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ShadowDragon8685
QUOTE (binarywraith @ Sep 21 2014, 08:46 PM) *
I disagree. Optimization, especially how unevenly optimized characters can easily become, is exactly the problem with Shadowrun. It isn't a matter of 'traps', as it is that given enough min-maxing, you can create characters who are so wildly out of parity power wise that challenges that one brushes off will have a pretty good chance of wiping out the rest of the players.

This is a bad thing to encourage.


Right, so the guy who's actually good at making characters and who likes to come to the table to sit down and shoot things right in the goddamn face for money should be punished for so doing, or prohibited for so doing?


I take a different tactic: Player-capability-blind opposition.

Unless the opposition are prepping specifically for the player characters (in which case, depending on the group, no measures up to and including tactical nuclear weapons, are out of the question,) I prep the opposition based on who they are, what kind of resources they have access to, and what kind of constraints are upon them.

If the opposition is street bangers and one of the players is a combat monkey getting his Human Revolution on, so be it, he deserves to go through street bangers like, well, a pissed-off Adam Jensen going through street bangers. The fact that street bangers would be a good challenge for the hacker who's seconding as a gun-bunny is immaterial. And if the opposition is a moneyed conspiracy with ties to multiple AAA megacorps, prepping for fully-cybered corporate hit squads and awakened assaults by Tir Ghosts or Dragons, and the combat monkey is the only guy in their league, then so be it, the group should try to think of an alternative, up to and including giving Mr. Johnson his down-payment back and walking away.
tjn
QUOTE (Sengir @ Sep 21 2014, 07:05 PM) *
Staying with that image, parts are a lot easier to arrange if you may sand off a bit here, and add some filling there.

The disconnect you're having is that you have a predefined idea of what the character is, and are attempting to force whatever character generation system to fit that preconceived notion. Of course you're going to have more problems with priority because it has less granularity to "sand off bits" to fit your preconceived notion of what that character is. However a new player going into the system functions a lot better if I ask him "what's most important to your character?" and they say they want to be a skill monkey, I say "Great, you now have 46 skill points, and 10 points to place in skill groups." They're now fitting who the character is according to how many points they've got, and they're not spending any time or mental effort on sanding or filling in. The character has 46 skill points, that's just who the character is.

The goal of character creation from a systems point of view, is to create characters of a consistent power level. The less granularity, the more similar characters are to each other, and thus they are more consistent in power level. This is at natural odds with the desire to customize and differentiate the character from others. This is a continuum and there is no proper answer, because you care much more about customizing the character than say, binarywraith, who seems to prefer having a consistent parity between characters straight from character generation.

As an exercise, have you (and anyone that feels that customization is more important than parity between characters) ever thrown out the character creation system altogether? Have you asked yourself, "how strong is this character?" and wrote down what you felt best fit the character you have already envisioned? I assure you, you will have all the customization you desire, and the character will be exactly as you have envisioned they are. This is a perfectly fine approach, and as an example, Marvel Heroic takes this approach, but it's not for everyone as there tends to be a knee jerk negative response on the part of gamers against this. If you have this knee jerk response, like many do, you might want to ask yourself why is that? If you don't have that response, why are you dealing with a character creation system to begin with? I promise you, you will be much happier just assigning the stats that feel best rather than using Priority, BP, Karma, or any other system.

QUOTE (ShadowDragon8685 @ Sep 21 2014, 07:28 PM) *
Quite frankly, optimization is not a bad thing. Falling into trap options is a bad thing, but a good GM should guide players away from trap options.
Quite frankly, optimization shouldn't be needed. That there exists trap options at all is a bad thing, and a good system shouldn't even have them to begin with, and a GM shouldn't have to fight the system to get it into a balanced state. Now I love optimizing and playing with numbers scratches a certain itch, but I've had players in the past who abjectly hated learning the system and just wanted to play. A system with traps either makes it harder on the GM, as I now have to handhold the player through character creation and warn them against things like Uneducated, or as a GM I play russian roulette with player characters that may come with distinctly different power levels or have to somehow posthoc salvage that Uneducated character without gutting the player's concept or letting in an unplayable character.
tjn
QUOTE (ShadowDragon8685 @ Sep 21 2014, 09:17 PM) *
Right, so the guy who's actually good at making characters <...> should be punished for so doing, or prohibited for so doing?
Punished? No. But unequal levels of optimization leads to problems at the table, usually in either a spotlight problem where the properly optimized character does everything better than the poorly optimized character, thus leading to the player of the poorly optimized character having significantly less impact, influence, and interaction with the game, or problems for the GM when creating a properly balanced challenge for the team, when what's challenging for one player would make road pizza of another (or leads back to the first problem where the optimizing player runs through the challenge as if it wasn't there, eliminating the agency of the unoptimized player.

To flip your question around, should a player who isn't good at optimization have innately less agency as a player, simply because they'd rather focus on acting and playing the part of their character than placing numbers within a system in a mechanically efficient manner?
Fatum
QUOTE (binarywraith @ Sep 22 2014, 05:46 AM) *
I disagree. Optimization, especially how unevenly optimized characters can easily become, is exactly the problem with Shadowrun. It isn't a matter of 'traps', as it is that given enough min-maxing, you can create characters who are so wildly out of parity power wise that challenges that one brushes off will have a pretty good chance of wiping out the rest of the players.
This is a bad thing to encourage.
A bad thing to encourage is players incompetent enough to be unable to even make a character.
Of all systems, Shadowrun does not have a party powerlevel problem, because unlike, say, D&D, every character essentially faces his own set of problems. What does a samurai care whether a hacker roll 10 or 30 dice, other than the latter is more likely not to bring trouble on his head? Similarly, what does a hacker care if the sam has 2 IPs or 3, other than the latter being more likely to keep him alive? The archetypes more likely to be directly comparable, like adepts and sammies or hackers and technos, when done right, produce characters quite alike in powerlevel.


QUOTE (ShadowDragon8685 @ Sep 22 2014, 06:17 AM) *
I take a different tactic: Player-capability-blind opposition.

Unless the opposition are prepping specifically for the player characters (in which case, depending on the group, no measures up to and including tactical nuclear weapons, are out of the question,) I prep the opposition based on who they are, what kind of resources they have access to, and what kind of constraints are upon them.

