Drunken Review: Shadowrun 5

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Silent Wayfarer
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Maybe they meant that lower Force spirits have lower Limits.

But really, fuck Limits.
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Post by codeGlaze »

Surgo wrote:I think I'm going to sum up the feelings of this entire message board:
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Yes.
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

Smirnoffico wrote:
Longes wrote:How about lower force spirits/sprites being harder to summon than higher force, because limit = force? And justification given by the devs is that "Lower Force spirits have more trouble staying in the physical world"
I never even got to reading magic chapter, so Frank's eventual review will be my maiden look at the rules. As far as I know, magic took some strange nerfs and buffs, the bottom line making this edition magic (namely mystic adept) run.

But yeah, if lower force spirits are indeed harder to summon, that makes no sense at all.
TL;DR: you roll magic+summoning, spirit rolls Force*2. For you spirit's Force acts as a Limit. So, when summoning Force 1 spirit you can't get more than 1 hit, meaning you can't get more than 1 service from him.
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Post by Rawbeard »

Seems like force 1 spirits are hard to summon, sure, your dicepool is muuuuuch higher, but if he rolls even one success you wasted your time... limits are ass.
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Post by Ancient History »

Magic Pokemon has always been a difficult balance point for Shadowrun, even before they started adding stuff like watcher spirits.
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Post by RadiantPhoenix »

Longes wrote:TL;DR: you roll magic+summoning, spirit rolls Force*2. For you spirit's Force acts as a Limit. So, when summoning Force 1 spirit you can't get more than 1 hit, meaning you can't get more than 1 service from him.
I believe this chart might be helpful for those who don't like calculating probabilities in their heads: (Spoiler for width)
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Did Shadowrun 5E do anything better than 4E? An edition going backwards in many or even most aspects is to be expected, but in every way? That's just so surreal.

... but then again, we have nWoD, Exalted 2E, and D&D 4E as counter-examples, so who knows.
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In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Smirnoffico »

Longes wrote:TL;DR: you roll magic+summoning, spirit rolls Force*2. For you spirit's Force acts as a Limit. So, when summoning Force 1 spirit you can't get more than 1 hit, meaning you can't get more than 1 service from him.
And what is the Limit for spirit?
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Post by Antumbra »

Presumably they have no Limit, as they aren't Player Characters.
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Post by Smirnoffico »

Seems about right
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Post by Rawbeard »

you need to stop talking about limits, before I start cutting myself.
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Post by Longes »

Rawbeard wrote:you need to stop talking about limits, before I start cutting myself.
Are you at your limit? :awesome:
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Post by Smirnoffico »

Seriously, there is some devious logic behind Limits - in one move the game just breaks down. I think i wouldn't be able to come up with something like this no matter how much I tried.
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Post by fectin »

@RadiantPheobix
That's a nice chart.
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Post by Username17 »

Your Character

Not actually a chapter, we're still in the Shadowrun concepts chapter. But all the stuff related to building a character is in here, so this section may as well be a chapter to itself. Page 50 and we finally get a rundown on the metatypes, which is sufficiently high level that I think it should have come earlier. But whatever. The big gripe here is that we're running through what is essentially a game mechanics section – we just went through the nitty gritty of how the numeric inputs for extended tests are stupid in this book, and now we're talking about the metatypes in pure magical teaparty terms. We get told that there are rumors of ancient Elves, but the only hint that Elves have attribute modifiers is that they are described as being nimble and “better looking.” But since Charisma actually has relatively little to do with how good you look, I don't know how that's supposed to be that helpful. The actual attribute modifiers aren't written until page 65, and the fact that they even exist doesn't get mentioned until the end. I'm definitely not saying that it doesn't make sense to introduce the metatypes narratively before you introduce them mechanically. I'm saying that it doesn't make sense to fold the narrative descriptions into the middle of a dry rundown of the game mechanics without putting the mechanics there as well.

