Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: falar on <11-24-15/1031:44>
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So, I've been noodling some stuff in my brain about how 5e works with regards to limits and dice pool modifiers and I'm wondering if the designers might have ended up designing how they work in reverse. See, it seems that a lot of the positive things that you get end up as just limit modifiers and most of the negative things end up as dice pool modifiers. For instance, when you have Vision Enhancement, the basic that you get is a positive limit modifier and the wireless bonus is a dice pool bonus.
I'm actually thinking that things should maybe be the reverse - positive things usually give you dice pool modifiers and negative things and super bonuses usually affect the limit. This would make the application of limits a lot more meaningful.
For instance, consider range modifiers. Currently, they're a 0/-1/-3/-6 to your dice pool. With a high dice pool, this wouldn't make a ton of difference and doesn't really represent what's going on - what's going on is not that you're less skilled, it's that the the weapon just isn't accurate at that kind of range. So what if the reduction was 0/-1/-2/-4 to the limit instead of the dice pool? This would mean that keeping inside the weapon's optimum range (Short-Medium) would be much more important and would also increase the desire to use Take Aim actions to increase the limit. In this case, you'd make SmartLink automatically give you +2 dice pool, but the wireless on bonus be +2 to the Accuracy.
After that realization, I started looking at other areas - for instance, melee and Reach. When making an attack, your limit would increase/decrease according to reach. If you're attacking someone with a Reach 3 weapon and you have Reach 0, we'd decrease your limit by 3 instead of removing 3 dice from your pool. On the other hand, if you beat them, you'd get a positive dice pool modifier, but not a limit increase. Then there'd be a solid want for a martial art that did exactly that.
The big one that hit me was social. Instead of using dice-pool modifiers on negatives, what if they were limit modifiers? Change the general social modifiers to negative limits on the negative side (Suspicious/Prejudiced/Hostile/Enemy at -1/-2/-3/-4) for your limit. Etiquette - if you're wearing the wrong clothes, you decrease the limit.
It would take a fair job of work to apply this across the board, but I think it would have a decent shot at a 5.5e shakeup. Limits are one of the most interesting things that they added in 5e, but the designers didn't really seem to get at home in the space. Positive limit modifiers are actually rarely helpful. Negative limit modifiers can be super crippling. Negative dice pool penalties are annoying, but not really until they're taking more than a quarter of your dice pool. Positive dice pool modifiers make everyone feel cooler.
Thoughts?
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At first glance, what you wrote makes a lot of sense to me. I'd need to spend some time working through examples to figure out how it would play, although the numbers involved would maybe have change in certain cases (extreme range adjust of -10, for instance)
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At first glance, what you wrote makes a lot of sense to me. I'd need to spend some time working through examples to figure out how it would play, although the numbers involved would maybe have change in certain cases (extreme range adjust of -10, for instance)
I did actually change the extreme range from a -6 dicepool penalty to a -4 limit penalty. I'm also wondering if there should be a minimum limit that can be adjusted. So, for instance, should an Accuracy 4 gun be just worthless at Extreme Range unless it has a SmartLink with wireless enabled? Or should there always be a minimum limit of 1? That could be combined with a quality, for instance, that sets your minimum limit for a specific skill to be 3.
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I think the issue you'll have with reducing limits in combat this way is that not only are you making it harder to hit and easier to avoid you're also reducing the damage potential by just as much. I can see an inaccurate gun being harder to hit with the further away the shot is but there's no reason why it should have any less damage potential. After all it's already hindered as it is by it's low level accuracy anyway for damage potential. The only way round this is to add split limits for accuracy and damage potential and yet more maths and book-keeping.
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I think the issue you'll have with reducing limits in combat this way is that not only are you making it harder to hit and easier to avoid you're also reducing the damage potential by just as much. I can see an inaccurate gun being harder to hit with the further away the shot is but there's no reason why it should have any less damage potential. After all it's already hindered as it is by it's low level accuracy anyway for damage potential. The only way round this is to add split limits for accuracy and damage potential and yet more maths and book-keeping.
I actually see this as a benefit. To me, the added damage from net hits was always because you shot in a more vital place. If you're less accurate, you're less able to do that.
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There is one paradoxical outcome of lowering limit without lowering pool: it gives incentive to used called shots.