If the opposition is street bangers and one of the players is a combat monkey getting his Human Revolution on, so be it, he deserves to go through street bangers like, well, a pissed-off Adam Jensen going through street bangers. The fact that street bangers would be a good challenge for the hacker who's seconding as a gun-bunny is immaterial. And if the opposition is a moneyed conspiracy with ties to multiple AAA megacorps, prepping for fully-cybered corporate hit squads and awakened assaults by Tir Ghosts or Dragons, and the combat monkey is the only guy in their league, then so be it, the group should try to think of an alternative, up to and including giving Mr. Johnson his down-payment back and walking away.
Yes, absolutely, you're as if reading my mind. The only problem is you still have to give players something to do no matter their powerlevel. When characters can come out of chargen with teen-sized pools, that means you're somewhat restricted in the themes chosen if you want the opposition to be both believable and challenging.
Fatum
QUOTE (tjn @ Sep 22 2014, 07:29 AM) *
Punished? No. But unequal levels of optimization leads to problems at the table, usually in either a spotlight problem where the properly optimized character does everything better than the poorly optimized character, thus leading to the player of the poorly optimized character having significantly less impact, influence, and interaction with the game, or problems for the GM when creating a properly balanced challenge for the team, when what's challenging for one player would make road pizza of another (or leads back to the first problem where the optimizing player runs through the challenge as if it wasn't there, eliminating the agency of the unoptimized player.
It puzzles me why people seem to link spotlight with character powerlevel. These can sometimes be linked, but player personality and roleplaying skills affect this immeasurably more. Say, for example, your sammy can be as optimized as humanly possible, but if you make him a grim loner and don't speak up at the sessions, you're at the very best rolling a bit more dice than the others - or even getting no spotlight at all, faces and/or hackers solving the problems the troupe is facing.

QUOTE (tjn @ Sep 22 2014, 07:29 AM) *
To flip your question around, should a player who isn't good at optimization have innately less agency as a player, simply because they'd rather focus on acting and playing the part of their character than placing numbers within a system in a mechanically efficient manner?
Why should a player who can't read a couple dozen pages worth of rules be encouraged? We're not dealing in rocket science here, making a decent character does not involve solving equations, even 5th-grade-level ones, or wading through obscure supplements like in some other systems. And it's certainly not mutually exclusive with desire for acting, rather, these are completely independent personal characteristics no more linked than the hair colour and the sense of humour. If anything, a player who put more work into his character is easier to engage.
toturi
QUOTE (tjn @ Sep 22 2014, 11:29 AM) *
Punished? No. But unequal levels of optimization leads to problems at the table, usually in either a spotlight problem where the properly optimized character does everything better than the poorly optimized character, thus leading to the player of the poorly optimized character having significantly less impact, influence, and interaction with the game, or problems for the GM when creating a properly balanced challenge for the team, when what's challenging for one player would make road pizza of another (or leads back to the first problem where the optimizing player runs through the challenge as if it wasn't there, eliminating the agency of the unoptimized player.

To flip your question around, should a player who isn't good at optimization have innately less agency as a player, simply because they'd rather focus on acting and playing the part of their character than placing numbers within a system in a mechanically efficient manner?

To me it is a question of effort. Someone who has made an effort to optimise his character should have his character fare better than someone who did not.

So to answer the question the player who isn't good at optimisation would have to focus on acting and playing the part of his character and live with the consequences of his non-optimised character. He does not have innately less agency as a player because by focusing on acting and playing the part of his character, the GM should (and is encouraged by the rules to) reward the player. So a player who optimises his character AND acts and plays the part of his character reaps both sets of rewards.
Glyph
Priority may reduce your rough point allocations to several big choices, which is good for newer players who might be overwhelmed by something like build points. But it is also bad in three ways:

First, because it requires prioritizing a character correctly, at least from an optimization standpoint. Take the character creation example of the technomancer who wasted his A priority on resources. How do you think that character would compare to one who used that priority for something more useful, such as Attributes or skills?

Secondly, it is within the priorities that newbies will still make suboptimal choices. They will take average Attributes all around instead of soft-maxing important ones, and they will spread their skills too thin instead of getting high primary skills then filling out the secondary ones. They won't know which adept powers, spells, or augmentations are useful, and which are... less so.

Finally, priority doesn't stop lopsided builds - it encourages them. You have to take something for those D and E priorities, so guess what, that street samurai with A for resources, B for Attributes, and C for a high Edge will wind up with a limited number of skills outside of his specialty areas. He may very well be more min-maxed than the same character would be with some form of build points, where the player could, for example, shave off a single Attribute point and reduce Edge to 6, to get five more skill points.
toturi
QUOTE (Fatum @ Sep 22 2014, 11:38 AM) *
Yes, absolutely, you're as if reading my mind. The only problem is you still have to give players something to do no matter their powerlevel. When characters can come out of chargen with teen-sized pools, that means you're somewhat restricted in the themes chosen if you want the opposition to be both believable and challenging.

The question is must the opposition always be challenging? Opposition should be believable to avoid breaking of suspension of disbelief. But challenge? To me not all opposition faced by the character should be a challenge. Also challenge should be in part chosen by the player. If the player doesn't want to face a challenge and take reasonable steps not to like avoiding tougher jobs, then he should not be forced to face tougher challenges.
Cain
The problem with unequal builds is that when your best tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

Let's say we have a table full of imbalanced characters. The scary powerful one is a pornomancer, the poorly-optimized build is the combat monster. It's going to rapidly reach the point where it's always better for the pornomancer to social-fu their way out of combat. When it comes to gathering intel, the pornomancer can step on the decker, by getting more critical successes while talking to contacts. And the covert ops specialist will feel useless because the pornomancer can just talk his way in, instead of needing stealth.

See, people think systems mastery should be rewarded. Well, in a game like Shadowrun , it is-- during game play, a player who understands the system better can make better moves, regardless of which character they're playing. They don't need to be rewarded twice: once for building a superior character, and again for superior game knowledge.

Finally: Back when I helped with Virtual Seattle, I saw dozens of priority characters come through. I never saw the same character duplicated, not once. Every single one was unique. Points, however, encouraged optimization more, which narrowed the field somewhat. In SR4.5, all effective characters had the same basic pattern: same gear, primary dice pool of 20+, same set of secondary skills, etc. SR3 priority also has the benefit of minimizing the effectiveness of system mastery-- the difference between an optimal and suboptimal spread in, say, attributes is much smaller than you would get under SR4.5's BP.
Glyph
QUOTE (toturi @ Sep 21 2014, 10:05 PM) *
The question is must the opposition always be challenging? Opposition should be believable to avoid breaking of suspension of disbelief. But challenge? To me not all opposition faced by the character should be a challenge. Also challenge should be in part chosen by the player. If the player doesn't want to face a challenge and take reasonable steps not to like avoiding tougher jobs, then he should not be forced to face tougher challenges.

That's kind of like a 10th level D&D party staying in the first level of the dungeon all the time, killing kobolds and giant rats. It might be fun for awhile, but I imagine it would get boring eventually, and they would probably also get tired of coming back to town with a few sacks of silver and copper coins, when they know they could be bringing back chests of gold and magical wands and swords, if they braved the lower levels.

Challenge in shadowrun is hard to do, but it is less about balancing weak vs. strong characters, and more balancing out the many roles and abilities that shadowrunners can have. This is harder than it looks, because a lot of GMs probably focus on some aspects of the game, and ignore others. If it is a game with a lot of talking, legwork, and planning, then the walking death machine might be bored a lot of the time. If it is a game with lots of combat, the smooth-talking detective with a tricked-out commlink and a mastery of disguise might be wishing he had put more into his pistols skill.

Look at the street samurai and the bounty hunter archetypes. If the game is mostly about combat, the street samurai will outshine the bounty hunter. For the bounty hunter to feel useful, he needs to be able to use his wider array of skills - animal handling to know that those guard dogs won't go for those poisoned steaks because they typically won't accept food other than from their trainer; intimidation to bluff past a group of gangers when the group is already pretty banged up; locksmith to get past the rusty padlock on the gate, or climbing to get over the fence if that doesn't work; survival to help the group find shelter in the barrens.

