The Shadowrun Situation
Moderator: Moderators
-
The Vigilante
- Master
- Posts: 246
- Joined: Tue Jun 02, 2009 1:42 am
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
The actual damage codes for SR1-3 are bad, containing one or two more pieces of information than makes any sense to include. A weapon with a higher power level does more damage and a weapon with a higher base damage level does more damage (and for SR1, a weapon with a higher staging level might do more or less damage), but none of these are in any way consistent. Moving to a single "power level" which determines how damaging an attack is, is clearly the better move (although you'd want to do something with armor penetration numbers, because they are absolutely the same as 1/3 of a power level in SR4, which makes the various supposed tradeoffs generally pretty stupid and obvious in all cases).
The real issue is that a rank amateur gets 1 hit on their dice while a super maxed out ninja gets about six. The entire range between ultra badass and mook #3 is about five hits. That means that if you want the combat system to make any fucking sense, the entire range between bouncing a bullet off someone's manly chest and one-shotting them to the floor needs to fit into a range of five hits.
What happens in SR4 with "one hit equals one more damage box" and "people have about 11 damage boxes" is that a rank amateur shoots with you one net hit and you take 5 boxes, and then one their second attack they shoot you with two net hits (because now you have a -2 wound penalty and a -1 second attack penalty to your defense roll) and you take 6 boxes and you just barely go down with a double tap. Meanwhile, the ultra ninja shoots you with 6 net hits and you take 10 boxes, and then they ultra kill you with 7 or eight net hits and you explode into bloody chunks with a double tap. And yeah, there is a non-zero chance that amateur boy will roll on the low side and take three shots to drop you, and a non-zero chance that hyper-ninja will roll well and drop you in only one, the average result is still exactly the same when Mook #7 and Super Dooper Street Sam take an intiative pass our of their lives to take you down with a gun. And that's super bullshit.
If instead the damage levels were what they used to be:
-Username17
The real issue is that a rank amateur gets 1 hit on their dice while a super maxed out ninja gets about six. The entire range between ultra badass and mook #3 is about five hits. That means that if you want the combat system to make any fucking sense, the entire range between bouncing a bullet off someone's manly chest and one-shotting them to the floor needs to fit into a range of five hits.
What happens in SR4 with "one hit equals one more damage box" and "people have about 11 damage boxes" is that a rank amateur shoots with you one net hit and you take 5 boxes, and then one their second attack they shoot you with two net hits (because now you have a -2 wound penalty and a -1 second attack penalty to your defense roll) and you take 6 boxes and you just barely go down with a double tap. Meanwhile, the ultra ninja shoots you with 6 net hits and you take 10 boxes, and then they ultra kill you with 7 or eight net hits and you explode into bloody chunks with a double tap. And yeah, there is a non-zero chance that amateur boy will roll on the low side and take three shots to drop you, and a non-zero chance that hyper-ninja will roll well and drop you in only one, the average result is still exactly the same when Mook #7 and Super Dooper Street Sam take an intiative pass our of their lives to take you down with a gun. And that's super bullshit.
If instead the damage levels were what they used to be:
- 1st: 1 damage box
- 2nd: 3 damage boxes
- 3rd: 6 damage boxes
- 4th: 10 damage boxes
-Username17
One thing that is a problem with SR4 is that armor penetration and damage are the same. As an example of the issues this causes, take shotguns. It makes shotguns silly to use. In the real world shotguns firing shot don't penetrate armor for shit (and hence do very little/no damage to people wearing even light armor) but if they can penetrate they are crazy lethal. You can't reflect that in any practical way in SR4.
This could also be part of an approach to making armored vehicles work better.
Also, in the real world, bullets designed to penetrate armor do significantly less damage to a living target than a round designed just to do maximum damage to living critters, like hunting or self-defense rounds, while hunting or self-defense rounds are comparatively bad at penetrating armor. AP rounds are designed to be very stable and very cohesive so they will go cleanly though most targets, creating a fairly small wound channel. Hunting rounds are normally designed to expand, tumble or fragment and dump all their energy into the target, and will typically create a much larger and more destructive wound channel.
This could also be part of an approach to making armored vehicles work better.
Also, in the real world, bullets designed to penetrate armor do significantly less damage to a living target than a round designed just to do maximum damage to living critters, like hunting or self-defense rounds, while hunting or self-defense rounds are comparatively bad at penetrating armor. AP rounds are designed to be very stable and very cohesive so they will go cleanly though most targets, creating a fairly small wound channel. Hunting rounds are normally designed to expand, tumble or fragment and dump all their energy into the target, and will typically create a much larger and more destructive wound channel.