Say that you've stacked things up to be tossing 18 dice, but due to range and conditions your limit has been cut to three. If the target is dodging your chance of hitting is pretty low so maybe the shot is a waste, but if you are going to take it anyway, and don't want to waste most of your dice, might as well make a called shot. Can drop to 14 dice and still almost surely waste hits to add two to your DV, or heck you could even go for one of the tough to hit body-location shots (-8 pool) and still probably saturate your limit.
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There is one paradoxical outcome of lowering limit without lowering pool: it gives incentive to used called shots.
Actually, since it's a negative modifier, it would be a limit decrease. So a called shot would probably be a straight up -2 or -1 to your limit.
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Hmm. Dice pools are better than Limit, because every Limit can be broken in some manner.
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Hmm. Dice pools are better than Limit, because every Limit can be broken in some manner.
I'm not quite sure I follow what you're getting at. Care to expound?
A side-effect of doing it this way is that it further incentivizes Push the Limit in more circumstances.
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It was a response to your suggestion of flipping bonuses (many of which currently give +Limit as a basic bonus and +dice as a Wireless-on bonus).
Dice are better, so getting them first is strange. It would incentivize not running things wirelessly, since oftentimes Limits are not a huge concern, and as you pointed out, can be broken easily. At the same time, for some rolls, particularly combat rolls, a dice pool penalty of -2 isn't the end of the world, but a Limit reduction of -2 means everyone will be hitting less (since Defense tests have no Limit).
I don't see this as a good thing. It will just slow down combat even more. What is the value?
There's also a weird thing where -Limit as a range modifier makes sniper rifles worse at range than up close.
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...in "the good ol' days" of Shadowrun. Range modifiers affected the TN making it harder to hit tour target. The current reduction to the attack pool for range basically follows the same concept. As you have fewer dice to use you have, the potential to get fewer hits, thus the net hits would not increase the DV as much while the target would have better odds defending against the attack.
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It was a response to your suggestion of flipping bonuses (many of which currently give +Limit as a basic bonus and +dice as a Wireless-on bonus).
Dice are better, so getting them first is strange. It would incentivize not running things wirelessly, since oftentimes Limits are not a huge concern, and as you pointed out, can be broken easily. At the same time, for some rolls, particularly combat rolls, a dice pool penalty of -2 isn't the end of the world, but a Limit reduction of -2 means everyone will be hitting less (since Defense tests have no Limit).
I don't see this as a good thing. It will just slow down combat even more. What is the value?
There's also a weird thing where -Limit as a range modifier makes sniper rifles worse at range than up close.
...true, with a personalised grip and internal Smartlink, KK's Remington has a base accuracy of 10. -2 to to the rifle's limit (as it has an imaging scope that reduces range increment by 1) would still allow a maximum of 8 hits for a base 20DV even at extreme range.
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There's also a weird thing where -Limit as a range modifier makes sniper rifles worse at range than up close.
For this implementation, you'd probably define medium range as the 0 modifier for sniper rifles, then close and long as -1 and extreme as -2, but I take your point.
I don't see this as a good thing. It will just slow down combat even more. What is the value?
I actually think it would slow down less than negative dice pool modifiers. My limit and number of hits is usually an easy number to compare. Adding and removing dice from my pool is more tedious.
As for the value - mainly it was a thought experiment. I didn't find Limits to be mechanically interesting as they are and I was thinking of ways to make them more mechanically interesting.
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There's also a weird thing where -Limit as a range modifier makes sniper rifles worse at range than up close.
For this implementation, you'd probably define medium range as the 0 modifier for sniper rifles, then close and long as -1 and extreme as -2, but I take your point.
I don't see this as a good thing. It will just slow down combat even more. What is the value?
I actually think it would slow down less than negative dice pool modifiers. My limit and number of hits is usually an easy number to compare. Adding and removing dice from my pool is more tedious.
As for the value - mainly it was a thought experiment. I didn't find Limits to be mechanically interesting as they are and I was thinking of ways to make them more mechanically interesting.
But now you just end up with really low "attack" rolls, thus increasing the chance to "dodge" the attack....
Thus you have combat drag out forever, or until they move to a range that they don't have as serious a modifier....
On the other hand, most SR combat happens at close to medium ranges for handguns/Smgs (hallways and office towers are only so big.... and city warfare with a ganger group is usually confined to 'across the street' distances...
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For instance, consider range modifiers. Currently, they're a 0/-1/-3/-6 to your dice pool. With a high dice pool, this wouldn't make a ton of difference and doesn't really represent what's going on - what's going on is not that you're less skilled, it's that the the weapon just isn't accurate at that kind of range
I disagree. I can group a lot closer at 50 yards than I can at 100, but it's not the rifle's fault, it's mine. A small problem with shooting stance, or site picture, or jerking instead of pulling the trigger will make a more substantive difference the further out in range the target is, and a good shooter knows how to minimize or eliminate those mistakes.