The GM should insure that everyone gets a chance to shine. Just keep in mind that not everyone wants equal spotlight time, and that not every character will equally rock out in their spotlight time - but some players might prefer playing an average Joe to a tough guy.
toturi
QUOTE (Cain @ Sep 22 2014, 01:52 PM) *
See, people think systems mastery should be rewarded. Well, in a game like Shadowrun , it is-- during game play, a player who understands the system better can make better moves, regardless of which character they're playing. They don't need to be rewarded twice: once for building a superior character, and again for superior game knowledge.

I think that system mastery should be superior character played with superior system knowledge and that is not rewarding system mastery twice. A player that understands the system can make better moves, regardless of how optimised the character. But the best move may well be different for an optimised and non-optimised character and the results of the best move may vary due to what move it is.
Cain
QUOTE (toturi @ Sep 21 2014, 10:18 PM) *
I think that system mastery should be superior character played with superior system knowledge and that is not rewarding system mastery twice. A player that understands the system can make better moves, regardless of how optimised the character. But the best move may well be different for an optimised and non-optimised character and the results of the best move may vary due to what move it is.

See, I disagree. I think it is rewarding them twice. As a result, they do even more amazingly than other players, which can lead to hard feelings. If a character creation system is more consistent, the differences in character builds is minimized, so the optimizers get a small edge, but not an overwhelming one. They get the rest of their advantage in game.
binarywraith
QUOTE (Fatum @ Sep 21 2014, 10:48 PM) *
It puzzles me why people seem to link spotlight with character powerlevel. These can sometimes be linked, but player personality and roleplaying skills affect this immeasurably more. Say, for example, your sammy can be as optimized as humanly possible, but if you make him a grim loner and don't speak up at the sessions, you're at the very best rolling a bit more dice than the others - or even getting no spotlight at all, faces and/or hackers solving the problems the troupe is facing.


Because sufficient powerlevel obviates the need to share the spotlight. When one character can solve nearly every problem the group faces, everyone else has their fun at his sufferance, which is how you get players to quit playing at your table.
apple
If you have a problem with player using the build point / Karma system for powergaming (whatever that may be): why donīt you create the character together with the player? I mean, sit together, go through the early years, spend points on how he developed during this late 1x / early 2x years, end with choosing the equipment. SR do not consist only of newbie players how are totally overloaded 120 points (*sarcasm*) but after some time the become vets as well. And to be honest, since using the point buy system starting in SR2 I always found it far easier to explain the point buy system to completely new SR/RPG players in opposition to the priority system, and I have never seen people having any issues with the point buy, but I have seen a lot of vets and newbies alike who had problems with the priority system.

Considering that a lot of other RPGs, from the more rule oriented like Pathfinder to the more stylish like SLA are using some form of point buy I simply cannot see any advantage in regarding of easiness or speed of charactercreation, for old or new players. 90% of character creation is equipment buying for the characters with a lot of nuyen. Chosing 40 BP to increase magic from 1 to 4 or choosing priority A for magic is in the other 10%.

SYL
Cain
My experience is exactly the opposite. I could teach new players Priority in a few minutes, because it's a simple step-by-step process. You do X, Y, and Z, in that order. Certain builds cold be made on a low Resources priority, like adepts. Point buy, by its very nature, is not as simple and has many more possible combinations. Thus, it's not as easy to do things is a simple order, there's always back and forth.

QUOTE
If you have a problem with player using the build point / Karma system for powergaming (whatever that may be): why donīt you create the character together with the player? I mean, sit together, go through the early years, spend points on how he developed during this late 1x / early 2x years, end with choosing the equipment.

I did that often in SR3 and earlier, because other than gear, building a character under priority only took a few minutes. However, in SR4/4.5, the fastest viable character I saw took over two hours, and some of mine took days. If I have four players, that means I need to spend eight hours, minimum, building characters with them. That could easily consume two or three gaming sessions, just building characters. One session I can deal with, but three?

And mind you: two hours was just for a viable character-- the bare minimum to function as a shadowrunner. I encountered more than a few characters that had to be sent back to the drawing board, because the player forgot or missed some crucial detail. In my first SR4 game, I had a player come late, so I didn't have a chance to fully look over her sheet. She was playing an otaku, but forgot to buy any Complex Forms. As a result, she was useless, and we had to stop the game so she could rebuild. Optimized characters took much longer, but even then, there were many fiddly bits that were overlooked, some of which caused a massive rewrite of the character.

QUOTE
Considering that a lot of other RPGs, from the more rule oriented like Pathfinder to the more stylish like SLA are using some form of point buy I simply cannot see any advantage in regarding of easiness or speed of charactercreation, for old or new players.

Not true. Shadowrun wasn't the first template system, but Priority inspired many other systems, like White Wolf. They essentially used a priority-like system, only with different categories. Savage Worlds also uses a template system. Even D&D-- 5th edition uses an array as the standard option. You can have speed and ease of use in a system, while still keeping flexibility. Point buy is not the only way, nor is it the most popular way: White Wolf is still huge.
sk8bcn
QUOTE (toturi @ Sep 22 2014, 06:01 AM) *
To me it is a question of effort. Someone who has made an effort to optimise his character should have his character fare better than someone who did not.

So to answer the question the player who isn't good at optimisation would have to focus on acting and playing the part of his character and live with the consequences of his non-optimised character. He does not have innately less agency as a player because by focusing on acting and playing the part of his character, the GM should (and is encouraged by the rules to) reward the player. So a player who optimises his character AND acts and plays the part of his character reaps both sets of rewards.


I tend to disagree.

In shadowrun, the debate tend to be biased because if the Street-sam just min-maxed and the decker did not, they have different areas to play with.

But I'll take Earthdawn as an exemple. If 1 or 2 guys optimize and the rest don't, as a GM you can't keep fights interesting because:
1-Either min-maxed characters walk through like a piece of cake.
2-Either the weaker ones can only hide and hope not to die.


DD isn't prone to min-maxing (just luck at stat rolls maybe). But give 2 characters lvl 5 characters and the rest lvl 1. You'll see how much of a problem it is.
apple
QUOTE (Cain @ Sep 22 2014, 06:07 AM) *
I did that often in SR3 and earlier, because other than gear, building a character under priority only took a few minutes. However, in SR4/4.5, the fastest viable character I saw took over two hours, and some of mine took days.


What part of character creation? I admit I only created a handful of characters for myself and another handful for my group (complete newbies), so perhaps 10-15 max. The attributes, skills and special gadgets (magic etc) were done usually in less than 30 min - it was the equipment of street samurais, riggers and hackers which blow up the process (that and the dreaded sensor rules in SR4). But that is no difference between SR12345, regardless the creation system.

Of course the BP system could be improved (i like smaller numbers and never understood why we had to go from 120 points to 400 with costs from 1 increasing to 4 for the same attribute for example).

