So what the shit is so bad about Shadowrun?

[Username17]

For different fixed target numbers, consider what it means to have a 6 die pool:

TN	Average	Chance of Average Roll	Chance of Below Average	Chance of Above Average	Number of Below Average Results	Number of Above Average Results	Chance of Average or Above
3+	4	32.92%	31.96%	35.12%	4	2	68.04%
4+	3	31.25%	34.38%	34.38%	3	3	65.63%
5+	2	32.92%	35.12%	31.96%	2	4	64.88%

So what does that mean? First of all, it means that the lower the base target number, the higher the base success threshold is going to be. If you're rolling TN 5+ dice you are looking for 2 hits and if you're rolling TN 3+ dice you are looking for 4 hits. Even so, people succeed more frequently with lower target numbers because people roll below average less often.
The big difference is in how many fail states versus how many success states there are. With TN 5+, there are 4 distinct ways you can roll above average and only 2 ways you can roll below average. Failures happen more frequently, but the different kinds of failure aren't much different from each other. Success is rarer, but people have more kinds of success they could get. TN 3+ is the opposite: failures are less common, but there are more gradations of failure available.

Probably the easiest way to think about it is that if you are on TN 3+ you have Fumbles but not Criticals, while if you are on TN 5+ you have Criticals but not Fumbles. With TN 3+ the MC has to consider what different degrees of failure mean, because that is the primary interesting output of unusual die rolls. With TN 5+ the MC is considering what different degrees of success mean, because that is the primary interesting output of unsual rolls. With TN 3+ you can fail to hit threshold by 3 and you can fail to hit threshold by 4. With TN 5+ you can't, but you can exceed threshold by 3 and exceed threshold by 4.

TN 4+ is, obviously, precisely in the middle of those two options, and its bellcurve is symmetrical. Degrees of success and degrees of failure are exactly the same.

-Username17

[saithorthepyro]

Okay, thank you. I see why they went with 5+ then, although I do think 4+ should have been used in 5th edition because of the ridiculous amounts of dice you need to roll.

On extra initiative passes in combat, I'm thinking of switching instead to having extra actions granted by Wired Reflexes and it's type, maybe a defense boost in addition. Essentially the same effect, because extra actions works a lot better than extra rounds in a pvp game. Would this cause any unintended consequences to the combat system that could wreck it, or could it be made to work?

[Whipstitch]

A lot depends on how you word it. If by extra actions you mean that people get to do even more between responses from enemies then it's plausible that such a change would make going first matter even more and in Shadowrun that's really saying something.

[saithorthepyro]

Doing even more yes. And yeah it would going first even more of an issue, but extra rounds are more of an issue on PBP than they are already in RL games. Added on top is going to be justifying the same number of actions already in ten second rounds as in three second rounds, unless I increase it there as well. The other option is just making it give something that is not extra actions in any way, shape, or form, which will probably end up as a massive nerf to those options. Frank's suggestions for replacements from the SR 5 drunk review (gives a passive dodge value you can use, no penalty for switching targets/moving and shooting) could work.

Another question that has come up:Dual-wielding in general appears to not be a viable option, unless you have a massive dice pool to split or are targeting enemies with low defenses. Assuming an environment with longer combat turns, switching to a small penalty seems like a decent change to fix this.

[Username17]

Okay, thank you. I see why they went with 5+ then, although I do think 4+ should have been used in 5th edition because of the ridiculous amounts of dice you need to roll.

This is gibberish. You don't roll less dice when your target number is 4+, you roll the same number of dice and hits mean less individually because you get more of them. The number of gradations of competence your game wants to model doesn't change. The outputs change, and how you interpret them changes. But the base target number has no effect whatsoever on the number of dice people roll.

On extra initiative passes in combat, I'm thinking of switching instead to having extra actions granted by Wired Reflexes and it's type, maybe a defense boost in addition. Essentially the same effect, because extra actions works a lot better than extra rounds in a pvp game. Would this cause any unintended consequences to the combat system that could wreck it, or could it be made to work?

In 1st edition the initiative passes go with everyone who has a third action taking an action, then everyone who has a second action taking an action, then everyone who has a first action taking an action. So if you only have 1 action, the Street Samurai will act two or three times before you do anything. The result in that system was that unwired people rarely got to act in combat at all, which is why 4th edition rules changed it so that extra actions got taken at the end of the turn. Extra IP are still very good in SR4, but unwired characters sometimes get to take actions. Moving to an extra actions model sounds like a more extreme version of SR1 rules, where whoever has the highest initiative boost would act three times before anyone else did anything and then combat would be over. Can't say that I'm a fan of that concept.

