Automatic Bonus Progression: A Total Failure

 "It was all over the news stands! Nary a mention of my Brass Cannons, and an entire spread on the bestial man storming down the manor, dragging the mayor screaming from his home."

I'm putting a somewhat unrelated disclaimer here, before I start. Like "phylactery" and a few other words, saying "skinwalker" gives me the ick. Navajo culture is that you're not supposed to say it, but more than that I don't want to support cultural appropriation in gaming. This, for once, is definitely cultural appropriation: the term's been used entirely without respect to Navajo stories and culture surrounding skinwalkers and without acknowledging where the term originates.

Expect me to use the term were-blooded as appropriate. 

Hello again. Do you miss me, when I'm gone? This blog is swiftly becoming a place to dump the essays that pour out of me whenever I run across stupid shit during my tabletop gaming career. I'm comfortable with this. Today's topic is an optional ruleset for Pathfinder 1e that I really, really wanted to like: Automatic Bonus Progression. 

Pathfinder has a lot of magic items, and that fact rubs some people the wrong way. Gently, I am one of them. There are a lot of magic items I'll be referring to as "math" items: things that exist solely to give you numerical bonuses. These items exist to provide "meat" to the loot you're given and a constant stream of things to purchase with your gold. Little +1s and +2s feel good enough that you have a constant stream of dopamine dripping toward you via treasure rewards. 

But it can feel like a bit much, and in 2025 it does kinda rub me the wrong way that I'm playing a character who's wearing the entire GDP of a small kingdom. You don't have the option of not doing that, really: the game's balanced around you having a certain amount of gold value. You're obviously not supposed to think too hard about it, but sometimes it's inevitable. So, thus exists Automatic Bonus Progression. 

ABP as a system takes 50% of your expected gold value and applies it to numeric bonuses to entirely replace those math items entirely. In your world, they simply (mostly) don't exist. I like the idea of this very much, it can create a world where individual magic items mean more. It can even support a world where magic items are very, very rare. 

But they cocked it up real bad and I fear the system isn't useable at all without a huge overhaul. Let me begin with two item lists: The first is what my level 12 were-blooded magus Eddie Crossheart currently has in our pathfinder campaign, which is using the standard ABP ruleset. Some values have been adjusted in accordance to ABP rules.

Adamantine Agile Rapier        5k

Amulet of Mighty Fists            4k

Celestial Armor                        13.2k

Hat of Disguise                        1.8k

Pelt of the Beast                       15.6k

Liar's Charm(custom)               2.9k

Deliquescent Gloves                8k

Ring of Sustenance                   2.5k

Wayfinder of Hidden Strength  5k

Dusty Rose Prism                      5k

Fleshwarper's Music Box           6k

Pearls of Power                           14k

Total:                                           83k

Edward's Craft Wondrous Item feat accounts for roughly 30k value. Level 12's expected gold value is 108k, so Edward is roughly where ABP says he ought to be: 50% of the expected wealth by level value. Next I'll list the bonuses he's gaining from ABP and their gold value. 

+4 to Dexterity                            16k

+4 to Intelligence                         16k

Armor Attunement +2                  4k

Weapon Attunement +2                8k

Resistance +3                                9k

Toughness +1                                2k

Deflection +2                                8k

Total:                                              63k

So, 63k plus 53k equals 116k. A bit over. I think that's fine, damn close to the mark. Next, as a thought experiment, let's see what I might have bought if this was a typical game. You're intended to give 25% extra wealth by level if a character has a crafting feat, and Edward had plenty of opportunity to craft, so our gold value is 135k. 

+2 Agile Adamantine Rapier          21k

Celestial Armor                              22.4k

Belt of Dexterity +4                       16k

Circlet of Intelligence +4               16k

Vest of Resistance +3                     9k

Pelt of the Beast                             15.6k

Hat of Disguise                               1.8k

Ring of Protection +2                      8k

Amulet of Mighty Fists                   4k

Fleshwarper's Music Box                6k

Pearls of Power                               12k

Total:                                                131.8k

Doesn't look a whole lot different, right? At first glance, it may even seem like the ABP version of Edward comes out ahead. The first thing I want to point out is that the book standard rules for crafting, the 25% bonus, is extremely conservative. I could have easily gotten far more value out of it: ABP Edward got 35% extra value out of his gold, and that's without utilizing every opportunity he had. 

Notice how traditional ruleset Edward ended with fewer, more powerful items? I only bought the deliquescent gloves, the liar's charm, the wayfinder and the ioun stone because I didn't know how else to advance my character's power. Funny how a system intended to reduce the amount of magic items ended in owning a larger amount. 

The weapon situation has to be addressed next. Weapon attunement is the biggest failure of the ABP system and serving as an enormous elephant in the room. You can only attune one weapon and one suit of armor, despite the fact that martial characters will often carry multiple weapons. You also give up your attunement's numerical bonus if you use special abilities, meaning two things. The first is that our gold values for ABP Edward include up to 8k in slop. The second is that it removes your ability to spend extra on weapons. You can't exactly spend extra to cover a deficiency, nor can you attune multiple items for different circumstances. Neither can you manipulate what sort of weapon you're using at higher levels: you're locked into +5 enhancement bonus, then 5pts in special abilities. You can't choose something like 4/6 or 2/8, because the system as presented doesn't support it. Traditional Pathfinder does.

The system rewards STR (and to a lesser extent, DEX) stacking and 1:1 attack bonus classes by letting you "slop over" your weapon attunement. You can buy whatever weapon you want and simply "eat" the attunement loss via race or class selection. It doesn't matter what your attunement value is, you're tossing it away for a huge number of special abilities. 

I want to pause here to remind everyone that making race and class selection more important is a bad thing, not a good thing. People shouldn't feel punished for playing what they want to play. 

And that kind of leads me into the other problem. I'm not the only one who was stumped on what to spend gold on. Everyone was. Magic item purchases are a sub-game that you may not be aware that you're playing. Traditional Edward could have dropped his vest of resistance entirely, relying on the value from his pelt of the beast to fluff his save numbers, or taken Craft Magic Arms and Armor for even higher value from his rapier. He could (and already is) making up for an attack bonus deficiency via his selections, and could manipulate his choices even further for it. Or, he could drop his DEX item entirely in favor of focusing on INT and spellcasting.

