Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Rules and such => Topic started by: Vareth on <11-18-20/1523:33>
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Hi chummers!
We have Bob who wants to learn Close Combat skill rank 5 -> 6. From CRB p.68 we know that it takes 30 karma and 6 months. We also can read:
Given eight hours for sleep and four hours for miscellaneous life activities, that leaves twelve hours, and therefore three different advancements that can be worked on simultaneously.
So can Bob focus only on Close Combat and learn it 3x faster that is in 2 months? Or maybe intention was you can't learn faster but you can work on 3 different things?
Now let's add lots of nuyen and let's hire private instructor. From CRB p.96 we can read:
Influence is also used for Instruction tests, which can shorten the time it takes to learn new skills (see p. 68). Instructors must have 4 or more ranks in the skill they want to teach. The instructor makes an Influence + Charisma test, which reduces the time to learn a skill by 1 day per net hit.
So a private instructor with dice pool 8 can buy 2 hits and reduce the time to learn new skill by 2 days.
Can private instructor (or Tutorsoft) do the test every day in effect reducig time to learn new skill 3 times?
If answer for both questions above is yes (focus only on one skill and instructor testing every day) can we cut 6 monts to 20 days (180 days / 3 for focus = 60 days / 3 for instructor = 20 days)?
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That learning time reduction is really out of proportion with the training times, isn't it? Saving a few days off of six months? I'll save my nuyen thanks!
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That learning time reduction is really out of proportion with the training times, isn't it? Saving a few days off of six months? I'll save my nuyen thanks!
If you could repeat learning test every day then it would be very neat. You would get 2-4 times time reduction.
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That learning time reduction is really out of proportion with the training times, isn't it? Saving a few days off of six months? I'll save my nuyen thanks!
personally, I concur. The suggested training times are, imo, much too high. But since they're only "suggested", feel free to alter them to suit your campaign.
Take SRM for example: the entire Seattle storyline is supposed to take place inside a single in-game year, so spending 6 months to increase a skill is out of the question.
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I concur with SSDR, it's a suggestion.
IMO: If a character has been using a still a lot in the game then I shave time off and do what sounds "right". It’s about having fun and what works for your group.
Best,
SL
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I concur with SSDR, it's a suggestion.
IMO: If a character has been using a still a lot in the game then I shave time off and do what sounds "right". It’s about having fun and what works for your group.
Best,
SL
There are three metacurrencies in Shadowrun character development: Nuyen, Karma, and Time (perhaps might also consider Essence a 4th metacurrency...) Nuyen and Karma are fairly hard-coded costs, but the time it takes to do a given feature of development is by design tailorable to the needs of your campaign.
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With most RPGs your stats increase between missions or after a rest. As a GM I only allow one stat increase between missions or days, and they can only choose a stat they used during mission they finished, hence learning through doing.
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I'd say that no, you can't hyperfocus on one training to wrap it up faster.
As for Instruction: Kinda sounds like a mistake copy-paste from SR5, not sure if anyone mentioned it for possible errata yet. I'd change it to either half a week or a full week (with a minimum training time of a week). That or you roll and pay for every week.
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Yeah... well there are still some inconsistency here I guess...
Learning spells, for example, is a base time of 12 days (8 hours per day rather than 4 days per day as it is for skills) divided by hits from a sorcery+intuition test where the instruction test add hits to the dice pool (here it act as a team work test rather than reducing training time directly).
Also.... in the suggested training time (advancement cost) table says 7 days per spell.
But is this really something to debate around? You finish the mission. You get karma. You spend karma. You have the skill (or spell) when the next mission start. Unless you are doing SRM, I see no purpose spend time and effort trying to bookkeep how many days it take. Shrug.
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But is this really something to debate around? You finish the mission. You get karma. You spend karma. You have the skill (or spell) when the next mission start. Unless you are doing SRM, I see no purpose spend time and effort trying to bookkeep how many days it take. Shrug.
