Uh huh!

It's all good, everything's balanced by what you can purchase with Karma,

Att point, 100
Skill point, 10
Spell, 20
1xtra Success on a Test, 10
Lower TN by 1, 10
Ressurection, 100, or 1 point of Willpower lost permanently and inability to puchase more willpower points.

Tell me, Weredigo, have you also replaced the dice in your games with d20s and written up a list of "Feats" your player's characters can get?

Or perhaps you're using d47-and-a-thirds, GM while tapdancing, and give an additional percentile dice karma for the winner of the Most Interesting Pants At Session award?

You ask us to suggest what you do in some published adventures, but you don't appear to be sticking to any of the other rules. How are we supposed to predict anything at all? [1]



[1] Nevertheless, my money's on the tapdancing.

If you have run either of these adventures any advice is welcome.
If you have not, still any suggestions are welcomes.
I don't recall asking for predictions, I can do my own thank you.


if you would prefer not to criticize my gaming in a constructive manner, feel free to take a jump off the highest closest skyscraper, the worlds smallest fiddle will be playing a sonnet just for you.

Here's some constructive criticism: I think the descriptions of your games seem not to be congruent with the general style and substance of the game of Shadowrun. It seems to be more of an overpowered amalgamation of different games. While not inherently wrong, it sounds more like Rifts than the Sixth World that most of us are familiar with. I went through a phase in middle school where me and my friends played DnD in a similar fashion (had a character that owned the Duchy of Karameikos and the Wizard was as powerful as the Elminster), and it can be fun for a while, so I'm not going to knock it (any more than necessary). But you can't expect to talk about the same game as the rest of us when you are playing something completely different.

Woo-hoo! Break out the Glitterboys!

Okay, Weredigo, telling us about the Djinns was a good thing. It gave us something of a baseline to start with. However, since it seems that your board is some sort of amalgamated homebrew, that still isn't enough. 'Harlequin's Back' is not some uber-munch monte haul. The Djinn's will pretty much walk over every combat and physical threat in the book, and a good deal of everything else as well. You're going to have to retool pretty much everything, and since we don't know what you're playing, there's really very little help we can offer on it.

Exactly, and to clarify what other "Flavor Information" I've added so that the maximum ammount of fun for both players, GM, and Peanut Gallery can be had.
And reason's Why.

RiFtS: Ah, so yer telling me (from SR1's timeline description) that 5/7ths of the worlds population is GONE) Okay, lots of elbowroom, so I guess nobody minds if I draw about half a dozen lines on the earth and reccomend players not get too close to them, unless I want to take them to a Dungeon Delving adventure, or maybe something from DnD

World of Darkness: Okay so they're saying Vampirism and the Undead are an infection, and that Were critters have no sentience, that's a bit boring, that also means that if my Players want to play Were Critters or Vampires I have to say no, well that's gonna spoil a lot of fun for everybody. So I guess nobody will mind if I rule that the Masquerade has fallen. Hey cool, I even have a fictional reference for it, Movie Queen of the Damned.

Murphy's World: Well shoot, my players are Stuck, they can't figure a way out of this situation, they've had 3 hours on it, so to get the game moving the opposition needs to make a mistake.

DnD: Dammit, not enough wierd critters, and the dragon's just don't look as kick ass as the fiction aludes them to be.

I don't know where you get this. Sure VITAS killed a lot of people, but 60 years of breeding has replaced any such losses. If anything, canon states that there are more people than today, even with VITAS, not less, and definitely not decreased by the figure you claim.

Maybe it's like this in your game, but claiming that this is Shadowrun canon is just wrong.

My group and I were just talking about this at the SR session last night. I think the statistic is something like 1 in 4 die from the various waves of VITAS.

According to the BBB, 1 in 4 die in the first wave throughout the world in the first wave in 2010, and 1 in 10 die in another wave in 2022. No mention if there are any other outbreaks (I'm pretty sure there were).

