It would appear that Ellery confused himself by not reading.

Options good. The option -how- to grow. By 'ware or by skills or by equipment or by contacts. Unfortunately the option to grow by magic is tossed by non-awakened back at character creation, and openning that option up is very, very large can of worms, and one i'd not look to open myself. Though someone else appears to be peering into it in another thread? *shrug*

Frankly a big part of what I'd like to see is less brute combat cyber. The extra room created would encourage other avenues. That's part of the problem with the idea of just filling in holes of previous cyber. In SR staying alive is typically job #1. When you take out some 'ware that gives an edge to soaking damage or increasing init (you are quick or you are dead) the game mechanics push hard to fill the gap up with like 'ware. Unless you are making a huge leap in grades that doesn't really open up much room for another type of cyber, and it certainly doesn't leave much cash since higher grade is a lot more cash. So even with removed cyber leaving an esssense "hole" you can use for other cyber the game still actually works to guide the PC away from a wider variety of 'ware uses.

P.S. Those SR3 monsters that can point a pistol at their own head, pull the trigger, and laugh as the slug mushes ineffectually against their skull have a solid start before 'ware enters the picture. With the way damage soaking works startinng unaugmented with 10+ Body can only lead to no good.

Well, it's not so much the being smart, there are very smart sane people, but our group figured the dramatic artifical jump can't be good for the mind. (None of us are at all invovled in this stuff so it's a shot in the dark)

Ok I had an over-reaction earlier.
But the way I always read essence loss with regards to magic was that it couldn't be geased same with giving magic to an ally spirit. They are not the same thing as magic loss very similar granted but different none the less.

But still buying up essance goes against 16 years of history there.
It's still a bad idea.

When it followed right after my post, with no reference to Eyeless, and in a generic "It sounds like me that the arguement is to get..." that seems address to all? It certainly seemed to ignore what I was talking about before.

Part of the puzzle, but not all.....

But to make it cheaper you'd see even MORE front loading. That's part of what I'm trying to combat with a sliding essense.

Just lower the cost no. But by having upgrading still cost more (i'm suggesting Beta similar to current Beta prices, Alpha nearly so), and with an essense lump come along without them having to pull out the old, that lowers the threshhold for the PC to put in different types of cyber. Sure brute force will still be on the list, but at least not the same cyber. Plus if the designers are more careful about brute cyber interactions/synergy/etc. then those brute force cyber slides even further down the list.

Yes, I understand the ingrained dogma in people's minds. But I've come to see it's also part of the SR rut. I know people here spit poison when they hear of D&D (EDIT: that it causes cancer makes that understandable), but WotC seem to have done well pulling themselves out of some nasty ruts. Like the "arcane casters just can't wear armor at all". It was 15+ years of dogma re-enforced by the fear of "tank mages". But they pulled themselves out of that rut and still managed to keep it from being a "tank mage" balancing problem through adding mechanism to allow graduants, limits, and such.

Besides I, with little to no writing skill, managed to scribble down something that rivals SR's current IC essense explaination...using monkeys. That's got to say something to you?

Yes indeed they are, from a POV of blindness from ingrained dogma, fear of uberness, and ignoring other changes (and potential for change) in the system. The rest of your post is parallel to the stuff that was seen as it came to light that 3e would allow mages to wear armour.

I'll get to your post later though, i've got RL stuff to do right now....

Not just a problem at high levels, and that was true --before-- WotC popped out of the rut and made the 3e changes.

Call it a "feature", i call it something that just doesn't work that well (for example see uber starting chromeheads). If you look at other versions of tank mages, fighters that can cast spells it is like a mage that gets better BAB and faster progression of attacks. But once again, you are taking this literal, not figuratively.

Are you suggesting I haven't gone through addressing concerns? I certainly can't address yours to your satisfaction because apparently what i'm saying isn't even registering with you. Yes there are balance concerns, but ones that can be addressed. You can't see inflexible essense as dogma that flowed from rules convience (like no arcane casting in armour was)? "Keep it that way because it's always been that way" can be a might deep rut.

In --SR3-- in a "high powered" campaign without other adjustments i, and others, have talked about. Ch-ch-cha-changes!