By imposing Limit modifiers to shooting tests, you're saying that someone shooting an Ares Alpha at Extreme Range with 9 dice in their pool is on average, as good a shot as someone with 18. Now, 9 dice isn't unskilled, but it does not represent the same kind of dedication, and training, and ware, and magic that gets somebody to the super-human level where they can reliably pull off 4 hits at 550 meters, which would seem to me to be within the capabilities of that kind of rifle -- maybe someone more knowledgeable than myself will chime in on that.
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Lets say my limit on a pistol shot decreases from 6 to 1 due to modifiers.
I still roll my (not bad, not insane) pool of say 12 dice and get the expected average 4 hits. Only of them 1 would count. Because I tried some tricky long distant shot.
The problem with that is that in this variant perfect shots do never ever happen in my example even though it is possible -albeit unlikely- that the projectile hits right between the eyes.
With reduced limits every difficult shot is guaranteed to be a glancing hit at best.
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I will say that the idea of adjusting Limits on social rolls is interesting.
The big one that hit me was social. Instead of using dice-pool modifiers on negatives, what if they were limit modifiers? Change the general social modifiers to negative limits on the negative side (Suspicious/Prejudiced/Hostile/Enemy at -1/-2/-3/-4) for your limit. Etiquette - if you're wearing the wrong clothes, you decrease the limit.
I would consider house ruling something like that, but I don't think a blanket statement like all social dice modifiers are now limit modifiers is the best call, and picking and choosing would be complicated for players. I'm torn, but adjusting the Limit here does seem "realistic" or at least makes sense with how I understand the spirit of the rules.
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The idea started in the guns world, but I don't think it really got cooking until I hit the social world. I think it models the social modifiers much better than the current system. But it's really tough to figure out how to do it without doing a lot of playtesting.
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For instance, consider range modifiers. Currently, they're a 0/-1/-3/-6 to your dice pool. With a high dice pool, this wouldn't make a ton of difference and doesn't really represent what's going on - what's going on is not that you're less skilled, it's that the the weapon just isn't accurate at that kind of range
I disagree. I can group a lot closer at 50 yards than I can at 100, but it's not the rifle's fault, it's mine. A small problem with shooting stance, or site picture, or jerking instead of pulling the trigger will make a more substantive difference the further out in range the target is, and a good shooter knows how to minimize or eliminate those mistakes.
By imposing Limit modifiers to shooting tests, you're saying that someone shooting an Ares Alpha at Extreme Range with 9 dice in their pool is on average, as good a shot as someone with 18. Now, 9 dice isn't unskilled, but it does not represent the same kind of dedication, and training, and ware, and magic that gets somebody to the super-human level where they can reliably pull off 4 hits at 550 meters, which would seem to me to be within the capabilities of that kind of rifle -- maybe someone more knowledgeable than myself will chime in on that.
Well, I can tell you that a 9mm round has enough energy to fly approximately 3km. That is not to say you could HIT something at that range.... just that the round has the potential to travel that far.
The 2 biggest factors to accuracy of a weapon are gravity and windage. Bullets do not travel in a straight line, they arc through the air. Take a standard .308 hunting rifle, and zero it in for a 400m shot, at the 200m mark the round will land 2-3 inches higher then center. At 600m the round would be 3-5 inches lower.
Windage is a factor just because it blows the bullet off course causing it to sway in the direction its blowing.
This is why snipers use a logbook. It contains all the info and formulae needed to correct for these issues. They litterally look up/work out the firing adjustments they need to make. (Target is 600m away. Wind speed is 11km/h from the left. I am using 'X' weapon.... I have to adjust my sights 3.25 inches up, and 1.75 inches left.)
Technology has played a part in fixing sone of these challenges. Rifled barrels to put a spin of the bullet to decrease windage. Longer barrels to increase velocity. Adjustable sights made to the ballistic performance of the weapon...
And, its important to point out, not all weapons are created equal, even amoung the same calibers. The remington model 700/.308 is so accurate that it is used by many police agencies as a sniper rifle, even though it is classified as a hunting rifle. (And really, really more accurate then other .308 hunting rifles....)
Actual sniper platforms push this accuracy even farther through the use of finely balanced weights and forces...
