The Shadowrun Situation

[NineInchNall]

So I was looking through the SR5 book trying to figure out what sort of action it takes to sustain a spell, because a friend and I were wondering whether you could just cast a spell on Monday and sustain it until forever. Since I couldn't find that, we thought, "Maybe there's something about being unconscious that ends sustained spells." So I did a text search for unconscious.

There's nowhere in the book where it says, "If X, then you go unconscious." There's a line on page 100 that says, "Every character has a condition monitor that tells the player how much Physical and Stun damage they can take before falling unconscious." But that's it, and that could easily be read to mean that you have to fill the whole thing, physical and stun, before going unco.

There's another line (page 137) that says, "If your Stun condition monitor overflows and you fall unconscious, then [X]." Again, though, that's just, "If two things happen, then another thing happens. It doesn't establish a causal relation.

I mean, yes, I know from previous experience and can infer from the way it's discussed that full-Stun monitor = unco. However, the fact that I have to do a fucking full text search to figure out how and when people get knocked unco and still don't have an unambiguous directive is terrible.

But anyway, the text search came up with one thing relevant to sustaining. Except that it's relevant to sustaining complex forms in VR, not spells. So WTF? I assume that magic spells just leech at your energy or lifeforce or something while they're active until you take an action to dismiss them.

But what sort of action is that? I looked in the combat section and found actions for calling spirits, dismissing spirits, casting spells, summoning spirits, and for fucking gesturing. But no motherfucking "stop sustaining spell".

Speaking of calling spirits, "placed on standby?" WTF? TEXT SEARCH! Okay, this word is used literally four times in the whole book. One of those times is in the index. One is talking about a bartender being an old standby. One is in the call spirit action. The last is about Technomancers' putting registered sprites on standby. Sooooooooo. 'Kay.

God, this book is shit.

[JesterZero]

I wasn't kidding or exaggerating when I said that despite the production values appearing to be high (in terms of aesthetics, art, etc.), this is a very frustrating book to use precisely because the usability is so low.

To illustrate the point, I originally got the PDF simply because at the time it was 1) cheaper, and 2) I was in the middle of Moravia, and good luck getting a dead-tree version. I'm old-fashioned. I'm a fan of dead-tree versions. But I plan to buy a hardcopy of SR5 precisely never because 1) I can't imagine trying to navigate this book without word search (and even then, it's iffy), and 2) given how frustrating using this book is, I don't want to give them any more money.

This is coming from someone who owns every single Shadowrun novel. My tolerance for variable quality in Shadowrun is pretty high...and this book still makes me angry.

[Tycho]

It is pretty obvious that something is wrong with your ruleset when something is the rules says:

Qualities cost 2 * the Karmacost in Karma

(because "Startkarma" and "IngameKarma" has not the same value, just sharing the name!)

also

Here's the answer to your question: The errata will be compiled and released as part of the preparation for the first corrected printing. There may or may not be an announcement as to when the errata will be compiled. The thread Patrick started may or may not get locked as part of this process. And given that nothing is truly gamebreaking I don't think there is a major push to get the errata out. Not at the expense at new product productivity.

so much for all the "we are comlining the errata as fast as possible etc.

[Rawbeard]

Wait... what? Startkarma and Ingamekarma? What is the point of that? Ofmg.

[Username17]

Wait... what? Startkarma and Ingamekarma? What is the point of that? Ofmg.

See, it just wasn't confusing enough to have Build Points and Karma be worth different amounts and called different things. I mean, I'll grant that it was already too confusing and lobbied for it to be standardized, but it just wasn't confusing enough for these ass clowns. So rather than fix anything, they decided to give you multiple pools of build points that are all worth somewhat different amounts and call all of them "karma," and then have another set of points that you gain as experience and use to buy upgrades and call those things "karma" as well. Because that is the only way to make things into a sufficient shit taco.

-Username17

[NineInchNall]

You forgot the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth set of character creation points!