ABP Edward doesn't get those choices. He gets what he gets, and there's no way to make different choices. When given gold value by his benefactor, he traded an agile spell-storing rapier for an agile adamantine one. It's objectively a worse weapon: a +2 equivalent traded for a +1 equivalent. He needed to do that to raise his attack bonus a bit, but what in-universe justification could there possibly be? Magic weapons aren't harder to use because they're more powerful. 

We never even answered that question! We just avoided discussing it in-character. 

It also creates problems which aren't as important, but still silly. At higher levels, your restriction is less your gold value and more the equipment slots you get. ABP Characters get two extra, because "belt" and "circlet" were invented by Pathfinder to solve stat boost items being lock-in choices. There's virtually nothing else that goes into those slots. 

In fact, this whole system does feel a little like whoever designed it didn't really play past level 12 or so. Options open up later because of how magic item costs scale (mostly) exponentially, and lesser magic items become far easier to get Backup weapons and armor become a far smaller percentage of your budget. ABP more or less removes this aspect of the game.

So how should this be fixed? I have a few ideas. First is that the attunement trade-off rule has to be removed. It makes no sense and it places undue importance on other aspects of the game. It's ridiculous, asinine, and honestly stinks of something added last minute. 

Frankly, this whole system smells like something either thrown-together or created by someone who's playing a much, much different version of Pathfinder than I am. 

Gold values can be adjusted to allow for magic weapons and armor to be entirely removed from the system. That might be for the best, but you lose something like a character using a mundane weapon for the entire game, like our battle Oracle in Edward's game. That's cool, but not cool enough for me to want to support a busted system. 

You could create several different bonus paths to choose from. Bonus paths like offensive, defensive, utility, stat-focused, something to re-introduce some small vestige of the equipment sub-game. 

You could lock this system into providing stat boosts and resistance bonuses to saves on a track, to lessen the amount of magic items flowing through the game and reduce some of the mathiness. 

Guys, I haven't been this disappointed in a long time. ABP just doesn't do what it says it does. It doesn't really reduce crunch, it just makes you go look for esoteric ways to get ahead. It doesn't reduce magic items purchased... if anything, it increases it. It certainly can't support a game that doesn't have magic items, let me make that perfectly clear. 

But I love the idea of this! Despite the magic item sub-game and how much I missed it, I don't think any of PF's "required" items should exist. Every character buys stat boost items and every character buys cloak of resistance. If nothing else, I'd love a way to remove them from consideration. ABP could have been that, but it's just not. 

The Divide - SR3's progression problem

And I'm aware you were lying in the gutter, 

'Cause I did everything to be there by your side...

Back from the fucking dead, just in time for Halloween. I gotta be honest, this is probably not me returning to regular updates. I've been focusing on fiction writing, and anyway... I think I probably said everything of value that I have to say. Nobody wants to read personal opinions on the progression balance of a dead and abandoned edition of Shadowrun. 

So today, the topic is personal opinions on the progression balance of a dead and abandoned edition of Shadowrun. 

My current game of SR3 has about a year left, and while that sounds like a long time for most games, for us it's 12 sessions. That sounds like we're close enough to the end to unpack some of the problems I have with the system, and honestly... it's worse than I thought when we started this game. This is the first time we made an attempt to bridge the gap between cybernetically enhanced and magic-using characters, and I definitely, solidly think we didn't go far enough. I'll unpack the evidence I've got and possible solutions today. 

I did a whole post on this that you can read at your leisure, but the gist of it is that magically active characters scale their powers blindingly fast compared to a character who scales with cyberware. Not only that, but the high and scaling cost of skills(more on that below) and the relative lack of ability score applications means the magically active character is guided toward blowing all the karma they can on initiation. Raising a skill from 6 to 7 will cost ten karma, and from 7 to 8 will cost twelve. Initiation with a group and an ordeal (which, let's face it, will be the vast majority of characters) is as low as nine karma for grade one, and ten for grade two. Compare a single extra die in a skill to a full point of physad powers, a raise in your magic rating(which, admittedly, may or may not matter much) and a metamagic power. The choice, most of the time, is obvious. 

Like I said, our GM used several house rules in an attempt to alleviate this. We lowered street index, lowered the costs of higher grades of cyberware, raised costs on initiation, and gave group discounts on skills. Our characters have just gotten to the one hundred karma milestone, so it's an excellent time to see how those attempts to close the gap played out. 

Let's address skills first, since this was (mostly) our best success. We saw a lot of buying skill groups in character generation and early on, which slowly fell off. It's obvious that was going to happen. It worked out well, for reasons I've gone over at length. Later on, the characters focused on buying up individual skills, which revealed something a bit problematic. Our group has always gone with the original printing of the Mnemonic Enhancer, which was that it reduces skill costs by 1 per level. This... is probably too powerful. Since I focused on buying a wide amount of skills up to four instead of improving a smaller list past six, Flamingo has a frankly embarrassing array of things she's capable of doing. Part of this is just how the system works, but part of it is that the Mnemonic Enhancer discount is much nicer at lower skill upgrades than higher ones. Mnemonic Enhancer should probably be knocked down to providing a two point discount, one at its first level, and one at its third. 

How did karma shake out in terms of magic power? Well, for the awakened characters of the game, it went okay. I don't think the raise in initiation costs impacted them much, but neither were they optimizing their builds very much. What could they have by now if they were? Let's see. 

Our modified system is (5 + new grade) times 3, then reduced up to forty percent if you do everything you can to reduce it. Assuming they did just that, seven grades of initation would be 116 karma. Allowing for the fact that they've all bought the maximum (three) amount of karma every session, this would easily be possible, with grade eight either being on the horizon or attained already. 

Where would they be if we didn't modify the rules at all? That would be (5 + new grade) times 1.5. Given the exact same 116 karma, they'd be grade eight, looking at grade nine soon, if they didn't have it already. 

