D&D 1st edition has a rule for nearly anything? You kidding, right? Go back to your book and tell me the rules for building a table. Jumping 5, 10 or 15 feet. Convincing a suspicious guard that you are not a rebel etc.

There were rules for almost nothing beside wonking monsters over the head and casting spell. For the rest, have fun.

D&D 3e, SR, WoD old or new... they all have roughly the same degree of rule structure, with a focus on activities particularly common to characters in these game world. You're telling me nWoD is "soft"? Compared to old AD&D it's steel solid but otherwise it's about the same as most game nowadays. SR might seem "hard" if you consider the sum of the rules, but it's only because SR needs more rules due to bizarre activities like decking and it has a larger shopping catalogue, but otherwise the "rule coverage" of SR is pretty much the same as nWoD or D&D. Meaning, I'm having to outright improvise a ruling roughly as often in all these systems and most other I've tried. The realism may vary, but the rules are there in all of the major games. It's the common paradigm, I guess.

The only thing really "soft" I can think of, beside diceless games, are fringe stuff like Feng Shui (Now, that's a game that simplify a lot of things into a single roll).

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If you want "dramatic games", it is usually entirely independent of whether the rules are "hard" or "soft". Dramatic game have their own mechanics specifically dedicated to making the game dramatic. For SR, it's the Karma. Take a look at what earns you karma after a run ; following the guidelines you can easily earn more karma from your roleplaying than from accomplishing your objective! OTOH A game like D&D has no drama mechanics at all and this comes closest to a wargame. A game like Riddle of Steel has the "spiritual attributes" mechanics which are the driving passions, faith and destiny of the character ; these are the only thing that will allow a character to progress, thus making it an heavily dramatic game. But it's not like the game isn't heavy on rules ; the game pride itself on perhaps the most realistic melee system ever designed and that means a lot of rule.

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So there you have it ; I've read a few post in the thread but I was confused. Everybody talking about "hard", "Soft", "Dramatic"... but without saying which game they are talking about, I can't picture what you are arguing about. I don't recognize the real games out there in these arguments.

The NPC dies. Tough luck. Don't have your whole campaign hinge upon the survival of one key NPC in a violent conflict with the PCs. With karma pool, extra goons who just happened to show up, Hand of God, etc., there are lots of options for preserving the NPC. If, despite all that, he still dies, well, maybe he deserves to be dead.

It's healthy for NPCs to be killable early. It keeps them on their toes and makes them act realistically (i.e. cautiously). If you're the kind of GM who wants to tell a story while your players sit around and listen and throw dice, then maybe there's a problem. If you are instead generating the world in which the players can write their own stories, there's no problem at all.

The story is, they win early. And if they realize how lucky they are, they'll talk about it for months to come.

The kind of cheating I'm talking about is that kind that allows this villian to come back some day and threaten the group again, even though they killed him. Does that make sense?

This is obviously the worst case scenario. But do you really think that breaking the rules needs to be this obvious and that it can't be done literally without the players ever finding out about it? And are you telling me that a GM can't manipulate the game behind the screen and make it more enjoyable? Not just more enjoyable for himself, but more enjoyable for everyone?

There are percentile rolls, too. They are important.

I'm not sure I would call AD&D a 'hard' rule style, but I wouldn't call it 'soft' either. The mechanics are modular. You can take a few simple mechanisms and apply them to almost any situation, almost entirely intact. The percentile roll makes that very powerful, because you can always assign a percent chance of success and roll straight at it. That is the built-in 'softness.' The hard facet comes from the fact that you don't alter the rules...you just apply them creatively. That's fun, and yet it is pretty realistic, depending on the DM and the percent chance they assign.

Apply the percentile to building a table. Or jumping further than normal. For bluffing a guard, roll d20 lower than charisma (if you even have to roll; there is the roleplaying aspect, where the player can simply come up with such a good lie that the DM doesn't even ask for a roll). Pee standing up? Ranged attack vs. an appropriate AC (as determined by the DM).

That is modularity. Not flexibility, because you don't change the mechanic. It doesn't require the rules to be all-encompassing, because they are versatile enough to apply anywhere.