That being said, I'm not really a fan of extra actions as a model for super speed. It slows the game down significantly. If I were to overhaul the super speed rules, I'd replace extra actions with something else. But I definitely wouldn't do "like SR1, but even harsher on slower characters." That seems insane to me.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Maybe make it so that boosted people get super parry/dodge or something insteaf of more actions.

[Username17]

Stahlseele]They made Trolls basically unplayable in SR4 and 5 for the things you would want a Troll (melee/bruiser/tank/heavy weapons guy) And instead made elves better in all of those.

Trolls are basically unplayable in every edition. Some more so than others. Being strong isn't worth as much as being perceptive in a game where people sneak around and use guns. Even in editions where melee is reasonably effective, it's still worse than using ranged attacks. It has a lower rate of fire and worse range by definition.

The thing that makes Melee terrible in SR4 is the two shot problem. Because of linear damage, it's extremely difficult to fill an enemy's entire line of damage boxes with one attack, however big that attack is. In SR3 you can potentially make a diamond katana attack that does so much damage you can drop fools in one hit, but you're still doing Complex Actions instead of Simple Actions and being in melee. The only reason that "melee guys" are even a thing in SR3 is because player characters are expected to optimize at a level considerably above the opposition - meaning that a Street Samurai can make deliberately suboptimal choices and still clear expected opposition in combat. But of course, if the MC throws attack helicopters and dragons at you, or even just medium sized groups of enemies with assault rifles, being good with a diamond katana is not going to fucking cut it.

Which brings us to the core issue with the Street Samurai character concept - killing people isn't actually very difficult in a modern setting and being good at killing people is insufficient to justify your position on a Shadowrunner team. Now Shadowrun combat takes a lot of table time to resolve, so the shooty/stabby guys have more spotlight time than their contributions would otherwise warrant, but they can be easily replaced by characters who have access to enough stealth to get a free attack on the shlubs in the next room or who have poison gas, conjured spirits, or remote control robots to go clear out the next room without even fucking going there.

Now if you were going to make a Shadowrunesque game that had different technology and different magic, you wouldn't necessarily have Riggers and Conjurers who could fully and satisfactorily replace the Solo. But even if you did that, so what? Killing people can still be satisfactorily performed by throwing a grenade into a building or blowing up the building with a larger explosive. And individual enemies can be stabbed in the back with nothing more than a kitchen knife if you're sneaky enough to get there unseen. Gunplay, swordplay, and pretty much any other "fighter" skills are obviously and severely deprecated since the development of the rifled musket and the grenade. It simply is not possible to be good enough at killing people in a stand-up fight for that to be meaningful as your sole contribution to the team.

Which means that warfighter type characters have always and will always be judged not on whether their killing proficiency dicepool is 17 dice or 19 or whatever, but on what they bring to the table other than spending combat actions removing enemies from the battle map. And Trolls have never ever been good for fucking anything other than carrying big weapons and murdering people with them. Even in editions when it was possible for them to do that effectively, they still fucking sucked because that's not a complete character and never will be.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Doesn't change that the more machine than meat mean monster is a staple character of the genre and doing away with that is . . kinda a meh approach.

[Whipstitch]

They need to be broadened rather than eliminated. Well-built sr4 Samurai are similar to rogues in D&D. They're objectively worse than mages or riggers but you can kill just about any single target you get the jump on and if you show up to the table with a shit ton of sensory ware, initiative boosters, muscle toners and tailored pheromones only the most hardcore min-maxers will complain about cutting you in on the payday. You're unspectacular but by loading up on nuyen and attributes odds are good you can cheaply and reliably pull off some stupid trick that the wizards don't really want to invest in themselves. Which, incidentally, is why the "Complete Trog" bullshit where the new crew has a hearty chuckle over trolls being a high priority race incapable of diversifying is so insulting and self-destructive. Troll samurai were suboptimal in sr4 but now they're just kinda fucked.

[Stahlseele]

Of course, even when i minmaxed a Troll to be killy or tanky, usually there was enough left to do something besides that.
Especially the Skillsoft cheesemonkey built obviously.

