D&D 4E OT: Shadowrun 4E announced

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

I'm pretty much in the same boat as Henry. His questions are my questions. His feathery hat is my feathery hat. Etc.

 

[Henry]

Boy, that new mind-control device Morrus issued us really --- er, I mean, glad to see someone with the same questions.

 

[Staffan]

5:Mike Pondsmith
---Not being an SR avid fan, I'm in the dark on this odd question.

Mike Pondsmith is the author of the Cyberpunk RPG.

 

[Saeviomagy]

2: Point-buy for character creation
-----A loss in my opinion, because the priority system made it to me one of the more unique games on the market. However, a point buy is not inherently bad, just different - kind of the way some people felt when D&D saving throws got streamlined.

There kind of already WAS a point-buy system in place. It was in the shadowrun companion, and every game I know of that used ANY expansion book used point-buy as well.

I think the main benefit is that the table only has a limited amount of space, so new character types had to be squeezed in. With a point system, you just assign a value to a new character type and you're done...

3: Open Tests gone
---could someone please refresh me about open tests? Is that the "exploding d6" mechanic or something I'm blanking out on?

Normal SR test: Roll a bunch (your skill, stat, whatever) of D6s, note how many beat the target number.

Open test: Roll a bunch(your skill, stat, whatever) of d6s (and explode them appropriately), note the highest one.

Open tests suck because
1) They're totally different from the normal method of resolution
2) They're unnecessary
3) They trivialise having a high skill: The luck of the roll becomes far more important than how good you are at what you're trying to do.
4) There's no such thing as a degree of success.
5) They got used for things that the normal resolution methods did a much better job at (like stealth, social interactions etc)

5:Mike Pondsmith
---Not being an SR avid fan, I'm in the dark on this odd question.

At a guess, he does cyberpunk203X, and people are suspecting that matrix 2.0 is going to be similar to cyberpunk203X's hyper-reality, where someone appropriately geared sees a virtual overlay of additional information on top of everything.

 

[Michelle Lyons]

For some reason, a number of people were hypothesizing that the mythware new Cyberpunk edition that's supposed to be coming out Sometime Soon had been rolled into SR4 and were asking about it. Mike Pondsmith is/was the force behind R.Talsorian publishing, which put out Castle Falkenstein, Mekton, Robotech (I think), Cyberpunk, and a few other games I'm not remembering right now. He got hired by Microsoft and ended up demoting his company to a very part-time endeavor in favor of making a good living.

 

[Vocenoctum]

Good grief, look at all the effort expended here to intentionally not get the point. They aren't gone, they're just called hackers now. You know this. Why be coy about it?

Perhaps you're not paying attention. The Decker as it stands in SR1-3 is gone. Hackers are Rigger/ Decker/ Wireless Wizards. I'm not "intentionally" not getting the point, you're not grasping the difference.

If I said Wizards are now called Sorcerers, and will cast magic spontaneously, that doesn't mean Wizards are now Sorcerers. It means they've been replaced in the setting.

 

[Vocenoctum]

Well, what exactly is the difference between "true criminals" and "cyberpunk outlaws"? The motivation? The style? The attitude?

Setting mostly. Shadowrunners may not be very good heroes, but at the end of the adventure, the world was a better place. Even if it just meant the bad guys were dealt a setback. Shadowruns are crimes because laws are broken, but in most cases they were commited in extra-territorial terrain, and "didn't count". Lone Star was full of inept racists, but they kept their jobs because the government was frankly vacant.
Corporations ran the world, and resisting them was fun. Humanis was the enemy, Aztechnology was irredeemably evil and bugs didn't have civil rights. No human with a silly name like Spinrad could repeatedly thwart Lofwyr and get away with it.

SR1 was not realistic, and yeah it becomes more unrealistic the more real technology outpaces 1990, but that's part of what made it fun. The more realistic you make it, the more unrealistic it becomes, for the simple fact that realistically the corporations could stop nearly any group of runners. Lone Star could catch them easily.

 

[Vocenoctum]

3: Open Tests gone
---could someone please refresh me about open tests? Is that the "exploding d6" mechanic or something I'm blanking out on?

Heh, in my old game, sometimes the players would want to do something truely silly. Since a "no" answer was always a let down, I'd just let them roll with a high T#.
You just gotta roll 30 on a d6, and you can do almost anything.

 

[Vocenoctum]

There kind of already WAS a point-buy system in place. It was in the shadowrun companion, and every game I know of that used ANY expansion book used point-buy as well.

I think the main benefit is that the table only has a limited amount of space, so new character types had to be squeezed in. With a point system, you just assign a value to a new character type and you're done...

Yeah, squezing in new stuff was getting harder and harder. Like Shapechangers having Race Bleh and Resources: blah.

But, I liked Build to Ten. ::shrug:: Point buy is just so... everywhere.

Open tests suck because
1) They're totally different from the normal method of resolution
2) They're unnecessary

I liked them for Stealth.

5) They got used for things that the normal resolution methods did a much better job at (like stealth, social interactions etc)

I liked them better for Stealth than a resisted roll because it cut down on the number of tests, given a couple guards and a few runners. I'm not married to the idea though, so I doubt it'll affect the system.

 

[Henry]

Strangely enough, until I recently downloaded NSCRG, I didn't even know there WAS a point-buy system for Shadowrun. I've only had two or three Shadowrun books (SR2, SR3, and the California Free State one) and never saw a mention. As I said, expedient, but not as quirky, sadly.