This is the kind of game I hope to see come from SR4. It my simple hope. Call it naiive (I probably would). But we have heard straight from their own FAQ that they are trying to unify the mechanics at the base level. I don't see why the rolling mechanism they have revealed can't be imported to any possible situation in the SR universe effectively, and still maintain a level of realism. Perhaps not the same level, but then again...why not?

The problem here is that you seem to think there's no option except fudging. As others have pointed out repeatedly in this thread, SR3 has plenty of "fudge factors" built into it, tactical pools being one of the most prevalent.

As a card-carrying member of the Evil GM's Union™, I don't think I've had to fudge a die roll in favor of the NPCs in the last six years or so. Clever use of karma pool, tactics, NPC's suddenly diving for cover instead of standing up like ducks in a shooting gallery... there's no limit to what you can do as a clever GM, within the rules. If you need to resort to GM fudging on a regular basis, then you're not doing something right as a GM.

The tactical pools are what keeps Shadowrun a "soft" and "dramatic" system, in my book. Removing them will force the game into a hard, strategic mold.

hahaha

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. It makes cheating noticeably harder after the first GM rolls are made, because then even if they post no or little information (e.g., Pools and Condition Monitors) prior, once they do you can't go back and say, "Oh, no he's rolling Body 6, not Body 3" because the numbers are sitting in plain view on a permanent page (like this one).

I "missed the point" as you say, because your point is irrelevant.

All of your talk about tactics and combat and properly using your dice pool is wonderful. Fantastic. I'm proud. Thats not "cheating" or dealing with the unexpected, thats just playing the game.

Choosing to duck behind available cover does not do you any good if your characters happen to get lucky when stealing an attack helicopter, and bypass an entire building's worth of defenses by crashing it into the seventh story and right into the middle of the Goblin King's throne room. In a Strategic, Hard game, they are going to die. On the other hand, this is a dramatic scene, would it be more fun to have them die, or perform some kind of amazing escape?

Or, the flip side, you've been doing everythign right, and your players have fought there way to the castle at the center of the labyrinth and are about to take out the Goblin King. In a Hard, Strategic game, your NPC is going to die. But on the other hand, you have an interesting character with some exciting plots going on, would it be more fun for the whole group to have him die, or perform some kind of amazing escape?

Playing by the rules is great, it can cause interesting, strategic, complicated battles, and I really do appreciate that. And obviously there are times when you should let your NPCs die. But in my opinion, its all about having fun, and sometimes the game is more fun when you can safely ignore the rules.

You're absolutely right that the game as built in flexibility. And you're afraid that that flexbility will be lost in the move to SR 4 despite the fact that there is no evidence for or against that except for a poorly written, confusing FAQ statement.

Very late on this, but to chime in…

The NPC dies. It's happened before, you deal with it and move on. If I want a world that does exactly what I want it to, I write a story.

I have absolutely no idea what you mean here.

If you're not willing to let the character die, the dramatic act is not dramatic and is thus worthless. This should not be rewarded.

In short no, it doesn't. I mean, I understand what you're saying, but the ramifications of it are that the characters' actions don't affect the world. It's a story, not a game, and there's no need for any sort of rules for that.

In my experience, to have him die. Letting him live kills suspension of disbelief, kills any inkling that the characters might make a difference rather than running in their mouse-mazes, kills the fun. That said there's a certain amount of room for fudging because sometimes NPCs are just smarter or more qualified than we are as GMs (for example, just because I forgot to put a chemsniffer at the zero-zone entrance doesn't mean Mitsuhama did), but "miraculous escapes" are absolutely not covered.

~J

If having your players listen to the BBEG's sinister monologue before he teleports safely away makes your game more fun for you and your players, then by all means do so.

But if you're contending that so doing makes the game more fun for me, Kagetenshi, mfb, Crimsondude 2.0, Raskolnikov, Cain, Ellery, et cetera....then you've some proving to do. And dismissing a point as irrelevant without reason isn't proof.