QUOTE
Point buy is not the only way,


What do you say to the problem that a priority system creates vastly different characters, depending on the choice of order for priorities (if you re-calculate it back to the karma or point system)?

SYL
binarywraith
Not seeing a problem in priority system generating different characters than point buy. It has a greater set of limitations which make it harder to twink without making actual sacrifices.
ShadowDragon8685
QUOTE (tjn @ Sep 21 2014, 10:29 PM) *
To flip your question around, should a player who isn't good at optimization have innately less agency as a player, simply because they'd rather focus on acting and playing the part of their character than placing numbers within a system in a mechanically efficient manner?


No, and they won't have to. It's easier for a GM and infinitely less objectionable to the players, to adjust a weak character up than to adjust - or nerf - a strong character down. If someone's proving weak and lacking for agency? Hey, how about that, 10,000 nuyen.gif just fell into their lap, go buy yourself something nice. Or maybe a nice Force 4 focus or something.
binarywraith
Yeah, and then what do you do for opposition? There's only so far you can scale up street gangs and generic corporate goons before you start breaking suspension of disbelief.
toturi
QUOTE (sk8bcn @ Sep 22 2014, 06:35 PM) *
But I'll take Earthdawn as an exemple. If 1 or 2 guys optimize and the rest don't, as a GM you can't keep fights interesting because:
1-Either min-maxed characters walk through like a piece of cake.
2-Either the weaker ones can only hide and hope not to die.

I think (1) is precisely what should happen and I think that if the players do not have a problem with fights not being interesting, then there is no problem.

But if the players think that the min-maxed guys (which incidentally I think is a misunderstanding of what min-max is) walk through like cake, then just handwave combat and get on with the important bits of the story.
Tymeaus Jalynsfein
QUOTE (Cain @ Sep 21 2014, 04:33 PM) *
Full Auto, like so many things in SR4.5, were pretty much insta-kills. In my experience, wounding people was rare; it was usually all or nothing. Stunball was the ending move, though, because it dropped large numbers of people with little drain. It was also silent, and harder to resist.


It is all in how you approach character design. Wounding was by far the most common instance of combat at our table, with very few insta-kills. Even what you call the ubiquitous Stunball was not as useful as you claim it to be since most opposition take such things into account and did not bunch up.
sk8bcn
QUOTE (toturi @ Sep 22 2014, 04:38 PM) *
I think (1) is precisely what should happen and I think that if the players do not have a problem with fights not being interesting, then there is no problem.

But if the players think that the min-maxed guys (which incidentally I think is a misunderstanding of what min-max is) walk through like cake, then just handwave combat and get on with the important bits of the story.


I should have said beeing a Munchkin. Min-maxing is fairly close, but not exactely.

Min-maxing is getting the best for the minimal cost.

For exemple, using the priority system, he will max Quickness and have minimal Stregth because it will cost him less karma to reach an average value than start the game beeing average, then develop his character.

It's the guy that picks the ennemy flaw, because with 95% of GM that flaw just creates story hooks, not really a flaw like if your character was blind (real flaw).

It's the one that will calculte the Average damage output if he takes a feat at +1 damage instead of +1 attack in DD.



The Munchkin is somewhat different. He's usually weaker at min-maxing. He just want to be a fighting monster. It's the one that picks the biggest axe, the heavy mini-gun, the troll.

Usually, he's surprised when his troll is beaten by the min-maxing elf and his combination of unfair powers that makes him invulnerable.


-----------------------

That beeing said, I don't like a group with too variable scale of power. I find that it drags down the intensity of the fight.

At my biggest surprise, Munchkin and min-maxer are usually happy to walk through like a piece of cake.

I've never understood that.
Jaid
QUOTE (sk8bcn @ Sep 22 2014, 11:47 AM) *
That beeing said, I don't like a group with too variable scale of power. I find that it drags down the intensity of the fight.

At my biggest surprise, Munchkin and min-maxer are usually happy to walk through like a piece of cake.

I've never understood that.


munchkins just want to be the best, not to be challenged. min-maxers/optimizers derive their challenge from other things, like figuring out how to make the system work for them. some will even deliberately choose suboptimal starting points (for a D&D 3.x example, a rogue that uses a quarterstaff as opposed to, say, dual-wielding kukris) to provide the challenge. also, it is entirely possible for a powergamer to derive their enjoyment while gaming from the roleplaying aspect.

i seldom find myself with a pressing desire to roleplay a bumbling idiot, and would much rather roleplay someone who is effective at what they do, and character optimization is one way to make sure that happens.
Stahlseele
A Min/Maxer works inside the rules.
Bending is not prohibited.

With munchkins you can be glad if he adheres somewhat to the rules usually.
Bending them into pretzel shapes as needed to work within his interpretation.
Moirdryd
I think it's a fairly obvious thing that Shadowrun wasn't designed with much in the way of Scaling written into the Ruleset. In fact Scaling outside of the Profession rating and the advent of D&D 3.5 was always much the purview of the GM for his or her game. There was, however, always the presentation of the world being believable and consistent. The only scaling that should reasonably be presented is the type of Runs being offered, a fixer typically is going to reserve high end infiltrations into MegaCorp facilities that boast ZeroZones and Elite Corporate Security to his teams that have a proven record (aka earned more karma).

A street ganger isn't going to be much of a threat to even a moderate Street Samurai in an open alley fight. But a gang with some prep time and ambush positions may prove to be a challenge if not out right deadly. To less combat focused characters either encounter would prove far more dangerous. But that's the sixth world for you. But Shadowrunners are supposed to be professional (even in 1st and 2nd edit when it was a side venture) and in the cyberpunk future that means you be careful, pay attention to your surroundings and so forth. Which means that having a broader range of skills comes in useful than pure specialisation.

If the problem isn't so much in the character but player agency then as GM (and the rest of the group) you should provide encouragement and suggestion as to improving the characters effectiveness or application of their abilities. This is often something with newer players or those simply inexperienced with games as deeply involving as Shadowrun. The Hammer only seeing Nails problem is only a problem if you allow it to settle in as such. Sure the pornomancer might be able to access info "better" than the decker by uber social rolls but that info probably takes longer to come by and is still likely to rack up a whole bunch of favours or cost more nuyen.
Fatum
QUOTE (Glyph @ Sep 22 2014, 10:11 AM) *
That's kind of like a 10th level D&D party staying in the first level of the dungeon all the time, killing kobolds and giant rats. It might be fun for awhile, but I imagine it would get boring eventually, and they would probably also get tired of coming back to town with a few sacks of silver and copper coins, when they know they could be bringing back chests of gold and magical wands and swords, if they braved the lower levels.

Challenge in shadowrun is hard to do, but it is less about balancing weak vs. strong characters, and more balancing out the many roles and abilities that shadowrunners can have. This is harder than it looks, because a lot of GMs probably focus on some aspects of the game, and ignore others. If it is a game with a lot of talking, legwork, and planning, then the walking death machine might be bored a lot of the time. If it is a game with lots of combat, the smooth-talking detective with a tricked-out commlink and a mastery of disguise might be wishing he had put more into his pistols skill.
Agreed on everything. And this is what differentiates SR from a few other settings and gamesystems.


