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Message no. 1
From: peter.andersson42@*****.com (Peter Andersson)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2006 21:58:08 +0100
I wonder if GM's limits this cyberware or not. As I see it you could
have a rating 3 Expert Driver with a rating 1 knowsoft and get to roll
4 dices for the skill, or is there a task pool limit somewhere in the
rules that says that you cant have more dice from a task pool the from
the skill?

Regards

Peter Andersson

Ps.Sorry for my bad English, I'm Swedish.Ds
Message no. 2
From: toast.in.the.machine@*****.com (Mark)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2006 14:24:20 -0800
On 12/4/06, Peter Andersson <peter.andersson42@*****.com> wrote:
> I wonder if GM's limits this cyberware or not. As I see it you could
> have a rating 3 Expert Driver with a rating 1 knowsoft and get to roll
> 4 dices for the skill, or is there a task pool limit somewhere in the
> rules that says that you cant have more dice from a task pool the from
> the skill?

I don't know SR4, but the only time I thought you could have more pool
dice than base dice was on damage resistance, and I'm not actually
sure if that was just a house rule to keep characters from dying.

Mark
Message no. 3
From: gurth@******.nl (Gurth)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2006 00:00:54 +0100
According to Peter Andersson, on 4-12-06 21:58 the word on the street was...

> I wonder if GM's limits this cyberware or not. As I see it you could
> have a rating 3 Expert Driver with a rating 1 knowsoft and get to roll
> 4 dices for the skill, or is there a task pool limit somewhere in the
> rules that says that you cant have more dice from a task pool the from
> the skill?

You generally can't roll more pool dice than skill dice, but basically,
yeah, the CED is a cheap way to make skillwires a lot more useful ...
This because the other limitation of pool dice isn't going to apply very
often (namely, that they refresh only once per turn -- skills you'll
probably use with a CED likely don't get used much in combat anyway).

My own campaign is currently in early 2051, so CEDs aren't available
yet, but if they were, I'd probably ask my players not to take them. If
someone were to insist, I'd figure out some kind of house rule to make
them a bit less broken :)

> Ps.Sorry for my bad English, I'm Swedish.Ds

Don't apologize, there are many native English speakers who write their
language a lot less well than you do :)

--
Gurth@******.nl - Stone Age: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
Van e-mail bakt men cyberbrood.
-> Former NAGEE Editor & ShadowRN GridSec * Triangle Virtuoso <-
-> The Plastic Warriors Site: http://plastic.dumpshock.com <-

GC3.12: GAT/! d- s:- !a>? C++(---) UB+ P(+) L++ E W++(--) N o? K w-- O
M+ PS+ PE@ Y PGP- t- 5++ X(+) R+++$ tv+(++) b++@ DI- D G+ e h! !r y?
Incubated into the First Church of the Sqooshy Ball, 21-05-1998
Message no. 4
From: efreeman@*****.net (efreeman)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2006 20:35:46 -0800
On Mon, Dec 04, 2006 at 12:57pm Peter Andersson wrote:
> I wonder if GM's limits this cyberware or not. As I see it you could
have
> a rating 3 Expert Driver with a rating 1 knowsoft and get to roll 4
dices
> for the skill, or is there a task pool limit somewhere in the rules
that
> says that you cant have more dice from a task pool the from the skill?

> Regards
> Peter Andersson
> Ps.Sorry for my bad English, I'm Swedish.Ds
>
>

Yes, I think it's a little nuts. A good houserule I've used is that the
CED lets you use any pool you would get if the chip was a normal
skill.

=í
Message no. 5
From: gurth@******.nl (Gurth)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2006 10:58:20 +0100
According to efreeman, on 5-12-06 05:35 the word on the street was...

> Yes, I think it's a little nuts. A good houserule I've used is that the
> CED lets you use any pool you would get if the chip was a normal
> skill.

Up to the rating of the CED, I assume? That rather limits it the other
way, IMHO -- too few skills use pool dice, if you ask me, to make the
CED worthwhile with this rule :(

--
Gurth@******.nl - Stone Age: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
Van e-mail bakt men cyberbrood.
-> Former NAGEE Editor & ShadowRN GridSec * Triangle Virtuoso <-
-> The Plastic Warriors Site: http://plastic.dumpshock.com <-

