So what the shit is so bad about Shadowrun?

[Stahlseele]

But we don't want that.

[Nath]

I'd also argue the verisimilitude objection goes out the window if you think of skills not as individual activities but as aspects of broader roles/disciplines. Let me put it this way: how many people do you really think are out there in the world who have managed to gain formal training in rocket launchers but have never had a crash course on using a rifle? I'd argue that in a game where war veterans are openly called out as a plausible background that the inability to afford being a reasonably competent modern infantryman is a much greater failing than overstating the similarity between various weapon systems. Plus, just because you've collapsed things into less skills doesn't mean that you can't still have specialization as an option.

Still, there are also seasoned hunters who can be highly skilled in using rifles, and yet should not be able to use a RPG.

One option to have broader skills and deal with subset of them would be to introduce flaws such as "hyper-specialization" (can only use the skill with a specialization, equivalent to getting a refund on the rest of the skill) or "partially ignorant" (choose the equivalent of a specialization, which becomes one use of the skill you cannot make).

Basically, edges and flaws should be used whenever necessary to represent unusual type of characters, rather than designing the entire system around them (this can also applies to strong-but-fragile or weak-but-resilient characters the distinction between Strength and Body is useful for).

[Zaranthan]

But we don't want that.

We don't? I'm pretty sure big scary trolls and cyberninja razorgirls have always been popular among Shadowrun players. People are upset because knives don't kill people anymore.

Do you want a Shadowrun that looks like XCOM, where a "close combat" Street Samurai sprints across the room, dodging bullets, leaps over the enemy's cover, and... sprays him with an SMG from a few inches away?

Because I don't.

[merc1138]

Still, there are also seasoned hunters who can be highly skilled in using rifles, and yet should not be able to use a RPG.

Why? Have you seen how simple a basic RPG actually is to use? The Russian RPG-7 takes little training or effort, it's about as point and click as you can get. Now other factors like range and wind come into play, but if you're worried about characters shooting at eachother with RPGs indoors like they're playing Quake there are other ways to resolve that(for example, difficulty of acquisition).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MrwJM1_kw8

Really one of the bigger problems with guns in shadowrun(in my opinion anyway) is the typical engagement range. Fighting indoors you're talking usually 30 yards at the most, outdoors maybe 50-60? Odds are unless you're talking about pistols and SMGs, most of the range increments aren't even relevant to combat.

Worse is the idea that weapon skill categories need to be broken up like that are. When I first heard a while back that it was "gun guys" who demanded that, I about lost it. Airsoft guys maybe. I have never heard of any modern police or military force that trains individuals with "assault rifles", yet ignores pistol training and doesn't have some sort of regular qualification. If you can proficiently use an M-16, you can likely pick up and use an MP-5 without too much difficulty, and as such were probably trained with a sidearm at some point so picking up a Sig p226 instead of the Glock 17 you're used to isn't a big deal. Doesn't mean you're going to be doing gun katas with the thing like Equilibrium but you certainly aren't going to be so inept with it that you'd be better off throwing the pistol at your opponent.

Now a previous comment about specialization for certain things, that I could agree with, even if most of the specializations are effectively worthless. That said, you shouldn't simply default with an RPG or pistol even though your automatics skill is an 8 and normally with an HK416 you could be mistaken for John Wick.

[Stahlseele]

No no, we don't want KZT to stop being frustrated, because frustrated rants are one of the best things on the internets.

We WANT silly ultryviolence close combat in shadowrun.
A Troll with twice the STR of the maximum modified body of an enemy should, by all rights, be breaking or ripping that enemy in half.
A Troll-Sized naginata with a titanium steel blade with industrial diamond coating on the edge should be able to cleave through vehicles like so much butter.
A quick as lightning adept should be so able to dodge dozends of attacks made at him and dismantle all his attackers one by one by simply turning things around on them and dealing damage to them in their own attack phase.
A Troll with more than 3 times the body of the maximum STR of a modified human body should be able to shrug off hits to the face with a shotgun and take a sword to the head and block it with his massive goring horns.
A modified human should wipe the floor with most any non augmented human and be free to decide how horribly humiliating he wants to beat his enemy. Cut his belt so his pants drop and he stumbles to the ground. Sure.
Enemy taking cover behind a wall? Punch your ceramic bones, steel fist or diamond katana right through the wall and the enemy!

Yes, this is all very much pink mohawk and completely incompatible with the usual black trenchcoat and sunglasses style of things, but this is what the game is missing!
This is what cyberpunk means to most people!
Look at terminator, robocop, Bladerunner, even matrix with the silly stupid fightscenes.

[kzt]

No no, we don't want KZT to stop being frustrated, because frustrated rants are one of the best things on the internets.