I can see a role for it, in the right kind of campaign. A gritty one.
A game where you have to scrounge for jobs, and you have to balance whether you can afford to continue to take time off for training or if you HAVE to get out there and earn some nuyen before the 1st of the month.
Of course in a game where job offers are assured (for example, SRM) it's less critical to worry about how much time has passed since your last payday.
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SSDR: You stated it better than I.
Our current campaign/story arch is taking place in 2-3 months of in-game time. Primarily due to a cool character idea from one of my new players. So, each game takes place about every in-game week. Some of the training time frames don’t fit well into that time frame so I as a GM hadn’t changed them.
Vareth, welcome to the boards.
I think SSDR’s quote from Katanarchist sums it up. I come from a philosophy of your telling a story and everyone is there to have fun.
Best,
SL
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We're playing in "West Marchies" sandbox style with random time between adventures/missions so we need clear training time rules as there are many game masters.
So far we agreed that you can train 3 things at one time but you can't "power level" one thing 3 times faster.
Exceptions are:
1) Spells take 2 "slots" for training (by RAW they take 8h/day)
2) Initiations take full day becouse they are extended test 1 month
3) Submersion is totally odd one. We treated it just like Initiation (despite not beeing described) with training time in weeks not in monts (as in CRB p.68)
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But is this really something to debate around? You finish the mission. You get karma. You spend karma. You have the skill (or spell) when the next mission start. Unless you are doing SRM, I see no purpose spend time and effort trying to bookkeep how many days it take. Shrug.
That is how I'd run it. I can see campaigns that role-play the downtime/training time of things more wanting some guidelines. In which case totally ignore what's in the book it would be a bad suggestion for virtually every campaign in existence, even if you are going for realistic. Realistic there would be different training times for each skill/attribute, it wouldn't have a linear increase in time based on level etc. In most campaigns I'd say
1. Never set up things so you can't break form the freely, I don't care if its a initiation ritual or hitting the gym. You don't want to make a player have to choose between doing his training or going on the run.
2. Make sure it doesn't take longer than the speed at which you earn karma, by that I mean under the current guideline it may take 12 months and 30 karma to increase a attribute, maybe they spend another 60 doing other things. If you are earning over 90 karma in that 12 months, you are constantly piling up karma with no way to spend it. If you give as few karma as the karma section suggests, then maybe slow advancement works.
As an aside to this discussion, the karma award section advice for the GM seems really really bad to me. 1-6 being the new karma award system, and the number to remember is 5, because everything works on multiple of 5? how many runs do you want your players to go on before they can improve their firearms by 1. Sure mages are like hey woo a new spell, everyone else after buying a specialization or two is just waiting for a ton of runs to be able to do anything. Are the new missions following those guidelines?
I mean lets assume I run a game for a year and have 45 sessions, roughly once a week we miss a few weeks for holidays etc. average karma seems to be 3.5ish based on the descriptions. So 157.5 over the year of near constant weekly gaming. So 31.5 attribute points of advancement. Sounds like a lot but bumping your firearms from 3 to 4 then to 5 cost 9 of that bumping some of those dump stats to survivable levels took another 6, getting a core skill to 7, take another 7, getting your 2nd core skill to 6 takes another 6 a specialization or 2 and you are pretty much out. So after a year of near constant gaming you got a little bit better in your core and fleshed your character out a smidgen. And I'm going to guess most people don't get to play that often. Heck many campaigns don't go this long, I'd suggest most don't. It shouldn't be as dramatic as D&D 5 e level 1-20 in 6 months stuff, but a couple dice in your main is barely noticeable, you will probably notice the lack of the dump stat at least.
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the karma award section advice for the GM seems really really bad to me.
Have you read the karma award section advice for GM in SR5...?
1-6 being the new karma award system...
Per game session, plus a bonus in the session where you complete the run.
In SR5 the advice was that you typically didn't get any karma at all until the end of the run.