And yes, the samurai is more or less supposed to be the swiss army katana.
I found the athletic trolls of SR4 quite hillarious to be honest.
Climbing a building faster than most any character could run on flat ground.
Jumping like a gummy bear. Lifting and throwing stuff. Heck, even swimming faster than most other characters could run on land.
I find those quite funny.

I haven't really bothered too much with SR5, with SR4 i at least tried a few sessions and at least read the apropriate books once . .

With SR5, i haven't done much more than just skimming over the base book as far as i remember.

Did they fuck over Samurai/Trolls even more?

[Whipstitch]

SR5 went back to the Priority system but they made being a troll a minimum of Priority B for some dumbass reason. The ability to sink more points into Strength and Body isn't a real advantage in SR5 so having to take on real sacrifices and build constraints for that dubious privilege is just an absolute kick in the balls.

[Stahlseele]

Ah, i see. Thank you.

[TheFlatline]

That being said, I'm not really a fan of extra actions as a model for super speed. It slows the game down significantly. If I were to overhaul the super speed rules, I'd replace extra actions with something else. But I definitely wouldn't do "like SR1, but even harsher on slower characters." That seems insane to me.

-Username17

This... Having played a fair share of SR and a *lot* of Vampire, Celerity/extra init passes/wired reflexes/whatever is insane. All the combat monkeys would play through a regular turn of combat, and the non-combat monkeys would take their one action and go smoke a cigarette and hope they didn't get splattered during the 37 other actions being taken that turn.

Vampire was out of control but SR was pretty bad.

[Username17]

Molly Millions has no problem being a main character in her books. And while it's instructive that Sally and Dodger get epic quests in later books and Ghost Who Walks does not, but initially Ghost is a fully functional member of the team.

In fiction, a character being "a badass" allows them to solve all kinds of non-combat problems. They can evaluate enemy defenses and predict enemy deployments. They can detect ambushes and traps. They can cool their way through social encounters. They can spot clues. They can sneak around. They can escape dangerous situations and catch fleeing people by performing stunts. But in a skill based roleplaying game, all of those are the effects of different skills from the one you use to shoot people. That might be Tactics, Perception, Etiquette, Stealth, and Athletics - and you don't get points in any of those other skills just for buying weapons skills. Indeed, weapons skills come directly out of your budget for all of those other things.

Characters in Shadowrun operate in a deficit of broad competence. In order to get the kinds of dice pools you want in your primary fields of interest, you end up having to let some of your off-theme skills be low or even zero. SR3 is particularly bad about this as regards to Street Samurai, in that it is completely impossible to afford a breadth of weapon skills to be reasonably treated as a weapons expert while still having even basic competence in other areas you would narratively expect a badass to be good. SR4 only accidentally gives Street Samurai a reason for existence in that the sensory boosters and athletics boosters happen to be real good so that syborg badasses end up being good at Perception tests and Gymnastics in addition to shooting people.

But in no edition is being big and strong particularly incentivized. It doesn't do anything other than offer suboptimal combat options.

-Username17

[Iduno]

being good with a diamond katana is not going to fucking cut it.

-Username17

Pretty good.

On topic:
Trolls are terrible for the same reason Sams are terrible. High physical stats barely matter in combat, and are worse out of combat. Especially any stat that isn't dexterity, because that's the one elves are good at.

Stats are mental>dex>strength, toughness when you're being sneaky or talking/thinking your way through problems. Being big doesn't make you intimidating, it doesn't help you fit in, and it doesn't solve puzzles.

And if a mage needs higher stats (because they aren't creative enough to solve the problem another way or are sandbagging), they use magic/spirits they summon with magic because it's a much better way to get to the same goal.

If you wanted the cyborg or born big and tough to be useful, you'd have those two be the only paths to high stats, and you'd have to have a lot of skills that are actually used and can only be done well with high physical stats.

That's possibly what Catalyst was trying to do with limits, except you'd want it done by people who aren't terminally incompetent (and you would probably end up with something closer to SR3's limiting skills with stats). Also, you'd probably want it done by someone who isn't an elf fetishist, because that undermines the whole "big strong person actually contributes" thing.

Molly Millions et al only get to be reasonable characters because it's okay in a book to have everyone else sit this chapter out while the badass is being a badass. You can't shouldn't do that in a game. That's why the decker is a hated role.

