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[Kameleon]

To reply to some of your points Rabek,

- The blinking words got your attention didn't they? I don't mean to sound glib, but I've addressed the past challenges with magic + cyber a few posts up - and it needs to be as apparent as possible for incoming players.  As much as blinking text may be a taboo in MUD circles, it appears to have served it's purpose, no?

- While combat 'no action' returns will not tell you how much time you have until your next attack, your prompt does by default.  Try a 'prompt all', or even something like (I apologize for the broken/incomplete color codes) 'prompt {G({x%e{G)({y%n{G){x H:%h S:%s Mv:[{G%v{x] W:[{c%w{x] %1 %2 %5'.  Sub the last two for appropriate pools where necessary, as those are casting and astral.  It does mean spamming enter or look or vmap or something equally innocuous every second or two, to refresh your prompt and know where you're at.  Sure it's a bit spammy and clunky, but it works.  Feel free to post a suggestion for something better/alternate/different though.

- I've got absolutely no argument or excuse for the spelling and grammar.  It has always been an area of challenge for the game, dating back to the original founders poor grasp of the english language (apparently).  That said, nobody knows they're there to fix until someone bug or typo reports them - so feedback of that nature is invaluable.

- I can't help but feel you were stretching for a 4th bullet there, as having some select impervious NPC's is pretty essential the maintaining a playable MUD for the rest of the playerbase.  If you can kill off one of the newbie shop merchants, or an important key of a scripted run chain - and they don't repop until the area resets (or worse, until a server reset or crash)... you're not doing anyone any favors in return for the realism you seek.  I for one think it's a fair and understandable tradeoff.

[LordBucket]

To reply to some of your points

if you're looking for feedback, I could probably offer some. But I expect that a lot of the things I have to say might be somewhat impractical to implement. Shadowrun is an interesting world and a fun pen and paper game, but pen and paper games generally translate poorly to computer games. Just in the few hours that I've played, I can see a lot of things I'd have done very differently. But implementing a lot of them would require a reset of the entire world, which is a non-trivial thing to suggest.

In terms of the new player experience, however, I can suggest a few things right away that you might be able to make use of:

1) An awful lot of things have no help entry. Lock-picking, reputation, hacking, decking...I wasn't making a list, but during character creation it seemed like about every fourth thing I wanted help on had no entry, even when I was asking for help on items specifically listed on a help page as something that I could request help on. Additionally, there seems to be some confusion in the help entries regarding descriptors that have a hyphen and descriptors that are two words. Both conventions are used, but sometimes the format listed in one help entry (for example, type "purchase" and you get a list) isn't the form that's needed to actually get a help entry for that thing. Or in some cases there's apparently no entry at all.

2) Many things that do have a help entry, have useless help entries, and sometimes the information I'm actually looking for exist in help enties other than the ones I would naturally go looking for it. For example, "help strength" tells me that dwarves get a +2 strength bonus, but "help dwarf" doesn't list any dwarven racial bonuses. This is sloppy. "help intelligence" gives me a paragraph long philosophical dissertation on what is and isn't intelligence, but it gives me no actual game significance of the attribute whatsoever. If I type help intelligence, I probably want to know what effect the attribute has in the game, I'm not looking for a dictionary definition of the word. In fact, the vast majority of all help entries in the game have this kind of issue. Help is very often not helpful in the least.

3) Many things that a player would obviously want to be able to do have no obvious help entries, and are totally unintuitive. For example, logging out. There's no entry for how to safely log out on the help menu. "Help logout" and "help logoff" have no entries. And if i simply go to sleep then disconnect, when I reconnect I have an "afk" prompt instead of the standard prompt, leaving me to guess that afk is a command I can use to make it go away. Or do characters always remain in the game world? If so, there should be some way to find out about that, but I don't see one. Do I need to log off in a hotel? I have no way to knowing. Logging off is just one example. I routinely ran into scenarios that apparently lacked help. At one point I cast control-action on some random human. Then tried to give him commands, but couldn't. The help entry for the spell contains no useful information. So I tried using sayto to issue commands. And the response I got contradicted the fact that my target was under my control. Too many aspects of the game are shrouded completely in mystery with no obvious way to find out how they work.