Special attribute points, attribute points. skill points, skill group points! Yay!

... I'm seriously considering selling my brand new hard copy of SR5. 'Cause I don't even see how this is at all a functional system, let alone a usable book.

[Rawbeard]

Motherfuckers...

[Tycho]

Wait... what? Startkarma and Ingamekarma? What is the point of that? Ofmg.

I don't know!

but the Character Generation works like This:

Priority System and you get 25 "Karma" to buy Stuff you want and for Qualities (negative Qualities increase your Karma and so on).

There is are pages worth of Qualities in the book, all the the specific Karma Cost of the Quality. But this is only the Karma Cost at Character Creation, later they cost double.

This leads to an entry in the Character Advancement Sections that says: Qualities cost 2 times the Karmacost in Karma!

It is just badshit crazy.

[phlapjackage]

Along those lines, I've never understood the double-cost of qualities after character creation (not just SR, but Gurps too, probably other systems).

Almost always, buying a new quality (or buying off a neg quality) is subject to GM-approval anyway, so it's not like there's going to be characters suddenly manifesting qualities that don't make sense in a game.

It just seems like a needless penalty that leads to dumb optimizations where players have to min-max more at chargen, and stagnates character growth during play because who's going to spend 20-30 karma on one quality that nets a +1 to infiltration?

[Username17]

Along those lines, I've never understood the double-cost of qualities after character creation (not just SR, but Gurps too, probably other systems).

Almost always, buying a new quality (or buying off a neg quality) is subject to GM-approval anyway, so it's not like there's going to be characters suddenly manifesting qualities that don't make sense in a game.

It just seems like a needless penalty that leads to dumb optimizations where players have to min-max more at chargen, and stagnates character growth during play because who's going to spend 20-30 karma on one quality that nets a +1 to infiltration?

Well, it's based on the SR4 costs, where qualities cost X Build Points or 2X Karma points. Karma points came in later, and paid triangular costs instead of linear costs. here were some gross injustices in the Karma costs, but basically around the point where you were buying rating 2 in something, you were 1:1 with Karma to Build Points, around rating 4 you were 2:1, and at rating 6 you were around 3:1. So to a first approximation, you could say that the average Karma to Build Point ratio was about 2:1 (at least, as long as you stayed in the ratings 1-6). So Qualities, which you bought all or nothing rather than in sequential rating points, paid that "average cost."

But 5th edition went to the priority system, meaning that they no longer had even a rough standard cost of Karma to Build Points, because there weren't any fucking Build Points. But they kept that Quality cost ratio for no reason. Or rather: because the edition is incredibly poorly designed and all rules changes are ad hoc and no consequences are thought through before or after changes to the system are made.

-Username17

[phlapjackage]

That makes sense. I thought that qualities were 2x(cost) after char gen, so under the karma system they would be 2x(2xBP) or whatever. But if they're the same cost at chargen and after in the karma system, that's just one more reason to like the karma system that much more.

And yeah, one more fail for SR5.

[Concise Locket]

I've been hearing from the SR5 apologists that the priority charagen system helps to avoid certain unbalanced builds, like the rigger who hides in an armored car trunk. True? False?

Unless overcasting and spirit summoning were reworked from scratch I'm not sure the "balanced" sweet spot they're claiming exists.

[silva]

I dont know how its implemented in 5th ed, but in 1st/2nd/3rd ed it generated very unbalanced builds. Not that I have a problem with it - Id rather have a fast and simple chargen that is unbalanced, than a super balanced chargen thats boring as fuck (like point-buy). But if, unlike me, you value balance, the priority system may be a problem.

[Korwin]

I've been hearing from the SR5 apologists that the priority charagen system helps to avoid certain unbalanced builds, like the rigger who hides in an armored car trunk. True? False?

Unless overcasting and spirit summoning were reworked from scratch I'm not sure the "balanced" sweet spot they're claiming exists.

