But the Street Sam gets a +1 for every bullet fired.
So even if he manages to shoot at you 8 times with his ares predator, he'll be facing a +8 to his TN on the 8th roll. So probably a TN of 10 - 14 at least.
Edit: eh, it's fro recoil, so if you can get some points of RC in there, it will not go that high . .

Let's say Medium range (5), stationary target in cover (+3), attacker walking (+1), Smartlink (-2). This is pretty common in a firefight, and somewhat in favor of the defender.

The first shot is at TN 7 (effectively 6), the second is at 8.

Recoil modifiers were only cumulative within 1 Combat Phase, not in an entire Combat Turn.

Structure:

COMBAT TURN
Initiative Pass #1
-> Player 1 Combat Phase
-> Player 2 Combat Phase
-> etc
Initiative Pass #2
-> Player 1 Combat Phase
-> etc

Because your TN could be a 2+. Instead of the 5+ it is in SR4.

Indeed, the awesomesauce for SR3 isn't so much increasing the number of dice (that's just for intimidating the other players, and very rarely go above 15), but being able to shift that TN up and down.

The pools really did add a dimension to the gameplay. You can describe if you're fighting defensively or offensively, which tasks are important and which are less so, where your attention is and so on, with real, in-game effects (and without complicated rules). It really is elegant and, indeed, agile. Cutting out pools makes SR3 agile like cutting off legs helps a gymnast.

And i still say: if one goal of the SR4 system was to reduce the dice being rolled compared to SR3 . . THEY DID IT WRONG!
Only Trolls could regularly roll more than 15 Dice, and that was when they rolled Body to resist Damage . .

You obviously never saw my decker build...

i obviously never did.

Yeah, i never really saw many dice in SR3... No one ever had a skill above 8 or so, MAYBE specialized. Combat pool, i think maxed out mostly at about 10. Thats about 18 dice... and maybe a reroll with Karmapool.

But you couldn't do that all the time.

Ok, some extreme characters might have had more... can't remember anyone being slow with their rolls though. And the game had such finesse in some regards. Still my favourite game of all.... well, maybe after "7th Sea" That system was just pure beauty.

Drastically fewer sources of bonus dice, mostly, plus the fact that attributes don't directly improve the number of dice you're throwing (each point of INT, QCK, or WIL is half a point of Combat Pool, which you can only actually use once per combat turn and which forms a big part of your safety net).


Or Surprised.


You mean Intelligence. That said, Quickness was such a close second that the question was really the distribution of Exceptional Attribute/Extra Attribute Point.

You do, however, seriously exaggerate the power of dodging. With an incoming single-shot attack with one success, you need to spend two CP to expect to dodge—and that's accepting a 25% chance of failure. A burst raises your dodge TN to 5, and six rounds of autofire makes it 6. Meanwhile, your Quickness 12 Elf is only packing 6 Combat Pool from the Quickness, and is unlikely to have better than 14 total. This works only for circumstances where "people" is a very small number, very lightly-armed, or very poor shots.


10 Combat Pool is the standard I've seen for starting characters, with some 11s mixed in.


Not really—between Muscle Toners and Cerebral Boosters you can get 6 points of CP-attributes, for an additional three points of pool. There's not much after that, though you can get a free (not even pool) die for physical skills from Enhanced Artwinkulation. The big thing is that the cap on combat pool expenditure decoupled the number of dice you're throwing from the size of your pool after a point.


Adepts with Ambidexterity and Improved Ability, Riggers can roll 15 dice out of chargen thanks to sensor-enhanced gunnery and can go up from there, Orks who throw combat pool into damage resistance, a few other things here and there.

~J

Why on earth do you think this should be a shot that you can reliably make? You're trying to shoot 2 different guys the second of which is moving and at a decent distance from you while you are also trying to duck behind cover. Why shouldn't you be required to use Edge to make this shot? This forces you to make decisions about how the combat situation affects your odds of success -- maybe your second shot at the second target should be a wide burst to increase your chances of hitting him (by removing defense pool). Maybe you shouldn't be shooting at him and instead make sure to drop your first target or take a simple action to reassess the situation.

