[Falconer]

It struck me that the game really needs a positive quality:
10BP positive quality
Goblinized:   The Orc/troll mutated into it's hideous form during puberty and gains a normal human lifespan rather than the shorter pureborn lifespan.

Really this is a huge problem... every bloody orc I ever see in game always goblinizes in it's backstory.  And this has some huge benefits when the orcs are looking at accelerated decrepitude and premature senility problems.   The game really doees NOT handle aging affects well.  Freebie fluff should NEVER give a large tangible in-game benefit like that.  This is doubly aggravated because orcs are so badly undercosted as a package at 20BP (especially with all the fluff changing to eliminate the racism inherent in the system).


I've been thinking about the upcoming 2050's book.

Thinking about how to run a campaign over that long a time... obviously I think it's reasonable to have a reasonable amount of downtime between paydays.  I don't think the setting really handles runners running constantly well.. especially in advancement terms.

There's nothing in there for aging on ANY of the races... but it strikes me in a game spanning 2 decades orcs are most affected (if orc starts running at say 25... 45 it should be pushing up daisies... even if starts as a 20yo or teenager, it's already into it's dying years by 2070).  It'd be nice to see some stuff regarding say loss of physical prowess and gaining of some mental acumen as things age...

Still though at those ages... trolls should maybe start losing a little physical prowess as they age... while humans are right on the cusp and dwarves and elves are still going strong.

[beowulf_of_wa]

dare say that the system doesn't handle aging at all. though to be fair, old runners don't really die of old age.

[Falconer]

Beo... it's not like they don't have other ways to do it... but look at leonization costs... IIRC it was 250k a pop... for 15 years...  so over the course of an orks lifetime that's worth a good 500k in saved nuyen... that's an awful lot of cyber/bio or other fun stuff..

[JustADude]

I've gotta say... 10BP for what is essentially a Special Snowflake Tax on a backstory decision that has no mechanical effect, except in the most incredibly long-running of campaigns, is absolutely ridiculous.

This is especially true since, while we know the "average" lifespan of an Ork is lower than a human, that piece of information is absolutely useless in practical terms since we have no clue what the spread is like on a Bell Curve. One Standard Deviation could be +/- 30 years for all we actually know about it.

Enforcing it as a 5BP Quality could be justified... barely... if you know, up front, that the campaign is going to be several decades of in-game time. Otherwise, since there's no aging mechanics, all you're doing is penalizing people because you've got a bug up your shorts about how Orks are balanced.

[All4BigGuns]

Honestly, I see no point in such a quality. I mean, how many games actually last long enough to span decades of in-game time--barring a huge GM fiat time skip? Even if a game were to last that long, it wouldn't really be that big of a deal for the player to keep the same stats and say after a while that the character is the son/daughter of the original.

The last part of JustADude's post seems particularly apt.

[Mirikon]

Agreed. Utterly useless way to screw people for something that doesn't even give them any actual benefits. Any GM enforcing this should take a 10 BP negative quality Kicked in the Balls for Being a Dick.

[Falconer]

Beowulf:
I agree... though I just thought of one place which does have aging rules.  Augmentation has them for cyberzombies/jarheads.   As they age they slowly pick up more and more 'flaws' until they finally go completely batshit insane and aren't usable anymore.  It's based on an edge roll every few months or years... don't recall the exact details.

It just struck me any kind of an aging system could use something similar.  Granted the types of flaws picked up would need to be a lot saner.  Some things would even make sense... yeah I got plastic bone lacing because my osteoporosis was becoming an issue....


To the rest:
Did you even read the post.  I was trying to wrestle with HOW TO HANDLE A CAMPAIGN THAT SPREAD OVER *20* years (read that *2* decades... (20 years).   So far we already have *ONE* poster boy in the canon and on the boards.   Bull's decker orc started as an old character back in the day (conveniently goblinized, which is why he isn't already senile).   It was only very very recently actually made into a major story NPC in relative terms.

Did you also read that I was thinking about it not because there is a CURRENT NEED, but because there's a FUTURE NEED with the upcoming 2050 book.  With the 2050 book we'll start to see people making more characters for the old setting and don't be surprised when some ask to age the character 20 years and play them in a 2070's based game.

I came up with 10BP because I looked at the leonization costs.  Over a normal human span an orc is looking at least at 2 leonization treatments.   Which is running upwards of 500,000 nuyen... 50BP is 250k nuyen... so 10BP on that scale is a steal.  In fact, I just double checked augmentation... it's 250k (and 2 months of down time for merely the 10 year life extension... full fledged leonization is 400k and 3+ months!).   So that makes this quality actually worth UPWARDS OF 750k!!!  That's big money.  Not one of you has addressed that point... instead simply blasting the idea as pointless and OF NO VALUE (simply punitive).

