[zarzak]

When I read the section I also took it to tie harvesting/destruction together.  This makes a lot of sense to me - destroying a focus instantly seems 'odd'.

[Hobbes]

I prefer immersiveness; I prefer to tell a story, even when it comes to the 'sideline things', because to me, and in my experience, that's what makes the world interesting, what makes it real to the players behind the characters. 

Seems to me that you can do that within the acquisition rules already.  Personally I feel the Availability rules are punitive and very immersion breaking.  As a GM I largely ignore them for anything but "F" items.  Honestly everything that is legal or you have a licence for you should just be able to google the nearest store and go buy it.  I'm not sure why a legal, off the shelf, item takes a month of intensive searching.  Cybereyes for example.

If your table likes to RP that stuff, that is great.  I don't see why you would put additional mechanical barriers up though.  If you're just tossing the whole section and replacing it with RP, rock on, it's what I essentially do.  If you're making a PC spend a solid month of down time (no other training or anything) just tracking down a new bit of gear, then throwing a series of RP encounters and dice rolls on top of that.  Erg.   

[Whiskeyjack]

When I read the section I also took it to tie harvesting/destruction together.  This makes a lot of sense to me - destroying a focus instantly seems 'odd'.

"Odd" is a polite way to put it. Allowing a focus, which a character invested both money and karma into, to be destroyed based on a second's worth of contact...that's more than odd, it's stupidly overpowered.

[I_AM_ZHOUL!!!]

When I read the section I also took it to tie harvesting/destruction together.  This makes a lot of sense to me - destroying a focus instantly seems 'odd'.

"Odd" is a polite way to put it. Allowing a focus, which a character invested both money and karma into, to be destroyed based on a second's worth of contact...that's more than odd, it's stupidly overpowered.

Exactly... the same point I was making between dispelling a Sustained Spell or a Quickened Spell. One can be pulled off without to much trouble the other one has a good chance of killing you for trying... cause who is going to cast a low Force Quickened Spell & not dump the full amount of Karma possible into it???

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

There's a difference between 'fast' and 'easy', which I think y'all are mixing up.  It isn't easy, and in this example it's pretty frickin' dangerous and stupid to try, because you're likely to get your neck broken and your head torn off by the adept whose (one!) Qi focus you just wrecked, or are trying to wreck.  I disagree with your time taken, but I guess that's because I'm a pre-4th person, where all they had to do is spend ONE karma (instantly) to begin bonding a focus, and the link was broken.  Honestly, 4th dumbed down (and made easier) a hell of a lot of things, and so much of it is only slowly bouncing back in 5th.

[Whiskeyjack]

that's because I'm a pre-4th person, where all they had to do is spend ONE karma (instantly) to begin bonding a focus, and the link was broken. 

It's for the best that most game systems have moved away from this kind of heavy-handed mindset.

I'm not of the opinion that "by grognards, for grognards" is a good way to sell a game line.

[Top Dog]

There's a difference between 'fast' and 'easy', which I think y'all are mixing up.  It isn't easy, and in this example it's pretty frickin' dangerous and stupid to try, because you're likely to get your neck broken and your head torn off by the adept whose (one!) Qi focus you just wrecked, or are trying to wreck.

Not all adepts are strong hulk monsters. In fact, I'm pretty sure most aren't. But yeah, maybe not do it to the big troll with flaming fists.

But if it works that way for Qi Foci, it works that way for Power foci, or Sustaining foci too. And with magicians, you're usually not worse off rushing them (might be better even - less likely to be fireballed).

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

It's for the best that most game systems have moved away from this kind of heavy-handed mindset.

I'm not of the opinion that "by grognards, for grognards" is a good way to sell a game line.

For the first, that's a matter of opinion.

Shadowrun, like other RPGs, is not a boardgame to be won, it's a roleplaying game to be enjoyed.  Getting your toys taken away - yes, even the ones you spent blood and money acquiring - can be a critical part of that.  (If you don't think that cyberware you worked long and hard and spent money and favors and did things for people like water isn't blood/karma, then you have another think coming.)  If it can't be taken away from you, or is impossible/very difficult to take away from you, then hell, what's the point, half the time?  The only thing - the ONLY thing - that should be incapable of being taken away from you are your skills, attributes, and innate abilities, and even THEN it should be negotiable, because critical injuries can do severe damage, cause amnesia, or - yes - cause permanent damage to your aura, i.e. take away your magic.

Not taking the toys away eventually - sooner or later, and quite often that's 'sooner' - leads to very boring adventures.  When you can slay virtually anything with a swipe of your blade or one shot of your gun or a backhanded delivery of a powerbolt, what's the point of continuing to play the game?  But losing all your stuff resets the stuff-o-meter, and makes the character and player have an interesting time 'making do' with crappy weapons, insufficient ammo, little to no armor, and/or whatever.  And it leads to great stories.  You might not want it in your game, and yeah, you're free to play that way, but when I want a game with a reset button, I play a video game; when I want a game that's gonna be a fantastic story-driven adventure with consequences, I play RPGs.  Well, except for 4th Edition D&D, because apparently that had the 'no consequences' button stuck permanently to 'on'.

