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blakkie
QUOTE (hahnsoo @ Aug 21 2005, 07:49 AM)
QUOTE (blakkie @ Aug 21 2005, 08:46 AM)
QUOTE (hahnsoo @ Aug 21 2005, 07:31 AM)
Glitch, just for reference, is having half or more of your dice come up as 1s. All 1s is a Critical Glitch (which is just like the old Fumble rule).

I thought 50% or more 1's and no Hits was a Critial Glitch?

Whoops. You are correct. I shall edit my post with your info.

Ya, that is going to come up a lot more often. The all ones was damn rare except when only one or two dice were rolled. For example with three dice it was 1 in 216. Now with 3 dice a Glitch will be 1 in 36, and a Critical Glitch will be 1 in 21.6! eek.gif
El Ojitos
QUOTE
(Special Note: Raising a Skill above 6 costs double the usual amount of Karma, and can only be done if you have Aptitude in that skill)

Does anyone know what Aptitude does exactly? It sounds like it makes it possible to break the skill 6 barrier - and not just by one point by the sound of it.
IF that's true, it should make some people happy (including you, Ellery and nezumi). If you have a special Aptitude and are prepared to spend vast amounts of time (read Karma) on it, you can transcend even the legendary level of 7. That would also mean that you can't reach the pinnacle of your ability at chargen.
Of course: If...
hobgoblin
while its late to do so, i want to answer the topic of this thread.

its the end of an old and the beginning of a new. as allways this leads to conservatives that goes into a hizzy fit over the changes...
hahnsoo
QUOTE (El Ojitos)
Does anyone know what Aptitude does exactly? It sounds like it makes it possible to break the skill 6 barrier - and not just by one point by the sound of it.

Nope. It only allows you to reach 7 with a skill as your max, that's it.
Samoth
QUOTE (Ellery)
I was afraid of that. That's why I split up the calculation the way I did.

So a character has basically exhausted his advancement potential after 3270 karma--less if they use build points to actually buy stats and/or skills.

Don't forget about spells, complex forms, initiation, magical bonding, submersion and all the rest. The great thing about SR is that there's always room for advancement.
mfb
actually, there's not. there are a limited number of spells and complex forms. you could iniatiate forever, of course, but that starts becoming pointless after a while, especially in SR4. is it really "advancement" if it stops having any appreciable effect in the rules?
blakkie
QUOTE (mfb)
actually, there's not. there are a limited number of spells and complex forms. you could iniatiate forever, of course, but that starts becoming pointless after a while, especially in SR4. is it really "advancement" if it stops having any appreciable effect in the rules?

You can't keep picking up metamagics? Or are you talking about the limited number included in the BBB?
Kagetenshi
Limited number.

Also, what about your non-magical characters? Or are they just unimportant?

~J
mfb
they can pick up magic for, what, 30 karma? or technomancy for 10.
Kagetenshi
I thought it was said that that was disallowed?

Either way, "given a long enough timeframe everyone learns magic" is not a good solution.

~J
mfb
i definitely agree. but unless i'm badly mistaken, you can indeed pick up magic after chargen. which i like.
blakkie
QUOTE (Kagetenshi)
Limited number.

Limited number of metamagics? That's not an issue. Either home-roll your own or buy Street Magic. *shrug* Same for spells.

QUOTE
Also, what about your non-magical characters? Or are they just unimportant?


Non-magical? There are people play non-awakened PCs? Oh yeah, i guess there are. wink.gif Yup, they are pretty much unimportant.

Of course you do remember my suggestion some time back about allowing the buying of Essense with karma? wink.gif Also didn't someone suggest that mundanes don't cap till somewhere over 3000 karma? I assume that is without buying as many Qualities post-creation as possible. That is a lot of karma.
mfb
we're talking about the system as-presented, not the system + houserules. after all, if we were accounting for house rules, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place--just remove the cap.
nezumi
QUOTE (chevalier_neon)
But average might mean "average professional" which means that you should have only 1 or 2 in runing or programing.... no ?

If I spent 4.5 years in college and $25k to get a 1 in computers, I will be very, very displeased (especially since I could've done the same after 1 shadowrun).

Yes, somehow I see the idea of 'all shadowrunners above 1,000 karma are magical' a little... irritating, really. So has anyone done some number crunching on at what point you run out of stuff to spend karma on?
Kagetenshi
If we assume that a character starts with all 1s in attributes, it takes 75 karma per attribute to max that attribute, or 675 karma (750 for mages/technomancers). That drops to 60 per if we start with all 3s, for 540/600. At that level all it takes is a single point of a skill to be better than an average trained professional—we've still got things to spend karma on, but we've already broken the system.

