Geez, thats exactly what Karma/Combat pools did. To bad their isn't a system Fanpro could have used with those features in them...

Well yeah, with him running the company and coordinating SR4's making as well as some four other books, and having another job too (he did, right?), I can imagine. But please tell him he's really losing fans here - potential buyers, after all - and that a bit of dmaage control might be in order.

Neither the Karma nor the Combat pool entirely matched what Edge does, especially in the realm of presenting options for "mundane" character types. Plus, there's that whole part about Combat Pool being applicable to just combat.

Now, why they decided to call it Edge and not Karma, I have no idea. Probably because karma is still being used for the experience points, so that would have caused confusion.

Well I know of one system the could use, but overall it's an aging dog's breakfast that evolved over a few iterations of tweaking so it's got a lot of legacy ballast holding it back. Plus since it's creation there has been a lot of advancement in understanding how to create a smoother playing system.

:^)

Except for the fact that after a certain amount of total karma the karma pools in SR3 became insane and unwieldy. Karma pools of 10 aren't that hard to acchieve with the base system and once you start getting that sort of karma on top of you high skill levels, augmentations and combat pool high end characters could utterly devastate hordes of mooks.

I'm not saying that will be the case with SR4 but that it's quite likely that Edge attributes in the mid range will be pretty rare and that double digit edge attributes would be pretty unheard of.

So it's cinematic in that high edge characters will be able to do a bunch of things that on paper they shouldn't be able to do (split an arrow with another arrow maybe) but that relying so much on luck will come at a significant cost to thier development in other areas.

yes, but the old combat pool was based on attributes, this one is a attribute of its own
it gives more flexibility on how the char is created. you can now have john woo inspired gunbunnies right next to the street sam with wired reflexes, smartlink-2 and the whole package. edge = style over substance

I know Ayn Rand never wrote about it, but have you ever heard of game balance?

Part of the beauty of SR is the "any street punk with a gun can get lucky" factor. Take that away and you effectively turn SR into a superhero game. That's why currently in SR magically active and cybered characters are not ubermensch. Maybe you don't notice this because most people's games seem to largely ignore the drawbacks, but if a GM cares to enforce them they are there.

It shouldn't take scouring the world to collect a group of "real, true RPers" in order to play Shadowrun as it was intended. It's also nice to have rules that keep you on the straight and narrow (because lets face it, even us real true RPers can get a little carried away at times).

*shrug* If Solstice can advocate against Edge, I can advocate for it, right?

Or are you some kind of commie?

-- Edit --

Besides, I wasn't reading that message so much as an attack on Edge but on game balance in general. We shouldn't have to rely on having the "right" group of players for SR4 in order for mundane, non-cybered people to get represented in proportion to their (overwhelming) numbers.

If you want to get down to it though: How many magically active and heavily cybered people wouldn't be recruited out of the shadows and into legit positions? Mages in particular would be much more valuable to a corp as full time employees instead of disposable, deniable shadow meat.

So was Reaction, yet it was calculated from other Attriubutes. So far, nothing has been left to random chance in building characters, so hopefully we will be able exert some meter of control over Edge as well any other calculated or otherwise attributes like we've seen in the past.

DE's statements pretty much indicate that just like strength, quickness and magic it's an attribute that you can purchase at creation. Now whether it costs the same amount to buy the same amount of edge that it costs to purchase quickness etc remains to be seen.

Well it was also linked to the various vehicle skills so did influence the costs of purchasing those skills in some situations (pretty rarely as pretty much only riggers and vehicular police routinely exceeded reaction in vehicle skill ranks). I'm not saying that reaction pretty much wasn't pretty much just the base amount for determining initiative but it did have a handful of other uses.

Mutant pinko commie traitor!

The Computer is your friend. Trust the Computer.

This is almost too funny for words.

Yes, CLEARLY, this is what the new rules will capture. Little old ladies of death. Never again will it be safe for your shadowrunner to assault little old ladies with twos across the board.

Clearly, a decision was made at FanPro that PCs bullying unimportant NPCs were to be made a thing of the past, and game balance was adjusted accordingly.

