The Gaming Den

So lots of people ask me two similar, but very different questions. The first is what I think will happen with 5th edition Shadowrun, and the other is what I think should happen with 5th edition. These are very different of course, since I won't be in any way involved with deciding who does any of the actual writing, editing, playtesting, graphics, typesetting, or development of the new edition. So I'm just going by the things that you can get people in the design community as a whole to groan and roll their eyes at the mention of for things that will get hit with the change stick. There will - of course - be a lot of change for change's sake. There's really no way to predict any of that. But a number of people, including some of the people who probably will be making those choices, are genuinely curious what choices I would make. So here they are.

The Look

Books in general have gotten longer since the halcyon days of the 1st edition Player's Handbook (which comes in tidily under one hundred thousand words). The 4th edition Core Book clocks in at about 250 thousand words, SR4A comes in at nearly 300k. I do not regard this trend as being universally positive. I think 300 thousand words is simply too long. Coming back from that particular abyss is difficult, the Shadowrun World keeps getting stuff added to it, and even cautious mentions of it uses up word count like you wouldn't believe (unless you've done any typesetting, in which case you would). But overall, I think the goal should be about 275k words. Now a good chunk of that is going to be fiction, which is flat easy to write. SR4 opens with the 6,500 word short fiction "Buzzkill" and SR4A opens with the 6,500 word short fiction "What's Inside your heart' - and I'll be honest that I can't actually remember what happens in either one. But the really important thing about these fiction pieces is that they don't have to be assigned to the main writing staff. They don't have rules, or dates, so the writers of the rest of the book don't have to concern themselves over much with what goes on in them. This is important, because it means that you can set all those pieces aside and have them written separately, or even at the last minute while you're doing layout.

Presentation is important. SR4A is on to something with putting the fiction pieces on different colored backgrounds. Much more so than the SR4 Core Book that put them in with italics. I find italics hard to read for more than a paragraph or so. I know I'm not alone here. Putting the fiction sections into a legible font is a must. Basically, you got 12 fiction pieces through the book, and the presentation in SR4A is way better (also: about 20,000 words longer). So you'd go with that. For those keeping track at home, that means that you'd have an initial fiction piece clocking in at 6,500 words, and 11 more pieces of genre fiction that were 3k each. And that means that the actual rules (including history sections and shit) would be 235,000 words or so. You can get about 1500 words a day out of a Freelance Writer, so at 5 writers, you're looking at about 31 days to actually write the damn thing. A month if you set these guys' ass on fire and offer some real monetary incentives to fucking do it.

Removing Italic blocks isn't just for fiction intros. SR4A uses blocks of off-color text for that. I find the green they use kind of hideous, but it's much more legible than italics. Personally, I'd use a light blood red/brown.

You're also going to want some art. And by "some" I mean lots of art. You already know what art you're going to want, so of course you're going to start getting art submissions day one, instead of the usual bullshit of waiting until writing is all done. And yeah, this means that the art won't fit very well with the short fiction pieces. So fucking what? If you have enough full color pictures of sexy ork babes with pistols, you can have your typesetter figure something out. That's what you pay him for.

Anyway, let's go chapter by chapter:

Welcome to the Shadows

It's basically a form letter at this point. You have to put in the damn "what is a role playing game" section at the beginning of every book. SR4A pretty much word-for-word copied the section from SR4. It's a bit over 4k words, and it works fine. I'd probably throw in a paragraph about investigation, intimidation, and counter-insurgency work. But whatever. This chapter is coming in at less than 5k words, but it's also going to be done on a Thursday since so much of it is text lifts.

And So it Came to Pass...

I'm deliberately using the SR1 chapter heading rather than the SR4 one here. 10k words like in the SR4/SR4A book is plenty, but this shit really needs to get out of Fastjack's editorial voice, like yesterday. It's the damn history section, the players can't afford to have it cluttered up with shit like Fastjack's opinion about some corp or political movement.

Dry as toast, it's the fucking history section. You got to do all the flash bang in the six thousand five hundred words of actual fiction you put at the front of the book. But while you're at it, you should put your foot down on some outright contradictions in the setting - especially those involving Los Angeles (which has by far the worst offenses leveled against it). Specific points you should nail down are:

• Tir Invasion of California.
• Aztec conquest of San Diego.
• Secession of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
• The flooding of LA.
• Germany. WTF.
• The New Soviet.

