Shadowrun Simplified?

[schpeelah]

The dodge roll is part of determining if the attack hits, and thus redundant if there already is an attack roll. There is no damage roll, so removing soak removes accuracy-independent randomization of damage.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Apropos of nothing, is there a gameplay reason why damage can't come in hard codes like pre-SR4? That is, it's impossible to actually do three damage in one attack. Everything has a universally static number of health boxes and you can do 1, 2, 4, 10, or instant-kill/destroy damage.

I can see why you wouldn't want to do that if you had soak rolls, because it'd create really weird discontinuities about when soak was 'worth it'. But what about abstractly?

[kzt]

Apropos of nothing, is there a gameplay reason why damage can't come in hard codes like pre-SR4? That is, it's impossible to actually do three damage in one attack. Everything has a universally static number of health boxes and you can do 1, 2, 4, 10, or instant-kill/destroy damage.

Because people really do get killed by a single .22LR pistol hit. And I'm not talking about winning the lottery kind of percentages, it's certainly not the most common outcome, but it happens fairly often. I saw in a class the video of a SC trooper getting shot in the chest (wearing a vest) with a .22 derringer by a drug runner. Trooper then shot the drug runner 6 times in the torso with a .357 magnum, then the drug runner shot him with the other round in the derringer. Trooper died (round bypassed the vest due to the angle of the hit), drug runner is still in jail with no real long-term injuries (he was a big fat guy).

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm not saying that we drop instant-death bullets, I'm saying that we drop the idea of damage coming in fully-discrete whole numbers. I wouldn't propose something like this for, say, Dungeons and Dragons in which you face a huge volume of attacks and the difference in strength between an ogre, a troll, and a hill giant is meaningful but for a game like Shadowrun I think it's a defensible speed/detail tradeoff.

[Whipstitch]

So, is this your super tortured way of asking about proportional damage codes?

[Lago PARANOIA]

So what have been all of the solutions to drop-out so far? It always comes up sooner-or-later when we're talking about Shadowrun so I think it's time to have a big throw-down.

So, is this your super tortured way of asking about proportional damage codes?

Maybe? I don't like that term, though, because both Shadowrun 4E and its previous editions use what can be technically referred to as 'proportional damage' but they imply different things. For example: the two-tap chump rule is a problem specific to SR4's proportional damage system and how it theoretically can output any whole number between 0 and infinity. SR3 doesn't have that problem.

[Korgan0]

The solution space for drop-out has actually been pretty well mapped-out, mostly by Frank. Just search for "Nash Equilibrium," and the arguments should come up. Basically, you have two choices. Firstly, you can create really awesome bonuses for people turning their shit on (SR5's wireless bonuses) that outweigh the downsides of having hackers fuck with you. The other side is you make it so that not running wireless gear makes it easier for hackers to fuck with you in other ways. EotM did the latter, SR5 did the former. I don't need to tell you which one worked out better.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Did the SR5 model even have a chance of working within Shadowrun? I could see it working in a game like D&D where the difference between a wageslave and a top-tier adventurer is several orders of magnitude, but when the difference is like one order of magnitude I can see a lot of people running the numbers and going 'worth it' or trying to implement some kind of inane workarounds like inhabitation-spirit'd juju zombies with baseball bats.

[kzt]

The 3rd answer for drop out is to not care.

Hackers are along to solve particular issues involving equipment and essentially their skills are add-ons to another character concept. A hackers weapons in a firefight are guns and grenades, hence they should have some skills in that direction.

Frank doesn't like this at all, but it's an option.

[Username17]

The 3rd answer for drop out is to not care.

Hackers are along to solve particular issues involving equipment and essentially their skills are add-ons to another character concept. A hackers weapons in a firefight are guns and grenades, hence they should have some skills in that direction.

Frank doesn't like this at all, but it's an option.

Even if you declare that you aren't going to support Hacker as a primary archetype, you still have to get your incentives in the right order. If there is a thing you can do or not do to shut hackers out completely, it has to be worse than accepting the risk of being hacked - even though hacking actions are worth taking.

Dropout is about taking things that you care about out of the potential hacking line of fire. So even if you said "hacking is just about unlocking doors and grabbing paydata" you still have to explain why people aren't shutting off wireless connections to their locks and putting their valuable data on non-matrix accessible storage media or whatever.

By making hacking a sub-specialty you've reduced the portion of the game you have to think about the Nash equilibrium for, but "not caring" still isn't an option.

Frank, could you elaborate on why you prefer the soak roll over the dodge roll?

Schpeelah got it in one. The Dodge roll is just part of the attack roll, not part of the damage roll. You're expanding the attack roll into an opposed roll, not creating a new step that randomizes something else. So if all you have is an attack and a dodge, you're still basically in nWoD territory with pretty deterministic attack results.

There's another thing, where dodge rolls don't actually make very much sense for a lot of attacks. Armored cars, far away targets eating soup, and padlocks all might be things that you care about whether and how you hit them, but it's fairly absurd to discuss them in terms of "dodging." So you need a robust system of determining whether a shot is difficult or not that applies when an attack roll isn't opposed by active dodging. And once you've done that, why is the active dodging roll an integral portion of your attack resolution at all?

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Fair enough. So, Frank, could you walk us through two scenarios? One is a badass prime runner in a firefight three Lone Star security agents and winning handily but not totally; the other one is a prime runner deciding that they want to blow open a bank vault. I don't need exact numbers or anything, just a description of the resolution mechanics for the scenarios.

[Orion]

I'd actually prefer is detailed arguments about drop-out and other hacking problems didn't happen in this thread. I'd like to focus more on mechanical aspects of simplification, what mechanics need to stay or need to be cut, and so on in this particular thread.

[kzt]

Well, you can drop the whole "combat hacking" morass if you decide that dropout isn't a problem, because then the hacker combat actions are focused on shooting back, not trying to hack someone's pistol while being shot at with that pistol. Time how long it takes you to pull out your smart phone and check the weather. Can you do that in 2 seconds from the point where you touch the phone? 2 seconds is the expected time for a student after a week of training to be able to reliably draw and hit a target twice in the chest at 5 yards.

Hell, you can drop the whole PC computer hacker bit, which means you MTP generic hacking with NPCs, and only have to come up with actual rules for things like alarm system, lock picking and electronic access control systems. Which is probably the easiest way to "fix" SR hacking.