For the second ... I'm not sure how I could possibly respond to that in a manner that would not be censored (and which I would be smacked) by the administration.  'Grow up', maybe?

[Beaumis]

I would like to point out that the core book heavily implies that Qi Foci are created by the act of tatooing, scaring etc.
" A qi focus can be an object, like other foci, but it can also be worked into  a  body  modification,  like  tattoos,  ritual  scarring, and piercings." (P. 319 Core)
To me, this reads like objects, such as an earing or a wand would be normally enchanted, but for tattoos and scarring the actual act of creating the tattoo or the scar is the enchantment. This would turn getting that focus into quite a chore.

Furthermore, since the OP is talking about a stealth adept, I would like to point out that at least according to missions, foci in tattoo form are always recognizable as such on the astral plane. For a person who is trying to be inconspicuous, a tattoo focus is a dead giveaway. (See Missions FAQ 1.3)

[Whiskeyjack]

For the first, that's a matter of opinion.

Uh, duh?

Shadowrun, like other RPGs, is not a boardgame to be won, it's a roleplaying game to be enjoyed.  Getting your toys taken away - yes, even the ones you spent blood and money acquiring - can be a critical part of that.  (If you don't think that cyberware you worked long and hard and spent money and favors and did things for people like water isn't blood/karma, then you have another think coming.)  If it can't be taken away from you, or is impossible/very difficult to take away from you, then hell, what's the point, half the time?  The only thing - the ONLY thing - that should be incapable of being taken away from you are your skills, attributes, and innate abilities, and even THEN it should be negotiable, because critical injuries can do severe damage, cause amnesia, or - yes - cause permanent damage to your aura, i.e. take away your magic.

There's a pretty big difference to me between taking away player advantages in the short term, say some projected magician turning off foci, a decker hacking your ware, or security technology negating your stealth gear, etc., and permanent loss of things you invest in, when that investment takes a chunk of resources at game start, or many sessions of play to build up to. I do consider the latter heavy-handed. If a person can't evoke the particular mood of what sounds like a very mirrorshades, black trenchcoat game without basically breaking the players' toys in order to do so, I wouldn't consider that person a very good GM.

Not taking the toys away eventually - sooner or later, and quite often that's 'sooner' - leads to very boring adventures.

As you said to me, this is a matter of opinion.

When you can slay virtually anything with a swipe of your blade or one shot of your gun or a backhanded delivery of a powerbolt, what's the point of continuing to play the game?

It sounds like you think there is one true way to play and you have the formula.

But losing all your stuff resets the stuff-o-meter, and makes the character and player have an interesting time 'making do' with crappy weapons, insufficient ammo, little to no armor, and/or whatever.  And it leads to great stories.

Again, in your opinion. See how saying that over and over gets annoying? 

You might not want it in your game, and yeah, you're free to play that way, but when I want a game with a reset button, I play a video game; when I want a game that's gonna be a fantastic story-driven adventure with consequences, I play RPGs.  Well, except for 4th Edition D&D, because apparently that had the 'no consequences' button stuck permanently to 'on'.

There's a pretty big difference between "actions have no consequences" and "this stuff you invested finite resources in is irrevocably gone." You're the only person talking about reset buttons. If you can't have fun without being stripped of everything you invested in and what might define your character, great, you do you. There are certainly games where that premise of starting with nothing and scratching your way by can be fun. I loved Dark Heresy 1e for that reason.

I played a Dark Heresy game in which at least 2 of our missions began with us stripped of the stuff we had accumulated and dumped somewhere, needing to play to our natural strengths to survive. They were a blast. But that is part and parcel of the course when you play a game where you are depicted as a relatively disposable acolyte. If that were to happen in a game like Exalted, where that's explicitly not what your character is, I'd say it's pretty cheap drama that goes against the overall baseline tone the game strives for.

Going back to my DH example, I wouldn't say that's a good basis on which to build the rules of game revolving around playing expert criminals. The expectations are rather different. Setting up the players to be experts given chargen and then taking everything they invested away from them seems to me to be going against the grain of the themes the game tries to present. It's not at all saying actions don't have consequences or bad things can't happen to your character, it's more about the nature of those bad things happening. A decreer's deck might get messed up pretty bad during a run, but that's something you should be able to fix with some time, or a follow-up mission to seek out some badass expert repairman. And it probably happened in a more significant way than "I touched your focus for an instant, spent a karma, and broke the bond."