Hardly a difference. So frankly, we didn't do enough for me to want to bother with a house rule. I'm going to unpack my problems with initiation later(in a different post), but in general I don't fault our GM for being wary of going further. House rules aren't for enacting a total restructuring of your game.

Now, how'd money shake out? This is more informal, because Flamingo started later in the game, and I don't have exact figures on our Nuyen totals. Full disclosure: I could get those numbers, from our GM, and I just don't want to do that level of math when I already know what the problem is. 

For cyberware, we lowered the cost of higher grades, slightly reduced Street Index, and basically hoped that making Initiation more expensive would close the gap. If she was there for session one, Flamingo would have begun the game with all or mostly Alpha-grade 'ware. At this point in our career, she has fully beta-grade cyberware and a small amount of extra room for upgrades. Her Guardian Angel system can charitably be called a major new purchase she would have made in the portion of the game that I was playing Shivani. Following that, She has purchased one major new piece of 'ware: cultured tailored pheromones II. 

So compared to seven grades of initiation, that doesn't sound great. Allow me to make it worse: The party agreed to fully fund Flamingo's cyberleg upgrades from standard to beta, and without them gifting me 1.32 million nuyen for it, She wouldn't have ever gotten them. She'd be stuck more or less in the same spot for 48 or more sessions and probably ending the game without a significant difference in her 'ware. Even as it is now, I'm still wondering how many of my (meager) planned upgrades I won't be getting. 

And I want to point out that, despite the lowered costs, I've completely abandoned the idea of getting delta 'ware. It's a pipe dream. It won't happen. I could find a clinic, I have the social skills. I simply don't have the nuyen. 

The other thing worth mentioning before we go over the real problem is that we've been given plenty of nuyen. From a certain point of view, too much. We're a once-a-month game, so the rewards were always going to be bigger: it sucks going several months between upgrades, even if it's only been a few sessions. However, while Flamingo is terminally broke... every other character has hundreds of thousands of nuyen in their bank account and relatively little idea of what to spend it on. Despite the fact that Flamingo is desperate for more so she can actually utilize the room her leg upgrade made in her build, we've inarguably been given too much.

Is some of that cash flow difference inexperience in play, not knowing what to buy? A little. Is some of it the fact that magically active characters in general rely less on gear? Yes. Does everyone else include, bizarrely, the rigger and the insertion decker? Also yes. 

Let's look at those leg upgrades. Kid Stealth legs are 100k Nuyen. Beta cyberware in our house rule system is x3 cost, and Kid Stealth legs have a SI of 2. There's a 10% extra cost for the ability to remove and replace the lower leg(which I haven't even been able to take advantage of) for a total of 660k nuyen per leg for an admittedly large essence return of 0.4 each. 

In theory, a sammy can double their amount of cyberware from first to final session, if they go from all standard to all deltaware. In practice, they'll be starting with mostly alphaware and upgrading to mostly betaware, for a rough increase of a mere 20%. In most cases this means that, over the life of a game, the most you can really hope for is to add a half dozen minor pieces of 'ware, or one or two major ones. Even if we assume 'ware is twice as powerful per point of cost compared to physad powers(It's not), that's still less than half as many points as the physad got over the same length of time.

That won't ever change, really. Playing with essence and bio index costs would be fiddling with a house of cards, and I won't be doing it. What can we do? Which solutions would work, and which wouldn't?

Solution One: It is what it is. 

This is the one where we all simply agree the system's too busted to fix elegantly. Lots of magically active characters, sammies rarely(if ever) get upgrades, and we all agree that while karma is distributed equally, nuyen will not be. Either that, or everyone just plays a physad or a mage.

Needless to say, I don't like this one. 

Solution Two: We don't take kindly to mages around these parts.

We could just fuck with initiation. If we double the cost of it, you're still coming out ahead compared to the poor sammy. Play whatever you want, because upgrades will be small and incremental. 

This doesn't work at all. Initiation costs ought to be tweaked, but they're not in a terrible place. Not only that, but this doesn't exactly solve the nuyen problem: The magically active characters will still be flush with cash if you give anyone enough nuyen to actually upgrade their 'ware. 

Solution Three: Call your uncle who works at Kash-4-Karma.

We could raise the output of selling karma. Every awakened character in our group bought karma, up to their limit, every session. Nobody ever sold karma. Ever. Flamingo was the most likely candidate, and I never did because despite the output being raised to 10k nuyen for 1 karma, it never felt like enough. It's a precious resource, and I had plans for it! I wanted to buy skills too. Giving up a whole skill at rating 4 just to get less nuyen than I'd need for one upgrade never felt worth it.

Selling karma would have to give 20k or more before it was worthwhile to do it, but I'm not confident about raising it so high. Added to that is the fact that buying and selling karma being so far removed from each other in cost creates problems of its own.

Not only do I not think this works either, but I don't know if selling karma will ever work. Ever. 

Solution Four: Just overhaul all of the cyberware and bioware costs by hand, NBD.

SR5's solution to this problem was to reduce the scale of nuyen in general. Things cost less, with 'ware being the biggest discounts, but you get less for character generation. In addition to "the million" being the much less cool sounding "the 400k" but having roughly the same buying power, Street Index is gone as a concept. 

Overhauling the costs of the whole cyberware and bioware list is too much. It's too much work, too likely to go wrong, and too much to ask of a group of players. Note, however, that Street Index doubled the cost of Flamingo's leg upgrades for basically no reason. Without it, She would have been looking at the still steep but much more attainable cost of 330k per leg, or 660k.

Eliminating Street Index from the game can only improve it. It's unwieldy, sort of asinine in concept, and it causes huge problems for street samurai. If costs of 'ware go down, the GM can give less nuyen for the same effect: the sammy will still be broke, but the other characters will no longer be flush with so much nuyen that the monopoly guy is blushing. There are absolutely individual pieces of equipment in the game that would need to be raised in cost to compensate, but I'm willing to bet the list is less than a dozen items. 

