, it certainly isn't the mechanical limitations of the firearm. unless, that is, smartguns make your gun actually shoot straighter rather than just helping you with knowing where your bullet should land.

(of course, if you swap the usual wireless bonus the way i've seen some people say they do for smartguns, it makes a lot more sense... smartgun gives you a bonus to hit because you know where it should land, and making it wireless so it can somehow get magical weather updates that can't be replaced with just having weather sensors all over the area and such lets you have a better calculation as to where your shot should land).

I admit, smartguns and laser sights probably shouldn't improve physical accuracy from a logical standpoint. They should just make it easier to line up a shot, effectively giving you an artificial skill boost represented by more dice.

I just file that away as one of the casualties of the wireless bonus nonsense. They couldn't leave well enough alone.

~Umi

Accuracy and Limits are a good idea in theory, but in practice they don't seem to be working.

In theory, it limits system abuses. In SR4.5, power was solely dependent on the size of your dice pool. So, powergaming was easy: Just build the biggest pool you could. The system heavily rewarded munchkining, but since the strategy to power was simple, system mastery was not as big of a deal.

In SR5, there's now Limits to consider. The most powerful characters will combine huge dice pools with ways to upping/breaking the Limits. That means system mastery is a bigger factor, because it's now about the optimum decision instead of just adding dice.

Huge dice pools break the system, it's not meant to handle more than 15 or so dice. Limits were supposed to disincentivise building huge pools, since you couldn't use all of those successes. In that regard, I'd call it a failure: I'm still seeing huge pools, they're just combined with limit-increasing advantages. Edge is a game breaker, if used right: you can declare it after you see how many successes you rolled, which not only means more dice to roll, but you just blew the limit out of the water *and* got to add more successes.

Well, there's always a house rule option to hang the limits and move on...

@Cain

Yes, but the idea is that increasing limits ostensibly comes at a cost.

Previously, you only paid for a high dice pool. Now, you pay for a high dice pool and for a high limit.

Now, maybe the numbers need tweaked, certainly some fine tuning and balancing can't hurt - but the basic underlying concept of requiring people to pay for both their dice and their limits does add some inherent limitations to the "Buckets-o-Dice" problem.

And certainly we don't see 30+ dice builds anymore like you found in SR4.

~Umi

That's not actually true - the concern was where the dice were coming from; the dev posts were very clear on that point. They wanted a system where your ability was as much as possible to do with the character, not with other stuff.

To be fair, they did cut out a lot of external dice pool modifiers.

That's probably why they mucked with smartguns, too. Take away the old dice pool modifier (unless you open the door for hackers to brick your gear), replace it with a bonus to the new Limit system. Sure, the limits become unimportant, but that's not the point - they managed to quietly destroy the dice pool bonus.

Classic misdirection. Clever.

~Umi

...

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see how you go from "the thing they explicitly said they were trying to do" to "something they did quietly with misdirection". That transfer of dice pool bonuses to limit bonuses? An explicit element of their explanation of the "more dice from skills" idea.

I haven't seen any 30+ builds, but I'm still seeing lots of 20+ builds floating around here, and I've even got one myself. And given that only the core book is out (and that most abusive stuff tends to come in the splats), I'd say we're headed down the same path. Limits don't stop dice pool inflation, they just penalize you for rolling well-- unless you can outsmart the system, which I have seen done.

For example, Edge. Spending Edge before the roll nets you extra dice, all your dice explode, and you can ignore the limit. But if you wait until after the roll-- after you know you've got more successes than the limit-- you can spend Edge to ignore the limit *and* get extra dice. Only these extra dice explode, but that doesn't matter, since you already know you've got a ton of successes.


You're sort of right. I read the dev posts too; they were concerned with both the source and the enormous size of the dice pools being rolled. Under SR4.5, attributes and skill might only make up a small part of your overall dice pool, the rest came from modifiers, gear and the like. They especially wanted skills to matter, which is why they raised the cap to 12. Also, they did remove a lot of dice pool additions, at least in the core book.