QUOTE (binarywraith @ Sep 22 2014, 11:58 AM) *
Because sufficient powerlevel obviates the need to share the spotlight. When one character can solve nearly every problem the group faces, everyone else has their fun at his sufferance, which is how you get players to quit playing at your table.
No, actually, it pretty obviously doesn't. You can have a streetsam as optimized as possible in your party, he won't hack the world and banish spirits.
Since optimization is specialization when the resources are limited, this becomes just a question of challenging each of your characters adequately.

QUOTE (binarywraith @ Sep 22 2014, 06:06 PM) *
Yeah, and then what do you do for opposition? There's only so far you can scale up street gangs and generic corporate goons before you start breaking suspension of disbelief.
You can postpone the problem a bit by replacing quality with quantity, but then you just have to move to tougher opponents. Character skills and attributes are an IC thing as much as OOC; so Johnsons and fixers are going to see that they have a team with high capabilities, and offer them the runs to match.


QUOTE (Tymeaus Jalynsfein @ Sep 22 2014, 07:32 PM) *
Even what you call the ubiquitous Stunball was not as useful as you claim it to be since most opposition take such things into account and did not bunch up.
To add to this, noticing spellcasting, if I remember, has a threshold of 6-Force. So an overcast stanball is going to be quite a firework.
Sengir
QUOTE (tjn @ Sep 22 2014, 04:39 AM) *
The goal of character creation from a systems point of view, is to create characters of a consistent power level. The less granularity, the more similar characters are to each other, and thus they are more consistent in power level.

Balance and consistency have nothing to do with granularity, and everything with careful design. Let's say you reduce skill choices to one of three options: Shadowrunning skillset, cooking skillset, expert in mating rituals of stone lice. Pretty low granularity, so all three have to have an equal power level, right?
Fatum
You have no idea of the scale of destruction a powerful licomancer can unleash upon the world!
Medicineman
QUOTE (Blade @ Sep 16 2014, 03:44 AM) *
Most players I know always feel that the edition they started with was the one with most/better atmosphere. I think that's due to discovering the whole deal at that point. When you discover the setting, you fill in the blanks with what you'd like to see. And then you discover what's really there, and it turns out not everything is to your liking.

So I think that "x edition was the most shadowrunny" is just some kind of nostalgia.

Usually I would agree, but not in this case
I started with SR2 and even if I liked the big Stories most (RAS & Deus or Dunkelzahn's Death f.E.) I consider the Rules Mechanisms of SR4A as the Best
and the unified Magical Theory is a grand Idea that makes playing magical chars much easier ruleswise so that you could concentrate on creating/describing a different Tradition by roleplaying it

Hough!
Medicineman
Cain
QUOTE (apple @ Sep 22 2014, 03:22 AM) *
What part of character creation? I admit I only created a handful of characters for myself and another handful for my group (complete newbies), so perhaps 10-15 max. The attributes, skills and special gadgets (magic etc) were done usually in less than 30 min - it was the equipment of street samurais, riggers and hackers which blow up the process (that and the dreaded sensor rules in SR4). But that is no difference between SR12345, regardless the creation system.

Of course the BP system could be improved (i like smaller numbers and never understood why we had to go from 120 points to 400 with costs from 1 increasing to 4 for the same attribute for example).


All of it, really. The back-and-forth was a big problem: players would spend time getting their attributes just right, only to discover they were short on skills. So, they went back and adjusted, taking forever. Then, they didn't have enough for equipment, so they had to go back and cut even more stuff so they could buy gear they needed. There was also a lot of gear that was needed just to function, and ofttimes they were overlooked. Some things, like commlinks, could be fixed easily; but others, like good Fake SINs, were too expensive to just handwave. After doing this, players might come short for contacts, or miss it entirely, which is severely crippling in SR4.5. And then, there's the specific stuff for each archetype, like CF's and spells. I already told you about the player who didn't know she needed CF's, and I've seen many mages go back and redo large sections of their character so they could get one more spell.


QUOTE
What do you say to the problem that a priority system creates vastly different characters, depending on the choice of order for priorities (if you re-calculate it back to the karma or point system)?

Overall balance is more important than karma equivalency. Really, Shadowrun has always been a front-loaded system: you get most of your abilities right at the start, and later gains are mostly a refinement on what you already have. Compare this to D&D, where most of your abilities come as you level. Both systems work fine, they just do different things. In a front-loaded system, it's all right to have a different build system than an advancement one.

What's more, karma equivalency depends on karma costs being balanced in the first place. IN SR4.0, they weren't-- attributes were way too good for their costs, and karmagen was never officially fixed to solve this. SR3 was better in this regard, since attributes were slightly overpriced. They didn't factor directly into your dice pools, so raising an attribute was somewhat balanced against raising a skill.

QUOTE (Stahlseele @ Sep 22 2014, 08:28 AM) *
A Min/Maxer works inside the rules.
Bending is not prohibited.

With munchkins you can be glad if he adheres somewhat to the rules usually.
Bending them into pretzel shapes as needed to work within his interpretation.


Well, sorta. A min/maxer is a player who likes to optimize. Nothing wrong with that, as long as the player is responsible. Munchkin is a playstyle, where the player constantly tries to be the best at everything and steal the spotlight from everyone else. Many munchkins are also min/maxers, but not always. Usually, they'll twist the rules into Esher-esque pretzels, but yes, they'll cheat as well. Sometimes you run across munchkins who aren't min/maxers, like the "serious roleplayers"-- the ones who will try and use their roleplaying skills instead of character stats, for example. They might play a Charisma 1 Uncouth Troll, and rely on their natural skills to solve social situations... and then whine when you make them roll dice.
QUOTE (Fatum @ Sep 22 2014, 09:14 AM) *
No, actually, it pretty obviously doesn't. You can have a streetsam as optimized as possible in your party, he won't hack the world and banish spirits.
Since optimization is specialization when the resources are limited, this becomes just a question of challenging each of your characters adequately.

That's where system mastery comes into play, My SR5 adept killed a force 6 toxic spirit by shooting it repeatedly, so who needs banishing? A pornomancer has such a crazy high Charisma, they can use a Test of Will to demolish spirits. Also, pornomancers can get critical successes on Con tests to get an NPC decker to hack the world for them.
QUOTE
To add to this, noticing spellcasting, if I remember, has a threshold of 6-Force. So an overcast stanball is going to be quite a firework.

Noticing a spell does you no good when you're unconscious.

QUOTE
Even what you call the ubiquitous Stunball was not as useful as you claim it to be since most opposition take such things into account and did not bunch up.

Harder than you might think. A Force 5 stunball has a radius of 5 meters, which means it's a circle over 30 feet in diameter. That can cover most of a room. Overcast Force 10 stunballs were disturbingly easy to resist Drain on, and those cover a circle of about 70 feet in diameter.

I had a GM who tried that: he said that inside the office building, each of the guards were spread out, more than 10 meters apart. I had to point out to him that, in order for that to work for 10 guards, the room would have to be larger than a football field.
apple
QUOTE (Cain @ Sep 22 2014, 03:19 PM) *
Then, they didn't have enough for equipment


And you didnt help them by telling them "yeah, a streetsam may go for the 250k"? Tell my, how did they know it in SR5? Because well, if they didn't know in SR4 that a streetsam needs a lot of money, how did they know that they should choose Priority A or B in SR5? Or did you tell them that they should take a higher priority? If yes, why didn't you tell them to take 50 BP in money in SR4?