Shadowrun has always been alternate history. Even when it first came out it referred to decisions by Supreme Court justices who had already left the bench. But it has a number of key events that have already (not) happened. To an extent that's fine. However, to avoid rubbing our noses in it, the exact dates on things like the Seretech Decision should probably be left off. In SR's original timeline, the Soviet Union holds on until like 2020. That should probably be quietly not mentioned, with only the formation of the New Soviet referenced by date.

Life on the Edge

It's about 12k in SR4 and about 14.4 in SR4A. If anything, I think it can be padded out to about 15k or even a bit more. The additions made by SR4A (like the current events ticker) are good ideas, but you'd want to rewrite them to be about new stuff because the book takes place 63 years in the future (would be 65, but Catalyst's release dates have been way behind of late). Still, we're again talking about something that would be pretty short to write. Again, stop taking fucking sides in this section, it needs to lose the reference to not liking Aztechnology, there are plenty of Shadowrunners who work for AZT.

Game Concepts

Now we're talking! A chapter that is going to get substantial rewrites. It's like 14k in SR4 and they grew it up to 15.75 in SR4A. And the general flow of it is going to be pretty much as-is. Key changes would be:

• Critical Successes do not restore Edge. That is just a broken rule that encourages bad ass cyborgs to do trivial bullshit to show off and regain Edge.
• Everyone and everything has exactly 10 condition boxes. The 8+X shit goes away. Also, you'd go to the Front Slash + Back Slash notation of nWoD (no Aggravated Damage, which simplifies things considerably).
• Talk about Changelings here. You'll have a picture of a human, dwarf, elf, ork, troll, cat girl and four armed asura. You'll list them too.
• You're going to put the changes list for fourth edition at the beginning of this chapter.
• The basic Extended Test is going to move completion time up the time chart by net hits, rather than rolling an ass tonne of separate times.
• The Difficulty table should have a threshold list for every number 1 through 6.
• Drop the distinction between Cyber and Bioware. More on that later.
• The Body and Charisma attribute are gone.

Character Creation

At about 14k in SR4 and a bit over 15k in SR4A, it's already about the right size. It's pretty straight forward, and I wouldn't change it substantially in flow. Changelist:

• Import a couple of your favorite qualities from the Shadowrunner's Companion. I don't even care which. It's just a piece of "value added" spice.
• Drop the Build Point allowance for a starting character from 400 BP to 300 BP.
• Drop the cost of Active Skills to 2 BP, Skill Groups to 5 BP, and Background Skills to 1 Bp.
• All Metatypes cost 25 BP.
• Reset Ork and Troll stats based on the fact that Charisma and Body don't exist.
• Drop the entire reference to calculating your condition monitors, because you have 10 boxes in your condition monitor.
• Drop the BPs for Services thing, because it's a really dumb plan. Allow players to do a certain number of binding rituals before the game starts.

Willing to hear arguments about dropping Language ratings and just having a very cheap quality that lets you speak another language.

Sample Characters

I don't even really care. These guys should be made late in the process and made well-ish. You're going to write up about 16 characters, and it will be amongst the most painful and least rewarding 6-7k words written for the whole book. But it has to be done. You gotta put out two versions of each metatype and probably 8 humans. And you want to throw out at least 2 Street Sams, 2 magicians, 2 Hackers, and 2 Riggers. And that leaves you 8 to fuck around with. Face, Bounty Hunter, Adept, whatever.

Skills

Basically, we're looking at 15k words of goodness (16k in SR4A). The big keys are that we're going to be dumping some skills. And by "some" I mean:

• Dodge
• Pistols, Automatics, Longarms, Heavy Weapons (new skill: Firearms)
• Unarmed, Clubs, Blades, Throwing Weapons (new skill: Close Combat)
• Exotic Melee Weapon, Exotic Ranged Weapon (new rule: Exotic Weapons suffer a -1 dicepool penalty unless you have an appropriate specialization or martial style).
• Navigation, Tracking (subsumed into Survival)
• Arcana

But it's not just that. The Skill Rating Table has to fucking go away. It will be replaced by a Dicepool rating table that has 2 die increments out to 16.

Obviously, you're going to be changing some of the attribute tests. Not the least because you are straight ditching some of them. But also because you want a non-linear strength lifting chart so that gecko tape can actually hold up a fucking man without having the strength to rip through tank armor.

And this is important: the Skill Augmentation max is always +3. No matter what your skill actually is.

Back from neuroimaging.