-
OgreBattle
- King
- Posts: 6820
- Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2011 9:33 am
What's a game that represents Power and Armor Penetration wellkzt wrote:One thing that is a problem with SR4 is that armor penetration and damage are the same. As an example of the issues this causes, take shotguns. It makes shotguns silly to use. In the real world shotguns firing shot don't penetrate armor for shit (and hence do very little/no damage to people wearing even light armor) but if they can penetrate they are crazy lethal. You can't reflect that in any practical way in SR4.
Not TTRPGs, but Fallout 1 & 2 had the best armour system I've seen on the PC. Each piece of armour included a deflection chance, a damage threshold and a percentage damage reduction. Because it was computerized it worked.
Oh thank God, finally a thread about how Fighters in D&D suck. This was a long time coming. - Schwarzkopf
-
mlangsdorf
- Master
- Posts: 256
- Joined: Fri Jun 06, 2008 11:12 pm
GURPS isn't elegant in this regard, but it's playable. Guns have damage dice, possibly an armor divisor, and an injury multiplier. Armor provides subtractive resistance to rolled damage, and then the result is multiplied by the injury multiplier. Each bullet is tracked separately.
So a 9mm pistol does 2d6+2 x1 damage, and a .45 pistol does 2d6 x1.5 damage. Against an armored target, the .45 does slightly more damage. Against someone in light kevlar (which subtracts 8 points of damage), the .45 will generally be absorbed but the 9mm will penetrate for 1-2 points.
A 12g shotgun loaded with buckshot would fire 9 shots for 1d+2 x1 damage. If half of them hit an unarmored target, you're looking at 2-3 times as much damage as that 9mm pistol - or nothing if the target is armored.
Again, it's probably more complicated than it needs to be, and some people have house rules to make it easier to play. But it's certainly possible to model penetration vs wound channel type issues in a playable way.
So a 9mm pistol does 2d6+2 x1 damage, and a .45 pistol does 2d6 x1.5 damage. Against an armored target, the .45 does slightly more damage. Against someone in light kevlar (which subtracts 8 points of damage), the .45 will generally be absorbed but the 9mm will penetrate for 1-2 points.
A 12g shotgun loaded with buckshot would fire 9 shots for 1d+2 x1 damage. If half of them hit an unarmored target, you're looking at 2-3 times as much damage as that 9mm pistol - or nothing if the target is armored.
Again, it's probably more complicated than it needs to be, and some people have house rules to make it easier to play. But it's certainly possible to model penetration vs wound channel type issues in a playable way.
HERO does it in an odd but effective way, which is by multiplying the damage after armor, and also can allow for making armor more effective against that weapon.OgreBattle wrote: What's a game that represents Power and Armor Penetration well
What I'd want would be a threshold that you have to exceed to do normal damage and have to get close to do any damage. But yeah, there are a lot of ways to do this badly.
-
Strung Nether
- Journeyman
- Posts: 153
- Joined: Fri May 21, 2010 7:34 pm
Idea to simplify it a little bit:mlangsdorf wrote:GURPS isn't elegant in this regard, but it's playable. Guns have damage dice, possibly an armor divisor, and an injury multiplier. Armor provides subtractive resistance to rolled damage, and then the result is multiplied by the injury multiplier. Each bullet is tracked separately.
So a 9mm pistol does 2d6+2 x1 damage, and a .45 pistol does 2d6 x1.5 damage. Against an armored target, the .45 does slightly more damage. Against someone in light kevlar (which subtracts 8 points of damage), the .45 will generally be absorbed but the 9mm will penetrate for 1-2 points.
A 12g shotgun loaded with buckshot would fire 9 shots for 1d+2 x1 damage. If half of them hit an unarmored target, you're looking at 2-3 times as much damage as that 9mm pistol - or nothing if the target is armored.
Again, it's probably more complicated than it needs to be, and some people have house rules to make it easier to play. But it's certainly possible to model penetration vs wound channel type issues in a playable way.
Shotgun does 5d2+18 damage, with a 9x armor multiplier
-Strung
-
Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
Isn't this a setting where sufficiently focused firepower kills anything?
Can't you, like, unload a couple of missile banks on a dragon and kill it to make the other straighten up and mind their p's and q's?
Can't you, like, unload a couple of missile banks on a dragon and kill it to make the other straighten up and mind their p's and q's?
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
My favorite part of that clusterfuck isn't the basic rules fail where in fact Great Dragons aren't really all that powerful and cannot possibly raze Albuquerque. It isn't even the basic geography fail where the authors apparently don't understand that North America and South America are different continents and sending bombing raids from one to the other is actually a really big deal that you have to explain somehow. No: my favorite part is that the authors of this piece of shit who came out to defend it were unable to present a single argument that any of this shit was in any way a good idea.