And this is also the point where people who know Shadowrun get a little bit antsy. See, there are a lot of things in the Shadowrun world other than just Elves and Dwarves, Orks and Trolls. You have Cyclopses, Satyrs, Centaurs, and Sasquatch. Just as Metahumanity isn't the source of all sapient creatures in the world (implied but not made explicit by having name dropped some Dragons earlier in this book), there are also rarer metavariants of Humans. Regional variations like Ogres and outright SURGElings like cat girls and shit. And while I can certainly understand why you wouldn't include rules for all that shit in the basic book of a new edition, it's pretty misleading to not even drop hints that such a thing is possible. Also completely puzzling from a marketing standpoint, because if you're going to leave the other material in other books, shouldn't you encourage your readers to buy those books? I don't get it. In any case, SURGE is only mentioned one time in the entire book, and it's in a sample character background, name dropped wholly without context. Players not deeply familiar with the Shadowrun world have no context at all for any of the events mentioned in that character's sample background because this book doesn't have a fucking timeline or “So It Came To Pass” chapter at all. But we'll get there when we get there.

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Anyway, then we are presented with the attributes. These are pretty much the same as the attributes in 4th edition, which is disappointing. See, back in 1989 Shadowrun went out with basically the same attributes as Dungeons & Dragons. Because it was the 80s, and that is what people did. Sure, “Constitution” was named “Body” and “Wisdom” was named “Willpower,” but it was clearly identifiable as the six stats that RPGs used by default. And for a game about industrial espionage, detective work, and gun fights, these attributes were actually pretty terrible. Being smart or fast was obviously better than being big and strong. But with the attribute array they had, you got a point of smartness instead of a point of bigness or strongness. It was fucked. And 2nd and 3rd edition just grandfathered those shitty and incredibly unbalanced attributes. Out of the hundreds of characters I've seen played in those editions, I may have seen like half a dozen who didn't have max or near max intelligence.

4th edition broke the mold by cutting the awesome stats in half. Now there were four physical stats and four mental stats. And this was by all accounts much more balanced. But it was still pretty unbalanced. The reality was that half of Quickness was still better than all of Strength. Because we live in a god damn modern society, and if you need to carry a lot of stuff you load it into a fucking truck.

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In a world where this is a thing, it takes serious super strength before it becomes even noteworthy, and the normal range of human strength essentially doesn't matter at all.

So nine years later, it's not like people didn't know that Body and Willpower were still dump stats when compared to Agility and Intuition. So it would have been nice to see the stats jiggled some more to be more balanced. But that didn't happen. Because anywhere and everywhere in this game where there is really obvious design space to improve things, the authors elected to just Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V on the old mechanics. Only where things worked fine was it deemed necessary to have the new designers stick their dicks in the mashed potatoes.

Even the special attributes are mostly the same. What has changed is Initiative. They made it complicated and stupid. In the pre-4th edition days, there was this whole complicated thing where people had initiative dice which unlike all the other dice in this game were rolled and totaled together and then added to a base initiative value and your result determined not only when you got to go but also how many actions you got in a round. The details varied between the first three editions but the basic constant was that people who had extra sources of initiative dice (such as Wired Reflexes or the Increase Reflexes spell) mattered and everyone else could go pound sand. But it was also needlessly confusing, used completely arbitrary mechanics unused in the rest of the system, and was basically terrible. 4th edition cleaned that shit up a lot by giving people their initiative scores using essentially standard game mechanical operations and made the number of actions people got be fixed and known. You still basically didn't matter if you didn't have reflex enhancers, but at least it was standardized and sensible. 5th edition, for no discernible reason, decided to implement shitty 1st edition initiative mechanics. Why? Weren't we fucking past that as a species? Was there some outcry for bizarrely clumsy legacy mechanics from the late 80s? I have no idea.

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A dark age of RPG design too.

This section doesn't really tell you what the attributes are used for, and it lies to you about what the range is. It claims that the unmodified range for humans is 1-6, but that's simply not true. Mysteriously, there is a floating paragraph about how characters have a lifestyle right after the stats, or maybe it's supposed to be one of the derived stats. I don't know, but this book has things in weird places. I don't even know how you are supposed to play it if you have a physical copy and not a searchable pdf.

