Trill wrote:Initiation has 4 purposes
Thanks.
Trill wrote:Eh, that feels too much like "Rocks fall, everyone dies". You should totally be able to do bad stuff in a game where you are playing monsters, and I rather have the world and the people react to that, than to get told "You did bad thing? Here's punishment without in-universe justification"
Too arbitrary. Mechanical consequence is best. Otherwise, it's down to the GM and in my experience, most GMs are shit at or cowards about coming down on stupid shit. At least if you give them this, they've got something to lean on or we've now just confirmed they're a shithead and shouldn't be hosting games at all.
To be clear, "bad thing" here is rape, murder, torture, GBH... to tell me this wouldn't fuck with you unless you were a psychopath means we exist on two separate planes of reality here.
Trill wrote:In 4e and 5e Karma (the points) and Karma (the concept) have a tenuous, long-range relationship. Yes, in 5e you get extra Karma or Nuyen depending on how evil the run was. But you can do a Evil run and still do good things, or a Good run and still kick puppies on the way.
It's linked. No matter how tenuous, it's still linked. Bad design choice. I mean, this in itself goes against your preferred "do as thou wilt shalt be thine length of thy law" since you'll lose precious EXP because you knocked over a homeless person's tent/shopping cart accidentally.
Trill wrote:
- Street Cred: How much the street and the Runner circles respect you. Gives you extra dice to negotiations with people that know about you.
- Notoriety: How infamous you are. Gives penalties to tests where you want people to see you in a good light or trust you. Gives extra dice when using intimidation or fear.
In 4e it also tells us that GMs may use it against you by letting you be targeted by police, people out for revenge or people trying to make a name for themselves.
- Public Awareness: How known you are to the wide public. Bigger means that people have a higher chance to know about you.
That can be good (if you want to use your Street Cred but the other guy can't remember who you are) or bad (if the police and security forces keep a dossier on you.)
Yes, this stuff. I put it all under Rep in my head.
See, there was no need for them to make Karma also be EXP here. Notoriety serves the purpose perfectly. Act like a psycho, get trusted less or get called only for nasty jobs. Great, wonderful, totally cool. Why is there a problem with this being mechanically represented?
Stahlseele wrote:Another Gentlemans Agreement.
Trolls could use 2-Handed weapons (yes, both melee AND firearms) as if they were one handed basically . . There was nothing to stop a Troll from getting into a sweet ass suit of Heavy Milspec Armor with dermal and bone armor and high Toughness and shrug off enough incoming fire to level small buildings.
And then they could shoot back with not one but two PACs because they can use those things onehanded/akimbo style.
In SR4, Trolls became surprisingly athletic.
There were Number-Games of Char-Gen Trolls that could climb up walls faster than anybody else could run in a straight line.
Or Trolls that ran faster than sports cars.
One very min/max Troll concept in SR4 moved slowly, but with how he was set up, he seemed to erode barriers and be able to simply walk through walls because of his unarmed damage against barriers.
Spoilered because fuck off huge pictures . .
Thanks for spoilering. Also, why is there a piece of Dragon Age concept art in there, I swore the first two characters look like Qunar'ii.
Also, that last pic is hilarious. That is why I can't understand for the life of me why they'd want to N-E-R-F Trolls as hard as they have, apparently. I thought the whole point was that Trolls were essentially they're own archetype? The others being close to the trad racial implementation.
Gentlemen's Agreement? Well, that's just system failure right there.
Trill wrote:Ah, yes. Bear-Who-Walks-Through-Walls.
Hah hah!
Whipstitch wrote:
I won't really pretend to understand this mindset. This is probably some riff on the "Everything has a price" spiel that the SR5 developers got hooked on, but that's never been as self-evident to me as it apparently is to you and some other cyberpunk fans. I mean, at the end of the day Robocop still chose to call himself Murphy and honestly the whole bit where people are less human because they have super advanced prosthetics is one of the those areas where things get kinda sketchy and ableist. I'd rather treat essence mostly as a build limiter and just support a wide variety of character builds instead.
I appreciate the honesty. This is why this convo as a whole has gone a lot better than if I had, say, did this thread on RPG.net . *shudder*
I agree with you on the ESS stuff. My problem is that the game has inextricably linked morality with stuff core to the system instead of making it its own sub-system like in NWOD or WH40KRP. Either we work with it or we rework it by surgical separation the way I've suggested. But if the designers have done it like this already, obviously they feel these two things are one and the same.
Trill wrote:And you are saying that we should penalize the mundanes further?
This game just gets more broken the further on your level up your build, jesus...
Direct reply: everyone should be penalized or, barring that reductionist approach (which seems to have happened each edition by the sound of it), simply balance the game systems better by challenging the unintentioned magic supremacy.
I feel like when I host this, after a few sessions, I'll come up with a pretty decent solution. Did it with NWOD, did it with WH40KRP, The Void, pretty much every game I've come in contact with that did something that just held it back from being greater. Shit, I even had to do this with SOTDL to make sure the PCs actually got a basic income every Lvl and their Professions fed into that.
FrankTrollman wrote:Archetype balance is complicated in Shadowrun, and is somewhat different in the different editions.
So, once again, you're saying that the system is fucked in specific, very grating ways in just that many more words than that?
See the thing is -- and maybe this is my problem, you know, trying to give my players variable and interesting challenges -- I'm gonna want to throw all sorts of stuff at my players in-game. Drones, adepts, SWAT, traps, mages, shaman, rival shadowrunners, gang members, mafia, spirits etc... And I'm gonna want to provide setups rewarding their archetypes and, in those same scenarios, challenge their builds.
Am I wrong for wanting to do that in Shadowrun?