That poorly written, confusing FAQ statement is the only thing there is to use as evidence. Discounting it also discounts even flimsy inductive reasoning until the only valid statement you can make about SR4 is "I dunno, because I threw away the evidence." No need for an entire forum to cover that, unless one of the admins here is interested in prankishly changing all posts in the SR4 Forum to just that.

And you don't think SR3, as canon, can't cope with this sort of thing? You've almost quoted the Hooper-Nelson example in the BBB, p 248.

First of all, if you've done your job, the NPC isn't necessarily going to die. Second, what you've described can lead to serious player frustration. If they really, really want an NPC dead, and they have him dead to rights, the NPC should die. Anything else would be GM favoritism, which is no fun for anyone. Third, if you really, really need for that NPC to have some sort of amazing escape, use the existing rules to pull it off. Between the tactical pools, regular karma pool usage, Hooper-Nelson, and Hand of God, any NPC can pull off a miraculous escape. What's more, your players can't complain, because they know they can use the same rules-- and if they ever have to, they'll feel sure that you'll give them the same sort of clean getaway that your NPC got.

But if you can play within the rules, it's even better.

Look, did you ever play Cops and Robbers as a kid? If so, I'll bet you had a conversation like this: "I shot you!" "No you didn't, you missed!" "No, I got you!" "You missed!" Rules are necessary to prevent this sort of disagreement. If you choose to ignore the rules, you end up with a fancy version of that argument.

As mfb pointed out, the FAQ makes it quite clear that the tactical pools will be removed. Don't believe me? Read it for yourself

And personally, I'm not going to game with someone who tries to apply Calvinball rules to SR.

Well then, I've missed the point. Any of you people catch it?

~J

mfb, you have grasped our disagreement on what is considered cheating, and what is not. It is a matter of semantics. Let us allow it to die, here.

My point, all matters of cheating or preperation aside, is that I find Shadowrun 3E to be extremely stifling to my ability to plan and execute a game plan from either the player end or the GameMaster end because of the fundamental nature of the game and its dice system.

I don't know, what 4E is going to be like. No one does except for the people who are making it. I've heard a lot of screaming, but I havn't seen anyone with an actually informed opinion.

I started this thread to analyze the differences between hard and soft dice mechanics, and how I percieve the game to be moving in a softer direction, which I appreciate.

One the other hand, it may be the case that Shadowrun will become bastardized instead of refined, thus is the thrust of the disagreement as I see it.

Oddly enough, I find Shadowrun to be the easiest system to plan and execute a game for, and I've played quite a few. I'm including one of my favorites, Everway, in this comparison-- Everway doesn't even have dice rolls, it has a tarot deck that you interpret. That's probably as pure of a "soft dramatic" system as you can get.

Shadowrun taught me how to gamemaster. Harlequin, IMO, is the best module for any game system ever written. It included the all-important "Debugging" section, which showed me that alternate pathways to a goal were equally valid-- I didn't have to fall into the "glass tunnel" trap of many story-driven games. More, it also said it was perfectly OK if the players decided to kick off and do something completely else-- it said, just say: "To heck with this!" and move on.

In general, I've discovered that when people are stifled by Shadowrun, it's because they don't fully understand the rules of the game. It's very different than d20, where the system itself can be very stifling.

Our "uninformed screaming" is based heavily on what we are being told. It's not all rampant speculation on our part. We know that tactical pools are being removed, and there's no suggestion that anything will replace them. The people with an informed opinion-- Patrick, for one-- hasn't said anything to let me believe that there will be any such replacement.

We're not uninformed. At worst, we're misinformed-- and that's the fault of the devs, who control all the outgoing information.

I put these two quotes together so you could see the contradiction. If playing a board game instead of an RPG is a bad thing, then making Shadowrun more like a board game is a bad thing.

You're the one who said that having fun was the most important part of a game, yes? I happen to love that sort of game. Even if it fails, planning can be a huge part of the fun of Shadowrun. What I personally find to be excruciating is the "glass tunnel" games, where I get to look at all the pretty plot things, but I'm not allowed to deviate from the path one iota. It took me a long time-- and reading Harlequin many times-- to finally drag myself away from that style of GMing, and I've never looked back.