GC3.12: GAT/! d- s:- !a>? C++(---) UB+ P(+) L++ E W++(--) N o? K w-- O
M+ PS+ PE@ Y PGP- t- 5++ X(+) R+++$ tv+(++) b++@ DI- D G+ e h! !r y?
Incubated into the First Church of the Sqooshy Ball, 21-05-1998
Message no. 6
From: ggerrietts@*****.com (Geoff Gerrietts)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2006 09:20:24 -0800
On 12/5/06, Gurth <gurth@******.nl> wrote:
>
> According to efreeman, on 5-12-06 05:35 the word on the street was...
>
> > Yes, I think it's a little nuts. A good houserule I've used is that the
> > CED lets you use any pool you would get if the chip was a normal
> > skill.
>
> Up to the rating of the CED, I assume? That rather limits it the other
> way, IMHO -- too few skills use pool dice, if you ask me, to make the
> CED worthwhile with this rule :(



The CED is cheap in essence and in cash cost. Its effect should not be
dramatic, but rather a minor enhancement. Allowing access to pools is a
fairly innocuous enhancement. Providing a huge pool for skills that don't
naturally have pools is game-breaking. When players discovered the poor
phrasing around the CED on the Shadowrun MUSHes, it is astonishing how many
people were suddenly rolling 12 Negotiations dice against your 8-dice
fixers. And for what? Ten, fifteen thousand yen between jack, soft, and
expert driver and .4 essence? I forget the exact numbers, but it was
disproportionate to the advantage. You can't get tailored pheromones that
cheaply, and that's only 2 dice, not 12.
Message no. 7
From: ggerrietts@*****.com (Geoff Gerrietts)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2006 10:38:17 -0800
Here's another of my favorite exploits.

Consider: Pistols 6 vs chipped pistols 6 w/CED 6 (and wires, obviously.) The
Pistols 6 guy gets his combat pool up to 6 dice as well as the 6 dice firing
pistols, for 12 dice to throw on a burst from a Viper or a Sav. Figure he's
pretty well-built so he's got another 3 combat pool dice to use for dodge.
That's nice, but the chiphead has 12 dice to throw, too -- and he still has
9 CP for dodge. Hands down better to chip your combat skills under the stock
rules.
Message no. 8
From: swiftone@********.org (Brett Ritter)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2006 13:46:38 -0500
On 12/5/06, Geoff Gerrietts <ggerrietts@*****.com> wrote:
> Consider: Pistols 6 vs chipped pistols 6 w/CED 6 (and wires, obviously.) The

CED is capped at 3 in the errata.
http://www.shadowrunrpg.com/resources/errata_mm.shtml
--
Brett Ritter / SwiftOne
swiftone@********.org
Message no. 9
From: gurth@******.nl (Gurth)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2006 20:03:57 +0100
According to Brett Ritter, on 5-12-06 19:46 the word on the street was...

> CED is capped at 3 in the errata.
> http://www.shadowrunrpg.com/resources/errata_mm.shtml

That still doesn't fix it, IMHO:

Skillwires 6 capable of running one rating 6 chip: 324,000¥
Skillwires 3 capable of running one rating 3 chip plus CED
rating 3: 55,500¥

That's a saving of about 85% in money, and 25% in Essence as well --
I'll take that kind of deal any day :)

And that's not even considering the difference in skillsoft cost --
rating 6 activesofts are 10,800¥ each, while rating 3 is only 2,700¥. I
know which one I'd go for ...

--
Gurth@******.nl - Stone Age: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
Van e-mail bakt men cyberbrood.
-> Former NAGEE Editor & ShadowRN GridSec * Triangle Virtuoso <-
-> The Plastic Warriors Site: http://plastic.dumpshock.com <-

GC3.12: GAT/! d- s:- !a>? C++(---) UB+ P(+) L++ E W++(--) N o? K w-- O
M+ PS+ PE@ Y PGP- t- 5++ X(+) R+++$ tv+(++) b++@ DI- D G+ e h! !r y?
Incubated into the First Church of the Sqooshy Ball, 21-05-1998
Message no. 10
From: swiftone@********.org (Brett Ritter)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2006 14:12:11 -0500
On 12/5/06, Gurth <gurth@******.nl> wrote:
> That still doesn't fix it, IMHO:

You'd have to ask the designers, but my thought was that CED was
designed to beef up skillwires because they were too "weak" for the
cost (i.e. essence expensive, availability)

I know I was a wires fan, but never had a character use them to any
benefit until CED came on the scene. You could get so much more for
that cost in both time and nuyen, and the loss of pool dice meant that
it wasn't useful for combat skills.

I'm much happier in SR4 land, wear they are either cheap, available,
and of low-but-useful benefit, or expensive, hard to find, and of vast
usefulness.

--
Brett Ritter / SwiftOne
swiftone@********.org
Message no. 11
From: gurth@******.nl (Gurth)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2006 11:12:22 +0100
According to Brett Ritter, on 5-12-06 20:12 the word on the street was...