Yes, this is all very much pink mohawk and completely incompatible with the usual black trenchcoat and sunglasses style of things, but this is what the game is missing!
This is what cyberpunk means to most people!
Look at terminator, robocop, Bladerunner, even matrix with the silly stupid fightscenes.

I'm all for making the guy with the sword or big knife dangerous as hell once in close. I'm not saying they don't get shot to ribbons trying to get all stabby on a guy 30 feet away with gun in his hand. "Feeling lucky, punk?"

[Whipstitch]

Basically, edges and flaws should be used whenever necessary to represent unusual type of characters, rather than designing the entire system around them (this can also applies to strong-but-fragile or weak-but-resilient characters the distinction between Strength and Body is useful for).

Edges and flaws are a blight. I'd also argue that knowing how to use a rocket launcher isn't actually that unusual in Shadowrun or constitute bending over backwards. We're talking about a setting where you can walk out of chargen with an Aztechnology Striker, go-gangers explicitly ride around in the vehicles from Mad Max and nobody is surprised when the local CEO is basically Jean-Baptiste Zorg.

[Username17]

This is what cyberpunk means to most people!

Well, Cyberpunk as the original genre probably died with Snowcrash, which in addition to being an awesome Cyberpunk book is also a pointedly snide deconstruction of the Cyberpunk genre and its setting and character tropes. That means really everything since 1992 has been "post-cyberpunk." There are people who have been born, graduated from university, gotten a job, and had kids who were born after the Cyberpunk genre was formally ended.

When you look at Cyberpunk movie lists from today, they list things like Blade Runner 2049 and Ghost in the Shell, but they also list YA Dystopia works like Maze Runner and Divergent. For Reals. The only movies that really gets into the pink mohawk mind space from the imdb list are Avatar and The Fifth Element, and I honestly am having a hard time coming up with a genre definition where both of those movies actually qualify.

You don't get much more mohawkish when you go into the world of cartoons - despite the medium being more ammenable to inhuman monsters punching each other through walls. Most cyberpunk is very noirish and low-key. There hasn't been a really good cyborgs-punching each other vehicle since the 90s. Good lord, Gunnm came out in 1993. Characters in Psycho Pass and Lain don't usually go in for battle armor or heavy weapons.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Yeah, 80's were the high time for flashy bitz cyberpunk.
Sad really.

[Thaluikhain]

I have never heard of any modern police or military force that trains individuals with "assault rifles", yet ignores pistol training and doesn't have some sort of regular qualification.

Depends what you mean by "ignores". Most British soldiers aren't issued pistols, so aren't trained with them. There are exceptions, of course, and there may be moves to extend them, but still lots of front-line infantry trained in assault rifles but not pistols.

[If you can proficiently use an M-16, you can likely pick up and use an MP-5 without too much difficulty, and as such were probably trained with a sidearm at some point so picking up a Sig p226 instead of the Glock 17 you're used to isn't a big deal.

For given values of "too much difficulty" or "big deal", perhaps.

Having said that, keeping track of lots of skills for different types of firearms seems likely to over-complicate the game without adding anything useful, I'd not advising beating players over the head with attempts at realism, especially in a inherently unrealistic game.

[kzt]

I have never heard of any modern police or military force that trains individuals with "assault rifles", yet ignores pistol training and doesn't have some sort of regular qualification.

Depends what you mean by "ignores". Most British soldiers aren't issued pistols, so aren't trained with them. There are exceptions, of course, and there may be moves to extend them, but still lots of front-line infantry trained in assault rifles but not pistols.

I think the first time I shot a pistol was when I got handed an ancient 1911 by the first sergeant and told to go qualify with it. Which I did, the standards for pistol shooting in the US Army are not exactly very high, at least if you are not a Ranger or something like that. But not a lot of people in the US military get pistols, though there was apparently serious discussion about issuing them to all infantry folks instead of just Rangers during the recent Beretta replacement project.

There are differences between the various classes of guns, but unless you do something like have every single spell and summon have their own skill that you can't default to it's absurd to be making the guys without magic buying a zillion gun skills, most of which they won't often use.

[EightWave]

Yeah, 80's were the high time for flashy bitz cyberpunk.
Sad really.

Cyberpunk is basically the 70's/80's NYC subway but the scary guy everyone's pretending not to notice has a metal arm and an Uzi, not a leather jacket and a sneer.

[Whipstitch]

Most cyberpunk is very noirish and low-key.

Yep, most of it is waaay more Cowboy Bebop than Shadowrun, when it gets right down to it.

[merc1138]

I have never heard of any modern police or military force that trains individuals with "assault rifles", yet ignores pistol training and doesn't have some sort of regular qualification.

Depends what you mean by "ignores". Most British soldiers aren't issued pistols, so aren't trained with them. There are exceptions, of course, and there may be moves to extend them, but still lots of front-line infantry trained in assault rifles but not pistols.