Yes to MOST settings it is a pointless cost with no benefit.   However until recently there's been absolutely no need for the rules to address aging in any way because of their 1 year == 1 year standard... Any of us who started playing 20 years ago (like me)... would only NOW start to see the issue pop up on only the shortest lived of the races.

As for the rest... I regularly make 20BP orcs(ogres to be precise) with 5BP (human-looking, avoids the few figments of anti-orc racism that's *RARELY* encountered anymore)... merely to powergame... hey if the points are there and the cards are in for it.  Even the way the system handles 'penalized stats' is a joke... since baseline log/cha3 pays nothing extra.  (even cheap gene therapy gets you up from 5/7 to 6/9 quickly... while only advancing 'normals' to 7/10).

My point was above... only with the advent of a 2050's rules port... and a decades spanning campaign does it even become an issue.  One none of you addressed.   Only stacked it up to my bias...

I strongly disagree with the assertion that this is merely a fluff based quality.   I already have it from a lot of the authors that the goblinized == full lifespan is considered canon... merely because of a single assertion because of some oddball runner in a pulp novel.  (comparing his orc grandfather who goblinized to his drooling senile mother IN HER EARLY 30's).  I had heard people assert this many times, but it was only recently where anyone actually was able to point me at any canon source for it.

Back to the subject at hand:
When running a long-duration campaign what kinds of givens do you think would work well.

One idea I had of sorts was longer downtime between runs.  I just find it kind of unbelievable that a shadowrunner is going to be running nonstop constantly and pulling in say 100+ karma a year given the rates.  Just for example... at that kind of a rate... it's not that far fetched to say a mage/adept pulls 1 initiation and 1magic point a year for 15 years averaging out the costs.

To me that means longer bigger runs but with more downtime between them while you use your safehouses etc...so lifestyle starts eating a bit more out of them.

What other practical type concerns can others think of?

Even in your more normal games now, what kind of advancement rates are people seeing for even things like shadowrun missions?

[All4BigGuns]

Beowulf:
I agree... though I just thought of one place which does have aging rules.  Augmentation has them for cyberzombies/jarheads.   As they age they slowly pick up more and more 'flaws' until they finally go completely batshit insane and aren't usable anymore.  It's based on an edge roll every few months or years... don't recall the exact details.

It just struck me any kind of an aging system could use something similar.  Granted the types of flaws picked up would need to be a lot saner.  Some things would even make sense... yeah I got plastic bone lacing because my osteoporosis was becoming an issue....


To the rest:
Did you even read the post.  I was trying to wrestle with HOW TO HANDLE A CAMPAIGN THAT SPREAD OVER *20* years (read that *2* decades... (20 years).   So far we already have *ONE* poster boy in the canon and on the boards.   Bull's decker orc started as an old character back in the day (conveniently goblinized, which is why he isn't already senile).   It was only very very recently actually made into a major story NPC in relative terms.

Did you also read that I was thinking about it not because there is a CURRENT NEED, but because there's a FUTURE NEED with the upcoming 2050 book.  With the 2050 book we'll start to see people making more characters for the old setting and don't be surprised when some ask to age the character 20 years and play them in a 2070's based game.

I came up with 10BP because I looked at the leonization costs.  Over a normal human span an orc is looking at least at 2 leonization treatments.   Which is running upwards of 500,000 nuyen... 50BP is 250k nuyen... so 10BP on that scale is a steal.  In fact, I just double checked augmentation... it's 250k (and 2 months of down time for merely the 10 year life extension... full fledged leonization is 400k and 3+ months!).   So that makes this quality actually worth UPWARDS OF 750k!!!  That's big money.  Not one of you has addressed that point... instead simply blasting the idea as pointless and OF NO VALUE (simply punitive).

Yes to MOST settings it is a pointless cost with no benefit.   However until recently there's been absolutely no need for the rules to address aging in any way because of their 1 year == 1 year standard... Any of us who started playing 20 years ago (like me)... would only NOW start to see the issue pop up on only the shortest lived of the races.

As for the rest... I regularly make 20BP orcs(ogres to be precise) with 5BP (human-looking, avoids the few figments of anti-orc racism that's *RARELY* encountered anymore)... merely to powergame... hey if the points are there and the cards are in for it.  Even the way the system handles 'penalized stats' is a joke... since baseline log/cha3 pays nothing extra.  (even cheap gene therapy gets you up from 5/7 to 6/9 quickly... while only advancing 'normals' to 7/10).

My point was above... only with the advent of a 2050's rules port... and a decades spanning campaign does it even become an issue.  One none of you addressed.   Only stacked it up to my bias...

I strongly disagree with the assertion that this is merely a fluff based quality.   I already have it from a lot of the authors that the goblinized == full lifespan is considered canon... merely because of a single assertion because of some oddball runner in a pulp novel.  (comparing his orc grandfather who goblinized to his drooling senile mother IN HER EARLY 30's).  I had heard people assert this many times, but it was only recently where anyone actually was able to point me at any canon source for it.