~J
Nomad
As far as skills go, I really like the idea of the skill groups. This finally address the problem of a broader set of skills that a person would accumulate as part of their job (i.e. Cracking and Electronics for deck....I mean hackers), while not overpowering it with an all encompasing skill (such as firearms pre-SR3).
hahnsoo
QUOTE (mfb)
i definitely agree. but unless i'm badly mistaken, you can indeed pick up magic after chargen. which i like.

You are mistaken. The book specifically states that Magic or Resonance cannot be earned after character creation. That is the one case that the purchase of a quality is not possible under the default rules. You can always house rule it, I suppose.
hahnsoo
QUOTE (Kagetenshi)
If we assume that a character starts with all 1s in attributes, it takes 75 karma per attribute to max that attribute, or 675 karma (750 for mages/technomancers). That drops to 60 per if we start with all 3s, for 540/600. At that level all it takes is a single point of a skill to be better than an average trained professional—we've still got things to spend karma on, but we've already broken the system.

Erm, I've never played a campaign that went beyond 300 Karma earned per character. That's about 60 runs, and assuming you played every single week, you'd have to have a character survive over a year's worth of dedicated playing, every week on the week. To get the Karma necessary to max out your attributes even if everything is at a 3 would take 2 years of grinding the same character... I don't know if I could stand constantly playing a character for that long, or even have one survive during that duration.
Kagetenshi
Your loss. Some of us play long-term campaigns, and the system is broken for us.

~J
mfb
that's... wow. that's kinda dumb. the magic thing, i mean.
hahnsoo
QUOTE (Kagetenshi)
Your loss. Some of us play long-term campaigns, and the system is broken for us.

Call me in 3 years and tell me when you break the system. *cheesy grin*
Ellery
I think it's broken for him already, if his group wants to use existing characters. Or it will be very quickly as they top up in the few places they're low.
blakkie
QUOTE (mfb @ Aug 21 2005, 12:15 PM)
we're talking about the system as-presented, not the system + houserules. after all, if we were accounting for house rules, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place--just remove the cap.

I was just collecting my "i told you so" coupon. nyahnyah.gif After all i didn't make the suggestion as a "house rule".
mfb
what?
blakkie
QUOTE (mfb @ Aug 21 2005, 02:41 PM)
that's... wow. that's kinda dumb. the magic thing, i mean.

Traditionalist option won out there. *shrug* frown.gif
blakkie
QUOTE (mfb)
what?

Sorry, i thought you were responding to me with that post. It was right below, and you didn't quote anyone.
Conskill
QUOTE (Kagetenshi @ Aug 21 2005, 03:38 PM)
Your loss. Some of us play long-term campaigns, and the system is broken for us.

~J

I'm curious, how much karma has your longest group accumulated?

The cap for individual skills certainly does seem to be a bit low, but my mind boggles at the idea that multi-thousand karma expenditures could be considered achievable. Even in my most karma-generous campaign, characters usually ended up dying before karma bloat was noticable.
Kagetenshi
QUOTE (Conskill @ Aug 21 2005, 04:49 PM)
I'm curious, how much karma has your longest group accumulated?

Only about 150ish—not much, by SR3 standards. Enough to top out two attributes from 3s and thus become better barely-trained than professionals in entire linked categories of skills in SR4, though.

Y'see, that's the thing. The game doesn't wait until you have all attributes maxed to break down—any one does it, and two or more just add fuel to the fire.

~J
FrostyNSO
That is one of the reasons I'm not a fan of the attribute+skill system.

The other reason being that I just want to look at my sheet and go "hey, pistols 6, I roll 6 dice." Rather than having to cross-reference each of my skills with it's attributes (which are always changing as I gain karma) before knowing what to roll.
apple
I doubt that your attributes will change everytime you get karma. Of course they will change slowly over time (when you get lot of karma and cybernetics, just like your skills and attributes in SR3 changed slowly) and I don´t think that is is a problem to write something like "Agility 4, pistoles 3 => 7w6, rifles 4 => 8w6"
on your character sheet. At least now you have constant values, unlike in SR3, where your skills where boostes with pools.