I happen to think that karama cost to make [EDIT]new[/EDIT] room rather than [EDIT]allowing 'ware to fill back in[/EDIT] essense holes is actually the prefered option, see my comments above about guiding characters to get a wider varitey of 'ware rather than just upgrading the beginning stuff (that tends to be brute force/speed survival related).

To put it simply: Options are good. More options are better. Having five areas you can branch out into is better than only having two-and-a-half, in particular with the linearly increasing cost to advance each areas of competence. Further, the fact that the mage chooses to sink most of his karma into initiations, foci and spells as opposed to background skills like the sam is forced to by default should indicate the relative power of the two options.


As for too much cyber at chargen issue, I'd be perfectly fine ditching the million and 650k options at chargen. In fact I'd go further, stretching the resource priorities into:

-5pts = 500Y
0pts = 5000Y
5pts = 20,000Y
10pts = 65,000Y
15pts = 125,000Y
20pts = 250,000Y
25pts = 400,000Y

or maybe even more, making 400kY the 30-pt option. The changed resource limit would work just fine provided thus:

1) Make it so eckers don't have to pay so damn much for their programs (currently the decker is the main reason for the million nuyen option anyway).
2) Try not to let riggers get too screwed by it.
3) Cyberlimbs (Edit: and maybe a few other selected bits of 'ware) get fixed in cost, possibly just cutting their base price to a tenth of what it is right now.
4) Surgery rules aren't *as* horrifically difficult and prone to failure post-chargen.

The problem with doing this is that it means that sams start right out of chargen muc weaker than they are now, and the power disparity between mage and sam will become obvious much earlier (say the 150-200 karma mark instead of 350+).

Okay, but do you view ranged combat, close combat, athletics, and stealth skills to be "background skills"? I'm really not sure where you think sams start putting karma into background skills.

For minimum proficiency for an effective street sam for shadowruns, I'd demand

• High-powered ranged weapon skill--rifle or shotgun.
• Concealable ranged weapon skill--pistol, most likely.
• Potent melee combat skill.
• Good stealth skill.
• Good physical stats.

And to be considered good, I'd further want most of

• Demolitions skill.
• Athletics skill.
• Some sort of intimidation skill.
• Heavy weapons skill.
• Good willpower. (Pesky mages.)

That's a fair bit of karma right there, without anything to do with branching out, while relying entirely upon the rest of the team to get into secure places, to negotiate contracts, to pick up information, to lead the team in combat, etc. etc..

The mage has more options, yes, but the mage has too many; they can't even reach basic magical competency without hundreds of karma (so you'd better have two or three to handle all scenarios).

Eventually, after many hundreds of karma and millions of nuyen, the sam starts to plateau, while the mage is still rising fast. But I don't view that as a problem, necessarily, not in a setting where "magic is power". If you don't like that--if you want to the phrase to be "magic is just like everything else", or "magic is stupid", then yes, it's a problem. But by the time that the sam has played second fiddle for as long as the mage had to up to that point, the characters are pushing 1000 karma, and you really have to think about what kind of campaign you're running and whether combat badassedness is a sensible measure of power any longer.

Of course, it's all much simpler if everyone levels up the same way, and everyone has about the same power at that level, so you don't have to think about it. d20 modern is better suited for this.

Added in edit: of course, in SR4 everything could be different. We have no idea of a mage's power. With the fixed TN system, there's a good chance mages won't be able to cast anything without causing themselves drain, which will make them fairly worthless one-shot cannons.

OD&D and AD&D definately suffered from that issue immensely. A big part of the reason is that Gary Gygax was/is a worldclass, hardcore powergamer muchkin. He poo-poos the concept of game "balance". He's definately old-school "arcane mages rule all". I think the crochety old bastard is at heart a mage player, and is certainly not above being a homer (designing the system to favour his class of choice to play).

D&D 3e set out to make classes other than Wizards mean something again, and for the most part accomplished this. Spell casters still are alround more versitle and powerful outside of combat. But in combat non-spellcasters are relavent up until high teens. Magic still plays a BIG roll up there, but even if you don't cast you still count. Fighters and such now have different ways to improve rather than just a bigger plus on the weapon and swinging harder.