[saithorthepyro]

Okay, thank you. I see why they went with 5+ then, although I do think 4+ should have been used in 5th edition because of the ridiculous amounts of dice you need to roll.

This is gibberish. You don't roll less dice when your target number is 4+, you roll the same number of dice and hits mean less individually because you get more of them. The number of gradations of competence your game wants to model doesn't change. The outputs change, and how you interpret them changes. But the base target number has no effect whatsoever on the number of dice people roll.

Yeah, I didn't fully elaborate, but the thought process was that Catalyst does, or at least did, assume players would have a certain sized dice pool for attempting the various thresholds of tasks. The idea was the Catalyst could switch to 4+ for hits, than adjust attributes/skills/other parts of the player's dice pool in order to shrink it so that they would still roll the number of hits expected from the player but less dice overall. For a TN 3 test 6 dice instead of 9, 8 instead of 12 for TN 4, etc. The main issue is that the dice pools come from a lot of different sources, most of which are too small to easily translate to being reduced by a third.

On extra initiative passes in combat, I'm thinking of switching instead to having extra actions granted by Wired Reflexes and it's type, maybe a defense boost in addition. Essentially the same effect, because extra actions works a lot better than extra rounds in a pvp game. Would this cause any unintended consequences to the combat system that could wreck it, or could it be made to work?

In 1st edition the initiative passes go with everyone who has a third action taking an action, then everyone who has a second action taking an action, then everyone who has a first action taking an action. So if you only have 1 action, the Street Samurai will act two or three times before you do anything. The result in that system was that unwired people rarely got to act in combat at all, which is why 4th edition rules changed it so that extra actions got taken at the end of the turn. Extra IP are still very good in SR4, but unwired characters sometimes get to take actions. Moving to an extra actions model sounds like a more extreme version of SR1 rules, where whoever has the highest initiative boost would act three times before anyone else did anything and then combat would be over. Can't say that I'm a fan of that concept.

That being said, I'm not really a fan of extra actions as a model for super speed. It slows the game down significantly. If I were to overhaul the super speed rules, I'd replace extra actions with something else. But I definitely wouldn't do "like SR1, but even harsher on slower characters." That seems insane to me.

-Username17

Yeah, after some debate we just decided to go with some of the suggested solutions from the SR 5 Drunk review.

As far as trolls and melee go, I'm giving them some buffs to aspects besides just general tankiness, and also reducing melee attacks down to a simple action. I actually don't understand why it was a complex action, was this is a sacred cow from edition 1, or is there actually a good reason for it?

As far as Samurai getting non-combat skills, I'm using reduced costs for skills, and splitting up at least mage spells into different schools of spells. Either that or condensing firearms back into a single skill.

[Whipstitch]

Guns should be one skill, full stop. Same deal with melee. Hell, you can make a fair case for having one combat skill and then people differentiate themselves through gear and magic ability selection. That's frankly what happens already, just people are stuck with dragging around signature weapons whether they like that flavor or not.

[Stahlseele]

Melee being a complex action is, indeed, legacy SR yes, because of how it works.
Melee in Shadowrun is not:"I punch him" and done.
Melee in Shadowrun is the complete choreography of attack, defense and evasion.
And it is not only possible for the attacker to deal damage, but also, if he is simply better or more lucky than the attacker, the defender can deal damage to the attacker. On the attackers initiative phase to boot.
There is very little else that actually works like that in Shadowrun, if i remember correctly.
And Melee damage can go to silly levels if you know what you are doing as well.

[Username17]

Yeah, I didn't fully elaborate, but the thought process was that Catalyst does, or at least did, assume players would have a certain sized dice pool for attempting the various thresholds of tasks. The idea was the Catalyst could switch to 4+ for hits, than adjust attributes/skills/other parts of the player's dice pool in order to shrink it so that they would still roll the number of hits expected from the player but less dice overall. For a TN 3 test 6 dice instead of 9, 8 instead of 12 for TN 4, etc. The main issue is that the dice pools come from a lot of different sources, most of which are too small to easily translate to being reduced by a third.

This is bluntly completely wrong. The number of dice you roll has to do with the number of dice that is comfortable to roll plus the number of gradations in competence your game intends upon making. Functionally, the sweet spot of dicepool systems tends to be about 6-20 dice, and that doesn't change when target numbers do.

When the target numbers go down, the worth of a single hit is reduced and success thresholds increase. But you don't spontaneously decide that dicepools become non-stupid with 2 dice in them or whatever.

