Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Rules and such => Topic started by: jtkirk22 on <04-10-20/1400:47>
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Hi,
1-Edge-Boost: Pick any die and reroll it. It
can be yours or your opponent’s, but the result
stands no matter what you roll. This is
done after all rolls have been made.
In fights: If I reroll one of my dice, it's a chance of 1/3 for extra damage. If I reroll an opponent's "5" or "6" it's a chance of 2/3 that the opponent won't roll a success again.
Is that intended?
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Yes. Re-rolling opponents hits is statistically better than re-rolling your misses on opposed tests.
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Absolutely intended. A lot of the "edge does nothing" complaining comes from people who don't get that you re-roll the opponents hits, not your own.
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I've seen several complaints about Edge, but none that were "it does nothing". Has that been common?
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I've seen several complaints about Edge, but none that were "it does nothing". Has that been common?
Uh, every thread ever?
"armor does nothing, because all it does is give you edge/deny your opponent edge" ring any bells? :)
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Armor can potentially do nothing =/= equal Edge does nothing. Drawing a direct line between those two statements/sentiments is silly. Edge is quite useful, if your worn armor actually makes the difference to net you some. . .and you know, your enemy didn't aim with the ludicrously broken scope to prevent it.
I thought you were claiming someone actually stated Edge does nothing. . .
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Incidentally, it not only makes the reroll (and don't forget you could say 'I pay X (e.g. 3) Edge to make my opponent reroll X (3) of their hits!', but not combine both own reroll and enemy reroll) more powerful in opposed situations, it also really helps summoners, since this way they can both give themselves more services, AND reduce the drain they're facing.
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This is one of my favorite uses of edge. I try to max my armor and take cover in every fight not only does cover help increase my DR to 15-16 DR in Jacket (18-19 if I am prepped in my full armor) which helps me gain the edge it also gives me +3-4 dice on my defense pool. Then I just re-roll the opponents success when I can and it helps me from being hit at all. You can't damage what you can't effectively hit.
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Armor can potentially do nothing...
While you have always been quite accurate in your wording around the limitations of edge, others have not ;)
Having said that, in the old soak dice system extra armor could also potentially do nothing since it was up to rng; 3 extra die does not automatically mean you always gain another hit.
Even if armor could potentially do nothing it also mean that in both systems a few points of more armor mean you would, on average - over many different fire fights and scenarios, take less damage / gain more tactical advantage compared to if you used less armor.
(Sorry for potentially derailing the thread, but I think OP already got a clear answer to this original question).
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Well the distinction I draw is this:
In 5e, armor always did something - it always added dice. Those dice just may not have worked out in your favor when rolling, but you still got those dice.
In 6e, if your DR is already sufficient to gain and/or deny edge, then the armor actually does nothing.
To me that is a significant difference, between doing something that may not work out due to RNG vs. actually not doing anything. Others may not see it the same, and that's fine.
I also still think that linking a sentiment of "armor does nothing" to "edge does nothing" is folly, because armor is only one very minor contributor to how edge can be gained. Are the two potentially related? Totally. But when you open up the spectrum of how one can gain edge, they are second cousins at best.
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Semantics.
You don't know beforehand what negative or positive modifiers you will have on your defense rating in every single future scenario and you also don't know beforehand what attack rating that will be attacked by.
In 5e, armor always did something - it always added dice. Those dice just may not have worked out in your favor when rolling, but you still got those dice.
In 6e, armor also always does something - it always add defense rating (which is used to deny the enemy a tactical advantage and also used to grant you a tactical advantage of your own). The extra defense rating just may not have worked out in your favor depending on the attack rating, but you still got that extra defense rating.
The different amount of damage you take while being naked and while having full body battle armor was of course much bigger in 5th edition (as most of the damage resistance came from armor in that edition). In 6E damage codes have instead been reduced across the board and the remaining resistance will be made up almost exclusivity by your body rating (which mean both extremely high and extremely low armor rating values have a much smaller effect in this edition than it used to have in the previous edition).
