You forget about Armor + Increase Initiative + reach weapon + some skill + ok attribute + mediocure to sub-par melee opponent without a dedicated weapon = slash happy mage.

Combat Lesson #1, carefully choose your momments and your opponents. Going toe-to-toe with a Laser Axe wielding Cyberzombie troll, bad.

Good day people. I'm semi new here, well first time posting here in these forums atleast.

Combat Mages should be built to go into combat, ranged and close and be able to hold their own/survive through it if they're smart and play to their strengths. Thats what it looks like this character does quite well. Primarily he has his spells, but he can also mix it up in ranged combat (Pistols) and melee combat (katana) if need be. Looking at both his stats and skills (as thats what makes up his dice pool) he is decent at both ranged and melee combat, but great at spellcasting (which he better damn well be if he's a mage). he wouldn't be able to take on everyone in melee or ranged, but he won't be worthless if he can't get a spell off or gets jumped.

Personaly, whats wrong with a mage being able to mix it up in melee combat? No he's not going to be as good as a melee monkey but thats to be expected. If you build a halfway decent combat mage Sabosec, you shouldn't have to imediately run away leaving your team behind when someone engages you in melee combat.

If you actualy take time to sit down and look at the char, or both of the sample chars. They seem to be built to be survivable. For all the cracks against the weapons master, she has decent ranged and melee abilities and a smartlink ontop of that. The mage here can take just about all forms of combat and not have to run away pissing his pants because some punk drew a knife on him.

Oh in response to the person above me. In melee combat he's not much worse, however in ranged, the mage has no smartlink whereas the weapons specialist does indeed. She seems alot better at ranged combat than in melee.

Edit: Another thing to note on the weapons specialist. She has the close combat skills group and firearms skill groups if i'm not mistaken. And now we see the combat mage with Blades and pistols. This leads me to believe you can get those skills (pistols and blades) at lower bp cost, or you can get the groups and have acess to ALL weapons in those groups and be able to use all those different types of weapons equaly well. Any thoughts on that guys?

Better than everyone being a dwarf

Take your racist bullshit elsewhere!

Just kidding, no hard feelings I hope, but I couldn't resist.

actually in 3rd the best was staff...due to reach. And I can see a katana being good at that for the sheer reasons of reach and intimidation factor.

Well first mistake, comparing it directly to sr3.

Second mistake, believeing that people can't dodge or use perception normaly. Why would they not be able to make a perception test normaly? No reason at all, just using whichever base stat lent to the dicepool. The skill i believe is so that people can specialize in it, some being better and picking out things than others. While all can make it, some people are better at picking out details, as seen with the perception skill. Same concept for dodge.

Also As for the weapons specialist, she is supposed to be good at improvised weapons and making repairs, prehapse the armorer skill will lend to that? Unable to tell at the moment though.

As for skill groups such as firearms, it would be like the 2nd ed skill firearms, allowing you to use all different types of firearms equally. Probably comes at a slightly higher bp cost, whereas getting pistols would come at a slightly lower bp cost but you would only be good with pistols.

As for qualities and such. They seem to be intrinsic parts of the system now, so banning them outright would probably be bad, restricting possibly. If you're a decent GM you're monitoring and going through cg with your players so they don't abuse the system or unballance your game.

You're also completely misjudging the survivability factors. You're trying to use sr4 stats and running them theoreticaly though sr3 combat. Doesn't work that way in sr4. It would be better to run the sr4 stats through something like the Exalted rules ( a system far closer to sr4's than sr3's is). If you do that, they are quite survivable characters as long as you don't do somthing stupid.

A note about the mage thing, they made mention they were streamlining it and things like that, can't remember which faq it was but they breezed over the changes to totems, lodges, hermetics and shamans.

And she's a weapons specialist good in anytype of weapons...why not have one of everything

They may not be, they may instead be lumping them into one thing for purposes of buying gear. Aka, the stuff to make the shamanic lodge costing the same as the stuff for a hermetic library.

From the FAQ. Prehapse he's his own trad?

