Embezzlement in Catalyst

[Gelare]

It would be awesome if Frank did some writing for the new Shadowrun and gave us solid mechanics with some actual goddamn math behind them (ZOMG!), but then again, the man doesn't exactly play well with others, and also is in med school, which I hear can be kind of time-consuming. So we'll see.

[Lokathor]

Rather than having some Den sockpuppet, how feasible would it be for Frank to just write the hacking section? Or in some other way do some of the writing as himself?

This is sounding less and less like a mad, multi-leveled evil scheme. Is that really what we want?

No, we need to keep the mad crazy multi-level scheme going. In fact, we should write an entire game that's a parody of Shadowrun and call it a super lame parody name, "DarkSprinter: 7th age Cyber-mage-punk".

[CatharzGodfoot]

How about ``Cyberpunk 2020''?

[Lokathor]

I thought that was a real game already.

Actually I think that playing Shadowrun in the modern world might be an interesting game. Shouldn't be hard to be better than D20 Modern and/or Hunter: The Vigil.

[The Vigilante]

Frank,
Do you think I will see my copy of SR4LE ? Or should I press for a refund ?

[The Vigilante]

Sorry, stupid double post.

[Ganbare Gincun]

The Vehicle rules will be ground-up rewritten.

Forgive my ignorance on this subject - are they that bad?

SR4 Spirits are too powerful. There will be a series of limits put on them. I would be fairly surprised if they don't have their skills cut in half. I would also expect them to have their mental stats decoupled from Force, for fairly obvious reasons.

What other limits would you suggest being placed on spirits? And why do casters get "follower" or "pet" NPCs like spirits while non-casters lack these options? Just curious.

[Gelare]

The Vehicle rules will be ground-up rewritten.

Forgive my ignorance on this subject - are they that bad?

Well I sure couldn't make heads nor tails of them.

[TavishArtair]

SR4 Spirits are too powerful. There will be a series of limits put on them. I would be fairly surprised if they don't have their skills cut in half. I would also expect them to have their mental stats decoupled from Force, for fairly obvious reasons.

What other limits would you suggest being placed on spirits? And why do casters get "follower" or "pet" NPCs like spirits while non-casters lack these options? Just curious.

Spirits are very much not like follower/pets in other games, and being an Awakened entity is much more of an investment than just writing "wizard" on your sheet. It's a notable cost to just write down Awakened, nevermind all the skill points needed to do conjuration worth a damn. Spirits in SR, in terms of USING them, are limited by a number of services you can invoke them for. It would be more analogous to having multiple casts of one of those ultra-flexible spells from D&D like moldable walls, polymorph, or telekinesis - they can do so many things it is hilarious.

An actual follower/pet device is available to Riggers. Who do not, by the way, cast at all. It is sheer futility to attempt to both Rig and control vehicles/spy/combat drones and also be a caster. You will hurt your Essence too much to ever try just by installing the basic control cyberware, nevermind the stuff you actually want on top.

[Crissa]

Great, Loren is responsible for deforestation, as well.

-Crissa

[Fuchs]

We usually handwave the vehicle rules.

[Murtak]

An actual follower/pet device is available to Riggers. Who do not, by the way, cast at all. It is sheer futility to attempt to both Rig and control vehicles/spy/combat drones and also be a caster. You will hurt your Essence too much to ever try just by installing the basic control cyberware, nevermind the stuff you actually want on top.

Why? You can install a rig and datajack and cybereyes and half a dozen small things and stay above 4 Essence. The limiting factor in summoning spirits is usually drain, which does not depend on your magic attribute at all. You can jolly well summon force 8 spirits and have them be useful for combat. Even if you are low on build points at character creation and only managed to get to a magic of 2 you can still summon useful utility spirits with a force of 4.

[Username17]

The reason I can say confidently that the vehicle rules are going to be rewritten is because no one likes them. True story: one (although admittedly not the most important) issue that was holding up the FAQ for so damn long was the fact that people inside the organization were arguing about the damn vehicle rules. It's a confusing mess. People were arguing for a full rewrite right there in the FAQ, and not a small number of people were sympathetic.

The basic problem with the vehicle rules is the same problem as with rate of fire - the 3 second combat round is simply too fucking short. During the entire combat round, a high velocity bullet only goes 800 meters. It's not unrealistic to fire 8 bullets in 3 seconds - but between your first SA and your second SA in a combat round that short it's pretty hard to justify you reacting to the resolution of your last shot, because the bullet actually hasn't reached the target yet. 3 seconds in vehicle time is similarly bullshit, since it takes most people longer than 3 seconds just to start a fucking car. A car at highway speeds (80KPH) only covers 67 meters of straight line travel in that amount of time. The idea of there being any kind of reasonable "maneuvering" during that period is pretty much laughable.

But beyond that, the rules themselves don't even do a decent job within those admittedly crippling limitations. I mean, your round to round movement rate (speed) is called your "Acceleration" and the overall vector of your movement reference point is your "Speed - Acceleration". Seriously, that doesn't make any sense, and people can't figure it out. I understand that you can't make the chase from Bullit exciting when your combat system is asking you to model it as two hundred fucking rounds, or that cross town traffic is never going to be interesting when an entire combat turn starts and ends after one light turns red and before the next light turns green. But even within that set of brutal restrictions, having your game model "acceleration" as "distance over time" is just fucking insulting.

