So what the shit is so bad about Shadowrun?

[Trill]

Well, for once it would mean that Sammies could focus on more different skills (since they don't need multiple skills to cover every weapon). That's good
It would also mean that Sammies would move closer in power to Riggers (since they could now use all weapons with one skill, like riggers did with Gunnery). That's good
And the second would mean that mages would be far more specialized (thus reducing their power) but may lead to them using Summoning more often (since that's still one skill for all spirits)

[OgreBattle]

Well, for once it would mean that Sammies could focus on more different skills (since they don't need multiple skills to cover every weapon). That's good
It would also mean that Sammies would move closer in power to Riggers (since they could now use all weapons with one skill, like riggers did with Gunnery). That's good
And the second would mean that mages would be far more specialized (thus reducing their power) but may lead to them using Summoning more often (since that's still one skill for all spirits)

Like dividing up sorcery, summoning would be divided by spirit type. Perhaps some types are lumped together because there's a lot more spirits than there were gun categories.

[Trill]

Like dividing up sorcery, summoning would be divided by spirit type. Perhaps some types are lumped together because there's a lot more spirits than there were gun categories.

Maybe split them by supported Spell type?
So you have

• Combat Spirits
• Detection Spirits
• Health Spirits
• Illusion Spirits
• Manipulation Spirits

And then just make Watcher Summoning possible with any of those. So you can choose which one you take.

---

But I'm honestly unsure if splitting the magic skills is worth the hassle with more skills to use.
I think putting Weaponry into one skill, Melee Weapons in another, and reshuffling the Spell types will be both faster (since you need to worry about less skills) and better balanced (since both Mages and Sammies need only one skill instead of multiple ones)

[Username17]

Splitting up Forearms was a direct skill point tax on Street Samurai. What's odd is that a lot of Samurai players don't see it that way. Suggest that you put combat skills back together and lots of Street Samurai players flip their shit that you are taking their shit away. People think that writing more job related skill names on a character sheet makes them better, like they were writing a CV. It's actually deeply counterintuitive that more job related skills being available is bad for you - a direct result of the skills having fungible costs.

-Username17

[Trill]

Has anyone tried explaining to them that the Skill list is a receipt?
That basically they say that instead of buying a car for $5000 you should buy the tires, the chassis, the motor, the upholstery, the windows and the miscellaneous rest for $5000 each?

[Whipstitch]

Analogies can help but even if you win that argument you're still stuck with people objecting on the grounds of role protection and realism. A lot of players want to be able to say "I AM HEAVY WEAPONS GUY!" and have that be enough to be considered a star contributor and will get super pissed if the Adept learns how to shoot every gun in existence with some pocket karma. That the same setup lets them learn other stuff is cold consolation, because again, they just wanted to be heavy weapons guy.

The realism bit may be even more problematic though depending on who you're talking to. Shadowrun has long been plagued by milspec fetishists that get viscerally offended by the idea that civilians can take on grunts and win or that the Navy Seals don't have millions, nay, hundreds of thousands of skill points. How the fuck that's supposed to square with runners occasionally surviving a mission is something they never bother getting around to answering, probably because a lot of them are the same sort of people who think party wipes are hilarious.

[Trill]

So basically you're saying that giving them what they want is dumb, because the thing that they want (the appearance of being specialized while being myopic to the other skills, having runners be mooks to show how great Navy Mermaids are compared against, and having the characters die often) is dumb?

[Stahlseele]

Every time one of the players in my SR groups complained because REALIZARMS in a scifi game with magic i handed them a mook character sheet. No ware, no magic, no special equipment, just mediocre attributes and no usefull skills beyond level 2.

[Whipstitch]

So basically you're saying that giving them what they want is dumb, because the thing that they want (the appearance of being specialized while being myopic to the other skills, having runners be mooks to show how great Navy Mermaids are compared against, and having the characters die often) is dumb?

Extremely dumb!

