Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[Username17]

and if you aren't willing to do deep dives into min maxing to get massive pornomancy dicepools or whatever, you probably shouldn't be an Adept at all.

-Username17

So in your opinion every Adept player should be a dirty Min-Maxxer? that's an opinion I just can't support.
Adepts are the magical equivalent of Street Sammies, focussing on augmenting their bodies to achieve incredible things. Things the Sammies can't replicate, just as they can't replicate the more tech based abilities.
And adepts aren't nearly as powerful compared to mages, so there's no reason why mages should get the boni of Mentor Spirits and Adepts shouldn't.

Adept powers are in general significantly worse than what can be achieved with cyberware or spells. If you aren't min/maxxing hard there's no reason to be one at all.

Now it's a resource other characters don't get to use. There are some gems in there and you can find ways to stack things up to get very large specialized dicepools. And that's fine if that's what you want to do. But if you're just going to take a little of this and a little of that, you're better off as a mundane who happens to have some cyberware.

"Frank, if you build a character in a completely unplayable way, it's completely unplayable!"
"So fucking what?"

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

That was supposed to be the defining difference between Adepts and Samurai so as to not just have magical samurai and cyber/bio samurai . .
Adepts were to be specialists focussing on one area of expertise(basically, yes, minmaxxing in game) while cyberware users were supposed to be more versatile than the magic users. The swiss army knife samurai with skillwires and gear and attributes for being good at many things but not as good as the adept, hacker rigger in their chosen niche.

As for Mentor-Spirits:
At least in SR3, Adepts used to have the Paths.
Is that not a thing that exists anymore?

I seem to remember there having been the toemist or shamanist or something like that way?

[Username17]

Everything about Adepts is based around the fact that the people who wrote Adept powers were deathly afraid that somewhere somehow adepts were going to be good at kung fu. Every power that is good enough to use is an accident that managed to escape the nerf stick because the fun police didn't have a shit fit about it. And since the fun police are deeply uncreative people whose idea of game balance is almost entirely based on combat against spherical cows on featureless planes, almost every power that escaped the Eye of Sauron did so by relating to something other than making attack rolls in combat.

By flavor, Adepts are actually supposed to have super powered kung fu and punch people at super speed or some shit, but those abilities are fucking awful because the fun police pre-nerfed them into unplayability. The SR4 gaming community has adapted itself to the idea that Adepts are all specialists that are crazy good at non-stabby tasks such as social interaction or stealth, but that's an emergent property of the fact that it is possible to make Adepts who are not hot garbage if you go that route. Not because any of the original source material implied that Adepts were like that.

You pay more for bonuses to combat skills not because you are supposed to invest in bonuses to Negotiations instead, but because the original authors thought you'd take the combat skill bonuses anyway and wanted your character to suck.

-Username17

[Whirlwind]

Everything about Adepts is based around the fact that the people who wrote Adept powers were deathly afraid that somewhere somehow adepts were going to be good at kung fu.

-Username17

Why did they worry so much about that happening?

[Stahlseele]

Everything about Adepts is based around the fact that the people who wrote Adept powers were deathly afraid that somewhere somehow adepts were going to be good at kung fu.

-Username17

Why did they worry so much about that happening?

DnD Monks come to mind and the inevitable comparision maybe?
Maybe an ill conceived attempt at niche protection for the samurai to stay the combat monkey while adepts go and become the refined society nth level cat burglars or something like that.
Maybe the person responsible looked at eastern movies of the time and went:"fuck that, i do not want that in this setting".
Not sure if there is anybody left to actually be able to answer that . .
Frank and Ancient History are probably the closest to somebody like that.
One because he understands the maths behind shit and the other because he knows more of the world background than many other people.

[Iduno]

and if you aren't willing to do deep dives into min maxing to get massive pornomancy dicepools or whatever, you probably shouldn't be an Adept at all.

-Username17

So in your opinion every Adept player should be a dirty Min-Maxxer? that's an opinion I just can't support.

Any attempt I've made at making an adept with moderate dice pools (12 or less) requires me to put time into reducing my dice pools, because that's a number that anyone can achieve reasonably. Unless you focus on powers that are unique (weird kung fu movie stuff like wall running, combat senses, traceless walk, etc.), you have either powers that are like samurai powers but cost more, or skill boosts that send your dice pools stratospheric and probably cost a reasonable amount.