To defend a work like this, you'd want to present some sort of case that the events were good for the game or good for the story or good for realism or something. But they can't do that. They don't even fucking try. All they can muster is increasingly ridiculous arguments that the events they wrote up are not completely impossible.
I mean yes, they wrote up a Dragon going on a murder rampage that killed forty thousand people in an Italian slum, and then had that information somehow suppressed by a vast media conspiracy composed of explicitly hundreds of groups, many of whom are openly at war with that dragon in particular, openly antagonistic to dragons in general, or personally living within one hundred kilometers of the massacres. That's the sort of major plot direction that you'd want some reason to take things in. But they can't do that. All James Meiers can come up with are lame excuses for how it's not totally impossible for crimes of that magnitude to fail to make the news.
Now those excuses are incredibly lame. The Syria example is laughable on the face of it, because the killings in Syria are not failing to get international media attention (as of this posting, there are three stories about the human misery in Syria on CNN's homepage and four on the BBC's). They are failing to get a UN resolution for military intervention because The Russian Federation still needs Syrian port access in order to protect their sea lanes from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. That is a complicated real-world piece of realpolitik that is in no way mirrored in "giant lizard with no appreciable national ties goes on a rampage, murdering people in the middle of Europe". But aside from the fact that the excuses are terribad, I find it hilarious that they can't even begin to make a positive argument for why any of that shit was good for anything in the first place.
Oh: and apparently Harlequin is raising an army in the Midwest to go attack Denver. Despite the fact that Harlequin has no official standing anywhere and is completely useless as a standard bearer because only a couple dozen people in the entire world know he even exists.
-Username17
To defend a work like this, you'd want to present some sort of case that the events were good for the game or good for the story or good for realism or something. But they can't do that. They don't even fucking try. All they can muster is increasingly ridiculous arguments that the events they wrote up are not completely impossible.
I mean yes, they wrote up a Dragon going on a murder rampage that killed forty thousand people in an Italian slum, and then had that information somehow suppressed by a vast media conspiracy composed of explicitly hundreds of groups, many of whom are openly at war with that dragon in particular, openly antagonistic to dragons in general, or personally living within one hundred kilometers of the massacres. That's the sort of major plot direction that you'd want some reason to take things in. But they can't do that. All James Meiers can come up with are lame excuses for how it's not totally impossible for crimes of that magnitude to fail to make the news.
Now those excuses are incredibly lame. The Syria example is laughable on the face of it, because the killings in Syria are not failing to get international media attention (as of this posting, there are three stories about the human misery in Syria on CNN's homepage and four on the BBC's). They are failing to get a UN resolution for military intervention because The Russian Federation still needs Syrian port access in order to protect their sea lanes from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. That is a complicated real-world piece of realpolitik that is in no way mirrored in "giant lizard with no appreciable national ties goes on a rampage, murdering people in the middle of Europe". But aside from the fact that the excuses are terribad, I find it hilarious that they can't even begin to make a positive argument for why any of that shit was good for anything in the first place.
Oh: and apparently Harlequin is raising an army in the Midwest to go attack Denver. Despite the fact that Harlequin has no official standing anywhere and is completely useless as a standard bearer because only a couple dozen people in the entire world know he even exists.
-Username17
-
unnamednpc
- Apprentice
- Posts: 90
- Joined: Fri Feb 25, 2011 7:23 am
Ok, so basically, Shadowrun is Reign of Fire now, only outside of this one book, the world fiction doesn't seem to acknowledge that at all?
It's really amazing, CGL has already set the quality bar so incredibly low, yet they still constantly and effortlessly manage to slip through under.
They are totally the limbo champions of hack writing.
Btw, did anyone bother to read their SR5 "design philosophy" pamphlet? Is it just me, or is referring to CGL headquarters
as a "comfortable apartment near Seattle" either incredibly poor wording or just downright trolling in light of CGLs business history?
It's really amazing, CGL has already set the quality bar so incredibly low, yet they still constantly and effortlessly manage to slip through under.
They are totally the limbo champions of hack writing.
Btw, did anyone bother to read their SR5 "design philosophy" pamphlet? Is it just me, or is referring to CGL headquarters
as a "comfortable apartment near Seattle" either incredibly poor wording or just downright trolling in light of CGLs business history?
-
Stahlseele
- King
- Posts: 5976
- Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2010 4:51 pm
- Location: Hamburg, Germany
That's Bogota! Level Stupidity right there . .
Same people working on both of these?
Same people working on both of these?
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
http://www.nationalreview.com/the-feed/ ... 3d-printer
This isn't really related to shadowrun as a game product, but it shows that within the shadowrun setting it's more realistic than it previously seemed to include "guns" on the list of things you can 3d-print rather than hand craft or drone/robot craft from machined parts using "normal" techniques.