Luckily military builds tend to still be beatable due to redundancy or crappy 'ware picks but in terms of overall build budget they're often pretty nutty thanks to Shadowrun's goofy accounting. E.g., SR4A Red Samurai have 90 bp sunk into just having the Close Combat and Firearm skill groups.

[mlangsdorf]

Analogies can help but even if you win that argument you're still stuck with people objecting on the grounds of role protection and realism. A lot of players want to be able to say "I AM HEAVY WEAPONS GUY!" and have that be enough to be considered a star contributor and will get super pissed if the Adept learns how to shoot every gun in existence with some pocket karma. That the same setup lets them learn other stuff is cold consolation, because again, they just wanted to be heavy weapons guy.

Wouldn't the right solution to be to reduce the cost of weapon skills and then provide additional ability purchases that allow people to be really good at being heavy weapons guy? Or is the only measure of being heavy weapons guy that ability to roll the most dice when using heavy weapons?

[OgreBattle]

If Guns are one skill could having a bunch of specializations in different types of guns help trick the gun fetishists?

Which edition of Shadowrun had the best action economy, or do you figure they're all bad and you've got one that works better for the setting?

[phlapjackage]

Shadowrun has long been plagued by milspec fetishists

see: the clip vs magazine debate

[mlangsdorf]

Which edition of Shadowrun had the best action economy, or do you figure they're all bad and you've got one that works better for the setting?

They're all bad, but 4th is less bad because the number of extra initiative passes is known and fixed, and you only roll the init dice once per combat.

[Coldstone]

I did like how they converted extra speed in SR5, in that once you hit a value, you got the extra pass. It let people who weren't cybered or magick'd up a chance to get that extra turn or two if they had the high stats/qualities for it, but also made it possible that the ones that did wouldn't always get all the passes (if they defended or otherwise), giving the smaller guys a bit more breathing room.

..That doesn't necessarily mean it is better, but the power spike of improving reflexes is a thing.

[OgreBattle]

Does the categorization of spirits in Shadowrun need any overhaul? I feel like having guardian (a role) and element (stuff they're made of) being excusive spirit types is limiting, guardian fire spirits should also be a thing.

Say instead you pick their role and elemental affinity (water, human civilization stuff like a person or a bike, beast, etc.) as separate things.

[Coldstone]

Not really, and yes? It is a thing that several of the spirits in street magic are simply better because of features they have and exploit value, but that exploit value is specific in most cases - the basic spirits all have some good options and perks, they just also have their weaknesses too.

That said, some of the new powers that the other spirits have access to could be given to the basic spirits - it was just a case that it was apparently decided to make that a GM decision versus suggesting what to which.

Otherwise, a guardian spirit can look to be made of fire, and a fire spirit can look like a guardian of some sort. What they look like is largely moot - its' the powers that dictate them. The actual flames are optional - things might just tend to combust around them due to sheer awesomeness.

They do make a point of this in a couple sections somewhere (probably street magic) how a beast spirit doesn't have to look like an animal - they might look like a Elven warrior with a big-ass sword.

[OgreBattle]

Ideally how is sorcery, summoning, and alchemy meant to be balanced against one another

It seems like the best thing is summoning spirits that have the sorcery you need at the moment

[Stahlseele]

It does not just seem like it.
There are a few "limitations" in that. Note the use of "" as i don't think they really limit anything.
First: you can only have a certain number of spirits bound at any one time.
There is no limites to how many spells you can cast and keep going at once.
Well, aside from your drain damage maybe filling up and dice pool modifiers.

Second: your bound spirits come with a pre defined number of services.
Every use of a specific spell or spirit power or really giving them any order at all constitutes use of one of those precious few services available to you.

Third: depending on how you treat your spirits they may go for the evil dschinn route and become very very literal and to the letter in how they do what you tell them to do.

Those are only soft "limits" because if you are good at summoning and have a decent pool to roll against drain damage from it, there is no need to have bound spirits at all. So instant summon, use services to your liking. Dismiss.
Repeat ad nauseum.