4) The character creation interface is klunky.
 * I don't feel like I should need to type things like "bod +" six times if I want 6 bod. "bod 6" would be far preferable. And if I type bod 6, spend the rest of my points and want to change my bod to 5 to spend that extra point elsewhere, I really should be allowed to.
 * There appears to be no way to undo anything. Accidentally press up arrow and enter (repeat in mushclient) too many times and you may have to delete and and start completely over. This is especially annoying at the skill stage where, for example, you start with one free karma in addition to your attribute and skill points. But the karma can only be spent to increase something by 1, which can create situations where if you'd spent the karma first you could raise a skill higher than if you spend a skillpoint first. This kind of juggling during initial character creation serves no purpose but to annoy first time players.
 * The info descriptions for equipment and cyberware are generally useless. If I type "info chipjack" it's probably because I want to know what the thing is and what it does, not merely how much essence it consumes, which I can see on the list anyway.
 * Which body positions armor fits to is not entirely intuitive. There are a few pairs of items that from their descriptions seem like they should both be wearable together, but they are not. It would be nice if "slot" information was available for item
 * During character creation it should be possible to sell items back for full value. It's an unreasonable nuisance to have to pay a resellers fee just to figure out what does and doesn't work.

5) There are many obvious shorthands that are missing. If I'm in a vehicle and type "dashboard" it's probably reasonable to assume that I want to look at the dashboard of the vehicle I'm sitting in. I shouldn't need to type out all of "vehicle eurocar dashboard". I should be able to type "hold deck" rather than have to specify precisely the model of cyberdeck I have.

6) Many location descriptions contain text that implies things that appear not to exist. For example, the description of the jail holding cell clearly mentions a fan. But there's no fan you can interact with. It's one thing to provide scenery, but it's another it tell me that there are things in game that I waste time trying to interact with. The convention appears to be that most locations have a big, long useless but "flavorful" scenic descriptions. Which starts to get annoying that I'm skipping over so much descriptive fluff when there's such a terrible, recurring lack of information that would actually be useful.

7) The layout, difficulty and rewards of the early couple missions and early gameplay in general are very discouraging.
 * I've been given a mission to retreive a file from Feathers 'n Leathers, but I have no password for the site. I'm told that without a password I will try to automatically hack in when I connect. And I do. Yet, despite having 6 computer skill, 6 electronics, 6 intelligence and almost every software as high a level as I was able to buy, after nearly a dozen connect attempts I've failed every single time. My best guess is that it's because I'm using an allegiance sigma cyberdeck. But if so...if the #2 "trainer" mission is uncompletable with max possible attributes, skills and software...simply assuming that a new character will start with enough money to buy one of the more expensive decks and designing the early missions to require it...that thoroughly reeks of lousy game design.
 * My Johnson directed me to the Software Emporium if I wanted to upgrade my software. The mission description implies that it's easy to get there. I was not able to find my way there on foot after ten minutes of real time. Yes, I checked the map. Repeatedly. The map as shown by the map command bears only a casual resemblance to the map as is traversible in the game.
 * When I finally gave up trying to find it and simply took a taxi, it turned out that there was no software available for me to purchase of any level higher than was available during character dreation. Meaning the trip was wasted anyway. And strangely, the taxi deposited me in a place that was apparently off-limits for taxis. I was dropped off, went in, went back outside, asked for a taxi and was told taxis couldn't go there, requiring me to wander around randomly for a while trying to find a spot taxis could go.
 * Eventually I gave up and just drove around in a motorcycle somebody left running, killing random people. In high heels. With a gun equipped. And no motorcycle skill. Yet I had no difficulty riding around, and there were apparently no skill checks required for driving. Which leads me to wonder why bother investing skillpoints in vehicle skills.
 * When all was said and done, by the time I finally was ready to delete and recreate my character, I had spent about three hours in game. And in all that time I had earned under a thousand nguyen, and 7% killing towards a single point of karma. And given that I need 7 karma to raise pretty much anything I care about, that suggests to me that any kind of standard rpg-style gradual progression of character power is totally out of the question. The character I made is pretty much the character I'm going to be stuck with for the foreseeable future, with minimal potential for growth. That's more or less standard shadowrun, but it's awfully discouraging.

