Contemplating a house rule Options Track this topic Email this topic Print this topic Download this topic Subscribe to this forum Display Modes Outline Switch to: Standard Switch to: Linear+

[James McMurray]

My group is about to start up a shadowrun campaign and are contemplating a house rule making the minimum target number for any test be 4 instead of 2. This will hopefully help to reign in the destructive power of the players and the more challenging foes. Situations this will hopefully help include:

- Sniping with a rangefinder and smartlink: instead of rolling 10+ dice against a target number of 2 and getting an average of 8+ successes (resulting in damage at 3-4 over D), the 10+ dice would grant an average of 4+ successes, for only 1 or 3 over D.

It may be necessary to let some target numbers go below 4, such as static tests against knowledge checks, locks, etc. If not, some things won't make sense (failing to learn very basic knowlege for example). Other things will skew the economy, such as people only having to buy locks above rating 1 if they want to have a rating of 5+.

- Magic (willpower targetting spells). Most opponents will have a fairly low willpower (lower than their body). That makes being hit by the mana spells (the ones with the easier drain target numbers) very deadly. The lower stat already penalizes the character by lowering the possible number of successes he can get.

Another house rule we're looking at would be to have any dice used from a single pool be used for all pools that round. This will mainly prevent mages from having better defenses than street sams. Normally a mage can dump a huge portion of his spell pool into offense, and leave his combat pool completely free for dodging and soaking. The non-mages have to split their pool between offense and defense.

I'm also contemplating some sort of different rule for handling opposed checks. Letting the opponent's number be the target and also how many dice they roll makes a diffference of 2 points in a skill almost gauranteed to let the one with the higher skill win every time. I'm not sure what kind of change we would use, or even if it would be necessary.

Any thoughts, comments, or flames?

And just to head off the "don't change it until you've tried it" response, all but one of my group has played shadowrun since 1st edition. The other guy is a complete newbie to the shadowrun system. He hasn't even used the White Wolf system, which is similar in many ways (at least as far as dice rolling goes).