SYL
FrostyNSO
I think there is a difference between an optional pool and a mandatory one. I think att+skill just introduces another mechanic that is easily exploitable, and doesn't have to be there in the first place. You may as well call them complimentary skills now instead of attributes.
Nerbert
QUOTE (Kagetenshi @ Aug 21 2005, 05:05 PM)
QUOTE (Conskill @ Aug 21 2005, 04:49 PM)
I'm curious, how much karma has your longest group accumulated?

Only about 150ish—not much, by SR3 standards. Enough to top out two attributes from 3s and thus become better barely-trained than professionals in entire linked categories of skills in SR4, though.

Y'see, that's the thing. The game doesn't wait until you have all attributes maxed to break down—any one does it, and two or more just add fuel to the fire.

~J

I think you'll find that the old adage for SR3 holds true. Specialized characters survive, generalized characters do not.

Attributes are generalized, Skills are specialized.

In the long run having a lot of high attributes will allow you to become really powerful. but in the short run you're going to be faced with the problem of not being particularly good at anything except what you can accomplish with pure talent.

So while your friends are spending Karma on skills and such, and quickly reaching high dice pools, you're going to be plodding along with high attributes that only work for specific sets of activities. You're nothing but potential.
Kagetenshi
We have statements from the devs that they consider average ability for trained individuals to be about six total dice thrown. We've got a case where someone is throwing seven in large numbers of skills, and probably nine or above in their specialties.

We've got both.

~J
FrostyNSO
Hell, in our groups, generalized characters always outlived specialized ones. They survived through planning and having a wide variety of options available to them. The specialists were the ones who got tripped up when a curveball got thrown. Your mileage may vary...

I agree wth your "nothing but potential" comment as far as SR3 is concerned, but SR4 specifically rewards characters who have high attributes in the form of higher dice pools. As K said, you have both worlds.
Nerbert
QUOTE (Kagetenshi)
We have statements from the devs that they consider average ability for trained individuals to be about six total dice thrown. We've got a case where someone is throwing seven in large numbers of skills, and probably nine or above in their specialties.

We've got both.

~J

Right, 9 or ten dice. After 600+ karma of gaming right? How long is that? A year, two? Sure, you're throwing 6-10 dice at a large number of skills in very narrow ranges. So, its great that you can run and climb and jump as far as the athletics specialist could 400 Karma ago, but so what? You probably failed a ton of dodge tests in the gunfight last year when all you had was 4 dice to throw at dodge because you were busy putting everything into Strength.
Kagetenshi
After ~60 karma. It starts breaking as soon as you get one high attribute.

~J
Nerbert
QUOTE (Kagetenshi)
After ~60 karma. It starts breaking as soon as you get one high attribute.

~J

Unless you die in your first gunfight because you can't dodge anything or soak any damage.
Crusher Bob
From playing with the char gen system, it looks like the 'reasonable' thing to do is always max out your points on stats, since buying the stat point seems to give you the same thing as a skill point plus 'other stuff'. In addition, you gain the advantage of having your skills be cheaper to buy up in game, meaning that you start equal to or better than the guy who didn't max his stats, and have to spend less karma to get better. For example, with the sample weapons specialist moved from agl 4 to agl 6 (assuming this still costs 10 points b/c of being an elf) and dropped 2 points of the firearms skill group, then she would still roll 8 dice for firearms, but would get more dice for anything else based of agility. Sigh, because stats are 'cheap' and after creation improvement costs are 'progrssive' is it better to max out one of the two sides of the dice pool in creation.
Kagetenshi
*Thumbs up* Congratulations for not realizing that you don't have to make those kinds of sacrifices!

I'll say this very slowly.

You. Can. Do. This. With. The. Sample. Characters.

There. Is. No. Sacrifice. Involved.

~J
Nerbert
*shrug* Sure, you're right. Its broken beyond repair. Damn that sucks. Time to move to a new game.

Or, in other words, I believe you, I just don't care. Theorycraft is not something I care for and I'll choose to be sad about the game once I play it and find out its broken.
Crusher Bob
Using the sample Weapons specialist and assuming the following skills are agility linked:

Archery [2] {8} |6|
Firearms skill group [4] {40} |8|
Dodge [2] {8} |6|
Throwing weapons [2] {8} |6|

(sample char skill levels in [], costs in {}, dice pool in ||)

Then droping the skills to get:
Archery [1] {4}
Firearms skill group [3] {30}
Dodge [1] {4}
Throwing weapons [1] {4}

giving you 22 build points

Buying 2 points of agility (going to 6 agl, costing 20 points) gives you the following die pools:

Archery 7
Firearms skill group 9
Dodge 7
Throwing weapons 7

meaning that you gain 2 build points, have 1 die more in the above pools, have to spen less karma to advance, and gain any other bonuses from having a high agility.
If you add some points to the stealth or athetics related skill groups (something every runner should have) then the point advantage of agility gets even bigger.
Bull
Buying the 6th Attribute Point (or the equivelant "Max" point for metahumans) costs 25 BP at CharGen, while earlier points cost 10 points each.