BTW: Critias, you're not helping. Kindly stop flaming Nerbert before a mod comes in and kills this thread. Nerbert is asking a legitimate question, and being mostly decent about how he's handled himself. Please stop attacking him.

Then I'm, by god, going to make a point of what was just said, by translating and summarizing it myself. Whether it's "helping" or not it's true, and it's time someone said so. The game's getting simplified to the point any chimp (or, in fact, any other creature with the opposable thumb required to throw a handful of dice) can sit at a gaming table, roll the number of plastic cubes their GM tells them to, and voila, be a super-L33T Shadowrunner. And that's crap. It wasn't ever just Shadowrun's setting that made it a great game, it was Shadowrun's system -- you felt like a badass because you had to think to play the game well and be a dangerous force (not only by spending hours planning before any sort of combat, but by spending time during combat thinking about what to do next and how to do it, in order to use your combat pool as well as the other guy and survive). In d20, you just have to ride the railroad from point A to B, roll, and trust in your levels to do all the work.

That's what they're turning Shadowrun into, they're turning Shadowrun into that because the world's full of morons that have the problem solving and tactical thinking skills of toast, and I'm tired of coddling them instead of rubbing their noses it. The people who find SR "too hard" right now are winning. They're cutting the balls right off the game so that the people who don't get it can get it. They win. That doesn't mean I can't be a little bitter about it.

[/rant]

That's unfair. d20 requires as much tactical thinking as SR does. How many points of attack bonus do I sacrifice for damage with Power Attack? Will I fight defensively, sacrificing attack ability for defense? If you're playing a wizard, it gets even more complex. And before you reply that it isn't to hard to cast a Fireball, it is commonly considered that casters who specialize in damage dealing are suboptimal, and that battlefield control spells like Web are much more useful.

The tactical utility of such mechanisms in the d20 system are suboptimal compared to their equivalents (the Combat Pool, equivalent spells) in the Shadowrun system. While the proper employment of certian spells in d20 is a good argument, you have to be a spellcaster with certain caster levels, in a certain class, in order to employ them. This is less flexible, via the aforementioned restrictiveness, than Shadowrun. In Shadowrun, if you are a spellcaster, you could choose to focus on such spells just as readily or more so than a character with levels in a caster class, in d20. The spells themselves may even be more useful, but I do not believe tactical spellcasting was what Critias was referring to. I believe he was referring to tactics available to all characters in a combat situation, regardless of particular magical gifts.

Fighting defensively, in the d20 system, is typically only useful in the earlier levels. Sacrificing a portion of your attack bonus, and all iterative attacks, in order to gain a certain bonus to armor class against melee opponents, becomes less and less smart an option the higher your attack bonus rises. Higher and higher Tumble skill somewhat extends the usefulness of the tactic, but not substantially so. The ranks in Tumble needed to effect additional dodge bonuses from defensive fighting require high enough levels that the iterative attacks you sacrifice are largely not worth it.

Likewise, in order to employ this tactic with some finesse, a character requires the Expertise feat. This feat is only fully utilizable up and until the 5th level in a strong base-attack class, the 7th level in a moderate base-attack class, and the 10th level in a weak base-attack class. To extend its utility further, one requires the Improved/Superior Expertise feat or prestige class ability, which is unavailable in the base rules and only available via expanded books' feat lists or prestige classes. Regardless, the initial capacity requires both a base Intelligence of 13+ and the expenditure of a precious, precious feat. The latter requires another such expenditure, through the purchase of the higher-level feat or the fact that the class in question confers the ability in lieu of some other ability which could be used in more general situations.

Power attack and its expansions (typically requiring a Prestige Class, though certain books permit Improved, Greater, and Supreme Power Attack as feats purchasable on the same tree) require equal expenditure of class abilities and/or feats, as well as a certain base attribute requirement, in order to obtain(in this case, Strength of 13+ is a requirement; I've quite a few finesse-oriented combat characters who could not pick this feat up or retain it when their magical equipment is not a factor). Thus these features are not truly in the hands of any character, but are rather in the realm of characters with a certain set of ability scores and the willingness to pick up feats and/or level in certain prestige classes to certain levels.