I'm assuming the go big or go samurai is because it's cheaper to get the same dice pools for a samurai until you go past the limits the samurai was balanced for.

[Whipstitch]

Why did they worry so much about that happening?

My theory is that a lot of the people who were interested in hunting down '90s era D&D alternatives did so precisely because they didn't want to dungeon crawl anymore and felt that it was important to discourage people from trying to solve every problem via applying a mace to the face. The most obvious example of this sort of thinking was Vampire. White Wolf handed out vampiric physical combat powers rather grudgingly and openly fretted about how such powers needed to be heavily policed lest they intrude upon someone's personal drama.

Shadowrun wasn't quite as bad on that front, but I do get the sense that many of the powerful things in the setting are a combination of math failures and people slipping shit in under the radar. For example, I don't have any reason to believe that the devs understood that in their game spendthrifts rule and skinflints drool. Adepts who kill dudes with their hands had virtually no expensive equipment to worry about losing but they paid for that privilege by sucking ass. By contrast a summoner or rigger who threw all of their resources at having a big material and equipment stockpile could theoretically be boned by burning through all of their gear but in exchange they had the ability to flop their dicks onto the table and show up the entire party if they really felt like it.

[OgreBattle]

Perhaps they saw it as role protection for cybernetics? Shadowrun seems to want a mood of "power at SOME cost" but having super ninja powers without having to go through flesh and essence shredding surgery dampens that.

[Username17]

The White Wolf comparison is very apt. A lot of people who wrote games in the 90s and 2000s genuinely hated min/maxxers but also only recognized min/maxxing with regards to basic combat metrics. That other forms of overpoweredness even existed to be combatted or allowed was outside the box thinking.

-Username17

[Prak]

Assuming everyone has equal HD, would a warg PC really be much more powerful than a party otherwise comprised of orcs, goblins, and other "savage" races?

I went through Pathfinder's race creation guidelines to get an idea of where a warg would be, but I'm definitely dubious of the conclusion that a warg is something like three times better than being an orc.

[Username17]

The Pathfinder 'Worg' has good stats (+6 Strength, +4 Wisdom, +4 Dexterity, +2 Constitution, -4 Intelligence), some natty armor, a decent movement, a tremendously mediocre weapon (basically a short sword with a trip attached), and no hands.

Wargs are pretty bad in combat, severely less effective than a PC warrior of equal hit dice. Their teeth are like a one handed weapon that they can't upgrade and also they can't use a shield while doing it. There's a reason they are normally considered a mount.

If they were allowed to be a Druid or Cleric of equivalent level, that would be broken. Because they have decent defensive bonuses and senselessly large bonus to Wisdom.

-Username17

[rasmuswagner]

The Pathfinder 'Worg' has good stats (+6 Strength, +4 Wisdom, +4 Dexterity, +2 Constitution, -4 Intelligence), some natty armor, a decent movement, a tremendously mediocre weapon (basically a short sword with a trip attached), and no hands.

Wargs are pretty bad in combat, severely less effective than a PC warrior of equal hit dice. Their teeth are like a one handed weapon that they can't upgrade and also they can't use a shield while doing it. There's a reason they are normally considered a mount.

If they were allowed to be a Druid or Cleric of equivalent level, that would be broken. Because they have decent defensive bonuses and senselessly large bonus to Wisdom.

-Username17

Monster ability scores don't work like that in PF. You add a +4, +4, +2, +2, +0, and –2 to the existing scores. Regardless of point buy because, you know, pathfinder.

The bite is a sole natural attack, and as such works like a two-handed weapon for strength bonus and power attack.

[Prak]

I used the Races of War guidelines for monstrous races before then building the warg in PF'S race creation rules, so +2 str, con and wis, -2 int is a bit more sane.

Edit:

Iunno what the magical beast type is worth compared to humanoid, but here's what we're looking at for a RoW style Warg

-+2 Str, Con Wis; -2 Int
-Magical Beast
-50 ft Speed
-+2 Natural Armor
-+2 Hide, Listen, Move Silently, and Spot
-Darkvision
-Low-light Vision
-Scent
-1d6 Bite
-Trip
-Quadruped, no hands.

For my game, I'd let them have relatively basic "hands" like dragons are commonly drawn with in D&D, sufficient for manipulating objects, but not practical for wielding weapons. PCs won't have access to the Cleric or Paladin class, but the issue of a druid warg is still valid.

