The Shadowrun Situation

[Lago PARANOIA]

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.

Sorry, this was the wrong thread to talk about it. So I'll just make another one.

[Stahlseele]

i usually play high body trolls with massive ammounts of armor . .
without chunky salsa rules, grenades are weak sauce for such characters.
for example, a stun grenade, 16M Damage. Minus Impact Armor of 7.
TN 9. with 16+ Body that is not so hard to accomplish.

[Username17]

i usually play high body trolls with massive ammounts of armor . .
without chunky salsa rules, grenades are weak sauce for such characters.
for example, a stun grenade, 16M Damage. Minus Impact Armor of 7.
TN 9. with 16+ Body that is not so hard to accomplish.

At TN 9 you average 1 hit per 9 dice. With a Body of 16, you average slightly less than 2 hits. The minimum number of hits to stage it down at all is 2. What are you talking about?

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

i roll like an elder god.
and sometimes like a christian <.<

ate 3 grenades once, walked away with 2 light damage from that.
had chunky salsa been in effect, i would have been fine red mist after the first, because it was in a bulding on a staircase.

[Stahlseele]

It seems the people at catalyst might be taking a page out of the Book of Trollman.
Rumors of Brainhacking in SR5 surfaced on dumpshock.

[Otakusensei]

The question is if they are going to rehash the existing rules and release what is essentially the last edition with a page layout change or if they are going to overreach and really hang themselves.

Looks like they are going for the extra rope.

[Stahlseele]

looks like an 80 to 90% rehash of SR4 to me right now . .
they simply don't have the manpower and creative power to do a completely new version right now.
let's see if they actually manage to make the matrix more playable(if i see the brainhacking, i could be cynical and say they are going to use a reworded version of Franks Ends of the Matrix) and if they can make good on their claim from 4th edition to reduce the ammount of dice rolled . .
if they are going to do it the same way they did with the change from 3rd to 4th, then people will need buckets of D6 this time around . .

[Fucks]

they simply don't have the manpower

Where did you get that info from?

[Otakusensei]

they simply don't have the manpower

Where did you get that info from?

Seriously. Freelance work for hire is the closest thing to slavery they can get away with and apparently they can still rope a few hired keyboards together when the boss comes around and they have to pretend someone gives a shit. Just look at that tour de force of PDF content they squeezed out.

[Aryxbez]

I just got news of this apparently: http://www.shadowruntabletop.com/2013/0 ... -come-from

Now I'm not sure, but that whole "Accuracy" thing, sounds pretty crappy, putting a hardcap on the amount of hits I can make? Though I guess won't matter if double tapping is still king, but all the same, I doubt if it'd really balance double tapping pistols to Single shot snipers.

[kzt]

I just got news of this apparently: http://www.shadowruntabletop.com/2013/0 ... -come-from

Now I'm not sure, but that whole "Accuracy" thing, sounds pretty crappy, putting a hardcap on the amount of hits I can make? Though I guess won't matter if double tapping is still king, but all the same, I doubt if it'd really balance double tapping pistols to Single shot snipers.

The general skills stuff isn't so bad, might even be good.

Accuracy might work, depending on they do it. The problem is that while there are significant difference in the ability of a $5000 rifle or a $200 pistol to hit a target, it isn't significant until you are pretty much heading out of pistol range.

To give an example, say a really nice rifle is 0.25 MOA (minute of angle) accurate, so it will mechanically hit within .25 of the aimpoint at 100 yards. This assumes no wind, the gun clmped in a stand, etc, etc. Basically no human can actually shoot that kind of gun to it's inherent ability.

Say a cheap and poor condition pistol is 15 MOA. So at 100 yards the round will be somewhere in a 30 inch circle centered on the target. However pistols don't usually shoot at 100 yards. They more typically shoot at 3-15 yards. At 15 yards the rounds will be within a 4.5" circle. Which is perfectly adequate for the average gunfight.

[Username17]

I just got news of this apparently: http://www.shadowruntabletop.com/2013/0 ... -come-from

Now I'm not sure, but that whole "Accuracy" thing, sounds pretty crappy, putting a hardcap on the amount of hits I can make? Though I guess won't matter if double tapping is still king, but all the same, I doubt if it'd really balance double tapping pistols to Single shot snipers.

Increasing the hard cap on skills is good. 4th edition has a hard cap that is too low. Making it "very expensive" means that they fundamentally don't understand the high karma game and how it fucks with mundane characters and rewards magic characters. The Accuracy thing is just hard caps by another name. If there are maximum hits you can have with your equipment then rolling much more than three times that many dice is pointless. As long as the Accuracy Numbers are numbers that come up at all, they are going to hurt mundane characters more than lifting the skill cap could help them. For one thing, it removes the possibility of your heightened skill caps meaning fuck all.

-Username17

[Fucks]

Increasing the hard cap on skills is good. 4th edition has a hard cap that is too low. Making it "very expensive" means that they fundamentally don't understand the high karma game and how it fucks with mundane characters and rewards magic characters.

Care to elaborate?

[Fucks]

Accuracy might work, depending on they do it.

Seeing J. Hardys track record as LD so far...

[Username17]

Increasing the hard cap on skills is good. 4th edition has a hard cap that is too low. Making it "very expensive" means that they fundamentally don't understand the high karma game and how it fucks with mundane characters and rewards magic characters.

Care to elaborate?