Comparing this to Shadowrun, where a character may gain enhanced damage capability, or enhanced defensive capability, with choice in the manner in which they employ a tactical pool common to all characters regardless of their inclination or ability set, it seems both more restrictive and less universally available. In short, in d20, if you are inclined to engage in tactical consideration, you must level in certain classes and/or possess certain ability scores and/or purchase certain feats (typically two or all three of the aforementioned), while such capabilities are in the hands of every Shadowrun 3rd Edition character, in capacity commensurate with their ability. Even the most aberrantly weak character, with all relevent attiributes of 1, may still benefit from a minor degree of tactical finesse with their 1-point Combat Pool. Average characters, with their 4-point pool, are able to exercise this capability with a degree of finesse that requires a lot of focus and development for a d20 character to match, within the bounds of the core rules.

Saying that d20 disavows all tactical thinking and precise player control over characters is an overgeneralization, but for the aforementioned reasons, I believe that the Shadowrun 3rd Edition system permits a much more universal and precise degree of such controls regardless of the type of character played. I don't know if this makes it "superior", but I certainly find it to be more suitable in such respects than d20 (which I have a great deal of experience with, as well.)

[mode=sarcastic on]
Are you thinking of the guy firing only 9 bullets (TN11) instead of 10 because he will statistically get twice as much success ?
[mode=sarcastic off]

Hi there im Mr. Toast in good need of a nose rubbing.
Posted early on in this thread, and am still happy to say i think SR is the best damn "dramatic" (storyline/world) rpg out there, and im still looking forward to GMing SR4 when it comes out. I have reservations about the FAQs, as im sure everyone does, but being Mr. Toast i would never have considered GMing SR3 as i am obviously a moron.
They could of modified the present rules, marketed the whole thing, kept the old school hardcore brigade happy, and got no new players (as we are all idiots and SR3 is just about adding and subtracting numbers, which we cant do) and therefore goes bust. Or they could make a new product that may/may not be good (we will see at launch), which continues the world, offers the hardcore SR3 players to continue with it by adapting the source books to the old rules, and maybe just maybe attracting more morons like me to take the game up. You never know, these morons may mean more material is produced....... and i know it sounds impossibe, maybe SR4 will not be as bad as some people think.

BTW there may be a touch of sarcasm in some of that post.
I like dramatic, i like strategic, i love the world of shadowrun, i pray the new rules are good, i dont like being called a moron.

Who told you TN 11 is twice as good as TN 12? I mean, you're real busy being sarcastic and all, but that's not even an honest example of whatever-it-is you're trying to insult.

EDIT - this was just me misreading (rushing a post while at work). I thought the comparison was 12 vs 13 (not 11 vs 12). And we all know (and hear) about 6 vs 7, 12 vs 13, etc.

There may be a touch of sarcasm in your post, but there wasn't any in mine. I meant, and continue to mean, every word. They're dumbing down the game in order to let more people in, plain and simple. Right now there are hordes and hordes of people out there who can't (or won't), for whatever reason, figure out how to run Shadowrun. They think it's too hard, allocating pools takes them too long, thinking before they act makes their heads hurt, planning an attack instead of kicking in a door wastes their time, adding and subtracting TN modifiers is too complicated, rerolling 6's is slow. Thinking makes a game work, instead of fun, to them. They lack basic mathematical ability, or attention span, or probability knowledge, or tactical acumen, or raw intelligence, or maybe just experience/practice at playing the game.

For some reason or another, more people can't or won't play Shadowrun than can or will. Simple fact. So the game is being made simpler. Simple fact. So that more people (who would otherwise lack the attention, intelligence, motivation, practice, whatever) will play. Simple fact. The things being cut off to "streamline" the game in this fashion are all things Critias likes very very much about the system. Simple fact.


Is this good for the company? Sure, if it works. Is it good for the game? We'll find out soon. Is it good for Critias, who Critias cares about most? Nope.

And I'm allowed to express my opinion about that.