[Whipstitch]

Perhaps they saw it as role protection for cybernetics? Shadowrun seems to want a mood of "power at SOME cost" but having super ninja powers without having to go through flesh and essence shredding surgery dampens that.

Perhaps that became a concern in later revisions but I'd note that a lot of the most straight forward combat cyberware was also pretty janky and overpriced too and the problem gets worse the farther you go back. E.g. Muscle Replacements are some of the oldest cyberware around and I would be willing to pay build points to not have them installed in my PC. There's a whole bunch of legacy 'ware that only NPCs ever use because that shit went obsolete the second ppl decided to ease up on the combat monkeys and started introducing battle 'ware that wasn't completely terrible.

[Username17]

The original concept was that half a point of Essence got you half a point of an attribute. Dermal Plating and Muscle Replacement were the original standards and they are fucking awful. The only reason Wired Reflexes and Cybereyes were good enough in the Big Blue Book is that the original authors underestimated how useful going first and spotting enemies was in a game where people had guns.

Cyberware and Adept powers share the core reality that the original set only has anything good in it by mistake because the intended balance point was actually extremely weak and crappy. The original authors really wanted players to make fighting men whose bulge over a rando gang member or angry dog was not very much. The fact that it was even possible to make a starting character who was not much threatened by a rando Ork with a sword was something that offended them deeply and for years the authors decried that as basically cheating and definitely playing the game wrong.

The Shadowrun fanbase looked at the sample characters and decried them as being unplayable, but that actually was the characters the authors imagined us playing. Complete with characters attacking with Hand Razors with a relevant close combat skill of 4. And they thought this would be OK because the Mage would know Mana Bolt at Force 3. The near universal rejection of this model is of course why Shadowrun was playable, but it's an emergent reality. Shadowrun in its early editions was mostly playable on accident rather than by design.

-Username17

[Trill]

So, theoretically, if I wanted to throw adepts a bone and have Mentor spirits give Adept powers (like SR5 does) AND used Franks Adept power errata:
How much should the adept powers be worth?
SR5 Mentor spirits give powers around 0.5PP, with Raven being the exception (1PP). Is that a good amount worth of powers?

[Stahlseele]

Depends. Having never read Franks Errata:
Are there actually usefull Powers you can cram into that ammount?
But on the other hand, you need to be really really carefull with this.
Giving Free Stuff to some and not to others is a good way to sour the mood on the table.

[Trill]

Considering the current situation it's less giving free stuff and more balancing it out
Mages get bonuses, disadvantages and roleplay opportunities
Adepts get disadvantages and roleplay opportunities, but pay the same as the mages

[Username17]

Considering the current situation it's less giving free stuff and more balancing it out
Mages get bonuses, disadvantages and roleplay opportunities
Adepts get disadvantages and roleplay opportunities, but pay the same as the mages

Mentor Spirits are, game mechanically, free power. They are functionally equivalent to setting the Awakening cost 5 points higher for everyone who can get them, because they aren't remotely balanced against not having them.

If you open up Mentor Spirits to characters who currently don't get them, what you are saying is that you are giving those characters free power. It's not really different from simply saying "I don't think this character type is good enough, so I've increased a couple of their dicepools by 2 with no explanation".

Now personally I am quite receptive to the idea that Adepts aren't good enough. Most of the things you'd want to do as an Adept you'd just be better off as a non-magical person who had completely mundane task training in the relevant fields. That's bogus and sad. But I'm also cognizant of the fact that the thing Adepts are good at is piling a bunch of bonuses together into a single pile that makes them have crazy high dice pools in a specific area of endeavor.

A Stealth Adept doesn't need a Mentor bonus to Stealth. A Pornomancer doesn't need a Mentor bonus to Etiquette. Almost literally anything else would be better from the standpoint of playability.

Although not quite literally anything else. To call out the specific dumb decisions of 5th edition for a moment, the Adept power points are linear and fungible. It means that if you get .5 PP worth of one thing you can just spend .5 PP less on that specific thing and have an extra .5 PP left over to spend on absolutely anything else. For any character who has both Power X and Power Y there is literally no difference between getting a bonus to Power X and getting a bonus to Power Y. Actually and specifically no difference at all. It would be simpler and not different to decree that Adepts just get more Power Points to spend.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Considering the current situation it's less giving free stuff and more balancing it out
Mages get bonuses, disadvantages and roleplay opportunities
Adepts get disadvantages and roleplay opportunities, but pay the same as the mages

On the other paw:
Adepts are? Correct. Magic.
Which can be countered by . . mostly magic and precious little else.
Also, impossible to actually deny access to in the case of Adepts.
MageHoods do not really work on their somatic powers as they do on spells / conjouring.