QUOTE
I already told you about the player who didn't know she needed CF's


SR4A, character creation table, step 5
QUOTE
Technomancer Resources: Technomancers rely on their living persona, complex forms (p. 239) and sprites (p. 240) to manipulate the Matrix

Perhaps you should rather play with players who read at least the character creation rules rather than using this player as an example to point out the disadvantages of the point buy sytem. Because well, if he would have not known technomancers before and did not feel the necessity to read through the steps 1-6 of page 97 in the core book, this player will simply not read ...
QUOTE
Technomancer: Resonance 6, two Rating 5 Resonance skills, 5 complex forms

...as well.

It rather sounds that your technomancer player wanted to play a "perfect" technomancer - instead of simply going with templates or archetypes and simply first learn the basic character creation and technomancer rules before creating an own technomancer.

SYL
Bigity
My thoughts on this thread as a SR1-3 GM and player:

Holy hell do I want to play SR1-3 again.
Stahlseele
*waits for CanRay*
binarywraith
QUOTE (Fatum @ Sep 22 2014, 12:14 PM) *
No, actually, it pretty obviously doesn't. You can have a streetsam as optimized as possible in your party, he won't hack the world and banish spirits.
Since optimization is specialization when the resources are limited, this becomes just a question of challenging each of your characters adequately.


No, seriously. When someones' good enough at what they do, it becomes moot. A pornomancer (or really, pretty much any mage with a big enough Control Thoughts) can solve pretty much every problem by simply getting the NPCs to do it for him. A street sam can do the same, once it becomes clear that the opposition is hopeless against him.

Pretty much the sole skillset that doesn't lend to this is decking, and that doesn't really matter because a decker who's that good makes more money on paydata in half an hour than the rest of the team could by running in a month. A rigger that good can do the same by more productively spending his time stealing and fencing cars.

QUOTE (Bigity @ Sep 22 2014, 04:38 PM) *
My thoughts on this thread as a SR1-3 GM and player:

Holy hell do I want to play SR1-3 again.


That's my takeaway from this thread as well. Had to go dig out my old SR3 campaign notes, thinking I can talk some people I played with recently who were also frustrated with SR5 back into it.
ShadowDragon8685
QUOTE (binarywraith @ Sep 22 2014, 10:06 AM) *
Yeah, and then what do you do for opposition? There's only so far you can scale up street gangs and generic corporate goons before you start breaking suspension of disbelief.


Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Street gangers are street gangers. Their power level will vary within a fairly tight set of constraints unless for some genuine Reason, they're more powerful than you'd think they should be.

If the players are so weak that they have real difficulty with street gangers, they shouldn't be taking jobs that will bring them into conflict with tougher opposition. If, on the other hand, the players are exceptionally powerful, then they should tear through a pack of street gangers like an Essence 5 Dawn-Caste Solar Exalted tearing through a pack of pitchfork-and-torches peasants.
Smed
QUOTE (Bigity @ Sep 22 2014, 05:38 PM) *
My thoughts on this thread as a SR1-3 GM and player:

Holy hell do I want to play SR1-3 again.


Me too. smile.gif

binarywraith
QUOTE (ShadowDragon8685 @ Sep 22 2014, 04:28 PM) *
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Street gangers are street gangers. Their power level will vary within a fairly tight set of constraints unless for some genuine Reason, they're more powerful than you'd think they should be.

If the players are so weak that they have real difficulty with street gangers, they shouldn't be taking jobs that will bring them into conflict with tougher opposition. If, on the other hand, the players are exceptionally powerful, then they should tear through a pack of street gangers like an Essence 5 Dawn-Caste Solar Exalted tearing through a pack of pitchfork-and-torches peasants.


Alright, and now bear with me here, because I know we probably have different ideas of how the setting works, but if you start out with characters who are better set up than corporate SpecOps, where do you envision the campaign going story-wise? Also, if they're that damn good, why do they start with no rep to back it up?

I think it's a clear mismatch of intent and result in the character creation rules. The intent of the rules is to create starting Shadowrunners who are good enough to get into the business, not street legends who apparently got that way without ever making any kind of name for themselves. The rules exist in 3e, 4e, and 5e to make prime runners, but they aren't the standard character creation rules by a long shot.
toturi
QUOTE (binarywraith @ Sep 23 2014, 06:53 AM) *
Alright, and now bear with me here, because I know we probably have different ideas of how the setting works, but if you start out with characters who are better set up than corporate SpecOps, where do you envision the campaign going story-wise? Also, if they're that damn good, why do they start with no rep to back it up?

I think it's a clear mismatch of intent and result in the character creation rules. The intent of the rules is to create starting Shadowrunners who are good enough to get into the business, not street legends who apparently got that way without ever making any kind of name for themselves. The rules exist in 3e, 4e, and 5e to make prime runners, but they aren't the standard character creation rules by a long shot.

I think that there can be quite a few reasons for having no rep. For one, the runner is starting in the shadows and he may be passably well-known in his previous career, but in his old job, the people there may be tight lipped and closed off in their interaction with people outside their community.

Or he could be new to the area and he is seeking a clean break with his past, finding some place where no one knows him.
binarywraith
That's a perfectly good rationale, until you get to people with skills that make them equivalent with Olympic athletes, top fraction of a percent in the world in their primary ability. People that good at what they do are known for it, unless they've been living in a cave like a Luddite for the last decade and somehow learned everything they know by divine inspiration.
Sengir
QUOTE (Cain @ Sep 22 2014, 09:19 PM) *
There was also a lot of gear that was needed just to function, and ofttimes they were overlooked. Some things, like commlinks, could be fixed easily; but others, like good Fake SINs, were too expensive to just handwave.

If players are not aware what gear their character needs, priorities won't help. Either they take a lot of money and blow it on useless stuff, in that case the fix is the same for both priority and point buy. Or they ignore money completely, in that case priority has a serious problem. You can't just drop First Aid (because the team has enough medics) to get more money, you need to reassign priorities from scratch.

QUOTE
After doing this, players might come short for contacts, or miss it entirely, which is severely crippling in SR4.5.

As I said earlier, priorities could be redone as a pattern for where to spend how many points. Alternatively, guide them with a carrot in the shape of CHAx2 free "contact points" .


QUOTE
, and I've seen many mages go back and redo large sections of their character so they could get one more spell.

Large sections of a character just to squeeze out a few points somewhere? Even taking that at face value, re-doing large sections would still be far less than completely juggling priorities around.
Cain
QUOTE (apple @ Sep 22 2014, 02:32 PM) *
And you didnt help them by telling them "yeah, a streetsam may go for the 250k"? Tell my, how did they know it in SR5? Because well, if they didn't know in SR4 that a streetsam needs a lot of money, how did they know that they should choose Priority A or B in SR5? Or did you tell them that they should take a higher priority? If yes, why didn't you tell them to take 50 BP in money in SR4?