So now we get down to the brass tacks. The chapters that have actual difficult decisions, the ones that won't just be text lifts from previous rule books. This means that we have to identify problems and propose solutions to those problems. And then create a


Combat

Combat in SR is actually pretty decent. People like it. But it bogs down, especially with large numbers of combatants. The key problems are:

• Too many rolls to resolve an attack (contrasts favorably with nWoD's "not enough rolls" problem).
• Many die rolls are essentially meaningless (Soak and Initiative especially).
• Not enough "happens" in combat.
• The Two Shot problem renders weapons weirdly equivalent.
• Melee isn't interesting or good.
• Vehicle rules in SR4 are so bad that the Rigger stopped existing as a supported archetype.

We got like 24k words to play with, and it's a big deal. This is in many ways, the most important chapter, we gotta make it count. So we come out swinging: The Combat Round is now 12 seconds long. Also, we don't limit how many Free Actions people can take. This means that the cops might actually show up after a panic button is pressed, and it means that people can like talk and shit. Boom, we got combat rounds to include things "happening" so we are on the right track.

Next, we divide the round into 4 Initiative Passes. Explicitly and exclusively. 5th IPs can't exist because there are only four of them to be had. You can choose to act in any Initiative Pass, ad people who are more bad ass can act in more than one of them. You declare a movement path and keep moving along that path in each initiative pass until you act in one and choose a different path or you abort movement for whatever reason. This isn't a huge difference from the way SR4 works already, but it changes it in ways that are key to smoother running of the combat round and which allow vehicular movement to make a bit more sense.

Now we address initiative. The current initiative roll is a waste of time, because everyone just goes in initiative order anyway (a character with Init 6 just never beats a character with init 8). Plausible options include simply not rolling, or having people go in the order of their actual number of hits.

But the big deal is damage. We are straight up going to static damage boxes (everyone has 10), and LMSD damage. Every net hit for the attacker or the soak shifts damage up or down one category, which means that you'll be able to actually die from an 8 meter fall. In general, this means that damage codes can be scaled back. Way back, since a Damage 4 weapon will fucking kill you. This makes armor and soak bonuses matter, because damage codes are small enough that you could ever possibly soak them, and also means that small weapons in the hands of skilled people could be a serious threat.

Second big change: the Defense Roll is gone. That's right, there's an attack roll, and there's a Soak Roll. You have a threshold to hit the target that isn't necessarily zero, and if you hit, you go straight to the target having to soak. This will speed things up immensely.

Recoil needs an overhaul. I think we are going to nWoD style weapon strength limits rather than the old per-bullet penalty. This means that we'll be able to jettison most of the gas vent crap. Super Gas Vent IV was only needed because the recoil system didn't work properly. So there will be penalties for using a weapon with a strength min more than your strength. Firing modes like Burst Fire will increase the strength min.

Vehicles need an overhaul, but the key is the whole combat turn pathing thing. Accidents happen because you've already used your Initiative Passes this round and can't repath, so the only thing you can do is try to abort by making a piloting test to panic stop. Making running over a dude with a sport car do less than the thirty P it does in SR4A is a given.

Damage isn't the only thing that can be brought down to saner numbers - it's even more so for armor. Remember that 3 dice will on average shave 4 boxes off a deadly wound. So these numbers can go way down. Also, inanimate objects now only have armor, they do't have Body scores.

The Awakened World

Shadowrun's Magic system ranks as one of the best systems ever. Designed by actual crazy people who think magic really works, it comes off as a magic system that could actually work. Nevertheless, it has some problems. They are:

• Adepts keep getting kicked in the pants.
• Magic items are painfully uninteresting (count how many plot point items follow the rules on what magic items do at all in the actual stories or world plotline).
• Spirits are way too powerful.
• Ritual Sorcery is far too weak.
• Manipulation Bloat.
• Some spells have drain codes that are not fair.

These are, in general, not that hard to deal with. The Adept Power cost list was written up in the early nineties, when every Adept got power points equal to their Essence at Chargen. No adays, Adepts start with one Power Point and have to buy up from there. So their stuff costs too much. In general, a Skill should never ever cost more than .25 to raise. An attribute should never cost more than .5. Extra Initiative Passes should cost 1, 2, 3 instead of a stiffer cost increase than that. And so on.

But the real umber one problem is Spirits. The Spirit Storm already got errataed out of existence, but you're still getting a Spirit with an Attribute and Skill that are both equal to Force by opposing its Force with your Attribute plus skill. That gives it a dice pool that is generally around 33% larger than that of the PC who summoned it - which is fucked up. So boom, Spirits have Skills equal to half force, rounded up. But they also need to have their Edge and Mental stats reigned in. So from now on, an Unbound Spirit has Mental Stats of 2 across the board (they can use their Strength to soak Mana spells), which increase to 3 for bound spirits (Allies, Free Spirits, and Queens are hard core because they have mental stats higher than a normal human, which big transient Force 9 newy summoned bad asses do not have).