Well, the numbers only vaguely correspond to outbreaks. There was that incident in... Shadows of Europe? (maybe?) where a bunch of folks were doused with VITAS-1 strain. There was mention of a viral outbreak that was incorrectly diagnosed as VITAS-4, so I think SR is only up to 3 so far.

kind fuzzy on what you mean by Skill Levels. As far as points in Skills, upon creating the character no more then 6. (houserule) I don't use the "point" system. Players are given the "necessary skills" posted somewhere else previously, and whatever other skills they want. They count up the number of Attributes, and Skills they have to roll for. 3 D6 are rolled, highest number get's recorded, and repeat, until they have as many numbers for each skill and attribute. Essence and Reaction are not rolled for, as Reaction is calculated from Intellegence and Quickness, and Essence starts as a 6.

also covered somewhere in a previous post

you'd have to ask them that. They were asked if they would like to try an Experiment.

...and now a word from our sponsors.

So you're playing a modified version of d20. You going to tell me you derive Active Skills from their linked attributes or something now?

Actually, what I got from that was that 3d6 were rolled, and the highest single number was kept.

The Brainsweat is half the fun for me. If it's too simple I'd get bored real quick.

That's my point. The suggested generation for characters is to roll 4d6 and toss out the lowest number, then sum the dice (for d20).

That's basically what his system is, except SR is based on d6 and starting attributes (before racial mods) are between 1 and 6, so one die is kept out of the three rolled.

You have now.

The Shadowrun system causes improving skills to make easy tasks achievable more quickly or with better results, to make moderately difficult tasks achievable more easily, and to make almost impossible tasks more possible, but never easy. This helps keep the excesses that other systems are prone to at the high end in check without crippling the low end, imposing arbitrary limits on advancement, or removing the advantage of better skills at the low end. All these behaviours are direct results of varying the number of dice and the TN independently and allowing multiple successes to improve degree of success.

It's got its flaws - the discontinuities on the probability curve at TN 6/7, 12/13, and so on - but, despite that, it's an elegant mechanic that works beautifully. I'd even call its relative opacity to easy probability analysis a feature... it discourages metagaming. It certainly beats d20's simplistic linear system all hollow.

This is my major bone of contention with the SR system: No. Being difficult to calculate statistics is not an advantage.

Yes, it discourages metagaming - But it also makes it simply impossible for a GM to reasonably predict what will happen or intelligently adjust the probabilities without inputting far more thought than he should need to. The joy of d20 is that it's very easy to figure out what the odds of the PCs succeeding or failing is.

"Hmm, my player has a total skill bonus of +15. I want him to have about a 75% chance of success. DC 20 sounds good."

vs

"I want this to be pretty easy, so I guess a TN of 5 will work."

If someone was intent on using d6's for a system, just make the TN of every single task 4 All TN modifiers would simply add or subtract from the number of dice you already have with some sort of minimum, maybe you always have at least one die or have that be a function of your karma pool. Or TN modifiers could create thresholds.

And in D20,where rolling a D20 you have tasks that were once impossable is now not only possabille but is shit simple. Take TN 30. How hard is that at, level 1,5,10,15?

For one, I should state up front that I DO think there are some things you simply should not be capable of until you are of a certain skill. The difficulty of tasks needs to be taken down a notch pretty much across the board. It's WAY too easy for people to fail at utterly mundane tasks, like driving a car.

But for your specific example - That's impossible to say. I've built diplomacy monkeys that could consistently hit a DC of 30 at level 3 IIRC(I'd have to do the math again to be sure). A 3rd level char I have right now has two skills that he has a +10 modifier to at level 3, so he COULD hit a TN/DC of 30, albeit with only a 5% chance of success.

Outside of some fringe cases - At level 1, impossible. Level 5, impossible. Level 10, maybe 50/50. Level 15, at least 75% and maybe 100% depending on the exact skill and whether or not the GM allows custom magic items.

The latter is, IMAO, how assigning TNs should work, anyway. You estimate how difficult the action should be, and assign a TN based on that. As tisoz says, there's even a table to guide the GM in that. That TN should be consistent with similar TNs thoughout the game, and shouldn't change just because the PCs' abilities do.

Metagaming on the GM's part to the extent that they're assigning TNs based not on the difficulty of the action, but on the probability of success that they want a specific character to have at it is bad for consistency and suspension of disbelief, and, when taken to the extreme, makes it pointless for the character to even have stats.