In Point buy you can choose to not spend Point into something.
In priority you Need to take something on an low priority.

In other words, Point buy = you can, if you want have an unbalanced build
Priority = you will have an unbalanced build.

Only if you have an category you dont need (like Magic on an non Magic user) it doesnt look like, you have an unbalanced build.

Not shure if an Rigger with E in Attributes is viable. (never played an rigger).

[Rawbeard]

how does the priority system prevent riggers from buying armored trucks?

[phlapjackage]

I've been hearing from the SR5 apologists that the priority charagen system helps to avoid certain unbalanced builds, like the rigger who hides in an armored car trunk. True? False?

Unless overcasting and spirit summoning were reworked from scratch I'm not sure the "balanced" sweet spot they're claiming exists.

Where were you hearing this? Maybe on the Catalyst boards?

I think SR5 priority gen CAN be faster than SR4 karma/BP, if you're new to the game or just want to "dive right in". If you're at all familiar with the basic SR rules and want to tweak your character just-so, SR5 priority gen sucks balls. Big, fat, hairy, sweaty balls. The fact that there are so many different point systems (attribute points, skill points, "special resource points", pre-gen karma...) makes it much, much more complex to tweak a character than when you're using the same resources (karma/BP) to build.

As others have said, your character HAS to suck at something (more like 2 things, priority D is almost as bad as E), and they HAVE to be awesome at something else. This is the edition where your character is boiled down to a stereotype like nothing before. No room for anything in the middle. If you want to play a mage or a non-human, you're going to REALLY suck at a few other things.

Don't get me started on the new magic rules...no, overcasting wasn't fixed, the problem was just swept under the rug and is still totally doable, just now you have to be even more rules-savvy to use those (telesma?) that let you ignore limits. Spirit summoning is now more broken than ever, in that the spirit I-Win button wasn't fixed, and watchers are not normally summonable now but require a ritual.

Still not sure if the huge nerf to direct combat spells is good or not...

[Username17]

An important thing to keep in mind is that the priorities are completely orthogonal to anything you'd actually care whether you were specialized in or not. So actual things you might specialize in might be something like "shooting people," which would be a sum of your Agility, your favorite shooting skill, your Smartlink bonus, and maybe an Adept power. But within the framework of the Priorities, all four of those contributors to your shooting dicepool count against different priorities. If you're an Elf Adept, you could legitimately pull down bonuses to your shooting dicepool from all five priority categories.

So controlling how much people sink into these arbitrary categories is wholly powerless to impede specialization or even extreme specialization. Indeed, it often cuts the other way, leaving you with scarcely enough in one category or another to get your main shtick going and thus preventing you from being good at a secondary thing.

If the goal of the priority system was to prevent people from specializing super hard at things like "rigging" and "decking" to the exclusion of other things, then the priority system is a dismal failure. More of a failure than doing absolutely nothing, since it stops zero people from specializing who want to and forces some people to make characters that are more specialized than they want them to be.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Yeah, the main advantage of the priority system as it was originally conceived was to differentiate itself from a) random rolling + class choice and b) point buy, which were the two major chargen systems at the time. Mechanical balance wasn't a concern as much as conceptual balance in terms of character concept - making a troll physical magician with max Strength was supposed to be rare or something - and opportunity cost, although that's really artificial, because as Frank pointed out you've got multiple sources of dice for a given pool.

The good thing about SR4-style Build Points is that the linear costs make something like PACKS or the Eclipse Phase Lifepath system really easy to do - hell, you could do priority gen as an overlay on BP and that's fine. The bad thing is that you build in BP (linear costs) and improve in Karma (geometric costs), so there's a drive to maximize at chargen. Karmagen was designed so PCs could just build and improve your character with Karma, but then you're dealing with really quite a lot of points and PACKS and Priority Gen overlays become, if not unworkable then relatively difficult because of the geometric costs.