I contemplated doing 3:1 but that involves math and my house rule design goal was that my players are always rolling the same dice pool against a fixed TN and the only thing that changes is the threshold. I wanted to cut down on the amount of time that needed to be spent calculating dice pools. I didn't want to sully that with having to multiply everything by 1/3.

If you can give me an good explanation for answering yes & no to the above two questions (which you seem to be doing) I might rethink it. My rules make the game less over the top comic book shit and more gritty. It makes combat last a long time which is nice and makes cover really good/desireable.

Actually, the Combat Pool is INT+QCK+Will/2

Intelligence is hard to raise via cyber/bio. especially seeing how only NATURAL Numbers count for the Pools. A Rigger with Reaction-Enhancer Level 6 does NOT get +6 to his Rigging Pool.
CYBER-Intelligence does simply not exist. BIO-Intelligence is not Char-Gen Legal and then prohibitive expensive.

QCK12, INT6, Will6=12 Dice in combat Pool. Tie between dodge success and attacker success goes to Defender.
Where do you find the part about BF and FA raising the TN to dodge? Not that i could remember . .

As i said, QCK+INT+WILL/2. This means a Troll can usually not get much.
Neither can Orks usually. Dwarves get a +1 on willpower, this helps, but not much. It's 1/3 of a CP Die. Elves get +2 on Quickness. This helps a bit more. 2/3 of a Combat Pool Die.

As i said. Cerebral Booster is cultured Bioware, not available on Char-Gen, pretty much not available any time soon either.
And why would you do that anyway, when you can get 5 points of Bioware Quickness in Char-Gen?

Ambidexterity does NOTHING to give you more dice.
It LOWERS The TN for the weapons you are using.
Improved Ability only goes up to magic level, and is 0,5 Power-Points per level. So you can get it up to Level 6 for 3 Points of Magic.
This gets you a skill of 12 maximum. And you can still only use 6 Points of Combat Pool, because you can only use Combat-Pool Dice up to your natural skill.
And you DO NOT Roll them ALL AT ONCE. You roll your 12 Dice for the improved skill. Then you check wether or not you have at least one net success. If you do, you can use 6 Combat Pool dice in a second roll. And i think the intent to use combat pool has to be stated before making the skill roll . .

SR3, p. 113. Every 3 bullets fired in burst or FA mode increases the TN by 1 to dodge. I had to dust of my old book s for this thread. And remembered that my SR3 book is held together by duct tape...

Because the skill system states that someone with a Firearms skill of 5 (no matter which type) is a crack shot. This is both in the fluff for the skill system in both SR3 and SR4 as well as backed up by NPCs such as beat cops having Pistols: 2 or 3, army grunts having Automatics (or Assault Rifles): 3 or 4, etc. Someone with Pistols: 5 is going to be a competition shooter and someone with Automatics/Assault Rifles: 5 is going to be something like Special Forces with advance training. Hitting a moving target while firing behind cover should be very easy for someone with a skill that high. The question should be whether or not the first burst would be lethal, especially with the advanced armor.

And there's other considerations such as smartlink/laser sights which in SR1-3 lower the target number (thus greatly increasing the chance for success) but in SR4 only adds to the dice pool (which only moderately increases the chance for success). Hopefully someone will double-check my math, but lowering a TN of 9 (two stationary targets firing at each other from behind cover) to a TN of 7 is much more of a mathematical advantage than adding two dice to a flat TN5. A TN9 in Shadowrun requires rolling a 6 and then re-rolling and getting a 3-6, which is a 1 in 9 chance. Meanwhile, a TN7 requires only a single roll of 6 (since a re-rolled 6 would still get you 7 even on a roll of 1). Therefore statistically, you would get 1 success for every 9 dice rolled in the former and 1 success for every 6 dice rolled in the latter. The Quickness: 5/Pistols: 5 mentioned in that example would net you 1.11 success per roll against TN9 while it would net you 1.67 success per roll against TN7 which is statistically significant.