Problem is, under the current system and with the current assumptions, you can only go so far with this. If new modifiers affect the Limit, not the pool, then you'll rapidly reach a point where the Limit is so high, it doesn't really matter. If they overcorrect for this, make the limits too low, they'll just succeed in annoying everybody. There is a theoretical happy medium, but I don't have faith in the design team to find it and keep things there. These are the same people who put out War! as an example of a rulebook.

Also: while the new rules sorta helped, skill still sometimes only makes up a small part of the dice pool. Allowing multiple rating 6 skills actually helps, because players will want to invest in higher skills over expensive bonuses. But since you can only start with 6 in a skill (7 with Aptitude), when someone is thrwoing 20 dice, it's still not even the majority of the dice pool. Yes, you can increase it to 12, and then it'll be the single biggest part of your dice pool; but at start, skill still doesn't count for as much as it should.

Except I never saw those builds EVER, except in Theory Crafting on Dumpshock. It isn't a problem if you never see it. *shrug*

Except that I have seen those builds in SR4A games. Sometimes on my own sheet, other times on other people's.

You are one of the exceptions and not the rule, in my experience. *shrug*
And at your table, it is obviously expected, so again it is not a problem...

TJ, i'm pretty sure the general consensus is that your table is the exception

My table tends towards TJ's interpretations for the most part. I just don't usually see any use in pointing it out most of the time

i'm not talking about his interpretations, i'm talking about the fact that he apparently has an entire group that doesn't even care about powergaming even a tiny bit. that's pretty danged rare, in my experience.

I include under "interpretations" the power levels of characters that make sense [to us] to bring to the table, i.e., the amount of powergaming applied to said characters.

our table tends not to have 20+ dicepools (except for soak) because those of the group who're good at powergaming don't really care to while those who care suck at it.

And yet, it is not JUST the ones I consistently game at. I have played the game since it came out, and I have rarely (I saw one once, in SR2, that was Stupendously Stupidly Powergamed) ever seen such monstrosities as show up on Dumpshock as Theory Crafting (or optimization for the Vocal Minority tables that are represented here). I do not think that I am unique in that regard.

On the (rare) occasions that I am inclined to do so, I find the characters very unfun to play.
Unless I am proving a point (as I did once in Champions).

Story time please?

Champions is pretty well known for the blind, deaf, mute, quadriplegic that could one-shot half a city with his once-per-day explosive power. Needless to say, they took changing his Depends immediately and his daily menu selection very seriously...

All joking aside, I have found that despite being able to power game masterfully, my groups have done a pretty good job of keeping our dice pools reasonable. We recognized early that 11-12 combat dice is pretty much Tier 1 Spec-Ops level in combat and didn't see a whole lot of sense in going much higher. Bulldog, our resident close combat blunt-force instrument and Total Badass ™, had and Agility of 4(7) and a Blades skill of 4 with an (Axes) specialization for the extra +2, add Personalized grip (+1), and the +2 situational reach dice with a Combat Axe and he capped out at 7 + 4 + 2 + 1 + (maybe) 2 = 16 dice. To be frank, I didn't see a whole lot of point in throwing more...pretty much ever...so I called it good there. He hit what he swung at, what he didn't hit every time was pretty much the big baddie and it was still fun to go "Dammit!" when I missed now and again because I didn't add Edge to the roll.

His soak was Body 8, Dermal plating 3, and an ArmorJack for 8/6 with Fire and Electrical resistance of 6 each due to being on the wrong side of each in-game. 8 + 3 + 8 came to 19 dice Ballistic/16 dice Impact and I'm pretty sure he was the biggest tank in the group. Again, I never once felt "Well, dammit. I need more soak dice..." so the game stayed relatively reasonable and a full-auto AR, especially with APDS, was still a pretty serious threat which I think we all enjoyed for the tension in our fights.