It's obvious which one I'm going to do, if and when I run. I never liked Street Index, anyway. Will it be enough? Honestly, I don't think so. Delta cyberware will remain unattainable and cybernetically focused characters won't ever see the amount of upgrades and cool new things magically active characters get. The system seems to think that risking magic loss in certain situations is a balancing factor, and... I'm simply not convinced. I've never been convinced. You can effectively "lose" up to twenty karma if you lose a point of magic at a high initiation level, but at 5k nuyen a pop, that's 100k. Go re-read my section on Flamingo's leg upgrades again and use that info to infer how bad I feel for you.

This post is titled very carefully: I call this problem The Divide because I fear that SR3 is irreparably broken in this respect, and all we can do is make the Grand Canyon sized divide a bit smaller and a bit less painful. On some level, it'll always be this way. After all: 

Some characters want nuyen. Every character wants karma. 

I think we're playing Shadowrun again either way once this game's over... so I guess we'll see what shakes out. Until next time. 

Social Penalties in TTRPGs

 There is nothing more bitter than an opportunist who miscalculates. 

Social skills in general and Shadowrun's social skill penalties are on the table today. No other aspect of tabletop gaming varies so wildly from game to game than social skills, not even combat. Philosophies on gameplay style, character design, and whether or not social skills should even be included at all combine to create a rat-king of surprisingly common problems with them.  

I've often said that when a game designer can't think of an appropriate drawback or penalty, they make it a social one. Sometimes it's appropriate and provides rich gameplay opportunity like the Nosferatu clan drawback, but most of the time these sorts of penalties feel thrown-in and poorly thought out. 

Before we go any further, there's something I need to explain about flaws. It can be very easy to 'check out' of a concept when building your character. We all do it on some level when we decide on the strengths of our build. The natural drawback is (of course) being bad at that particular thing and often covering your weakness with another character. That's teamwork. 

This can become problematic in two ways. The first is when that particular concept is one that will never present itself outside of the player proactively creating the situation. It's fine to be comically bad at something when you won't ever have to do it. Some things just seldom come up on their own, like social skill rolls or stealth. Others carry their own natural penalties for a deficiency, like ranged combat. 

The other problem is the depth of the deficiency you can create via flaws or character choices. When you've already decided you won't be participating in a particular challenge, it doesn't matter how large the penalty is that you're taking. Games with a lot of different penalty sources for one thing can create tilted character building scenarios that are often toxic. The feeling is often that if you take one social flaw, you may as well take them all. 

Here's what I mean by toxic. Is checking out of a whole concept bad? Well, yeah. Most of the time. The most fun you can have at a table is being able to participate as often as possible. The way you do that in a healthy game is having more than one way to contribute. Tanking or dump-statting something narrows the character's usefulness. Social skills in particular are a one-two punch of a skill that's often proactive, and can often be handled by a single person. It's ripe for discarding to fluff your numbers somewhere else. 


Mentions of narrow usefulness bring us to the Shadowrun portion of our discussion. Cyberware in SR causes a large variety of social penalties: +1 per 2 essence lost or portion thereof, +1 for "particularly lurid" cyberware, and even more for certain items like the balance tail, kid stealth legs or my favorite, the cyberskull. A sammy, even one that didn't take the million, can easily be taking +4 to social skills with penalties that the book states outright should apply in "most situations". 

I have a lot of problems with this. A lot. We'll go through them in no order. 

One. Applying enormous penalties on the sammy is yet another thing included "LoGiCaLlY" that tilts the game's bias toward magically active characters. It's one of the worst offenders, because not only do they not take any kind of penalties like this, but also physads can take bonus dice in social skills. 

Two. Shadowrun is already a game where a player can end up sitting and waiting while someone else does something. This is by design and this strange "Ocean's 11" playstyle is part of its charm. Because of this, it absolutely does not need players being less capable. 

Three. A flat, "most of the time" penalty just for having visible cyberware doesn't make sense within the world's internal logic. While it's expensive and rare, cyberware is constantly advertised and displayed in media. The world's most popular athletes all have cyberware. Depicting runners is an extremely popular subgenre of action sims and movies. Would you sometimes run into a situation where you're taking a penalty? Absolutely. Cyberware and visible body mods don't fit into the corporate omniculture of conformity. Would it be "most of the time"? No. Would it be so heavy handed? Absolutely not. 

Four. Transhumanism, punk fashion and culture, and body modification are a core part of the genre as well as Shadowrun's world. Trying to shuffle players away from one of the most interesting ways you can express yourself in a TTRPG with hefty penalties is cruel. It's called Cyberpunk, not Cyberconformist. 

Five. Setting the penalty based on Essence is wildly deceptive. The section even has to tell you that non-visible cyberware shouldn't count. Re-calculating your penalty based on the essence costs of your visible cyberware is pointless busywork.

Six. Surely penalties might be in mind for etiquette, negotiation and leadership. However, try as I might, I can't think of why interrogation, intimidation or instruction would take penalty from visible cyberware. Really, I'm being nice saying negotiation might take a penalty, because I don't think lying to someone(which is covered by negotiation) would be affected much.

You know, there's probably more but I think I've made my point. Social penalty rules are often misguided and poorly placed, and this section is no different. A better rule would be to say that visible cyberware or body modification can mean social penalties in some situations, primarily when dealing with corporate employees. The penalty, even when counting wild cyberware like cyberskulls, articulate arms and kid stealth legs(which I maintain aren't even that fucking weird) should, at no point, rise higher than +3. 

Everyone knows I have appearance-related emotional baggage, and over the years it's made me treasure expression of self and appearance in TTRPGs. I also love the gameplay style of cyberware. It sucks that SR3 wants to penalize you for trying to place those two things together, and I'm glad that most people seem to agree that this section of the book is particularly heavy-handed. 

Oh, and not for nothing: this section in the SR3 core book is right next to a really stupid rule for rolling racist biases randomly that implies half of all people are racist in some way. That's fucking bleak. 

The End of Every Road: What I learned from Shivani Sedana

 "Cable... Shivani had to have died. Right? She couldn't have survived a rocket strike. If she's dead, then what am I?"

I loved my most recent character. Shivani Sedana is a cybernetically enhanced soldier, a monster with a golden machine gun, and a natural leader. She was also mentally ill, a sickness called cyberpsychosis bubbling just under the surface. She's a lesson in the dangers of ignoring your problems: it doesn't make them go away. 