I think the first time I shot a pistol was when I got handed an ancient 1911 by the first sergeant and told to go qualify with it. Which I did, the standards for pistol shooting in the US Army are not exactly very high, at least if you are not a Ranger or something like that. But not a lot of people in the US military get pistols, though there was apparently serious discussion about issuing them to all infantry folks instead of just Rangers during the recent Beretta replacement project.

There are differences between the various classes of guns, but unless you do something like have every single spell and summon have their own skill that you can't default to it's absurd to be making the guys without magic buying a zillion gun skills, most of which they won't often use.

My point, is that there is still some familiarity involved and someone who has managed to gain a reasonable amount of experience with a rifle is not going to suddenly be so utterly useless in the event that they have to pick up a pistol, that they might as well not bother. Not being issued a pistol, is not the same as having absolutely no understanding of basic fundamentals.

The way SR 5e works, you can have 6 ranks in automatics, 6 ranks in long arms, and be reasonably proficient with a PDW, an assault rifle, a shotgun, a "sniper" rifle, and so on, but if you didn't also dump skill points into that pistol group... you might as well have picked up a potato if a pistol was your only option because your dice pool is going to just be attribute -1, which is the same as having no ranks in throwing weapons... so you might as well just throw the thing and run.

If it were the other way around, the firearms skill group could still be as overvalued as it currently is, but then allows me to have the specialization of "assault rifles" that I can buy more than once to actually specialize in that while maintaining a base proficiency.

Having a basic small arms proficiency with the bulk of the use invested heavily into a specialization ranks prevents that idiotic scenario, allows a character to specialize, but doesn't leave them completely gimped if they don't have their weapon of choice available. It doesn't mean that assault rifle commando man will be just as good with a pistol as he is with his assault rifle and all of a sudden it's like he's in a John Woo movie with doves flying through the air as he dives for cover, but it means it's not the equivalent of handing a pistol to a caveman.

[Whipstitch]

I really don't want people going down the rabbit hole of divvying up skills into multiple specializations that can all also be taken in multiple ranks. Such things are a giant pain in the ass when you try to balance out anything more esoteric then firearm form factors--I'm not fond of people boiling social interactions into "I seduce at the thing" because that's the only spec they took, for example. I'd rather people be grounded enough in broader disciplines that when we get into slap fights over what spec applies I'm only taking away a die or two instead burning their pool to the ground.

[merc1138]

I really don't want people going down the rabbit hole of divvying up skills into multiple specializations that can all also be taken in multiple ranks. Such things are a giant pain in the ass when you try to balance out anything more esoteric then firearm form factors--I'm not fond of people boiling social interactions into "I seduce at the thing" because that's the only spec they took, for example. I'd rather people be grounded enough in broader disciplines that when we get into slap fights over what spec applies I'm only taking away a die or two instead burning their pool to the ground.

Sure, it can definitely be a problem, but it's already broken up like that for some things. Leaving out firearms and just looking at the social skills, those are broken up into 6 separate skills. Somehow Impersonation and Con are two different things which I could see making sense, but someone who is an amazing con artist somehow can't make a deal worth anything without having a separate skill for Negotiation? That's quite the odd split. Someone great at impersonation can't get a read on a social situation and know the proper Etiquette for the scenario they're in, which should be a part of pulling off the Impersonation they're supposedly amazing at in the first place? And then which category does "I seduce the thing" even fall under in a social setting?

I'm not saying I know exactly how to fix the skill system in shadowrun, but as it currently stands it's a broken mess where someone can be amazing at one skill but completely lacking in another even though the skill they're good at should be included as part of a basic proficiency with others.

Then you've got the inverse of that where it makes sense to have specializations beyond basic proficiency but the game(at least in 5th edition) doesn't bother to split much of anything. Other than cybernetics, the world's greatest neurologist using the medicine skill also happens to be the best ophthalmologist, psychiatrist, cardiologist, etc. all wrapped into one. Any street doc in SR might as well just be House.

You're right, it's not going to be the same as various types of small arms that aren't crew-served weapons, but it's still just as odd. As far as a game where you've got a player so hyper-specialized that they think they can just seduce everything, either the game needs to not allow that or the DM actually does need to shut that behavior down because it isn't something that would actually work in every scenario no matter how good that particular character is at it.

[Eikre]

I'm coming from a position of nearly perfect ignorance: How often do people end up generalizing?

Is there anybody currently putting significant investments into pistols when they've gone heavy into squad-operated weapons that is going to suddenly and destructively have a whole bunch of nontrivial extra character building resources to play with if you implemented a floor on skills equal to their highest-ranked related skill, minus X? And just arbitrarily permit the guy who is ordinarily incentivized to use rocket launchers all the time also contribute reliably if the only thing at his disposal is a crossbow?

[Stahlseele]

Let us not mention the skill web for defaulting . .

[Ignimortis]

Let us not mention the skill web for defaulting . .