The strangest of the special attributes is Edge. Edge was introduced to Shadowrun in 4th edition, before that it was an attribute that Mechwarrior characters had. But it takes the place of the “Karma Pool” of 3rd edition. Back in first edition, they had this idea of characters having “Karma” which they could spend to make good things happen. And one of the things they could buy with Karma was increases to their skills and stuff, but they could also use it to influence die rolls and shit. This was a terrible system. As a practical matter, people hate spending “permanent” experience points on instantaneous die roll modifiers. They fucking hate that shit, and almost no one ever does it. On the other hand, if you correctly gauge the end of the campaign and cash out all your Karma on buying success on various die rolls, you win the game. Really, no matter how the system was used it was shitty and people hated it. So in second edition, they split the concepts (for the most part) into your Karma (the experience points that you got to buy up your abilities) and your Karma Pool (the floating points you could spend on getting rerolls and shit). This worked much better, people spent their reroll points on rerolls and their their advancement points on advancement, and all in all people were OK with it. It was confusing as fuck to explain to new players, but it kind of worked. It did have a little thing going where your Karma Pool just kept going up and very advanced characters eventually became able to do stupid shit by basically rolling until they succeeded at pretty much anything. Anyway, 4th edition streamlined the terminology and hard capped the character power curve by making the Karma Pool an attribute and calling it by its Mechwarrior name. And there was much rejoicing.

In SR5, your Edge is pretty much the same as it always was, but because the game has new fiddly systems that are shitty, the Edge also has options to be used on them. So you can spend Edge to fiddle with the retro-stupid initiative system somehow or fuck with Limits now. Fuck it.

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Section.3 Creating a Shadowrunner

Yes, chapter 2 was “.02” and chapter 3 is “.3” because all these fucking fiddly bits all over the page don't actually mean anything. There's no deep understanding of all these fonts possible, because there isn't actually a reason why some text is a funny color or on a funky background or whatever. It's turtles all the way down. Even the computeristic allusions on the chapter headings aren't consistent.

Anyway, you're probably wondering what the difference between the “your character” section and the “creating a shadowrunner” section is. There kind of isn't one? There's some bad fanfic dividing them, and the previous section is more about what the stuff on your character sheet means while the latter section is more about what numbers you actually get. But that isn't consistent. Like, at all. Anyway, this is nominally the chapter that contains the character generation rules.

This book tells us that there are six main archetypes: Face, Spellcaster, Decker, Technomancer, Rigger, and Street Samurai. There's a lot wrong with that, and the mechanical support for all those just aren't there. But it's a window into the designer's brain, such as it is. Clearly, they were looking to make a game that was like 50% hacking, since three of six of the main archetypes were wireless users. Going back in time, different editions have tried to support different archetypes to one degree or another. The “big three” are the Street Samurai, Decker, and Mage, as that is the original concept team, is plastered on the cover of every edition of the game, and have been presented in every edition. Various other archetypes have been supported to one degree or another, usually to fairly lackluster results. Books have been dedicated to Riggers, Reporters, Conjurers, Soldiers, Cops, Adepts, Technomancers, Medics, Rockers, Pirates, Thieves, Political Agitators, and Smugglers. But to be honest, none of that caught on the way the “big three” did. There's a lot of potential design space, and certainly lots of source material to draw upon, you could really announce that you were supporting whatever archetypes you felt like other than the three mandatories of Hacker, Mage, and Street Sam. They have announced their intention to also support Faces, Technomancers, and Riggers and that's a defensible choice. Honestly, I would have accepted anything from “just the core three” all the way up to maybe twelve. Six core archetypes is just enough that you cannot accuse the designers of being cautious. Spoiler alert: they fail.

Like most RPGs, character generation starts with “character concept” which is terrible, because for people who aren't already deeply familiar with the game, how the fuckity fucksticks would you know what constitutes an acceptable character concept? This is a persistent grief I have with RPGs in general, and this book isn't the only edition of Shadowrun to make this mistake. And it still isn't nearly as bad about this shit as Unknown Armies. But it should be called out. It is a problem that players are asked to choose their character concept before they have been told how powerful characters actually are. And this is ultimately probably the core problem of this game: the designers obviously have no idea how powerful characters actually are. Not that there are secret optimization routes the designers aren't aware of (though obviously, there totally are), but that as was made painfully clear with the Limits and the Thresholds, the designers have no idea what a dicepool value means. The thresholds are presented in a total void: 4 is harder than 3 or 2, but there aren't any fucking examples of what that might mean. It's only slightly better than fucking Scion. I mean, at least there's a difficulty chart at all, but with no concrete examples, what fucking good is it?