The only people in the whole world who care about getting a magic sword are people who can't use magic. Also, bonuses to dice pools are boring. Magic items should in general be something that people want, and also something that is interesting. As such, we mostly dump foci as more than a foot note. From now on, most of that section is fucking anchored effects - which in turn no longer cost an asstonne of Karma. Dual-natured katanas that shed fire that street samurai can use. Fuck. Yes.

Spells. First of all, we're moving all the Manipulation spells that influence perceptions or emotions into Illusion, where they belong. Silence is exactly like Invisibility, and it belongs in Illusion. Influence and Control Emotions? Illusions. Secondly, Indirect Combat spells kind of blow monkey ass, so they should get a huge Drain Discount. I don't think Firebolt should cost more drain than Power Bolt. Seriously. Stuff like Confusion needs to increase action thresholds rather than penalize dice. You're only getting a net hit or three, and shifting just a few dice around hardly gets noticed.

Ritual Spellcasting: Sympathetic Linking for the win, for normal casters without metamagic. It's the whole point. We want people to be afraid of giving up their hair samples again. Secondly, you should be able to set up a link ahead of time that you can cash out with a quick spell. So that a Doc Wagon mage could have the link taken with the paramedics and cast a heal spell from his office on a wounded dude in the street. You know, useful shit.

But hey, while we're here, we can also divy up the spirits a bit better. Shamanism gets Plant, Water, Beast, Man, and Air.

The Wireless World

This section has too many problems to bullet point them. The SR4 version is 28k words of wasted opportunities, and the SR4A version is over 30k and if anything even worse. Screw that. Screw it all. The author gets 25k words. They gotta make it simpler. No, simpler than that. With less die rolls.

It's a ground-up rewrite. The core conceit is that there are levels of Matrix immersion that open you up to new kinds of attack, but also allow you to use greater defenses. The Firewall you can benefit from is limited by your immersion. People who are disconnected entirely can't be black hammered, but can have limited remote hacking effects inflicted on them (peristalsis, distraction, overstimulation, etc.), and they can't run a firewall, because they are disconnected. People who have actual datajacks running can be black hammered, but they can also run any Firewall they want. People who have a personally calibrated trode net can run a limited firewall and expose themselves to middling tier attacks (like blackout). And yeah, if you can scan someone up close and personal for five minutes, you can trode them and hit them with second tier brain hacks.

The next thing is that people should under no circumstance have to worry about thirty different programs. Or program ratings. You have a Firewall rating, a System rating, and... that's it. You use your own stats and skills to define your dice pools, and the maneuvers you have available are all based on the concept of hacking on the fly. In general, there should be a Cybercombat option, a Hacking option, and an Electronic Warfare option to do to computers and people at every level of immersion.

Stuff needs to be handled with one or two die rolls. Period.

Running the Shadows

It's about 24k words in both books. That can be repeated easily. It's mostly a pretty passable chapter either way. A couple of things have to be done:

• Healing is way too fast.
• The Disease rules from Augmentation should be ported in.
• Drugs should follow the same rules as poisons. Which means that yes, there should be beneficial effects to Poisons you'd actually want.
• Drugs/Poisons should follow the same rules as Diseases, because they work better than either of the other options.
• The Notoriety/Street Cred rules need to be scrapped and replaced by something more akin to GTA wanted stars.
• The standard advancement scheme should just involve gaining BP.

And that's pretty much it. Most of the chapter is perfectly reasonable GM advice. And lists of traps. Both of which are pretty much fine.

Friends and Foes

Group Edge should go away. Grunts can just plain not have Edge. Also, the professional rating chart should go all the way from one to six, with explanations. And while we're on the subject, Level 3 grunts have PC stat lines, that is bullshit. A starting PC should be better than an individual Lonestar beat cop. Seriously.

The Prime Runner rules are just poorly conceived, and should be dropped. To be replaced by a discussion about how using NPCs with comparable abilities to the PCs can be good for rivalries. In fact, you could call the subheading "Rivals" and have a picture of two dwarven riggers ordering their drones to fight.

The Contacts table needs to be rewritten. Right now, the basic "this is an NPC I know" type contact costs way too much, and having Damian Knight willing to take a bullet for you is way too cheap (frankly, it shouldn't be on the list at all). I think we should go back to "Level 2 Contacts" and such like in SR2/3.