And yes, there are some people out there that are ungodly accurate with their weapons! I forget the guys name, but there is a Yank out there that can hit a small balloon at 60m with a snubbed nosed .38 (accurate to 20m) on the first shot.... that's 3 times the "accepted accurate range" of the weapon!
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Well, I can tell you that a 9mm round has enough energy to fly approximately 3km. That is not to say you could HIT something at that range.... just that the round has the potential to travel that far.
I don't think anyone disagrees with the default that there's a maximum distance you can hit at all with a given weapon (except that some might disagree with the specific given numbers for that distance, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms).
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Not saying you could hit something (on purpose) at 3km with a 9mm.... but that is the distance the round could travel given its energy.
Accuracy has more to do with the weapon firing the round and the skill of the shooter. (Something SR already takes into account with its current weapon limit system)
And the round itself does play a small part. If your weapon range AND target are 1000m away, but your ammo only has the energy to reach 800m.... your never going to hit the target regardless of how good you or the weapon are.
But all of this is really beside the point. There isn't 300 different ammo manufacturers, making 200 different types of ammo. Heck there isn't even calibers in SR! (Aside from weapon class)
The entire firearm system in SR is an abstract to keep the game moving forward and simplify paperwork...
You buy 'heavy pistol' ammo, and that gets used in every heavy pistol, be it revolver, or automatic, across different brands.
In the real world. I have to buy 9mm rounds for my 9mm handguns, .45acp for my subgun and colt 191. 10mm for my colt delta elite, .44-40 for my remingtion 1871, .44mag for my S&W, .454mag for my cassul magnum. And .38 or .357mag for my king Cobra..... and if I run out of one ammo, that gun is a paperweight..... in SR you just take heavy pistol roubds from one pistol and put them in the next!
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@Reaver, I'm not sure that I follow your point. Certainly all weapons will break down in accuracy -- and potential damage -- due to range. The CRB makes an effort to adjust for that fact in the range table, and I think it does a fair job of that by reducing the dice pool of the shooter. -6 dice at Extreme range not only accounts for the difficulty in hitting a target at that range, but also the -2 hits average equals a limit in damage output as well.
Or am I missing what you're saying?
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I am saying there is more going on in the rules then most people realize. Part of this is abstraction, part is ease of book-keeping, and part is realism.
Falar's suggested changes to limits/dice pools needs a lot more thought and work before going anywhere as it doesn't deal well with some issues and opens up other issues in other areas.
That is not to say it's not worth exploring, just that there is already a lot of abstraction going on in the original rules that he is going to have to deal with if he wishes to continue on with his changes to limits/dice pools.
As it stands, and if I am reading his suggestion right, there are instances where you could have a skill of 13 (the absolute max), an agility of 11, all sorts of mod enhancements..... and a limit of 0 (zero)..... meaning you auto-fail.... even though the weapon is technically in range (even if extreme)
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@Reaver, gotcha. That is my understanding as well, and the reason why I'm opposed to that blanket change, especially as it relates to combat. With social modifiers, it would make more sense to me personally if the authors of the CRB had imposed some dice penalties and some Limit modifiers, but I'm unsure how to best implement those changes in a house-rules / home game environment.
Of course, part of my willingness to do so may be the result of my own biases when it comes to how social interactions are handled by RAW.
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As it stands, and if I am reading his suggestion right, there are instances where you could have a skill of 13 (the absolute max), an agility of 11, all sorts of mod enhancements..... and a limit of 0 (zero)..... meaning you auto-fail.... even though the weapon is technically in range (even if extreme)
You'd never get to a limit of 0 at extreme range, unless you have a really crappy gun and don't use Take-Aim and a scope to reduce the range modifier. You'd get lower, yeah, but you wouldn't really get to 0.
0 would probably only be possible if you were shooting in very low light, it's raining, and you're at extreme range.
That said, one of the things I originally mentioned was the idea of a minimum limit. It would never be impossible to hit - it would just get very hard. I wibble back and forth what the minimum limit would be between 1 and 3, but anything that would drop you below the minimum limit would just start taking dice off your dice pool.
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I actually like the idea. It would be hard to balance out and get the numbers right, but it could be worthwile.
I don't think that you should have any hope of getting an official 5.5 version with these changes, though ;)
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I don't think that you should have any hope of getting an official 5.5 version with these changes, though ;)
It'd be combined with an Alchemy rewrite and a Rigger rewrite and a Hacking rewrite. :) Not that hacking isn't better in 5e, but it still could be even better.