---------

Overall the game has a distinctly unfinished feel. It feels like a flavor, text and map conversion of some other game. For a game that's been around for ten years, it has an awful lot of rough edges. Skills that are purchaseable at great expense that only later does a player find out that they're not fully implemented. Cyberware with obvious potential uses that apparently are for "RP purposes only." And all the previously mentioned issues of incomplete help and awkward character design. I realize I've only been playing for a few hours, maybe it gets better...but if you've been working on this for ten years, honestly I'd expect it to be more refined than this.   

22 separate language skills and 29 build & repair skills, but how many skills that the average player is likely to find useful? Why are there 11 vehicle skills and 11 vehicle build & repair skills when so far as I can tell, vehicles are terribly implemented, don't seem to servce much purpose, and rigging is not well implemented? Is water travel so important to gameplay that it's justifiable to have eight separate skills for: sailboats, motorboats, ships, submarines and B&R skills for each of them...when apparently a single computer skill is all that's relevant for decking?

I realize that you're constrained by the fact that you're trying to be faithful to an existing pen and paper game, but like I mentioned before, sometimes that doesn't work very well. The overall feel here is that you simply copied lists of things from the source material and never quite got around to checking to see how relevant the items on those lists were to the game. The fact that roughly a third of all the cyberware I bought turned out to be for "RP purposes only" corroborates that.

There are more things I could point out, but honestly I don't really expect you to act on any of this. If the game has been around for ten years, it's unlikely that me after a couple of hours will be able to suggest anything that hasn't already been said by somebody. A change of media usually benefits from careful adaptation. There are several tvtrops entries on this subject. For whatever reason, that was not done here. And to do it now would require throwing out a lot of what's been in use for all these years, probably a complete wipe and restart, and the serious displeasure of the existing player base. Again, I don't expect any of that to happen. I'm simply sharing my views as a prospective new player.

But you might consider at least implementing the help and character creation suggestions from earlier in this post.

[Yoink]

On second thoughts, I don't know if I will try this, sadly. I never have much luck with games requiring macros for combat, and now that I learn roleplaying isn't really the big focus I might give it a miss.
Looks kinda interesting, though!

[Kameleon]

Great feedback LordBucket.  I've relayed that as appropriate.

[beorn080]

On second thoughts, I don't know if I will try this, sadly. I never have much luck with games requiring macros for combat, and now that I learn roleplaying isn't really the big focus I might give it a miss.
Looks kinda interesting, though!

The macro's aren't too bad. Mostly its just to take really long phrases like cast 3 flame-thrower ghoul and turn it into something like alt-c ghoul. Honestly, I'm getting by spamming flame-thrower at force 3 with my wall of conjure 6 litter. So far I've killed a king and his guards, and an army of ghouls, and only die when I notice my wall of ablative litter has been stuck at an obstacle. Need to find more things to kill, gang members go down pretty easily two, even 2-3 of em.

I also agree with LordBucket. This game does have a REALLY rough feel, but I can almost understand why. It feels like everything was created on the fly as it was needed, and rarely revisited. It IS really nice underneath all the lack of polish, but a small team or even a person dedicated to cleaning would work great. For example, the newbie quest chain. It ends, seemingly, at an old man who is looking for a ghoul bone. Ghouls are NASTY. The only reason I can kill them out of chargen is because I take the time to summon a swarm of conjure 6 minions. However, I wasn't able to figure out how to use minions until I was told about astral vision and the order system, and then I was told about the order all command. Not much in the help files about any of that, especially in the conjure file.

I'll fill out more in a bit.

Edit: I would just like to mention specifically that all complaints are about the actual game and the automated responses, runs, help system, and the like. The player base is extremely helpful and newbie friendly, and have entertained all my questions so far.

[Synzig]

I'm playing this.  Anyone want to work together on some decking?  It's sort of a learn-as-you-go thing.

[karock]

Hey there guys, I've been a player on Deckeon since about '02 and more recently a builder and GM there and it's been really great to see the level of interest from all of you. Also been great to get as much critical feedback as you've given us both here and in game. My girlfriend just moved 2.5 hours away to pursue a masters degree so I'll likely have a bit more time on my hands and my goal is to get the game a bit more newbie friendly. Help files, better in-game tutorial, more appropriate newbie areas, etc.

In the meantime, here's some tips on starting a new character that will be the least frustrating (possibly munchkinish advice here, but imho it'll make for a character that is a lot more fun... feel free to disregard any of the points here if it offends your sense of RP):

0a) HELP RACIAL - this will show you two tables that list the bonuses/penalties for each race

0b) Don't be a human unless you're a physical adept (even then probably don't) or a masochist. Humans get no appreciable benefits and having your stats capped at 9 is painful in the longrun. I generally take resources E and race D which opens up basically all races except troll and elf variants.