Back to the subject at hand:
When running a long-duration campaign what kinds of givens do you think would work well.

One idea I had of sorts was longer downtime between runs.  I just find it kind of unbelievable that a shadowrunner is going to be running nonstop constantly and pulling in say 100+ karma a year given the rates.  Just for example... at that kind of a rate... it's not that far fetched to say a mage/adept pulls 1 initiation and 1magic point a year for 15 years averaging out the costs.

To me that means longer bigger runs but with more downtime between them while you use your safehouses etc...so lifestyle starts eating a bit more out of them.

What other practical type concerns can others think of?

Even in your more normal games now, what kind of advancement rates are people seeing for even things like shadowrun missions?

It's still a pointless point-sink (of which there are a lot already). Being goblinized rather than born as ork/troll is and should remain entirely as the fluff of the character, and if it really bothers a GM that much, then they're micromanaging things way too much.

[Mirikon]

What's next? Making people take qualities for having blue eyes? A quality to be left-handed? Face it, there's really no need for this, at all, unless you are micromanaging things to an obscene degree. Whether someone goblinized or not has no effect on the game, unless you were just looking for a reason to screw over people who play orcs.

[All4BigGuns]

What's next? Making people take qualities for having blue eyes? A quality to be left-handed? Face it, there's really no need for this, at all, unless you are micromanaging things to an obscene degree. Whether someone goblinized or not has no effect on the game, unless you were just looking for a reason to screw over people who play orcs.

Careful man, apparently the smiters are coming out of the woodwork on this thread...

[Mirikon]

Meh. If the first 109 haven't stopped me...

But seriously, this is a bad idea. Even in the case of a game with a twenty year span, there's just no point in doing something like this unless you want to single a player out for a screw job.

[CanRay]

What's next? Making people take qualities for having blue eyes? A quality to be left-handed? Face it, there's really no need for this, at all, unless you are micromanaging things to an obscene degree. Whether someone goblinized or not has no effect on the game, unless you were just looking for a reason to screw over people who play orcs.

The "Aryan" Quality was removed from the game because while everything gets better when you add Nazis (To shoot, repeatedly, in the groin), it probably wasn't a good idea to be adding that as a PC option.

[Falconer]

Canray... that also strikes as the kind of thing which would legally need to be removed by SR's largest secondary market in Germany.   That particular one probably ran afoul of quite a few of their state laws.

I remember the shock I was informed about when I asked a German friend of mine 20 years ago about Wolfenstein-3D... and learned it was banned simply because of it's iconography.

In any case, it's already handled by that one quality in runners companion.  Prejudiced.

Mirikon:
And your straw men all ignore one major thing.  Having blue eyes in the game system has no real bearing it is purely fluff.  In fact the cosmetic surgery to change it is remarkably cheap and zero essence to boot.  Similarly... left-handed has no game balance implications, but we have a positive for ambi-dextrous which clearly does.  If that's the best you can do for an argument....

Now you come after me for anticipating the need to basically sit a player down and tell him... you were too cheap to buy this positive quality when you made the character.  Either pony up a half-million for leonization or you're taking a dirt nap of natural causes.  Which clearly DOES have a very large in-game financial impact.

[Mirikon]

Except that being goblinized or not has no real effect on the game as well, Falconer. My examples weren't straw men, they were to point out just how ill-advised the idea is. And you're not talking about "Hey, you were too cheap to pay for this quality, so spend an ass-ton of money or die". You're talking about "I decided to punish people who play certain metatypes in my abnormal game, so buy this overpriced quality I made up or you'll have to spend an ass-ton of money or die."

[Falconer]

Correction... let me fix your diction.
"Except that being goblinized or not has no real effect on *a SHORT-TERM* game as well".

You're intentionally ignoring the consequences of choosing something which has a short life-span.  Then you accuse me of singling out people who do so for the point savings and crunch benefits of doing so, and then expect to save hundreds of thousands of nuyen later... all because they made a fluff decision.  I got news if the 'fluff' decision has that large of an impact, it's no longer fluff...  I gave a clear tally of the costs involved in being goblinized vs born that way above.  It's neither small nor insignificant.

There has been no need so far, again because the book setting has been pretty much straight 2070's the entire way.  Until we get the 2050's book I don't expect this to be a large problem.


Anyhow, to others not fixated on my idea for a quality... any other thoughts of the problems which arise with such a long time frame such as power creep and the like?  A more 'realistic' run rate and the like?  (sorry I don't have an easy time seeing johnsons having multiple runs per month as seems to be the norm for a lot of people).  For people engaged in an ops tempo that high, the casualty rate seems inordinately low as well.