Bull
Cain
QUOTE
Attributes are generalized, Skills are specialized.

In the long run having a lot of high attributes will allow you to become really powerful. but in the short run you're going to be faced with the problem of not being particularly good at anything except what you can accomplish with pure talent.

So while your friends are spending Karma on skills and such, and quickly reaching high dice pools, you're going to be plodding along with high attributes that only work for specific sets of activities. You're nothing but potential.

You are incorrect, at least under SR4.

It doesn't matter *where* the additional die comes from, only that you have it. If you've got Attribute 1, skill 6; you're functionally identical to someone with Attribute 6, skill 1. So, as Crusher Bob pointed out, you're better off improving the generalized stat-- in this case, the attribute.

7 dice is 7 dice, regardless of how you get there.

[edit]
QUOTE
Buying the 6th Attribute Point (or the equivelant "Max" point for metahumans) costs 25 BP at CharGen, while earlier points cost 10 points each.

I think he accounted for that. Since the Weapon "Specialist" is an elf, her racial starting cap should be 7-- so that's the "max point".
Kagetenshi
QUOTE (Nerbert)
Or, in other words, I believe you, I just don't care. Theorycraft is not something I care for and I'll choose to be sad about the game once I play it and find out its broken.

Fair enough.

~J
Nerbert
You know what just occured to me that would really slow down character progression and also help minimize the sweeping effects of high attributes. It would be a fairly simple thing to implement too. Eliminate skill groups.
Ellery
Then you encourage people to spend even more on attributes, since there is no other cheap way to increase the number of dice you roll for a bunch of related skills.
Crusher Bob
Um, that will actually make stats more powerful, as it will increase the comparitive costs of skills.

The real trouble lies in the fact that there will probably be a few 'moby' stats (agility is the most likely one) on which many skills will be based. So you will be able to increase your effective pool in many skills by raising your stat by one. As stats are cheap (compared to skills), it seems always advantageous to raise the stat (where you have more than X skills linked to it) (don't know X yet). from looking at character creation, X is one skill group or 3 ungrouped skills that rely on that stat.

[edit]
curses, too slow
[/edit]
Nerbert
*shrug* Maybe. I don't really think y'all have any idea what you're talking about. I'v played the nWoD system for a long time now. It has skills and attributes all capped at 5. You kind of think we'd be showing the same problems in that game as you're describing in this and it hasn't been the case at all. The best way to avoid it was to stick to the minimum amount of bonuses at chargen, in this case 300 Karma. But i have no real means of analysis and even less motivation to try to prove anything, so I'll just let it rest.
Crusher Bob
The WoD character generation system is less explotable because the points used to by stats and skills are seperate. While each subsections is 'gamable' individually, you cannot move points from one to the other, as in SR4.

This is why I dislike having character generation mechanics that are radically different from advancement mechanics. If creates all sorts of simple exploits in the system. The ability of a character to do X, Y, and Z should not be based on the players ability to do simple linear optimizations.

Some examples of gamey WoD 'char creation':

Stats:
Assigning the following stat profile to you '3 point' stat group:

1|4|1, it costs you 8 xp (iirc) to get to 2|4|2, while someone who assigned 2|2|2 to their stats in character creation would have to pay 20 xp.

Skills:
A new skill costs 3 xp, after that skills cost level x2 xp to raise.

A character who assigns 3 skill points to a skill spends 3 skill points (7 xp equivalent) a character who assigns 1 to 3 different skills (still 3 skill points) gains 9 xp equivalents.
mfb
i think SR4 is pretty much perfect for people like Nerbert--people who don't understand, or don't want to understand, what die mechanics really mean. if you're just looking for a quick and dirty vehicle to facilitate roleplay, SR4 is for you. if you want to play an enjoyable game that makes you think, it may benefit you to sample some alternatives. there's nothing particularly wrong with the first play style, except that by its very nature, proponents of it don't tend to recognize their biases (since they don't really recognize non-obvious differences in game mechanics, which is what the rest of us are hooting and hollering about).
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