NinjaPirate

And, despite his name, he doesn't actually have any electric-based powers.

He punches people. From a distance. Using soundwaves.


-np

I'd point out that Destro has never really been all that interested in taking over the world.

He's an arms manufacturer. His family has been in the business for generations. He makes a asston of money of selling his military guns, robots and vehicles. Mostly to Cobra, who is ALWAYS buying.

So he's never so much "following a weak leader" as "showing nominal support for an important client."

I personally don't think he cares if Cobra succeeds in anything or not. Just as long as they keep buying.

Also, his girlfriend is in Cobra. So he has to at least pretend he cares.

Cobra was somewhat less inept in GI Joe: Resolute, though.



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I'm probably biased against hackers as I have a LOT more play time under the old editions, where the game literally stopped for the rest of the players when it came time for a hacker to "do his thing".

That said, even under 4E, which I've played a couple dozen sessions of, I've had the opposite experience - in all that play time, the amount of time I've seen "hacker stuff" done was maybe 5% of the overall play time. Many sessions there was no hacker at the table at all and it really didn't affect anything.

At DragonCon, though, most of the Shadowrun events scheduled are Shadowrun Missions games. Those at least are written in theory so any random combo of character archetypes can show up and be successful.

Shadowrun Missions has it's own modifications to the standard rules.

There's also a message board to discuss that specific campaign at Dumpshock. Which... appears to be down at the moment.


-np

Uh, just when did you order that thing?





-np

Whoa, who went and pissed in your cereal this morning, Negative Nancy?



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Ohgod yes.

For those not aware, Lorraine Williams, owner and CEO of TSR, was not a gamer. She HATED gamers, considered them inferior to her in every way. She didn't want to be even in the same room as gamers. The only reason she ended up as owner of TSR was through a series of unwise stock transfer incidents on the part of TSR's actual founders.

She did, however, like money, and was willing to take gamer's cash. So she set out to make TSR a successful business.

If only she was any good at it.

I'll just go ahead and link Ryan Dancey's blog about the state of affairs at TSR at the time WotC took over.

In short, Williams nearly ran TSR into the ground. The ONLY REASON D&D even SURVIVES to this day is because WotC bailed it out.


-np

I have all the books.*

There are a bare handful of "hyper-maximized" super-builds in 4E.

There were literally HUNDREDS of such builds in 3E.

And even then the super-builds in 4E tend to be of the "I can do an impressive amount of damage for one round and then fall over unconscious and am useless at anything else but this" variety. As opposed to the 3E "I crack the planet in half" builds.

The major difference is that in 4E, you can have, at most, ONE 'prestige class' and later one epic class. And they're not really even full classes, they're more like a half dozen powers added to your main class. Multiclassing base classes is even more restrictive, it's more adding a single limited-version power from another class than actual multiclassing.

Contrast 3E where a character can have as many classes as he has levels, just about.

Additionally, Wizards of the Coast maintains the Character Optimization boards for a reason. The CharOp folks are REALLY REALLY GOOD at finding out broken combos. And unlike previous editions, they errata and update the books ALL THE TIME, constantly nerfing the hell out of the problem powers.

That said, I still count 3E as my favorite edition, with 2E also having a fond place in my heart. 4E I find fun but I also find it a bit shallow.



-np

* - and I mean ALL the books. Even the old white box D&D set. The collection occupies an entire large bookcase.

If it helps, think of it as "You can start with a 6, but you can also choose to put the points elsewhere."

Here's the thing. You're not going to be throwing 6 dice on stuff your character has a focus in.

You're going to be throwing 12-16 dice.*

Your focus areas you will likely have an attribute of around 5, and a skill rating around 4-6. You will often also have 2-6 bonus dice from various sources.

Heck, my Merc character has mediocre social stats, but still rolls 12 dice when negotiating deals simply because of bonus dice.

Usually that will get you 3 to 6 his, which is usually enough in most cases.

If not, there's Edge. Many 'new' players don't realize the importance of Edge.

If you have an Edge of 5, that's 5 dice you can add to almost any test. Five times per game session. If you do it before you roll the test, ALL the dice can 'explode' - every Six rolled adds another die you can roll for the test. Added afterwards only the dice can explode, but that's pretty good too.

Alternately, you can use Edge to re-roll a failed test, or negate a critical glitch. You can even permanently burn Edge to get automatic successes, but this is rarely used.

It's not unusual to see a player rolling 20 dice for really important tests.

I myself modified a set of dark colored dice for Shadowrun. I colored the pips on the 2-4 sides the same color as the dice, the 1 side bright red, and left the 5 and 6 white. Makes it VERY easy to see the results even if there's a lot of dice.

I went with buying only the PDFs. A bit cheaper, and I can quick-search for stuff.



-np

* - (Upwards of 20 before Edge if you're really min-maxed. Upwards of 30 for social skills if you're a Super-Face charisma character. Yes, the social-maxed character is disgusting in SR 4E, even if you cap the number of bonus Social dice)

You can in 4E, but only up to a practical limit.

In 3rd Edition, the problem wasn't so much mix-maxing, it was that you could do it to an extreme degree and still have a well enough rounded character in other areas that it was playable.

In 4E, because of it's severely limited framework nearly all the extreme examples of min-maxing require serious sacrifices to most other areas of character development.

Unfortunately, 4E did this by making most of the character classes and powers so cookie cutter that if you took a random sampling of a dozen powers and classes and removed their names, it'd be difficult to tell them apart.

Hey! This power does X dice of damage to a nine-square burst at range, if you succeed at a D20+Attribute Modifier+Other Modifier roll vs target's Reflex defense. Quickly tell me what power I've described.

Every class has the exact same number of powers at any given level. The ONLY real significant difference is whether they're melee or ranged.



-np

Ahah, I just remembered a particularly squick-inducing variation that showed up on the character optimization boards.

The Exemplar class had as one of it's abilities the power to impress and awe people in an area by a stunning display of a skill. Basically you get to use another skill in place of Diplomacy.

Escape Artist is a skill that among other things, you can use to wriggle through tight spaces. If you roll high enough, you can even manage to get through spaces smaller than your head.

So, the CharOp boards being what they are, realized what this REALLY meant. It meant you could crawl up into some tiny space in a manner SO AWESOME and awe inspiring that it could make everyone around you instantly your best friends.

Thus was born the Arseplomancer.

I will leave you with just the name to figure out the punchline.



-np

Yeah, the character I as talking about wasn't hyper-focused on strength, though. The character was not just a melee specialist, it was ALSO an arcane caster with top level spells.

I've seen character optimization monstrosities of 40 or even 50 strength. I was referring more on how easy it was to get even to 30.


-np

The point is, it's STILL not the 'addicting' game's fault. If anything, the most you could blame is the addicted person's physiology.

This isn't a physical addiction. So it's more or less the addicted person's brain having a malfunction.


-np