> You'd have to ask the designers, but my thought was that CED was
> designed to beef up skillwires because they were too "weak" for the
> cost (i.e. essence expensive, availability)

For which a better fix would have been to just reduce their cost, or
maybe to re-introduce skillwires-plus (from Shadowtech) ...

--
Gurth@******.nl - Stone Age: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
Van e-mail bakt men cyberbrood.
-> Former NAGEE Editor & ShadowRN GridSec * Triangle Virtuoso <-
-> The Plastic Warriors Site: http://plastic.dumpshock.com <-

GC3.12: GAT/! d- s:- !a>? C++(---) UB+ P(+) L++ E W++(--) N o? K w-- O
M+ PS+ PE@ Y PGP- t- 5++ X(+) R+++$ tv+(++) b++@ DI- D G+ e h! !r y?
Incubated into the First Church of the Sqooshy Ball, 21-05-1998
Message no. 12
From: ggerrietts@*****.com (Geoff Gerrietts)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 09:20:19 -0800
On 12/6/06, Gurth <gurth@******.nl> wrote:
>
> According to Brett Ritter, on 5-12-06 20:12 the word on the street was...
>
> > You'd have to ask the designers, but my thought was that CED was
> > designed to beef up skillwires because they were too "weak" for the
> > cost (i.e. essence expensive, availability)
>
> For which a better fix would have been to just reduce their cost, or
> maybe to re-introduce skillwires-plus (from Shadowtech) ...


For that matter, did the CED even require skillwires? Seems to me it didn't,
which was a big part of the problem -- skills that you couldn't ordinarily
have a pool for, you could get one with a CED. Central to the problems I was
having with it were the chromed-up combat characters who would have a
skillsoft jukebox or a couple different jacks, then would slot an Etiquette
and a Negotiations skillsoft and outbargain pure fixer characters. Limiting
their pool size to 3 does make a difference (when I was having this problem,
that errata was not in place yet) but it doesn't solve the problem.

On the one hand, without the CED, many players turned their nose up at
skillwires, because the versatility they offered was limited. In order to
get parity performance out of a chipped skill, you'd need to have twice that
level in your wires and your skillsoft. The high essence cost of wires
started forcing hard decisions: do I have high initiative, or broad
versatility?

During this time I was playing SR online, on the MUSHes. There are plusses
and minuses to playing this way, but one of the plusses is that you get to
see lots and lots of different people making what they think of as really
solid characters. Not all of them are right, many of them have crappy
backstory, etcetera. But, prior to the CED, I think I saw something like a
2% purchase rate on skillwires, and something like a 5% purchase rate on a
simple chipjack. This included when skillwires plus were available under
SR2. Most of the time, the wires were added almost as afterthought to an
otherwise complete package, as a way of spending a little leftover essence
to add a lot of versatility to a sammy character.

When the CED was discovered, new characters started having skillwires at
something closer to 50% and a chipjack at something like 60%. After the
first few waves, that adoption rate continued to climb; the only people who
would roll a character without at least a chipjack and CED were people who
had never seen a character that had them in operation. These percentages are
among the chromed characters, but we even had a few mages who thought
chipjack + CED was worth the magic point.

When we adopted the "allows access to pools" decision, it seems to me that
there was some brief argument that SR3 rules never explicitly state that
wired skills don't get pools. I don't remember how that argument came out.
However, I seem to remember that wires dropped to about 1 in 5 for new
characters, which seemed to me about like how it should be. I'm not sure
whether the errata item would have had the same effect. I suspect not quite
as profound.

Since I left the online games in I think early or mid 2003, I've only played
periodically with friends in small tabletop games. Here, the balance of the
rules doesn't matter quite so much because it's easier to personalize the
game itself. I've stuck with the house rule, though -- if only because I
didn't want some joker throwing 12 dice (or 9 I guess if I'd read the
errata) at every problem I pose.
Message no. 13
From: swiftone@********.org (Brett Ritter)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 12:27:16 -0500
On 12/6/06, Geoff Gerrietts <ggerrietts@*****.com> wrote:
> For that matter, did the CED even require skillwires?

No, but since all Active skills (including Negotiation, Etiquette,
etc,) require skillwires, there was still a hefty base investment.
Sounds like that wasn't being enforced in your experience.

Limiting the Pool to 3, and not granting more pool than the skill
means that the resulting skills are much more manageable.