You've gone and mentioned it, so I wonder what that would mean. Is there something like a system that allows you to substitute dice from one skill for another one reasonably close enough with a slight penalty, but still having a bonus? Something like all the social skills being linked together so that a con-artist can intimidate at -3 dice and impersonate at -1 or something like that? Because that seems a rather nice way of rewarding specialization and yet not having specialists absolutely suck at anything they don't have skill points in.

[Whipstitch]

Because that seems a rather nice way of rewarding specialization and yet not having specialists absolutely suck at anything they don't have skill points in.

It's one of those ideas that sounds neat but in practice the skillweb ended up dying largely unmourned. There were already situational modifiers that could affect your odds of success on a given task so asking "What skill should I be using if I'm not using the skill I'm supposed to be using?" on top of that was often the straw that broke the camel. You'd end up with people taking too long on their turn as they figure out what their best long shot chance would be and everyone else at the table would roll their eyes because all this faffing about was probably just going to lead to a failure anyway.

[OgreBattle]

Well what problems/solutions are created with hyper specialization vs generalist defaulting?

I guess specialists encourage more teamwork, but that can also means 'wrong' composition can result in failure so somebody "has to be the healer/detective/driver" as a mandatory thing. Can also result in the spotlight lingering too long or short, like a hacker among walking tank mercenaries.

I'm leaning towards generalists with some specialization to increase success but not be the only means of success, then you can split 'em up.

[kzt]

My point, is that there is still some familiarity involved and someone who has managed to gain a reasonable amount of experience with a rifle is not going to suddenly be so utterly useless in the event that they have to pick up a pistol, that they might as well not bother. Not being issued a pistol, is not the same as having absolutely no understanding of basic fundamentals.

The way SR 5e works, you can have 6 ranks in automatics, 6 ranks in long arms, and be reasonably proficient with a PDW, an assault rifle, a shotgun, a "sniper" rifle, and so on, but if you didn't also dump skill points into that pistol group... you might as well have picked up a potato if a pistol was your only option because your dice pool is going to just be attribute -1, which is the same as having no ranks in throwing weapons... so you might as well just throw the thing and run.

If it were the other way around, the firearms skill group could still be as overvalued as it currently is, but then allows me to have the specialization of "assault rifles" that I can buy more than once to actually specialize in that while maintaining a base proficiency.

Having a basic small arms proficiency with the bulk of the use invested heavily into a specialization ranks prevents that idiotic scenario, allows a character to specialize, but doesn't leave them completely gimped if they don't have their weapon of choice available. It doesn't mean that assault rifle commando man will be just as good with a pistol as he is with his assault rifle and all of a sudden it's like he's in a John Woo movie with doves flying through the air as he dives for cover, but it means it's not the equivalent of handing a pistol to a caveman.

This is already MagicRun, you are just incentivizing even more the "we are all magicians" party.

[Whipstitch]

Also, c'mon man, ain't nothing more cyberpunk than improbable doves.

[Stahlseele]

Yeah, the Generalist/Specialist problem stems from the fact that it is vastly cheaper to specialize highly in char gen and then diversify a bit more in game.

Same with Attributes.
Getting them up high is so much cheaper and fucking easier than it is in the game. It is just stupid to not at least soft max what you want your character to be good at when building him.

Basically, not going specialist into generalist is gimping your character into uselessness. Even if you go for the complete newbie by background.

Now, SR4 did a bit away with this, if you just upped agility, logic? and charisma, then you could get away with relatively low actual SKILL levels and still had a mediocre dice pool to roll, just because those three attributes cover about 80% of all skills . . but still, specialization into generalisation is cheaper and easier in game.


And yes, the problem with magicrun is that mages benefit from everything you do for the mundanes. But not the other way around.

Which makes this a complete and utter bitch to try and balance . .

[Iduno]

I'm coming from a position of nearly perfect ignorance: How often do people end up generalizing?

Is there anybody currently putting significant investments into pistols when they've gone heavy into squad-operated weapons that is going to suddenly and destructively have a whole bunch of nontrivial extra character building resources to play with if you implemented a floor on skills equal to their highest-ranked related skill, minus X? And just arbitrarily permit the guy who is ordinarily incentivized to use rocket launchers all the time also contribute reliably if the only thing at his disposal is a crossbow?

Currently, people generalize by having high stats and a lot of low skills.

People might put a point or two into a lot of weapon skills, but if they want 4-6 points of skill in their main weapon, they probably ignored the rest. Picking anything else up would be 5-7 dice fewer, about 2 hits (better chance to hit, and more damage).

The suggestion with a "firearms" skill and specializations means the difference would be putting 4-6 points into shooting, and 2 points into shooting better with one type of gun. Much less difference (less than 0.667 hits on average), so they might be willing to slum it with a different type of weapon on occasion.