Rewards & Rewards in Shadowrun & Other Games

No, there isn't a typo in the title - it is rather a nod to two separate ideas of reward.  All will become clear...

Because game money cannot be converted into real money, then the main rewards that can be given to players is new abilities. Whether these abilities are 'skills' or 'equipment' is functionally quite irrelevant: they both increase the ability levels of the character that the player is playing, and thus expand the scope of what is possible for both player and character within the confines of the game.

Original D&D famously tied advancement to money (or treasure anyway); magic items and killing monsters also provided a route to advancement but since they were obtained in the same way, that doesn't change anything important here. It got some stick for doing this but it had one great advantage: the reward to the characters and the players was very directly for doing the things that they ought (in the premise of the game) to be doing. In my opinion, it also provided a very useful degree of moral hazard: it was perfectly possible to play a bad - or very bad - character simply because the incentive to do so readily existed: optimize for getting more money, whether from friend or foe.

Later RPGs and D&D itself moved away from this but something important was lost: the reward system tended to become more complex, nebulous or both; whereas the OD&D approach basically successfully optimized the reward system to the essence of the game. Complex systems tended fundamentally to want to model some kind of 'real world' process for skill improvement whilst nebulous systems that rewarded 'good roleplaying' were intrinsically subject to GM fiat and caprice as well as, potentially, creating tension at the table since 'playing in character' as a player goal can interact quite badly with other players, although doubtless some groups really thrived off this.

 

And so to Shadowrun.  Shadowrun is a game dominated by money, since it is in a world dominated by money - even more than the present. The tag line from 5e, Everything Has a Price, kind of epitomizes this. So there might be quite a good case for linking 'Karma' awards in Shadowrun to money, with the big-earning characters definitionally playing in the big leagues, so to speak, whereas 'street-level' characters earning street-level money would be slower to advance (and hopefully, face lower odds). What this might be precisely is open for debate and experimentation, but maybe 10000Y per karma point might be a good start point.

However, there is another use for money in Shadowrun and that is to track 'reputation' - think 'Reward' as in Wanted: Dead or Alive.  The value to/for/or against a corporation, or any other organization in the Shadowrun world can be tracked via nominal money gained or lost.  And given the nature of the corporation in the Shadowrun world, this makes a lot of literal sense: everything would be done on a cost/benefit basis. This is in addition to any other considerations: killing someone's family in the course of a run goes above and beyond the money, but that motivation applies to family and friends, not the 'organization' as a whole (and especially not a corporation). And this creates a specific mechanic that players can take advantage of: is their beef really with the thrill gang, or just with a few members? And if the players benefited the rest of the gang to the extent that they were in a positive relationship...well, that could be very interesting in terms of roleplaying. Conversely, it also gives an incentive to limit the damage - why generate pointless emnity by ratcheting up the Nuyen cost even more...unless, of course, your other friends are secretly delighted by this. In any case, I have been using it in my current Shadowrun campaign and it is working nicely as a way of tracking who friend and foe is, and who will get out of bed to make their life a misery, and to whom they are just too insignificant to even watch.  As a last thing, it could/should/would determine the resources that an organization would expend to get them, but I haven't made that procedural yet. Coming soon.

Firing Fully Automatic: when should it be done?

Chris Turner, British paratrooper, is at the corner of a solid stone farmhouse. Three Polish scouts are approaching, unawares.  Chris opens fire, fully-automatic, at about 30m distance…

 I am quite interested in when it is optimal for characters in 'modern'-themed role-playing games to  use automatic fire from assault rifles and submachineguns. My impression was that in some games it is pretty much always pointless, and in others nearly always optimal.  My initial survey somewhat confirms this...

In Twilight 2000 2.2, Chris has a Small Arms Asset of 16 (Strength 8 + Small Arms (Rifle) 8).  He is carrying an M16A2, with the following stat-line.

Weapon	M16A2				Recoil		Rng
ROF	Damage	Pen	Blk	Mag	SS	Brst
3	3	1-Nil	5	20/30	3	5	55

Chris can fire up to 5 bursts per round, each of 3 bullets (the weapon’s ROF). He fires a fully automatic burst at each Polish scout.  The range is short (under the printed range).

Each round counts as an ‘Impossible’ shot, i.e. resolved at ¼ of the asset, 4.

No rounds are lost from each burst due to range.  Total recoil is 15-8 for a total of 7, however, which is more than the number of shots in the burst. Therefore the fire is wasted!