The NPCs are pretty solid, although obviously, the more the better.

Critter powers are mostly pretty decent. Changelist:

• Immunity is just Immunity. ItNW is a whole new power that is called Invulnerability. They are not connected in any way.
• All the weird crap about brain damage and spells is just out for Regeneration. Every Initiative Pass, the critter gets to heal boxes by rolling Magic + Strength. Damage caused by something it is allergic to stays, when they take incapacitating damage the healing rate slows, and if they take so much damage that they are still dead after getting a regen attempt, they stay dead. Done.
• Confusion modifies thresholds, not dicepools.
• Critters with Astral Form use their physical stats on the astral.
• Rewrite Earth Spirits so that there is a purpose to them.
• Add a new power that is called "Speed" that works similarly to Movement, except just on the critter's natural locomotion.
• Bring high end stats down to the new requirements.

Gear

This is where the magic happens. All the damage blocks are going to have to get cut down, because a Light Pistol will be pretty happy with a damage value of 2. All the armor values can get reduced proportionately as well. Every weapon needs a strength value. Concealability modifiers should be to perception thresholds, not dicepools.

All augmentations need to reduce Essence in the same way. The Bio/Cyber inter-non-transparency thing is dumb. But the big deal with augmentations is that they will now be marked as to whether they are "local" or "Systemic" mods (which determines how easily they can be removed), as well as being "cultured" or "generic" (which determines whether they have to be custom built for the recipient). And finally, each should have a "tech base" - which is just a period when they came into use (2040s, 2050s, 2060s, or 2070s).

And Bone Lacing does not come in "aluminum" - it comes in ratings. And it is a cultured systemic mod with a 2040s techbase. Bone Density is a generic systemic mod with a 2060s techbase.

-Username17

Frank, you have been saying 'so it came to pass' a lot lately.

Everything you say that phrase I feel like John Smith is punching my cat in the liver.

So stop that.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: I feel like John Smith is punching my cat in the liver.

Wat?
did Lago just have a stroke?

Silly as it is, I like part about separate meters for physical and stun damage (though each should just be 10 boxes, sure). Since wound modifiers are based on your total damage of either type (aren't they?) then you still can't really do anything if you're at 9 damage on each, but you're still awake and you can yell at people and stuff.

If Body and Charisma are gone, then Strength just does most of what Body did (soak rolls), but what does the jobs that charisma did ("talky" skills)?

Arcana lets you write spell formulas. Does that just become a knowledge skill that some people have? Or do you just ditch spell formulas as a thing that you buy since you pay 3BP to learn a spell anyways?

Lokathor wrote:Since wound modifiers are based on your total damage of either type (aren't they?) then you still can't really do anything if you're at 9 damage on each, but you're still awake and you can yell at people and stuff.

That... could be correct or incorrect depending on what exactly you mean by "total damage of either type". If you have 2 Stun and 2 Physical, those don't stack to give you 4 (and hence a -1 penalty), you get zero wound penalties (zero from Stun, zero from Physical). If you have 3 Stun, you get a total -1 wound penalty.

This also means you're at an advantage against an enemy if you deal all Stun or all Physical compared to doing part Stun/part Physical.

that is what armor is for. Soaking whether natural armor aka troll or or manufactured aka balistic best.

FrankTrollman wrote:[*] Talk about Changelings here. You'll have a picture of a human, dwarf, elf, ork, troll, cat girl and four armed asura. You'll list them too.

Really?
Really?

Can't the extras just be shoved into an expansion? And aren't ghouls iconic enough to warrant inclusion in the core book if you're adding "four armed asuras" and cat girls?

FrankTrollman wrote:[*] Drop the distinction between Cyber and Bioware. More on that later.

I'm glad you said that. The distinction has been pissing me off for a long time.

It would be bad enough with the essence accounting if there was some consistency to what was considered 'cyber' and what was 'bio', but instead it's a combination of 'completely random' and 'another kind of beta'.

Anyway, please continue.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Frank, you have been saying 'so it came to pass' a lot lately.

Everything you say that phrase I feel like John Smith is punching my cat in the liver.

So stop that.

You mean "Joseph Smith." Joseph Smith is the illiterate con man who can't write two pages without using the phrase. But it's still a useful phrase. Especially if you don't hang it at the beginning of every paragraph. John Smith founded Virginia.

Lokathor wrote:Silly as it is, I like part about separate meters for physical and stun damage

The problem isn't the "silly" it's the part where people overcast to avoid getting knocked out and similar such nonsense.

