| From: | korishinzo@*****.com (Ice Heart) |
|---|---|
| Subject: | SR4 Conversion |
| Date: | Tue, 26 Jul 2005 13:17:22 -0700 (PDT) |
> On 7/26/05, Ice Heart <korishinzo@*****.com> wrote:
> > D20 Shadowrun and Heaps-O-Dice Shadowrun are both too distant a
> > departure for me to accept.
> Heaps-O-Dice Shadowrun? How is that a departure from the current
> game? I know I've got my 5 gallon "dice bucket" already. It's the
> primary complaint most have against SR, in my personal experience.
The average dice pool in most of games, especially since we switched
to SR3, is about 5 dice. A foolish or desperate player might throw
enough Combat or Spell Pool dice at this amount to double it. 10
dice. I have seen much worse. I ran a WoD werewolf game for a year
where dice pools were routinely this big or bigger. But that was not
really the point of my use of the phrase 'Heaps-O-Dice'. I was
referring to the following style of situation.
Player A has a troll sammie with a gyronmount and big gun and he is
doing something typically gun bunny like belting on some AV ammo and
emptying the thing into a fully armored Mobmaster. He pulls over his
tray of dice and starts doing this:
"Okay, I have Heavy Weapons at 5 >rattle<, oh but I specialized in
the Vindicator >more rattling<. Okay, I have a smartlink 2 >rattle<
and the gyromount >rattle rattle<. Oops, you are right, I was
running. >rattle rattle< But the gyromount offsets some of that too.
>rattle<. Okay, I am going to fire full auto. >rattle< Wait,
what's my visibility? >rattle<
You see, in my experiences, only the smallest fraction of players
bother to really learn the mechanics. Certainly, a precious precious
few ever learn them well enough to calculate anything quickly. And
even less of those players bother to figure out what they are going
do, to whom, and how before they are called by the GM for their third
action in a 3 second combat round that is going on 45 minutes to
resolve. So I prefer this scenario:
Player A: I wanna shoot it with the minigun.
Me: Roll heavy weapons, plus any combat pool you want to use.
Player A: How much can I use again? And how much do I have?
Me: You have 7, as detailed under "Combat Pool" on your character
sheet. You've spent 3 so far this Turn. That leaves 4. And you can
add pool dice equal to your base skill. Which is 7 with that minigun
you are specialized in.
Player A: What's my target?
Me: Just write down what you rolled on each of those dice and toss me
the note. I'll tell you what happens. Meanwhile... actions on Phase
7. Yes, Player B, you were casting a spell you said?
By the time this exchange is half done, I have pulled up a mental
image of the scenario and referenced my memory of the firearm's
combat mods. I know how injured the character is. I can calculate
the target number while the player is still remembering that his
Heavy Weapons skill is listed under Active Skills and that the
numbers beside the words are the dice he rolls. Maybe I am cursed
with an inordinate number of atavistic throwbacks at my gaming table,
but more likely, the vast majority of people (gamers included) are
too mentally lazy to become conversant in the system. Okay, I'll
stop ranting. *grin* My point is, players are responisble for the
dice they roll, and I am responsible for knowing what the roll
translates into in the game. So they don't need to be figuring out
anything that is not printed on their character sheet. Period.
> As for the rest, I used to play this way, but frankly, I got tired
> of being the only one that knew how to competently gm the system,
> and having to keep track of the vagaries of each sheet. If you lay
> the modifiers out on the table, and let the characters apply their
> cyberware and so forth, and calculate it themselves, the game
> system runs a lot smoother, and you soon find yourself explaining
> less, and playing more. If they don't know what's causing the mod,
> just don't tell them. They may look around for something funny (and
> they may not find it), but really, there's no reason to hide
> systemic information from players, in my opinion. Thematic
> information is an entirely different matter, and is where the
> system truly shines. Your methods and objections are valid, but it
> leads to closed-book GM'ing, in my opinion. Not saying you're
> wrong, or even that you are doing it, I'm just stating my opinion.
It is closed book gaming, but not because I am banning my players
from opening a book. I own multiple copies of core books for a
reason. Back when I ran SR2, I had a copy of the main book available
for each and every player. And those players would sit there, with
their character sheet on top of the closed book and ask me what their
TN to resist drain was. Or what type of spell Powerdart was. Ignore
the fact that my character sheet had space for that information, set
up to intuitively mimic the spell entry format in the book, so they
could copy said info to the sheet while they had the book open to
select the spell. They don't do it.
Under past versions of SR, dice pools were fairly constant, and TN's
were highly variable. The onus of abstracting the environment for a
given set of actions into a final TN was on the GM. The player was
responsible for a fairly static piece of information with fairly
limited room for variation (bonus dice pools). Under SR4 (what
little we know) the TN is constant and the dice are highly variable.
So now the GM is required to abstract the environment into a modifier
to dice pool, inform the player, and then still wait while the player
figures out what their base dice pool was. Because the players still
won't, by and large, learn the system well enough to know. What they
will do, is ask why their dice pools are changing. They will want
the details. Why? It is psychology. The dice in their hand, they
have a sense of control over. The numbers on their character sheet,
they have a sense of control over. The mystical, arcane vagueries of
the environment their character is stumbling around blindly within,
they have a distinct sense of zero control over. Now the GM is going
to look at them and tell them how many dice to pick up and roll.
Eroding, subtly but surely, something that was once their's to
control. I realize it is superstitious nonsense to think that way.
But, I also have players who will sit and roll 6-siders quietly on a
book cover for 30 minutes straight, setting them aside according to
some secret formula. When asked what they are doing, they respond
quite seriously, that they "rolling all the 1's out". [yes, I was
floored - but I am not kidding and neither were they]
Closed book gaming is not some conspiracy enacted against players.
It is, in fact, exactly how most players want it, in my experience.
"Let me play with my dice, tell me what happens." So, since I (the
GM) have to know and calculate all the modifiers anyway, why bother
dragging the player kicking and screaming into the thick of the
process? Let them know what they need to know. Specifically: the
stuff on their character sheet. If they would bother to learn even
that, the game would flow smoother. SR4 is going to be a mess the
moment it gets out of the hands of experienced gamers, most of them
long time game masters, and into the hands of the masses. Combat
will take longer than ever, I predict. Two types of people do well
at keeping a game moving. The gamer who has no clue, and cares only
about telling the GM what they want their charcter to do, thrilled
when the world reacts to their vicarious actions. And the gamer who
has spent most of their time behind the GM screen. They have a keen
sense of what they should be responisble for, and what the GM should
be. They know the system more than a player needs to, and scale that
knowledge back. They understand the nuts and bolts enough to relax
and focus on their character. In between these two poles lies
everything from number-crunching munchkins to people for whom gaming
SR or playing a console FPS are roughly an equal toss-up. The former
want to know the rules only to seek out loop-holes. The latter will
ask you a dozen times a game session what they have to do to make
their guy shoot someone. In either case, they should be handed the
simplest possible interface (fixed dice pool/optical mouse) and told
to point, click, and let the GM worry about the devil in the details
(aka all the myriad ways they can miss or hit, fail or succeed - the
TN and its mods). At the poles you have the rules-clueless newbie
and the rules-relaxed veteran, both of whom are already happily doing
just that.
That is my considerably-more-than-2-cents worth. :)
======Korishinzo
--yep, still cynical I guess
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