1) Take attributes at the highest level possible for your archetype (with the possible exception of deckers wanting to have resources A for the best deck), they are very expensive to raise with karma later.

2) Max out your body and willpower stats at chargen. You roll your body stat to resist most types of damage, as well as black IC for deckers.  You use willpower for resisting mana-based spells, drain for mages and shamans, and killjoy for deckers, among various other things.

3a) If you are going to use guns in combat, raise the clubs skill so you are able to defend yourself from melee attacks with your firearm. Don't bother with taking the laser or launch weapon skills at chargen, you probably won't ever come across them, and certainly not early.

3b) If you aren't going to use guns in combat, pick a suitable melee skill, raise it to 6, and get a weapon with good reach (sadly difficult to determine by looking at items). Things with reach 2 are stuff like whips, most polearms, and the combat axe (edged). Most sword-type things are reach 1, fwiw. Reach in melee lowers your target number (TN) or raises your opponent's tilting the balance in your favor. Also trolls/giants/cyclopsen have a natural reach of 1.

4a) Useful miscellaneous skills include:
- lock-picking (though currently hard to find picks... find someone IC and ask, will be hopefully adding easier access to picks soonish)
- etiquette (allows you to have better success at asking the Johnsons who give autoruns for jobs before your timer is up)
- athletics (a number of places have swimming/climbing checks and failing these gets annoying fast)
- negotiation (each success gets you 1% extra cash for selling stuff at a vendor, more importantly it gets you 5% more cash/karma per success when turning in an autorun to a J)
- biotech (used via the 'firstaid' command. can heal physical damage, though can actually deal damage if you fail the test... still a good way to stabilize someone who is dying)
- search (sometimes worth 3-4 points if you have low int and don't like having to search an area twice for an autorun item)

4b) Generally unimportant skills...
- any vehicle skills (there are driving checks but the only consequence to failing them is that your vehicle gets scraped up, vehicles are cheap and can be repaired anyway)
- electronics (currently only used to hotwire vehicles, though hopefully this will be a useful skill in some cases in the near future)
- diving (athletics should cover you here)
- fishing (just used for fun)
- interrogation/intimidation/leadership (sometimes used but generally unimportant)
- stealth (sometimes used but isn't generally like WoW stealth aka omg where'd you go?!)

5) generally it's (mathematically) best to min-max your character's attributes and skills. 1 point at chargen can be used to raise something a full level, but raising something with karma is the new level of the thing times a multiplier, so the higher the level the more karma it takes.

6a) playing a decker: if it were me, I'd set the character up in chargen as a street sam with a datajack and 6 computers skill. I'd pick attributes A skills B race C/D Resources D/C Magic E. You won't have cash for a deck starting off so just grind it out in the autorun system or kill stuff for loot. I'd save up for the Renraku Kraftwerk deck (say 600k or so after utils and whatnot) and by the time you got there you'd probably be able to raise your computers a little above 6 anyway. It *is* possible to be an effective decker straight out of chargen, but making money is a lot easier than getting enough karma to raise stats 6 times.

6b) If you want to be a decker right away, take resources A and shift everything I said above down one priority (don't be a human though, pick something with better body because black IC is painful with even with 9 body, don't be something with low int and quickness though or your reaction will suffer which is also annoying).

7) Before you go up against a ghoul, make sure you're got at least 2-3 impact armor rating and a weapon that you know how to melee with. Even with less than 6 body that should keep you pretty safe. Remember you can always 'flee <direction>' to end combat and get away if you start to take damage. Though you might have to stand up first if you've been knocked down (stand && flee e).

At least do a 'prompt all' when you start to get a decent prompt, though the one Kame posted above is better (mostly because it's mine that I gave to him :p)

9) ask other players IC for help or directions. we're all very willing to help a newbie out, but when you ask about IC stuff in the OOC channel we tend to be less helpful because many of Deckeon's previous GMs were sticklers about keeping the channels separate.

I guess that's enough for now, hopefully that'll help some of you get a better start in Deckeon

Thanks again for the feedback, us builders will definitely be taking it to heart and trying to improve the learning curve for newbies in the near future.