It might not be just you, but that doesn't mean dice pool inflation isn't a problem for a majority of Shadowrun players. When SR4 first came out, I ran a lot of Missions, open play games. I saw a wide array of dice pools, depending on the players level of system mastery. Even in home games, getting everyone on the same page was difficult. I used the Missions rule to cap dice pools at 20, and then they found a way around it.

Anyway, with SR5, I think we have to consider the learning curve. Back when SR 4 came out, 15 dice was a big deal. The book street sam, with 17 dice, was a scary combat monster. However, it wasn't long until 20+ dice became more common, as players mastered the system. Splats tended to make this worse; but even so, the first incarnation of the Pornomancer was strictly core book, and it had about 32 dice.

SR5 is starting slightly higher than SR4 did, most of the characters I've seen in play are in the mid/upper teens for primary dice pools. That number will increase, though as people learn the tricks of the system. Expansions are going to tend to increase this number. I don't know where it'll end up, although I suspect it'll be pretty high.

Wait... wouldn't 19 Ballistic armor push you into Encumbrance penalties of -2 to Agility and Reaction with only 8 Body? I thought that stacking Armor from things like Dermal Plating also counts toward max Encumbrance?

~Umi

No, it was 19 dice total, including Body dice. I just kept with the two armor types, and dice pools, separated to remind folks it was 4th Edition, not 5th. The total rating for the armor was 11/9 with both Dermal plating and the ArmorJack.

Doh! Right you are.

I think it was just how you worded it saying "19 dice ballistic", which I read and instantly conceptualized as all being armor. Thanks for the clarification!

~Umi

No book handy, but IIRC, cyber and natural armor didn't count. Troll's dermal armor definitely didn't count.

Oh yeah, Champions. Champions was the game where I learned the importance of system mastery. My first attempt at a character was unplayably bad: You have to buy your actions per round, and since I was coming from a D&D background, I thought one action would suffice. Boy, was I wrong. Because initiative in that system is fixed, everybody else went multiple times before I even had a chance to move. Combats were usually over before my action even came up.

The GM let me do a full rewrite, and I came back with a martial artist based on Iron Fist. She was much better overall; but when I actually unloaded her biggest attack-- a 15d6 HKA with armor-piercing ability-- I basically one-shotted a tank with my bare hands. I had learned from my mistake, and I probably overcompensated. Fast forward a decade or so, and you'd see my pinnacle of system mastery: a combination of Iron Man and Green Lantern. I munchkined out the Power Pool rules, so I could basically whip out whatever power I wanted, whenever I wanted it, as big as I could manage. And in both cases, I was still outclassed by Planet-Man type characters: characters who couldn't do anything but throw planets at you, which did a couple thousand dice of damage and basically screwed up the world you happened to be standing on.

You can't run a reasonable superhero game (or any genre, really, but superhero games tend to have more character points) with the Champions/Hero system unless you have a graduate degree in saying "no" to players. The book even tells you which powers specifically you should monitor carefully for abuse with "warning" and "stop" icons. It's a great example of a system that doesn't try to coddle groups by adding "player fences" to the system; rather it recognizes that players (if so inclined) will *always* find a way to abuse the rules, and puts the responsibility for dealing with that firmly in the GM's lap. Personally, I prefer that approach.

No worries. I seem to have jumped to conclusions myself a bit back and shoved my foot in my mouth. At least it didn't take 2 pages of replies for you like it did for me.

YMMV, of course, but I took the wrong lesson away from that game. I learned that if you don't min/max for every advantage you can, you'll be outclassed in no time flat. To this day, the first thing I do when I encounter a new RPG is to see how many ways I can break the system. Once I'm confident I've found all the tricks and pitfalls, I can feel comfortable playing a reasonable character. And as I learned to GM, I came to appreciate systems that worked *with* me to keep things even, as opposed to systems that said: "You're the GM, you deal with it."

