Possible House Rules, SR3, Are any of these stupid? Options

[JaronK]

We're thinking of implementing some house rules in our SR3 game to make more options viable and deal with some areas that are currently overpowered. Do any of these sound particularly good or horrible?

1) Pistols and SMGs are rolled into one skill, Small Arms. This is partly to make SMGs more useful, since they'll become the FA option in the pistols skill.

2) Heavy Pistols suffer recoil as though they'd fired twice as many bullets, so you'd need two points of recoil compensation to avoid recoil on first SA shot and four for the second. Additionally, their concealability is reduced by 1. This is mostly to deal with the fact that heavy pistols have incredible damage and concealability, making them too obviously a default choice. Light Pistols might start to see some use.

3) Concealable Holsters only work for pistols with a concealability of 7 or higher. This is again to help make light pistols useful, since with rule 2 heavy pistols can't ever use these.

4) Shotguns and Spray Weapons are rolled into one skill, Spray Weapons. This mostly just adds more flexibility to the Shotguns skill, since no one ever took spray weapons.

5) Rifles and Assault Rifles are rolled into one skill, Rifles. We were already combining a bunch of skills anyway, and didn't want to leave some skills covering too few things.

6) Heavy Weapons and Launch Weapons are combined into the Heavy Weapons skill. As above. It's Str based. Gunnery will have to be the only Int based weapon skill.

7) All special weapons are rolled into appropriate other skills. Guncane becomes Rifles, Bracer becomes Pistols, Gyrojet Pistol becomes Pistols, etc. Otherwise these just never get used.

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif) Tractors can pull up to Body 7 Trailers as a special ability, since otherwise 53' trailers can't be pulled at all. Also, their max Load rating is increased to match current modern day load limits.

9) Casters can only learn a number of "free" spells equal to their intelligence. Currently using Fettish limiting or Exclusiveness can make it free to learn Force 1 or 2 spells. This limits that effect without removing it entirely.

10) Skill chips can never be stored in memory, so they have to be in your head to be used. This includes Knowsofts, and mostly comes about because right now our party includes 4 skill chippers who are all using each others chips, and as such no one learns skills.

11) Sniper rifles have recoil as though they fire 3 times as many bullets, so 3 points of recoil compensation are needed to fire one shot without recoil. This makes sniper rifles a little more balanced with other weapons, and means that it actually makes sense for a Sniper Rifle to have a bipod. It also means you may have to chose between a Gas Vent system or Silencer.

12) Characters in cover can "trust their cover" if they want. This is declaired on your action, and means that you take no penalty to hit enemies from your own cover (the Cannon Compendium rule). However, you can't dodge until your next action.

JaronK