So really, what I'd have gone for is a BP-based system that uses "Karma" but with linear costs, and the initial book would have the priority gen/PACKS overlay of that system for quick character generation. But that's me.

[Blade]

The real problem with chargen in Shadowrun is not to handle the math of the attributes/skill costs (which Priority system helps with). Especially when you use a chargen software.

The real problem is gear.
Buying all the gear your character needs for what you want him to do takes a lot of time, and even more so if you want to optimize it with all the options from the additional books.
And if there are implants, you need to balance the effectiveness/cost of cyberware vs bioware with the need to take into account essence and nuyens cost, nuyen cap and cost effectiveness vs skill/attribute raise.

Without the gear, priority system does make it easier to make a character in a few minutes when all you have is a pen and a sheet (I know I've used it in SR4 when I had to create a simple character in two minutes). But if you add the gear, the few minutes you win aren't really meaningful.

But Priority generation system is also good to create fully random characters. Which is completely useless but really fun to do.

[phlapjackage]

The real problem with chargen in Shadowrun is not to handle the math of the attributes/skill costs (which Priority system helps with). Especially when you use a chargen software.

The real problem is gear

God this is so true. The part of making a character I always dread is the gear loadout. Almost makes me want to always play a dirt-poor character, if only so I don't have to spend hour(s) sifting through the gear lists and calculating costs and all that...

[Ancient History]

Which, again, is where PACKS comes in. I think a big part of the reason is that PCs are given quite a lot of currency to spend at chargen in SR compared to games like D&D, where you're basically assumed to start with a loincloth and the jawbone of an ass and work your way up from there.

[NineInchNall]

Almost makes me want to always play a dirt-poor character, if only so I don't have to spend hour(s) sifting through the gear lists and calculating costs and all that...

Well, in SR5 you're always going to play a Mage Mystic Adept, so everything is going to require a higher priority than cash. 'Specially since cash is given out in large quantities after missions, but karma isn't.

Speaking of cash rewards, I note that the game explicitly rewards you more cash for doing evil/morally bankrupt stuff, and so literally incentivizes that. Unless you're in it for the karma, in which case you want to do good stuff. So half the players are fighting for nice stuff and half for evil stuff. I seriously can't see that as a good result.

[Longes]

If the goal of the priority system was to prevent people from specializing super hard at things like "rigging" and "decking" to the exclusion of other things, then the priority system is a dismal failure. More of a failure than doing absolutely nothing, since it stops zero people from specializing who want to and forces some people to make characters that are more specialized than they want them to be.

From what I can see, the priority system actually forces you to specialize on your archetype/class. If you are a decker or a rigger, you HAVE to have Resources A and, in case of decker, Skills B.


Anyone got any opinion on the new Technomancers? I loved the idea of technomancers, but they seem absolutely horrible in SR5, especially compared to deckers - they can't swap their matrix attributes which are going to be lower than decker's, unless you invest into 'ware, they die to Black IC (stun+physical, instead of matrix+physical), their Complex Forms are kind of crap, their Sprites are kind of crap...

[NineInchNall]

To be honest, I haven't really looked at the Matrix chapter in detail.

I saw the two page spread of "matrix jargon" and said, "Fuck you."

Then I went back to reading Kant, because it's more straightforward. And less needlessly complex. And more clearly written.

Yes, that's a philosophy nerd rip on the SR5 writers.

[Longes]

To be honest, I haven't really looked at the Matrix chapter in detail.

I saw the two page spread of "matrix jargon" and said, "Fuck you."

Then I went back to reading Kant, because it's more straightforward. And less needlessly complex. And more clearly written.

Yes, that's a philosophy nerd rip on the SR5 writers.

Oh noes! Who's next? McDonnalds workers?!

New matrix seems to be too fiddly to me, from the GM perspective - you need to track everyone's matrix stats, loaded programs, Overwatch Score, Matrix condition monitor, initiative, MARKs...