Implications on the core mechanic
Stat + skill target 5.

I finally got of my bum and read the SR4 FAQ and I noticed some implications of the core mechanic. Do you agree that they will occur and do you think that they will be bad.

1: defaulting is more attractive. In SR3 defaulting to stat 3 created a very low chance of success. Buy my maths you now have a better than 70% chance of success (if there are no other modifiers). For some things (pistols) I see this as a good thing, for others (cracking a mag lock) I see it as a bad thing. A rigger (specialist vehicle hacker) with no skill in computing but a high logic (I assume that will be the linked stat)will be a competent computer hacker (hell somebody with high int and no experience could pick up the tools and perform as well as a les intelligent person with significant experience)

2: there is such a thing as imposable. In SR3 no mater the penalties you could take a roll and have a chance of wining, even if the TN was 35 it could happen. Under SR4 these tasks will be imposable. This is fine for really hard things the difference is minuscule but consider a low skill use. Stat 2 skill 2 taking a shot at short range SR3 2 dice target 4, SR4 4 dice target 5. Now apply a 2 point glare and a 2 point range penalty. SR3 2 dice target 8 (achievable with luck) SR4 no chance.

3: les for thought required. Without pools that have to be spread out over multiple actions you wont need to consider latter needs for thinks like spell pool or combat pool, if the total pools do need to be split over multiple actions then what about a character that casts a spell with one action and then fires a gun. These use very different pools so he will evade the downside. This will be a non issue if the initiative system doses not grant multiple actions in a turn but that would return initiative to a D&D like importance, going often is a lot more significant than going first.

That is all I can think of for now.

Opinions pleas.

Edward

So, right. That about sums up what the rest of us have been saying, more or less, for a few weeks now. Attributes have the potential to become more important than skills, your characters might never just luck out at a dramatically appropriate moment ever again, and any jackass smart enough to pick up a handfull of dice and throw them can do well.

The only opinion I've actually got about your post is that you might want to smack that "spell check" button once or twice before submitting, next time. It was genuinely difficult to read, at times.

yeah, i'm pretty much in agreement, especially with point #3. i really don't want to play yet another game where all i do is toss my predetermined number of dice every time. Edge won't have any real impact on the boringocity of the no-dice-pool thing, unless it's designed to come into play a lot more frequently than karma pool did. "a lot more frequently" as in "every round".

#1, this trouble do not bother me - since the GM does his work and choose to add penalties if the skill rank is not sufficient.
#2, I see 2 possibility to make test possible when the penalty is stronger than the dice pool
A) explosive dice. It does complicates the statistics for all dice tests, and make it "possible" to have any number of hit for any number of dice.
B) avoiding 0 dice. A bit tricky. Just consider the minimum of a pool is 1 dice. If the penalty increase by X, add X dices, throw all the dices(X+1), and keep the smallest result
eg: Stat 2 skill 2 taking a shot at long range +2 and bad visibility +3
initial score 4-5=-1 so 0 dice. in this technic take 4-3=1dice, and add the remaning penalty (2 dices), throw the 3 dices. Keep the worst result. If you score only 5 and 6, you get a hit, otherwise you fail.
probability of scoring 1hit: 1/9 for initial score = 0, 1/27 for initial score =-1 ...
This doesn't change the stats on other test (pool bigger than penalties), and does allow if lucky to have 1 and only one hit if the pool is smaller or equal to penalties.
Doesn't permit success if more than 1 hit is needed.
#3a, I am not sure as I could be a strategic place for splitting your pool (skill+att) between action in SR4 ...
#3b, Initiative can't have a D&D importance, since in SR you can easily kill your opponent in one action - or at least give him significant penalties.

That assumes that you can still kill an opponent in one action. If the difficulty for resisting damage is 5, I can see combats lasting a lot longer. What ended combats fast in SR3 wasn't the amount of damage, but the huge damage codes.

That (#3b: initiative is important) assume effectively combat is still lethal in SR4. Which seems both mandatory to keep Shadowrun what it is, and not hard to do at all ... Ther is so much way to achieve that, that I don't see the point to discuss it without knowing the actual playtest mechanic.
Of course the wound penalty will often(actually on test you have a lot of dices to throw) be less important than before (a penalty in SR4 seems to mean "only" 1/3 hit less).

I didn’t think of damage.

I am assuming that damage resistance tests will be body + armour – power (I am not thinking of other options ATM) this will keep damage deadly (moor so as you cant get lucky with your large number of dice).

Another implication becomes a los of mechanical differentiation between cyber armour (dice to resist damage) and worn armour (reduced target numbers)

And in D&D there are spells that kill you outright. Several of my wroat tournament builds involved outragesly high initiative, disintegrate and quickened phantasmal killer. But it seeses to be the be all and end all.