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the karma award section advice for the GM seems really really bad to me.
Have you read the karma award section advice for GM in SR5...?
1-6 being the new karma award system...
Per game session, plus a bonus in the session where you complete the run.
In SR5 the advice was that you typically didn't get any karma at all until the end of the run.
SR5 screwed up in a lot of areas as well.
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I mean I ran a campaign that first was every 2~3 weeks, turning every month or worse when one player moved and we ended up having two Antwerp players, so in the end over 52 sessions, of which 32 were SR5, we averaged a bit over a month per session. I finished each run in 1 session, ended up giving an average of 6.5 karma per run based on the SR5 rewards. Adding nuyen->karma still kept them below 10 karma per month, which is about the point in SR6 where you'd be spending karma as fast as you're gaining it. So honestly, I don't think training times would have been a problem for us, nor were SR5 or are SR6 karma rewards.
But that's for a normal '1 run per month' campaign. If you're running anything else, then go ahead and do whatever you want, both training times and karma are explicitly guidelines. I ran a double-exp D&D 4e campaign from level 1 to level 10, because that was the speed I liked. I've played in short campaigns for Shadowrun where we spent everything as fast as we gained it, wasn't a problem there. If you want time to progress faster, go ahead and raise rewards in return. Want the players to go through tough runs? Go ahead and up the benefits. Playing a 30 Nights style campaign? Go ahead and toss out the training times. The system's not broken for the default style, but they acknowledge not everyone runs the same way, so feel free to modify using the baseline idea, so you have a rough idea to base it on rather than just random numbers.
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Why is one run per month "normal". Do people just want to make the bills? On a meta level don't mundane players want to buy new cyber or upgrade existing cyber, its not nearly as cheap as it was in 4e. so unless each run a month is paying out massive amounts I feel this stagnates mundanes. We are in more the weekly run camp. And we pay out more than seems the standard if missions etc is a guideline.
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Why is one run per month "normal". Do people just want to make the bills? On a meta level don't mundane players want to buy new cyber or upgrade existing cyber, its not nearly as cheap as it was in 4e. so unless each run a month is paying out massive amounts I feel this stagnates mundanes. We are in more the weekly run camp. And we pay out more than seems the standard if missions etc is a guideline.
It depends on the campaign assumption on how much laying low time is recommended/mandatory in between jobs.
It won't do to do a job on tuesday, and then another job wednesday night. The people your tuesday job wronged are still looking for who hit them.
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Why is one run per month "normal". Do people just want to make the bills? On a meta level don't mundane players want to buy new cyber or upgrade existing cyber, its not nearly as cheap as it was in 4e. so unless each run a month is paying out massive amounts I feel this stagnates mundanes. We are in more the weekly run camp. And we pay out more than seems the standard if missions etc is a guideline.
It depends on the campaign assumption on how much laying low time is recommended/mandatory in between jobs.
It won't do to do a job on tuesday, and then another job wednesday night. The people your tuesday job wronged are still looking for who hit them.
We've always run it as unless you do something crazy on the run, like kill their puppy they just write it off as cost of business. back to back days sounds a bit much, but one Tuesday, and then another one Sunday doesn't sound extreme to me.
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While there's often an aspect of "behave professionally, and you'll be treated professionally" that limits how much blowback shadowrunners face (when they conduct themselves as they "should")... some runs have more blowback than others. If you extract a prototype, the target corp isn't going to just throw their hands up and go "aw, shucks. We sure got the short end of that shadowrun didn't we!". They're going to at least look into getting it back. And necessarily, that involves seeing if they can find the thieves who absconded with it to see if they're willing to squeal on who they gave it to. Sure, eventually they'll realize leads have gone cold and if they haven't found professional shadowrunners by now, they never will. I happen to think that takes more than a week for corpsec to reach that point. Hit their profits hard enough, and it'll take months for them to consider pursuing you being wasted nuyen on top of lost nuyen. Maybe even years! Do a big enough job and yeah, you essentially may have to retire afterwards. Such a run would be a natural way for a campaign to reach an organic conclusion.