-Username17

[dirkformica]

Weren't there also chunky salsa issues with occupants in vehicle collisions? Like where cars colliding at residential speeds would cause the cars to be lightly damaged and everyone inside to be reduced to a fine mist?

<edit> More on topic: LOVE this Frank response on Dumpshock.

[Username17]

Weren't there also chunky salsa issues with occupants in vehicle collisions? Like where cars colliding at residential speeds would cause the cars to be lightly damaged and everyone inside to be reduced to a fine mist?

The Ramming damage is peculiar and incredibly titanic. Cars are far and away the most lethal thing in Shadowrun. The base damage is your vehicle's body. The body of a sub-compact is 8, the body of a sedan is 10. There is then a multipliar placed on that, based on the vehicle's top speed (not current speed, which isn't even a stat). Now, as it happens, almost every single vehicle in the game happens to fall into the "x2" bracket, because it's fucking immense (72-240 KPH). This means that ramming with pretty much anything is going to do a base damage of 16-20. Which is enough to red mist pretty much anything.

Yes, you can get even more stupidly titanic damage values out of other things, but it's a vehicle test with a threshold of 2 to keep control of your vehicle, after which you can back up over the target again on your next initiative pass for definitionally the same amount of stupidly ricockulous damage. But yeah, for the record a pick-up truck smashes into things for 28 damage, a sports car for 30, and a police APC for 32. Even a great dragon only has 20 points of hardened armor, so you can pretty much expect to run Lofwyr over to death with a couple of step vans if your rigger can actually get the GM to take this shit seriously.

If your vehicle is rammed or crashes, your car and the peopl inside suffer the normal damage for being rammed (OMGWTFBBQ) and you get to apply some extra armor dice for being inside a car. So um... instead of resisting 20 damage, you only have to resist 18. Which still means that you instantly explode. On the plus side, it's a lot easier to avoid getting hit in a moving vehicle than it is on foot, because you get to make a Pilot test instead of a Defense test.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

...maybe rolling that many dice for damage would end up with an okay number? Based on current speed of course, top speed is just absurd. Current speed wouldn't be hard to track at all.

[Username17]

...maybe rolling that many dice for damage would end up with an okay number? Based on current speed of course, top speed is just absurd. Current speed wouldn't be hard to track at all.

The thing is, current speed is impossible to track. We're talking about future cars, who seriously have a 0 to 60 of 3 seconds. By the end of the round, they will be going 97 KPH. If you're deliberately ramming a dude, you can expect that you're going to be gassing it before you're crashing it.

The really important question isn't "current speed" but actually "acceleration distance." That is to say, that if it takes you 3 seconds to hit 97 KPH, it much more importantly takes you a bit over 40 meters to get up to that kind of speed. What you'd want, in addition to a much longer combat round, is some maximum speeds and some acceleration distances (that is to say, how much space has to be covered before getting to important speed brackets). But those stats don't really exist for SR vehicles. All there is is a discretionary maneuverability number that is mysteriously called "acceleration."

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

It's easy enough, so long as you have wheeled vehicles accelerating via engines turning those wheels, acceleration is limited by the coefficient of friction between the wheels and the road, and at a perfect coefficient of friction equal to 1, you max out at an acceleration equal to gravity. So if you're still talking future cars (and not like future rocket-boosted cars or future hover-cars or future cars with chemical adhesion systems on their tires) the rules for getting hit by a car could quite reasonably be identical to the rules for having a large object dropped on your head.

[Murtak]

When someone drops a safe onto you we can reasonably assume you will be squished against the floor. When someone rams you with a safe we can reasonably assume you will go flying through the air. Getting rammed is always going to be less damaging than getting something dropped onto you, unless you are leaning against a solid wall.

[Rejakor]

Ideally, cars should do less damage at less than top speed. Distance travelled pre-ram nicely covers that. Furthermore, building a free 'power slide' into ramming means you can get sent flying and not take as much damage as if someone rammed you into/through a wall. And being able to elect not to take the power slide (if you die of damage you automatically powerslide the rest) means really really tough/heavy characters can just stop a speeding car in it's tracks like the Thing. Which is awesome.

[dirkformica]

More gold from Frank (sorry, I'm starting to sound like a fanboy.)

One thing I've noticed on the latest Dumpshock threads is a tactic I remember from the Paizo forums of orchestrated thread derailment to distract from the pertinent discussion at hand. Since I lurk here I know some of the personalities, and I don't want to invoke a particular one, but what is a good counter for that tactic?

[Parthenon]

There are seriously five dumpshock threads about this? Any bets on how long before this one gets shut down?

[virgil]

The fact one of the mods has explicitly made it his goal to derail the thread so it can be ended doesn't help; and then has the audacity to complain about people whining (oh, the blatant hypocrisy), despite the fact it's one freakin' thread out of an entire forum.

[A Man In Black]

It's not worth getting angry about. It's a developing situation, so either you have threads full of OT junk or you have to make a new thread when something new happens. Either way, you've got to get people interested again when new developments occur.

[Gelare]

The fact one of the mods has explicitly made it his goal to derail the thread so it can be ended doesn't help;

I was dubious, but that's actually exactly what happened, I was a fool for doubting you. Bull is such a tool.