Catharz wrote:Really?
Really?

Yes. Really. I don't mean that they get a playable writeup in the basic book, I mean that they get described as components of metahumanity in the basic book. With pictures. Ghouls totally get a stat line in the NPCs, and Asuras get to be described as one of the things humans are in the 2070s. Neither one of them get a BP cost until the "aw fuck it" book of bonus (and likely unbalanced) PC options - which of course is Runner's Companion in every edition of the game. And they are called Asuras, and not Nartaki. Because Nartaki is, among other things, a euphemism for prostitute.

-Username17

I see. That mostly makes sense, although it seems like giving a BP cost is completely trivial if you've already written up NPC stats.

Quantumboost wrote:

Lokathor wrote:Since wound modifiers are based on your total damage of either type (aren't they?) then you still can't really do anything if you're at 9 damage on each, but you're still awake and you can yell at people and stuff.

That... could be correct or incorrect depending on what exactly you mean by "total damage of either type". If you have 2 Stun and 2 Physical, those don't stack to give you 4 (and hence a -1 penalty), you get zero wound penalties (zero from Stun, zero from Physical). If you have 3 Stun, you get a total -1 wound penalty.

This also means you're at an advantage against an enemy if you deal all Stun or all Physical compared to doing part Stun/part Physical.

I do it the opposite, and it works out that people can mix damage types all they want, and things suffer more before they go down. At first I read it to mean that wound modifiers were based upon each track separately (based upon the character sheet diagram too), then the first GM I played with insisted that the character sheet diagrams were misleading and that you actually just combine them before determining a single large wound modifier.

I personally think that it works out better when you combine the total damage boxes taken to determine a single wound modifier, regardless of what the book actually wants you to do. I also tend to make effects that let you reduce wound penalties shave off an entire penalty point at once instead of reducing your damage total before calculation, so I guess I'm doing all sorts of wacky things with the wound rules.

FrankTrollman wrote:The problem isn't the "silly" it's the part where people overcast to avoid getting knocked out and similar such nonsense.

Question: Should the overcast mechanic simply be changed?

Example: "When overcasting, you determine drain damage normally based on the spell's force and then take that much damage as both stun damage and as physical damage (soak each value separately)."

Lokathor wrote:I do it the opposite, and it works out that people can mix damage types all they want, and things suffer more before they go down.

Sure, that's fine. But it's not how the core SR4 handles it, and we're talking about the changes between SR4 and a hypothetical SR5, so your house rules and your GM's house rules are a non sequitir.

"We're talking about a hypothetical set of rules based on the existing rules, so considering how well some alternative to the existing rules has or hasn't worked out is pointless"

I don't at all agree with that sentiment.

Okay, I misspoke pretty badly there. Treating your houserules as the baseline you're comparing to is wrong. Treating them as a possible addition to the hypothetical rules isn't.

If the cyber/bioware distinction goes up in flames, wouldn't 'ware need a essence cost reduction all across the board? Or make higher grade stuff easier to come by?

FrankTrollman wrote:Shadowrun's Magic system ranks as one of the best systems ever. Designed by actual crazy people who think magic really works,

...wait what? That sounds awesome.

Extra Initiative Passes should cost 1, 2, 3 instead of a stiffer cost increase than that. And so on.

Could SR4 just use this too?

On the subject of Initiative Passes, if a guy has 4 passes but doesn't take an action during the first pass for whatever reason, is it just gone?

So boom, Spirits have Skills equal to half force, rounded up. But they also need to have their Edge and Mental stats reigned in.

Should unbound spirits even get access to their Edge points at all? Like with grunts, can't you just say "They can't use Essence"?

What is the point of the "Tech Base"? I mean, I find SR history pretty cool, so I'm happy to just have them listed alongside equipment as reference points, but I'd expect there to be a better reason to include them.

It can have an effect on where you can get it, who has it already, and so on. Like a second kind of availability.

Gelare wrote:What is the point of the "Tech Base"? I mean, I find SR history pretty cool, so I'm happy to just have them listed alongside equipment as reference points, but I'd expect there to be a better reason to include them.

This might or might not be Frank's actual reason, but it does mean that you could plausibly use the system to run something in an earlier timeframe in SR history.

Frank - do you anticipate that combat in SR5 will be more tactical then it is right now? Or will that aspect of combat pretty much stay the same?