And that's "just" corporations. Revenge isn't profitable. You do a run against organized crime, and revenge is a matter of honor rather than mitigating losses. You burn down a bunraku parlor, or geek a Capo, and there's a whole dimension beyond the nuyen. You don't project strength by having a good laugh about how those Shadowrunners really pulled one over on the family this time.
Now none of what I said is meant to imply that "Kill an Oyabun this week, and the Yakuza have forgotten about it next week" is wrong. If that's what works for your game, great. As I led with my earlier post: It depends on the campaign [as to how long you "need" to lay low between shadowruns].
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Unless you are handing out ridiculous stack of cash each run, that 1 really hurts mundanes, and 2 doesn't make much sense to me. If my pay not only has to cover my living expenses but my hide for at least a month expenses, the pay better be insanely good. like 30-40k each minimum. Because 1/2 that will be being used just to lie low.
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Why is one run per month "normal". Do people just want to make the bills? On a meta level don't mundane players want to buy new cyber or upgrade existing cyber, its not nearly as cheap as it was in 4e. so unless each run a month is paying out massive amounts I feel this stagnates mundanes. We are in more the weekly run camp. And we pay out more than seems the standard if missions etc is a guideline.
It depends on the campaign assumption on how much laying low time is recommended/mandatory in between jobs.
It won't do to do a job on tuesday, and then another job wednesday night. The people your tuesday job wronged are still looking for who hit them.
And honestly, if you're doing frequent smaller jobs, then the base rewards are just fine. If you're doing big high-level jobs, having bigger rewards but more downtime (since those jobs don't just fly around all the time) makes a lot of sense. If you're running 20 karma a month, then yes, the training times need a tweak.
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Why is one run per month "normal". Do people just want to make the bills? On a meta level don't mundane players want to buy new cyber or upgrade existing cyber, its not nearly as cheap as it was in 4e. so unless each run a month is paying out massive amounts I feel this stagnates mundanes. We are in more the weekly run camp. And we pay out more than seems the standard if missions etc is a guideline.
It depends on the campaign assumption on how much laying low time is recommended/mandatory in between jobs.
It won't do to do a job on tuesday, and then another job wednesday night. The people your tuesday job wronged are still looking for who hit them.
And honestly, if you're doing frequent smaller jobs, then the base rewards are just fine. If you're doing big high-level jobs, having bigger rewards but more downtime (since those jobs don't just fly around all the time) makes a lot of sense. If you're running 20 karma a month, then yes, the training times need a tweak.
I suspect they'd need a tweak anyways in almost any campaign, it might not mechanically break but it would both be a hassle and unsatisfactory. Just making sure it doesn't stock pile is the bare minimum of making it work. But no accounting for taste and all that, so that might work for people, and its a start point of any campaign discussion.
But okay lets go with the 1 run a month paradigm, to bump a stat from, 5 to 6, that's 12 sessions+ before you see the fruits of your labor. in my games it would be like 48 sessions. And either way if you are not gaming every week, 12 sessions might be 6 months in real life. That is both a pain in the ass to track, like 1e d&d spell component level of pain in the ass,(which in my youth I enjoyed, but I was rare in that back then) and I suspect frustrating to most players. I suspect most people just want to spend their karma and see the result. Again there are people who role play their downtime as much or more than the runs, so if you want to role play hitting the gym, shooting the shit while target practicing etc. Maybe long training times will work for your campaign. Otherwise I suspect most will just see it as a pain in the ass and not worth the hassle. But me, I as a player don't want to die of old age while i am waiting for my characters training to complete. I mostly GM, so we just have people spend karma and next time they show up its done. While we role play downtime a decent amount its not tied specifically to training up where you spent your karma.