In fact, it was recently announced on the official Shadowrun webpage that Shadowrun 4th ed will actually be known as "Geriatric Run" and everyone will be forced to play anemic old ladies with osteoperosis. When you want to roll Athletics, you must first make a Body check to see if your bones have crumbled or not. And that's how the old lady mundane succeeds; because while the NPC mundane is in fact an old lady, she isn't an old lady with osteoperosis and anemia, but you as the PC are. And that's where strategy comes in, see.

Also, the reason that they combined riggers and deckers is so that you can drive a rocket-powered VCR controlled walker that has 50 cal machine guns mounted on the sides. Unfortunately, you must make a crash test whenever the 50 cal machine guns fire, and furthermore you must roll a body test to make sure that the recoil didn't make your bones crumble again.

Bull, I think you logged in under someone else's account by mistake.

Fallout was going to be based on GURPS, but there was a falling out, and they made their own system, which is not based on GURPS in any way, shape or form - there are seven attributes instead of 4, there are hitpoints per level, action points / round, skills are expressed as percentages...

No, your post was too funny for words.

Mr. (straw) Man, SR3 DOES allow anyone to pretty much kill anyone...mundane or not. No edge needed. That is my point.

Yes the current mechanics allow people to occasionally pull off amazing stunts but I think the fundamental goal of the new edge attribute is to allow mundane archetypes to hang with cybered and awakened characters routinely rather than just on rare occasion.

It's not DE that's saying that all NPC gangers will suddenly use Edge to compete with samurai characters but that PC ganger archetypes will actually be able to function in a party with the samurai without always getting overshadowed. If you can honestly say that mundane noncybered archetypes are equally playable under SR3 I think a lot of people would call you delusional.

And somebody else analysed the game and turned it into an pen&paper rpg!
It's out somewhere on the web.
(And covers not only Fallout but also its unofficial but de facto predecessor Wasteland.)

Dunno about that - a 'Ganger' shouldn't be able to hang with a Samurai. Now a ganger that's 'graduated' from the gutters and is now making the 'big bucks' , sure. The archtype should have been called 'Former Ganger'.

Unless you are running a ganger style game that is

Straight up lethality he's going to get his ass handed to him but if you factor in luck and pluck you can generate a decent ganger template that can survive in combination with a mid range razorboy (something like 200,000 - 400,000k resources) long enough to afford some augments of his own.

The character types I'm looking for here are ones like Dirk Montgomery from 2XS etc. They aren't magical they aren't cybered but between a good mix of skills and some lucky breaks they can stay in the same room as Argent.

Under SR3 a human detective simply just can't compete effectively. I'm not saying that Dirk should outfight Argent but that he shouldn't be useless either.

Anyone?! Even old ladies? Whoah, man! That sounds like communism or something...

My point is that this balance WRT mundanes needs to continue to be the case in SR4 even if an "Edge" attribute is required to maintain it.

Don't get me wrong, those types of chars do have their place - but they are just mundanes, and should not be able to stand up to the cybered/awakened chars.

Which logical fallacy did you violate this time?

I'm talking within reason of course. Said mundane would actually have to HAVE a combat skill in order to kill said cybered/magic/badass character.

But it dilutes the neccesity for cyber and bioware. The gritty nature of the Shadowrun universe as I've come to know it is that people don't get cyberware because they want to (in general), but because they have to. Otherwise, they can't stay competitive.

Obviously, there are industries where you don't need cyberware or bioware to compete. I would think being a megacorp CEO probably doesn't require a huge investment in mental bioware and what not, but in some fields it would be required.

Giving the mudane soldier or street punk the ability to hang with his cybered comrade (watch out for those commies ) will they feel the need to undergo the knife as much? Probably not. Will the benefits of the cyberware outweigh the downsides? It'll just depend on 'game balance' most likely, but I have a feeling the balance has tipped in favor of not getting that wired reflexes installed, or not getting those tailored pheremones, etc.


Ah well, I'm kind of uncertain about SR4 as is everyone else. Overall, judgement has to be reserved for the book itself.

They are most definitely playable. They also most definitely shouldn't be on the same scale power-wise though, and I don't see why that should change. They are called mundanes for a reason, in that they do not have the edge that augmented or awakened charaters possess.

Propably under a table, waiting for Argent to shoot all the baddies down. Yeah, he got the queen in the end. Guess tht's where he used all the Edge dice at once.

