Best posts made by Lithium

@Thenomain Because it is very much a place where the majority are essentially slaves to the corporations they work for, or the SINless in the sprawls who have no identity at all and pretty much live in a third world economy where might makes right, gangs can and do rule huge swaths of area, supernatural rats are a serious threat, trying to survive every day is a very real struggle and life is by no means certain.

There's darkness and grittiness there, in addition to the Runners themselves essentially being 'outside' the system, yet without the 'system' they wouldn't have work either.

If you are rich/influential/powerful then the world of ShadowRun is luxurious. For most (PC's included) it's the opposite, it's a harsh struggle for survival. There are more 'Runners than work, and you might be flying high one month only to be back in the gutter the next.

Meanwhile the cops are corporations in their own rights, and don't really care about the rights of the individual over the 'Law' they have been hired to enforce (to varying degrees of accountability) mixed in with their own greed and needs.

That's the dichotomy I mentioned, there's the potential for the 'high fantasy' bit where magical people have incredible magical toys, the rich have the best pads and cyber/bioware, and then on the other side there is the guy who got rolled and his arm chopped off because it was a prosthetic and what's left of him gets sold as meat to Tanamous Ghouls.

This idea has worked in the past on several occasions, but what makes or breaks you here is what system you are using.

If the system is to complex then you have a hard barrier of entry (See Champions MUSH and other Hero System Games).

If the system is to rules lite (IMHO FS3 falls into this) then everything is to homogenized and there's nothing really differentiating people except for flavor text when it comes to viability (The old if everybody is super, nobody is thing).

If I were to do another one (I coded up an Aberrant Cgen once) I would probably use something like Strands of Fate or something like that.

Fate can be made fairly crunchy while still being simple enough.

Used to hate Fate but it's grown on me.

It might also be worth doing to use say Marvel or DC and just have like a Night of Long Knives where /every/ FC is wiped out never to return... then how does the world react to the Chaos? Who steps up to fill the shoes?

@Thenomain Absolutely cool. Was just trying to point out that ShadowRun can be so many different things to different people that you either need to leave it all in to try and retain the 'feel' to everyone, or you need to limit the scope yourself so the game works for you.

I didn't mean any disrespect, trying to be helpful

I'd like to see your take on such a game Theno.

@Ghost The problem with Mutants & Masterminds is it is easily broken imho. To much is covered by Afflictions and certain Feats can just destroy the power scale (ie. Brick types taking all out attack feats that give them great chance to hit while reducing defense, which they don't really care about because their main defense is just soaking damage anyways).

M&M looks great at first blush but the holes are pretty easy to spot and abuse imho.

Not that familiar with MWP but I haven't enjoyed any of them since the FASERIP set of rules back in the 80's. The system for MSHRPG with the d12 through d4 system is pretty neat but the only book I saw of that was more focused on playing FC's and there wasn't any reasonable rules for OC's that I found.

Part of the problem is the perception of the player I think.

Elves in SR aren't all Tolkeneized(sp) and whatnot in general. One of the most vocal elf npc's is a drug addict junkie rigger with cyberware in her head to control vehicles. She's not magic, she's not high society, far from it.

Part of the big things about metahumans is that it takes racism to a different level. It's less about skin color and more about actual race for the most part (There will always be bigotry though). Orcs and trolls get a bad rap, dwarves get made fun of but for the most part nobody really hasa problem with except for the human extremists, elves are pretty and so are generally more acceptable to humans, but orcs, trolls, and dwarves still can give them a hard time, and like all aspects of humanity there are people in every race who hate the other races.

For example: The Ancients is thousands of elves, stretched over north america, who are a bad ass biker gang. They aren't your typical tolkein based elves.

There are a few, like Harlequin, Erron the Scribe, and a few others who stretch back to Earthdawn who would fit the tolkein mold, to an extent (Harlequin definitely doesn't) but you can safely remove those elves and not break the game imho.

When I think of ShadowRun elf I think of Dodger the Decker, Turbo Bunny the Rigger, Netcat the Technomancer etc. I don't think of Glorfindel.

Maybe that's just me tho.

Nowhere really. I am so burnt on anything XofDarkness and my work makes it difficult to get involved in things.

@WTFE It's food assistance for pregnant women and young mothers to help try and ensure that they get at least some decent food so they can live healthily.

I'm actually a fan of Hero Games System for dark and gritty fantasy. You can negate much of the customization crazy by just severely limiting the packages and options.

Standard humans get standard range with a maximum attribute, racial packages modify that, and add bonuses or negatives.
Spells can be built in standard format.
Weapons are already built.
So is armor.

It's surprisingly well balanced at the fantasy level and you can remove the nightmare of 'speed' as a stat by just stating everyone has one action per round or whatever.

With enough time taken to set it up, Hero System is nice and crunchy without being overwhelming. The problem with it is when you /don't/ take the time to set it up. Then it's open system makes it extremely tricky but you can hide a ton of it behind the scenes by just proper setup/coding.

@deadculture said in Shadowrun: Modern:

@Lithium I think the tropes are very different. You see that Molly's jobs tend to be less formal (in that there's no severance package, no corporations but people hiring her) whereas Turner seems to get himself jobs thanks to contacts in corporations here and there. He tries to honor his contracts, but evidently in the span of the novel he starred, that didn't turn out so well.

Also the choice in weapons and training reflects that. Turner is a mercenary, but he has military training and background. Molly has knowledge and training from the streets.

Ummm I disagree with everything you just said.

Street Samurai's can come from many different backgrounds. It's a general archetype that can be further customized on a per character basis.