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Another factor that should be noted on wether to armor up or not is cover. In almost every fight I want cover since it adds to me defense test making it specifically harder to put damage on me due to having less net hits after resolution.
Cover denies you from gaining edge while attacking this limits your ability to gain edge to needing a larger DR and environmental during defense.
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Semantics.
Maybe, but I personally believe the values are not equal.
Bonus dice are always of benefit, even if an individual roll did not help. That is a failure of random number generation, not a failure of the affect failing to be beneficial. A brief aside bonus dice are the most mechanically powerful element in the game, followed closely by re-rolls.
Armor on the other hand, yes, it always adds a static number to your DR - but it is possible that that particular number does not sufficiently boost your DR to a point where it grants you edge or denies your opponent edge, therefore the affect does nothing. With the exception of melee attacks now, ranged attacks have such a compact AR number range across the board that there is unlikely to be a lot of swing in the value of armor. It will either help you frequently if you are low to mid-range without armor, or it will likely help you rarely or never if you were already high range DR without it.
I am not a linguistical genius to use to the most appropriate language to highlight what makes constantly applied bonus dice that fail to get hits in a particular instance different from the increased DR of armor not making a difference on a particular attack, but to me the difference between those two situations is significant.
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Armor that gives you bonus dice in 5e still "does something" even when those bonus dice result in no hits, yet armor that gives you bonus DR in 6we "does nothing" when that bonus DR doesn't change the edge picture?
If that's how you feel, I don't think we have a bridgeable gap between perspectives here.
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Yes, and yes.
Bonus dice can or should (depending on the number) reliably provide bonus hits.
Armor taking my DR from say 8 to 12? That is probably useful to me. Armor taking my DR from 22 to 26? Not really. In the vast majority of cases in the later, it is doing nothing, and not just due to mathematical probability, it is doing nothing by design.
Again, someone more eloquent than I could probably explain it better, but those two things are not remotely the same to me. You can't argue with math.
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Yes, and yes.
Bonus dice can or should (depending on the number) reliably provide bonus hits.
Armor taking my DR from say 8 to 12? That is probably useful to me. Armor taking my DR from 22 to 26? Not really. In the vast majority of cases in the later, it is doing nothing, and not just due to mathematical probability, it is doing nothing by design.
Again, someone more eloquent than I could probably explain it better, but those two things are not remotely the same to me. You can't argue with math.
It's not a matter of math. Well, it's not a matter of linear math, but rather one of a bell curve. We both appear to agree that going from 8 to 12 DR is going to be meaningful quite a lot of the time. But going from DR 22 to DR 26? Yeah, ok, maybe THAT instance of +4DR isn't doing very much... but look at the premise. How are you even AT 22DR in the first place? Clearly, you've already stacked a whole bunch of armor in order to even be at 22DR. (Unless you're talking about a 22 body dragon putting on a dragon-sized armor jacket or something... doesn't seem relevant to 99% of the gameplay if so! ;) )
What you're actually illustrating there is that a little bit MORE armor on top of a drekton of pre-existing armor is well into diminishing returns. 1) I'm fine with that. Looks like a feature to me, not a bug. 2) diminishing returns is the same phenomenon that was in 5e. "Hey, I have 39 soak dice! Lol, when I put on forearm guards on top of that for 40 dice, it's doing nothing because I already soaked all the damage down to nothing with the first 39 dice!"
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I mean you can hit 22 without armor of any kind, but not without the miscellaneous host of things that add to DR.
I freely concede that in this system there is not really a functional difference between worn body armor, a combat sense spell, mystic armor, cyberlimbs, dermal ware, ect.