Back in 1989, first edition Shadowrun had a chargen system that was based on “priorities.” The concept was that there were different aspects of your character: Attributes, Skills, Resources, Magic, and Race, and you had to prioritize them ABCDE. It was like a points system, but you could only spend discreet chunks into each category and you were forced to buy certain minimum numbers of skill points no matter how hard you fought the system. So like a hybrid between class based systems and point based systems. And to be honest: it was pretty terrible. For starters, being an Ork was nowhere near good enough to justify all the skills and attributes and gear you had to give up to get there. And really: it was simply way more complicated than it needed to be. Vampire: the Masquerade did it better by giving people bundles of stats and skills in separate bundles and then giving them some freebie points to buy whatever they wanted at the end. Vampire didn't have a great chargen system, so when I am saying that it was better than SR's, that's a scathing comment. Indeed, one of the most popular sourcebooks in the history of Shadowrun was the 2nd edition Shadowrun Companion, which gave an “alternate character generation system” where you just got a pile of points to spend. People fucking loved that shit, and I haven't made a character with the priority system since like 1996. In SR4, the priority system was done away with entirely, and there was much rejoicing. However, for reasons that defy ready analysis, SR5 brings this crap back. I really have no idea what you'd need to be on to think that was a good idea.

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Yeah... more like 19 years ago now. I feel old.

So the priorities are wonky in a whole lot of ways. Moving from A to B in attributes costs you 4 points of attributes. Moving from B to C costs you 4 points of attributes. But while moving from A to B on skills costs you 10 skill points, moving from B to C costs you only 8. So depending on where you are on the chart at the moment, the tradeoff between any two things is different. So you might be able to trade 4 attribute points for 10 skill points, but maybe you can only trade them for 8. You know, whatever. Basically, the higher in priority you go, the more of a thing you get by pushing it up one priority level. But once play actually begins, karma costs are higher the more of something you have. Which is basically the opposite balance idea altogether, right? This system is horribly unbalanced. It is extremely trivial to make two characters with a little bit of advancement under their belts in which one of them is literally exactly the same as the other but better.

The Priorities don't even come in to encourage players to make interesting or diverse characters. You aren't given a pile of social skills or technical skills – you have a generic pile of skills. And you get a rather small pile of them and you are directly rewarded mechanically for maximizing your archetype skills. Both at chargen (where you get to be good at your job), and then later in advancement (where it actually costs less karma to advance from a hyper focused min/max starting point than it does to advance from a more spread out dabbler character). It's just really really terrible.

And it's fucking complicated. It looks like this:

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Remember that even a mild alteration of your character's starting points in something likely requires that you rejiggle your priorities, which then has knockdown effects on how much you have to spend in every other pile.

Just to make the nomenclature more confusing, the maximum ratings you can bring your attributes and skills to are called “Limits.” Which is totally not the same thing as the “Limits” that are the maximum number of hits you can count on various tests, which are sometimes derived from your attributes and sometimes not. You have a “natural limit” which can be exceeded in several ways (yes, really), and that's totally different from an “inherent limit” which is also a thing. Fuck this.

Character advancement is handled by giving players advancement points that they can spend to increase their abilities. These points are called “Karma Points.” However, after doing all that priority accounting bullshit, you have some free points to spend wherever you want. These points are also called “Karma Points.” They are not the same thing, despite having literally exactly the same name. Also, you have positive and negative qualities and they have costs (or bonuses for negative qualities) listed in “Karma Points.” You can already see where this is going.
Actual Sentence in this fucking book wrote:The cost [in Karma] for purchasing a Positive quality during game play is the listed Karma cost x 2.
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The qualities themselves are incredibly, obscenely, laughably unbalanced. And the values appear to be handed out pretty randomly. If there is anything to tell us why one thing is worth 9 points and another thing is worth 10 and yet another thing is worth 7, I don't know what it is. See, in addition to the values being apparently pulled out of a hat, they are also incredibly granular. Some things are worth 25 points, but it also wants to keep track of the difference between 6 and 7. It reminds me of SKR's Feat Points ruminations more than anything.

This character generation system has nine steps and step eight is called “Final Calculations,” and the one page of examples for step seven is labeled “Final Steps.” You can't make this shit up! Apparently finality in Shadowrun 5 chargen is measured on the Final Fantasy scale.