How was this done? By adding options for growth with Feats, and to a lesser extent Skills and functional cross-class progression.

No you don't -have- to do this. But it does provide a wider range to play with, and that can only make the game more fun for more people.

P.S. Over time you'll see again and again smoother graduated progression is usually a good idea in game design. D&D 3e made that mistake with frontloading of features in Rangers, Monks, Paladins, etc. One good thing about 3.5e is that they got rid of that.

I think so. It makes things easier - esp as a GM. You don't have to worry about the 'weaker' chars a t the beginning of your campaign, and you don't have to worry about one class or another getitng more powerful than the others as they progress. Really makes it diffisult to throw things at a team if you have to worry about one guy being weaker than another. I've not really had this problem in SR, but ya D&D is stinks. I love playing mages - but I'll never play a 1st level one again.

And at least as a player you can look down the road and have goals - other than 10's in all of your skills.

And i oucld easily see that veteran shadowrunner pc looking at his 10 computer skill and wondering "Hey, I've got a data jack and nuttin else to spend my nuyen on, I'll buy a fairlight and some progs and do it myself."

Bzzzzzzzz, try again. Everyone CAN play an awakened PC. Or do you enforce some rule that only a limited percentage of the team can be awakened????

It's not an everyone is equal. It's lots of options down different paths. Remember, you got confused on this once before. Options good. How exactly that is enforcing a boring sterotype? It is smoothing out and extending the advancement curve of one particular path, and encouraging a wider variety down that path to boot. I mean hey, i'm not the one clinging to an old abitrary number created as a rules convience.

I think you are kinda rambling here, so I'll need some clarification. Do you now want the "classic" archetype of heavily cybered at the start of the game? Is this the archetype perviously known as boring? Or is it not boring because it's "classic" to have it at standard character creation?

Is magical ability purely based on skill in SR?

Yes, options are good. So, how do you make sure that some options aren't better than other options, resulting in a scenario that will lead to imbalanced power levels?

I don't really care, honestly. But a street sam with a significant amount of cyber has featured prominently in artwork, stories, and character archetypes throughout the history of SR. Removing this as an option is one way to give street sams more room for expansion (which keeps everyone productively expanding for longer), but it comes at the expense of changing a major part of the setting.

Sure. Sometimes it requires a bit of thought to piece together my meaning. I'll elaborate when asked.

I think what he's saying here is that you don't have to impose artificial limits on which characters are made in order to balance them. Ars Magica does this (from what I remember) by basically allowing one player to be the mage and forcing the rest to be grunts. In SR this doesn't happen, and in the beginning it's fairly well balanced in terms of allowing meaningful choices for creation/development without degenerating into a pure skill system. The problem as we're seeing it is at the higher "levels" where this balance goes away due to lack of meaningful development options on the mundane side.

The point we're making here is that having options on one side, and having effectively *no* options on the other side is decidedly unbalanced. Deciding how much a point of Essence would cost (and actually I happen to think Essence should be bought in smaller increments like .25 or .5, but I digress) would be a big deal and subject to much debate, sure, but not having it at all leaves us in the current situation It's not *too* bad a place to be in, but it's still not quite optimal.

And thus we come to the option of expanding Essence post-chargen, or rather for the ability to "buy back" Essence that has been lost through any means (vampire Essence Drain, cyberware, etc) post-chargen. You can *start* heavily-cybered, and then you can get *more* heavily-cybered later on.

If you mean Shaman vs. Hermetic, no that is set at character creation. But once you choose to be awakened you can be an Adept and/or Caster and/or Conjurer based on the skill/powers you choose. But exactly what where you getting at with "small fraction of magically active people" then?

Umm, put on your reading glasses. The thread is chock full of suggestions for not only keeping balance but on how to use the mechanism of Essense gain during a characters career to -improve- over the current SR3 balance situation. Would it hit perfection? Nah. But improvements, like options, are good.

Remember, ch-ch-cha-changes!

You didn't answer the question fully, and I don't mean why this isn't a "boring" stereotype. Do those pictures have sub-titles that say "STARTING CHARACTER"? Besides you can look all cybered up and still have lots of Essense room. Unless you have [arguable inappropriately high essense cost] cyberlimbs galore, most of your essense loss is on the inside. Especially if you take the higher levels of MBW.