My point of contention is a two prong personal tastes (I just don't like it, but that doesn't mean it is wrong/bad), but secondary it doesn't make sense. Regardless of what your personal durability level is, if you then don body armor designed to protect you, it really should further protect you - not functionally do nothing. And that is not even touching on the minor action plus scope issue, which is the nail in the armor coffin.
We both know we're on opposite sides of the fence on this issue, but I respect you're preference and position, so I'll happily circle the wagon with you as many times as we care to. :p
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Mathematically, I agree with Lormyr mostly. But I think pointing at Armor is a red herring. Its better to say that under the new system SOMETHING will often be useless to you. Once you have hit your 2 Edge limit per action, any additional factors at play gain you no extra benefit. That could be armor, but it could just as easily be a spell, or an ability, or an advantage in the fiction, or some gear advantage. Armor stands out because it was "moved" from one category to another in the change of editions (from dice source to factor that gives out Edge), but I think that is a bit of a distraction from the real issue. (I call it "issue" instead of "problem" because not everyone will agree it is problematic.)
For example, if the rules said that you can always gain up to 1 Edge from AR/DR, 1 Edge from situation, and 1 Edge from gear, and 1 Edge from Edge-giving qualities, the argument that Armor "does nothing" would be undercut. The AR/DR mechanics would no longer be "competing" with the other Edge sources. Of course, 4 Edge per action would probably be crazy, but the point is that the issue is the "competition" among the Edge sources that is the underlying problem, not the Armor per se.
I personally think integrating Armor into the AR/DR mechanic was a mistake. But I think the bigger mistake was making AR/DR a complicated numerical system that has to be compared (with a 4 step threshold even) to decide whether a single point of Edge is granted or not. Its all just too much stuff to end up boiling down like that. There is all this conceptual weight around that system, columns dedicated to it in the weapons tables, multiple modifications to it in rules all over the place, and then...if you get 2 Edge from some other source it was all pointless.
All those numbers should have been made more meaningful (e.g. adding to dice pools as they seem to have done in previous editions) or jettisoned completely and left to some kind of simple GM check on who has the superior position to award 1 Edge. As it is, for me at least it feels like the worst of all possible worlds.
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There's not many people that can reliably pull off 2 Edge. Boosting that even more would screw over all non-Streetsams in combat. It's already a problem that non-combat-mages depend on their GM to grant them extra Edge, since there's no explicit rule.
Also: I ran into plenty of cases where players were just short of the AR or DR needed, and they had to weigh options for their Edge. Yes, against grunts you'll get Edge a lot. But against tougher enemies, getting Edge already becomes far tougher for people relying solely on their Thermographic Vision and high AR and DR. That's the point where these values will matter a LOT.
(Plus, y'know, there's plenty of ways to finetune how you want the Edge system to work at your table. Bashing SR6 Armor because they did a daring act and made tweaks, rather than trying to be constructive and going 'how would I tweak the system to fix what I consider weak spots', is a waste of energy.)
As for 'complicated numerical system', a near-static value vs a nearly-always-static value isn't that complicated to me. Called shots at specific positions, constant dice modifiers, adding up negative modifiers for wind, light, range, etc, that was a complciated numerical system to me. =/
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As for 'complicated numerical system', a near-static value vs a nearly-always-static value isn't that complicated to me. Called shots at specific positions, constant dice modifiers, adding up negative modifiers for wind, light, range, etc, that was a complciated numerical system to me. =/
Fair enough. I accept that I am making a subjective assessment here. To my mind, the weight of all the AR/DR system far outweighs its actual impact on the game, such that either giving it more weight, or making it much simpler, would have been preferred to where it ended up. I think the designers made a mistake in judgement here. But I'm not trying to convince anyone of that, that would be pointless. If you like it, you like it!
In our own game, we are just living with it. Its too integrated into the rules to easily house-rule without essentially rewriting everything from scratch. Of course, social isolation means we won't actually be PLAYING that game for who knows how long...
EDIT: If I only ever played games I thought were perfect, I would play very few games!