This isn't really related to shadowrun as a game product, but it shows that within the shadowrun setting it's more realistic than it previously seemed to include "guns" on the list of things you can 3d-print rather than hand craft or drone/robot craft from machined parts using "normal" techniques.
That's with a ABS too. Fancier printers can use better plastics. Structural metal 3d printing is not that far out. But it will likely be cheaper for a long time to buy a mini CNC milling machine for a couple grand and use that to make the parts from aluminum stock.
However, barrels are going to be difficult at home to make for a long time without a lot of effort, space and capital. I'm told in Europe barrels are controlled much like receivers in the US and they are made by a small number of large manufacturers using very expensive equipment.
However, barrels are going to be difficult at home to make for a long time without a lot of effort, space and capital. I'm told in Europe barrels are controlled much like receivers in the US and they are made by a small number of large manufacturers using very expensive equipment.
Out of curiosity, does this have to be static boxes, or can it vary at all? Maybe with "5th : All your boxes" ?FrankTrollman wrote:If instead the damage levels were what they used to be:And everyone and every thing had exactly 10 damage boxes, the entire problem would just go away. Assault Cannons would do really large amounts of damage in one shot and would be actually scary, it would be theoretically possible to have functioning rules for heavy vehicles, and you would really see the difference between having a Street Samurai shooting at something and just having a couple of rent a cops point the same direction.
- 1st: 1 damage box
- 2nd: 3 damage boxes
- 3rd: 6 damage boxes
- 4th: 10 damage boxes
-Username17
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
There's no reason you absolutely couldn't vary the amount of wound boxes, there's just absolutely nothing to be gained from doing so.Previn wrote:Out of curiosity, does this have to be static boxes, or can it vary at all? Maybe with "5th : All your boxes" ?FrankTrollman wrote:If instead the damage levels were what they used to be:And everyone and every thing had exactly 10 damage boxes, the entire problem would just go away. Assault Cannons would do really large amounts of damage in one shot and would be actually scary, it would be theoretically possible to have functioning rules for heavy vehicles, and you would really see the difference between having a Street Samurai shooting at something and just having a couple of rent a cops point the same direction.
- 1st: 1 damage box
- 2nd: 3 damage boxes
- 3rd: 6 damage boxes
- 4th: 10 damage boxes
-Username17
As long as the boxes don't vary, then a serious wound means the same thing to everyone. With boxes meaning variable amounts on different targets, damage is not proportional (or at least, not directly proportional) and that's unfortunate.
Basically, by varying the boxes you introduce the problem of D&D where kobolds step on caltrops and then explode for no adequately explained reason. And the problem of SR4 where all attacks end up doing an intermediate number of boxes and then everything goes down in two shots regardless of how tough it is supposed to be. I mean, if you don't vary the number of boxes as much, you might see that problem less, but it's still going to be basically there.
-Username17
-
Lago PARANOIA
- Invincible Overlord
- Posts: 10555
- Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am
If you don't vary the boxes and you have a lot of power-level scaling, then you get something ridiculous and lamesauce as subtracting 40 levels of soak from 48 damage. For a game like Shadowrun in which you really aren't supposed to survive a grenade blocking up directly in your face that's fine, but I think the 'kobold dying when you step on caltrops' problem (and it is a problem) is a superior choice to... that.FrankTrollman wrote:Basically, by varying the boxes you introduce the problem of D&D where kobolds step on caltrops and then explode for no adequately explained reason.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
What?Lago PARANOIA wrote:If you don't vary the boxes and you have a lot of power-level scaling, then you get something ridiculous and lamesauce as subtracting 40 levels of soak from 48 damage. For a game like Shadowrun in which you really aren't supposed to survive a grenade blocking up directly in your face that's fine, but I think the 'kobold dying when you step on caltrops' problem (and it is a problem) is a superior choice to... that.FrankTrollman wrote:Basically, by varying the boxes you introduce the problem of D&D where kobolds step on caltrops and then explode for no adequately explained reason.
I genuinely don't even know why you would think it was a problem that massive attacks against massive targets have double digit power and soak values. No one seems to give a shit that in D&D high level characters are subtracting double and triple digit damage numbers from double and triple digit hit point totals after modifying them by double digit DR or ER. Hell, no one gives a rat's ass about how high level characters are rolling a d20 + 34 in order to hit an AC or Save DC of 47.
The problem with SR in specific moving up to bigger numbers is that it is an inherent effect of piles of dice that the more of them you roll, the more swingy the results are. And that is why you end up using auto-hits and auto-damage for big attacks and big defenses rather than just increasing dice pile sizes.
-Username17