I loved her, but my interpretation of her mental condition is born from dysphoria, depression and disassociation. She was originally designed in 2017 and... I think it's fair to say I wasn't doing well. It's 2023 and I'm doing better, better enough that I'm making the decision to put her away. We had to skip a session this month, so I made a deal with the GM to get the game back on track and avoid having to think about Shivani for another thirty days. I can shelf her for a while, and write some long form content dealing with her condition. I can put her character finale to paper with some nice, rich description. Maybe even portray her improving. What a wild concept: a pen and paper character ever getting better.

I think playing her was pretty enlightening for a number of reasons, and I thought I'd go through them in no order. Some of these deal with building and playing characters, and some of these are specific to Shadowrun 3rd Edition. 

Mental Illness is rewarding but draining to portray. Shivani only suffered a break for one session, showing extremely obvious signs and symptoms. However, her mental health issues were present the entire time I played her. Habits like her direct(to a fault) thinking, lack of backup plans and callousness were all informed by her condition. Her persistent delusions came up every single session: I just didn't say it out loud. For a long time it felt great to play her. It was an outlet for a lot of various feelings I had when I started playing her. Ones you can guess if you know me, and wonder at if you don't. 

One of our players, the man behind the surveillance-drone rigger Director noted that he could tell something was wrong with Shivani from day one. I don't have a lesson to go along with that. It just made me feel really good.  

But as those feelings and thoughts started to go away, she became a drain. It's tough to know what would help your character's mental health and know they won't do it. One of Shivani's unhealthy coping mechanisms was routine, and one of those routines was Shadowrunning. Running puts her into contact with a lot more stressors than her rigid adherence to routine was ever going to alleviate. So, playing her still felt good, but became emotionally taxing. It's probably just me, but watching a character make choices that will ultimately harm them is frustrating, even though those are the choices that remain true to their personality. It's even worse when those choices are done in-part or solely to keep them playable.

Be wary of characters you conceptualized a long time ago. I don't think this is a mistake on my part. Far from it, Shivani helped me a lot! But I should have expected playing her to become more difficult the better I felt about myself. Everything about Shivani's mental health was defined a long time ago, before I started medication and therapy for my own. I really should have seen this coming, but I guess nobody expects their mental health improvement to cause something like this. 

I(Me, Mouse) Might be a Leader. I don't know what to say about this one except that I feel like I lean toward this role in games now, and I might be reasonably good at it. I guess you never stop learning things about yourself, right?

Homage Characters are Awesome! Most of the Time. Shivani was inspired by a friend's character from 20 years ago named Bob Collins. He also had Cyberpsychosis and heavily personal themes. Some of them are quite similar to Shivani's themes. Doing an homage to Bob without understanding those themes completely would have been catastrophic or even insulting. It's a good thing I didn't do that. Everyone should feel free to homage an existing character with their own... just be sure to know what you're doing and put in a little work.

Hobbies and Friends are Key to Building a Rich Character. So, I've started to see a lack of hobbies, activities, casual interests or friends as indicators of illness. That's an important tool, but I can't help but think that not including those things is simply a common mistake. I think it's especially true of fantasy games, where travel is overwhelmingly common. You sort of have to carry your interests on your back and count the PCs as your only friends. 

But in a modern game, you really have no excuse. You definitely have a house. It's definitely full of stuff. Like, things. Things mean you have interests, and hobbies, and personality. The other PCs can't possibly be your only friends. Lacking some or all of these things would be a major red flag. Including a major red flag should be deliberate. 

I probably have more to say on this later, so I'll save some for next time. In Shadowrun it's easy to focus on only taking the knowledge skills you think will definitely come up, like Chemistry or Security Design, or Gang Identification. I think that's a big mistake.  If Shivani didn't have her skills on the bass or her love of tailoring, she'd be a poorer character. Did I ever roll Bass? Of course not. That's not why I took it. 

I did roll Tailoring, though. Several times. So maybe it's just a question of what skills you're able to finesse into a situation.

Heavy Weapons Really Aren't as Great as they Seem. I enjoyed the hell out of Shivani and her gold-plated light machine gun, Golden Mandala. A Mandala can be described as a spiritual road map, and Golden Mandala is a map that helps you meet God. I noticed a few things about heavy weapons while I was using it. 

* It's a pretty narrow skill. Realistically, it covers light machine guns, and assault cannons. That isn't as flexible as other skills. Other guns can be quiet, apply chemtech or cover funky utility weapons. Cannons and LMGs are quite nice weapons, but they really only do the one thing.

* The damage boost is slight. An assault rifle is 8M, and a light machine gun is 7S. You get a damage level bump in exchange for a reduction of power, and I'm convinced that ends in a very slight boost, especially if you're optimized for the skill you're rolling. It means that machine guns are better at suppressive fire, but... I'm tempted to say "so what?". 

* They're big. So this isn't a concealable weapon in the slightest. I definitely couldn't carry or use it on every job. I can't say the same about shotguns, rifles, or even assault rifles. In a world where a sawn-off SPAS-22 is 9S, can burst and has a conceal of 6, I don't know how much I can justify carrying an LMG for any reason.  The weight even became a factor: the GM can attest that I sanity-checked Shivani's loadouts for weight, and that's not something I ever had to worry about with other SR characters.  

* They require resources to optimize. If you don't put forth resources toward lowering recoil, I don't know if LMGs turn out better than assault rifles at all. Mandala had a custom 2 pts of recoil compensation and Shivani had a cyberarm gyromount, both of which were integral to this weapon being a good one. That isn't a cheap piece of 'ware. If all you did was pick up an LMG off the shelf, I don't know if it's a great choice.

My GM was Right and Skill Groups are the Way to Go. I just wanted to say here that slightly improving the amount of skills someone can take via skill group discounts is a good thing, and there's very little downside. The bonus isn't that pronounced: I definitely didn't even roll every firearms skill. Even more of them I only rolled once or twice. They soften the blow of "required" skills and lets characters branch out and be useful in other situations. Seeing as how this is a game where you're sitting on your thumbs by design sometimes, that's good. 