--
Brett Ritter / SwiftOne
swiftone@********.org
Message no. 14
From: ggerrietts@*****.com (Geoff Gerrietts)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 10:50:14 -0800
On 12/6/06, Brett Ritter <swiftone@********.org> wrote:
>
> On 12/6/06, Geoff Gerrietts <ggerrietts@*****.com> wrote:
> > For that matter, did the CED even require skillwires?
>
> No, but since all Active skills (including Negotiation, Etiquette,
> etc,) require skillwires, there was still a hefty base investment.
> Sounds like that wasn't being enforced in your experience.
>
> Limiting the Pool to 3, and not granting more pool than the skill
> means that the resulting skills are much more manageable.


Yeah, I don't know any more; we might have been guilty of that. I'm pretty
sure SR2 considered social skills to be not active, and we might have been
confused still. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure spell design was/is a
knowledge skill check, and there might have been others like that, that I'm
not remembering.

I don't think limiting the pool to 3 is as big a win as you think; I'm
pretty sure a character with Pistols 6 and Skillwires 6 will chose to use
the chipped skill over the natural. I know I would, at least for the first
shot in a double-tap.

Did SR3 ever limit the rating on skillwires or skillsofts? Buying skills
with karma has a factorial progression, but buying skillsofts with cash is
near-linear.
Message no. 15
From: gurth@******.nl (Gurth)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2006 21:58:55 +0100
According to Geoff Gerrietts, on 6-12-06 19:50 the word on the street was...

> I don't think limiting the pool to 3 is as big a win as you think; I'm
> pretty sure a character with Pistols 6 and Skillwires 6 will chose to use
> the chipped skill over the natural. I know I would, at least for the first
> shot in a double-tap.

IIRC there is the rule, though, that if you have a skill both chipped
and "real", you always use the chipped skill even if it's lower than
your real skill rating.

> Did SR3 ever limit the rating on skillwires or skillsofts? Buying skills
> with karma has a factorial progression, but buying skillsofts with cash is
> near-linear.

The price is a straight multiplier for the chip's memory requirement,
but that in turn is the square of the rating multiplied by a fixed
number. For the price of one rating 6 chip, you get 4 rating 3 chips,
for example.

--
Gurth@******.nl - Stone Age: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
Van e-mail bakt men cyberbrood.
-> Former NAGEE Editor & ShadowRN GridSec * Triangle Virtuoso <-
-> The Plastic Warriors Site: http://plastic.dumpshock.com <-

GC3.12: GAT/! d- s:- !a>? C++(---) UB+ P(+) L++ E W++(--) N o? K w-- O
M+ PS+ PE@ Y PGP- t- 5++ X(+) R+++$ tv+(++) b++@ DI- D G+ e h! !r y?
Incubated into the First Church of the Sqooshy Ball, 21-05-1998
Message no. 16
From: ggerrietts@*****.com (Geoff Gerrietts)
Subject: [SR3]A quick question about Chipjack Expert Driver
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 22:36:47 -0800
On 12/6/06, Gurth <gurth@******.nl> wrote:
>
> According to Geoff Gerrietts, on 6-12-06 19:50 the word on the street
> was...
>
> > I don't think limiting the pool to 3 is as big a win as you think; I'm
> > pretty sure a character with Pistols 6 and Skillwires 6 will chose to
> use
> > the chipped skill over the natural. I know I would, at least for the
> first
> > shot in a double-tap.
>
> IIRC there is the rule, though, that if you have a skill both chipped
> and "real", you always use the chipped skill even if it's lower than
> your real skill rating.


This sounds familiar but I didn't see it in the three or four minutes I was
poking through books this morning. Maybe it could be implied from the
statement about how using a chipped skill doesn't give you access to pools,
even if you have the natural skill. Seems a stretch, but it's equally likely
I just don't have the right citation.

> Did SR3 ever limit the rating on skillwires or skillsofts? Buying skills
> > with karma has a factorial progression, but buying skillsofts with cash
> is
> > near-linear.
>
> The price is a straight multiplier for the chip's memory requirement,
> but that in turn is the square of the rating multiplied by a fixed
> number. For the price of one rating 6 chip, you get 4 rating 3 chips,
> for example.


I checked (because I'm a big nerd) and "factorial" isn't right. The cost in
karma of a skill is determined by the sequence of triangular numbers (1 + 2
+ 3 ... n), not the factorial sequence (1 * 2 * 3 ... n). The growth curve
for cost in karma and cost in cash are both quadratic, but karma grows
slower. In a campaign where cash and karma are balanced around the "magic
balance point" the natural skills will grow a bit faster. I'm not sure what
the balance point is. SR3 suggests no more than 12 karma for a run, but I
seem to remember that one of the books suggests cash equal to 1 lifestyle
payment for the same run (anyone have a citation?); with cash scaling up
like that, advantage may depend on what your character's lifestyle is.

In the end it's probably closer to balanced than I'm really ready to admit.
Maybe in another 2 or 3 years.

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