[Username17]

To the extent that game balance enters into it at all, Conjuring has more powerful and versatile effects and is less immediate in its effects than is Sorcery. Even summoning an Unbound Spirit and telling it to tear into your opponents has the following time frame:

• You act, summoning a spirit onto the Astral Plane.
• On your next action, you order your spirit to fuck shit up.
• On the Spirit's next action, it materializes.
• On the Spirit's action after that, things start getting wrecked by your spirit.

Compare to Stunbolt, where you take an action to cast it and your target goes unconscious during that action. Summoning spirits can do some pretty boss shit, but it's basically too slow for Shadowrun combat that often takes place inside of 6 meters with everyone on both sides equipped with automatic weaponry.

Where Conjuring goes crazy is in situations where the extra time doesn't actually matter. Which is pretty much every time that people aren't literally pulling guns on each other. And that includes situations like "We are pretty sure there's a bunch of assholes with guns in that building." The extra seconds it takes to summon a spirit and give it instructions and have it materialize don't mean shit when you're sending the spirit into a building or around a corner.

Another issue is drain. Conjuring in most editions has larger and more variable drain than Sorcery does. And while that doesn't mean a lot when your typical use of Conjuring is to bind spirits at home, days or weeks before the mission the spirit is intended to be used on; it does have an issue where the larger summonings can straight up randomly kill you, which is a thing to keep in mind when talking about the high end of conjuring effects. It does mean that conjuring done "on the fly" is usually done with spirits that are much smaller than what the player could plausibly conjure, because crippling drain during a mission is still crippling.

Alchemy is not and never has been written up with balance in mind. Not in any edition. And now that chucklefucks own the line full time, probably not ever in the future.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

The decision to unify summoning was, I think, a mistake, and destroys a lot of flavor.

It's mechanically more elegant, and in some ways it's more fair, but I think the game works better with that fundamental difference between Shamans and mages.

[Username17]

The decision to unify summoning was, I think, a mistake, and destroys a lot of flavor.

It's mechanically more elegant, and in some ways it's more fair, but I think the game works better with that fundamental difference between Shamans and mages.

Disagree. There's pretty much no way to balance Shamans and Hermetic Mages in 1st through 3rd edition. Summoning Elementals takes a lot of downtime, but pulling Force 8 Water Elementals out of your ass 3 at a time is bigger than anything any of the other characters could possibly do under any circumstances. Basically, you either have enough resources in time and flower petals that you can do that (in which case you overshadow all the other characters) or you don't (in which case you suck). There really isn't any middle ground.

By making Binding something everyone could do, but then making the drain prohibitive for higher force conjurings, we ended up with a system that people could use without making people who didn't use it feel small in the pants. And by leaving the option to temp summon somewhat larger spirits one at a time to everyone, we had a system in which characters who didn't have the resources to spare on binding could still contribute meaningfully to the team.

There are things that I don't much like about the specifics of spirits in 4th edition. The fact that 4th edition quite harshly caps Edge and Mental stats for metahumans, but gives Spirits those stats equal to Force is a huge mistake. The game seriously groans under Task Spirits with a Logic and Edge of 8. That was never a good idea (and I asked to change it during Street Magic and was told by the devs that I couldn't). But unifying Summoning and Binding was absolutely necessary.

As to the flavor argument, I would argue that actually most Shadowrun conjuration had no flavor. People couldn't be fucked to write whole new spirit lists and summoning systems for every kind of magician, so they just didn't. Priests of Zeus end up summoning Native American place spirits because it would have been more work to think of something else. Fuck, the Irish path mages end up picking some spirits off of each list, which means that they functionally had Summoning and Binding back in 1st edition. Really, only Shamans, Hermetics, and Houngans ever had any unique conjuring flavor, and in a game with Wujen, Psychics, Wiccans, Idolaters, West African Sorcerers, Aztec Nahuali, Elf Channelers, Hindu Weather Controllers, and On-Myoji, that's a seriously fucking terrible batting average.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

The decision to unify summoning was, I think, a mistake, and destroys a lot of flavor.

It's mechanically more elegant, and in some ways it's more fair, but I think the game works better with that fundamental difference between Shamans and mages.