However, if Chris fires two bursts, the total recoil is 2; these 2 shots are taken from each burst, thus Chris only rolls for one hit with each.  He is better off staying with single-shot.

But if Chris fires only a single burst, then he will get to fire all three shots, even if he only hits on a 4 or less.  If he had fired three single shots, he would hit on a 15 or less with each.

However, supposing he is with Jason, a driver who has an asset of 12, but greater Strength (10).  If Jason fires two bursts, he would get to roll six dice.  He would need a 3 or less to hit on each of them.

Usually single-shot fire is much better than automatic fire in Twilight 2000; this is particularly true for ROF 3 weapons. But imagine Doug is a British soldier, who has Strength 12 and an overall asset of 16.  He could fire two bursts of 5 rounds, for 10 rolls needing a 4 (i.e. a 20% chance) or more to hit.  He could still fire 4 rounds single-shot, but each hitting on a 16 or less (i.e. 80% chance).  Doug is still more likely to hit with the single-shots. This equation only changes a little at longer ranges: John’s hit chances will go down, but the number of effective bullets from the bursts goes down too. 

The only really useful thing is that the bullets that don’t hit the target might hit anyone else who moves in the vicinity, so it at least has some kind of potential suppressive effect.

 

 In Twilight 2000 1e, things work in a very different way.  Essentially every 'shot' of ROF represents 3 rounds fired for most weapons - you can work out exactly how many by the number they have divided the number of bullets in a magazine by.  Our M16 has a magazine of 10 rather than 30, so each shot represents 3 rounds fired.  The chances of hitting at 30m are 48% for each of the four shots, so not too awful for Chris in these rules. Incidentally, if I recall the rules correctly, if Chris spends a turn aiming, his first shot is fired at a 96% chance of hitting.

If the same situation took place in Shadowrun1e, imagine Chris has a Firearms skill of 6.  He is armed with an FN-HAR assault rifle; this has a 20-round magazine and a Damage code of 5M3; and it also comes with integral laser sight and gas-vent recoil compensator (2).  30m counts as medium range in Shadowrun 1e for an assault rifle, so the base target number is 5.

On fully automatic fire in Shadowrun, the number of bullets fired can be up to firearms skill +1, so in this case 7.  However, the number of shots is applied as modifier to the required target number: in this case it would move it up to 12. 2 points of this can be offset by the stabilizers on the FN-HAR, leaving the final target number as 10.  Chris rolls 6 dice for each round (i.e. 7 times) requiring a 6, then a 4 or more on the additional die rolled for throwing a 6 (i.e. a 1-in-12 chance).  It would be much more effective for Chris to limit himself to two shots, where he has 6 dice and only needs to score a single 5 or 6 to achieve a hit. And he has a reasonable chance of getting the 3 hits he needs to shift the damage from ‘Medium’ to ‘Serious’.

If the FN-HAR is the ‘smart-gun’ version, then bursts are much more worth it: one could try 4 shots and there is a quite decent chance of taking down an unarmoured target.

The damage code of 5M3 indicates the ‘Power level’, the ‘Wound Category’ and the ‘Staging Number’.  The ‘Power level’ is the Target number for anyone hit by the fire to try and reduce the damage of the attack; the ‘Wound Category’ is the base level of damage the weapon does; and the ‘Staging Number’ is the number of additional successes either the attacker or the defender need to change the ‘Wound Category’ up or down.  Interestingly, Shadowrun rules that the ‘Power level’ increases if a weapon uses automatic fire – but since the bullets are supposed to be rolled for separately, it is difficult to see why this is the case.  To make sense of this, I would suggest that each burst is considered to consist of 3-, 4- or 5- individual bullets.

 

 RECON has a more idiosyncratic system although it does have its points. All weapons of the same type have the same rate of fire; this rate of fire that you roll for is explicitly NOT the same as the number of bullets fired. So all submachineguns can fire 5 ‘shots’ on full automatic; the only modifier is a further -10 to all hit probabilities (which are given in percentages). The RECON 2e rules (i.e. the ones published by Palladium) use a ‘situational’ rather than ‘simulationist’ system, whereby the main modifiers are the combat situation: attackers in  an ambush are likely to roll at nearly their base skill level, those being ambushed fire with big penalties.