They haven't gotten to the Rigger yet, which apparently is just a synonym for Dwarf. :^)

Huh? I'd seen the odd Ettiquette-less characters. Yes, they also tended to be low Cha, socially stunted characters. But i fail to see how forcing PCs to take any given skill is a good tact?

Well thank god we don't have to wait for the companion this time for those basic parts of any RPG. Wow, living beings can move--maybe we should make rules for that! It would be like making a FPS where all you can do is move forwards or backwards.

Perception and Dodge can't be treated differently from Blades and Electronics without sacrificing streamlined rules which is a stated design goal. Because then you'd have a group of skills that can be used untrained (Perception, Dodge, Etiquette, Negotiations, Stealth and Athletics) and those that can't be without penalty (Blades and Electronics). This creates two subsets of the rules. However, they are at least easy rules changes (not like maneuver score) and familiar to anyone who plays d20.

And those ones I've listed as unskilled are pretty much inherent to about 90% of humanity coming from our prey animal background and social behaviour patterns so most people should be fairly good at them without any ranks.

Why not? They already have perception/memory tests:

You know...where you look at a picture for a few seconds, then have to describe as much as you can, in detail?

At least some police recieve training in this - makes for much more reliable eye-witness accounts.


And if nothing else...a short stint as an editor (especially for continuity) will either improve your perception or get you fired.

The simple answer, when you buy the book just flip to page 130 and read up on it.

Well lets see, why don't you let me try shooting you and we'll see just how good you are at dodging the bullet? Despite what they show in movies, dodging bullets is not all that easy or common. Its not like dodgeball, and even in dodgeball most people get taken out pretty quickly because that can't dodge worth s&*$!

Same thing goes for perception. Everybody can do it to some degree or another, but unless you have trained yourself to look for the details its a lot harder to notice them. A normal person could look at somebody with a concealed weapon and not even notice it because that haven't trained themselves to look for such things. They might notice the slight bulge but pay not attention to it because they aren't looking for it and would probably just think of it as an odd fold or some such. A police officer would find it far easier to and identify the bulge as a concealed weapon because he has training.

Another example would be security guards in a store, typically they aren't very bright, but thanks to some minimal training they aren't too bad at spotting shoplifters.

Because I, as an evil GM, require that the Players skills match their background story. He had to grow up somewhere. And during that time he had to interact with other sentient beings. ( Barring of course a truly inventive background story ) So your low Cha, socially stunted character has an Ettiquette of 1.

For the longest time, I just let players do athletic feats just based off attributes. And picked a target number out of the air and completely ignored Athletics.

I suppose the real test will come when I actually get to see the rules and determine for myself. Is dodge a skill a character can live without or would a player be nuts not to invest some points in it as it is a skill he truly can't live without? Similar with Perception. Can a character function without the skill or is the skill necesssary so the character has a chance of noticing clues in his environment? As I noted before the fact that these 2 skills was had by both sample characters suggests that the writers think their essential.

Ok this is just getting silly.

First to the guy before booklord, no it doesn't look like a roll and keep system what so ever. It is not a L5R system. Its closer to the exalted, and the new WoD systems. Neither of those are roll and keep.

Now to Booklord. Some people are better at percieving things than others. Some people are trained to notice things better, but SR3 has nothing that supports that. Infact it runs off your intelligence. I know very intelligent people who are extreamly unobservent. But if they were made into SR3 chars they would be extreamly observent. Furthermore, someone might not be incredibly intelligent but trained to notice things, CSI type people. But in SR3 there was no real skill that augmented things like that.

Now we have a system that conforms to the way most other gaming systems are set up. There is a skill for perception, be it spot, awareness, whatnot. You can actualy show that you've been trained to spot things better, or that you get better at noticing things over time with increasing the skill. People call it a bp drain? I don't see how. As some have you pointed out athletics and stealth have been staple skills in your game (and in effect ping skill drains in and of themselves). In my journies in Exalted and the new WoD systems, Awareness and dodge (preception and dodge in sr4) have been my two staple skills.

