Interesting posting at dumpshock: Wakshaani talking about the "design concept" of SR5.
So, before we dig into a big ol' plate of Troll meat (ew), we first have to talk a bit about design philosophy. There are a couple of key phrases that are invoked in the design process that try to bring constant color through stuff. You have:
"Everything has a price"
"Choice is good, auto-include is bad"
and
"Honor the old material"
(I'm paraphrasing here, but it's close enough.)
The first one is simple: Things should have a cost. The bigger the benefit, the bigger the cost. This cost could be in many forms ... money, Karma, Essence, Drain, whatever, but getting a benefit for free is a bad thing. Small benefits have small costs, big benefits have big costs. At some point, people need to hit a wall where they can't, or won't, pay the price. This is a good thing. There are ots of places that this can come up; A spirit pact where the spirit wants you to, say, eat a bag of kittens, a rare prototype weapon that costs a cool million Nuyen, an awesome cyber body that costs 5.95 of your Essence, leaving you little more than a brain in a really cool jar ... are you willing to pay what it takes to get these things? Some people say yes, some say no. Finding the right balance is tricky, but needs to be done.
Which leads to #2: Choice is good. Do you want this big loud pistol with a small ammo reserve or do you want this easily-hidden small pistol that does less damage but is sneaky? Do you want a sword, which uses no ammo but requires you to be way over there, or sporting rifle with really long range? These are choices, letting people tailor what they want to do, and that's good. If you instead introduce, say, a high-powered pistol that's also easy to hide, silent, and has a big ammo reserve, well you just eliminated a choice as it's clearly better than all other options. "Well of *course* you dumpstat your Strength to a 1, then get a single cyberarm with Str and Agility 6. I mean DUH." <-- This is an auto-include, which is bad. To eliminate this, you have to make one option better (Strength is more important?), the other option worse (Cyberlimbs now cost, uh, 4 essence!) or somewhere in between. Adjusting these numbers up or down is where the art comes in, as you try to figure out where the right balance to make different builds *attractive* but not *seductive*, IE, Some concepts will go some way and others another way, rather than one build to rule them all.
And then there's #3. Don't change old stuff unless you HAVE to. If you arbitrarily go around, turning the Predator into an assault rifle and make Elves half a meter tall with meter long ears, people will be up in arms and rightly so! Changing older information is to be avoided if at all possible. If you simply have to do it, it can be done, but you'd better be prepared to bring one heck of an arguement to the guys above.
"So, Wak. Half meter tall Elves? Replacing the way we've done Elves for over twenty years? Let's hear it."
"Well, uh. Lidda was a great selling point for D&D art?"
*booted to the curb*
There were a lot of topics that people complained about for years, in SR 4 but also older editions, and people upstairs noticed. Stick-n-Shock ruling everything was a known problem that had to get fixed. Non-augmented adepts simply falling so far behind the augmented adept curve needed to be handled. There were other issues, major and minor, that were handled during the cleanup and the move from 4th to 5th. Lots of subsystems got tried out, tweaked, changed, tossed out, and new ones moved into their place. Some rule debates got hot, with some passion being thornw around as cases were made for X and Y. EVentually, higher levels made calls as they are supposed to do, everyone got on the same page, and while there was some under-breath grumbling about a thing or two, everybody lined up behind the official word and moved ahead with that. These are essential things and, luckily, the Shadowrun team is filled with professionals who understand that you don't take your ball and go home if you lose a battle. Yeah, you'll still find a grumble or two, but it's mild and no one is talking revolution or whatever.
So, that brings us to Trolls.
Trolls are a defining element of Shadowrun's history. They're big and beefy and COOL, you have the horn thing, the general massiveness, the tusks... they're just cool. Everybody loves 'em. For two editions, they were minor players at best, due to how expensive it was to be a Troll and how minor the benefits were (High Strength in an edition where Strength was a dumpstat = bad investment) ... this changed in 3rd edition, where the previous 1-2 edition focus on humanity was changed, Metatypes made easier to take in chargen, and sample archetypes completely flipped from around a 15-3 human majority to a 14-2 meta-majority. 4th edition kept this going, again with a majority-meta bit of character samples and cheap metaforms.