SR 3 Sure Has Weird, Draconian Armor Rules. I think it's weird that basically everyone layers form-fit with something else. If I had my way, I'd bump most sets of armor by 1/1 or 2/1 and just remove form-fit entirely. Just make the decision for you and let you wear one piece of armor. I understand the aesthetics don't necessarily matter, but having relatively little freedom in dressing your character and imagining their outfits sucks. 

In addition, the penalties for having too much armor rating compared to your QCK is a pretty bad system. There should absolutely be a penalty here! It's just that trading points of combat pool for armor is a mathy decision and I don't like it. For as crunchy as people think this system is, it has very few of these decisions. I can see why future editions do away with pools entirely. 

You Don't Know What You've Got 'Till It's Gone. I'll make this short. This is my first character with a low combat pool, and you really don't understand how nice it is to have a large pool until you don't any more. It's a good thing that Shivani was built to let things hit her. Because they often did. 

That's it for today. Thank you for this weird potpourri of lessons that I don't think I could spin into whole posts on their own. If you're sad that Shivani is gone, don't worry: The next part of her story is coming soon. That, and I don't think the other characters are entirely finished feeling her impact. 

Roasting Myself Again: Girl Edition

 "Don't name your children after fictional characters. 

If they're transgender enough, they'll do it themselves."

Hi. I feel like being a little mean to myself today. That's not true, I'm just interested in an answer. Today I'm going through all of my old characters to see how many of them have very particular themes of identity. If you know me, you probably know what theme I'm talking about. If you don't? You'll probably figure it out by the end of the list. Consider this a companion piece to the other two posts I did about my characters. Don't know how interesting those posts are, but memory lane is fun and the blog is for me, not you. Well, it's a little bit for you. 

Criteria is a simple zero to five rating, zero meaning none at all, and five meaning the theme is basically central to their character. 

To speed things up, here are all the zeros: Thorgg, Autonicus Jamble, Chief Tumbling-Dice, Callisto, Mister Smiley, Levistus, Skag, Cipher, Cpl, Ramirez, Blind Mary, Icke, Vaux, Arkham Pawn, Elle Arcineau, Tatters, Riyo'to, Seong, James March, Trixie Glimmerskull, Cardinal Seras Hearstring, Cable's Daughter, Celine LaRoque. 

All of these characters either have no strong personal themes or very different ones from what I'm looking for. Most of these are great characters that I'd play again some day! Let's call them The Control Group. Following are every character who scored above a zero and a few comments on each. 

William Loman. Themes of being happy with what you've got are central to Loman's story thanks to his tie to Death of a Salesman. It's not an identity-centric story by any means, and "being happy with what I've got" turned out to be impossible. Still, it's somewhat adjacent, so Loman scores a 1/5.

Akuma. Akuma was rejected by society for his appearance and, as such, hated himself for it. I still think he's a shitty character. 4/5. 

Anna Lacroix. Anna's a character with pretty dense themes, but has some themes of second chances and body modification among them. Outside of the obvious stuff that comes with every cybernetically enhanced character, she enjoyed body mods like heavy tattooing and piercing. 2/5.

Lenore. Shapeshifter. Listen, shapeshifter nets you at least 2 points just on its own. While not every female character I played had an appearance I strongly would've liked for myself, Lenore(and a few others) did. 3/5.

Zero. Was literally transgender. Also had themes of "new life" or "second chances" thanks to being a CIA agent on the lam. Girl this was like 2006 why didn't you get it yet? 5/5.

The Medusa Socialite. She bears mentioning because she was a result of a human mother being cursed in a social power play and decided to just rock it instead of falling to despair. 1/5.

Sianalayn Vyanathen. At some point in the campaign Sia undergoes a transformation to change herself. This was to rid her of the Warlock class which I was very unsatisfied with, but like... she didn't need to come back as a Tiefling. It didn't need to be a physical transformation at all. 2/5. 

Miyako Summerfield. Transformed against her will. Basically the same theme as the socialite. 1/5.

Inkless. Shapeshifter. Also, another "new life" or "second chance" theme because she ran away from Heaven. Honestly I think "second chance" is a great, solid theme for a character so I'm on the fence of saying it doesn't count, but...to prove a point I'm saying it does. 3/5. 

Viktoria Wakefield. Only mentioned because "Slutty carnival folk with a huge rack" is probably wishful thinking on my part. 1/5.

Aikiyo the Mockery. Aikiyo is a robot, but her story centered strongly around purpose and living for yourself as opposed to others. 2/5. 

Pink Annis. Shapeshifter. Pink also had issues with her perception of self and society, seeing human society as something that isn't "for" her, and something she shouldn't be interacting with. 4/5. 

Lace Weaver. Transformed against her will but glad for it. (again). Another theme of second chances as well. 3/5. 

Shivani Sedana. Practically an avatar of dysphoria. Dysphoric and delusional because the UCAS Military ruined her life, meddled with her health and caused her to develop cyberpsychosis. 5/5.

A little math later and I can tell you that 14 out of 36 characters scored above a zero, or about 39%. In addition, only two scored a "perfect" five: Shivani and Zero. The two who have literally felt dysphoria in some way.  This whole time I was scoring my characters I was practically pleading for me to be below 50% and thank god I made it. 

It's also 24 out of 36(2/3rds or 66%) girls, with one being genderfluid(Seras) and one being a robot(Aikiyo) who counts as girl because that's how she sees herself.

But really, I'm just being playfully mean. I just like data. Without these characters, I might not know who I am today. I might never have known. For that, I'll always be grateful.

Cyberlimbs in SR3

"This is it. It’s the end of the line for me. But not for you. Fast is what you do best, ain’t it? Just keep running."

I fucking love Shadowrun. I've played 3e extensively and 5e a short amount. Both are good games, but it's become increasingly clear to me that both have their own mess of problems. 5e fixes some but breaks others, and I got to thinking about what things it got right. This time, I'm talking about cyberlimbs and presenting house rules to lift them out of the gutter hell of "flavor" purchases. 

In 3e, cyberlimbs are a niche purchase. They have their gimmicks, like Kid Stealth legs, hydraulic jacks, or the cyberarm gyromount. They're also prohibitively expensive due to a variety of factors(that I'll go over later) and Cyberskulls in specific are virtually worthless. Its "best use" is to protect your headware from stress, but even that is laughably pointless: It isn't as though headware is harder to repair or more prone to damage than anything else. 