I also would /love/ to see a Street Samurai get a severance package, and be hired by more than a Johnson but at that point they would become Company (Wo)Men archetype as far as SR is concerned.

Basically, just because Molly chose to be hired by people, doesn't mean every Solo is hired only by individual people.

Honestly, I don't think it's that horrible of a merit. I've only taken it with one character, and that was a Hunter. There are a /ton/ of other things to spend my XP on that I find way more valuable than 9/again and rote quality. Why? Because any solid build shouldn't /care/ about rote quality, and if you do care about rote for a skill, then personal training is probably a good way to fill the gap.

To wit:

A werewolf can /easily/ get upwards of 20+ dice on brawl just to start. Even subtracting defense that's still going to get an exceptional success most of the time, and rote doesn't matter.

I assume the same things can be done for Vampires and other splats. I think I recall hearing some nonsense about Sin-Eaters being uber dice happy. Don't know, never played one or read their stuff.

9 again quality is nice sure, but I don't find it incredibly game breaking either.

So to me, Professional Training is fine, contacts are good sure but that depends entirely on the plots on how you can use them.

sighs And you missed my point entirely @deadculture. My point is that it doesn't matter where the skill set comes from, just that they have the capability to do the job with the skills they have.

Solo's and Street Samurai's are physical operatives of high caliber. It is their specialization, their focus, that's it. In ShadowRun a lot more 'Archetypes' exist than in CP2020, not even counting the magical ones... at least depending on the edition of SR involved.

What does a solo do? They kick ass physically, are faster than everyone else, and are bad asses.

What does a Street Samurai do? That's my point.

Any differences between the two are more about customization options to individualize the character rather than making them two different types of characters.

My point is dead is dead. It doesn't matter how much it's dead, just that it's dead. An exceptional success is an exceptional success for everything else.

Rote is not something that matters most times because you're already hyper specialized to the point that dead is already dead.

The Santa Clarita Diet on Netflix is fucking fabulous.

I love it.

So much fun.

Also looking forwards to Iron Fist and the Defenders.

@Arkandel said in CofD and Professional Training:

@Lithium said in CofD and Professional Training:

The solution is enforcement of theme and rules. Everyone by playing the game knows (or should) know what the rules are for the game and it's systems. They should know what happens when social skills are used.

I just explained why that approach hasn't worked - in my opinion. Can you explain why you think that interpretation is incorrect?

It hasn't worked, because it was never enforced. I've yet to see a single game since 1992 that was based on WoD where social rules were actively enforced. Oh sure, Dominate got enforced, certain Gift's got enforced, but not actual social dice.

Admittedly I've not played on every WoD game there was, but if you know of a game where social rules were actually enforced, I'd like to hear why that didn't work. If it was a problem with people not liking the rules, or /other/ problems that usually end up with a mu* dying, like bad staff etc.

@ThatGuyThere This is just another reason why I have long felt that TT systems simply do not work for MU. It's an entirely different medium. Sure we've hamfisted a few systems and made rules adjustments but in my experience everything that has the same cost, needs to have comparable value.

In this case there is no difference in costs between social skills and combat skills, so those social skills need to be just as important and the rules need to be just as followed as with combat skills.

Is it perfect? Of course not, but to do otherwise is quite simply saying: Social characters are pointless to even do.

That's not something I accept.

@Ganymede I agree with what you're saying, and this is one of the reasons I /like/ Fate so much in a MU setting. Social combat? Almost identical to real combat. Losing can actually be beneficial. I watched a Warder lose social combat about a possible Warlock and so they retreated. Sure they could have turned it combatty, and being a warden maybe could have forced the issue but they didn't.

So in the end it comes down to what was said before: The problem comes down to /players/ who abuse/break the rules, and the staff has to be willing to show those types to the door. At least in my opinion, because a problem player or three can chase people away from a game just as easily as bad staffers can.

That said: I don't mind the idea of Social not even being statted beyond a few key things, but otherwise being RP based. My first real MUSH used Amber Diceless and I had a /ton/ of fun there, socially and combatty. Not pure consent, but pretty close all things considered.

Fun is entirely subjective.

Player Toxicity also in a way because people have different tolerance levels so what is toxic to one person, may not be to another.

The key to enjoying any game though is finding out how much you can put up with, and developing the ability to find those who you enjoy playing with and making it work.

No game is perfect.

No game is even great for everyone.

@HelloProject @ first world problem.

That is really what it comes down to though. Can you make it work, or can you not?

If you can a game can be fun, if you can't, move on and find a game that can be fun.

It's sort of like anything really, there will never be anything that everybody likes, 100% approval. Just not going to happen because people's tastes are different.

Trying to force a square peg into a round hole is just... silly imho.

The system I am creating for personal scale combat doesn't have multiple actions per se, everything is resolved in one roll.

People at the start of each turn declare if they are fighting Defensively (Pure Defense), Balanced (Trying not to get hurt while still trying to hurt someone), or Offensively (With no regard to defense). These apply modifiers to your dice rolls, unless you're fighting offensively you're considered to be /trying/ to not get hurt somehow so declaring that you're trying not to get hurt and using an action for it are kind of unnecessary.

I'm hoping it'll help speed combat up.

The system I am writing puts more focus on skills than attributes. Attributes are only used when a skill is not learned at all, and that's a bad thing. Otherwise what attributes do is provide soft cap limits on skills after which skills become more expensive (But not exhorbitantly so).

When I have more of it ready to go will continue to add, but I am a bit tired of systems where attributes are king.

@Chet That is very Eclipse Phase. Most humans are now digital uploads of their brains living in VR