"A street sam needs a lot of money" is easy in Priority, just assign the max. In points, it's not as clear, especially when you could spend those points elsewhere. Players would weigh the BP/cash conversion for buying up attributes versus augmentations.

The bigger problem was with medium to low gear characters. They wanted to spend as little as possible on gear, which frequently led to them cutting corners. Problem is, on essential stuff, you can't do that. Some of these are easily fixed, like forgetting to buy ammo or a commlink. Cheap stuff can be handwaved. But expensive stuff, like Fake SINs? They cost too much to give them away, and weak ones are more of a liability than none at all. This was a serious problem when I ran the Denver Missions: I was required to accept any legal character, and fake SINs are a necessity there. Also, with the time crunch, I couldn't pour over every character and fix the sheets.

QUOTE
SR4A, character creation table, step 5

Perhaps you should rather play with players who read at least the character creation rules rather than using this player as an example to point out the disadvantages of the point buy sytem. Because well, if he would have not known technomancers before and did not feel the necessity to read through the steps 1-6 of page 97 in the core book, this player will simply not read ...

...as well.

It rather sounds that your technomancer player wanted to play a "perfect" technomancer - instead of simply going with templates or archetypes and simply first learn the basic character creation and technomancer rules before creating an own technomancer.

SYL

Actually, it was our first game ever with SR4. Mistakes were bound to happen, although that was the worst. Really, the problem was time: it was an open play session for a game store, and in addition to not being able to spend hours and hours pouring over characters, she arrived late. She just had to jump in and start playing. I'm sure she read the book, she just got buried in the huge number of choices and missed a step.

And people missed steps all the time. I lost count of the number of characters who came in with no contacts. Or had a commlink, but no OS-- they assumed the OS came bundled with it. One guy bought a smartlink for his adept, and smartlinked all his guns, but forgot to buy a visual display for it. Really small detail, really serious problem. I try not to sweat the small stuff, but sometimes it gets out of hand.

It is unreasonable to expect me to personally help build every single character, in any game. It's especially unreasonable in SR4.5, where character creation typically took hours, and sometimes took days. I just don't have that kind of time.
Remnar
QUOTE (Bigity @ Sep 22 2014, 01:38 PM) *
My thoughts on this thread as a SR1-3 GM and player:

Holy hell do I want to play SR1-3 again.


Yeah, me too.

My issue always was that starting with SR4 Shadowrun just lost that 80's flair that I loved about it. It just kinda felt... blah... to me with the meta. Mechanics were pretty decent, and I've never been too put off by mechanics, I'm pretty laid back and don't really let those things bother me. Probably also because my gaming group always liked to play fast and loose with the rules anyway.

Even now what I want from Shadowrun is that awesome 80's cyberpunk world where telecoms were in homes, cyberdecks were HUGE, punks wore pink mohawks and a trip down the Interstate was a gun battle, often as not. Tone that down and its just another near-future sci-fi game, not Shadowrun.

IMO of course.

Edit: Oh yeah, and Shamans and Mages were VERY different, and Technomancer's weren't a thing (Otaku were OK though, as long as they stayed crazy strange and rare and not as PCs).
Cain
QUOTE (Sengir @ Sep 22 2014, 05:09 PM) *
If players are not aware what gear their character needs, priorities won't help. Either they take a lot of money and blow it on useless stuff, in that case the fix is the same for both priority and point buy. Or they ignore money completely, in that case priority has a serious problem. You can't just drop First Aid (because the team has enough medics) to get more money, you need to reassign priorities from scratch.

Not really. In Priority, it usually takes deliberate obtuseness to gimp a character. Fine details can still be missed, but they're not as critical. Usually, you build street sams around a couple expensive pieces of cyber, and just fill in the edges with other stuff.

Also, in SR3, there was less essential gear to buy. You didn't need a commlink or cellphone, you didn't need Fake SIN's (they were nice, but not necessary), and so on. Contacts were free, so if you missed them, it was an easy fix. The problem with buying stuff is that it costs you something else.

QUOTE
As I said earlier, priorities could be redone as a pattern for where to spend how many points. Alternatively, guide them with a carrot in the shape of CHAx2 free "contact points" .

That house rule didn't appear until SR4.5 came out. And even then, it wasn't helpful in the Missions games I ran, since there were no house rules allowed.

Also, technically SR4 did that. You couldn't spend more than half your BP on attributes, which usually meant you should spend 200 BP on them. Problem was, it wasn't clear, so those who didn't realize this were disadvantaged, if not permanently gimped. And if you weren't careful, you could fall for the other trap, and hardmax an attribute. The writing was deceptive: it looked like it only cost you 15 BP more. But the opportunity cost was the chance to raise three other attributes, not two. That's why it was a trap.
QUOTE
Large sections of a character just to squeeze out a few points somewhere? Even taking that at face value, re-doing large sections would still be far less than completely juggling priorities around.

One spell = 5 BP, right? Let's look at the opportunity cost here:

You could trade in 25,000 nuyen worth of gear,
You could trade in two skill points,
You could trade in half an attribute... but since they don't come in halves, you have to trade in 10 BP.
You could trade in a 2/3 Contact (or other combination)
Or you could do some combination of the above.

If you trade in attributes, skills, or gear that affects your dice pools, you have to recalculate them. But if they start looking off, then you have to adjust elsewhere to make up for the shortfall you just caused. That causes another deficit, which has to be fixed.

As you can see, it's not a straight trade. It's a complex trade off to get everything right. Also, BP, by its very nature, encourages fiddliness. You can tweak here and there, so you feel like you *should* tweak here and there. Before long, you've spent more time tweaking than you did in the initial build. The same thing happens in comparable build systems, like Hero and GURPS. Like SR4.5, those systems also reward you for that tweaking, with a significantly more powerful character.

The trick with Priority is, you don't need to juggle them. You don't see people complaining about juggling priorities in White Wolf, even though it uses a similar system. Because it's simpler, you don't feel as much temptation to undo and redo like you do in a fiddly system. There's also less reward for doing so, which minimizes the impact of system mastery. So, not only is it simpler, it's faster and more balanced.

Now, to be fair, this is only when done right. SR4.5's Priority system was none of the above, because it was done completely wrong. I'm still sitting on the fence with SR5, because it's a little too fiddly for my tastes, and I'm not sure how balanced it is. I'm going to give it a few more tries before I make up my mind.
apple
QUOTE (Cain @ Sep 22 2014, 08:11 PM) *
"A street sam needs a lot of money" is easy in Priority, just assign the max. In points, it's not as clear, especially when you could spend those points elsewhere.


Oh please. Take 50 BP. Get 250k Ĩ Trade back the rest if you donīt need it. Somes goes for lower attributes. Take 5 BP, get 25k Ĩ. I simply do not belive that a player has so big problems with that if they ever read the character creation chapter.

QUOTE
And people missed steps all the time. I lost count of the number of characters who came in with no contacts. Or had a commlink, but no OS


Sorry

Player and general SR issue due to very inconvenient equipment lists.

Not a rule issue.