How would you go about making summoning more distinct for each school and still be somewhat balanced?

[hyzmarca]

The decision to unify summoning was, I think, a mistake, and destroys a lot of flavor.

It's mechanically more elegant, and in some ways it's more fair, but I think the game works better with that fundamental difference between Shamans and mages.

Disagree. There's pretty much no way to balance Shamans and Hermetic Mages in 1st through 3rd edition. Summoning Elementals takes a lot of downtime, but pulling Force 8 Water Elementals out of your ass 3 at a time is bigger than anything any of the other characters could possibly do under any circumstances. Basically, you either have enough resources in time and flower petals that you can do that (in which case you overshadow all the other characters) or you don't (in which case you suck). There really isn't any middle ground.

I don't disagree with your assessment. It is unbalanced. But, I have by this point given up on the idea that game balance is actually desirable.

Really, only Shamans, Hermetics, and Houngans ever had any unique conjuring flavor, and in a game with Wujen, Psychics, Wiccans, Idolaters, West African Sorcerers, Aztec Nahuali, Elf Channelers, Hindu Weather Controllers, and On-Myoji, that's a seriously fucking terrible batting average.

-Username17

Lets be honest, Shadowrun was always about technological Japanophillia and mystical mildly-offensive-magical-Indian-o-phillia. Hermetics and Shamans were core, everything else was tacked on as an afterthought. It isn't that they couldn't give every statted tradition unique flavor, it's that they didn't want to. I'm mostly (not entirely) okay with that.

The decision to unify summoning was, I think, a mistake, and destroys a lot of flavor.

It's mechanically more elegant, and in some ways it's more fair, but I think the game works better with that fundamental difference between Shamans and mages.

How would you go about making summoning more distinct for each school and still be somewhat balanced?

I honestly wouldn't have summoning be something that everyone does. If I were going to build a magic tradition based on something that exists in the real world, I would go and research that real tradition instead of just slotting it into an existing framework with minor nomenclature changes. This, however, takes a lot of work.

[Whipstitch]

Lets be honest, Shadowrun was always about technological Japanophillia and mystical mildly-offensive-magical-Indian-o-phillia. Hermetics and Shamans were core, everything else was tacked on as an afterthought. It isn't that they couldn't give every statted tradition unique flavor, it's that they didn't want to. I'm mostly (not entirely) okay with that.

There's long been a huge gap between what shadowrun was purportedly about when it was hashed out and what people actually play though. I played 4th for years and literally never had anyone play an explicitly Native American shaman at any point, in large part because ppl were sick of third and really did think it was embarrassingly retro and played out. It's not really cool from for rock bands to unironically wear a head dress anymore and that's a problem unless you're a pretty dedicated hipster and still have a spirit Hood in your closet from that time you got drunk at Coachella. Hell, in my experience people find the whole NAN thing weirder and more confusing than the magic coming back. People at least understand why you want to be a cyber-jedi while the Indian thing just leaves people puzzled.

[Iduno]

There's long been a huge gap between what shadowrun was purportedly about when it was hashed out and what people actually play though. I played 4th for years and literally never had anyone play an explicitly Native American shaman at any point, in large part because ppl were sick of third and really did think it was embarrassingly retro and played out. It's not really cool from for rock bands to unironically wear a head dress anymore and that's a problem unless you're a pretty dedicated hipster and still have a spirit Hood in your closet from that time you got drunk at Coachella. Hell, in my experience people find the whole NAN thing weirder and more confusing than the magic coming back. People at least understand why you want to be a cyber-jedi while the Indian thing just leaves people puzzled.

To be fair, unless your players are also natives, having a lot of native characters would probably be problematic.

Shadowrun is often weird about time passing. The metaplot changes, but they don't bother changing the base expectations of the game. It's been over 25 years, and the devs are still keeping with the idea of the native people rising up (in some areas, they'd be rising up against themselves, because they're in charge now) and yellow panic, even though nothing has been done with that in decades. There aren't any writers with ideas, so the closest they can come to changing anything is "bug spirits, except with technology?".