[hemmingjay]

A long time ago I played AwakenedWorlds and after spending time on Deckeon I am wondering, outside of the location, what is the difference?

For anyone who is curious, AW is based in Seattle. http://www.awakenedworlds.net/

[karock]

for all of you who made deckers and had trouble getting useful utils, the mob who upgrades programs and fixes deck mpcp has been made a bit more capable so you should be able to buy utils up as far as you need for early decking now.

[Rabek Jeris]

To reply to some of your points Rabek,

- The blinking words got your attention didn't they? I don't mean to sound glib, but I've addressed the past challenges with magic + cyber a few posts up - and it needs to be as apparent as possible for incoming players.  As much as blinking text may be a taboo in MUD circles, it appears to have served it's purpose, no?

It did, yes. But I've had friends in the past who enjoy color in their MUDs, but claimed that the blinking can trigger their epilepsy. It's a strong taboo for me for that reason. Caps in bright red can be just as eye-catching without being repulsive and possibly inconsiderate.

- While combat 'no action' returns will not tell you how much time you have until your next attack, your prompt does by default.  Try a 'prompt all', or even something like (I apologize for the broken/incomplete color codes) 'prompt {G({x%e{G)({y%n{G){x H:%h S:%s Mv:[{G%v{x] W:[{c%w{x] %1 %2 %5'.  Sub the last two for appropriate pools where necessary, as those are casting and astral.  It does mean spamming enter or look or vmap or something equally innocuous every second or two, to refresh your prompt and know where you're at.  Sure it's a bit spammy and clunky, but it works.  Feel free to post a suggestion for something better/alternate/different though.

A simple countdown would suffice. Automated instead of requiring commands. RetroMUD does this with a skill called 'spirit eye' or somesuch. Each 'tick' or second or what have you would give an updated progress bar of sorts. I imagine Deckeon could do just fine with a number instead of a progress bar.

- I've got absolutely no argument or excuse for the spelling and grammar.  It has always been an area of challenge for the game, dating back to the original founders poor grasp of the english language (apparently).  That said, nobody knows they're there to fix until someone bug or typo reports them - so feedback of that nature is invaluable.

Perhaps sending a newbie builder (if you have any, or a more skilled one if not) through the area as a brief cleanup would be wise. I build on MUDs. I know you can't catch every spelling and grammar issue. Give it a brief once-over and reward players somehow for reporting typos. That's how it's done everywhere else I've played for any length of time.

- I can't help but feel you were stretching for a 4th bullet there, as having some select impervious NPC's is pretty essential the maintaining a playable MUD for the rest of the playerbase.  If you can kill off one of the newbie shop merchants, or an important key of a scripted run chain - and they don't repop until the area resets (or worse, until a server reset or crash)... you're not doing anyone any favors in return for the realism you seek.  I for one think it's a fair and understandable tradeoff.

Perhaps I was stretching, perhaps not. When I entered the game, I was assured that roleplaying was a key facet of the game. My primary games are all RPI (RolePlay Intensive, for the uninitiated) games. They do not protect key mobs from death except by the mantra of ICA=ICC (In Character Actions equal In Character Consequences). I understand Shadowrun is more violent than other settings, so I can see why this is the case, but making them more powerful rather than immune might help. Faster spawn rates, perhaps. Anyway, as I said, it's just a pet peeve. Pet peeves don't always appeal to ideal logic.

As a final note, I feel I should give some background. I've been MUDing for the better part of twelve years now. Well, MU*ing perhaps, though MUDs are the large majority. I've played many, many MUDs, so I'm pretty picky. I know what works for me and what doesn't.

I should have disclaimered on the first critique, but I only listed my personal issues with the game. In no way do I mean to suggest everyone will feel the same way. I may, in fact, be far too critical. I'm of the, perhaps, radical opinion that the lack of quality in most MUDs is part of why less people play them these days. Not the only reason, surely, and I've played MU*s (mostly MUX) with an 80+ player minimum at any given hour, up to maximums over 500. But anyone who plays many MUDs can attest to the swarms of mostly stock, poor quality games floating around. Deckeon gives the impression that it's one of these. I know it's not. I poked around enough to see that glimmer of 'something more' that might be hiding. But, as has been said by others, it's rough. There's something there, but I don't feel like digging through the dirt of that first impression to get to it.