As for the talk about skills that should be able to be used untrained and other things like that. Electronics is a bad example because it depends on what you're doing. Plugging a card into a computer? Anyone might be able to figure that out (stat + electronics skill of 0 still equals a dice pool equal to the stat). However deciphering a circuit board they probably won't be (as seen with a higher threshold or simply being a good GM and saying 'hey you have no idea how that thing works put the dice down').

I suppose, phrases such as the GM has final aproval of this type of thing and what rolls you can and can not make, don't weigh in at all with some of you. As far as I know you're not going to roll to go to the bathroom to see if you hit the can or you pissed all over the bathroom floor. Why? Because theres no reason to and it slows the game down. You people are looking too damn hard at the actual rules (which might I add aren't out yet) believing them to be the be all end all of shadowrun. They're not, the story, the game are the be all end all as well as having fun.

And secondly why does it suggest that you HAVE to have those skills to preform those actions? In every other system close to sr4's you don't have to have those skills. They certainly help as they increase your dice pool, but they're not required to look about or try to duck out of the way. I imagine the doge pool would be agility or reaction + dodge. Thus if your dodge was 0 you'd just roll your agility or Reaction. Which makes sense.

SR3 actualy had the problem, of if I have a high stat but no skill its better for me to just default and take the penalty because getting the first rank in the skill and beyond is a hinderance to my dice pool. A friend of mine made a character with a quickness of 12. It was better for him NOT to get stealth because he had a better chance of getting a high roll with 12 dice than he did if he started to pick up the stealth skill. Was a waste of karma to him. Furthermore, if you were doing any kind of runner you HAD to get ettiquette, and probably stealth, and lets not forget biotech, and athletics. Theres more skills there that i -had- to have, than in Exalted or any system with a dice system similar to sr4. I wouldn't be great at talking to people just rolling my base stat, but i wouldn't be the blundering uncouth ass that you would be in shadowrun.

Ah thats right. My apologies. But I've never seen a single char with it. And I don't know why i'd make a guard with that skill. He doesn't sneak around why should he have anything to do with the stealth skill. It was a stupid idea for a skill specialization.

I do know enough about getting behind some cover when someone pulls a gun. I don't have any martial artist training. The martial artist is just better at getting out of the way because he has trained for it and has faster reactions. Just like how I am better at avoiding sword thrusts because I'm a trained fencer but anyone who gets attacked with a sword has a general idea of how to get out of the way they're just not as skilled. Same thing like how I can remember the robber was a tall man with a beard but a cop might remember the color of his eyes and the placement of his tattoos.

The concern with having them be a skill is how crippled those without a skill are at using perception and dodge (both of which were "free" in SR3). If the threshold goes up by 1 or 2 that's a pretty drastic change. Now I might not even remember if the robber was tall or had a beard. Ditto if you lose dice. With my logic (or whatever) of 3 if I lose one or two dice I won't be able to remember the most basic of details (depending on how Perception works in SR4 v SR3).

Basically, is every infiltration expert going to have to take Negotiation, Stealth, Athletics, Electronics, Computer, Electronics and Computer B/R plus (now) Perception so that he can actually spot, not the hidden cameras, but the dogs barking at him or the security guards talking about last night at the strip club?

And besides, I didn't say you can dodge a ball you can dodge a bullet. I also forgot that this board probably has a higher than average group of non-athletic people for whom dodging a ball may be hard

But again dodgeball is opposed so the skill of the person throwing the ball does make it harder to get out of the way. However, both throwing and dodging are pretty basic human abilities so will attribute 3 people playing dodgeball be a pathetic sight as they both struggle through defaulting penalties and couldn't hit the broadside of a barn in addition to actively throwing themselves in the way of the ball?

You mean when I illegally download a copy of the PDF next week before deciding to spend my hard earned money on the Hardcover copy I have on order?

Ya, that's the one.

EDIT: You know, i'm to the point that i snicker everytime i see the cliche "hard earned money".

I'm just going to assume that you have trouble with English or that I made some huge oversight in writing that post (like how I usually think faster than I type so I sometimes miss parts of a sentence).