But in any event the GM setting the starting Essense higher or giving Karma (and likely cash too) to represent more developed "starting" characters certainly puts fullbody chromeheads in reach. Even above SR3 levels if you advance them far enough, quite easily above SR3 level if you give them enough cash and unlimited item availibility. Frankly if I was advancing in that way I'd likely apply the street index to costs for all equipment, or at least be careful about the cash to karma ratio I doled out.

This is where we differ in opinion. I fail to see where the non-awakened have 'no' options. I have played Sammies into the 400-500 Karma range, and have never felt restricted as far as options are concerned. And, as I've said before, I have never had a player complain that he had nothing to spend his character's Karma on, awakened or not.

I don't agree with the use of "no options". But the growth can be rather stagnent in many ways. Usually on the 'ware side.

P.S. It's usually around the 250+ Karma mark that [fully] awakened characters start pulling away. But that can vary on the campaign/GM actively slanting things the other way.

I said the 'ware tends to stagnate. Even if you have the 'ware removed leaves a hole, it tends to get filled again with the same 'ware of a different level and grade. Plus this chews up a lot of cash that could have gone to other types of 'ware.

However the powerlevel of the non-awakened definaetly plateaus in comparison to awakened characters. Well usually not for riggers (especially if they managed to somehow land a VCR3) where, surprise, the archetype doesn't have the same kind of essense cap on their key gear. I'm not so sure about deckers.

The mundanes then start being backups for other team specialists, well except usually for rigging/decking because of the essense requirements there.

Well, shamen and hermetics have different advancement options, don't they? In particular, shamen with Invoking don't have to worry about the one spirit limit any more; as long as they can soak drain, they're good to go, on the fly, with as many spirits as they have charisma. That sounds pretty powerful to me. Hermetics don't have a good choice like that. Invoking isn't very useful for them, in comparison. "Hey, no fair, shamen have more choices than Hermetics! We need to fix it so Hermetics can summon elementals on the fly!"

Hopefully you can see where this is going. Choices at character creation will impact that character later on unless you have a pure skill system where anyone can always buy whatever skill they need (they may have to buy prerequisites first) without a substantial penalty for doing it sooner or later. For good or ill, SR has never had a pure skill system; it's had a strong skill system, but prior choices matter and shape your future choices.

In SR fiction, a small fraction of the population is magically active. Players can, as long as the GM allows, play anything they want. But if the rules say, "Hey, it's really really easy to pick up magic, or play a magical character, anyone can do it!" and the fiction says, "Wow, magic is so rare and cool, nobody has it!", there's a problem. It's a problem because the players are going to act according to the rules, not according to the fiction. So to them, it will seem like magic is not rare if anyone can pick it up any time they feel like it (even if the fiction says that you can't do that).

So it's hard to mix a pure skill system, where anyone can take anything, with a fictional setting where some things can't just be worked at, like magical ability.

Improvements are good if they address problems that ought to be addressed. I can't see a good qualitative distinction between what's being proposed here and what one would propose after you were done and someone else complained about deckers having more options for long-term expansion than riggers, or Otaku having fewer optoins for long-term expansion than street sams, or whatever.

Balance is good, but a very close balance is hard to achieve, and you usually end up sacrificing a lot of your game to it, or you end up in endless sequences of "me too"-ism, where professions are alternately strengthened, weakened, and blandified, until everyone can do everything...and then people still complain just as vociferously. (If you don't believe me, just check out some MMORPG board archives some day.)

Personally, I only try to balance things so that different professions are at least useful. Street sams are always the fastest and shoot the most accurately under standard conditions; they're usually the toughest as well (at least against ballistic weapons). That's true at 0 karma earned, and it's true at 1000 karma earned. They have an important role to play, and if your team doesn't have a wired up sam, you're going to suffer when you take on people who do have one. Plus, you're very often the star of the show--minor threat pops up, you take it out before anyone else can blink. That's useful. That's important. Your job, as a sam, is to keep that edge, and sometimes it involves putting karma into a weapon skill you've already got awfully high, just to get that bit more of an edge, keep ahead of the curve. Okay, maybe it's not as exciting as picking up Reflective Shielding, but all are not equal, and that's the way it goes.