So, to go back to our example, Chris has a base skill of 80% with assault rifles. He can fire 5 times on full-automatic.  He can split his fire between the three Polish scouts. Because he is ambushing them, he will roll twice at the first two and once at the third with a 70% chance of hitting.  Ammunition is dealt with in a somewhat ‘quantum’ fashion: everyone has ammunition until they haven’t, the relevant factor being the character’s Alertness rating – more Alert characters pay more attention to their ammo expenditure, less Alert characters blaze merrily away.  This doesn’t affect their likelihood of hitting, just how many stoppages, whether through magazine changes or jams, they have. There is actually quite a lot to be said for this approach, as long as ammunition shortage isn’t a significant tactical factor.  It might be taken into account by demanding a ‘weapons check’ (i.e. a stoppage check) after every occasion on which a character fires fully automatic, but not when they fire on semi-automatic.

Thus there is a fair amount of disagreement about how accurate or not automatic fire is and thus how and when it is most worth using. In very broad terms, the answer seems to be  - always in T2000 1e, very rarely in T2000 v2.2 except when doing a form of area denial or at certain ranges when spray'n'pray works a little better, nearly always in Recon, and a little bit in Shadowrun 1e i.e. to the extent that the weapon is rigged out to avoid recoil, although these rules overall don't seem to make that much sense in any case. 

Twilight 2000 v2.2 - Playing the Game - Clean Procedures & Structures

I have been playing some more Twilight 2000 2nd edition recently and it has been quite fun. The setting has always been reasonably compelling in terms of its premise, and the detail around that premise has been satisfactory enough to get a game out of it.  Mixing military, survival and exploration themes in a plausible way in a modern setting isn't necessarily so easy, but the game gives it a good go.

 

However, elements of the execution of this in practice are not good. I have some issues with character generation, equipment and overall calibration which I will write about another time, but here I want to concentrate much more on how the game is actually played.  I have tried to codify it so it has a more logical flow - please have a look at this page for details.

Fundamentally, Twilight 2000 v2 resembles a hex crawl game.  Unlike a very traditional hex-crawl, the players and characters know the approximate shape of the world and the local environs but not the exact shape or contents. I think there is a hidden premise in the game - there certainly is when I play it - that the Twilight 2000 world both is, and is not, the world of real life. The big cities, even small towns are there, but it doesn't have fidelity down to area/village/street level, so players and GMs aren't expected to research every area in which the world takes place, hence farms and villages can be generated as random encounters. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from trying to take the level of granularity down further especially in the age of Google Maps, but I don't think the expectation in the rules is that you will do that. The level of expectation of fidelity probably - definitely guessing here, based on the scale of the supporting materials - got lower between Twilight 2000 1st edition and 2nd edition, even.

Almost all of the mechanics one would need for a hex crawl are in there: movement rates & quite detailed encounter tables, rules for survival (food, fuel, fatigue, sickness) etc. The most recent version of the game (edition 4, which I have not played yet), because it is explicitly designed as a hex-crawl, has a free hex map of Poland (and Sweden) to download. So 4e recognized the logic of where this game needed to go and went there, which is possibly a vote of confidence in the idea that the same design logic can be applied to earlier versions.

However, although almost all of the individual mechanics are there, the structure is emphatically not. And I am not on about the explicit lack of 2e hex maps or anything as relatively trivially as that. No, I mean the way the rules are organized within the rulebook makes using it generally difficult. They aren't optimized for play; it would be some excuse if they were optimized for learning but they aren't really done that way either, although the organization of the book makes a little bit of sense in terms of the latter. And I think this lack of structure really diminished the amount of times I played it when it was first out: it felt like, it was, quite hard work to get a game out of it compared to games where it was all more obvious what one should do.  When you add in to that the individual complexity of certain mechanics (explosive weapons for instance) then the game just becomes too much, even though most of the individual rules are quite well done and thought out.

The Alexandrian

 I have been really enjoying catching up on The Alexandrian blog (95%+ focused on role-playing games) and on the YouTube Alexandrian channel. I know it has been going for ages, but it was entirely new to me. Although role-playing games have always been part of my gaming - or at least they have for 35 years or so - it has always played third string to miniatures games and board games. However, RPGs have been more prominent for me over the last year, for two reasons: firstly, whenever life gets more stressful, I have tended to increase RPGs and diminish other games; and secondly, most of my children prefer RPGs to wargames in particular, so I have tended to focus more on what they want.  Anyway, I have found a ton of useful and usable advice in The Alexandrian on every aspect of running RPGs - it is proving a brilliant resource in making my current games (Twilight 2000 v2 and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1e) much better. So, if you haven't heard of it before, check it out.