The fundamental issue is that if you got really good, even crazy good at firearms, then your maximal effect from that would still just be that you could shoot two guards with two simple actions. That's moderately impressive in a way, but it's still nowhere near what a mage can pull off with an overclocked stun ball. Any skill you care to name is at its best basically about as good as a single spell or spirit service called in from a high-end mage. And that is of course assuming that there was no cap on what your skills could accomplish. Having arbitrarily high infiltration could be you casting a personal silence, having an arbitrarily high palming could be you casting a physical mask. Having an arbitrarily high first aid could be you casting a treat wounds. And so on and so forth.

There are things that magic does crazy better than you and things magic is a little clumsy at, but that's details. The overarching plot of the story is that after everyone has sucked down a bunch of karma and become high end runners, the Mage spends 5 karma and gets a new capability - and he can use that capability at a high end ability immediately. Meanwhile, a mundane character is being asked to spend "a lot" of Karma to to extend a skill into the high end of ability, and is thus being asked to spend "a lot" to pick up a new skill at a high end of ability.

When a mundane character wants a new skill at a comparable level of ability to what they already had, that is equivalent to the Mage learning a new spell (something which is very cheap). When a mundane character wants to enhance a skill they have to a higher level of ability, that is equivalent to the Mage raising the force on their spell focus (which is again something that is very cheap). To put up disclaimers that you're going to charge mundane characters "a lot" of karma for either of those things is a frank admission that you don't understand how the high karma games function and why people feel small in the pants next to Mages.

---

Anyway, having given their Accuracy concept a second thought, I have determined that it is even worse than I first thought. Because it doesn't even remotely do even the thing they gave as an example. The ability of a rifle to shoot for kilometers actually has nothing to do with the maximum number of hits you can roust up - distance penalties are a reduction in dice pool. Which means that weapons with a "lower accuracy" are less bothered by extreme range than weapons with a higher accuracy. Heck, low accuracy weapons are less bothered by any negative conditions: weather, cover, visibility, whatever. Negative conditions reduce your dice pool, which in turn means that you'll roll very large piles of hits less often, and the accuracy cap will matter less.

What low accuracy weapons are really bad at is shooting fast moving targets at short range. You know, people on full defense who are rolling a lot of defense dice. Because those are the people you need a lot of hits to connect with. So a grimy old Remington with a cracked barrel is totally fine for sniper work, because your dicepool is small and you only need one hit. But you really need a high quality sniper rifle for melee combat, because when you're in close combat you have access to your full dicepool and you need a lot of hits to overcome the defense pool of your target.

So it's not just that you're introducing a stealth hardcap to what mundane characters can ever accomplish, thereby making Spirits literally unbeatable at the high end. It's that even the very limited thing it is supposed to do is something that it really seriously gets exactly backwards.

I need to not read things Hardy writes. He had two teasers there and both of them revealed that he had absolutely no idea what the fuck he was doing.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

Wouldn't distance modifiers in the next edition just be accuracy modifiers though? It seems like, if you're gonna change one thing, you'd change other things to go along with it. Then again, this is J.Hardy so...

Question: Would "accuracy" as a weapon distinction work better as a range penalty profile for each weapon? eg: a particular shotgun gets +2 within 10m, +0 within 20m, and -2 out to 100m? Or something like that?

[Username17]

Wouldn't distance modifiers in the next edition just be accuracy modifiers though? It seems like, if you're gonna change one thing, you'd change other things to go along with it. Then again, this is J.Hardy so...

Question: Would "accuracy" as a weapon distinction work better as a range penalty profile for each weapon? eg: a particular shotgun gets +2 within 10m, +0 within 20m, and -2 out to 100m? Or something like that?

Accuracy modifiers for range would be even stupider, since as long as they don't modify accuracy to zero they have no effect at all on your chances of hitting an unaware target and only make your attack easier to dodge. Then there's a cliff, where they would impose an actual maximum range at the point they reduced accuracy to zero.

It's just a really shitty toggle. A lower accuracy has no effect whatever on your chance of hitting at all, but substantially reduces your number of average hits. That hurts in an opposed test, and has literally zero effect in an unopposed test. Virtually exactly the opposite of anything that you might describe as "accuracy".

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Accuracy might work, depending on they do it.

Seeing J. Hardys track record as LD so far... :rofl:

Ahem . .

>Morg
>Posted February 2, 2013 at 10:03 am | Permalink
>
>So is this how you will be doing programs for the matrix as well? Hacking/Computer + Int Limited by program?


jhardy
Posted February 2, 2013 at 12:12 pm | Permalink

Not quite. It will be Attribute and Skill limited by cyberdeck (yes, cyberdeck) attributes. Programs will add some functionality and provide other bonuses.

REBOOT!

[OgreBattle]

Fuckin radical, i love the imagery of cyberdecks

[Stahlseele]

*nods*
Primetide, one of the Head-Honchos of SRO and all around nice guy, answered me when i asked about this on their part of the shadowrun boards. Seems like People will have Comlinks with AR and Runner will have Decks with VR or something like that . .

[Fuchs]

Groovy, back to stupidity. Cyberdecks are one thing we should be glad to have gotten rid of.

[Stahlseele]

More Style in my eyes. Not neccessarely bad.

[Fuchs]

Being forced to go back to dragging around cyberdecks is bad. Commlinks allowed more stealth. And if you have to mark deckers by lugging around so much hardware, technomancers beat them out whenever you need to disguise yourself to infiltrate some compound.

[kzt]

Being forced to go back to dragging around cyberdecks is bad.

Just use RDP to access your cyberdeck.

[sabs]

well, except you need a cyberdeck to rdp into your cyberdeck?