Shadowrun has always had a “catalog shopping” problem. One of the things that attracts people to the game is the page after page of futuristic gizmos, cars, and cybernetic enhancements that you can flip through. Some of the more popular books in the series have been actual catalogs for fuck's sake. But while this is legitimately entertaining, it's also slow as the Queensland Experiment. The sample character bought 39 separate things (counting things like “6 spare chips” and “1000 rounds of ammunition” as one thing each), some of the entries are only 30¥, he doesn't spend all his fucking money, and he's missing some fairly major things. The character is being asked to spend 450,000¥ in sometimes extremely small increments before starting play. This is completely unacceptable if you're trying to generate characters and play the game in a single day. If you don't have actual time to yourself with the book at home to make your character, this just isn't going to fucking happen. Now various things have been suggested to fix this shit. Abstracting bullshit equipment like individual bullets and memory chips would help. Having premade archetypal gear packs would help too. Equipment could be standardized in game effect and the catalogs of metahuman enhancements and firearm mods could all be flavor text. Or any of a dozen other perfectly plausible fixes that have been proposed over the last 25 years so that chargen can actually happen in a reasonable amount of time. This book does none of that. All in all, the micro in this book is probably worse than it has ever been in the basic book of any previous edition of this game. Although of course nothing will ever be as bad as 3rd edition's Rigger 3 expansion book which wanted you to keep track of the lost gas mileage and cubic footage for putting a crash cage in your car. It's bad. It's terrible even. But the game has seen worse, just not ever in the basic book.

Now we get to the sample backgrounds I was talking about earlier. These name drop major events in Shadowrun history that are otherwise not mentioned in the book at all. Night of Rage? SURGE? They mention the second Matrix Crash, but don't discuss the first one. You'd never know there was a crash of 29, and you can only infer that there must have been something like that because they call the 2064 crash the “second crash.” Fuck!

You know what? Fuck it. We're up to the presented archetypes and I don't think my liver can handle this tonight. That'll have to wait until later.
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Post by Longes »

In SR4, the priority system was done away with entirely, and there was much rejoicing. However, for reasons that defy ready analysis, SR5 brings this crap back. I really have no idea what you'd need to be on to think that was a good idea.
Pile of people whining to the designers that SR4 is bad and that SR1-3 was the best thing ever? I mean, you can clearly see the attempts to burry everything SR4 has ever created.

Oh, and spoiler alert: none of the sample characters are rules legal. For example, Street Samurai has about twice the money it's possible to have.
Last edited by Longes on Sat Mar 15, 2014 11:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by kzt »

One of the writers on dumpshock mentioned that they changed the character design system after they wrote the sample characters, but the developer didn't notice or care - I'm not sure which, that this made all the sample characters illegal. Another example of the famous CGL QC and proofreading right there.
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Post by Lokathor »

FrankTrollman wrote:Image
What are those numbers next to the races?
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Post by John Magnum »

The number of points you have to spend increasing Essence and other special stats. The book is remarkably coy about this fact.
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Post by Nath »

John Magnum wrote:The number of points you have to spend increasing Essence and other special stats. The book is remarkably coy about this fact.
No, not Essence. Only Edge, Magic and Resonance.

Well, the Shadowrun Concepts chapter does list Essence as a Special Attribute, while Creating a Shadowrun reads "The special attributes are Edge, Magic, and Resonance" in the section about choosing metatype.
Last edited by Nath on Sun Mar 16, 2014 12:41 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Lokathor »

But magic is another category...?

So I can pick magic as my top category and i don't get magic 6, i just get the ability to buy magic 6 with points i might not even have?
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Post by Nath »

No, the "Magic or Resonance" priority does give you the attribute at the listed rating, and the point from the "Metatype" priority comes on top of that.

You can take Priority C in Metatype and D in Magic to make an Adept with Edge 3 and Magic 6. Or you can takeC in Magic and D in Metatype to get the same thing, plus a Rating 2 Active skill.
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Post by John Magnum »

Yeah, sorry, got that wrong Nath. Meant to type Edge.
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Post by John Magnum »

Incidentally, am I the only one who kind of thinks something like a priority system could be a useful way of doing chargen? "Pick a thing you care most about, and then a few things that are interesting to you but not core to your dude" and then deriving your stats and stuff from those choices actually seems way more helpful than "Begin with a character concept." But of course I have no idea if I care about Skills or Metatype or whatever, so even if the 5e Priority System weren't a difference engine clusterfuck it wouldn't be a helpful path through chargen.
-JM
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Post by kzt »

Providing sample characters that were legal, well designed and properly equipped would be an easy way to allow people to start playing without having to do character creation. Through 5 editions they have never managed to do this. They usually are illegal, stupidly designed and also have dumb choices of equipment.
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