If we loos the multiple actions for high initiative I think brick shithouse builds (obscenely high mounts of armour) with pain editors (or pain resistance) will become far more common than the present favourite speed sami.
Consider this example.

Speed samy verses 8 gangers with moderate professionalism ratings

SR3
Actions samy 3 gangers 1
Samy shoots 2
6 shoot samy
samy shoots 2
samy shoots 2
end of round
next round
samy shoots 2

initiative dose not gain actions, samy will win initiative
samy shoots 2
6 shoot samy
samy shoot 2
4 shoot samy
samy shoot 2
2 shoot samy
samy shoot 2

if he isn’t getting his extra actions he needs to soak twice as many bullets. A tank samy would go like this (assuming win initiative half the time, he is a little faster than the gangers so we will have him win first action).

Samy shoot 2
6 shoot samy
round 2
6 shoot samy
samy shoot 2
round 3
samy shoot 2
2 shoot samy
round 4
2 shoot samy
samy shoot 2

he has to take 4 extra hits because he cant reliably win initiative but with the essence and nuyen he would have spent on speed boosters he should be able to get enough armour to soak heavy pistols every time (at least you could in earlier editions)

Edward

I think you are also forgetting that instead of simply modifying the dice pool with modifiers you can also modify the number of successes based on the difficulty increasing.

Statistically speaking 3 dice is pretty much equal to an increase in difficulty of 1 success. That way you can have lots of potential modifiers to the dice pool but also mess around with difficulty levels.

Now I'm not saying that this method is used but based on my past experience with fixed TN dice pool systems it seems to work pretty well.

"Statistically speaking 3 dice is pretty much equal to an increase in difficulty of 1 success"
I do not agree at all ... It depend to much of 1) the initial SR and 2) the number of dice ...

You have 4 dices sr5, do you mind having 1 dice sr4 ?
You have 14 dices sr5, do you mind having 17 dices sr6 ?

In both case the stats of first choice are much higher ...
The stats will change a lot in SR4, THANKSFULLY ... Too much troubles in SR3

No, you explained it well.
I just rode it wrong
You are quite right !

Why do people insist in sticking the SR3 rules into the SR4 mechanic?
Is it not obvious that the rest of the rules are gonna change around the new mechanic?
Give it them time to publish either by FAQ or book some actual rules then work out if its gonna work.
Tried not to be too offensive with this.

I don't see the offence ?
By the way most of that thread discuss on issue considering the official FAQ for SR4 ... (I think so ? - maybe my brain is off today ???)

I had assumed that for combat successes would stage damage rather than requiring multiple successes to achieve a hit. Of cause assumptions are the brother of all fuckups.

Also I was not assuming that a samy could kill 2 gangers an action. I was assuming he could achieve sufficient wounds to exceed there professionalism rating. Of cause under SR4 you may not be able to take 2 shots with a SA or BF weapon in an action.

Edward

Actually one of the accepted facts is that simple and complex action are still gonna be around.

Last I looked, there were four variations on initiative using the new core mechanic. All of them work, some of them better than others. What we're working on right now is figuring out which one of them works best; my group has formed its opinion and told Rob and the other developers, so we wait for the next draft to see how that shakes out.

Combat is still in rounds. You still get 2 Simple Actions or 1 Complex Action per round. Free Actions also still figure into things.

There's a lot more staying the same than is changing.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Will we still get more than one complex action by round, depending on initiative ?
...
Asking is free

If you where going to house rule in a combat pool you would use Intuition in place of intelligence, and agility in place of quickness.

If you really want to that is.

Edward

Sure there will be some new concepts, main players, plots and all that, but I'll argue that If most of the background will be the same for SR4, then one of the main reasons to play SR4 is for the revision of the rules.

If you want to play SR4, then why House Rule things back to make them like SR3?

heh. i'm not sure the FAQs are meant to be soothing at all. they create a lot of discussion, and get a lot of people excited about SR4, even if a significant portion of that discussion and excitement is negative. there's no such thing as bad publicity, right?

Depends on if the publicity makes you curious enough to get it just to see how 'bad' it is, or if it just makes you walk away, now doesn't it mfb?

I don’t really think anybody will make a hard decision not by buy SR4 before they have reviews of the final product. Unless of cause they make it D20.

Edward

Wah.

If Edward's feelings were hurt by me offering some advice, he probably would've said something some time in the four days between that post and today. He's a grown up. You don't have to leap to his defense.