It wasn't even that hard in champions, slap an active point limit on the game if you need it and you wont have 15d6 HKA's(a 150 AP attack), avengers level is around 80-90 AP max. 150 is planet stomping monsters. After that all you need is to watch out for douche moves like 1d6 30 shot autofire 0 end, NND area of effects, usable against other shenanigans and the ! and stop sign powers.

I think you need more breaks on games like shadowrun though. In champions you are building a character from scratch, why your flaming monkey character can't teleport people into the sun is up to you. But in shadowrun the cyber and devices exist so it is harder to justify why someone who isn't an idiot isn't taking advantage of them. When your out of game justifications shape the in game environment, nothing but the GM is needed. When the in game environment effects the out of game character building decisions you need more limits/

I guess it's largely a combination of play style and where you sit as a gamer. I've been gaming for 29 years now, and have actually played a World of Synnibar campaign, so I've gone full-retard with min-max and munchkin. I love chucking dice as much as the next gamer, but once you get to 15 dice or so it gets to be a real PITA to count all those little bastards up. Why anyone would want to toss around 20+ dice at any one problem when you're going to be looking at an average of 5 hits on 15 dice (Hard-plus/Extreme-minus by 4th AE standards on average without adding Edge to the mix) is a complete mystery to me. I mean, seriously? Don't you want some semblance of risk and excitement in your game sessions?

The only answer I can come up with is that the player is not interested in telling a fun story with their friends at that point. They just want to "win the game" and that is an attitude that I left behind quite a while ago and have very little patience for.

Its not always about being more powerful, but about making logical in game choices that your character would make. IN SR4 a smartgun link gave you 2 dice to shoot, that is the difference between professional and world class skill levels. Who wouldn't get one if they were going to shoot people in combat. Enough of those basic logical choices and you end up throwing a bucket of dice, not because you are power gaming but because it makes sense.

Well, there are a couple of things that motivate me.

First of all, while I enjoy all styles of game play, I prefer the gonzo, over-the-top, cinematic kinds the best. If that involves dumping buckets of dice on the table, all the better! And there's nothing wrong with it, as long as everyone else at the table is in on it. If people come to the table with different power levels, the game is going to be less fun for everyone, but especially for the weaker players. One of my biggest complaints about SR4.5 was that it was inconsistent: it was simultaneously too easy to break and gimp a character.

The second is that I game to escape the ordinary. I do not want to play an average, ordinary Joe; I especially don't want one who's as disabled as I am. I want to get away from that, so I refuse to play a character that's gimped. Of course, gimped is a relative term: what I consider to be powerful might be painfully weak at someone else's table. So, my solution is to min/max to hell and back. I aggressively seek out pitfalls and power tricks, to make absolutely certain I'm not playing a gimped character. It's not enough to avoid the trap options; I have to make sure I can play at any power level the game might offer. So, my initial characters for any system will be as powerful as I can make them.

SR5 is still very much in that phase for me. I've only played a handful of sessions, and while my character is kicking butt, he doesn't yet feel effective enough. Once I'm comfortable with the levels of play offered, I'll settle down, and aim for something suitable, instead of something no one can take advantage of. But until I feel secure enough to have fun a different way, I'll keep going for the maximum power levels.

There's the "stunt dice" rule at my table. If you want over-the-top and you describe what you wanna do very well, I'll give extra dice to the act. So much funner when I can actually get the players involved in the action, more than just "I'll shoot the sprawl ganger." A whole lot easier on me, too, LOL.

Plasying a game in San ANtonio about 20 years ago... I had been running a Champions game for about 8 or 9 years by that time, and a new guy joined our group. Said he wasnted to run Champions game... I was cool with that having come off a very long run as GM for a 4th Edition Game (the Blue Book). So, I asked him what his game parameters were (200 point Supers), what we were allowed to play and what was off limits. He said, and I quote... "You can do whatever you want, does not matter, because there is nothing you can create that I cannot control."

