From:	Robert Watkins <robert.watkins@******.COM>
Subject:	Re: Old Age Runners
Date:	Fri, 8 May 1998 10:19:50 +1000

Gurth writes:
>It disappointed me when I looked at the damage rules in SRII... I _liked_
>the variable staging, it gave weapons slightly more ways in which to be
>different, and my experience is that it didn't make combat slower than in
>second edition. With either you have to divide the successes by something
>and then stage up or down accordingly, it's just that the number varies
.instead of being a fixed 2.

I wasn't too upset with the demise of variable staging for weapons, when I
noticed that armour didn't give automatic successes anymore. I think the
tradeoff was fairly decent, and I remember a quote from this list from when
SR2 came out: "We played our first game of SR2 last night, and I discovered
that Trolls aren't bulletproof anymore!"

What disappointed me was the demise of variable staging for _spells_, and
spell drain. Sure, it made the design more complex, but the munchkin trick
of casting high drain spells at low force, and throwing away the drain just
wasn't possible. If you slung major mojo around in SR1, you were going to
take drain... it wasn't uncommon for drain to need 3 or 4 successes per
level, so if you throw a big spell around, you'd be assured based on the
number of available dice that you'll take at least a light or even a
moderate drain. Now, you can toss Force 4 with Deadly drain spells around
all day, nearly. (Willpower 6, keep 3 dice back from the spell casting test
to resist drain).

This is one area of SR2 that needs serious overhaul in SR3, IMHO.

--
sig deleted to conserve electrons. robert.watkins@******.com