I was going to go into the specific differences between SR3 and SR4 combat with a specific example of two people shooting at each other from behind cover, but with the changes to how defenders roll against damage, it's a huge pain in the ass to try to work out the math. Hopefully, someone with more mathematical skill than I will be able to do it justice, but the end result is that in SR3, you're going to do almost twice as much damage per shot fired than you would in SR4.

Aaah, ok good to know . . .

Yeah, divided by 2. So each point of attribute gets you 1/2 pool die. Q4 I4 W4 is (4+4+4)/2 or 6. Increasing Quickness by 2 gets you Q6 I4 W4 is (6+4+4)/2 or 7. The only pool that divided by 3 was the Hacking Pool, which oddly is only 2 numbers (Intelligence + MPCP of the deck). Control pool is the only one that isn't divided by anything, but it's also solely your Reaction (which is average of Quickness and Intelligence) and modifiers based on the level of rigging cyberware.

Also, Elves got +2 Charisma +1 Quickness.

Yeah, but charisma does not help with dodging bullets or resisting damage . . and it's good that it does not!

You didn't ask yes or no questions. Ignoring that.

Reliably? No. But a threshold of 7 is ridiculous for a kind of shot that's not all that rare. To have a significant chance you have to be superman, since being of superior skill and attribute just isn't going to cut it. It's like the system is pre-dodging for the target.

I've stated before, I forget in which thread, but street-level gunfights don't last long in reality. If you've taken a gunfight that's normally 2 combat turns and turned it into 5+ combat turns for the sake of having a longer fight, you've actually departed gritty realism and headed for "comic book shit."

Not really. Combat turns are only 3 seconds long. Unless you're running 10 turn fights, you're still in the realm of realism. Also, your average street-level gunfight doesn't involve advanced bodyarmor either.

I also seriously doubt that modern crack shooters can hit 2 different targets in less than 3 seconds of shooting without just spraying and praying which is what I said they'd have to do. We're also talking about hitting one of them who is moving at range.

I also seriously doubt that modern crack shooters can hit 2 different targets in less than 3 seconds of shooting without just spraying and praying which is what I said they'd have to do. We're also talking about hitting one of them who is moving at range.

I did ask two yes/no questions in my first paragraph.

I also seriously doubt that modern crack shooters can hit 2 different targets in less than 3 seconds of shooting without just spraying and praying. We're also talking about hitting one target who is moving at range -- not stationary targeting dummies. If you want to hit them perhaps you should consider using Suppressive Fire as opposed to direct fire? I just work in the financial industry not the military so I'm not sure that I'm accurate in this statement but I'm pretty sure it is pretty much down to luck to do what you are proposing IRL.

I've found that my combats go from 1-2 IPs to about 3-5 turns. So combat changes from being 1-2 seconds to being max 15 seconds. That's about how long it takes someone to realize they've dropped something and pick it up in real life. Is that realistic?

Edit: sorry, accidentally submitted before typing whole thing.

3 seconds is a long time in a gunfight. Time enough to start and finish it.

Bob Munden would like to disagree with you there

No. Notice how long it took him to aim at and hit the coins he was flipping? That was a moving target at short range. The balloons were stationary, at point-blank range, and not shooting at him. That video reinforces my claims -- thanks! Saved me having to dive into more gun websites and make my firm's IT guys nervous.

A lot of this goes out the window with Sammy's but their benefit as compared to a non-enhanced person is that they get 3 IPs per round and are situationally aware during all three rounds. In other words they can adapt to the situation more readily than someone at 1 IP. So I might start a full burst from my assault rifle during the first IP and still be trying to recover/adjust to the situation 3 seconds later. The street sam would be able to fire 6 short bursts in the same amount of time and be able to more accurately choose their shots. Or he'd be able to shoot 4 short bursts, drop both the targets, pop open a can of beer and laugh at me while I desparately try to control the recoil on my gun.

Did it with both a Shotgun and a .45 Automatic at an FBI Range....
Did it with an M16 at a Marine Corps Live Fire Range in Okinawa at ranges over 200 Meters....

Is not all that hard to do really, if you are skilled.