You can say similarly useful things for adepts and magicians and stealthy/breaking/eentering types and so on. Riggers don't mesh quite so well (tending to be alternately useless and completely overpowering and out-reacting everyone else), and deckers really don't mesh so well--and hopefully SR4 will address some of these points.

Yeah, some of them do, actually. Look in SR3 at the color plate that should be p. 66 and the one that should be p. 75 (Combat Decker and Street Samurai respectively). They've got metal in their bodies, cords coming out of their heads, etc.; they look pretty heavily cybered. The rules say they're pretty heavily cybered. They also say that they're starting characters. Look at p. 62 in SR2. Look at the fiction for SR2--plenty of street sams there. It's hard to know what other artwork depicts, but presumably it's supposed to be depicting things that typical runners do.

Anyway, you could argue that appearances are deceptive, the archetypes are overpowered, and so on. I'm just pointing out that you'll find people who will argue the opposite just as strongly.

Well....you could start with the first point. But you'd look like fool arguing with that. So maybe you could try bluff your way through by saying there weren't any substantive points....er, nevermind.

You need "X" number of items to be a given archetype? How about you should EXPECT that a character riding the Essense edge is going to lose a few pieces of 'ware. Going from SR2 to SR3 there were countless PCs that became dead/cyberzombies. Not just by a little bit, but by points of essense. Crap is going to happen anyway.

Given that you don't see anything substantive in my post, then I don't doubt that you've seen no reason....because you seem to be off in a thread of your own.

Well it wouldn't be for -me- personally. When I am a player now it is with awakened characters.

Yup, not even in the same thread.....

Crazy. Crazy like a fox!

I notice on that list you included "conservative"? I assume this was ment as an insult, the rest certainly do seem intended as such? I'm not exactly sure in which way i'm a "conservative". I'm sure this wouldn't be a red word like calling somebody a "liberal" in politics has become. You know, a word empty of meaning.

I certainly did stop to think about the different graduations. I didn't say 20% of people wanted to see the change. Like I said it's a scary leap for people that have played one way for a long, long time. I was a little surprised by having even a little over 25% saying "hrmm, i guess i could live with that" (actually closer to 30% of the votes after the first barage of rejections, before the idea was even moderately developed). I mean you have approximately 10% of the people here that are freaked enough by changing to fixed TNs, splitting a couple attributes, and cosolidating all the pools into one that they aren't even going to consider moving to SR4. That seems to me a pretty traditionalist orientated crowd for a forum for a new version of a game. *shrug*

Funny, I was thinking something very similar of Ellery's posts. Sort of my point with the comment about the 1.5 Essense for the Decker. Yours at least have a intentionally humourous bent. Certainly it would need to be playtested to make sure it worked, but the idea behind motivating diversity more than just backfilling after you pull out 'ware is pretty sound, no? However I'm a bit handcuffed for hard numbers since I'm not a playtester, even if I was couldnt I give numbers.

P.S. I think I see what Ellery is saying about mages having two traditions, Shadowrun isn't actually completely classless. Well actually wasn't there some sort off SOTA 64 magic thing that was a melding of the traditions? But his example doesn't really follow the form i'm talking about. I wouldn't suggest that adding cyberware enable someone to see into the astral (at least in realtime, once again see the SOTA 64 for some oddities). Hermetic mages do have magic avenues to go down that are roughly similar in scope to Shamans, even if it's not the same path.

Oops, my bad. Yes i suspect that a strong "traditionalist" bent (conservative isn't really a good name for it) does play a sizable role here. I'm not saying that disagreeing with me is nessararily stupid, but I do content there can be stupid reasons for doing so.

"willfully blind"? actually I think i implied an unknownling blindness as a contributing factor, which is much different than willfully blind. As for "Paranoid, crazy", fear of the unknown is certainly not outside the experience of people generally considered sane. In fact a strong wariness of that you can't see isn't a particularly bad idea at all.

Indeed, I am suggesting making a change for a purpose.

But THAT isn't the purpose.

Interesting idea, but that aside not really what I'm aiming for.

Ah, but it's not just a few. It is less than a majority of people here that could live with the solution. There are people that are just fine with the issue staying.