IIRC they are still refering to this stat+skill method as a dice pool. Do we know yet how quickly this pool refreshes, or how quickly its components refresh. For example what if your skill component refreshes immediately, but the stat portion only refreshes once a pass or turn or whateve they have in 4th ed. So sure put all you 4 quikness into that shot, but now your 2nd shot is pure skill, and you have no quickness left to add to your blank skill later in the round to save you from certain doom.

That only applied if you don’t have the skill. Even somebody with skill of one was allowed to try and hit the invisible mage, in the dark, in a sleet storm, with glare form street lights, with a shitty pistol at extreme range while on serious physical and serious stun having recently awakened from a dose of gama-scopolamine (target number 31 by my estimate) it is only somebody that has never fired a pistol that will not be able to try.

Edward

This is a generic responce to all who think fixed TNs will ruin the game.
I picked up the World of Darkness main book about 6 months back and until I played it I would have agreed with you. You really have to change your core thinking about how dice pools work before you understand why a fixed TN is a good thing. First off forget numbers as you know them. Now everything is dice. Your Ares Predator is no longer 9M its more like 4 dice to add to your pool. Your at a medium range which gives you -1 die. Your dex is 3 so add 3 dice. Your skill is 4 so add 4 dice. The enemies Armor is 3 so -3 dice. That gives you 7 dice to hit your target. Each success counts as one box of damage. Now I know your thinking thats odd I mean you can use your gun as skill "dice" but think about it from a GM end. You can now just get hit by a bit of glass off the broken window from that near miss with the pistol. The GM may have to think out of the box more as to how you took one box of damage from a rocket launcher but I think thats a good thing.
Ok, so what about staging and penalties that take you in the negative dice. Well for staging in WOD if you roll a 10 (some gear may lower this number) you get add a success and roll it again. You can also never have less than 1 die however if you would have had 0 or less dice you must roll 10. I don't know how shadowrun will handle this but I really think it will be similar. Give it a try you never know you might like it.

I'm not sure I'd like seeing enemy armor subtract dice. Besides the player having to wait for the DM to give up the NPC armor number before rolling, and the fact that the exact value is given up at all, that sort of thing causes all sorts of headaches when you are targetting two opponents. It doesn't happen as often with firearms, but with spells that are AoE or multiple target, or even unknown target at the time of casting, that is a senario that is going to be common.

And yes, i would like to see guns and magic (and vehicles and decking and melee) use as similar dice mechanics as feasible. Unlike SR3, which is the best 4 1/2 games I never played at the same time.

I understand that shooting somebody with a pistol will work like this.

Attack roll, dex + pistols + - mods.
Dodge roll ????
Soak roll body + armour – power
Net successes modify damage level in some way.

This would mean that the only stat a GM would need to give over is the power of your opponent’s guns (and that was always necessary)

I know how it works, I don’t even think it is the work of the devil (although others seem to) it is a bit annoying that there are so many more things you can not even try to do. The best possible starting marksman (stat 7 skill 6 IA 6) in the situation I gave above would probably have -8 dice. That is to say no chance at all as apposed to a snowflakes chance in hell (which is what he would have had in SR3).

The WOD system described buy tete could be closer to what they use but I hope not. The one box of damage per success leads to a les deadly game than SR and I would prefer retain the importance of eth soak roll. (I know WOD has a soak mechanic as well but that just further reduces the deadlines of the game and is usually only available (at a useful level) to supernatural creatures and WAD has les boxes of damage than SR

The reduction of depth is great. For a specific example, who will benefit most from a high powered scope at long range, a novice that can barley hold the gun properly (skill 2) or an expert that has been using the gun for years, (skill .

I don’t however think this will make it a bad system, just one that could be better but when have you seen a game mechanic approach perfection.

Edward

Under SR3 the lower skill shooter is helped a lot more if the weapon's base damage is S or D (sports/sniper rifles), and if the target isn't allowed it's Dodge Test (many GMs rule this way if you can't see the shooter, a situation that should be common if the shooter really is a "sniper"), and the GM doesn't implement house rules for staging damage past Deadly or implement the optional Deadlier Over-Damage rule (and the Body of the target is low enough, which it usually is with really good sniper rifles).

In that case a single success, or two if the base damage is S, is the same as a half-dozen or more success. Once the expert is rolling 10ish dice the scope advantage is fairly minimal. It's basically protection against an incredibily unlucky roll or huge negative TN modifiers such nursing a Serious wound while shooting blind from the back of a galloping camel.

Making any assumptions about who is helped more by a scope under SR4 is completely wild speculation given we know next to nothing about how ranged combat targeting tests and damage system.

And if the low-skill person is shooting an unarmored target who has low body--that is, if it's already an easy kill, the expert doesn't need the advantage of the scope, which makes sense to me.

The problem with the SR4 method is that it's hard to imagine how having a scope (or a smartlink) could ever be much help to an expert.