On techbase: all of the above. There s legitimate desire to play Shadowrun during specific events, and the core book and future toy books should cater to that. If you want to run a bug city campaign, you shouldn't be forced to ad hoc by ware descriptions whether you think they are available - the rules should just tell you. Furthermore, clinics can indeed have technical access levels - you go to a street doc in Lagos and you can get Muscle Replacement, but not Muscle Augmentation or Body Hydraulics. And it's just plain useful for making Ex-Whatever PCs and NPCs.

As for total Essence levels, I genuinely don't think it's a problem. The high tech base stuff is so Essence Friendly that the stat may as well not exist for high nuyen bad asses. Let's be real here, Synaptic Booster 3 Delta costs less than one Essence point. It's Techbase 2070s and it's expensive as heck, but the fact remains that that's cheap as free. At the point where you can max out all your physical attributes, cyber up all your senses, and turn your IPs up to the max without resorting to Cybermancy, I just don't even see the point in juggling the more than 6 Essence in 6 Essence equations.

Damage addition: if you are going to add Lethal and Stun damage together for wound penalties, you should add them together for the consciousness check. At no time should you ever say "Damnit, my armor downgraded that attack to stun." or "I'd better overcast to take lethal damage, because I can't afford to take any more damage that isn't lethal." Those are dumb. And the [/] vs. [X] damage notation solves all that shit. On a secondary note, Lethal and Stun are bad words to use for damage types when Light and Serious are already damage levels. Also, Deadly is a bad name for a damage level when it can be inflicted as Stun that won't kill you. Should go Light, Moderate, Serious, Incapacitating, with actual damage types being Normal and Deadly. Then you can abbreviate damage suffered as NM or DS or something - which would make play-by-post a lot easier at essentially no cost.

GG wrote:Frank - do you anticipate that combat in SR5 will be more tactical then it is right now? Or will that aspect of combat pretty much stay the same?

Again with the Will/Should discrepancy. I am not going to write SR5. It will be written by a disparate group of people who feel strongly about me. Some of whom even hate me. I can say that dicepool games in general have pretty much never delivered strongly tactical combat. The resolution mechanic is actually pretty abstract, so you're not going to bust out squares or measuring tape.

On the plus side - it means you don't need miniatures. On the minus side, it means that it doesn't do Sword and Sorcery very well.

-Username17

Love the change ideas. I generally find a lot of Frank's D&D ideas to be questionable, but his SR insights are really pretty amazing.

The main one I find somewhat questionable are the LMSD damage categories, especially converting from one net hit would make the game incredibly more swingy. It also doesn't really leave much room for special types of ammunition to do much, because there's a lack of granularity.

The rest of the fixes are pretty damn awesome. I'd really actually like to see more elaboration on the matrix revision too.

And honestly, I might leave out the changelings from core, only because you really don't want people trying to be one. SR is a game of anonymity and being something ultra rare is a decidedly awful move. Unless you want to make them commonplace, it's not a good idea to wave them in the PCs faces.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:It also doesn't really leave much room for special types of ammunition to do much, because there's a lack of granularity.

You can still fiddle around with armor and the likes. Examples:
APDS reduces armor by 2, Flechettes increase damage by one step but increase armor by 4.

Murtak wrote:

RandomCasualty2 wrote:It also doesn't really leave much room for special types of ammunition to do much, because there's a lack of granularity.

You can still fiddle around with armor and the likes. Examples:
APDS reduces armor by 2, Flechettes increase damage by one step but increase armor by 4.

SR4 actually taught us that simple positive and negative modifiers to damage and dice pools just give a simple answer that is always the same. Eclipse Phase should have learned that and didn't, and the end result is that the ammos are all broken. SR5 needs to learn from that mistake. The key is proportional modifiers. Every +/-3 armor dice is worth exactly the same as +/-1 Damage value. There's no mystery there unless you vary the value of an armor point or vary the value of the AP modifiers. So "-1/2 (max 5)" is a good AP value for the APDS rounds to have, while "-2" or "-4" is not. If you wanted to balance the bonus ammo, you'd give out something like this:

Ammo	Damage	AP
APDS	-	-1/2 armor (max -5)
Explosive	+1	-
Flechette	+2	x2 armor

Tadaa. When targets have an Armor score of 3 or less, Flechette is the way to go. When the target has an Armor score between 3 and 6, Explosive is the way to go. When the target has an armor of 7 or more, APDS is the way to go. You can throw in some right curve balls in Arsenal, like where you throw in Tracer ammo that increases accuracy, and is thus better against soft or hard-to-hit targets. But for the basic expensive damage boosting ammo in the basic book, there's no reason you can't have it be contingent which is the "best."

