FrankTrollman wrote:Absolutely not. Player characters aren't different from commoners in SR. Some players are gong to be Morgo the Invulno Troll, and they are supposed to be highly resistant to damage (and switching out of 1:1 damage, they will be), but a lot of player characters are just pedestrians wearing flak vests. They aren't supposed to be more survivable than normal humans. They are normal humans.
Frank, what kind of health/damage system would you recommend using if you wanted to run a game where some humans were tougher and different from normal humans? More like Feng Shui or D&D. Maybe a system with the current damage structure of SR4 where your Strength determined how many "wound points" you had (something along the lines of Strength x 10?), you had an attack roll and a defense roll, and your armor served as "damage reduction" against a certain amount of damage?
What I did for aWoD was to have the player characters and special NPCs have Edge and other people not have Edge. Then I had the Edge stat add to soak rolls. So if you're a player character, you take 3 wound boxes from an attack that would have caused an NPC 6 wound boxes.
That's how soak based proportional damage systems work. Being tougher means that you have more soak hits, which means that you take less severe wounds from the same attacks.
Can I get a quick once-over of the LMSD damage system, maybe an example? I missed SR3 almost entirely, so I -think- I know what you're talking about but I never actually saw it in play.
Ferret wrote:Can I get a quick once-over of the LMSD damage system, maybe an example? I missed SR3 almost entirely, so I -think- I know what you're talking about but I never actually saw it in play.
OK. You have ten damage boxes:
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
If you take a "Light Wound" you fill in one box:
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
If you take a "Moderate Wound" you fill in three boxes:
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
If you take a "Serious Wound" you fill in six boxes:
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
If you take a "Deadly Wound" you fill in all the boxes:
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
If all your boxes are filled in, you are unconscious. And there are breakpoints along the way where you take wound penalties. So a Light Wound plus a Moderate Wound plus a Serious Wound, or two Serious Wounds, or one Deadly Wound would all incapacitate you.
Why not just give everyone a starting attribute line of all 2's (excepting special attributes)? If you want you can throw in a 'feeble' flaw that will drop an attribute to 1 for some piddling point value. Characters min/maxed with multiple 1's do nothing good for the game, because the math really suffers.
Why keep Reaction as an attribute? It seems to do pretty much nothing. You could easily roll it into Intuition, Agility, and Edge (admittedly making those already good attributes even better).
And what is a burnout mage supposed to do? Is it just a basic background trait on some other type of character that grants astral perception and magical knowledge? Can a burnout provide some sort of background count to run magical interference in parties without mages? Is it a bit like being a ghoul with normal vision and no diet issues?
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from stealing bread, begging and sleeping under bridges.
-Anatole France
Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
Win Game.
-Josh Kablack
Why don't you like Reaction as an attibute? Agility, Intuition and Edge are all 3 really GOOD stats to begin with.
Agility is already the 1 stat to rule them all.
A Gun bunny wants agility, some body, and reaction. If you take away his need for reaction, That's even more of a 1 stat pony.
I pray that 5th edition Shadowrun does not come out until someone new has the license. Because if JH and CGL write SR5, Its going to be the complete death of the license.
sabs wrote:Agility is already the 1 stat to rule them all.
A Gun bunny wants agility, some body, and reaction. If you take away his need for reaction, That's even more of a 1 stat pony.
I'm not going to cry if one attribute is king in a gunfight.
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from stealing bread, begging and sleeping under bridges.
-Anatole France
Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
Win Game.
-Josh Kablack
Fundamentally, shadowrun is a game which is based on detective work, sneaking around, and shooting people in the face. As such, with the original system where there were basically the six attributes from D&D (some with different names), the stats that make D&D Rogues jizz their pants were overpowered. Because everyone is a fucking Rogue. So Intelligence and Quickness (Dexterity) were simply better than other stats. By a lot. Especially Intelligence, which was basically 6 on all player characters.
So in the runup to SR4, Rob did something clever: he took the two best stats and cut them in half. Quickness was now Agility and Reaction, while Intelligence was Intuition and Logic. And you know what? That still wasn't far enough, because those two attributes were so much better than the remaining four that any of those half attributes are still better than any of the remaining four. The solution of course is to merge Charisma and Willpower and merge Strength and Body. Because those stats still suck compared to Intuition or Logic.
Basically, I'd use 6 stats. But I'd use the six stats from Dead Man's Hand, not the six stats from aWoD. Because Shadowrun is a lot more physically and martially oriented than aWoD is, and it makes sense to have half the attributes be physical.
I'm gonna repost my questions in case Frank missed them, along with another:
CatharzGodfoot wrote:A couple of questions:
Why not just give everyone a starting attribute line of all 2's (excepting special attributes)? If you want you can throw in a 'feeble' flaw that will drop an attribute to 1 for some piddling point value. Characters min/maxed with multiple 1's do nothing good for the game, because the math really suffers.
And what is a burnout mage supposed to do? Is it just a basic background trait on some other type of character that grants astral perception and magical knowledge? Can a burnout provide some sort of background count to run magical interference in parties without mages? Is it a bit like being a ghoul with normal vision and no diet issues?
Wouldn't an 'unnaturalness' attribute which cyberware adds to be more easy to work with than an essence which is subtracted from? It seems like any actual use of your essence score involves first subtracting it from 6.
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from stealing bread, begging and sleeping under bridges.
-Anatole France
Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
Win Game.
-Josh Kablack
Having an Essence Loss that counts up would be easier to keep track of for some purposes (like Magic Loss). It would be harder to keep track of other things (like Magic Maximum and Vampire Attack). Unfortunately, having Essence count up would make explaining the concept much more difficult. It would be like weight or heat in battletech, and people would want to circumvent it in more ways.