Meanwhile, a cybered Samurai?
Gets countered by Magnets.
Seriously. There is so much cheap and easy to aquire external gear that it is technically impossible to not be found out.
Only if you use the patented:"too much information to sift through!" kind of mind-caulk.
And that does not hold up either, because even if you get that much data, you only need to look at the data from a certain point or space in time.
Which massively reduces the data overhead you have to look at.

[OgreBattle]

Ideally in your own Shadowrun, how would you define the Adept power set vs cybernetics vs sorcery vs summoning?

[Stahlseele]

Adept i would want to be able to do whatever the hell he wants with his power points, including going Kane from Kung Fu . .

Adeps should, as per the fluff be highly specialized in whatever field they so chose. So giving them cheaply stacking bonuses that get more expensive as they diversify sounds about right.

Cyberware Samurai should get many smaller bonuses to many more broader areas that are harder to stack to keep with the theme of the swiss army knife character jack of all trades master of none.

Let the cyber specialists like deckers and riggers specialize in the same way as adepts do, cheap stacking bonuses that get more difficult to get when trying to diversify because of a lack of syncergy.

Sorcery and summoning is a bit harder for me to wrap my head around, because, stupidly, it can basically do anything. Aside from Matrix stuff for the most part.

Ideally, magic should be doing stuff that can not be done by mundane means and precious little else. Mainly dealing with the enemy magics.
Healing on the fly. Flying and you lot probably can come up with way better examples than i do . .

[Username17]

Ideally in your own Shadowrun, how would you define the Adept power set vs cybernetics vs sorcery vs summoning?

I'm personally not sold on the idea that Adepts were a good idea in the first place. The Magic/Mundane split was good for world building in that Magic had a defined set of rules with limited effect on the overall setting, but it wasn't good for game balance. The idea of 'you need a magic guy to solve magic problems' doesn't really work if the magic guy can also solve non-magic problems, which the SR mages very definitely could.

There are things you could do, and various ones have been tried, but ultimately if you need a mage to solve a magic problem, then for simple role protection purposes you should need a non-mage to solve a non-magic problem. That doesn't mean that every problem that isn't non-magical needs to be role protected for mundanes, but that there need to be a significant portion of the challenge space that mundane characters are needed to solve in the same manner as magic characters have significant challenges that are reserved for them.

This makes Adepts and buff spells like Increase Reflexes inherently problematic. A 'magic character who focuses on interacting with challenges that mundane characters are expected to focus on' is a threat to game balance even if they aren't especially good at their job. Why would any player choose to not be able to solve a significant subset of challenges if they could otherwise choose to be able to solve them and still be able to solve the problems that interested them in the first place?

To the extent that this is a needle that can be threaded at all, it is the Street Samurai that has to go. If we let magical martial artists and fireball slinging wizards interact with the combat minigame, fighting is not a protected role! Meaning that a Street Samurai needs to also be a hacker or also be a face or whatever.

Having Adepts at all is basically admitting that you don't actually think Street Samurai is a real or protectable archetype. And considering that it's one of the most popular archetypes, I don't think that's the correct direction to go. Ghost Who Walks is the only original character who didn't get an epic transformation, but he is one of the original characters. And I think if you can't support him in your framework you need to acknowledge that you've fucked up.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Meaning that a Street Samurai needs to also be a hacker or also be a face or whatever.

-Username17

Yeah, SR4 samurai min-max boils down to accepting that anything that only increases your combat numbers needs to be looked at with great suspicion. Muscle Toners, Synthacardium and some form of Initiative/Reaction (even if it's just injectables) are about all you need to punk some mall cops and they pull double duty by letting you assure the GM that your character can run, jump and drive a car without too much trouble. Installing illegal implanted weaponry or metal bones on top of that is weaker than what the summoner or rigger can do with the same money and is all around just way less useful than grabbing tailored pheromones and a bunch of cyborg super senses.

[OgreBattle]

perhaps cyborgs can sacrifice their flesh and ability to be 'normal', and casters sacrifice their sanity.