Dirk Montgomery was, if anything, a face/investigator character, not a fighter. Oh, and he got a cyberarm in the end, since he lost his opriginal one and was apparently too cheap to pay for a forced-growth cloned one.

No, no, no! Judgement and execution shall commence forthwith!

You seem to be missing the point that DE made that this attribute (regardless of whatever mechanics it uses) is intended to bring out the playability of the 1e archetypes like the rocker, detective, tribesman, etc without making every single one of them purchase quickness 6 pistols 6.

I suspect that Edge becomes something that allows characters to be the type of character that always seem to have the knack of doing something right at the right time. I suspect that will be additional dice that he/she can roll when the team's rigger is incapacitated and they really need someone to drive them the hell out of the scene. Or it could be dice used to represent that little bit of trivia that someone picked up while watching the trid nature show.

Basically I think it's a design decision to allow some characters to reliably succeed in doing things that aren't neecesarily purchased skills or augmentations. Think of it as a wild card element in which people can do stuff unskilled or marginally skilled but they don't need to rely on freak dice rolling to acchieve that as long as they don't do it all the time.

In SR3 we have such a "crutch": It's called Karma Pool. I've got characters with no magic and no cyber but enough KP to pull all kinds of stunts that would get less experienced runners killed.

Tactical thinking and intelligent use of skills could also be considered such a "crutch". Ever watch MacGuyver?

they're not. at most, they're introducing one new attribute, and even that one fills a similar function to a mechanic that already exists in SR3.

the Logic/Intuition split already exists in SR3. it's just not called "Logic" and "Intuition". check out the stats for non-intelligent critters, and you'll find this split right there. the difference is--and yes, it's a big difference--the split is being applied to all characters, rather than just animal-intelligence critters.

likewise, the Agility/Reaction split is already present. Agility equals Quickness, and Reaction equals Reaction. it's simplified because Reaction is no longer derived from Qui and Int--which, really, never made much sense anyway, since i know plenty of smart people with really laggish reaction times (i punch them a lot to test!).

and Edge is Karma Pool. different mechanic, probably, but largely the same concept.

Yes it's called "combat pool" and "karma". They seem to have forgotten that. Those two pools were the chance for the "non-combat/mundane" whatever, to suceed at a critical time. Basically, they are saying: "we are going to make it easier for the "dice challenged" to succeed. I say goddamn it if I build a badass sam with quickness 10 and pistols 12 I expect not to be upstaged by a "mundane". Granted anything is possible (which is reflected by karma/combat pool quite well), odds go with the nonmundane...as they should. I see no justification for tipping the scales other than to "level the playing field" just for the sake of satisfying some underlying political agenda.

Like I said more than a few pages back I would hope that a roughly equal amount of active skills are linked to the 8 core attributes or they have other effects equal to a certain amount of active skills. Otherwise in an attribute + skill system some attributes are qualitatively more valuable than others and the weak ones invariably become dump stats. Dump stats should be avoided like the plague if you can possibly avoid it and when designing a new system like they are doing it's a perfect time to fix such things.

So you agree with me. Excellent. What was the argument then?

Political agenda?

Hahahaha!

The game shouldn't be about which character is able to kill the most people the fastest. If that's the style of game you play then when the new system comes out just say Goddammit if you aren't awakened cybered to the gill you automatically fucking lose.

Yes combat pool helped in combat as people mentioned but meant jack shit if you wanted to do some sort of fonzie move and get the stalled APC working. Yes Karma pool was suitable for noncombat but just about everyone here says the karma pool rules sucked and made high experience characters godlike.

If you don't like it called Edge call it Karma or Luck or Batshit factor but it seems pretty clear what it's design is for is to replace combat and karma pool with a small static pool that costs build points rather than experience to enjoy.

Um? On the contrary, as long as the GM was willing to let the difficulty level be such that occasionally burning karma would be necessary, karma pool is not only an awesome mechanic but quite manageable as well.

~J

I love verbally provoking you guys.

Your overreacting. Your right though, it's not just about combat. I was merely using that as an example. But, as I said above. If I were to make a godly combat character...I would expect him to not be upstaged by a mundane except in very few instances (karma/combat pool).

...
Don't tell me you really believe in the commie conspiracy.