House Rules - What are yours? Options

[starranger]

Here are my house rules that I'm using for my SR 4 game:

1 SR 2 initiative. Yes I know this gives an edge to cyber characters - but come on - life isn't fair. When a Street samurai can do in .75 seconds which takes you 3 seconds - yes , he gets to go twice or even 3 times. Trade off - its hard to heal him, and Magic types - you guys will catch up in the end. After about 100 Karma - its actually the Samurai who are whining - when you look at all the options the magic types get.

2 - Laser sights 2 dice, smartgun link 4 dice. Still not totally hooked on the WOD combat system for Shadowrun - but I'm going to give it a chance. But I had to fixed this offensive oversight with the game designers.

3 - Etiquette is always specialized. I think its absurd that someone can take a general Etiquette and know the inner lingo of technomancers, and at the same time talk biz with a street gang. Too much difference in my book.

4 - Remove penalty on Maxing out stats. Come on, this is a "dumb" way to make people not max out their stats. I’m always against making rules just to force players to play a certain way. If someone wants to min max, let them - no sense in building rules just to avoid this.

5 - Racial maximums - I'm keeping these but with Karma you can raise your natural attribute maximum.

6 - Drop the RFID paranoia. Yes they are everywhere - but for 19.95, you can buy a simple radio "blaster" which kills them all. Same for Mage spell which does the same thing.

7 - Drop the Open wireless everything. As I mentioned in a previous post, this belief that all things would have "open ports" so that technomancers and other hackers could cause havoc is non-sense. Especially for Shadowrunner - Privacy and control are of the essence - and in 2071 - things returned to "normal" in my world where most companies invented hardened or closed systems that "selectively at user discretion" opened themselves up to the wireless web.