Ok got my copy and have been reading to the exclusion of all else. The rules as they are seem to hold together pretty well. That is unless you want to run anything but the presented street level game. I personally like to run epic or heroic games, thats why I play fantasy/scifi RPG's. I know several people including the writers have stated that you can just add more build points to up the power level. However if thats all you do you and your players are still going to run smack dab into the hard skill and attribute caps. The augmented skill and attribute caps are not much better and make no sense except to keep the game at a low setting. I mean why put a cap on augmented attributes? Cyber or magic are meant to over come the limitations of the physical form so why does Fanpro feel the need to slap a hard cap on this aspect of the game except to limit the power level? As for the skills hard cap Fanpro has built in a point were characters simply can not advance any more. 3rd and even 2nd edition had there problems but they always allowed players to continue upping there skills beyoud the "normal" range.
Any one elses thoughts?

Hence resolving the whole power level issue. It's hard to complain about your character being at the pinnacle of human development after all. Of course, some people like to climb mountains because it's hard.

You can also treat 4s as hits, which makes a bigger difference between ratings. Consider making higher attributes a bit harder to get, too.

<<If you boost the build points, you very quickly end up with runners who are at the pinnacle of human development (according to the rules) in multiple areas. >>


I think this is what bothered me the most is that instead of allowing players to increases their skills in their areas of interest the game will now push them into becoming masters of every skill. An exageration I know but still its not wrong either.

Am thinking I may keep the attribute cap as is but do away with the augmented attribute cap. As for skills am thinking of a couple different ways of handling this. The first is to take the aptitude edge and say that it allows you to increase your chosen skill as far as you want rather than just one point. The other option is to apply a graduated cost scale for skills that exceed the controlling attributes racial maximum. The problem with this is I do relies that characters will reach a point were the only thing to threaten them will be other legendary shadowrunners or world threatening monsters.

The big problem is not that a character made in SR4 is street level. That can be overcome by any of a number of ways. No, the big problem is that a properly made SR4 character is 14. Years old.

Skills are a really bad deal, both at the beginning and later on in your career. So while PCs are going to need some of them, the fact is that they are going to purposefully buy up their attributes as far as they will go before they buy up skills to anything.

There are 59 active skills that are available to characters without Magic/Resonance, and 35 of them can be purchased as part of 10 skill groups. That means that getting a rating in every single skill so that you never have to default on anything costs a whopping 196 points. Of course, that's about as much as you would want to pay on skills under any circumstances, because as previously noted - skills suck.

Here's why: For 10 points you can get +1 to a "skill group", that would add 1 die to some of the skills linked to an attribute. But for 10 points, you could get +1 to that attribute, which would add the same amount of all of the skills linked to that attribute. On character creation, skills cost literally twice as much as they are worth when compared to attributes. If you chopped the price in half, players still wouldn't go all skill crazy because at that point it would just be a fair deal. At 5 points for a skill group and 2 points for a single skill, it would still be a good deal for many characters to get a point of Intuition (which adds to assensing and navigation and knowledge skills, and Initiative) over spending 3 points less to get +1 to the stealth group and +1 to Perception (which is admittedly most of the benefits of Intuition). And that's not the most extreme example by a long shot (which would, of course, be Agility, which has two skill groups in it and a bunch of secondary skills besides).

But it gets even more bizarrely extreme after character generation. It costs less karma to raise your Agility to 6 than it does to raise your Firearms Group to 4. That's absurd. noone is going to spend karma on skills as long as any of their attributes are less than maximum.

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The fact is that a triangular system does not, and can not, mesh with a linear system. If Karma costs are triangular, BP costs have to be triangular. If BP costs are linear, Karma costs have to be linear as well. There's no point in going halvies on that, there is no workable middle ground. As long as anyone anywhere is paying linear prices for anything, everything has to be linear in price.

The only workable solutions are to retrofit the entire game to be triangular in costs from the ground up, or to make everything linear. That means that either you have to put BPs on a triangular scale, and make all the graded cyberware triangular, and make all the focus costs triangular, and everything else I haven't thought of yet; or you have to take the remaining triangular things out of the game. that means that karma costs have to be linear, and it means that Wired Reflexes needs to have its cost put into line with the Synaptic Accelerator (1 Essence and 11k per rating point).

Both answers are workable and fair. But a split decision where some things cost more and more as the game progresses and some things don't is definitely neither. Obviously, making things strictly linear is easier, and that makes it better. We are telling a story, not playing Accountant: The Addition. As for what linear scale to go with, I suggest that Karma costs should equal BP cost. Getting Karma in game should just give you more BPs at the rate of 1 for 1. There is absolutely nothing gained in having things grow at any other rate.

-Frank

Personally, the easiest way I see so far of increasing the ultimate cap on power is to simply raise the maximum augmented attribute cap to 2x racial max.