-Username17

[kzt]

Merging all firearms skills: I've heard the arguments here about how this gimps combat characters, how it's unnecessary, and was a change forced more by gun nuts than anything else. I agree that basic firearms should have the same skill, but for more exotic weapons (Heavy Weapons, Magic, Alien, maybe sniper rifles?) there should be separate skills to handle them, because shooting a pistol and rifle isn't too much different, but between shooting a pistol and rocket there is a fair bit.

It's just like the sights on a rifle. Really.

A primitive guided missile like a Sagger (or even a TOW) has some major differences and if someone hasn't shown you how to assemble the launcher (or you've practiced extensively with the launcher and the manual) you are not even going to get it to fire. But a rocket? Nope, it's just like a rifle.

Massive number of equipment variants: Saw some complaints about the sheer number of guns within categories. While I agree that SR has a lot of equipment bloat, I'll probably keep at least 3-4 variants for each type, not including weird weapons, to provide some kind of variation and also for world-building purposes. Applied to other equipment types as well.

Every damn gun ends up having something that makes it different from every other gun. Make 50 different guns (each with their cool advantage) and I'll bet that the players will only use about 3, because you will have made them clearly mechanically superior. So why invest two weeks of your time into writing up those 47 cool guns that nobody will ever use? Spend it doing something useful.

Really, tell me how, given the granularity of SR, a G19 is different from a M92F300M or an HK USP? They are all 15 round 9mm pistols. Like all pistols they suck at making people intent on doing bad things to you actually stop trying to do bad things to you, but they are certainly more effective than angry looks and harsh words.

[kzt]

I will argue that armed melee should inflict much more damage than it does. Hitting someone with a sword or a mace is really likely to ruin their entire weekend. I'm talking shattered bones or removed limbs. I'd rather get shot with a 22 in the head than get hit with a mace in the head, or get shot in the arm with a 22 than have a dude swinging a three foot straight razor hit it.

Don't get me wrong, a single .22 hit can kill you, but the odds are a lot better that it won't functionally end the fight for you.

[Whipstitch]

Merging all firearms skills: I've heard the arguments here about how this gimps combat characters, how it's unnecessary, and was a change forced more by gun nuts than anything else. I agree that basic firearms should have the same skill, but for more exotic weapons (Heavy Weapons, Magic, Alien, maybe sniper rifles?) there should be separate skills to handle them, because shooting a pistol and rifle isn't too much different, but between shooting a pistol and rocket there is a fair bit.

It's just like the sights on a rifle. Really.

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. Letting the civvies take a a point or two of the Guns skill plus the Pistol specialization while Rambo puts in 5 ranks and gets the whole smorgasbord isn't perfect but it beats the status quo.

[Stahlseele]

Really, tell me how, given the granularity of SR, a G19 is different from a M92F300M or an HK USP? They are all 15 round 9mm pistols. Like all pistols they suck at making people intent on doing bad things to you actually stop trying to do bad things to you, but they are certainly more effective than angry looks and harsh words.

Magic.

[Thaluikhain]

I will argue that armed melee should inflict much more damage than it does. Hitting someone with a sword or a mace is really likely to ruin their entire weekend. I'm talking shattered bones or removed limbs. I'd rather get shot with a 22 in the head than get hit with a mace in the head, or get shot in the arm with a 22 than have a dude swinging a three foot straight razor hit it.

Don't get me wrong, a single .22 hit can kill you, but the odds are a lot better that it won't functionally end the fight for you.

Well, yes, but then the .22 (assuming you mean the .22LR) is a weak round used for plinking or shooting small animals, some very limited military use but it's not standard issue for anyone. That doesn't apply to swords and maces.

A standard issue round like the 5.56 NATO is very different. I'd also tend to think that a better comparison would be with multiple rounds, using a double tap, failure or zipper drill.

[Whipstitch]

I'd also tend to think that a better comparison would be with multiple rounds, using a double tap, failure or zipper drill.

That's kzt's point. In Shadowrun the melee damage you can do in 3 seconds is comparable or superior to what you can do with wholly unremarkable light pistols if and only if you're a super jacked metahuman or a cyberninja with a monosword and synthetic muscles. If SR's trained melee damage outputs were instead more comparable to a soldier performing a Fatality then kzt wouldn't be quite so frustrated.