5e simplifies limbs and adds options as well as adding a large variety of limb gadgets. Those are the easy part: I've already adapted several of those and it wouldn't be hard to adapt more. 5e also accidentally turns cyberlimbs into a dominant strategy, but I promise that fact is irrelevant to our discussion today. 

Simplification is on the menu to make limbs easier to use, less math-crunchy, and easier to justify purchasing. SR3 designs with realism in mind but as you'll find out, some of the issues with cyberlimbs already don't make any fucking sense. 

Ability Scores. This is the major financial albatross around your neck if you're buying cyberlimbs. They start at STR and QCK of 4 and must be bought up and balanced with your natural ability scores, or else you take penalties. What's worse is that raising these scores gets harder and more expensive after three points, which can easily push you into taking a lot of extra essence and nuyen penalties. Let me go over a simple, basic example. Keep in mind this is all STANDARD grade 'ware. Alphaware will be even higher.

>--<

A character with a QCK of 4 and two cyberlegs has paid 150k nuyen and 2 essence. This is our baseline for a "fair" price: they're expensive, but do come with baked-in benefits in addition to being a framework upon which to hang extras. 

The same character with a QCK of 7 pays 330k nuyen and 2 essence. They get no additional benefit other than simply being able to actually use their QCK of 7 when running. 

If they have a QCK of 8, they're paying 420k and 2.6 essence. Again, there is no additional benefit. 

>--<

Blowing money just to match the stats you've already got quickly gets fucking ridiculous. The character in question might have cyberlegs primarily for hydraulic jacks, and ironically might consider just installing those in his meat legs for 2 essence and a mere 25k nuyen. He loses out on the ECU of the legs and the 2 points of body, but he gets to start with hydraulic jacks without having to refinance his fucking home. 

My suggestion: Remove limb stat balancing. Cyberlimbs should reflect your stats naturally, like a lower limb already does. Additional stat boosts beyond that can be handled by the system in their normal way: they can still cost the same and still apply to tests "using primarily that limb", just like the book says. 

Edit: Another way to handle stat boosts would be to allow someone with 3 or more cyberlimbs to buy stat boosts for a flat nuyen and ECU cost and allow them to affect stats normally like muscle replacement or muscle augmentation/toner. This would allow a cybernetic character a "replacement" for those pieces of 'ware, which they are not able to use. Be careful allowing this with two limbs, however: it would mean the character can benefit from muscle aug/toner as well as this boost. 

ECU. So, the values for ECU are okay. I think arms should have a bit more and legs should have a bit less, but that's a nitpick. Synthetic cyberlimbs also feel as though they're punished too harshly in this aspect. Our main issue is the fact that you lose ECU for higher grade limbs "because the implants are more streamlined and ergonomic and therefore smaller and have less space available."

This does not and has never made sense to me. The most charitable explanation I have is that standard grade limbs are much larger than a limb ought to be(which is reflected in a few pieces of artwork in the book) and the limb gets progressively smaller until a Delta limb is exactly the size a limb ought to be. This whole interpretation rapidly falls apart because a synthetic cyberlimb, which is intended to appear normal, has a concealability of 8 at standard grade. If it's already basically the size of a normal limb, what's happening as it goes up in grade? Premium, more ergonomic parts sure don't sound like they'd be larger then standard ones.

I also want to point out here that SR5 lets you buy additional ECU via an option called Bulk Modification. You can get up to 6 more ECU for the torso or 4 more for a limb, for example. I think porting this wholesale would be fine so long as we remind players of the "cyberware and social interaction" rules. I always suggest going soft on these to begin with but it's not my fault if you look like a Sherman tank.

My suggestion: remove the loss of ECU for higher grade limbs. Asking the player to balance ECU considerations with their essence is pointless bookkeeping. Making a sammy is crunchy enough. Consider adding Bulk Modification to your games. 

Limb Extras and Gadgets. Part of the problem with limbs is a lack of standardized gadgets and limb extras. That's not a huge problem considering the rules allow you to use your own ingenuity. However, porting some stuff from 5e or coming up with your own is a good idea. I particularly like the idea of a limb holding a tool or biotech kit, it feels like exactly something someone would do with their cyberlimb. Synthlinks for musicians and better rules for modular connectors are perfect stuff. 

I also want to point out the concept of limb DNI. In SR3, you have to pay for direct neural interfacing for any limb gadgets, as in it's not controlled directly by your brain until you do. This rule is extremely poorly conveyed and practically vestigial. Trying to follow it closely raises more questions than it solves: sure, I'd have to plug into my cyberdeck even though it's in my arm, but what's the difference between a DNI cybergun and a non-DNI one? What about cyber-implant weaponry? Would lack of DNI imply that I'm pulling blades out of my hand like I'm opening a utility knife? This rule only makes sense to me for things that you want to put on your headware network. Even then, "DNI Adaptation" isn't the same as a router and RAW, you have to do both. To put a finer point on it: this only makes sense to me for cyberdecks and electronic devices. Even then, this is just yet another tax. Your brain is already controlling the limb and cyber-implant weaponry is already described as something like a new muscle in other areas of the book. I see no reason why ANY gadget would be different. 

My Suggestion: Remove "DNI Adaptation" and just assume limb gadgets are DNI by default. Adapt some gadgets, either from 5e or your own ideas. Or just wait for me to do it.

Concealability. Man, this pisses me off. I barely talk about Synthetic cyberlimbs because they get hit with huge penalties on top of all of the downsides they share with obvious limbs. They have half the ECU of their counterparts, but also have to worry about their concealability going down. What's worse is that basically, everything you'd think to put in the fucking thing lowers concealability. The only reason you'd have a synthetic limb is to sneak your capabilities and gadgets past a MAD, and your conceal rating is the thing you're using to get PAST that MAD, so it creates this awful situation where you already lost half your ECU and you feel like you can't even fill what's left for fear of impacting your limb's usefulness. 

My suggestion. Remove. Entirely. 