RC wrote:Love the change ideas. I generally find a lot of Frank's D&D ideas to be questionable, but his SR insights are really pretty amazing.

Thanks. I'm here all week. On a more serious basis, D&D isn't well defined as to what it is supposed to be. So if you fiddle with the balance towards one of the possibilities, you anger people who wanted one of the others. Shadowrun is nailed down pretty hard. Figuring out how to improve the rules is just a math problem.

And honestly, I might leave out the changelings from core, only because you really don't want people trying to be one.

The key is merely to put them in the lineup of metahumanity in the "this is what humans look like now" chapter. You don't actually give them BP or stats in the basic book. There are just too many of them, so if you introduced any at all in the core book, you'd be forced to do just a tiny sample. And then those examples would end up being as common in peoples' games as Dwarves. Much better to wait on the "playing a changeling" rules until you have the space in the Companion to go nuts and throw them all in. But at the same time, they are part of the world, and you want people to be at least vaguely aware of that in a real and tangible fashion reading just the core book. So that when you introduce rules for playing the damn things later on, it won't seem like a cheat.

RC wrote:The main one I find somewhat questionable are the LMSD damage categories, especially converting from one net hit would make the game incredibly more swingy.

More swingy is actually good. Firstly, because you're taking swinginess out by hacking the Defense Roll out of the game. And you want to put some back in so that it doesn't end up like nWoD combat.

But the real point here is that the difference between some random dude on the street and a cyborg super ninja in power armor is... 4 hits on a soak test. Since that's really the full gamut of badassery between someone rolling 3 dice (body 2 + Real Leather jacket) and 15 dice (Body 7 + Full Body Armor), that needs to be the full gamut between dropping a dude and bouncing a bullet off their armored chest.

The way to make it less swingy would be to reduce the target number or increase the number of dice and ask for more hits between staging - and either one is simply a pain in the ass. Having the damage roll really matter and having knives and holdouts periodically leave nasty wounds is totally OK. Desirable even.

I'd really actually like to see more elaboration on the matrix revision too.

The Ends of the Matrix rules do what I need them to do. And that's to get people doing what they are "supposed" to be doing. Hackers get datajacks and internal simrigs, target corporations leave their wireless on, and the hacker has something to do on every mission. Those are my design goals, and they fulfill them. But other people have another design goal that they want people to dramatically pull cables out of their head while being hounded by Black IC. And if they don't get that scene, then the system just doesn't work for them. And even though I'm not one of those people, those people exist as a pretty sizable portion of the fanbase, and if you're making a whole new edition from scratch, then keeping them happy while still keeping people doing what they are supposed to be doing is totally workable. It's just a math problem.

The key is that there are two models to work with as far as getting people to turn their damn commlinks on - the carrot and the stick. Ends of the Matrix uses a simple Stick model: turn the commlink off and people can take all your data and put you in seizure without you getting to roll firewall. But if you could write the fluff from scratch of what all the basic items and cultural gadgets did, then you could run a stick and carrot system simultaneously.

Here's how it works: you got three levels of immersion, and there are tradeoffs to working at each one. And those tradeoffs take the form of increasing the number of things that could be done to you, but increasing your own caps for purposes of doing something about it. This means that the general equilibria is for people to gravitate towards an immersion level that befits their competence level, and no deeper or less deep. As long as the minimum level that you can do to people who turned their compy all the way off stays at the level of that Fringe Episode where the evil neuroscience chick had the light show that made people lose time, simply telling the Matrix to fuck off altogether won't be a good option. And then "real" hackers will have a "real" reason to plug the computer directly into their brain with the biofeedback filters turned off, and secure installations will have a "real" reason to have matrix defenses going to try to stop those guys instead of just unplugging everything.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:SR4 actually taught us that simple positive and negative modifiers to damage and dice pools just give a simple answer that is always the same. Every +/-3 armor dice is worth exactly the same as +/-1 Damage value.

Which is why I proposed flechettes they way I did - always worse against armored targets, better against unarmored targets. Multipliers do open up more possibilities though. But I'd be a little worried about handing out multiple bonus damage levels, or total soak dicepools of 10+ for that matter. Seems like the original damage level does not really matter when you attacks increase the damage by a couple of levels, ammo adds another two, getting you to incapacitating++++ or something and then armor and body take it down by 5 levels again. That's a gut feeling though, maybe it works out. I actually like the concept of any punk with a hold-out being sort of dangerous, even to a street samurai, but I'd also like an actual reason for carrying around bigger weapons than that.