Is wasn't saying SR4 was going to be Roll and Keep. In roll and keep I find that I am better off to raise my base stats than to increase my skills. So I end up with characters with very high stats and skills of 1 in just about everything so that I don't get defaulting penalties.

Depending how the defaulting rules work in SR4 we might see this happen too, which would kind of suck. I liked that SR had the attributes only govern how easy it is to get skill not actually performing the action. With the new system it could easily turn out that having higher stats is more important than skills.

.... except that wasn't the only thing they did.

In many ways mid to high values across all attributes was more important than mid to high values across a large number of skills. On top of that you had Defaulting.

I don't feel too bad using it since I'm working two minimum wage jobs just to pay off my tuition, let alone moving out of my mom's house (where I sleep in the living room).

When you are so poor that you're po' then any money is hard earned

No I have no trouble with english at all. I apparetly did, however, misinterprate what you had said. My apologies.

As for a roll keep system, L5r first ed focused on having high stats like you stated. L5R 2nd ed focused more on skills. The third ed of the book is trying a more ballanced aproach to the idea, where both are important and you could go one way or the other, but ignoring one side, such as only getting one rank in a skill will completly hamper your character or vice versa.

Again my apologies for my misinterpritation of your words.

Oh and as I've stated in a couple of posts now, it seems like its going the way of the new WoD and Exalted games. So while stats are important, so is having skills since acording to the FAQ's theres going to be hard maxes on stats.

Wow, I've never seen CP in SR3 being used to dodge bullets meaning that you stand there Neo style dodging bullets. I have forced players to move their characters out of position to get cover or actually go prone to dodge bullets. Both of those are what I see dodging bullets as whereas dodging melee/unarmed attacks is actually moving out of the way without getting out of position or going prone or actually blocking the attack (where possible).

Now, for adepts this is kinda different because there magic does make them a little more like Neo. Ditto with wires although only at the REALLY high levels (like my homebrew I ran a couple of times which had Wired Martial Arts and Gun Fu).

I'm pretty sure I heard it mentioned somewhere that the magic loss rules had been ditched completly in an earlier thread or in the FAQ.

@Nikoli - Not exactly. SR 3 has Stealth (Alertness), which only affects perception rolls when attempting to spot someone else that's using Stealth. It won't let you see monowire, but the idea is someone trained in Stealth will be better at spotting others that are stealthing.

I found it was more desireable to have mid range skills in a lot of things than to default to 4-6 level attributes. Once you got up to the high stats then yes, you could default without too much trouble. Like this one orc sam I saw who was actually better at driving than the rigger sans VCR by defauting to his wired reaction.

Plus yes, they did govern the special attributes and pools however I think that's largely irrelevant in the SR4 defaulting v skilled debate. My argument is that in SR4 if the defaulting works the way I think it will then it will be better to have lots of skills at low levels and high stats and that characters without Perception could potentially be blind as bats. In SR3 you needed VERY high stats to make the defaulting better (+4 TN, no pools--ouch)

For you last comment I again direct you to many of my earlier posts. My particular favorite was my thread Shadowsprint: The Running. I have been quite vocal in that same opinion.

well one we don't completely know the bp costs. Secondly attributes are probably going to be much more expensive to raise. And as for the skill group things. Why is there no reason to get them? That makes no sense. Considering with the skill group it looks like i could use all of the firearms at the same skill level with the group. Instead you think its better to purchase pistols, shotguns, rifles, smg's, heavy weapons seperately at the same level? That doesn't make sense what so ever.

I wouldn't exactly call it Neo-esque, but I don't recall any canon referrence that says there has to be any movement at all connected to the dodge test. That's fine if you house-ruled it that way, and I can definitely see sound reasoning behind that.

But as far as the actual SR3 canon rules go, it isn't necessary. The fact that there was an optional rule in the Cannon Companion to use the Athletics skill to give you extra dice on normal dodge tests kind of suggests (at least to me) that Dodge is meant to be movement of the body in general, not necessarily to cover or dropping prone.