For the second ... I'm not sure how I could possibly respond to that in a manner that would not be censored (and which I would be smacked) by the administration.  'Grow up', maybe?

If you really get so worked up by my opinion that your immediate reactive response would get you modded, I would certainly say the same to you.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

*shrugs*  Okay.  Play it the way you want to play it.  I think you're missing out on some key elements of both roleplaying in general and Shadowrun in particular, but hey, I'm not at your table; have fun.

[I_AM_ZHOUL!!!]

*shrugs*  Okay.  Play it the way you want to play it.  I think you're missing out on some key elements of both roleplaying in general and Shadowrun in particular, but hey, I'm not at your table; have fun.

This attitude much like your signature is confusing. You do realize that you are operating near the bottom of the scale of spectrum of RPGers, right??? If you & your players think that resetting power levels to inherently weaken them instead of playing against increasing powerful opponents is fun... do so. But it makes you very Low Power players... I want to win!!! Every mission we complete is a successful win that sets up to play increasing difficult missions. Punishing bad moves or total screw ups is fine & has resulted in a few TPKs when I GM, cause some encounters are supposed to be fled or mistakes/unlucky rolls spiraled out of control. Which is a valuable learning lesson cause I'll just call on a mulligan afterwards while we discuss what went wrong. But to set up arbitrary player reduction is counter productive to me, what's the point of character advancement then??? Why not just restart with new characters if you only want to play at a certain power level??? Force people to play different roles & enforce some variety in play styles at least.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

So ... okay, so you win.  Congratulations, you won Shadowrun.  What now?

If you find my .sig confusing - I presume you mean the 'play the game, don't try to win it' - then really you and I are going to find it tough to talk to each other.  I get the sense that perhaps you come to RPGs via wargames - where you win a scenario, and you heal or build up your army further, and you go into the next scenario, and the next, etc.  And each one has its win conditions for each side.  I've played wargames (Battletech mostly, but a little Warhammer too) so I understand where you might be coming from, but I approach RPGs from an actor's standpoint: the object isn't necessarily to achieve those 'win conditions', but to tell a great story together, and to be able to tell that great story to other people later on.  That is, in fact, what I'm doing with Pananagutan - it was a great story, and I'm retelling it to people who weren't in the game.

This means, in part, that I look at an RPG scenario not from a gaming perspective (wargaming or otherwise), but from a storyteller's perspective.  In stories, the heroes - those who are the PCs in a tabletop game - lose before they win.  They take damage.  They lose gear, or get their ass kicked because they misunderstood or underestimated their opponent.  Sometimes they get captured.  (Sometimes they get killed, which makes for a strange Act III.)  They enter the final act outmaneuvered, outgunned, out-classed, out-something'd, making their eventual victory a triumph, instead of a foregone conclusion.

The games I play don't have a conclusion, an endgame, a big finale.  Oh, adventure strings do - like mission seasons - but the games I play simply don't stop.  I want my character or my players to be able to take a call and walk onto a high-speed civilian transport (HSCT, like the Concorde) if they're mages, or a suborbital or semiballistic if they're not, and go to any spot in the world and do a job with either what they can carry onto the plane, or whatever crap they can acquire there.  I want them to be able to get blown out of their seats as they're riding the monorail in whatever city they happen to be in, carrying their 'sightseeing' stuff, and be able to be effective.  Is it cool when you get to haul out the big guns and go to town?  Sure as hell.  But I and the people I play with want to tell exciting stories, and we want to be able to do that whether we have 4 karma, 40, 400, or 4000.

Contrary to Whiskyjack's accusation, no, I don't believe I have 'the One True Way'; I rarely believe in a 'one true way' in anything, much less something as self-interpretive as roleplaying.  (And whatever he babbled, I said opinion once - and it was in reference to his 'It's for the best that most game systems have moved away from this kind of heavy-handed mindset.', because while it means you won't hardly ever lose anything for good, it's tough to crank up that level of 'oh crap' that a lot of story depends on.)  I believe that I have a very good way, and I confess that it irritates me when people denigrate it, as the two of you have been.  Play your games, enjoy your games, by all means; I am abso-fraggin'-lutely certain that you have, are, do, and will have loads of fun playing your way.  But please understand that your ways aren't the only ways either, and that just because I like to be able to play a huge variety of power levels all with the same character doesn't mean I can't play your way as well.

Or did you think that for some reason a character who's been run for nearly as long as game's been around can't pull out some seriously heavy big guns when they need to, and be reasonably confident of winning via wipeout when going one-on-one against a company-strength force of mercs?

[ZeldaBravo]

It is possible to win in TRPGs: if you and your friends had a fun ride - you won. It is a clear and accurate formula but 'fun' part varies for everyone out there.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Which is my point, as compared to the 'victory conditions' that are part of wargaming.