SYL

apple
QUOTE (Cain @ Sep 22 2014, 08:34 PM) *
One spell = 5 BP, right? Let's look at the opportunity cost here:


Besides that it is not 5 points, you are talking about the absolute minmax area of character creation. it would be the same if you need 25 skillpoints but only geht 24 skill points due to your priority. If you really want to have that skillpoint, you need to rearrange all priorities and that is at least as complicated as "me, skill -1, but +1 spell" - and I would suspect that it is far more work, especially if attributes, money or special attribute priorities are involved.

QUOTE
You didn't need a commlink or cellphone, you didn't need Fake SIN's (they were nice, but not necessary), and so on. Contacts were free


You needed a PDA/cell phone/(pocket secretary, yes, you need a (fake) SIN, because SIN checks were common in SR3 as well, and if player forget about the 10 BP for a fixer connection, they forgot about the 2 level 1 connections in SR3 as well. But thats easy to fix - just reduce one attribute by 1, end of problems.

Or read the character creation rules ...


QUOTE
You don't see people complaining about juggling priorities in White Wolf,


You dont see people complaining about the ability to swap one spell into a skillpoint ...

Sorry, all what you describe sounds like player issues, not specific point character creation system issues.

SYL
Cain
QUOTE (apple @ Sep 22 2014, 05:09 PM) *
Besides that it is not 5 points, you are talking about the absolute minmax area of character creation. it would be the same if you need 25 skillpoints but only geht 24 skill points due to your priority. If you really want to have that skillpoint, you need to rearrange all priorities and that is at least as complicated as "me, skill -1, but +1 spell" - and I would suspect that it is far more work, especially if attributes, money or special attribute priorities are involved.

Special attributes is SR5, and I'm still sitting on the fence there. But generally, since there's fewer moving parts, there's fewer points where decision paralysis comes into play. Also, there's fewer rewards for fiddling, so if you don't optimize as heavily as someone else, the difference isn't as great. Because of the way Priority works, if you come up short by one skill point, it's easier to get it by sacrificing another skill point, which is 1:1. Since you can't make funky trade offs, they're not a problem.


QUOTE
You needed a PDA/cell phone/(pocket secretary, yes, you need a (fake) SIN, because SIN checks were common in SR3 as well, and if player forget about the 10 BP for a fixer connection, they forgot about the 2 level 1 connections in SR3 as well. But thats easy to fix - just reduce one attribute by 1, end of problems.

Or read the character creation rules ...

You did not need a pocket secretary in SR3. They were nice, as were cell phones, but not needed since a landline was included in most lifestyles. But let's look at what happens if you sacrifice an attribute in SR4.5. First of all, you lose a die off every pool that attribute factored into. That means, if you needed certain skills at a given level, you had to spend more to correct for that-- which requires even more adjusting. In addition, you might lose off a derived value, like Initiative. That could be fixed with augmentations or magic-- but that would require more BP on resources, which is another spend. Finally, you cripple yourself in the long run, since attributes are expensive to raise with karma. Not spending the absolute max on attributes was a trap, because of this.

I had a player who insisted on running a poorly min/maxed troll, with all 1's in his mental attributes. I asked him three times if he really wanted to do that, and he said yes. He quickly learned why it was a horrible idea, and spent a ton of karma bringing his mental attributes up to a decent level. As a result, he was noticeably behind the curve from everyone else, who had spent the max on attributes to start, and didn't need to raise them afterwards.


QUOTE
Sorry, all what you describe sounds like player issues, not specific point character creation system issues.

They're one and the same. A character creation system encourages certain things from the players. If the system encourages fiddling and fine-tuning, players will gravitate towards that. If a system encourages ease of use and speed of play, players will go for that instead. SR4.5 was towards the fiddlier, complex end of the spectrum, if not *on* the very end: it was at least as bad as Hero, and decidedly comparable to GURPS.
Glyph
QUOTE (binarywraith @ Sep 22 2014, 02:53 PM) *
Alright, and now bear with me here, because I know we probably have different ideas of how the setting works, but if you start out with characters who are better set up than corporate SpecOps, where do you envision the campaign going story-wise? Also, if they're that damn good, why do they start with no rep to back it up?

I think it's a clear mismatch of intent and result in the character creation rules. The intent of the rules is to create starting Shadowrunners who are good enough to get into the business, not street legends who apparently got that way without ever making any kind of name for themselves. The rules exist in 3e, 4e, and 5e to make prime runners, but they aren't the standard character creation rules by a long shot.

The key word is "shadowrunner". Shadowrunners are top level freelancers, so a starting shadowrunner is not the same as a starting criminal. That is why they have lower-powered rules/suggested build points for truly beginning street level games. Look at the description of the street samurai in SR5. He may be new as a street samurai, but he spent years of small-time jobs, training himself, and getting augmented bit by bit, before he finally became a street samurai.
Cain
QUOTE (binarywraith @ Sep 22 2014, 03:53 PM) *
Alright, and now bear with me here, because I know we probably have different ideas of how the setting works, but if you start out with characters who are better set up than corporate SpecOps, where do you envision the campaign going story-wise? Also, if they're that damn good, why do they start with no rep to back it up?

I think it's a clear mismatch of intent and result in the character creation rules. The intent of the rules is to create starting Shadowrunners who are good enough to get into the business, not street legends who apparently got that way without ever making any kind of name for themselves. The rules exist in 3e, 4e, and 5e to make prime runners, but they aren't the standard character creation rules by a long shot.

Ok, here's the disconnect. There is no such thing as a first-level shadowrunner. This isn't D&D, where you start off in danger of being killed by a housecat, and end slaughtering titans and having tea with gods. Shadowrun is front loaded, where you start off much more competent and capable than the everyday person. This is by deliberate design. Sure, you *can* turn it down so you can play gangers, but that's not the default. A shadowrunner has to be very good at what they do, or they wouldn't have survived this long. What's more, even though you won't advance like you would in D&D, you will get better and become a prime runner someday-- if you live that long.

The mismatch is *within* the character creation systems, where you can create wildly varying power levels. This is most evident in SR4.5, where the book encourages you to have dice pools of 6-8, and considers 12-15 to be really high... but then turns around, and lets those who can see deeper into the system have dice pools of 20+. SR3 was better about this-- not perfect, but it was harder to create a gimped character by accident, and not as easy to create one that was vastly overpowered in relation to the other PC's.
toturi
QUOTE (binarywraith @ Sep 23 2014, 07:56 AM) *
That's a perfectly good rationale, until you get to people with skills that make them equivalent with Olympic athletes, top fraction of a percent in the world in their primary ability. People that good at what they do are known for it, unless they've been living in a cave like a Luddite for the last decade and somehow learned everything they know by divine inspiration.

Please tell me you can name the Olympic gold medalist for any shooting event from the last Olympics from memory. Hell, I'd concede the point if you can name me any Olympic gold medalist from any non-mainstream event from any Olympics from memory.

Now we look at the close, tight lipped community of spec ops guys, sure, there are the Mark Owens, Andy McNabs and Chris Ryans, but these aren't their real names and the premise is that the runner is newly arrived in the shadows despite his superlative skill in a certain shadow related area.
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