Cyberskulls. I just wanted to make a note here because there's basically no fixing this piece of 'ware. It's not too expensive, the essence cost isn't too out of line... it just doesn't really do anything. Fluffing its ECU would be okay, a measly 2 ECU isn't much. However, even then I'm just not sure of how many pieces of equipment could go in your HEAD. It already fits a cybersquirt, can you do that? I say yes, but a lot of reasonable people I know would laugh. It's the world's best protection against a head shot, but if there's a sniper and you've got an obvious cyberskull, they're going to know. In addition to its lack of benefits, it comes with enormous social penalties which are intended to stack on top of the normal cyberware and social interactions penalties. I dunno I just don't think an obvious cyberskull would cause such a severe reaction, especially considering what media exposure must be like by 2065. 

My Suggestion: go soft on the social penalties. Cutting the base essence cost from 0.75 to 0.50 might be warranted. Consider eliminating it from "counting" as a limb for purposes of 'ware benefit reduction.

I love cyberlimbs.  I like the cool aesthetic, the self-expression in their design, and having a lot of extras, gadgets and answers. I find a reason to fit them into a lot of builds. They're just frustrating to work with: I want characters with varied options and I feel like paying a premium for that is counter-intuitive. After all, the "power" options are cheaper and less impactful on essence. If I wanted to build the overall most effective murder machine I could, they wouldn't have any cyberlimbs, I can promise you that.

Research: Abusability and Unique Options of SR3 Gun Creation Rules

 "I would like to see every woman know how to handle firearms As naturally as they know how to handle babies."

Hi, more grunt work research today, so if my hyper-specific interests bother you today, sorry. I'm going over what you can do with the gun creation rules, specifically how bad you can abuse them and everything unique it can create. We've long called them balanced. I want to make sure. 

Some notes. Unique means something that can't be attained from just buying a stock firearm. This means that something like a 7M full-auto SMG isn't notable despite being powerful: there's two of those already. Also, if I left a category of gun out, it means there's nothing notable about it. I just can't imagine even these rules can create a hold-out pistol that's worth looking at. Finally, if something is unique across every frame universally, I only mentioned it when it sticks out. I did a post on that, anyway.

Oh, and abuse score is from 1 to 10, 1 meaning not abusable at all, and 10 meaning extremely abusable, worthy of a house rule or denial.

Heavy Pistol

10M semi-auto damage. Every other 10M pistol is single-shot only. I don't think this is gonna break the bank, but high powered weapons are what wins you fights in SR. Something to keep an eye on. 4/10.

Burst Fire as a simple action. Not technically unique, but bears mentioning. The only other two heavy pistols that can burst are one that does it as a complex action and one that Lone Star hunts down and punishes the users of, respectively. 7/10.

Worst Case Scenario: A 10M SA/BF pistol with a conceal of 7. 

SMG

Recoil Compensation. Heavy Barrel and Integrated Recoil Compensation means 3 extra points. This can compensate for having to use a silencer over a gas vent. 2/10

High Velocity Capability. The only HV SMG in the book has a piddly 6L damage code. an HV SMG is already of limited use compared to larger HV firearms, but a created HV SMG would be a gun you'd actually want to buy, unlike the Ingram Supermach 100. 3/10.

Worst Case Scenario: You make an SMG worth using.

Taser

12S Stun Damage. The two tasers in the game are 10S Stun and 8D Stun. Power wins fights, doubly so when it's something like a taser which is already not hitting on your full impact armor. 6/10.

Ceramic Components. Like most weapons, unavailable at stock. Unlike most weapons, uniquely suited for its use seeing as how a taser is an easy lights-out button. 5/10. 

Worst Case Scenario: a 12S Stun taser with 3 ammo and a conceal of 7, or a 10S taser with a conceal of 6 and Ceramic Components 3. 

Sport Rifle

Burst Fire. Unavailable outside of the weird, stinky combination rifles. 2/10.

Concealability. Bullpup Configuration and Barrel Reduction stack, meaning you can get a rifle up to a conceal of 6. 8/10.

Worst Case Scenario: a 9S SA/BF rifle with a concealability of 6 and 4 extra points of recoil compensation.

Assault Rifle

9M Damage. Power wins fights and this rivals MMGs for stopping power combined with full-auto capability. 9/10. 

Concealability. See Sport Rifle. AR gets both of those as well, netting you a conceal of 7. 9/10.

Recoil Compensation. AR is the best candidate for a silenced gun that still does burst fire or full auto, and the 4 recoil compensation you can easily reach helps compensate for the loss of the gas vent. 

Worst Case Scenario: a 9M SA/BF/FA weapon with a concealability of 7 and 4 extra points of recoil compensation. Yikes. 

Sniper Rifle. 

16M Damage. The other book-listed sniper rifles are 14M and 14D. The one that's 14D also comes with a lot of baggage, see previous weapon discussions for more info. 7/10

Worst Case Scenario: That. 

Machine Guns

All three of these frames can get 1pt of power higher than the best book-standard guns in their category. They also benefit from the 3 easy points of recoil comp available to them. Finally, this is the only source of a high-velocity MMG or HMG. 5/10.

Assault Cannon

20D damage. The other two assault cannons are 18D. 5/10. 

Worst Case Scenario: IDK man it's still only single shot, power wins fights(like I keep saying) but I doubt the difference between 18 and 20 is gonna matter much. 

Parting Shots Thoughts

So, the only gun frame that's crunched for FCU is SMG. I wouldn't be surprised if the SMG frame was supposed to have 2 or 2.5 and the change got lost in the shuffle. Every other gun frame has ample FCU to fit whatever you'd like to put in it: SMG is the only one that has to make hard choices. 

Balance isn't done in a vacuum. Remember that before you start trying to hand-edit these rules. It's okay for a gun to be notably more powerful than others of its kind if it was expensive or hard to get. Remember, the GM basically decides the availability of these weapons by themselves. Don't be afraid to say yes, then put an extra-high availability on it. 

Watch out for people trying to sneak that godlike pistol-sized assault rifle past you, though. I wouldn't be shocked if a GM made the ruling that Bullpup and Short Barrel don't stack.