As to setting the starting attributes, I can't for the life of me think of a single benefit from starting at 2 instead of 1.
Seems like it'd be easy enough to explain if you renamed it - I was initially thinking something like "Corruption" (reflecting the body being corrupted by technological invasion) but I think that has the wrong connotation.
Ferret wrote:Seems like it'd be easy enough to explain if you renamed it - I was initially thinking something like "Corruption" (reflecting the body being corrupted by technological invasion) but I think that has the wrong connotation.
Assimilation, maybe?
I would think "Corruption" is a four letter word at this point. Too much SR related baggage. And "Assimilation" sounds too damn Borg.
Also, even though it kills you in SR, going all transhuman isn't necessarily a bad thing. There are lots of good things that can kill you if you take too much of them. Coffee, cocaine or chips in the brain; too much of anything will kill you.
FrankTrollman wrote:All augmentations need to reduce Essence in the same way. The Bio/Cyber inter-non-transparency thing is dumb. But the big deal with augmentations is that they will now be marked as to whether they are "local" or "Systemic" mods (which determines how easily they can be removed), as well as being "cultured" or "generic" (which determines whether they have to be custom built for the recipient). And finally, each should have a "tech base" - which is just a period when they came into use (2040s, 2050s, 2060s, or 2070s).
How do you determine tech base some something like a comlink, which should (in theory) be based on rating?
Also, I'd go with the following terminology for cyberware: tailored (instead of "cultured"), generic, local, systemic, and plug & play.
Plug & play would be shit like generic cyber eyes & cyber limbs, which you could seriously just pop on, pop off, and trade like baseball cards.
CatharzGodfoot wrote:
How do you determine tech base some something like a comlink, which should (in theory) be based on rating?
How does a 1987 cell phone compare to a 2007 cell phone? Well, the 1987 DynaTAC cell phone cost $3995 bucks and weighted 28 ounces. The $3995 phone allowed you to talk to people, and that's it. The 2007 phone is a first gen iPhone. Oh, and the analog cell network that DynaTAC used has been taken down years ago.
That's the scale of the difference.
Last edited by kzt on Tue Jan 11, 2011 7:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
CatharzGodfoot wrote:
How do you determine tech base some something like a comlink, which should (in theory) be based on rating?
How does a 1987 cell phone compare to a 2007 cell phone? Well, the 1987 DynaTAC cell phone cost $3995 bucks and weighted 28 ounces. The $3995 phone allowed you to talk to people, and that's it. The 2007 phone is a first gen iPhone. Oh, and the analog cell network that DynaTAC used has been taken down years ago.
That's the scale of the difference.
Right, but I'm still not sure how you translate that into telling what gear a runner can get in a given time period. Do you just pretend that the two are equivalent (which keeps the numbers working)? You you lower the maximum rating on earlier models? You you actually remove capabilities?
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from stealing bread, begging and sleeping under bridges.
-Anatole France
Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
Win Game.
-Josh Kablack
The basic SotA conceit is that attacks and defenses are advancing together in some sort of Red Queen scenario. That's fine as far as it goes - it means that you don't need to put a techbase on rating levels at all. You simply posit that rating 3 doesn't mean the same thing in the 2040s as it does in the 2070s.
The next part you're going to do is address miniaturization. The 2050s Cyberdecks were the size of keytars, the 2060s cyberdecks were modular and could be stashed in the pockets of a duster, while the 2070s commlink is the size of a cell phone and you can put it in the left pocket of a pair of jeans.
And yeah, you probably want to put some tech creep into the actual capabilities as well. But it doesn't need to be that significant, because Black Hammer was available in the 30s and Psychotrope was invented in the 40s.
CatharzGodfoot wrote: Do you just pretend that the two are equivalent (which keeps the numbers working)? You you lower the maximum rating on earlier models? You you actually remove capabilities?
A combination.
For example, 10 years ago many people carried around a personal organizers (electronic or not), watch, portable camera, a little music player, a cell phone, gps tracker, a blackbery, and a notebook computer.
Now they have an iPhone and a notebook PC. In 10 years they just have a "jPhone".
But the "jPhone" takes higher res pictures, HD video, gigabit speed wireless, crazy huge memory, plus something else that we can't imagine living without, but I have no idea what it will be.
Well, if you combine it with your Jglasses, it'll do a super imposed 3d Augmented Reality. It'll let you buy items by using the Safeway(tm) App, so yuo just hold the bar code to the camera and it scans the item and automatically deducts.
It's the first step to hassle free shopping. No more cashier lines, because you'll have paid for everything before you leave the building.
The way I would deal with SotA and tech creep in a shadowrun setting.
Using the SR4 device ratings:
You make a state of the art extended test:
device rating, threshhold(6), interval 1 or 2 months, depending how fast you want stuff to degrade.
So a Commlink with a DR of 8, would roll 8 dice, average 2.5, and after 3 months, it would become DR 7, and then it would roll 7 dice, etc.
It creates a money sink for people trying to stay above 5, and a huge sink for people trying to stay above 6.
Obviously if you change the 'stats' for electronic equipment, you come up with a different formula. But the goal is to have /real/ cutting edge stuff remains valid in a player's hands only for a certain amount of time.
This is really for electronics, hand guns aren't worth doing that to, because their degrade period is much longer than an average game.
I'm more comfortable having SotA just be exactly what Frank said; a way of indicating what year an item becomes available. Degradation during play (while normal) is an annoying distraction for me.
And, yeah, I had forgotten the conceit of mutually scaling offense and defense. That makes the ratings issue almost completely handwaveable.
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from stealing bread, begging and sleeping under bridges.
-Anatole France
Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
Win Game.
-Josh Kablack