Much like writing a novel, if you can't catch someone's attention in the first paragraph, you don't have a best seller.

Probably a poor metaphor, but I wrote this post at 11:50am after not going to bed the night before. I'm sure you can decipher my point, though.

[nenjin]

Perhaps I was stretching, perhaps not. When I entered the game, I was assured that roleplaying was a key facet of the game. My primary games are all RPI (RolePlay Intensive, for the uninitiated) games. They do not protect key mobs from death except by the mantra of ICA=ICC (In Character Actions equal In Character Consequences). I understand Shadowrun is more violent than other settings, so I can see why this is the case, but making them more powerful rather than immune might help. Faster spawn rates, perhaps. Anyway, as I said, it's just a pet peeve. Pet peeves don't always appeal to ideal logic.

I can tell you that, in SR, the chances a random player will try to blow away (or succeed in killing in some way) a vital NPC are almost 100%. It's a very violent setting and it's got a fair number of fans who qualify as goons. Just by reading I can tell that the world is designed for quite a few people; much in the same way MMOs have vendors who start at max level so newbies in the newbie areas couldn't just gank them.

If they've made allowances for other NPCs to die as a point of story development, it would be alright wouldn't it? To me it even makes roleplaying sense: if you're in a slum that sees new people everyday, some of them you can trust and many of them you can't....wouldn't you put some bad ass retired mercenary in charge of running your guns 'n ammo shop?

For an RPI player, I can see invincible NPCs as problematic. As a GAMER though, I don't see many other ways around the situation. In some games I know it's basically been a running joke that the best way to level up is to slay the shopkeepers.

[Kameleon]

Rabek Jaris, I understand what you're saying completely - and you bring up some very good points.

I can see us feasibly being able to ramp up threat and stat levels for some mobs, and take away their nokill flag.  There's a few whose threat level or stats may dictate other functions (J's for example) that likely wouldn't see such treatments, but many that could.

Also a great idea on a typo contest.  I'm going to chew on that.

You said you build for other muds, and if you're so inclined I'd strongly encourage you to become familiar enough with the game to apply as a builder here too.  That kind of attention to detail is exactly what we need.

[LordBucket]

Don't be a human
stats capped at 9

That contradicts what the help files say. I can't quote you which exact help text it was, but when I made a character it said that stats were capped at double their starting cap, then modified by racials. So, help says that 12 is the cap for humans. The help also claims that humans constitute the majority of the population. Basically, character creation pretty much encourages us to do exactly what you're advising us not to.

Having this kind of major game-crippling affect attached to an unchangeable decision before a player could possibly know any better...it's an awful way to do things. Especially when your help files are encouraging people to cripple themselves. And reading about this just prompts to me wonder how many other major problems like this exist that might require me to play for months before I realize that oops, I totally crippled myself.

This probably isn't the best way to encourage players to want to invest time in the game.

Don't bother with taking the laser or launch weapon skills
at chargen, you probably won't ever come across them

So why does the skill exist if players will probably never actually find an item that requires it? I mean, personally I didn't even consider taking it...but it seems like your model is to throw dozens of choices at the player, but there's only one or two "correct" choices. Why? What's the goal? To make people play for months and then start over to fix all their mistakes?

unimportant skills..
electronics (currently only used to hotwire vehicles

Totally counterintuitive. Electronics skill was so useful in the pen & paper version that it never even occurred to me to not take it. Look at the help entry for it. It describes electronics skill as governing the use of "just about everything in common use." Your help files, previous experience with shadowrun P&P, plus common sense all agree that this skill should be important, but you're telling me you didn't bother to implement it any any useful way?

And as to hotwiring vehicles, I saw a 33 skillcheck required to hotwire a beat up old van. 33? Seriously? What design philosophy is at work here? What was the intended goal? To allow people to spend months grinding a skill to have a chance to maybe do something that's totally unnecesary?

vehicle skills

So, you're flat out saying that a quarter of all the skills in the list are useless? And if you include B&R skills, then what...half? Why are they there? Why differentiate four different kind of boats when even car skills are a waste of time? And if vehicle skills are useless, we can probably add gunnery to the useless list, since it seems to be for guns mounted on vehicles.

Basically looks to me like out of the couple dozen skills you have to choose from the only significant skill selection anybody needs to make is: "choose which type of weapon you want to use."