So, Gauntlet thrown down, and challenge accepted.

After Creation, my 200 Point Super was about 1200 points (or so, may have been more) prior to limitations on powers. Took all of about 1 session to establish that no, he could not control the character in any fashion. Was then asked to not come back... which was okay with me, because I was starting a new character in a campaign of Immortals at that point anyways, so no enamel off my teeth.

Did not have to resort to the super crazy Quadriplegic, one blast fixes all, either. He was an Uber Martial Artist, who sported a 10 Speed and 50 Dex, and enough Combat levels to not ever need to worry about the opposition, like ever. Interesting character. Eventually, I added 50 points to him (and toned him back at the same time), and made him the enforcer for a new Villain Organization when I started my NEXT iteration of Champions a few months later. He was much more fun as a Villain, anyways.

If you can Master Champions, you can do some crazy, Scary stuff... It still amazes me that many people playing Champions are adverse to taking limitations. Cannot tell you HOW many complaints about how a character was just all sorts of suck. They were mechanically sound, but were always getting trounced by more superior characters who were actually CHEAPER than they were on the power scale. It is an entertaining thing. I generally let people play with their concepts for a bit, and would then help them re-develop them after a few sessions once they got the flow of the game. Their characters tended to be MUCH better on the re-write.

I never had a problem with that. And the guy I learned under was a MASTER of the Genre, so I hade a good teacher in that regard. Champions is my Go-To system for Super heroes. But the Math does tend to keep people away a lot.

I am sure nobody else likes to admit that they are the vocal minority. I am pretty sure that you are belong to that particular subculture, but I will not say you are unique in that regard.

Well... The Dozens of players I have gamed with vs. the 10-12 or so who are Vocal about it here. Seems like pretty simple math to me.
I like to think I am somewhat Unique, though.

thats what we all do !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVygqjyS4CA

with a philosophical Dance
Medicineman

I have to admit I'm more on TJs power scale when I play Shadowrun, not as small dice pool but not far off. My mages pretty much never start with power focuses, my street sams are fine throwing 15 dice for shooting in their specialty etc.

I make a point to match the power scales of my characters to the game the GM wants to run. That said, that power level consistently tends to be above what TJ would hold as all you ever need.

Wait a minute here.... If you are a veteran Runner with 400+ Karma, I can see the scale sliding a bit. Maybe 18-20 Dice or so.

Whereas I've played games where that's considered reasonable for starting characters.

Yeah, limitations are the way to go. The second character I mentioned was crazy powerful because all his powers had huge limits on them, that never managed to get exploited. I think you could reduce powers down to 1/4th by taking enough limits, so a cleverly-designed 100-point character could effectively have 400 points of powers. Since he was an Iron Man/Green Lantern fusion, all his powers came from his armor, which gave them all the Focus limit at a decent level; there were lots of others. Add to that the fact that cosmic power pools are broken to begin with-- any power you want, at will!-- and you see how he got out of control.


I've gamed with over a hundred players in SR4/4.5, in both home and open play environments. And there was a huge wide disparity in dice pools that crossed my tables. It really depended on player experience and system mastery: a few players thought 10 dice was really good, while the min/max masters weren't satisfied with anything less than 20. So, while your experience is your experience, that doesn't mean that dice pool inflation isn't a real problem in Shadowrun.

Now, some people think this is a feature, not a bug. Shadowrun can handle low powered games, and high powered games, is their logic; set level to taste. Unfortunately, that never quite works: because characters can and do come out at wildly different power levels, balancing a game gets to be really hard. It'd be much better if it always went low, or always went high: as long as it produced consistent characters, the problem would be lessened. However, that's not what we have.

Yeah... I am a big fan of Champions. Maybe I should start a new campaign again. Been a while since the last one. Kind of out of practice, though. *sigh*
Never really had problems with Cosmic Power Pools, really (They were not my go-to power framework). Though you are right, they could get really broken really quick.