One thing that came out of 4th was the "Anorexic Ork/Beanpole Troll" build, where people would take the meta type for cheap, keep the minimum attributes they gave (Body and Strength), then boost everything else. This was efficient as it cost roughly double to get the Body and Strength normally as it did to just take "Ork" and you got metavision on top of that. The stereotypical "Big dumb Troll" was replaced by a weedy Troll magician. Was this intentional or was it just efficiency fallout?
So, when it came to Trolls, a few things stood out. One is that in the earlier methods of chargen, being a Troll was crazy costly. Attributes were being rebalanced to make some more alluring than before, Strength in particular was getting upgraded, Charisma was made more important especially when cheap tech ways of boosting it were taken out, and getting the cost for Trolls right was a real bear.
Trolls, and even moreso Orks, have an extra layer in them which depends on the game. In some groups, "Walking while tusked" is enough to reason to be pulled aside, frisked, and made to produce a valid SIN pretty much anywhere on the street, especially in high-class areas. In otehr games, nobody gives a hoot and you can find Troll bankers in suits, reading paperwork over teensy glasses while in the middle of a Shiawase building. If you made Trolls cheaper due to racism, the other games would see a big break in Trollcost. If you didn't factor it in, then the games where "Spread 'em" was the norm would grumble about having paid so much for a Metatype then get harassed *constantly* ... it might not be worth it.
You also had to factor in the new design concepts... should the big dumb Troll be encouraged and players rewarded for going that way, or should the new model Troll be embraced and the old cast aside? Was "Troll" a character build in and of itself, or did you need to be able to say "Troll Samurai" or "Troll Mage" with barely a blip? Troll bonuses were *so* large that they deformed chargen. Should Trolls be trimmed, their bonuses made smaller, so as to be less-deforming? If you do that, do you further adjust Orks and Dwarves down, to make room for the new smaller Troll mods? How do these attribute reductions line up with older books and established canon? If we take half a meter of height off of Trolls, take away muscle mass, and make them cheaper, will the Shadowrun fanbase be willing to accept them?
Lots of decisions to make and the echo of it could cover everything. If you want to play around with (non-official) numbers yourself, here on Dumpshock there's a post about someone's home-brewed Karmagen system, where they go through and take a stab at the assorted costs of each Metatype. Just taking a Troll in that system eats up about a qurter of your karma. Is that good? Bad? Should the cost be lower? Higher? Someone in a later post will probably link to that thread, and you can discus the pros and cons here. You can also talk about the official rules and see how moving Troll priority around could make a dent, or about changing Troll stat mods, or, well, whatever really. It's Dumpshock. Things wander. smile.gif
Getting the balance just right isn't easy, to say the least. There's a thread or two on here about "Troll combat monsters" and how they can be made into giant damage-soaking machines. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is it, perhaps, a good thing that's been taken too far, or a sign of when a GM has to step in and swat a player's hand and go, "No! Try to match up with your team members." Should the game put more faith in players and GMs to do police themselves or should teh game try to do some of that work for the players, since newer GMs might not be willing, or able, to do it in a way veterans can?
Tons of variables.
My participation will be spotty for a bit, since I have a day job to deal with, but I'll be here where I can and I'll talk about what I can, but, again, there are NDA issues here and the simple fact that I'm a freelancer, not a design team member, means that there's plenty of stuff I don't know. I might have had a suggestion here or there, but it was never my rule to write and never my call to make; that's a burden of responsibility way over my pay grade. smile.gif Still, this is a topic that's come up quite a few times, so, I figured we should go ahead, get one big thread on it, and chew the fat for a while. I hope that everything can be kept civil and that criticism, which will flow, could be constructive where possible. I always suggest that if you want to point out a problem, you should try and make a stab at presenting a correction as well, but that's different than just grappling with an issue and discussing it. It should also be noted that a discussion, where a problem is disected, pulled apart, looked at from several angles, and examined, is different than a debate, where one person tries to move opinion to their own.
I think that's all the disclaimers that I have for now. Everybody put on your thinking caps. It's time to talk Trolls.