Like I said in my last post, it totally looks like you just copied the lists from the source material and never actually bothered to check to see if anything on those lists had any relationship with the game you were making.

if it were me, I'd set the character up in chargen as
a street sam with a datajack and 6 computers skill.

Sounds like your advice is pretty much the only valid option if you want to have a character with skills that actually do anything. Which begs the question why character creation is so lengthy and complicated when apparently there are only about two meaningful choices to make.


---------

Karock, I don't mean to be harsh...but nothing you're saying here encourages me to want to have anything to do with Deckeon. Basically you're telling me that the game is just as poorly made as it appears to be.

[karock]

That contradicts what the help files say. I can't quote you which exact help text it was, but when I made a character it said that stats were capped at double their starting cap, then modified by racials. So, help says that 12 is the cap for humans. The help also claims that humans constitute the majority of the population. Basically, character creation pretty much encourages us to do exactly what you're advising us not to.

Not sure where you saw that, please let me know if it's in a help file somewhere and I'll get it changed because that's flat wrong. Racial maximums are generally (6+bonus)*1.5 rounded up (so humans with starting max of 6 and no bonus end up with 9 racial max, a troll has a +5 body bonus so it's 6+5=11*1.5 = 16.5 = 17 racial max). You can look at the help racial-max to get all that info without having to calculate it yourself though.

Having this kind of major game-crippling affect attached to an unchangeable decision before a player could possibly know any better...it's an awful way to do things. Especially when your help files are encouraging people to cripple themselves. And reading about this just prompts to me wonder how many other major problems like this exist that might require me to play for months before I realize that oops, I totally crippled myself.

Race and magical ability are the only two things that can never be changed. Many of the veteran players who went human end up wishing they'd chosen differently, which is why I mentioned it. If you've got your heart set on being human then nobody will stop you.

So why does the skill exist if players will probably never actually find an item that requires it? I mean, personally I didn't even consider taking it...but it seems like your model is to throw dozens of choices at the player, but there's only one or two "correct" choices. Why? What's the goal? To make people play for months and then start over to fix all their mistakes?

Nothing prevents you from picking up new skills later, in fact it is quite encouraged. Many of the skills I listed as unimportant are used for various things but aren't important right away for new chars. Some of the skills are definitely underutilized (particularly electronics) which will hopefully be remedied by the builders and coders soon, but for now I just figured I'd list out what makes the biggest impact for new characters.

Totally counterintuitive. Electronics skill was so useful in the pen & paper version that it never even occurred to me to not take it. Look at the help entry for it. It describes electronics skill as governing the use of "just about everything in common use." Your help files, previous experience with shadowrun P&P, plus common sense all agree that this skill should be important, but you're telling me you didn't bother to implement it any any useful way?

Yeah, I can't disagree. I've only been building for a couple months but it always boggled my mind that it never got used for more stuff, my P&P chars always had electronics and found it very useful.

As for the majority of skills being 'useless' (your word, not mine), most of them are implemented, can be used, function as they do in P&P, but just aren't really necessary for a new character. Obviously not everybody is going to need a vehicle skill, or every build/repair skill, etc. But they do come into play periodically and add flavor to the game. How often does a P&P character need to know how to drive a vectored thrust aircraft? Probably never unless the GM is running a campaign with one in it. It's the same deal here. GMs set up runs periodically and knowing one of the lesser used skills can save your team's bacon. I just swept them under the rug because being a new character is a lot easier when you have the skills that offer the best bang for the buck.

[beorn080]

I haven't played much shadowrun, mostly on the genesis though I recall making a character at a camp once. Wasn't there catchall skills for firearms, driving, and repair? Not as effective as the specific skill, but made raising the skills under them slightly easier and made it less restrictive for what to start with?

I do agree about Chargen though. The number of choices are MASSIVE, and unless you know what you're doing, its hard to figure out. For instance, I'm rolling up a mage, due to stupidity regarding contracts and exploring. Looking through the list, several spells have no help file. Identify, Regenerate, Death Touch, those three have no description at all, while Poison and Disease have descriptions, but they don't help at all since there is no way to know what the effects of the various poisons or diseases are. Likewise, Physical Barrier. It has a decent description, but says nothing about objects going out. Can the player shoot through it? Cast spells? Only certain spells? Sure, you can take it and test it, but as has been said, its a waste of points.