All round I think you have gotten a very distorted impression of my intentions and motivations. That you are suggesting I'm making change for the sake of change or change for a "small" group alone convinces me of this. Please recheck the posts and you'll see my thoughts and reasonings do not reflect this. Or perhaps a better collection is needed to straighten matters out as I've addressed items as they have come up. I'll work on that, but i won't be able to put together a concise treatise till at least tonight.

How about i reread when you fix your crappy conjunctive. EDIT: By this I mean i was confused by the odd placement of "and" and commas, and what I guess is an implied "or"?

Pretty sure that last sentence isn't what you ment. But even as you likely intended it, ummm, no.

*shrug* It isn't just me. It isn't just my various personal experiences (which you don't represent accurately there). I also based this on information gleaned from other posts over the years at DSF. I wrote the original from my gaming experience POV, but that certainly wasn't the sole influence at all.

You also seem to have missed people that suggest that there is an issue, but think that just changing the 'ware removal rules would fix the problem.

I'll try to make it clearer next time I post about the subject. But judging from the content in the rest of your post the thread is dead.

P.S. I know you ment the idea as an example, I just thought it an interesting idea and commented as such. But the comparison to my suggestion wasn't really that accurate. At least not as written.

Hey, okay, I'm up for looking like a fool.

This is the first point. You're laughing at me for some reason, but it's not clear why from this sentence, so we don't have enough context to evaluate this point. Let's keep going.

Since I didn't mention the PC's soul, this reference isn't clear to me. Since you only say "IMO" and do not provide the reasons upon which you base your opinion, this doesn't constitute an argument in favor of a position.

So, anyway, I think your first point is badly worded and poorly argued. I don't see much substance here.

I was giving an example of a cyber-heavy character that would not be possible to create if you had strictly limited the cyberware you could start with in order to leave room for expansion:

You're making an observation that I specifically ask to be made, and you report that, as I had already maintained, the character has used up about 3/4 of their essence during character creation and therefore has a lot of cyber. You suggest capping starting essence at 3 (half essence used up), which would not allow the creation of this character under existing rules.

(Of course, you also suggest that everyone get twice as much cyber as before, which I would argue will create major problems with game balance--but I was only addressing the point about limiting cyber, not raising the total amount of cyber one could take.)

So this isn't very substantive. You've stated a fact that agrees with what I've said, but from the phrasing "has more than" you apparently believe this indicates something important. However, you don't specify what that is.

The term colloquialism "so-so" typically is used as a synonym for "mediocre", so this point (if it is a point) is that an idea that archetypes should be consistent is a mediocre idea. The usage of "just" indicates that this is a personal opinion, and again, without an explanation of the reasoning or thought process that led to the opinion, it's hard to view this as a point.

Here you are setting up a straw man--you are implying that the reason that some people dislike this idea is not because it's a bad idea, but because people are afraid of any change at all, and save for fear of essentially all changes, the idea would be popular.

It is easy to see that this is a straw man (i.e. it is arguing against a position that your opponents don't hold) if we look in my previous post:

So I'm specifically saying that I do want change, but I want the changes to be improvements--I want them to address existing problems. And in this particular case, since you are saying that the problem is one of game balance, I want a clearer case made that this type of balancing doesn't do more harm than good.

That is the entirety of your post, and upon close inspection, you have, as I claimed earlier, made no substantive points. I agree that it looks rather foolish to do this, but you did invite it, so I have obliged.

However, I won't do so again--it's a useful exercise as illustration, perhaps, but after that it's really a waste of time.

I never said that. As an exercise, I leave it to the reader to review my previous posts and see if they can figure out what my point was regarding large amounts of cyberware in starting characters.

It's hard for me to be sure, but you seem to be implying that there was an argument made in this thread similar to the hypothetical argument that I wanted to see.

If this is your claim, can you please list the dates of the posts to this thread that lay out this argument? ("This thread" means the one titled "What if PCs could use Karma to increase Essense?" which is located at the URL http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=8174.)

As I happen to hold a different opinion, cot exactly opposite as we're not discussing the same thing. I suppose we're going to have to agree to disagree, though, as yours and Ellery's posts appear to be the last of rational discussion in this thread.