Shadowrun doesn't actually have people use different maneuvers and attacks in combat. Basically, you shoot people and your typical attack action is "I shoot that guy." The tactical and strategic choices are mostly based on positioning and ambushes, not choice of attack modes. Most characters have whatever gun is at hand and declare that they are shooting people with them once combat happens.Ogrebattle wrote:So how does Shadowrun handle the "spam your best spell" problem that comes with being able to cast everything you know until you faint?
Magicians often only have one or two attack spells on their whole list, defaulting to shooting people with guns when their spell or spells aren't appropriate. Combat in Shadowrun is also really short, with a typical enemy being dropped in two shots and characters getting two shots when their turn comes up. If there are enough belligerents tht combat drags on for people to care whether they are using the "same attack" over and over again, the game does in fact become extremely dull because there aren't a lot of choices to make after you do an acrobatic dodge, take cover, and start shooting.
If you make the very top spells ridiculously hard to use, then people won't use them very often. But spell points will still encourage you to trade up for the highest level spell that is practical to cast. It just obviously does that, and it has done that every time it's been tried.hogarth wrote:It's trivial to come up with a spell point system where that doesn't happen. For instance, you could come up with a system where level 1 spells cost 1 point, level 2 spells cost 2 points, level 3 spells cost 4 points and level 4 spells cost 8 points and a 7th level wizard has 15 spell points. Or you could have a spell point system where each spell level has a cooldown (along the lines of the recharge magic variant in 3.5 Unearthed Arcana).souran wrote:So, people who are arguing that spell points don't cause people to just trade away their lower level spells for a few extra castings of their best spells know that they are not just theoretically wrong but emperically wrong as well right?
If your primary resource management system is Cooldown, then your primary resource management system isn't spell points. So it doesn't have the advantages or disadvantages of spell points and has the advantages and disadvantages of cooldown instead. I feel this is so obvious that I'm surprised I would even have to say it.
-Username17