Example: for elves, that will give them the ability to have something like 36+ dice in a specialized firearms or melee skill, for example. I dunno about you, but 12 hits on average on a firearms test with a high-end weapon with good ammo seems pretty powerful to me.

Again I will state my opinion about Harlequin and SR4.

He** yeah! To me, being able to kill Harlie is a good thing.

Skills and attributes are hard capped at character creation and afterwards are they not? If you can raise past the caps once game play starts that's completely diffrent from what I read.

If a hot-off-the-press Decker can be as good at decking as that hot-off-the-press mage is at magic, then all of a sudden I am seeing FastJack getting out-decked (Oh, right, I meant to say out-H4<K3D)pretty fast...

Which is not right.

A decades worth of practice, hardship, and tears at the gaming table should be certifiabley better than a character creation character.

You can't buy a skill group up to 6 at character creation, only 4.

simple solution, no edge cap

but keep the refresh low or nonexistent so that you dont end up playing WoD

People do realize that the BBB puts a cap of 200BP on stats for a 400BP character, right? That's like four 4's and five 3's when building well rounded characters.

Of course, we know that most people are going to buy up at least one 6, a couple of 5's and 1-2 for the non-prime stats. After all, it costs 15 karma to buy a 4 up to 5 and only 9 karma to get 2 to 3. Say hello to plenty of Cha:1 sammies, just like the old days and thanks to the "my stat has no relevance" matrix rules, Logic:2 hackers. (I say 2 just to get the extra knowledge skill points)

Where to start? Ah, at the beginning will do:

Guys, one other problem you face. In order to keep the die mechanic, you have to effectively rewrite all of trhe modifiers in the book to account for the increased power level. Otherwise, you end up with your characters having enough dice to get automatical successes at things that are supposed to be impossible.

Yeah, but looking at the Threshholds, it's like SR3 where a high powered campaign required a partial rewrite of the TNs in some cases. Unlike SR3, you can't stick enough official modifiers on something to give a guy with 20 dice to roll a challenge at simple tasks (such as, surviving falling 120 feet).

If you want to increase the difference between different numbers more, but don't want to go as far as giving out hits on a 4, give back the rule of six. With the rule of six active, a die scores .4 hits on average, which makes rolling more dice a bigger deal. Note that this also makes armor a little less asstastic.

-Frank

This is why pen and paper games are great. If you don't like the rules change them. I had no problem at all with the attrib/skill caps I just ignored them its that simple. The rules are not written in stone just printed on expensive paper make the game work the way you want it to.

D.G., a game system shouldn't require being taken back to pretest just to change a few problems that should be minor or even just up its power level.

Hehe. Actually, the "low power level" approach is on my (very short) list of things that I like about 4e so far.

Prob still won't buy it.

look at the bright side. now, there really is only one way to play SR.

If you want your characters to be more "high powered" just use 3rd edition skill examples and go up to 500 BP's. That way you can get skills of 12 I also suggest removing any artifical caps on dice based on game balance. I mean muscle toner 4 works on a agil 3 human but not a agil 6? I can understand diminishing returns, but that can be compensated for by upping the essence cost of the last few points to show that it takes more "toner" to get that agil of 10 than it does to go from 3 to 4.

But I will say that with the game at street level and 400 BP's a lot more people will be taking Exc Att and skill. Especially in my game when they were NEVER allowed in 3rd edition because they were far too munchy. Now, to be "one of the best" those 2 "positive qualities" are basically required.

I like the Sr4 system so far, but the OP is correct, as written it is not playable in a heroic setting. You can not run harlquin's back with a group of sr4 starting characters, even with 50 or 75 karma. They would just die too fast. Now if the game modules take this into account thats kewl, but who would pay for a brainscan type game module if your knocking off the city's mob boss or some random mid-level AAA johnson. Because those are the "heroic" encounters for Sr4 starting characters.

I would hope they would survive the same way SR3 characters would survive - by being smart, hedging their bets, stacking the deck, doing their legwork, and never letting dice decide anything that can be accomplished with sufficient planning.

Sufficient planning never makes up for the hellhound behind the door and the shaman opening up with Force 8 fireballs. Only, now, it'll be likely Force 16.

Exceptional Attribute only works for Physical and Mental attributes. It says so right there in the quality description.

Having read the rules more. Am thinking to start with I am going to remove the hard cap on augmented attributes. Skills and natural attributes I am going to leave as normal right now until some of my players start bumping up against the hard caps. At that point I am hoping I will have a better understanding of what can and can not be changed. Do agree that most of the available printed runs are going to have to be ignored till much later in the game. I know there are many people who play Shadowrun who enjoy the lower level power games but there are just as many who enjoy the heroic level games and Fanpro's suggestion on how to up the power level does not work if you intend to use the rules as written. disappointing because the rules do play well if your willing to play to the power level Fanpro has chosen.