Full Version: The Big Picture
| QUOTE (Shadow) |
| Glad to have you back Gyro. The thing is Shadowrunners at the 123 point level were supposed to be professionals. Not amateurs. They were running for at least a year (or equivalent experience). The beautiful thing about the Point buy system is you can reduce points to reduce the starting power. Want a gang campaign, 90 points. Children, 60 points, etc. Or you could go the other way, give someone 150 points to make a character (watch everything get maxed). I hope SR4 has that kind of scalability and doesn't pigeon hole everyone into playing '1st level' characters. |
Thankee
Perhaps my problem with the way things are set up in SR3 is that it seems like there isn't enough ground between 'the best of the best' and 'amateur'. It always seemed to me that by the way it was described, the jump between 'professional' and 'uncannily excellent' was too short. If the human limit of an attribute is six, that implies that there is such a tiny percentage of such people available that having a PC who has that naturally is difficult, and having more than one is silly, especially since Shadowrunners are themselves a very small part of the community. Same thing with skills.
Now, if the scale was, say, one to a hundred, with your typical professional shadowrunner's skills and attributes falling in the 70-85 percentile of the population, that would seem to me to be a little more reasonable.
| QUOTE (Shadow) |
| Glad to have you back Gyro. The thing is Shadowrunners at the 123 point level were supposed to be professionals. Not amateurs. They were running for at least a year (or equivalent experience). The beautiful thing about the Point buy system is you can reduce points to reduce the starting power. Want a gang campaign, 90 points. Children, 60 points, etc. Or you could go the other way, give someone 150 points to make a character (watch everything get maxed). I hope SR4 has that kind of scalability and doesn't pigeon hole everyone into playing '1st level' characters. |
Agrred. Having Professional level characters is one of the reasons I love the game.
Tired of playing 1st level characters. Hopefully they will have a system in place to start people out at whatever campaihn level they want; Street punk, ameture, pro, expierenced pro, and Prime Runner.
If not, and your stuck playing low level chars (Withou house ruling) then that would just plain suck.
I'm sure they'll have options at chargen available. Rob & FanPro may change a lot of things and mechanics in the SR-setting, but they are not so stupid to make the chargen a one-way-street which only allows 1st level characters.
A point-based priority system is, by default, easy to adjust to your liking compared to the alphabetic system. The former only requires you to adjust how many points you allow, while the later requires you to adjust the entire grid.
With the exception of Cash. That was capped at a million - non linear progression.. Hopefully the new system wil cover that.......
| QUOTE (Grinder) |
| I'm sure they'll have options at chargen available. Rob & FanPro may change a lot of things and mechanics in the SR-setting, but they are not so stupid to make the chargen a one-way-street which only allows 1st level characters. |
Right. I belive that.
| QUOTE (Doctor Funkenstein) |
| A point-based priority system is, by default, easy to adjust to your liking compared to the alphabetic system. The former only requires you to adjust how many points you allow, while the later requires you to adjust the entire grid. |
That presumes a straight-buy system. Once you get into progressive costs, things get wonky real fast. Try comparing characters built with Build Points versus those built with BeCKs, you'll see what I mean.
| QUOTE (Eldritch) |
| Agreed. Having Professional level characters is one of the reasons I love the game. |
I don't have anything against the starting characters being professional; as I said, it's more of an issue of where the text says the 'best possible human' attributes are, and, based on that, where characters have to be to be professional.
It just seemed unrealistic that your typical professional Shadowrunner is one of the most brilliant people on the planet, or setting Guiness Book World records with their amazing maximum human attainable strength of...6. Which is what any runner based on strength has.
I just don't like how the scaling was portrayed.
Humans could raise all attributes to 9 with karma in SR3. Having an attribute of 6 would put you in the top 8-5% of the population, but you were a long way from being the best in the world.
They could actually go up higher than that; with the Exceptional Attribute edge, a human would have a racial max of 11. So, 11 represents the absolute pinnacle of human achievement, as opposed to 6.
Superman! 
In other words, starting runners were no where near the best, and almost no characters raised their attributes to the point where they were even in the top 3% of the most gifted (in that attribute) people in the world. Seems about right to me, you need to be above average to survive in a profession like shadowrunning I would think.
And you need a team as no reasonable runner is able to fullfill all needed roles alone.
| QUOTE (Cain) |
| They could actually go up higher than that; with the Exceptional Attribute edge, a human would have a racial max of 11. So, 11 represents the absolute pinnacle of human achievement, as opposed to 6. |
Well then, I withdraw my complaint.
I was under the impression that 6 was the best you could do, and everything above that was superhuman and supernatural.
| QUOTE (Gyro the Greek Sandwich Pirate) |
| I was under the impression that 6 was the best you could do, and everything above that was superhuman and supernatural. |
It's just a hell of a lot easier to take the superhuman/supernatural route to get there.
Thread drift is absolutely amazing.
Thanos
Thanos
| QUOTE (Wireknight) | ||
It's just a hell of a lot easier to take the superhuman/supernatural route to get there. |
No kidding. Assuming you start at 7, it costs over a hundred karma to raise your stat that far.
When your life is training for the powerlifting event in the unaugmented olympics, that's not far-fetched. Runners have to be a little less specialized. You see a lot of bright, strong, charismatic people in the shadows, but that's because you have to be above average to survive past the "gang drug mule" stage of street life.
This is a "lo-fi" version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.