The stats don't even need to be completely standardized, or there could be an options pool to fiddle with their stats so that the gun guy can get a better firearm out of his saturday night special just as the hacker can presumably get more out of his burner phone. Encourage players to rant about how the Česká Zbrojovka 808 has a distinctive sound signature, so you want to put some tape on the side to create ambiguity in gunfire locators when firing it in cities. Or whatever. Characters should have opportunities to technobabble their specialty field, and a setup where the assumption is that people get burner equipment for each job lends itself to that quite well.Red_Rob wrote:Guns, drones, and vehicles could all be given standard stats for their type without affecting the core experience of the game I think, and it would encourage things such as ditching your gear after every mission to avoid leaving a trail, which is thematic.
I think I agree with you, although I think "power schedule" is probably not the right word. The summoner or necromancer certainly does different stuff to get their spirit allies for the mission, and they quite possibly have different resource expenditures to do it. But the fact that the things they are providing in the legwork phase are now comparable to the things that the summoner and necromancer are providing makes the different power schedules be something that can at least potentially be balanced.Verbyast wrote:It also feels a lot like the classic summoner/necromancer/artificer characters from DND, where the character's role is "provides useful doohickies" and its abilities are directed toward ensuring that the doohickies (summons, skeletons, gadgets) are always available and useful. The drone guy is the closest to this (doohickies = drones, availability = rebuild them from salvage, usefulness = do nifty things with drones), but you could make a shooty character on the same framework (doohickies = guns, availability = can get good guns, usefulness = can shoot good guns). They're on the same "power schedule", if that's the right word, as summoner and necromancer builds.
Meh. Movement is always going to be weirdly abstracted in a game with distinct turns, and the terms used for that movement are necessarily going to be used in a way that is not identical with reality. In D&D, your "speed" is actually your displacement and not your speed. I mean, consider how fucked up from a physics perspective the statement "When you run, you can move up to four times your speed in a straight line" is. Running increases your speed, it doesn't let your speed happen more than once. But still, you fucking knew what they meant, and everything is fine. The vehicle rules in SR4 are terrible because they don't work well, not because they use physical terms incorrectly. Besides, they basically use the word "velocity" correctly, it's acceleration that they use in a manner that doesn't make sense.kzt wrote:It hardly seems overly demanding to expect that some guy being paid to write rules and another guy being paid to edit those rules understands what a dictionary is and knows how to look at up what the word "velocity" means and what it doesn't.
Actual Spec Ops teams could have gadget pools like Q in James Bond. Each Mission they get to requisition some stuff for being Spec Ops guys.Sigil wrote:If you wanted your characters to feel more like special Ops instead of shady criminals, you could go with some sort of wealth system instead of discrete money. Your rigger would simply primarily invest his Revenue Points into Drones and Computers, while your street samurai would have most of his invested into Cyberware and Combat Gear. Between missions you could allow the characters to decide what that expenditure actually represents for that time frame, and could even have them incur minor penalties or bonuses for destroyed equipment during the prior mission.
Implemented poorly, though, such a system has its own problems (see D20 Modern).
The wealth level system of D20 Modern was a war crime. I like abstracted wealth, and you're basically going to have to abstract wealth in at least some way (lifestyle costs, for example), but you're going to have to do it very differently from what D20 Modern provided.
-Username17
